With President Obama set to call on Congress to overhaul to NSA’s surveillance programs, it’s important to understand what he’s up against. He is not messing with people you want to be messing with.
Edward Snowden has made some dangerous enemies. As the American intelligence community struggles to contain the public damage done by the former National Security Agency contractor’s revelations of mass domestic spying, intelligence operators have continued to seethe in very personal terms against the 30 year-old leaker.
“In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” a current NSA analyst told BuzzFeed. “A lot of people share this sentiment.”
“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official, a former special forces officer, said bluntly. “I do not take pleasure in taking another human beings life, having to do it in uniform, but he is single handedly the greatest traitor in American history.”
That violent hostility lies just beneath the surface of the domestic debate over NSA spying is still ongoing. Some members of Congress have hailed Snowden as a whistleblower, the New York Times has called for clemency, and pundits regularly defend his actions on Sunday talk shows. In intelligence community circles, Snowden is considered a nothing short of a traitor in wartime.
“His name is cursed every day over here,” a defense contractor told BuzzFeed, speaking from an overseas Intelligence collections base. “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him.”One Army intelligence officer even offered BuzzFeed a chillingly detailed fantasy.
“I think if we had the chance, we would end it very quickly,” he said. “Just casually walking on the streets of Moscow, coming back from buying his groceries. Going back to his flat and he is casually poked by a passerby. He thinks nothing of it at the time starts to feel a little woozy and thinks it’s a parasite from the local water. He goes home very innocently and next thing you know he dies in the shower.”
We’d like to think that our intelligence services are filled with do-good patriots who only want to keep America safe, and that is for the most part true. But their ranks include no shortage of what you and I would consider homicidal maniacs. Cross them in the wrong way, and even if you are an American, some will want you dead.
We have no problem understanding this phenomenon in Russia or Syria or Egypt, that intelligence services have the final say on who rules the country, but we’ve been fed on myths about the virtues of American democracy that make it hard for us to understand (pdf) how difficult and risky it can be for an American president to rein in the intelligence services.
You may have your own theories about the JFK assassination, but one thing is clear. In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy said that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” He began that process, and he didn’t get to stand for reelection. Whether a faction within the CIA played or role in his death or not is still hotly disputed, but no president can feel comfortable that they can cross the intelligence community with impunity.
I suspect that most progressives will feel that the president’s proposals don’t go far enough. I anticipate that I will feel that way, myself. I am also a realist. No one wants to be put on the same list as Edward Snowden.
Then he shouldn’t have run for president. Everyone in his position and who desire to get to that position know this history and they know the intelligence community is full of murderers and the lot. Standing up to them is part of the job description. I’m not saying I would have been brave enough to do it, but that’s why I’m not president.
The system does not allow for crusaders to be successful presidential candidates. If we wait for change to come from the top down we’ll be waiting a hell of a long time.
These are not mutually exclusive characteristics. I don’t suggest waiting for moral crusaders to make it to the top and we just wait for them to do it. That’s somewhat how i view the Greenwalds and Bob Cescas of the world: they’re so focused on “what’s legal and what’s not” when te real issue is raised consciousness of the citizenry to demand unethical shit not be done no matter its legality or constitutionality. For instance, what happens when or if this crap is ruled constitutional? IMO it shouldn’t fucking matter bc it’s wrong and should stop. But from a Cesca/Greenwald analysis it sort of stops at the constitutional premise. Obviously Greenwald thinks it’s unconstitutional. But what he thinks doesn’t matter.
TL;DR: citizens shouldn’t wait for the POTUS but they shouldn’t just say “well that’s just what those at the top do so oh well we can’t expect better.”
You need to understand something. If not for the Constitutional civil liberties guys, there would have been no voices above a whisper and with zero power or influence to stop the forces of fascism in this country. “Doing the right thing” isn’t in the interest of those forces and a majority of people in this country either aren’t bright enough or are psychologically predisposed to embrace a police state.
Right now it’s Greenwald and a few others or nothing. Those invested in trashing Greenwald are no less an enemy of the people than that those in government itching to assassinate Snowden.
I disagree. I think that’s like saying we should clap our hands louder to applaud Obama at every turn because the Republicans are worse. Greenwald deserves critcism IMO for keeping a monopoly on the disclosures, as I stated previously in other threads. They should be disseminated to journalists everywhere from all over the world. I’m not saying release it all to the public without any thought put into it. But his monopoly on the drip-drip confined with his billionaire money honey don’t sit well with me.
Either way that’s only a specific subset of criticism of GG, and not completely where I was going anyway. What I meant was that GG sees things through too much of a legal lens and has too much faith in the law; in a way it’s probably his libertarian leanings that go that route. I see it from a lot of pwoggies too, this the reference to Cesca. Te difference being of course that Cesca will be like “it’s legal so spp criticizing Obama!” whereas GG will be like “the ruling was wrong and we gotta switch the judges and make it unconstitutional.” Comes back to Citzens United: its legality is irrelevant. Reverse the ruling and it won’t matter without a change in culture. Greenwald understands this to a certain point, but he’s still too hung up on legal shit that frankly doesn’t matter. Commenter below gets it.
Would say that’s a bad analogy except it’s not even an analogy.
Greenwald has no monopoly on anything. Why do you blame him for the absence of other strong and forceful voices?
I’m not speaking of just this moment but historically for close to a hundred years. The only ones that put up a sustained fight were the civil liberties people and many of them paid a huge price. Doesn’t sound as if your living memory extends back before Greenwald emerged as a more effective voice less than a decade ago. And Congress — sheesh — they went along with imaginary WMD, torture, warrantless wiretapping, and collection of all our communications for some future use.
I’m not blaming him for fewer voices but his monopoly on these specific leaks. Maybe other journalists would do the same; after all it does wonders for one’s career to be in charge of the story of perhaps the entire decade. But he’s the one with the Snowden leaks; along with Poitras and the WaPo guy.
Poitras is a documentary filmmaker — not a journalist nor an attorney. The WAPO’s Gellman wasn’t a Bernstein was he? And weren’t documents shared with the NYTimes?
Seriously, why have you and others blamed Greenwald for the failures of US news organizations and the US Congress? That’s like Limbaugh blaming Springsteen for Christie’s bridge scandal.
It certainly does mean a far higher risk of personal danger to the top guy, as the JFK example shows, if he tries major reform without having a long, very public groundswell of public opinion having preceded it.
Public opinion from the grass roots, along with enough senior or establishment members of Congress with guts enough to finally call out our intel agencies.
But now, Ron Wyden, Leahy and Bernie Sanders only just don’t constitute a quorum. I suspect we’d need three times those numbers to get the ball rolling.
And it would be an added bonus if some of those brave souls could also argue in favor of returning the CIA to its original raison d’etre — only to gather intelligence from abroad and report back to the president. Not to make its own policy and independently carry out rogue operations with no oversight.
The CIA always had a clandestine operational arm written into the legislation. That organization took on the functions that OSS served during World War II. What gives agencies the power to conduct rogue operations is (1) secret budgets, secret even from Congress, (2) limiting the access to information to only the members of the Intelligence committees, (3) an absolute doctrine of state secrets in which classification trumps Constitutional checks and balances, (4) extreme compartmentalization and intense organizational rivalry for funds, promotions, and prestige, and (5) the ability to delegate upwards to the chief in organizations by selective presentation of information, slow-walking orders that one disagrees with, and creation of secret skunk works.
And most of all what allows it to happen is 67 years of plausible denial and lack of actual oversight by the President and Congress.
They’ve been on their own for so long that they do operate like a state within a state.
A reasonable executive would consider the Buzzfeed article a direct implication of a threat against anyone who sought to hold the intelligence agencies accountable and would investigate (with a rival agency) to discover how high that sentiment went.
Only one president ever tried to stand up to him. He soon wound up in a box. You might want to consider that.
I meant “to them”
Actually two Presidents. Carter got sandbagged in several ways, including personnel acting on behalf of the Reagan campaign to sabotage the release of the hostages.
Yes.
Yes.
BooMan,
I totally agree.
With all of our Conservatives and white supremacists (but I repeat myself) already figuratively and literally gunning for him, President Obama doesn’t want to be on any more “Enemies Lists.”
If I remember right, Carter also tried to do something with the CIA and NSA, or at least started to make noises.
Then, after weeks of the NY Times front-page warnings about the possibility of a takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran, the Ayatollah’s groups overtook it.
The CIA said it never saw THAT coming!!!
Uh, yeah…
What, no one at the CIA or NSA ever reads the “Libtard” NY Times?
Not even back then?
Uh, yeah…
Well, Carter started out on the right track — not renewing Poppy Bush as DCI, despite Bush apparently lobbying Carter for another term, then choosing Ted Sorensen to be DCI.
But w/n a few weeks, or less, word got out that during the Korean War, TS had registered w/Selective Service as a conscientious objector. That was enough to scuttle his nom for Carter. He quietly withdrew his support, despite Sorensen protesting that he could make a very good showing for himself in the hearings.
Imagine what reform a Ted Sorensen as DCI would have meant — almost as much as RFK would have brought (JFK, per Bobby’s later oral history interviews, said he had in mind bringing in his brother to clean things up over at Langley in his second term).
The eventual successful nominee, Adm Stansfield Turner (iirc) certainly was no Richard Helms or Allen Dulles, so it could have been worse.
But we missed a major momentum opportunity with Carter — coming so soon to office after the Church Comm’ee inquiry into CIA misdeeds — to reform our intel community.
George H. W. Bush, former CIA officer and Director of the CIA sure does have a lot of connections to Democratic Presidents who didn’t like the CIA being a shadow government…
Carter’s biggest sin was trying to get rid of all the old career ops people in the CIA. You know, the E. Howard Hunts et al, although by then Hunt himself had pretty much played out. Not terribly surprising that Bay of Pigs vets showed up at Watergate, but they and the next generation were soon bringing in cocaine from Latin America and sending weapons to Iran after Carter was sent packing.
It shouldn’t be surprising to find out that a young Colonel Ollie North was running Carter’s hostage rescue mission. Surprise surprise that it failed. Soon North was in a position where he was cutting deals with freedom fighters who exchanged white powder for killing machines. Nor should it be forgotten that Monser al-Kassar, the biggest heroin importer into Western Europe and the US in the late 80s, also was dealing armaments on the Iran side of the operation.
The positive thing here is that these CIA malefactors have historically been aligned with the Republican Party (although one could credibly argue that Clinton was on board too), and blackmail for past crimes aren’t easily translatable to Obama. It would be interesting to see how the country could handle the truth about JFK’s demise. Actually, I’m sure most of the citizenry could handle it, but I’m not sure about the MSM.
Don’t ask me why, but seem I remember some NYT’s article not long after Carter came into office and started to talk about changes in our security agencies, and there was a quote – from I can’t remember who, probably an un-named source – which basically said, ‘We’ve been here for a long, long time. He’s just coming in. He’ll be gone soon enough. And when he’s gone in 4 or 8 years, most of us will still be here.”
So it’s not just our DC MSM Villagers who have that “Our Town” philosophy.
The Bush administration was horrific but they were actually very competent at manipulating the machinery of government. They excelled at burrowing and it is still creating problems.
CIA focuses on the real enemies, the ones that might affect their funding: in Congress, White House, and Pentagon.
Don’t forget about Democratically-elected leaders of foreign countries that may or may not have pulled the rugs out from US corporations.
I understand that a President who wants to do his job honestly is putting his reputation and his life on the line and that it is a very personal decision about how far out on a limb to go. But there are very many ordinary people who have and are still going out on that limb in hopes of restoring democracy in this country. Some of them have already died, been beaten, or are spending long years in prison.
What is striking is that if what has been mentioned is the limit of reforms, the deep state that rules this country must have our elected officials on a very short leash indeed.
And what your attitude says is that effectively democratic processes in the US are dead; accept it and move on.
Now tell us why elections matter.
But the Buzzfeed article is merely sensation 24-type stuff. The New York Times article said it more chillingly. The President is balancing the concerns of civil liberties advocates against the possibility of backlash from the national security agencies. That in cold Gray-Lady-speak is saying that our military is already in a state of mutiny–at least at the level of the brass. It is not that it’s potential but that it is already real and likely Congress knows it.
This is a very chilling development. Each of us must consider carefully what we will personally do about it.
Snowden is aware of the sentiment quoted in Buzzfeed. In the first interview in Hong Kong he mentioned that possibility and was concerned that it might catch up to him in Hong Kong. It’s too bad for these shortsighted blighters in the intelligence community that killing Snowden will only unleash more disclosures of NSA documents.
And then there’s the Senate Intelligence Committees report on CIA torture that is out there. The house of cards will eventually collapse.
And people will realize that unemployment benefits and food stamps and infrastructure repair have been cut just to waste $68 billion or more (it is a black budget) on these creeps and thugs who have not kept us safe.
“our military is already in a state of mutiny”
There are factions within the military and within the intelligence “community”. Some military brass are engaged in some nasty business and some are trying to fight it. I would caution you not to assume Snowden is a “good guy”.
I have no idea at all what Snowden’s character is, but I understand clearly what the documents that the media have released are saying. And they show a clear contempt for the Constitution and for the rights of all innocent people.
You have some curious inside information.
I’m well aware of how factions in organizations can run counter to the original purposes of organizations in the competition of players for power, status, and financial reward. And I have seen how that can destroy and organization when accountability does come.
The national security and intelligence communities have operated to a great extent without accountability and real performance audits for 67 years. A wise leader of those institutions would want an effective audit instead of waiting for a calamity to sweep it all away.
What is at stake now is not good people or bad people but the continued existence of Constitutional government that honors the rights of people. And actually seeks a peaceful world instead of using that as lip service to scam more money out of the taxpayers they are abusing.
Snowden did this country a service.
Unless of course you think the NSA should continue violating the Constitution.
How can you reform something fed by so many secret budgets and sources of cash – even if you killed half their known budget, they have tentacles all over drawing money from god knows where. That alone makes it daunting.
My concern is that there will be some kind of terrorist attack (we’re long overdue, frankly) and the CIA/NSA/etc will use it as a way to get back anything Obama takes away from them now.
Step one. Remove the legality of secrecy from the budgets and conduct a thorough audit.
Step two. Remove thee legal authorization of the agencies and their drawing accounts on the Treasury.
Step three. Seize the assets that belong properly to the US Government and relocate them to other government services or warehouses.
As long as there are a sufficient number of members of the military, law enforcement, and civil service who are loyal to the principles of the Constitution and will obey publicly declared orders of the Congress and the President, it can be accomplished.
Too many “realists” and we are doomed.
that would be one hell of an audit.
Sorta make the Fed audit pale by comparison.
An audit wouldn’t help–at all.
Sure it would. It would separate out the straight-shooters from the folks who have been playing operational and money games.
There is no way to audit the CIA.
Then tear it down and start over. Cancel its Treasury accounts. Let its staff join the unemployment rolls like a lot of the rest of the country. To say that it cannot be audited is to say that it is a clear and present danger to the public.
It is also to say that it is already too late and we better start capitulating to our new dictatorial overlords. It is to say that the military who are putting themselves in harms way are risking their lives for a system that is not worth their sacrifice.
Publicly and authentically try to audit them and lets see what happens.
There are a lot of people/operations that are totally off budget.
Auditing is not against budget it is against expenditures. And if they are too far off budget, the really are not under the control of the United State of America. Which means that you have an entire organization of rogue actors self-assigning tasks that are effectively illegal. If the agency gets a line-item of $5 million, there should be records of where that $5 million went. If there aren’t, the agency fails the audit.
Once that budget becomes dark even to expenditures it changes from an agency of state to a criminal enterprise because even the ODNI has no way of finding where that money went.
That is a huge fiscal problem for an agency soaking up tens of billions of dollars.
Money that was sent to Iraq finally was audited. The public found out that pallet-loads of currency were airlifted, provided to US personnel and contractors and no one ever saw it again. That was a matter for Congressional oversight.
The public needs to know where the ratholes in the intelligence budget are. And some idea of the identity of the rats.
The off-book stuff will never be made public. That’s the point. This funding is used for “dirty purposes” that the public is not meant to know about and this necessitates that official records not be kept or sought. Too many skeletons there for that.
If the Snowden fallout couldn’t force a restructuring of our dark ops then I don’t see what could possibly lead to that in the short-term.
Obama handled the NSA problem just like he handled the CIA. Basically, he told them to keep up the good work.
The audit will show where the money goes into the dark and the approximate amounts. The manager responsible for that fund then can be questioned.
If there are too many skeletons, then the operation doesn’t deserve continued funding. How exactly are these folks demonstrating to their management that they are doing their job? Besides making sure the money is gone by the end of the fiscal year?
We are not done with the Snowden fallout. Before today’s speech my take might have been “The beginning is near.” Today the beginning began.
Obama did what he needed to do to keep the discussion going while looking (authentically no doubt) like he was standing up for the worker bees in these agencies and their professionalism. Another prod for a functional Congress.
It’s more important what actually gets done in Congress and the administration over the next year. Because the stories are not going to stop. And the concern of IT security professionals in corporations is not going to stop. The way that NSA is doing its job is making corporate IT security more difficult. Aside from the bulk surveillance.
it’s making the sale of security products pointless.
meant to say “purchase” of security products.
The vendors of those products who trusted the NIST standards would go with “sale” as well as “purchase”.
But there is suspicion that contractors are selling off-the-shelf exploits moderately indiscrimantly to any paying customer. Tracking down those contracts and having the contractors audited would put this to a test.
Don’t you mean as long as there are ones without skeletons in their closet?
In this way the culture of non-privacy might be helping. Increasingly people feel like if you aren’t an asshole and you aren’t hurting people any secrets you have are no big deal. Makes it harder to blackmail.
You can stop their Treasury accounts but not their Heroin and Cocaine money.
It gets laundered somewhere.
Last year elements of the CIA were trying their damnedest to get the US involved in taking out Assad for their Saudi allies. The weird coalition also included Israel and Germany. And al Qaeda. Consider McCain as the sore on the surface of that rot. You could consider that element of our intelligence as a fifth column, working against the interests of the American people. Essentially, Obama and Kerry thwarted the warhawks. Now they are trying to scuttle diplomacy to secure peace in the region with Iran. Obama walks a very thin tightrope.
It’s pretty clear that those elements who are aligned with the House of Saud are not working in our best interests. They are the same career intelligence people who have been supporting the Chechen terrorists against the Russians in order to give the West an advantage in the pipeline wars that have been going on just beneath the surface of the world’s conciousness.
Obama is a very cautious man. He is too conservative for my tastes. But one must understand that his courage against the CIA is the most a President has shown since at least Carter, maybe since JFK.
Keep alert.
The alliance was with France, president Hollande who was left standing alone by Obama’s reversal. Support for taking out Assad was of course from AIPAC and the White House humanitarian hawks Susan Rice and Samantha Power. Besides the GCC states, especially Turkey with Muslim Brother Erdogan got angry with Obama. Secretary Kerry and FM Lavrov dealt a blow to the neocons and war hawks in US Congress. A battle won, although the war is still raging on Capitol Hill.
“In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself”
Well said, anonymous tough guy!
Considering me completely unsurprised about this attitude.
It’s not like I don’t feel the exact same way about the intelligence guys. And the only reason I can say that is that I am too weak and small fry for them to do anything but mock.
I agree the proposed reforms don’t go far enough. But at this point I’ll support any reforms and if having my support at all is something that makes that more likely and also makes it less likely for the intelligence services to go after Obama, he’s got it.
We need to purge the intelligence ranks, certainly, but I’ll wager that 99% of the incoherent rage directed at Snowden is less about his revelations of what they’re doing and much more about protecting the gravy train of the billions and billions of black budget dollars flowing into the pockets of contractors.
Snowden’s big crime wasn’t exposing intelligence failures, but threatening the money spigot.
And that is a capital crime in a capitalist country.