Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 107

A tweet that explains everything

(updated below)

In connection with this matter, I was literally awake all night overseeing (with complete uselessness) the successful birth of six puppies -- an amazing and moving experience that I hope never to repeat again for as long as I live -- and was therefore not planning on writing today as a result of the ensuing exhaustion.  But then I saw the Tweet That Explains Everything.  A momentous controversy erupted earlier this afternoon when President Obama announced that he wanted to deliver a speech about jobs to a joint session of Congress next Thursday at 9:00 p.m., which happens to be the same date and time of a planned GOP presidential debate, prompting House Speaker John Boehner to respond that he would convene a joint session on Wednesday -- the day before -- but not on Thursday.

The profound issues raised by this conflict prompted an orgy of probing analysis and vibrant debate among political journalists, party spokespeople and various partisan loyalists over who was being dishonest and Outrageous (indeed, so weighty and consequential is this showdown that it even subordinated the day's prior top news story involving the scheduling snafus of Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann in Iowa).  Thankfully, we have a free and adversarial watchdog media in this nation to sort out the competing claims and to keep the citizenry informed and focused with respect to the Wednesday/Thursday conflict, which is what produced this aforementioned Tweet:

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Also today, this report appeared, referring to this U.S. diplomatic cable released this week (original article is here; click image to enlarge):

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Chuck Todd won't be going on "#Hardball" -- or any other television news program -- to discuss that story, nor will virtually anyone else be doing so (such matters will not be mentioned at all, except to explain how it is WikiLeaks who are the Real Criminals).  And that contrast explains virtually everything there is to say; as I said earlier today as this speech scheduling crisis emerged: "I hope this Tuesday v. Wednesday [sic] drama goes on for at least a week - will be so valuable for historians trying to explain things." 

 

UPDATE: Here is the headline and sub-headline from the NYT article on this conflict; to read it and realize that it is the top story on the paper's website is to hear "imperial collapse" like few other things convey (click on image to enlarge):

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Omitted facts from the 9/11 commemoration

(updated bel0w)

The Obama administration has issued formal guidelines identifying the messages government agencies are to communicate as part of the commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack.  The New York Times obtained a copy of these guidelines and notes one significant omission:

The guidelines say the absence of Al Qaeda playing any significant role in the "Arab Spring" uprisings against longtime autocrats in the Middle East and North Africa should be cited as evidence that Bin Laden's organization "represents the past," while peaceful street protesters in Egypt and Tunisia "represent the future." Left unsaid was that many of the deposed leaders were close American allies and partners in counterterrorism operations.

That little fact is not only "left unsaid" in the administration's 9/11 messaging guidelines but in almost all media and political discussions of the Arab Spring (kudos to the NYT for its rare inclusion here).  That is why, at the risk of invoking an Internet cliche, I literally laughed aloud when I read Roger Cohen's giddy self-celebration in this morning's NYT over the glorious American "victory" in Libya.  Leaving aside how obviously premature and information-deprived his victory dance is, Cohen's concluding passage struck me as so delusional as to be darkly humorous:

In the end, I think interventionism is inextricable from the American idea. If the United States retreats into isolationism, it ceases to be itself -- a nation dedicated, however much it falls short, to a universalist ideal of freedom.

There are no fixed doctrinal answers -- a successful Libyan intervention does not mean one in Syria is feasible -- but the idea that the West must at times be prepared to fight for its values against barbarism is the best hope for a 21st century less cruel than the 20th.

I honestly don't understand how anyone is able to sustain this fairy tale in their brain, pleasurable though it might be.  Is Roger Cohen even aware that, as his own newspaper put it today, "many of the deposed [Arab] leaders were close American allies and partners in counterterrorism operations"?  And even that understates the case: these tyrants weren't merely U.S. allies, but stayed in power for decades largely because the U.S. fed them with money, weapons, and training to maintain their grip on their own citizenries -- and continued to do so until their demise became inevitable.  

It's one thing for the U.S. Government to "leave unsaid" these uncomfortable facts (and they are facts): that's just standard government propagandizing.  And it's another thing for people to defend such conduct on "realist" grounds: that it's wise or at least necessary to keep dictators in place to serve American interests.  But it's just extraordinary for a political columnist to proclaim that the same country which has spent decades propping up many of the world's most heinous dictators -- whom we agree not to hate until it's time to wage war on them and then righteous condemnation is suddenly unleashed against all their alleged sins (Saddam pulled babies from incubators, gassed his own people and had rape rooms!; Gadaffi's son abused his domestic servant!!) -- is devoted to freedom-spreading as a core "value."  In light of this long and overwhelming history, in what conceivable sense can it be said that removing dictators is a "value" of the U.S. or that it is "dedicated" to a "universalist idea of freedom"? 

Even as nationalistic messaging -- which is not supposed to be Cohen's job -- it's ludicrous.  Many Americans may be blissfully unaware of this conduct by their government because of how often it is "left unsaid," but much of the world, particularly the people who lived under those regimes, certainly are not.  And as the Iraq war proved quite conclusively, having the West militarily remove a dictator of an oil-rich country with whom it long did business changes neither the reality nor the perception of U.S. conduct in the world. 

But the most notable omission is reflected by this part of the message:

The White House has issued detailed guidelines to government officials on how to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, with instructions to honor the memory of those who died on American soil but also to recall that Al Qaeda and other extremist groups have since carried out attacks elsewhere in the world, from Mumbai to Manila.

It's commendable (or at least shrewd) enough that the White House wants to internationalize the commemoration of Al Qaeda's victims over the last decade.  But what will also be "left unsaid" are the vastly more numerous victims of America's militarism and aggression -- both in putative response to 9/11 and leading up to that attack (and that's not even counting the various  victims of America's client states using U.S.-supplied weapons).  That's not a criticism of the Obama administration per se -- no U.S. government is going to include those facts when it comes time to squeeze the still-potent emotional impact of 9/11 -- but the fact that victims of American violence over the last two decades have easily outweighed, and continue to outweigh, those of the Dictators and Terrorists whom we so vocally despise is nonetheless an extremely important fact that should shape our understanding of 9/11.  But as usual, that's another fact that will be "left unsaid."

 

UPDATE:  Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former Chief of Staff to Gen. Colin Powell when Gen. Powell delivered his infamous Iraq/WMD speech to the U.N., is certainly aware of these omitted facts and is unwilling to ignore them.  I was on Democracy Now with him this morning, talking about Dick Cheney's book, and he had some very interesting things to say. He's what someone with a moral conscience sounds like after being involved in some very bad acts.  It's well worth watching.  Raw Story has the story and the video here, and the transcript is here.

The decade's biggest scam

The Los Angeles Times examines the staggering sums of money expended on patently absurd domestic "homeland security" projects: $75 billion per year for things such as a Zodiac boat with side-scan sonar to respond to a potential attack on a lake in tiny Keith County, Nebraska, and hundreds of "9-ton BearCat armored vehicles, complete with turret" to guard against things like an attack on DreamWorks in Los Angeles.  All of that -- which is independent of the exponentially greater sums spent on foreign wars, occupations, bombings, and the vast array of weaponry and private contractors to support it all -- is in response to this mammoth, existential, the-single-greatest-challenge-of-our-generation threat:

"The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It's basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.

Last year, McClatchy characterized this threat in similar terms: "undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism."  The March, 2011, Harper's Index expressed the point this way: "Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 -- Minimum number who died after being struck by lightning: 29."  That's the threat in the name of which a vast domestic Security State is constructed, wars and other attacks are and continue to be launched, and trillions of dollars are transferred to the private security and defense contracting industry at exactly the time that Americans -- even as they face massive wealth inequality -- are told that they must sacrifice basic economic security because of budgetary constraints. 

Despite these increasing economic insecurities -- actually, precisely because of them -- the sprawling domestic Security State continues unabated.  The industry journal National Defense Magazine today trumpets: "Homeland Security Market 'Vibrant' Despite Budget Concerns."  It details how budget cuts mean "homeland security" growth may not be as robust as once predicted, but "Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman . . . have been winning more contracts from DHS"; as a Boeing spokesman put it: "You'll still continue to see domestically significant investment on the part of the government and leveraging advances in technology to stand up and meet those emerging threats and needs."

Of course, the key to sustaining this Security State bonanza -- profit for private industry and power for Security State officials --  is keeping fear levels among the citizenry as high as possible, as National Defense expressly notes, and that is accomplished by fixating even on minor and failed attacks, each one of which is immediately seized upon to justify greater expenditures, expansion of security measures, and a further erosion of rights:

Polls still show that there is increasing public concern about another terrorist attack. It is this fear and an unrealistic American perception of risk that will continue to propel some aspects of the market, analysts say. . . .

Small-scale attacks, whether successful or not, will continue to prompt additional spending, the market analysts at Homeland Security Research Corp. say. They point to the failed 2009 Christmas plot of a man trying to blow up a flight to Detroit with explosives sewn into his underwear and the attempted car-bombing in Times Square early the next year. Though unsuccessful, these events led to immediate White House intervention, congressional hearings and an airport screening upgrade costing more than $1.6 billion.

The LA Times, while skillfully highlighting these wasteful programs, depicts them as some sort of unintended inefficiencies.  That is exactly what they are not.  None of this is unintended or inefficient but is achieving exactly the purposes for which it is designed.  That's true for two reasons.

First, this wastefulness is seen as inefficient only if one falsely assumes that its real objective is to combat Terrorist threats.  That is not the purpose of what the U.S. Government does.   As Daniel Weeks explains today, the Congress -- contrary to popular opinion -- is not "broken"; it is working perfectly for its actual owners.  Or, as he puts it, "Washington isn't broken -- it's fixed":

Our problem today is not a broken government but a beholden one: government is more beholden to special-interest shareholders who fund campaigns than it is to ordinary voters. Like any sound investor, the funders seek nothing more and nothing less than a handsome return -- deficits be darned -- in the form of tax breaks, subsidies and government contracts.

The LA Times, and most people who denounce these spending "inefficiencies," have the causation backwards: fighting Terrorism isn't the goal that security spending is supposed to fulfill; the security spending (and power vested by surveillance) is the goal itself, and Terrorism is the pretext for it.  For that reason, whether the spending efficiently addresses a Terrorism threat is totally irrelevant.

Second, while the Security State has little to do with addressing ostensible Terrorist threats, it has much to do with targeting perceived domestic and political threats, especially threats brought about by social unrest from austerity and the growing wealth gap.  This Alternet article by Sarah Jafee, entitled "How the Surveillance State Protects the Interests Of the Ultra-Rich," compiles much evidence -- including what I offered two weeks ago -- demonstrating that the prime aim of the growing Surveillance State is to impose domestic order, preserve prevailing economic prerogatives and stifle dissent and anticipated unrest.

Pointing out disparities between surveillance programs and the Terrorist threat is futile because they're not aimed at that threat.  The British Government, for instance, is continuing its efforts to restrict social media in the wake of the poverty-fueled riots that plagued that country; as The New York Times reports today, it is secretly meeting with representatives of Twitter, Facebook, and the company that owns Blackberry "to discuss voluntary ways to limit or restrict the use of social media to combat crime and periods of civil unrest."  That revelation prompted taunting condemnations of British tyranny from China and Iran, both of which have been routinely excoriated for surveillance abuses and Internet suppression of the type increasingly common in the West.

Meanwhile, much of the anti-Terrorism weaponry in the U.S. ends up being deployed for purposes of purely domestic policing.  As the LA Times notes: those aforementioned BearCats are "are now deployed by police across the country; the arrests of methamphetamine dealers and bank robbers these days often look much like a tactical assault on insurgents in Baghdad."  Drones are used both in the Drug War and to patrol the border.  Surveillance measures originally justified as necessary to fight foreign Terrorists are routinely turned far more often inward, and the NSA -- created with a taboo against domestic spying -- now does that regularly.

Exaggerating, manipulating and exploiting the Terrorist threat for profit and power has been the biggest scam of the decade; only Wall Street's ability to make the Government prop it up and profit from the crisis it created at the expense of everyone else can compete for that title.  Nothing has altered the mindset of the American citizenry more than a decade's worth of fear-mongering  So compelling is fear-based propaganda, so beholden are our government institutions to these private Security State factions, and so unaccountable is the power bestowed by these programs, that even a full decade after the only Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, its growth continues more or less unabated.

Secrecy, leaks, and the real criminals

Ali Soufan is a long-time FBI agent and interrogator who was at the center of the U.S. government's counter-terrorism activities from 1997 through 2005, and became an outspoken critic of the government's torture program.  He has written a book exposing the abuses of the CIA's interrogation program as well as pervasive ineptitude and corruption in the War on Terror.  He is, however, encountering a significant problem: the CIA is barring the publication of vast amounts of information in his book including, as Scott Shane details in The New York Times today, many facts that are not remotely secret and others that have been publicly available for years, including ones featured in the 9/11 Report and even in Soufan's own public Congressional testimony.  

Shane notes that the government's censorship effort "amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath," particularly given the imminent publication of a book by CIA agent Jose Rodriguez -- who destroyed the videotapes of CIA interrogations in violation of multiple court orders and subpoenas only to be protected by the Obama DOJ -- that touts the benefits of the CIA's "tough" actions, propagandistically entitled: "Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives."  Most striking about this event is the CIA's defense of its censorship of information from Soufan's book even though it has long been publicly reported and documented:

A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said . . . ."Just because something is in the public domain doesn't mean it's been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government."

Just marvel at the Kafkaesque, authoritarian mentality that produces responses like that: someone can be censored, or even prosecuted and imprisoned, for discussing "classified" information that has long been documented in the public domain.  But as absurd as it is, this deceitful scheme -- suppressing embarrassing information or evidence of illegality by claiming that even public information is "classified" -- is standard government practice for punishing whistleblowers and other critics and shielding high-level lawbreakers. 

The Obama DOJ has continuously claimed that victims of the U.S. rendition, torture and eavesdropping programs cannot have their claims litigated in court because what was done to them are "state secrets" -- even when what was done to them has long been publicly known and even formally, publicly investigated and litigated in open court in other countries. Identically, the Obama DOJ just tried (and failed) to prosecute NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake for "espionage" for "leaking," among other things, documents that do not even remotely contain properly classified information, leading to a formal complaint by a long-time NSA official demanding that the officials who improperly classified those documents themselves be punished.  In a Washington Post Op-Ed today, :

From 2001 through 2008, I was a senior executive at the National Security Agency. Shortly after Sept. 11, I heard more than rumblings about secret electronic eavesdropping and data mining against Americans that bypassed the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act . . .

I followed all the rules for reporting such activity until it conflicted with the primacy of my oath to defend the Constitution. I then made a fateful choice to exercise my fundamental First Amendment rights and went to a journalist with unclassified information about which the public had a right to know.

Rather than address its own corruption, ineptitude and illegal actions, the government made me a target of a multi-year, multimillion-dollar federal criminal "leak" investigation as part of a vicious campaign against whistleblowers that started under President George W. Bush and is coming to full fruition under President Obama.

To the government, I was a traitor and enemy of the state. As an American, however, I could not stand by and become an accessory to the willful subversion of our Constitution and our freedoms. 

Far more often than anything else, that is the real purpose of government secrecy: to shield ineptitude, corruption, abuse of power and illegality from seeing the light of day, and -- as illustrated by the CIA's efforts to destroy Soufan's critical book while guaranteeing the predominance of Rodriguez's propaganda tract -- to ensure that the government controls what the public hears and what it does not hear. 

Ironically, it is that behavior -- abusing secrecy powers to cover-up embarrassing and incriminating evidence -- that is a far more destructive and common crime than unauthorized leaks.  As the Supreme Court explained in rejecting Nixon's classified-based censorship efforts of the Pentagon Papers: "The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of governmental suppression of embarrassing information."  Indeed, abusing secrecy powers to conceal embarrassing and incriminating information has long been illegal, and is even expressly barred by President Obama's own Executive Order governing classified information:

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Abusing government secrecy powers is a vastly more frequent and damaging illegal act than unauthorized leaks, yet the President obsesses on the latter while doing virtually nothing about the former other than continuing its worst manifestations.  As the Supreme Court explained, few things are more damaging to a democracy than allowing political leaders to abuse secrecy powers to cover-up wrongdoing and control the flow of information the public hears, i.e., to propagandize the citizenry. 

But that's exactly what Washington's secrecy fixation is designed to achieve.  And while excessive secrecy has been a problem in the U.S. for decades, the Obama administration's unprecedented war on whistleblowers makes it much more odious, since now it is about not only keeping vital information from the public and stifling public debate, but also threatening whistleblowers (and investigative reporters) with prolonged imprisonment.  That's why they turn what candidate Obama called these "acts of courage and patriotism" (whistleblowing) into crimes, while the real criminals -- political officials who abuse their secrecy powers for corrupted, self-interested ends -- go unpunished. 

This is a perfect symbol of the Obama administration: claims of secrecy are used to censor a vital critic of torture and other CIA abuses (Soufan) and to prosecute an NSA whistleblower who exposed substantial corruption and criminality (Drake), while protecting from all consequences the official who illegally destroyed video evidence of the CIA's torture program (Rodriguez) and then help ensure that his torture-hailing propaganda book becomes the defining narrative of those events.  As usual, the real high-level criminals prosper while those who expose their criminality are the only ones punished.

The fruits of elite immunity

(updated below - Update II [Fri.])

Less than three years ago, Dick Cheney was presiding over policies that left hundreds of thousands of innocent people dead from a war of aggression, constructed a worldwide torture regime, and spied on thousands of Americans without the warrants required by law, all of which resulted in his leaving office as one of the most reviled political figures in decades. But thanks to the decision to block all legal investigations into his chronic criminality, those matters have been relegated to mere pedestrian partisan disputes, and Cheney is thus now preparing to be feted -- and further enriched -- as a Wise and Serious Statesman with the release of his memoirs this week: one in which he proudly boasts (yet again) of the very crimes for which he was immunized.  As he embarks on his massive publicity-generating media tour of interviews, Cheney faces no indictments or criminal juries, but rather reverent, rehabilitative tributes, illustrated by this, from Politico today:

That's what happens when the Government -- marching under the deceitful Orwellian banner of Look Forward, Not Backward -- demands that its citizens avert their eyes from the crimes of their leaders so that all can be forgotten: the crimes become non-crimes, legitimate acts of political choice, and the criminals become instantly rehabilitated by the message that nothing they did warrants punishment.  That's the same reason people like John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales are defending their torture and illegal spying actions not in a courtroom but in a lush conference of elites in Aspen.

The U.S. Government loves to demand that other countries hold their political leaders accountable for serious crimes, dispensing lectures on the imperatives of the rule of law.  Numerous states bar ordinary convicts from profiting from their crimes with books.  David Hicks, an Australian citizen imprisoned without charges for six years at Cheney's Guantanamo, just had $10,000 seized by the Australian government in revenue from his book about his time in that prison camp on the ground that he is barred from profiting from his uncharged, unproven crimes.  

By rather stark contrast, Dick Cheney will prance around the next several weeks in the nation's largest media venues, engaging in civil, Serious debates about whether he was right to invade other countries, torture, and illegally spy on Americans, and will profit greatly by doing so.  There are many factors accounting for his good fortune, the most important of which are the protective shield of immunity bestowed upon him by the current administration and the more generalized American principle that criminal accountability is only for ordinary citizens and other nations' (unfriendly) rulers.

* * * * *

Speaking of that principle, Matt Taibbi today explores the battle between New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and the White House over accountability for Wall Street's mortgage fraud schemes.

 

UPDATE:  I'll be on MSNBC tonight at 8:10 pm EST or so, on Lawrence O'Donnell's Last Word program, talking about these matters with guest-host Chris Hayes.

 

UPDATE II [Fri.]:  Here's the Last Word segment I did last night:

A progressive case for Obama's foreign policy greatness?

At The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky today says that while President Obama "hasn't been much of a domestic-policy president from nearly anyone's point of view" (he apparently hasn't read Steve Benen or Ezra Klein lately), the war in Libya highlights how "one can see how he might become not just a good but a great foreign-policy president."  Tomasky's argument is somewhat cautious and expressly contingent on unknown, future events, but is nonetheless revealing -- both in what it says and what it omits -- about how some influential progressives conceive of the Obama presidency.

First, I'm genuinely astounded at the pervasive willingness to view what has happened in Libya as some sort of grand triumph even though virtually none of the information needed to make that assessment is known yet, including: how many civilians have died, how much more bloodshed will there be, what will be needed to stabilize that country and, most of all, what type of regime will replace Gadaffi?  Does anyone know how many civilians have died in the NATO bombing of Tripoli and the ensuing battle?  Does anyone know who will dominate the subsequent regime?  Does it matter?  To understand how irrational and premature these celebrations are in the absence of that information, I urge everyone to read this brief though amazing compilation of U.S. media commentary from 2003 after U.S. forces entered Baghdad: in which The Liberal Media lavished Bush with intense praise for vanquishing Saddam, complained that Democrats were not giving the President the credit he deserved, and demanded that all those loser-war-opponents shamefully confess their error.  Sound familiar?

No matter how moved you are by joyous Libyans (just as one was presumably moved by joyous Iraqis); no matter how heinous you believe Gadaffi was (he certainly wasn't worse than Saddam); no matter how vast you believe the differences are between Libya and Iraq (and there are significant differences), this specific Iraq lesson cannot be evaded.  When foreign powers use military force to help remove a tyrannical regime that has ruled for decades, all sorts of chaos, violence, instability, and suffering -- along with a slew of unpredictable outcomes -- are inevitable. 

Tomasky acknowledges these uncertainties yet does not allow them to deter him, but that makes no sense: whether this war turns out to be wise or just cannot be known without knowing what it unleashes and what follows.  Just as nobody doubted that the U.S. could bring enough destruction to Iraq to destroy the Saddam regime, nobody doubted that NATO could do the same to Gadaffi; declaring the war in Libya a "success" now is no more warranted than declaring the Iraq War one in April, 2003.

Then there's the issue of illegality.  Tomasky pays lip service to this, dismissing as "ridiculous" Obama's claim that he did not need Congressional approval because the U.S. role in Libya didn't rise to the level of "hostilities." By that, Tomasky presumably means that Obama broke the law and violated the Constitution in how he prosecuted the war.  Isn't that rather obviously a hugely significant fact when assessing Obama's foreign policy?  The Atlantic's Conor Freidersdorf argues that no matter how great the outcome proves to be, Libya must be considered a "Phyrrhic victory for America" because:

Obama has violated the Constitution; he willfully broke a law that he believes to be constitutional; he undermined his own professed beliefs about executive power, and made it more likely that future presidents will undermine convictions that he purports to hold; in all this, he undermined the rule of law and the balance of powers as set forth by the framers.

Similarly, The New Yorker's Amy Davidson warns of the serious precedential dangers not only from Obama's law-breaking but from our collective willingness to overlook it.  Honestly: can anyone claim that if George Bush had waged an optional war without Congressional approval -- and continued to wage it even after a Democratic Congress voted against its authorization -- that progressives would be lightly and parenthetically calling it "ridiculous" on their way to praising the war?  No, they'd be screaming -- rightfully so -- about lawlessness and the shredding of the Constitution; that this identical contempt for the law by Obama has become nothing more than a cursory progressive caveat (at most) on the way to hailing the glorious war is astounding.

That leads to an equally dangerous precedent from acquiescing to illegality that has not received nearly enough attention.  There seems to be this sense that while it's regretful that Obama had to break the law to wage this war, the outcome is so good, the cause was so imperative, that we can accept this. 

As someone who spent years arguing literally on a daily basis about Bush's lawlessness, I can assure you that this rationale was exactly the one offered by Bush followers over and over again: even if it was technically illegal to eavesdrop without warrants, it was justified because (a) FISA is too restrictive a law on presidential authority and (b) the cause -- detecting Terrorist plots -- is so important and just.  Replace "FISA" with "War Powers Resolution" and "detecting Terrorist plots" with "vanquishing Gadaffi" and one finds that mentality in full force today (in December, 2005, I wrote a post entitled "Claiming the Right to Break the Law," highlighting how Bush officials such as Condoleezza Rice were defending the NSA program on that ground that stopping Terrorists was so vital that it justified the warrantless eavesdropping (and see the discussion there of how Bush followers justified anything their leader did even when it was illegal), and in January, 2006, I wrote a post entitled "The Bad Law Defense," critiquing the claim from Gen. Michael Hayden that illegal eaveasdropping was permissible because FISA was too restrictive).  As I wrote back then about that latter view:

As always, the first -- and, for this scandal, the dispositive -- principle is that the solution to a bad law is to change the law, not to break the law in secret and then claim once you're caught that the law you broke was a bad law. If the President has the power to comply only with those laws he likes but to violate the laws he dislikes – and that, at bottom, is the Administration's position -- then we have a President who, by definition, does not believe in the rule of law and refuses to comport himself to it.

And as I wrote in my first book, How Would a Patriot Act?, about Bush lawlessness and the NSA scandal:

The heart of the matter is that the president broke the law, deliberately and repeatedly, no matter what his rationale was for doing so. We do not have a system of government in which the president has the right to violate laws, even if he believes doing so will produce good results. . . .

An illegally fought war isn't some minor nit on Obama's foreign policy record generally or the war in Libya particularly; it's fundamental to what he did and how it should be assessed.

Then there are the multiple claims and promises of Obama's that were clearly breached by this war.  When running for President, he vowed that "we will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers" and: "no more ignoring the law when it's inconvenient. That is not who we are."  He unambiguously told The Boston Globe that "the President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."  And he told the nation when explaining the war in Libya after he ordered U.S. involvement that the purpose was protecting civilians, not regime change, and that "broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake."  All of those public vows were simply brushed aside -- blithely violated -- without the slightest explanation.

But even more confounding than the praise Tomasky heaps on the war in Libya is his broader admiration for Barack Obama's foreign policy generally.  Not only has the Democratic President escalated the war in Afghanistan, but he's dramatically increased American violence and aggression in multiple countries around the world, including Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.  His actions have ended the lives of dozens upon dozens of innocent civilians, including a single cluster bombs attack in Yemen -- cluster bombs -- that by itself killed 23 children and 17 women; his own top General in Afghanistan described an "amazing number" of innocents killed at checkpoints; drone attacks continue to pile up the corpses of innocent human beings.  None of this massive war escalation, increased aggression, and civilian death at Obama's hands even merits a mention from Tomasky, let alone impedes the gushing; all of that has just been whitewashed from the progressive mind.

Then there is Obama's continuation -- and strengthening -- of the Bush/Cheney Terrorism and civil liberties template that many progressives once pretended to find so deeply offensive.  Perhaps Tomasky could argue that these don't belong in a critique of Obama's foreign policy (though I was just told by Scott Lemieux that these issues don't belong in a discussion of Obama's domestic policy), but surely some of it does.  Obama has fought to deny Afghan prisoners any minimal habeas corpus rights, employed Somali proxies to house accused Terrorists in black sites, used "detention and torture by proxy" in Kuwait and elsewhere, targeted U.S. citizens for due-process-free assassinations, and vastly bolstered the secrecy regime surrounding his actions.  Maybe some of that should be taken into account by progressives rushing to proclaim Obama's foreign policy Greatness?

Stranger still are the alleged accomplishments Tomasky cites in his concluding paragraph:

But it's hardly impossible to envision an Obama administration in a few years' time that has drawn down Afghanistan and Iraq, helped foster reforms and maybe even the growth of a couple of democracies around the Middle East, and restored the standing of a country that Bush had laid such staggering waste. And killed Osama bin Laden. If this is weak America-hating, count me in.

That's all very moving, except for the fact that none of it is real.  Obama hasn't "restored" America's standing; granted, the country is more popular in Western Europe, but in the crucial Middle East and predominantly Muslim regions, America, if anything, is viewed more negatively now than it was under Bush.  There's no sign that Obama is "drawing down" in Afghanistan (his announced "withdrawal" plan would leave more troops than were there when he was inaugurated), and he's currently working hard to pressure Iraq to agree to U.S. troops in that country beyond the repeatedly touted deadline (beyond the private army to be maintained by the State Department).  And Tomasky's fantasy that Obama will spawn "the growth of a couple of democracies around the Middle East" -- the hallmark of neocon yearning -- is revealing indeed; it's also quite redolent of this bit of speculative presidential tongue-bathing about Bush's democracy-spreading from Time's Joe Klein in 2005:

But that is where the democratic idealism of the Bush Doctrine has led us. If the President turns out to be right -- and let's hope he is -- a century's worth of woolly-headed liberal dreamers will be vindicated. And he will surely deserve that woolliest of all peace prizes, the Nobel.

Tomasky is right about Obama's tonal improvements over Bush: as I've noted before, his less belligerent rhetoric is welcome.  And it's also true that it's impossible to imagine Obama landing on an aircraft carrier wearing a fighter pilot costume (though he was hardly shy about dispatching anonymous aides leaking classified information to cover him with glory over the bin Laden killing).  And Obama deserves credit for more effective use of the U.N. and alliances to manage American wars.  But much of that is atmospheric, and it is setting a very low bar indeed: he's not as much of an overtly chest-beating play-acting warrior as George W. Bush is not exactly greatness-establishing.

On the level of actions, any progressive decreeing Barack Obama's foreign policy Greatness can do so only via willful blindness and/or a complete repudiation of previously claimed progressive principles.  Both are vividly on display in Tomasky's salute.

* * * * *

On the subject of Libya and Obama's foreign policy generally, Jeremy Scahill's appearance this morning on Morning Joe, in which he tries to explain some basic facts to a very confused Howard Dean and Tina Brown, is a must-watch:

Obama administration takes tough stance on banks

In mid-May, I wrote about the commendable -- one might say heroic -- efforts of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to single-handedly impose meaningful accountability on Wall Street banks for their role in the 2008 financial crisis and the mortgage fraud/foreclosure schemes.  Not only was Schneiderman launching probing investigations at a time when the Obama DOJ was steadfastly failing to do so, but -- more importantly -- he was refusing to sign onto a global settlement agreement being pushed by the DOJ that would have insulated the mortgage banks (including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo) from all criminal investigations in exchange for some relatively modest civil fines.  In response, many commenters wondered whether Schneiderman, if he persisted, would be targeted by the banks with some type of campaign of destruction of the kind that brought down Eliot Spitzer, but fortunately for the banks, they can dispatch their owned servants in Washington to apply the pressure for them:

Eric T. Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, has come under increasing pressure from the Obama administration to drop his opposition to a wide-ranging state settlement with banks over dubious foreclosure practices, according to people briefed on discussions about the deal.

In recent weeks, Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and high-level Justice Department officials have been waging an intensifying campaign to try to persuade the attorney general to support the settlement, said the people briefed on the talks.

Mr. Schneiderman and top prosecutors in some other states have objected to the proposed settlement with major banks, saying it would restrict their ability to investigate and prosecute wrongdoing in a variety of areas, including the bundling of loans in mortgage securities.

But Mr. Donovan and others in the administration have been contacting not only Mr. Schneiderman but his allies, including consumer groups and advocates for borrowers, seeking help to secure the attorney general's participation in the deal, these people said. One recipient described the calls from Mr. Donovan, but asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.

Not surprising, the large banks, which are eager to reach a settlement, have grown increasingly frustrated with Mr. Schneiderman. Bank officials recently discussed asking Mr. Donovan for help in changing the attorney general's mind, according to a person briefed on those talks.

In response to this story, the DOJ claims that the settlement is necessary to help people whose homes are in foreclosure, an absurd rationalization which Marcy Wheeler simply destroys.  Meanwhile, Yves Smith, whose coverage of banking and mortgage fraud (and the administration's protection of it) has long been indispensable, writes today:

It is high time to describe the Obama Administration by its proper name: corrupt.

Admittedly, corruption among our elites generally and in Washington in particular has become so widespread and blatant as to fall into the "dog bites man" category. But the nauseating gap between the Administration's propaganda and the many and varied ways it sells out average Americans on behalf of its favored backers, in this case the too big to fail banks, has become so noisome that it has become impossible to ignore the fetid smell.

The Administration has now taken to pressuring parties that are not part of the machinery reporting to the President to fall in and do his bidding. We've gotten so used to the US attorney general being conveniently missing in action that we have forgotten that regulators and the AG are supposed to be independent.

Her entire analysis should be read.  The President -- who kicked off his campaign vowing to put an end to "the era of Scooter Libby justice" -- will stand before the electorate in 2012 having done everything in his power to shield top Bush officials from all accountability for their crimes and will have done the same for Wall Street banks, all while continuing to preside over the planet's largest Prison State . . . for ordinary Americans convicted even of trivial offenses, particularly (though not only) from the War on Drugs he continues steadfastly to defend.  And as Sam Seder noted this morning, none of this has anything to do with Congress and cannot be blamed on the Weak Presidency, the need to compromise, or the "crazy" GOP.

I particularly regret that my book to be released in October -- examining America's two-tiered justice system, whereby political and financial elites are immunized from accountability even for the most egregious crimes while ordinary Americans (particularly poor and minorities) suffer unfathomably harsh punishments for minor transgressions -- won't include this incident, as it so perfectly highlights the book's argument (though it's long been obvious that Wall Street criminals would be immunized from accountability and the book deals with that extensively).  Also worth reading in that regard is this article from Joseph Stiglitz on how failure to criminally prosecute mortgage fraud would destroy the rule of law. As I wrote at the end of my May post on Schniederman:

It is worth keeping a watchful eye on Schneiderman's investigative efforts and doing everything possible to provide what will undoubtedly be much-needed support if, as appears to be the case, he is serious about taking on these pernicious factions and impeding the conspiring by the political class to protect their benefactors/owners.

When I wrote that, I assumed the pressure would come from the banks themselves, not from top Executive Branch officials.  At this point, though, the mistake is to consider those entities as separate and distinct at all.  As Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin said of the branch of government in which he serves:  banks "frankly own the place."  Capitol Hill is obviously not the only property they own on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Libya War argument

In April, 2003, American troops entered Baghdad and Saddam Hussein was forced to flee; six months later, the dictator was captured ("caught like a rat in a hole," giddy American media outlets celebrated) and eventually hanged.  Each of those incidents caused massive numbers of Iraqis who had suffered under his decades-long rule to celebrate, and justifiably so: Saddam really was a monster who had brutally oppressed millions.  But what was not justifiable was how those emotions were exploited by American war advocates to delegitimize domestic objections to the war.  Even though opposition to the war had absolutely nothing to do with doubt about whether Saddam could be vanquished by the U.S. military -- of course he could and would be -- the emotions surrounding his defeat were seized upon by Iraq War supporters to boastfully claim full-scale vindication (here's one of my all-time favorites from that intellectually corrupt genre). 

So extreme was this manipulative way of arguing that then-presidential-candidate Howard Dean was mauled by people in both parties when he dared to raise questions about whether Saddam's capture -- being hailed in bipartisan political and media circles as a Great American Achievement -- would actually make things better.  Dean's obvious point was that Saddam's demise told us very little about the key questions surrounding the war: how many civilians had died and would die in the future?  What would be required to stabilize Iraq?  How much more fighting would be unleashed?  What precedents did the attack set?  What regime would replace Saddam and what type of rule would it impose, and to whom would its leaders be loyal?  That a dictatorial monster had been vanquished told us nothing about any of those key questions -- the ones in which war opposition had been grounded -- yet war proponents, given pervasive hatred of Saddam, dared anyone to question the war in the wake of those emotional events and risk appearing to oppose Saddam's defeat.  That tactic succeeded in turning war criticism in the immediate aftermath of those events into a taboo (the same thing was done in the wake of Mullah Omar's expulsion from Afghanistan to those arguing that the war would result in a "quagmire").

As I've emphasized from the very first time I wrote about a possible war in Libya, there are real and important differences between the attack on Iraq and NATO's war in Libya, ones that make the former unjustifiable in ways the latter is not (beginning with at least some form of U.N. approval).  But what they do have in common -- what virtually all wars have in common -- is the rhetorical manipulation used to justify them and demonize critics.  Just as Iraq War opponents were accused of being "objectively pro-Saddam" and harboring indifference to The Iraqi People, so, too, were opponents of the Libya War repeatedly accused of being on Gadaffi's side (courtesy of Hillary Clinton, an advocate of both wars) and/or exuding indifference to the plight of Libyans.  And now, in the wake of the apparent demise of the Gadaffi regime, we see all sorts of efforts, mostly from Democratic partisans, to exploit the emotions from Gadaffi's fall to shame those who questioned the war, illustrated by this question last night from ThinkProgress, an organization whose work I generally respect:

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The towering irrationality of this taunt is manifest.  Of course the U.S. participation in that war is still illegal.  It's illegal because it was waged for months not merely without Congressional approval, but even in the face of a Congressional vote against its authorization.  That NATO succeeded in defeating the Mighty Libyan Army does not have the slightest effect on that question, just as Saddam's capture told us nothing about the legality or wisdom of that war.  What comments like this one are designed to accomplish is to exploit and manipulate the emotions surrounding Gaddafi's fall to shame and demonize war critics and dare them to question the War President now in light of his glorious triumph.

Of course, ThinkProgress could have just as rationally directed its question to President Obama's own Attorney General, Eric Holder, and his Office of Legal Counsel Chief, Caroline Krass, and his DOD General Counsel, Jeh Johnsen, all of whom argued that the war was illegal on the same grounds as Boehner did.  Or they could have directed their comment to the numerous House Democrats who vehemently protested the war's illegality, and to the 60% of House Democrats who voted to de-fund it.  Or they could have even directed it to ThinkProgress' own Matt Yglesias, who repeatedly expressed doubts about both the legality and wisdom of the Libya war, and last night wrote:

Let's wish the best of luck to the people of Libya. Part of the problem with this intervention has always been that the fall of a dictator seems to me just as likely to lead to a bloody civil war or a new dictatorship as the emergence of a humane and stable regime. The effort to build a better future really only starts today.

Those are among the key questions that remain entirely unanswered.  No decent human being would possibly harbor any sympathy for Gadaffi, just as none harbored any for Saddam.  It's impossible not to be moved by the celebration of Libyans over the demise of (for some at least) their hated dictator, just as was the case for the happiness of Kurds and Shiites over Saddam's.  And I've said many times before, there are undoubtedly many Libya war supporters motivated by the magnanimous (though misguided) desire to use the war to prevent mass killings (just as some Iraq War supporters genuinely wanted to liberate Iraqis). 

But the real toll of this war (including the number of civilian deaths that have occurred and will occur) is still almost entirely unknown, and none of the arguments against the war (least of all the legal ones) are remotely resolved by yesterday's events.  Shamelessly exploiting hatred of the latest Evil Villain to irrationally shield all sorts of policies from critical scrutiny -- the everything-is-justified-if-we-get-a-Bad-Guy mentality -- is one of the most common and destructive staples of American political discourse, and it's no better when done here.

U.S. Mideast policy in a single phrase

The CIA's spokesman at The Washington Post, columnist David Ignatius, recently announced that the glorifying term "Arab Spring" is no longer being used by senior intelligence officials to describe democratic revolutions in the Middle East.  It has been replaced by the more "neutral" term "Arab transition," which, as Ignatius put it, "conveys the essential truth that nobody can predict just where this upheaval is heading."  Note that what was until very recently celebrated in American media circles as a joyous, inspirational awakening of "democratic birth and freedom" has now been downgraded to an "upheaval" whose outcome may be odious and threatening.

That's not surprising.  As I've written about several times, public opinion in those nations is so strongly opposed to the policies the U.S. has long demanded -- and is quite hostile (more so than ever) to the U.S. itself and especially Israel -- that allowing any form of democracy would necessarily be adverse to American and Israeli interests in that region (at least as those two nations have long perceived of their "interests").  That's precisely why the U.S. worked so hard and expended so many resources for decades to ensure that brutal dictators ruled those nations and suppressed public opinion to the point of complete irrelevance (behavior which, predictably and understandably, exacerbated anti-American sentiments among the populace).

An illustrative example of this process has emerged this week in Egypt, where authorities have bitterly denounced Israel for killing three of its police officers in a cross-border air attack on suspected Gaza-based militants, and to make matters worse, thereafter blaming Egypt for failing to control "terrorists" in the area.  Massive, angry protests outside the Israeli Embassy in Cairo led to Egypt's recalling of its Ambassador to Israel and the Israeli Ambassador's being forced to flee Cairo.  That, in turn, led to what The New York Times called a "rare statement of regret" from Israel in order to placate growing Egyptian anger: "rare" because, under the U.S.-backed Mubarak, Egyptian public opinion was rendered inconsequential and the Egyptian regime's allegiance was to Israel, meaning Israel never had to account for such acts, let alone apologize for them.  In that regard, consider this superbly (if unintentionally) revealing phrase from the NYT about this incident:

By removing Mr. Mubarak's authoritarian but dependably loyal government, the revolution has stripped away a bulwark of Israel's position in the region, unleashing the Egyptian public's pent-up anger at Israel over its treatment of the Palestinians at a time when a transitional government is scrambling to maintain its own legitimacy in the streets.  

That word "loyal" makes the phrase remarkable: to whom was Mubarak "loyal"?  Not to the Egyptian people whom he was governing or even to Egypt itself, but rather to Israel and the United States.  Thus, in the past, Egypt's own government would have sided with a foreign nation to which it was "loyal" even when that foreign nation killed its own citizens and refused to apologize (exactly as the U.S. did when Israel killed one of its own citizens on the Mavi Marmara and then again over the prospect that Israel would do the same with the new flotilla: in contrast to Turkey which, acting like a normal government, was bitterly furious with Israel --- and still is -- over the wanton killing of its citizens; in that sense, the U.S. is just as "dependably loyal" as the Mubarak regime was). 

But as remarkable as it is, that phrase -- "authoritarian but dependably loyal" -- captures the essence of (ongoing) American behavior in that region for decades: propping up the most heinous, tyrannical rulers who disregard and crush the views of their own people while remaining supremely "loyal" to foreign powers: the U.S. and Israel.  Consider this equally revealing passage from The Guardian:

Israel fears that the post-Mubarak regime will be more sympathetic to Hamas and could even revoke the 1979 peace treaty with Israel. "They feel the need to respond to the [Arab] street," said an Israeli government official. "Instead of calming things down, they are being dragged." The Egyptian statement was "a very dismal development", he said.

"Arab street": the derogatory term long used to degrade public opinion in those nations as some wild animal that needs to be suppressed and silenced rather than heeded.  That's why this Israeli official talks about "the need to respond" to Egyptian public opinion -- also known as "democracy" -- as though it's some sort of bizarre, dangerous state of affairs: because nothing has been as important to the U.S. and Israel than ensuring the suppression of democracy in that region, ensuring that millions upon millions of people are consigned to brutal tyranny so that their interests are trampled upon in favor of "loyalty" to the interests of those two foreign nations. 

This is why American media coverage of the Arab Spring produced one of the most severe cases of cognitive dissonance one can recall.  The packaged morality narrative was that despots like Mubarak -- and those in Tunisia, Bahrain and elsewhere -- are unambiguous, cruel villains whom we're all supposed to hate, while the democracy protesters are noble and to be cheered.  But whitewashed from that storyline was that it was the Freedom-loving United States that played such a vital role in empowering those despots and crushing the very democracy we are now supposed to cheer.  Throughout all the media hate sessions spewed toward the former Egyptian dictator -- including as he's tried for crimes against his own people --  how often was it mentioned that Hillary Clinton, as recently as two years ago, was saying things such as: "I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family" (or that John McCain, around the same time, was tweeting: "Late evening with Col. Qadhafi at his 'ranch' in Libya - interesting meeting with an interesting man.")?  Almost never: because the central U.S. role played in that mass oppression was simply ignored once the oppression could no longer be sustained.

And, of course, it wasn't the case that the U.S. Government decided to cease its democracy-crushing, or that the American media one day decided to denounce the U.S.-backed Arab tyrants and celebrate democracy.  They had no choice.  These events happened against the will of the U.S., and only once their inevitability became clear did the American government and media pretend to suddenly side with "democracy and freedom."  Even as they indulge that pretense, they continued -- and continue -- to try to render the "democratic revolutions" illusory and to prop up the tyrannies that are still salvageable.  In sum, American discourse was forced by events to denounce the very despots the U.S. Government protected and to praise the very democratic values the U.S. long destroyed.

This is what Ignatius means when he decrees that the U.S. should not try to be on "the right side of history" but rather, "what should guide U.S. policy in this time of transition is to be on the right side of America's own interests and values" and, most critically, that "sometimes those two will conflict."  The U.S. has always subordinated its ostensible "values" (democracy, freedom) to its own "interests" in that region, which is why it has crushed the former in order to promote the latter.  As we prepare to celebrate the reportedly imminent fall of Gadaffi just as we once celebrated the fall of Saddam -- Juan Cole is already declaring large parts of Libya "liberated" -- that behavior should be kept firmly in mind; whether a country is truly "liberated" by the removal of a despot depends on who replaces it and what their "loyalties" are: to foreign powers or to the democratic will of that nation's citizens.

For Americans in such consensus to celebrate the fall of evil Arab tyrants without accounting for the role the U.S. played in their decades-long rule was bizarre (though typical) indeed.  That "senior intelligence officials" are regarding these fledgling, potential democracies with such suspicion and longing for the days of the "dependably loyal" dictatorial regimes tells one all there is to know about what we have actually been doing in that part of the world, and have been doing for as long as that part of the world was a concern to American officials.

A prime aim of the growing Surveillance State

Several weeks ago, a New York Times article by Noam Cohen examined the case of Aaron Swartz, the 24-year-old copyright reform advocate who was arrested in July, after allegedly downloading academic articles that had been placed behind a paywall, thus making them available for free online.  Swartz is now being prosecuted by the DOJ with obscene over-zealousness.  Despite not profiting (or trying to profit) in any way -- the motive was making academic discourse available to the world for free -- he's charged with "felony counts including wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer" and "could face up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines." 

The NYT article explored similarities between Swartz and Bradley Manning, another young activist being severely punished for alleged acts of freeing information without any profit to himself; the article quoted me as follows:

For Glenn Greenwald . . . it also makes sense that a young generation would view the Internet in political terms.

"How information is able to be distributed over the Internet, it is the free speech battle of our times," he said in interview. "It can seem a technical, legalistic movement if you don't think about it that way."

He said that point was illustrated by his experience with WikiLeaks -- and by how the Internet became a battleground as the site was attacked by hackers and as large companies tried to isolate WikiLeaks. Looking at that experience and the Swartz case, he said, "clearly the government knows that this is the prime battle, the front line for political control."

This is the point I emphasize whenever I talk about why topics such as the sprawling Surveillance State and the attempted criminalization of WikiLeaks and whistleblowing are so vital.  The free flow of information and communications enabled by new technologies -- as protest movements in the Middle East and a wave of serious leaks over the last year have demonstrated -- is a uniquely potent weapon in challenging entrenched government power and other powerful factions.  And that is precisely why those in power -- those devoted to preservation of the prevailing social order -- are so increasingly fixated on seizing control of it and snuffing out its potential for subverting that order: they are well aware of, and are petrified by, its power, and want to ensure that the ability to dictate how it is used, and toward what ends, remains exclusively in their hands.

The Western World has long righteously denounced China for its attempts to control the Internet as a means of maintaining social order.  It even more vocally condemned Arab regimes such as the one in Egypt for shutting down Internet and cell phone service in order to disrupts protests.  

But, in the wake of recent riots in London and throughout Britain -- a serious upheaval to be sure, but far less disruptive than what happened in the Middle East this year, or what happens routinely in China -- the instant reaction of Prime Minister David Cameron was a scheme to force telecoms to allow his government the power to limit the use of Internet and social networking sites.  Earlier this week, when San Francisco residents gathered in the BART subway system to protest the shooting by BART police of a 45-year-old man, city officials shut down underground cell phone service entirely for hours; that, in turn, led to hacking reprisals against BART by the hacker collective known as "Anonymous."  As the San-Fransisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation put it on its website: "BART officials are showing themselves to be of a mind with the former president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak."  Those efforts in Britain and San Fransisco are obviously not yet on the same scale as those in other places, but it illustrates how authorities react to social disorder: with an instinctive desire to control communication technologies and the flow of information.

The emergence of entities like WikiLeaks (which single-handedley jeopardizes pervasive government and corporate secrecy) and Anonymous (which has repeatedly targeted entities that seek to impede the free flow of communication and information) underscores the way in which this conflict is a genuine "war."  The U.S. Government's efforts to destroy WikiLeaks and harass its supporters have been well-documented.  Meanwhile, the U.S. seeks to expand its own power to launch devastating cyber attacks: there is ample evidence suggesting its involvement in the Stuxnet attacks on Iran, as well as reason to believe that some government agency was responsible for the sophisticated cyber-attack that knocked WikiLeaks off U.S. servers (attacks the U.S. Government tellingly never condemned, let alone investigated).  Yet simultaneously, the DOJ and other Western law enforcement agencies have pursued Anonymous with extreme vigor.  That is the definition of a war over Internet control: the government wants the unilateral power to cyber-attack and shut down those who pose a threat ot it, while destroying those who resists those efforts.

There have literally been so many efforts over the past several years to heighten surveillance powers and other means of control over the Internet that it's very difficult to chronicle them all.  In August of last year, the UAE and Saudi Arabian governments triggered much outrage when they barred the use of Blackberries on the ground that they could not effectively monitor their communications (needless to say, the U.S. condemned the Saudi and UAE schemes). But a month later, the Obama administration unveilled a plan to "require all services that enable communications -- including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct 'peer to peer' messaging like Skype" to enable "back door" government access. 

This year, the Obama administration began demanding greater power to obtain Internet records without a court order.  Meanwhile, the Chairwoman of the DNC, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, is sponsoring a truly pernicious bill that would force Internet providers "to keep logs of their customers' activities for one year."  And a whole slew of sleazy, revolving-door functionaries from the public/private consortium that is the National Security State -- epitomized by former Bush DNI and current Booz Allen executive Adm. Michael McConnell -- are expoiting fear-mongering hysteria over cyber-attacks to justify incredibly dangerous (and profitable) Internet controls.  As The Washington Post's Dana Priest and William Arkin reported in their "Top Secret America" series last year: "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications."  That is a sprawling, out-of-control Surveillance State.

One must add to all of these developments the growing attempts to stifle meaningful dissent of any kind -- especially civil disobedience -- through intimidation and excessive punishment.  The cruel and degrading treatment of Bradley Manning, the attempted criminalization of WikiLeaks, the unprecedentedly harsh war on whistleblowers: these are all grounded in the recognition that the technology itself cannot be stopped, but making horrific examples out of those who effectively oppose powerful factions can chill others from doing so.  What I tried to convey in my NYT interview was that the common thread in the Swartz and Manning persecutions -- as well similar cases such as the two-year prison term for non-violent climate change protester Tim DeChristopher, the FBI's ongoing investigation of pro-Palestinian peace activists, and even the vindictive harassment of White House/DADT protester Dan Choi -- is the growing efforts to punish and criminalize non-violent protests, as a means of creating a climate of fear that will deter similar dissent.

It is not hard to understand why the fears driving these actions are particularly acute now.  The last year has seen an incredible amount of social upheaval, not just in the Arab world but increasingly in the West.  The Guardian today documented the significant role which poverty and opportunity deprivation played in the British riots.  Austerity misery -- coming soon to the U.S. -- has sparked serious upheavals in numerous Western nations.  Even if one takes as pessimistic a view as possible of an apathetic, meek, complacent American populace, it's simply inevitable that some similar form of disorder is in the U.S.'s future as well.  As but one example, just consider this extraordinary indicia of pervasive American discontent, from a Gallup finding yesterday (click on image to enlarge): 

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The intensely angry "town hall" political protests from last August, though wildly misdirected at health care reform, gave a glimpse of the brewing societal anger and economic anxiety; even Tea Party politicians are now being angrily harangued by furious citizens over growing joblessness and loss of opportunity as Wall Street prospers and Endless Wars continue.  This situation -- exploding wealth inequality combined with harsh austerity, little hope for improvement and a growing sense of irreversible national decline -- cannot possibly be sustained for long without some serious social unrest.  As Yale Professor David Bromwich put it in his extraordinarily thorough analysis of the "continuities" in what he calls "the Bush-Obama presidency": 

The usual turn from unsatisfying wars abroad to happier domestic conditions, however, no longer seems tenable. In these August days, Americans are rubbing their eyes, still wondering what has befallen us with the president's "debt deal" -- a shifting of tectonic plates beneath the economy of a sort Dick Cheney might have dreamed of, but which Barack Obama and the House Republicans together brought to fruition. A redistribution of wealth and power more than three decades in the making has now been carved into the system and given the stamp of permanence.

Only a Democratic president, and only one associated in the public mind (however wrongly) with the fortunes of the poor, could have accomplished such a reversal with such sickening completeness.

Economic suffering and anxiety -- and anger over it and the flamboyant prosperity of the elites who caused it -- is only going to worsen.  So, too, will the refusal of the Western citizenry to meekly accept their predicament. As that happens, who it is who controls the Internet and the flow of information and communications takes on greater importance.  Those who are devoted to preserving the current system of prerogatives certainly know that, and that is what explains this obsession with expanding the Surveillance State and secrecy powers, maintaining control over the dissemination of information, and harshly punishing those who threaten it.  That's also why there are few conflicts, if there are any, of greater import than this one.