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Yesterday, Cryptome published a copy of an email between USA Today's Brad Heath and Brian Fallon from DoJ about a story that Heath was going to publish. The emails have since been removed from DocumentCloud but Cryptome saved some screenshots. This is a PDF copy of the email. Basically, Heath has a story and he went to DoJ for comment before publishing. Fallon tells him he has some information that would make it unwise for Heath to publish the story. But he refuses to give him any information about it! He tells him he won't give it to him and instead he's going to wait until after Heath publishes and then give the information to a competing news organization, presumably to embarrass him with it. Heath makes several attempts to get the information and to accomodate Fallon but in the end Fallon just insults him and says he's biased. Heath and his editor aren't buying and last night they published the story. A really weird exchange.
It seems to me like DoJ was bluffing and trying, in an assholish way, to intimidate USAToday so they'd decide not to publish something damaging to the government, but I guess we'll have to see if Fallon does what he said he'd do. If he does, USAToday tried to get the government's side of the story.
By chance, I noticed the tweet from Cryptome (their exchange with Dan Froomkin) early on and saw that emptywheel had retweeted it, and a few other people had too. She posted about it (before the USAToday piece was published). I'm not sure who put the copy of the email out on DocumentCloud to begin with and frankly, was not really aware that DocumentCloud was a big thing but apparently Cryptome regularly looks through what's out there. And the email is worth looking at too just to observe the back and forth between a journalist and the government when the government is the subject of a story (though hopefully most govt. officials are more accomodating than Fallon was) and the games they play.
I would guess that by now, the govt. is pretty frazzled by 3+ months of stories based on the Snowden files. I would also guess that a lot of people had to cancel or shorten their vacations this summer and between the Snowden files and the manic pace at which other things have been happening, they're overworked and stressed, which generally leads to mistakes or bad judgment, and who knows what else. Here is a bit of emptywheel's post from yesterday morning. She also updates later after the article was published. She notes that Lisa Monaco (and her predecessor) would have been responsible for oversight of the national security/intel issues and FISA warrants. She was recently promoted by Pres. Obama to succeed John Brennan as chief counterterrorism advisor to the President.
DOJ Refuses to Explain How Executive Gets Away with Serial Lies to the FISA Court
USA Today’s Brad Heath asked DOJ a very good question: why haven’t the Executive Branch’s serial lies to the FISA Court ever been referred to Office of Professional Responsibility?
I’ve talked to a former OPR attorney who says the office would ordinarily review a case in which a judge used that type of language, and that it should have at least opened an inquiry into these.
Over the past several days, DOJ’s Brian Fallon has been stupendously prickish about Heath’s questions based on his assertion that Heath is biased in his belief that such gross misrepresentations would normally merit some kind of sanction.
I have an answer from OPR, and a FISC judge. I am not providing it to you because all you will do is seek to write around it because you are biased in favor of the idea that an inquiry should have been launched. So I will save what I have for another outlet after you publish.
[snip]
You are not actually open-minded to the idea of not writing the story. You are running it regardless. I have information that undercuts your premise, and would provide it if I thought you were able to be convinced that your story is off base. Instead, I think that to provide it to you would just allow you to cover your bases, and factor it into a story you still plan to write. So I prefer to hold onto the information and use it after the fact, with a different outlet that is more objective about whether an OPR inquiry was appropriate.
I’ve lost count of the number of times someone in the Executive Branch complains that no one comes to them to get their view on NSA-related questions.
But apparently this is what goes on. If you don’t come in with the Executive Branch’s bias, then they refuse to provide you any information.
And last night, Heath published the article in USAToday. And this is big news because every govt official from the president on down has said that the DoJ exercised oversight over the NSA. But judges were complaining that the NSA misled them, yes FISC
judges, and DoJ National Security division did not follow that up with an OPR investigation. A former lawyer from the DoJ Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) said that judicial opinions like this should have triggered an investigation by OPR. DoJ's Fallon claims that there was no problem with what DoJ's lawyers did (or didn't do) and that the "department attorneys' representation before the court met the highest professional standards".
Another former DoJ lawyer, Carrie Cordero, claims that the misleading info given to the judges by the NSA were just a matter of lawyers translating technical information but ACLU says that the FISA judges stated that they were misled and that an investigation was warranted because the DoJ rules state that any hint of professional misconduct calls for one. The information prepared for the FISA judges is done by the NSA with the assistance of lawyers.
Justice Dept. watchdog never probed judges' NSA concerns
In response to a FOIA request from USA TODAY, the Justice Department said its ethics office never looked into complaints from two federal judges that they had been misled about NSA surveillance.
The Justice Department's internal ethics watchdog says it never investigated repeated complaints by federal judges that the government had misled them about the NSA's secret surveillance of Americans' phone calls and Internet communications.
Two judges on the court that oversees the spying programs separately rebuked federal officials in top-secret court orders for misrepresenting how the NSA was harvesting and analyzing communication records. In a sharply worded 2009 order, one of the judges, Reggie Walton, went so far as to suggest that he could hold national security officials in contempt or refer their conduct to outside investigators.
The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility routinely probes judges' allegations that the department's lawyers may have violated ethics rules that prohibit attorneys from misleading courts. Still, OPR said in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by USA TODAY that it had no record of ever having investigated — or even being made aware of — the scathing and, at the time, classified, critiques from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court between 2009 and 2011.
Finally, here is Fallon's statement after the article was published. Of course by this time he knew that his emails with Heath had been published, so this looks to me like a bit of CYA for his behavior. We didn't see any evidence of the supposed earlier offer to put Heath in touch with "people who could independently explain" anything. And one wonders why DoJ, if they are so confident that there was no misconduct, did not just forward this to OPR to begin with. OPR could have done an investigation and officially found no misconduct and then this wouldn't be a story at all. Also, it's impossible not to wonder how many other cases like this are out there that we are unaware of because the information about them are still classified. We only know about this because the Snowden files led to declassification of FISA orders and opinions and we don't even have all of those. And then there are the things that were inevitably done without any involvement of the FISA court.
Statement by Brian Fallon
"Brad is reporting on the lack of an OPR inquiry, but that only seems newsworthy if one might be warranted in the first place. It isn't. For the last several days, we asked Brad to exercise discretion rather than write a story that leaves a false impression that there was any evidence of misconduct or basis for an inquiry. We proposed putting him in touch with people who could independently explain why no inquiry was warranted in hopes it might persuade him. When it became clear he intended to publish his story regardless, there was no point in asking any of those people to reach out."
-- Justice spokesman Brian Fallon.
Syria’s Refugees: The Catastrophe
In more than one way, what happened in Jisr al-Shughour is unusually revealing about the course of Syria’s civil war: it was the first well-documented case of protesters arming themselves and fighting back against Syrian troops. It was also one of the first occasions that large numbers of Syrians were forced to flee to a neighboring country. At the time, the Turkish government had not yet endorsed the Syrian opposition; it had spent the previous decade building economic and political ties with the Assad regime and still hoped for a negotiated solution to the uprising. But Turkey is a Sunni country whose current leadership has Islamist sympathies. Jisr al-Shughour was a Sunni town with a history of Islamist activism and violent repression by Syria’s ruling Baath regime, which is dominated by the Alawite sect. The refugees who left for Turkey soon became the first links in a crucial supply chain for the rebel cause. In July 2011, a few weeks after we met Lajia and other Syrians in the border region of Hatay province, a group of military defectors among them announced the founding of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), dedicated to the armed overthrow of Assad.
Since the summer of 2011, what happened in Jisr al-Shughour has been repeated in villages and towns all over Syria, with far-reaching consequences on almost every side of its 1,400-mile-long perimeter. The country had a population of 22.5 million when the war began; about 10 percent have now left. With nearly a half-million Syrians now in Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is actively supporting the Syrian opposition and has turned his country into a primary conduit of arms to rebel groups. Along with the FSA, which is favored by the US and its allies, these include other militias, some of them associated with aggressive Islamism. Notably, the Turkish government has not impeded the activity of the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda-linked rebel group that has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the UN Security Council.
In Jordan, a far smaller and more fragile country, the arrival of an even greater number of Syrians has raised fears that refugees could bring instability or encourage jihadism among Jordanians themselves. In recent months, the Jordanian government has clamped down on its refugee population while quietly allowing the United States to build up a military presence to protect its border with Syria. In northern Iraq, a rapidly growing population of some 200,000 Syrian Kurds is drawing Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government into a violent new war between Kurds and Islamists in northeastern Syria. Iraq’s Kurdish leaders are meanwhile locked in conflict with Syria’s main Kurdish party over the future of Syrian Kurdistan.
And then there is Lebanon. A tiny, fractious country of about four million people when the Syrian uprising began, the Lebanese Republic has large populations of Sunnis, Shias, and Christians, and especially intricate ties to Syria, which surrounds all of its northern and most of its long eastern borders. According to the government, it has now received well over a million Syrians, most of them within the last twelve months; soon, nearly one in four people in Lebanon will be Syrian. A large majority of the refugees are Sunni Muslims and many Lebanese Sunnis strongly support the Syrian opposition. Yet Hezbollah, the powerful Shia group that controls significant parts of Lebanon, has been fighting in Syria on the side of the Assad regime.
The view of an interventionist. After a whole lot of blustering about morality, he gets to the crux of the issue, which many have said was the goal all along* which is to slice up Syria. This author doesn't, however, mention what happens to the Golan Heights, of course. Assad stays in place* and the country is split up. *If Saddam and Gaddafi are any indicator, Assad might stay in place for awhile, but his long term odds are not good after he gives up his WMDs.
How to Save the Syrians
A cease-fire, however, is impossible until all external interveners supporting the proxy war—including Saudi Arabia and Qatar as well as Iran and Russia—begin to understand that neither Assad nor the rebel side is going to emerge victorious and that the longer the conflict goes on the more harm it does to civilians and to peace and stability in the whole region.
From stalemate comes a ray of hope, the hope that all the external sponsors of the conflict will begin to reduce weapons supplies to all sides. A strategy of asphyxiation could be followed by concerted pressure at the UN for a negotiated cease-fire. If no side can win it all, it is just conceivable that each may settle for what it already has. The result would be a divided Syria, with Assad in sovereign control, but with effective authority in the north and east in rebel and Kurdish hands.
This seems like a pretty big deal. A three-part discussion series is being held at Georgetown Law, starting next Tuesday, with former members of the Church Committee. And you might find it interesting that Dianne Feinstein scheduled a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that conflicts with it. I wonder why. Worried that the Church Committee event might be broadcast on C-SPAN3 or get some attention from the cable news channels?
September 24, 2013 - Surveillance and Foreign Intelligence Gathering in the United States: Past, Present, and Future
Georgetown Law's Center on National Security and the Law and National Security Law Society proudly present a three-part discussion series this autumn: Surveillance and Foreign Intelligence Gathering in the United States: Past, Present, and Future
This is a crucially important time in the United States' history.A number of foreign intelligence gathering programs using new technologies recently have been unveiled, and the public, the media, and scholars are just beginning to address what these programs mean for the future of the country.
Please join us on September 24, 2013 for the first event in the series, focused on the past.
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), will be giving the keynote address, followed by a panel discussion by former members and key staff of the 1975-76 Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities ("Church Committee").
The Church Committee exposed government surveillance abuses and played a key role in the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which, as subsequently amended, provides the framework for current foreign intelligence gathering programs.
And here is McCain's much anticipated piece published in Pravda (joking about the much anticipated part) in which he persuades the Russian people.
Senator John McCain: Russians deserve better than Putin
When Pravda.ru editor, Dmitry Sudakov, offered to publish my commentary, he referred to me as "an active anti-Russian politician for many years". I'm sure that isn't the first time Russians have heard me characterized as their antagonist. Since my purpose here is to dispel falsehoods used by Russia's rulers to perpetuate their power and excuse their corruption, let me begin with that untruth. I am not anti-Russian. I am pro-Russian, more pro-Russian than the regime that misrules you today.
I make that claim because I respect your dignity and your right to self-determination. I believe you should live according to the dictates of your conscience, not your government. I believe you deserve the opportunity to improve your lives in an economy that is built to last and benefits the many, not just the powerful few. You should be governed by a rule of law that is clear, consistently and impartially enforced and just. I make that claim because I believe the Russian people, no less than Americans, are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
A Russian citizen could not publish a testament like the one I just offered. President Putin and his associates do not believe in these values. They don't respect your dignity or accept your authority over them. They punish dissent and imprison opponents. They rig your elections. They control your media. They harass, threaten, and banish organizations that defend your right to self-governance. To perpetuate their power, they foster rampant corruption in your courts and your economy, and terrorize and even assassinate journalists who try to expose their corruption.
Kevin Gosztola writes about the letter that Keith Alexander sent out to NSA employees and talks about the seige mentality. Well worth a read.
NSA Sends Letter to Its ‘Extended’ Family to Reassure Them That They Will ‘Weather’ This ‘Storm’
The National Security Agency sent out a letter to all of its employees and affiliates, including contractors, that could be printed and shared with family, friends and colleagues. It was intended to reassure them that the NSA is not really the abusive and unchecked spying agency engaged in illegal activity that someone reading former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures might think it happens to be.
The letter, sent on September 13, is signed by NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander and NSA Deputy Director John Inglis, begins, “We are writing to you, our extended NSA/CSS family, in light of the unauthorized disclosure of classified information by a former contractor employee.”
If anyone was thinking of breaking up with the NSA family, the letter states, “We want to put the information you are reading and hearing about in the press into context and reassure you that this Agency and its workforce are deserving and appreciative of your support.”
[...]
“There are some in the media who are taking the time to actually study the leaked material, and they have drawn conclusions that are very different from those who are in it for a quick headline,” the directors concede. Unfortunately, they are not talking about anyone like Marcy Wheeler.
The directors quote Lawfare’s editor-in-chief and frequent national security state apologist, Benjamin Wittes, who wrote a post chastising The Washington Post as well as President Barack Obama’s administration for how it was handling the leaks.
Hagel says 'red flags' missed before Navy Yard shooting
"Obviously, when you go back in hindsight and look at all this there were some red flags - of course there were," Hagel said.
"And should we have picked them up? Why didn't we? How could we have? All those questions need to be answered."
General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said it would have been hard to foresee Monday's bloodshed. "I don't know what the investigation will determine, but he committed murder. And I'm not sure that any particular question or lack of question on a security clearance would probably have revealed that."
Dempsey was also hesitant to adopt the term "red flag." "Until I understand the outcome of the investigation, I can't render a judgment about whether it was a red flag or just something that flew beneath the radar."
NYTimes public editor, Margaret Sullivan, questioned the managing editor about why the Times didn't publish the story about how the NSA shares raw intelligence with Israel. His answer is not convincing to her and to many others. If he is not being truthful, what's the real reason?
Guardian Story on Israel and N.S.A. Is Not ‘Surprising’ Enough to Cover
After a weekend in which no mention was made in The Times of the article, I asked the managing editor, Dean Baquet, about it on Monday morning.
He told me that The Times had chosen not to follow the story because its level of significance did not demand it.
“I didn’t think it was a significant or surprising story,” he said. “I think the more energy we put into chasing the small ones, the less time we have to break our own. Not to mention cover the turmoil in Syria.”
Here is some more from that nsfwcorp story about the Saudis sending death row prisoners to fight as mercenaries in Syria. I subscribed to nsfwcorp to check this new site out for awhile, because a lot of people are saying some really good things about it. I hope it's not just hype. This one was from a week and a half ago by a Gary Brecher, who calls himself "The War Nerd". It's hard to find really good writing about our wars even though they consume so much blood and treasure. As we all know, the monstrous media prefers to keep the wars away from the beautiful minds of Americans. I, maybe unfortunately, can't forget about them and they're on my (not so beautiful mind, I guess) every day.
This guy caught my attention in the first few paragraphs when he mentioned that
"every story on Syria comes from some sleazy angle or other" because the propaganda around the Syrian civil war and proxy war is rampant, both from the "rebels" who know how or who have been taught how to generate their own propaganda, and or the people with an agenda in this proxy war who pump it out too. And he's also a really good writer who seems to have a depth of understanding that only comes from being on the ground or having access to sources who have been there.
The Saudi Dirty Dozen and Jihadi as Risk Disposal
Across the street from the prison on the Northern edge of town was the barracks of the border troops—under the command of the same Ministry of Interior that sent that memo about enlisting death-row inmates. It’s always the Ministry of Interior you have to fear in most countries. Not in the US, where the Dept of Interior’s only job is selling off public land to oil companies, cheap—but almost everywhere else. The Interior Ministry’s barracks were the only thing in Najran bigger than the prison, stretching for more than a mile out into the dry scrub, a huge architectural warning to every one of us heretics that if the prison guards and the Mutaween couldn’t handle us, there were even bigger guns waiting just across the street.
Saudi may seem hard to believe, and harder to accept, but really, it’s just what happens when you take the Beverly Hillbillies scenario to its unfunny reality-TV conclusion. That’s really the best way to understand the Saudis: What if Jed Clampitt was for real? Backwoods Baptist norms, religion, culture imposed on the world by any means necessary. We have a weak version of that—it’s called "Texas." But the most surprising thing I learned in Saudi is that even our Baptists are weak in their belief. Only in Saudi did I see real religious belief, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.
The results of hardcore belief like that are in front of you now, if you’re a Syrian unlucky enough to live in the jihadi-run areas where the Saudis dropped off their 1,200 death-row prisoners. Like maybe Aleppo. Remember that horrible story out of Aleppo—a boy shot in front of his family for joking about not giving coffee on credit even if the Prophet came back?
[...]
Aleppo is full of jihadis from the Saudi-backed SILF (Syrian Islamic Liberation Front). It may well be one of the killers the Saudis sent over to Syria on their Dirty Dozen flights [...] Nobody knows how many Dirty Dozens the Saudis have brought into Syria by now. You can expect routine denials, but they mean zero. This program is a natural for a Saudi bureaucrat: It gets rid of surplus young males, mostly foreign, many brown or black, expelling them into an ecosystem the Saudis are interested in destroying. It’s like realizing you can dump your toxic waste on your hated neighbor’s back yard; there’s just no downside.
Heh. This set off a firestorm on Twitter and spawned a bunch of photoshopped Obamas with pink hair. Here is the
Friedman's column. And as for being out of touch, have you ever seen
Friedman's house?
Someone Should Show Thomas Friedman What The Internet Is And How To Write For It
Unfortunately, Friedman's very good column has been encased in a very bad column about a pink-haired shop clerk in Bern, Switzerland, who blew a kiss to a woman outside, and sold Friedman some nectarines, because Friedman needed some nectarines. The blown kiss causes Friedman to remark that the clerk had "not a care in the world," leading him to conclude that it must be "nice to be a Swiss" and not have to spend time "agonizing over the proper use of force against Bashar al-Assad," or feel any duty to "the global commons."
From there, the column ruminates briefly on President Barack Obama's hair, which is not pink. The unpinkness of Obama's hair is considered for a few sentences, which culminate in a very bad Grecian Formula joke, and then you hear the sound of thousands of people clicking "close tab" and getting on with their lives.
[...]
So what went wrong here? How can this be avoided? To my mind, the issue is one of medium. Friedman writes as if he is a print columnist. And to be fair, he is a print columnist. But he's not a very good print columnist. He's become known as The Print Columnist Who Talks To Taxi Cab Drivers and The Print Columnist Who Derives Special Meaning From The Way The Hotel Concierge Behaves. And people hate this stuff. This is the stuff that drags Friedman into the world of metaphors, where he has famously failed to succeed.
Another crook off the hook. The article says that the state can still appeal to the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals.
Conviction of ex-US House leader DeLay's tossed
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas appeals court tossed the criminal conviction of former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on Thursday, saying there was insufficient evidence for a jury in 2010 to have found him guilty of illegally funneling money to Republican candidates.
DeLay was found guilty of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering for helping illegally funnel corporate money to Texas candidates in 2002. He was sentenced to three years in prison, but his sentence was on hold while his case made its way through the appellate process.
The Texas 3rd Court of Appeals said the evidence was "legally insufficient," and in a 2-1 ruling decided to "reverse the judgments of the trial court and render judgments of acquittal."
[...]
But in a 22-page opinion, the appeals court said prosecutors "failed in its burden to prove that the funds that were delivered to the seven candidates were ever tainted."
Interesting piece about the State Dept. by "Chase Madar, a journalist, is the author of 'The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower.'"
Dropping Their Pens and Waving Guns
It’s a nasty paradox that civilians in the State Department (without getting into the laptop bombardiers in the news media) are increasingly among the most aggressive voices for war, by whichever euphemism they choose to call it.
[...]
It’s a nasty paradox that civilians in the State Department (without getting into the laptop bombardiers in the news media) are increasingly among the most aggressive voices for war, by whichever euphemism they choose to call it.
Madeleine Albright, when serving as President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, asked Colin Powell, “What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?”– surely one of the worst reasons for the resort to force in recorded history.
[...]
Most remarkably, Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, has made a career out of the weaponization of human rights.
Imgur, lol.
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