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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website. In the sequester and government-shutdown era, the classic military newspaper Stars and Stripes is facing some of the problems of its civilian brethren and so downsizing its print edition. Among the features to go: Dear Abby. As it happens, TomDispatch is ready to step into the breach. We’ve called on an old and knowledgeable friend, Colonel Manners (ret.), whose experience in military and surveillance matters is evident from his impressive CV (unfortunately, a classified document). His assignment: to answer letters from Americans puzzled by the etiquette, manners, and language of the arcane national security world of Washington. Here is a first sampling from a column that, in syndication, could go global.
I’m an embattled newspaper editor. Recently, I read a New Yorker piece by Ken Auletta that included this disturbing passage about the New York Times: “In early August, the Times was working on a story about an intercepted terror threat when James R. Clapper, the administration’s director of intelligence, asked the paper’s Washington bureau to withhold certain details. Clapper warned that, if the full version were made public, the Times ‘would have blood on our hands.'” The Times withheld those details. However, with so many classified documents pouring out of Washington and the possibility that some might come into the possession of my paper, I worry about finding blood on my hands, too. On a personal note, I’m extremely squeamish. In college, I had to leave my biology class when the professor showed a film on Harvey’s discovery of the circulatory system. While watching Grey’s Anatomy, I have to close my eyes whenever surgery comes on screen. I grow faint if I get a paper cut. Any suggestions?
Stressed and Bloody Anxious in Chicago
Dear Stressed and Bloody Anxious,
I see your problem. Fortunately, I can assure you that it’s all in your head. To understand why, you need to grasp a distinction that’s clear in Washington, but might be less so in Chicago. When a government official suggests that an outsider might have “blood” on his or her hands—as happened repeatedly, for instance, during the Bradley Manning imbroglio—they are talking about prospective blood, future blood. Negative reactions to blood, according to scientific studies, are due, in part, to its alarming red color. Future blood, being metaphorical, is not red. If it gets on your hands, you will not actually “see” it.
In Washington, this is similarly true of past blood. Take National Intelligence Director Clapper. From 2001-2006, he was the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, then undersecretary of defense for intelligence, before being nominated in the Obama years to head the office of national intelligence. In other words, he has served in Washington throughout the Iraq and Afghan Wars, as well as the Global War on Terror. Like many Washington officials, military and civilian, who supported the American global mission in those years, he might be said to have some responsibility for any number of deaths and so to have “blood on his hands.” Think of the almost 4,500 Americans who died in Iraq or the nearly 2,300 who have, thus far, died in Afghanistan, or the tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans who died in those years.
Now, here’s the point: Washington is not disturbed by such blood. The reason is simple. It, too, can’t be seen. I’ve met Clapper and I can assure you that, when he shakes your hand, there is not the slightest trace of a reddish tint anywhere on it. (He’s got an impressively firm grip, by the way!) This, I hope, will lighten your unnecessarily grim mood. Like so many other stalwarts in our national security universe, Clapper is a model. He is unfazed, and his “blood” is far more real than the highly speculative and metaphorical blood that might someday be on your hands for a killing related to the release of a classified document. Note that, despite the appearance of startling numbers of such documents in recent years, there is no record of prospective blood actually being spilled.
Yours truly,
Col. Manners (ret.)
***
Dear Col. Manners,
As the owner of a furniture store in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I’ve been worried about our competitors, especially IKEA, getting a step on us. So here’s what I want to know: recently, speaking of Iran, President Obama said that he was keeping “all options on the table,” adding that “we will do anything to make sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon.” I’ve noticed that this phrase has, since 9/11, grown ever more popular in Washington. I was wondering about that table everyone is talking about. Given that it seems to be reserved for major weapons systems of various sorts and nothing else (at least nothing else is ever mentioned), who manufactures such a table? Can I order it somewhere? Does it really exist or is it just an image meant to stand in for a future military assault on Iran (or wherever)? Would it be too big to fit in my store? I’m most appreciative for any information you could give me on the subject.
Tabled in Kalamazoo
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Henry Farrell catches something interesting today. In a show on Brazilian TV about NSA surveillance, the PowerPoint slide on the right appears on the screen. Among other things, it suggests that the NSA has targeted the SWIFT payment network for penetration.
Now, it’s always a good idea to take PowerPoints with a grain of salt, and it’s worth noting that this one is even less clear than usual. It merely says that many targets use private networks, which doesn’t necessarily mean that the NSA has actually cracked these networks. At the very least, though, this slide certainly implies that NSA is trying to crack them.
Here’s why this is interesting. You may recall that shortly after 9/11, the Bush administration worked out a deal with SWIFT officials to turn over all or most of their database voluntarily on a monthly basis. The idea was to use the information to try and track the money flows of al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks. That lasted until 2006. Farrell picks up the story from there:
When EU decision makers became aware of this (thanks to a New York Times story which the Bush administration tried to get spiked), there was political uproar, resulting in the negotiation of a framework under which the US agreed to impose limits and safeguards in return for continued access.
….This is interesting for two reasons. First — the EU thought the US had signed onto a binding deal on access to SWIFT data. If, as appears likely at this point, the US was letting the EU see what it did when it came in through the front door, while retaining a backdoor key for the odd bit of opportunistic burglary, it will at the least be highly embarrassing. Second — there are people in the EU who never liked this deal in the first place, and have been looking for reasons to get rid of it….If the US has demonstrably lied to the EU about the circumstances under which it has been getting access to SWIFT, it will be hard for the EU to continue with the arrangement (and, possibly, a similar arrangement about sharing airline passenger data) without badly losing face. Even though the people who dominate the agenda (officials in the Council and European Commission) probably don’t want to abandon the agreement, even after this, they’ll have a bloody hard time explaining why they want to keep it. The EU-US homeland security relationship, which had been looking pretty cosy a few months ago, is now likely to be anything but.
Of more interest to the Brazilian reporters, of course, is the fact that Petrobras, their national oil company, is an NSA target. And the French will certainly be interested in the fact that their Ministry of Foreign Affairs network is also a target. Stay tuned for further fireworks.
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NSA Has Apparently Targeted SWIFT Network, Petrobras, and the French Diplomatic Network
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Bradley Manning’s verdict has been handed down:
An Army judge on Tuesday acquitted Pfc. Bradley Manning of aiding the enemy by disclosing a trove of secret U.S. government documents, a striking rebuke to military prosecutors who argued that the largest leak in U.S. history had assisted al-Qaeda.
The judge, Col. Denise Lind, found Manning guilty of most of the more than 20 crimes he was charged with. She also acquitted him of one count of the espionage act that stemmed from his leak of a video that depicted a fatal U.S. military airstrike in Farah, Afghanistan.
This is a bit better than I had hoped for. I never thought that Manning had any chance of avoiding conviction on the basic charges related to publishing classified information. Nor did I think he deserved to. But Judge Lind acquitted him of the egregious charge of aiding the enemy, and then went a step further and also acquitted him of leaking material from an Army investigation into a 2009 airstrike in Afghanistan’s Farah province. That was a justified act of whistleblowing regardless of whether or not it came from Manning.
CORRECTION: Sorry, I screwed up. I initially wrote that Manning was acquitted of leaking the “Collateral Murder” video. The Farah airstrike was in Afghanistan and was entirely different. I’ve corrected the text.
Excerpt from:
Bradley Manning Convicted, But Not of Aiding the Enemy or for Leaking Airstrike Video
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Friday afternoon at San Francisco’s City Hall, Kris Perry and Sandy Stier become the first same-sex couple in California to legally marry following a major Supreme Court decision on Wednesday that effectively overturned California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage. The couple were litigants in the court’s Hollingsworth v. Perry case, which addressed the California ban, making today’s ceremony especially memorable for the crowd of local supporters and national media in attendance. Watch below as California Attorney General Kamala Harris officiates their wedding and pronounces them “Spouses for life”:
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It’s official: the Washington Post is putting up a paywall. You can view 20 articles per month for free, but you need a subscription to view more than that.
For casual news consumers, this doesn’t matter much. And even for me, it’s more annoyance than anything else, since even after you’ve viewed 20 articles you can still get in free via search engines or links from other sources. Still, it’s an annoyance. And it means I have a decision to make. I already subscribe to three newspapers—the LA Times, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal—and I really can’t afford to subscribe to more. So should I just put up with the annoyance of getting access to the Post, or should I drop one of my other subscriptions?
If the Koch brothers buy the LA Times, that will make my decision pretty easy. But they haven’t done that yet. The Journal is less useful than it used to be before Rupert Murdoch dumbed it down, but it’s still useful. I could switch to the Financial Times for my business news, which would make sense from a quality-of-journalism perspective, but it’s more expensive than the Journal, so it wouldn’t help on that front. I could also dump home delivery of the LA Times and switch to home delivery of the New York Times to satisfy my prehistoric need for a print newspaper, but that would set me back nearly a grand a year all by itself (at least, as near as I can tell from the Times’ egregiously hard to understand subscription page).
Decisions, decisions. Back in the day, all this stuff was free and I had access to Lexis/Nexis too. I guess that was the golden age of blogging or something. No longer.
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President Obama’s chief of staff and the White House’s top lawyer got wind of an inspector general’s investigation into the IRS’ singling out of tea partiers and conservative groups several weeks before the report went public. But those officials, according to press secretary Jay Carney, did not tell Obama. The president says he learned about the IRS’ screw-up only after an agency director apologized on Friday, May 10, for employees having targeted conservative groups—an apology that went viral.
Carney told reporters Monday it was “appropriate” that Obama wasn’t told of the damning IG report beforehand. And the president, he said, wasn’t angry to not have been given early notice. “He believes it’s entirely appropriate that, you know, some matters are not appropriate to convey to him and this is one of them,” Carney said.
As we’ve reported, a Treasury Department inspector general, at the behest of angry members of Congress, spent nine months probing whether IRS staffers targeted tea party groups and other right-leaning conservative outfits who had applied for tax-exempt status under the 501(c)(4) section of the tax code. Although staffers did in fact zero in on conservative groups, the IG’s report concluded that political bias did not play a role. Instead, staffers used “inappropriate criteria”—catchwords such as “tea party,” “patriot,” or “9/12 Project” (the latter a creation of conservative talk show host Glenn Beck)—to look for groups that might’ve been too involved in politics. (Groups that file their taxes under 501(c)(4) can dabble in politics, but it can’t be their “primary activity.”) IRS employees got away with this due to “insufficient oversight” by the higher-ups in Washington, the report found.
Testifying before Congress last week, Steven Miller, the acting IRS commissioner who will soon resign as a result of the agency’s tea party debacle, echoed the IG’s findings. He said IRS employees made “foolish mistakes” and that the agency’s behavior was “obnoxious.” But those employees did not have a grudge against conservative groups. Their errors, Miller said, “were made by people trying to be more efficient in their workload selection.”
“What did they know” and “when did they know it” are two big questions looming over the IRS scandal. Here’s what we know right now: Almost a month before IG’s report came out last Tuesday, a staffer in the office of White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler learned of the report. Ruemmler herself was briefed on April 24. Soon after, she informed Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff. Carney said the president was not told of the investigation because there was nothing to be done about it. Also the White House did not want to appear to be interfering with an inspector general’s report on such a sensitive issue. There is no evidence yet that Obama or his top aides knew about the investigation before this year.
Here is the IG’s report:
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White House Learned of IRS Tea Party Probe Early—But Didn’t Tell Obama
Mother Jones
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From Mike Konczal, summarizing a new study that says Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff made a coding error in a famous paper claiming that economic growth slows down in countries with debt levels above 90 percent of GDP:
If this error turns out to be an actual mistake Reinhart-Rogoff made, well, all I can hope is that future historians note that one of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.
In an update, Konczal tries to be a killjoy:
People are responding to the Excel error, and that is important to document. But from a data point of view, the exclusion of the Post-World War II data is particularly troublesome, as that is driving the negative results. This needs to be explained, as does the weighting, which compresses the long periods of average growth and high debt.
Yeah, yeah. The authors of the study suggest that R&R’s paper has three separate problems: (a) exclusion of some high-growth/high-debt years following WWII, (b) weighting of slow-growth episodes in a dubious way, and (c) the Excel error. I assume that Reinhart and Rogoff will respond to all of this at some point.
In the meantime, though, I prefer to think of this as the Excel Error Heard Round the World.
Link:
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As the rich have become richer and the poor even poorer, the valley’s middle class has disappeared. Nowhere is inequality more obvious than Silicon Valley, where the homeless are building tent cities not far from Google and Facebook headquarters. Moyers & Company reports from the tent cities of San Jose:
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Video: The Homeless Tent City in Google and Facebook’s Backyard
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U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer 2 Bethany Bump conducts her pre-flight routine in a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and checks with her crew chief before a mission on Jalalabad Airfield in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, March 13, 2013. U.S. Army photo.
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