Human rights are freedoms established by custom or international agreement that impose standards of conduct on all nations. Human rights are distinct from civil liberties, which are freedoms established by the law of a particular state and applied by that state in its own jurisdiction.
Declassified documents released last week shed light on the Central Intelligence Agency’s central role in the 1953 coup that brought down Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh, fueling a surge of nationalism which culminated in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and poisoning U.S.-Iran relations into the 21st century.
The approximately 1,000 pages of documents also reveal for the first time the details of how the CIA attempted to call off the failing coup — only to be salvaged at the last minute by an insubordinate spy on the ground.
Known as Operation Ajax, the CIA plot was ultimately about oil. Western firms had for decades controlled the region’s oil wealth, whether Arabian-American Oil Company in Saudi Arabia, or the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Iran. When the U.S. firm in Saudi Arabia bowed to pressure in late 1950 and agreed to share oil revenues evenly with Riyadh, the British concession in Iran came under intense pressure to follow suit. But London adamantly refused.
So in early 1951, amid great popular acclaim, Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil industry. A fuming United Kingdom began conspiring with U.S. intelligence services to overthrow Mossadegh and restore the monarchy under the shah. (Though some in the U.S. State Department, the newly released cables show, blamed British intransigence for the tensions and sought to work with Mossadegh.)
The coup attempt began on August 15 but was swiftly thwarted. Mossadegh made dozens of arrests. Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi, a top conspirator, went into hiding, and the shah fled the country.
The CIA, believing the coup to have failed, called it off.
“Operation has been tried and failed and we should not participate in any operation against Mossadegh which could be traced back to US,” CIA headquarters wrote to its station chief in Iran in a newly declassified cable sent on Aug. 18, 1953. “Operations against Mossadegh should be discontinued.”
That is the cable which Kermit Roosevelt, top CIA officer in Iran, purportedly and famously ignored, according to Malcolm Byrne, who directs the U.S.-Iran Relations Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. More
The CIA has publicly admitted for the first time that it was behind the notorious 1953 coup against Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, in documents that also show how the British government tried to block the release of information about its own involvement in his overthrow.
On the 60th anniversary of an event often invoked by Iranians as evidence of western meddling, the US national security archive at George Washington University published a series of declassified CIA documents.
“The military coup that overthrew Mosaddeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government,” reads a previously excised section of an internal CIA history titled The Battle for Iran.
The documents, published on the archive’s website under freedom of information laws, describe in detail how the US – with British help – engineered the coup, codenamed TPAJAX by the CIA and Operation Boot by Britain’s MI6.
Britain, and in particular Sir Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, regarded Mosaddeq as a serious threat to its strategic and economic interests after the Iranian leader nationalised the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, latterly known as BP. But the UK needed US support. The Eisenhower administration in Washington was easily persuaded.
Mohammad Mosaddeq
British documents show how senior officials in the 1970s tried to stop Washington from releasing documents that would be “very embarrassing” to the UK.
Official papers in the UK remain secret, even though accounts of Britain’s role in the coup are widespread. In 2009 the former foreign secretary Jack Straw publicly referred to many British “interferences” in 20th-century Iranian affairs. On Monday the Foreign Office said it could neither confirm nor deny Britain’s involvement in the coup.
The previously classified US documents include telegrams from Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA officer on the ground in Iran during the coup. Others, including a draft in-house CIA history by Scott Kock titled Zendebad, Shah! (Viva, Shah!), say that according to Monty Woodhouse, MI6’s station chief in Tehran at the time, Britain needed US support for a coup. Eden agreed. “Woodhouse took his words as tantamount to permission to pursue the idea” with the US, Kock wrote.
Mosaddeq’s overthrow, still given as a reason for the Iranian mistrust of British and American politicians, consolidated the Shah’s rule for the next 26 years until the 1979 Islamic revolution. It was aimed at making sure the Iranian monarchy would safeguard the west’s oil interests in the country.
The archived CIA documents include a draft internal history of the coup titled “Campaign to install a pro-western government in Iran”, which defines the objective of the campaign as “through legal, or quasi-legal, methods to effect the fall of the Mosaddeq government; and to replace it with a pro-western government under the Shah’s leadership with Zahedi as its prime minister”.
Kermit Roosevelt
One document describes Mosaddeq as one of the “most mercurial, maddening, adroit and provocative leaders with whom they [the US and Britain] had ever dealt”. The document says Mosaddeq “found the British evil, not incomprehensible” and “he and millions of Iranians believed that for centuries Britain had manipulated their country for British ends”. Another document refers to conducting a “war of nerves” against Mossadeq.
The Iranian-Armenian historian Ervand Abrahamian, author of The Coup: 1953, the CIA and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations, said in a recent interview that the coup was designed “to get rid of a nationalist figure who insisted that oil should be nationalised”.
Unlike other nationalist leaders, including Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Mosaddeq epitomised a unique “anti-colonial” figure who was also committed to democratic values and human rights, Abrahamian argued.
Some analysts argue that Mosaddeq failed to compromise with the west and the coup took place against the backdrop of communism fears in Iran. “My study of the documents proves to me that there was never really a fair compromise offered to Mosaddeq, what they wanted Mosaddeq to do is to give up oil nationalisation and if he’d given that of course then the national movement would have been meaningless,” he told the Iranian online publication, Tableau magazine.
“My argument is that there was never really a realistic threat of communism … discourse and the way justifying any act was to talk about communist danger, so it was something used for the public, especially the American and the British public.”
Despite the latest releases, a significant number of documents about the coup remain secret. Malcolm Byrne, deputy director of the national security archive, has called on the US intelligence authorities to release the remaining records and documents.
“There is no longer good reason to keep secrets about such a critical episode in our recent past. The basic facts are widely known to every school child in Iran,” he said. “Suppressing the details only distorts the history, and feeds into myth-making on all sides.”
In recent years Iranian politicians have sought to compare the dispute over the country’s nuclear activities to that of the oil nationalisation under Mosaddeq: supporters of the former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad often invoke the coup.
US officials have previously expressed regret about the coup but have fallen short of issuing an official apology. The British government has never acknowledged its role. More
Via TomDispatch : I've seen nothing that caught the liberties-constraining mentality of the national security state better than these four paragraphs from Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic based on a recent speech by former NSA (and CIA) head Michael Hayden.
What Hayden says seems so commonsensical to him and it should chill the rest of us to the bone. Don't miss Friedersdorf's fourth paragraph which translates Hayden into our English. Tom
In a speech at Washington and Lee University, Michael Hayden, a former head of both the CIA and NSA, opined on signals intelligence under the Constitution, arguing that what the 4th Amendment forbids changed after September 11, 2001. He noted that "unreasonable search and seizure," is prohibited under the Constitution, but cast it as a living document, with "reasonableness" determined by "the totality of circumstances in which we find ourselves in history."
He explained that as the NSA's leader, tactics he found unreasonable on September 10, 2001 struck him as reasonable the next day, after roughly 3,000 were killed. "I actually started to do different things," he said. "And I didn't need to ask 'mother, may I' from the Congress or the president or anyone else. It was within my charter, but in terms of the mature judgment about what's reasonable and what's not reasonable, the death of 3,000 countrymen kind of took me in a direction over here, perfectly within my authority, but a different place than the one in which I was located before the attacks took place. So if we're going to draw this line I think we have to understand that it's kind of a movable feast here."
I think I understand.
The Bill of Rights may guarantee certain limits on government today. But if there is a terrorist attack tomorrow, a bureaucrat within the national security state may decide, without asking permission from any elected official, that the people are actually owed less protections than before. The more innocent people that terrorists succeed in murdering, the less our own government is limited by the Constitution. With every attack that the government fails to prevent it gains new powers.
Who was affected by growing surveillance power? "Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras are fond of accusing the NSA of suspicion-less surveillance. That's almost a nonsense comment for somebody with my background," Hayden said. "I am not a law enforcement officer. I don't suspect anybody. I am simply going out there to retrieve information that helps keep my countrymen free and safe. This is not about guilt. In fact, let me be really clear. NSA doesn't just listen to bad people. NSA listens to interesting people. People who are communicating information."
He feels that Edward Snowden has distorted the debate about gathering that information and when it constitutes an unreasonable search under the Constitution. Observers looking at his leaks are like people who began watching a murder mystery in the third act. He urged his audience to reassess the leaks in context.
For most of the life of NSA, y'all were pretty enthusiastic about our intercepting the communications of the Soviet Union. And one of our targets in the Soviet Union was SRF, Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces. The guys with the ICBMs. And they used to transmit their orders out of SRF headquarters in Moscow through microwave shots up over the Urals to Soviet ICMBM fields in the Far East. And we were all over that network. We were intercepting communications 24 hours a day, looking, I must admit, for words of interest. Like launch. There isn't a civil libertarian alive who gave a damn about that.
The 21st Century equivalent of those Soviet SRF signals on that isolated microwave network jumping over the Ural mountains are proliferator, drug trafficker, terrorist communications, pretty much existing in emails, in a global telecommunications grid, coexisting with your Gmail and you Hotmail.
And so the fundament I want to give you here is, if you want these guys to do what they did for you during the 1970s and 1980s, they gotta be on networks where your stuff is.
And that's just the way it is.
So if I understand the argument correctly, to keep apprised of a possible nuclear war with the Soviet Union, an event that could've precipitated a literal doomsday for much of humanity, the NSA spied on a few military posts in the USSR, and no one cared. Today, America's enemies use the same platforms to communicate as U.S. citizens. So the NSA must be given access to all platforms we use to let them do their jobs.
There is a grain of truth here. Terrorists have been known to use consumer phone networks and popular web tools to communicate. On the other hand, neither terrorists nor drug traffickers (which existed during the Cold War too) are comparable to an expansionist Communist empire with the ability to start a nuclear war. And while most civil libertarians remain perfectly content to let the NSA spy on the people with the capacity to launch ICBMs at America, "the guys with ICBMs still aren't communicating "words of interest" like "launch" on Hotmail.
In Hayden's view, "Privacy is the line we continuously negotiate between ourselves as unique creatures of God and ourselves as social animals. In the first category we have a right to keep things to ourselves. And in the second category we have a responsibility to reveal things about ourselves to the community for the greater good."
What goes in which category? Hayden's actions suggest that Americans have a responsibility to reveal all the telephone numbers that we dial and that dial us, aspects of our Web activity, and James Clapper only knows what else for the greater good—and that government officials have a right to keep to themselves sweeping changes in how surveillance affects Americans, rendering the electorate too ignorant to protest via elected representatives, per our republican system.
Hayden's entire speech can be viewed here:
If you reach the part where he claims that NSA surveillance attained the "Madisonian trifecta" of approval by all three branches of government, don't be fooled.
Attentive viewers will also notice that at the beginning of the speech he treats the NSA's dragnet surveillance on millions of innocent Americans as a response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks—whereas near the end of the speech, he characterizes such practices as a pragmatic, pre-9/11 response to technological trends. To me, the distinction hardly matters. As I see it, the Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, and mass surveillance always qualifies. I'd argue that this makes my Constitution more resilient to terrorism than his. More
The government stands accused of seeking to conceal Britain’s role in extraordinary rendition, ahead of the release of a declassified intelligence report that exposes the use of torture at US secret prisons around the world.
Diego Garcia
The Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation programme, due to be released in days, will confirm that the US tortured terrorist suspects after 9/11. In advance of the release, Barack Obama admitted on Friday: “We tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values.”
Now, in a letter to the human rights group Reprieve, former foreign secretary William Hague has confirmed that the UK government has held discussions with the US about what it intends to reveal in the report which, according to al-Jazeera, acknowledges that the British territory of Diego Garcia was used for extraordinary rendition.
“We have made representations to seek assurances that ordinary procedures for clearance of UK material will be followed in the event that UK material provide[d] to the Senate committee were to be disclosed,” Hague wrote.
Cori Crider, a director at Reprieve, accused the UK government of seeking to redact embarrassing information: “This shows that the UK government is attempting to censor the US Senate’s torture report. In plain English, it is a request to the US to keep Britain’s role in rendition out of the public domain.”
Lawyers representing a number of terrorist suspects held at Guantánamo Bay believe their clients were rendered via Diego Garcia. Papers found in Libya indicated that the US planned to transport Abdul-Hakim Belhaj, an opponent of Muammar Gaddafi, and his wife via the territory, an atoll in the Indian Ocean leased by Britain to the US. The government has denied Belhaj was rendered via Diego Garcia, but there are suspicions that others were held on the atoll.
Crider said the UK’s attempts to lobby the US into redacting parts of the report “turns the government’s defence in the Libyan renditions case of Abdul-Hakim Belhaj and his wife entirely on its head”.
The government has consistently sought to block Belhaj from bringing a case against it.
“The government protested America would be angered if this kidnap case ever went to trial – and now we learn the British government is leaning on the Americans not to air Britain’s dirty laundry. It exposes their litigation stance as mere posturing,” she added.
Confirmation that a British territory was involved in extraordinary rendition could leave the government vulnerable to legal action. Last month the European court of human rights ruled that the Polish government actively assisted the CIA’s European “black site” programme, which saw detainees interrogated in secret prisons across the continent.
The court concluded it was “established beyond reasonable doubt” that Abu Zubaydah, a Guantánamo detainee the US mistakenly believed to be a senior member of al-Qaida, was flown from a secret site in Thailand to another CIA prison in Stare Kiejkuty in northern Poland.
The judges concluded that not only was Poland “informed of and involved in the preparation and execution of the [High Value Detainee] Programme on its territory”, but also “for all practical purposes, facilitated the whole process, created the conditions for it to happen and made no attempt to prevent it”, prompting lawyers to ask what else it has been used for since. More
So-called liberals attack the whistle-blower duo -- and a brilliant Supreme Court justice saw it all coming
In the famous wiretapping case Olmstead v. United States, argued before the Supreme Court in 1928, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote one of the most influential dissenting opinions in the history of American jurisprudence. Those who are currently engaged in what might be called the Establishment counterattack againstGlenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden, including the eminent liberal journalists Michael Kinsley and George Packer, might benefit from giving it a close reading and a good, long think.
Brandeis’ understanding of the problems posed by a government that could spy on its own citizens without any practical limits was so far-sighted as to seem uncanny. (We’ll get to that.) But it was his conclusion that produced a flight of memorable rhetoric from one of the most eloquent stylists ever to sit on the federal bench. Government and its officers, Brandeis argued, must be held to the same rules and laws that command individual citizens. Once you start making special rules for the rulers and their police – for instance, the near-total impunity and thick scrim of secrecy behind which government espionage has operated for more than 60 years – you undermine the rule of law and the principles of democracy.
“Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher,” Brandeis concluded. “For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means — to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal — would bring terrible retribution.”
Kinsley’s anti-Greenwald screed in the New York Times Book Review, and Packer’slonger and subtler essay for the British magazine Prospect, deliberately ignore or finesse the question of what the government has taught us through its black budgets, its institutional paranoia, its super-secret and extra-constitutional spycraft. Those two articles, and others like them, amount to a sophisticated effort to change the subject on the Greenwald-Snowden affair now that its initial impact has faded, and also to reassure by way of bewilderment: In the face of all this confusion about who’s right and who’s wrong, the best policy is to keep calm, carry on and leave all this boring stuff to the experts. Instead of focusing on the larger issues of privacy, power and secrecy articulated by Brandeis or on the corroded nature of contemporary democracy, Kinsley and Packer urge us to deplore the perceived personality defects or political misjudgments of Greenwald and Snowden, and throw up a virtual smokescreen of invidious comparison. OK, maybe that whole NSA thing wasn’t super awesome – but you could be living in Communist Russia!
You know, I have some criticisms of Glenn Greenwald too, and I’d be happy to share them with you, or with him, on some other occasion. George Packer is no dolt, and he scores a few hits on both Greenwald and Snowden in his enormous and detailed article, which at least on the surface is much more evenhanded and thoughtful than Kinsley’s drive-by hackwork. But to observe that Greenwald can make infelicitous or inconsistent statements at times, or that his argument about the chilling cultural effect of mass surveillance is not well worked out, does not add up to “a pervasive absence of intellectual integrity.” For that I’m afraid that Packer – still in ideological rehab, it seems, for his “liberal interventionist” support of the Iraq War and the neoconservative foreign-policy agenda – had better look in the mirror.
When Greenwald derides mainstream journalists (in his response to Kinsley) as “jingoistic media courtiers” tasked with attacking “anyone who voices any fundamental critiques of American political culture,” he is not being polite or diplomatic, and is no doubt painting with too broad a brush. There are numerous exceptions, and as Greenwald surely knows, the newsrooms of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have over the decades been the sites of vigorous internal debate about how best to cover issues of surveillance, espionage and national security. But as a general tendency, he’s more right than wrong, and in this instance Kinsley and Packer are fighting a vigorous rearguard action on behalf of the entrenched interests of the Beltway elite, the self-described serious grownups of the “permanent government” and their well-connected media allies.
Any pretense of a critical relationship toward power — which was once supposed to be the journalist’s role in a democratic society — has been abandoned altogether (in Kinsley’s case) or eaten away to nothing by reasonable-sounding nuance and dispassionate analysis, as with Packer. Kinsley’s review has already been subjected to widespread mockery, even by “mainstream” commentators like the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, and no wonder; it reads as if it had been cranked out during a single Acela Express trip from New York to D.C. (and filed by the time he reached Wilmington). Kinsley appears to feel that the entire topic of Greenwald and Snowden is beneath him, and that it raises no questions to which the right-thinking people in his circle don’t already know the answers: Journalists have no special rights or privileges, David Gregory was being “perfectly reasonable” when he accused Greenwald on “Meet the Press” of being a criminal, and we simply can’t allow “newspapers and reporters to chase down and publish any national security leaks they can find.” Who gets to decide how, when and whether government secrets are released? Why, the government, of course! Isn’t it obvious? More
Barack Obama may have a to-do pile full of Edward Snowden-related headaches, but the NSA whistleblower might be joining him on one of the world's more prestigious clubs.
Mr Snowden has been nominated by two Norwegian MPs for the Nobel Peace Prize, a gong the President himself won in 2009.
Baard Vegard Solhjell, a former environment minister, and Snorre Valen said on Wednesday the public debate and policy changes "in the wake of Snowden's whistleblowing has contributed to a more stable and peaceful world order."
Mr Snowden, who had worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency, made global headlines beginning in June last year when he unleashed revelation after revelation about government snooping in various countries.
His releases sparked diplomatic grumbles aplenty. One of the more problematic was the revelation that US spies tapped the German Chancellor Angela Merkel's personal mobile phone.
Having fled the USA, initially for Hong Kong, he is currently in Russia under temporary asylum, though there have been hints that he could return to his native US, where the government deems him a criminal, under a plea bargain.
Late last year he was pipped to another august title - that of Time magazine's Person of the Year, which Pope Francis won.
In a joint statement, Solhjell and Valen said: "There is no doubt that the actions of Edward Snowden may have damaged the security interests of several nations in the short term.
"We are, however, convinced that the public debate and changes in policy that have followed in the wake of Snowden's whistleblowing has contributed to a more stable and peaceful world order.
"His actions have in effect led to the reintroduction of trust and transparency as a leading principle in global security policies." More
Spying has a history almost as ancient as humanity itself, but every now and then the rules of the game change. This post-9/11 moment of surveillance is one of those game-changers and the National Security Agency (NSA) has been the deal-breaker and rule-maker. The new rules it brought into existence are simple enough: you -- whoever you are and wherever you live on Planet Earth -- are a potential target. Get used to it. The most basic ground rule of the new system: no one is exempt from surveillance.
But then there’s human nature to take into account. There’s the feeling of invulnerability that the powerful often have. If you need an example, look no further than what key officials around New Jersey Governor Chris Christie were willing to commit to emails, even in this day and age, when it came to their scheme to tie up traffic on the George Washington Bridge. Something similar has been true of the system NSA officials set up. Its rules of the road were that no one was to be exempt from surveillance. (Call me Angela Merkel.) They then plunged their creation into the deepest secrecy, in part because they couldn’t imagine a world without at least one categorical exemption: themselves.
As it happens, Edward Snowden’s revelations fit the logic of the system the NSA created to a T. What the former agency contractor revealed, above all, was that the surveillance of anyone and everyone was the essence of our new world, and that not even the NSA would be exempt. He made that agency his own object of surveillance and so opened it up to the scrutiny of the rest of the planet. He gave its officials a dose of their own medicine.
Much of the ensuing outrage from the U.S. intelligence community, including the calls for his head, the cries of “treason,” the demands to bring him to “justice,” and so on, reflect outrage over the fact that the agency had gotten a full-scale dose of its own rules. It turns out that you don’t have to be an ordinary citizen or a world leader to feel terrible when someone appropriates the right to surveil your life. When it happened to agency honchos, they undoubtedly felt just like Merkel or Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff or so many other figures who discovered that their lives and communications weren’t private and weren’t their own. In a perfectly human manner, reality being far too ugly for their taste, they wanted payback.
There’s humor in the fact that the key figures involved in creating the foundations of a new, all-encompassing global security statesimply couldn’t imagine the obvious happening. Unfortunately, as TomDispatch regular and historianof U.S. surveillance practices Alfred McCoy points out, what the NSA set up, despite the blowback it's now causing, is irresistible to Washington. Not surprisingly, as new information about the agency's methods continues to ooze out, the president’s recent NSA speech makes itclear that genuine “change” or “reform” isn't on the agenda, thatlittle that matters will alter in the NSA’s methodology, and that nothing will be allowed to shake the system itself.
Surveillance and ScandalTime-Tested Weapons for U.S. Global Power
By Alfred McCoy
For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from theWashington Post, the New York Times, theGuardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places. Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington. The answer is remarkably simple. For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line -- like, in fact, the steal of the century. Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.
For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington’s search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leaders worldwide.
What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long historyof U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet’s last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America’s closest allies. More
In January 2012 we defeated the SOPA and PIPA censorship legislation with the largest Internet protest in history. A year ago this month one of that movement's leaders, Aaron Swartz, tragically passed away.
Aaron Swartz
Today we face a different threat, one that undermines the Internet, and the notion that any of us live in a genuinely free society: mass surveillance.
If Aaron were alive, he'd be on the front lines, fighting against a world in which governments observe, collect, and analyze our every digital action.
Now, on the eve of the anniversary of Aaron's passing, and in celebration of the win against SOPA and PIPA that he helped make possible, we are announcing a day of protest against mass surveillance, to take place this February 11th.More
Three disclosures this week show that the United States is losing its way in the struggle against terrorism. Sweeping government efforts to stop attacks are backfiring abroad and infringing on basic rights at home.
CIA drone strikes are killing scores of civilians in Pakistan and Yemen. The National Security Agency is eavesdropping on tens of millions of phone calls worldwide — including those of 35 foreign leaders — in the name of U.S. security.
And the Department of Homeland Security is using algorithms to “prescreen” travelers before they board domestic flights, reviewing government and private databases that include Americans’ tax identification numbers, car registrations and property records.
Will we create a Minority Report-style Department of Precrime next?
Obama administration officials have a duty to protect Americans from terrorism. But out-of-control NSA surveillance, an ever-expanding culture of secrecy and still-classified rules for how and when foreigners and even Americans can be killed by drone strikes are excessive, unnecessary and destructive.
Twelve years after September 11, 2001, the United States’ obsession with al Qaeda is doing more damage to the nation than the terrorist group itself.
Two new reports issued this week by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watchdetailed dozens of civilian deaths caused by drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen.Classified documents obtained by the Washington Post suggest that CIA officials who carry out the strikes make little effort to track civilian deaths.
“There is a lot more pressure building” on President Barack Obama, Sarah Holewinski, head of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, a group pushing for greater transparency in drone strikes, told me this week. “He’s going to have to look at these legal questions.”
Documents leaked by whistleblower Edward J. Snowden emerged this week, revealing NSA phone monitoring of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, 35 unidentified heads of state, and 70 million calls in France.
The government's ever-expanding culture of secrecy is excessive, unnecessary, and destructive.
The extent of the surveillance is sparking widespread indignation and endangering joint counter-terrorism operations among Germany, France and the United States.
“The perception here is of a United States where security has trumped liberty,” New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote from Berlin on Thursday, “intelligence agencies run amok (vacuuming up data of friend and foe alike), and the once-admired ‘checks and balances’ built into American governance and studied by European schoolchildren have become, at best, secret reviews of secret activities where opposing arguments get no hearing.”
There is a serious terrorist threat to the United States. The administration is under enormous pressure to prevent attacks. But there are ways to safeguard the United States without sparking such a serious backlash abroad and at home.
Holewinski called on the Obama administration to implement its promise to move command of drone operations from the CIA to the American military. She said the shift, which Obama announced this spring, is going “very, very slowly.”
Military control is one step toward a key goal: greater transparency in countries where drone strikes are enormously unpopular. Keeping the drone strikes as a covert CIA-run program makes accountability and determining the true number of civilian deaths impossible, she said.
If strikes are commanded by the military and disclosed publicly, reports of civilian casualties could be investigated under military law and compensation paid to victims — as now happens in Afghanistan.
Holewinski also urged the administration to disclose targeting rules that it has refused to make public. How are civilians defined? And how are civilian casualties assessed? What is the legal definition of an individual who can be targeted?
She credited the administration for a decrease in drone strikes since Obama promised one in May. But, she insisted, the targeting process needs to be far more transparent.
Inside the United States, meanwhile, press reports emerged on Monday that the Transportation Security Administration is expanding its prescreening of airline passengers to include government and private databases that contain employment information, property records and physical characteristics.
Khaliah Barnes, a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which opposes this prescreening, said many Americans do not grasp the current scale of domestic government data mining.
“The average person doesn’t understand how much intelligence-driven matching is going on and how this could be accessed for other purposes,” she said. “There’s no meaningful oversight, transparency or accountability.”
One critic called the new TSA program “a ‘pre-crime’ assessment every time you fly.”
A bipartisan proposal to rein in government surveillance unveiled last month by Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Mark Udall (D-Colo.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is a good start. The measure would end the bulk collection of American’s communications records; limit Washington’s ability to obtain information from Google and other online providers, and make the secret court that oversees U.S. surveillance operations far more transparent.
After months of promising change, Obama should back the senators’ proposal. He should also enact Holewinski’s recommendations for making drone strikes more transparent.
Terrorists already know that the United States monitors phone calls and emails worldwide. They already masquerade as civilians in areas where drones operate. Making drone strikes, NSA surveillance and TSA screening more transparent will build trust at home and solidify counter-terrorism cooperation abroad.
If there is one ideal that Obama needs to embrace, it’s transparency. It is a strength, not a weakness. More
This article also appears at Reuters.com, an Atlantic partner site.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court released a previously classified opinion this week asserting the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) controversial bulk phone log collection program. The 29-page opinion, written by Judge Claire V. Eagan, is the most extensive explanation yet for the massive program, defending the practice on the grounds that it is sanctioned by a provision of the Patriot Act, and that it does not violate the Fourth Amendment since it does not eavesdrop on contents of phone calls. Judge Eagan, a 2001 George W. Bush appointee assigned to the FISA court this year by Chief Justice Roberts, wrote that “any decision about whether to keep it was a political question, not a legal one.” Jameel Jaffer, a senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was unconvinced by the court’s opinion, saying the opinion “only confirms the folly of entrusting privacy rights to a court that hears argument only from the government.”
The ACLU isn’t the only one not reassured by Judge Eagan’s opinion on the program’s legality.Senators Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, issued a joint statement this week regarding admissions by senior intelligence officials that they did not fully understand the entirety of the NSA’s bulk collection programs. After revelations that intelligence officials routinely mislead the FISA court and consistently violated the court’s orders, the Senators argue that, “[i]f the assertion that ineptitude and not malice was the cause of these ongoing violations is taken at face value, it is perfectly reasonable for Congress and the American people to question whether a program that no one fully understood was an effective defense of American security at all. The fact that this program was allowed to operate this way raises serious concerns about the potential for blind spots in the NSA’s surveillance programs. It also supports our position that bulk collection ought to be ended.”
Judge Eagan’s opinion also revealed that no telecommunications company has ever challenged the legality of an NSA surveillance request. While technology companies like Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have all filed petitions with the FISA court to disclose records proving their objection to the programs, the NSA pays AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon hundreds of millions of dollars for their willing compliance. Matthew Aid argues this means that these private companies “now actually do much of NSA’s SIGINT collection work, for which NSA pays them tens of millions of dollars every year. And the irony is that we American taxpayers pay for this through a series of surcharges, fees and taxes tacked on to our AT&T, Verizon and Sprint long-distance telephone bills.” A Verizon executive went so far as to say tech companies were “grandstanding” in public about their aversion to cooperating with the NSA. However, despite the controversy surrounding the NSA’s surveillance practices, President Obama’s review panel created specifically to reform the NSA’s programs did not discuss making any substantive changes during the panel’s first meeting.
In non-NSA news, while the NSA has the budget to pay telecommunications companies $278 million for user data, the FBI is facing serious government spending cuts. The agency has long agonized over the anticipated budget cuts, and recently decided that the bureau will be forced to shut down their headquarters and nation-wide offices for 10 days over the course of the next year. “Besides the short-term effect on morale, response time and focus on the mission, this will degrade the capabilities of the bureau in the long term as well,” according to former FBI deputy director Tim Murphy. “I think the long-term impact is not being considered by those having this budget debate in Congress. Mistakes will be made down the road because of these cuts, and they will be able to be traced back to these cuts.”
The ACLU is challenging the CIA’s refusal to release any documents on its use of drones in targeted killings. Since the ACLU submitted a FOIA request to the CIA for use of drones for such practices, the CIA has continually refused to list or describe any documents in its possession –in direct opposition to a federal court’s orders. The CIA is not only ignoring the federal courts on the basis that releasing any information would endanger national security, it is continuing to engage in what an appeals courts calls a “pattern of strategic and selective leaks at very high levels of the Government,” prompting the ACLU to state in its brief, “[i]ndeed, the CIA’s response is so obviously deficient that one can only assume that the CIA’s goal is not to prevail on this motion but simply to delay as long as possible the day on which the agency will finally be required to explain what documents it is withholding and why.” More
Washington, D.C., August 19, 2013 – Marking the sixtieth anniversary of the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, the National Security Archive is today posting recently declassified CIA documents on the United States' role in the controversial operation.
Shah's Firman
American and British involvement in Mosaddeq's ouster has long been public knowledge, but today's posting includes what is believed to be the CIA's first formal acknowledgement that the agency helped to plan and execute the coup.
The explicit reference to the CIA's role appears in a copy of an internal history, The Battle for Iran, dating from the mid-1970s. The agency released a heavily excised version of the account in 1981 in response to an ACLU lawsuit, but it blacked out all references to TPAJAX, the code name for the U.S.-led operation. Those references appear in the latest release. Additional CIA materials posted today include working files from Kermit Roosevelt, the senior CIA officer on the ground in Iran during the coup. They provide new specifics as well as insights into the intelligence agency's actions before and after the operation.
The 1953 coup remains a topic of global interest because so much about it is still under intense debate. Even fundamental questions — who hatched the plot, who ultimately carried it out, who supported it inside Iran, and how did it succeed — are in dispute.[1]
The issue is more than academic. Political partisans on all sides, including the Iranian government, regularly invoke the coup to argue whether Iran or foreign powers are primarily responsible for the country's historical trajectory, whether the United States can be trusted to respect Iran's sovereignty, or whether Washington needs to apologize for its prior interference before better relations can occur.
Donald N Wilber
Also, the public release of these materials is noteworthy because CIA documents about 1953 are rare. First of all, agency officials have stated that most of the records on the coup were either lost or destroyed in the early 1960s, allegedly because the record-holders' "safes were too full."[2]
Regarding public access to any remaining files (reportedly about one cubic foot of material), the intelligence community's standard procedure for decades has been to assert a blanket denial. This is in spite of commitments made two decades ago by three separate CIA directors. Robert M. Gates, R. James Woolsey, and John M. Deutch each vowed to open up agency historical files on a number of Cold War-era covert operations, including Iran, as a sign of the CIA's purported new policy of openness after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.[3]
A clear sign that their pledge would not be honored in practice came after the National Security Archive filed a lawsuit in 1999 for a well-known internal CIA narrative about the coup. One of the operation's planners, Donald N. Wilber, prepared the account less than a year later. The CIA agreed to release just a single sentence out of the 200-page report.
Despite the appearance of countless published accounts about the operation over the years - including Kermit Roosevelt's own detailed memoir, and the subsequent leak to The New York Times of the 200-page CIA narrative history[4] — intelligence agencies typically refused to budge. They have insisted on making a distinction between publicly available information on U.S. activities from non-government sources and official acknowledgement of those activities, even several decades after the fact.
Kermit Roosevelt
While the National Security Archive applauds the CIA's decision to make these materials available, today's posting shows clearly that these materials could have been safely declassified many years ago without risk of damage to the national security. (See sidebar, "Why is the Coup Still a Secret?")
Archive Deputy Director Malcolm Byrne called for the U.S. intelligence community to make fully available the remaining records on the coup period. "There is no longer good reason to keep secrets about such a critical episode in our recent past. The basic facts are widely known to every school child in Iran. Suppressing the details only distorts the history, and feeds into myth-making on all sides." More
When it comes to national security, there are two kinds of secrets. One is the strict military secret. Examples would include the design specifications of a new weapon or planned troop movements.
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
Giving such secrets to an adversary may tip the military balance and is clearly damaging to national security. Most people have little trouble seeing those who give away such secrets—like Manhattan Project physicist Klaus Fuchs, who gave design details of the first atomic bomb to the Soviets—as traitors who should be punished.
The second kind of secret is what anthropologists call the “public secret.” These are denied yet known. Their ambiguous status as simultaneously public and secret torques them with psychological conflict. The concept of the public secret can best be grasped through examples from family life. It may be a public secret that a man is having an affair, but as long as his family does not confront him, the pact of silence allows everyone to behave as if he really does work late a lot at the office. It may be a public secret that a woman is an alcoholic, but as long as no one mentions the bottles stashed in odd places or the mysterious mood swings, public appearances can be maintained. As anyone familiar with such family situations knows, the consequences of saying publicly what everyone knows privately can be profound, forcing corrections in behavior or breaking families apart. Not infrequently, as Henrik Ibsen famously dramatized in his play An Enemy of the People, opprobrium attaches most harshly not to the transgressor, but to the person who tells the truth out loud.
It is not just families that have public secrets. Religious institutions do too, as we learned from the child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. And states have public secrets. For example, as the political thinker Michael Ignatieff has written, in Argentina under the military junta that ruled from 1976 to 1983, it was a public secret that activists and radicals were quietly being abducted by the military, tortured, and killed. This policy, under which between 15,000 and 30,000 citizens disappeared, was not publicly announced, and wealthy elites who had a vested interest in not knowing felt confident in denying it. Still, it was widely known in the way that whispered things are known. Eventually the ambiguity of the public secret was resolved and the facts were made public thanks to the indefatigable activism of the group the Mothers of the Disappeared, who demonstrated weekly in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, and a truth commission appointed by President Raul Alfonsin. While the Mothers of the Disappeared could be dismissed as crackpots, a state commission armed with official documents finally had to be believed. As Ignatieff writes, the truth commission stripped the public secret of its deniability, forcing it into the open and working “to reduce the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse.” He observes that “its work has made it impossible to claim, for example, that the military did not throw half-dead victims into the sea from helicopters.”
Often the state’s greatest rage is directed at those who reveal public secrets, not military secrets. Richard Nixon called Daniel Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America” not because he shared military secrets with the Vietcong (he did not), but because in giving the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times (and thus the American people), he made it impossible to deny what many already suspected—that the US government had lied about the reasons for the Vietnam War and about progress in fighting it.
US national security officials have likewise been enraged by Bradley Manning, the US Army soldier who gave WikiLeaks 250,000 diplomatic cables and 500,000 Army reports. Although the Obama administration claims that Manning and WikiLeaks gave away military secrets, for the most part they caused embarrassment by revealing public secrets. Many Americans had long been sure that, military propaganda notwithstanding, some American troops in Iraq were prone to using violence indiscriminately, killing innocents, and enjoying the act of killing, but Manning’s release of the “collateral murder” video, shot from a US military helicopter, gave visceral and undeniable form to inchoate knowledge. Likewise, in 2011 there were few Tunisians who did not know that their government was corrupt, but the people did not rise up against their government until WikiLeaks revealed that the US ambassador had cabled that "Corruption in Tunisia is getting worse. Whether it's cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President Ben Ali's family is rumored to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants."
Even though he has yet to be found guilty, Manning has been punished harshly. The United Nations special rapporteur on torture complained that Manning—held for months in solitary confinement, often naked, and deprived of sleep—had been subjected to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of Article 16 of the Convention Against Torture.”
Like Manning, Edward Snowden gave away a public secret, revealing that the National Security Agency does not just spy on foreigners, but in violation of the legal framework established after the Vietnam War, also harvests vast quantities of information on the communications of American citizens, including email messages, browsing histories, postal records, and telephone metadata. When public rather than military secrets are given away, the state always insists that military security has been damaged, so it should not surprise us that the Obama administration claims Snowden gave away military secrets that will help those bent on attacking the United States. But there is a reason the top leadership of Al Qaeda has communicated for years by personal courier, and it would be a terrorist or insurgent with a very short life expectancy who would communicate by cell phone or unencrypted email. Snowden’s real crime was to reveal incontrovertibly what some already guessed and others might prefer not to know: The US government has secretly created a massive apparatus of domestic surveillance on the edge of the law.
American leaders say they will avoid future Mannings and Snowdens by segmenting access to information so that individual analysts cannot avail themselves of so much, and by giving fewer security clearances, especially to employees of contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton, where Snowden worked. This will not work. Segmentation of access runs counter to the whole point of the latest intelligence strategy, which is fusion of data from disparate sources. The more Balkanized the data, the less effective the intelligence. And, as Dana Priest and William Arkin make clear in their important bookTop Secret America, intelligence agencies are collecting so much information that they have to hire vast numbers of new employees, many of whom cannot be adequately vetted. Since 9/11 the National Security Agency’s workforce has grown by a third, to 33,000, and the number of private companies it relies on for contractors has tripled to close to 500. The more people know your secrets, the more likely it is they will leak out.
But, in the final analysis, the reason there will be more Mannings and Snowdens is that so many American secrets are not strict military secrets but scandalous public secrets pertaining to ways the US national security state behaves that are at odds with national or international law, or in conflict with fundamental national values. Whether one condones what Snowden did or not, it is clear that he was motivated by a deep sense of indignation that his government was doing something profoundly wrong. "If you want a secret respected,” said Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the country's greatest commentators on secrecy, “see that it's respectable in the first place." More
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