Do past abuses of personal data point toward future abuses of NSA metadata collection?

Stephen Walt spotlights why we worry about metadata collection:

The real risk to our democracy is what this situation does to potential dissenters, whistle-blowers, investigative journalists, and anyone else who thinks that some aspect of government policy might be boneheaded, unethical, or maybe even illegal. If you are one of those people -- even on just a single issue -- and you decide to go public with your concerns, there's a possibility that someone who doesn't like what you are doing will decide to see what they can find out about you. It doesn't have to be the attorney general either; it might just be some anonymous midlevel bureaucrat or overly zealous defense contractor. Or maybe it will be someone who wants to suck up to their superiors by taking down a critic or who wants to have their own 15 minutes of fame. It really doesn't matter: Unless you've lived an absolutely pristine online and cellular life, you might wake up to discover that some regrettable moment from your past is suddenly being plastered all over the blogosphere or discussed in the New York Times. 

 In a way, though, Walt's evidence that we should worry cuts two ways:

The truest thing you will read today

Really, I promise. Think about it.

How overreaction has become the touchstone of our era:bit.ly/12VCBUw
— Lenore Skenazy (@FreeRangeKids) March 15, 2013

In this case, the overreaction is to a paring knife accidentally baked into the bottom of a birthday cake:. Never mind the parental hysteria: here's Walmart:

GOP leaders: GOP is unfit to govern

Let's step back and let the obvious sink in. Think about this internecine GOP spat for a moment:

BRIAN KILMEADE: Now, Sen. McCain, I want you to hear a sound bite from one of the Sunday shows. Dick Cheney sits down, talks about your selection of vice presidential candidate Governor Palin. Listen.

DICK CHENEY: I like Governor Palin. I’ve met her. I know her. She – attractive candidate. But based on her background, she’d only been governor for, what, two years? I don’t think she passed that test…of being ready to take over. And I think that was a mistake.

BRIAN KILMEADE: You agree? Disagree?

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Well, I’m always glad to get comments four years later. Look, I respect the vice president. He and I had strong disagreements as to whether we should torture people or not. I don’t think we should have. But the fact is I’m proud of Sarah Palin. I’m proud of the job she did. I’m proud of the job she continues to do. Everybody has their own views and I respect those views. But I’m proud of what we did.

Run, Sarah, Run!

If Dick Cheney can try to lure Hillary Clinton into the presidential race, why can't we progressives have a go at Sarah?  Jonathan Bernstein:

Could Palin launch an independent bid for the presidency? Why not? What bridges would she be burning with Republicans that she hasn’t burned already? And if she did go that route, she certainly wouldn’t have problems raising a fair amount of money, and she would be able to mobilize enough volunteers to get her name on the ballot in quite a few states.

Cheney's still spinning..

No wonder Dick Cheney considers Rush Limbaugh a friend. Cheney twists political reality as relentlessly as he once twisted intelligence, relentlessly as Limbaugh.  If he gets a new heart, he should get his own show. 

Via Slate, here's his latest spin on Obama's counterterror policy, from an interview to be aired tomorrow on NBC:

He obviously has been through the fires of becoming President and having to make decisions and live with the consequences. And it's different than being a candidate. When he was candidate he was all for closing Gitmo. He was very critical of what we'd done on the counterterrorism area to protect America from further attack and so forth.

I think he's learned that he's not going to be able to close Guantanamo. That it's-- if you didn't have it you'd have to create one like that. You've got to have some place to put terrorists who are combatants who are bound and determined to try to kill Americans.

I think he's-- in terms of a lot of the terrorism policies-- the early talk, for example, about prosecuting people in the CIA who've been carrying out our policies-- all of that's fallen by the wayside. I think he's learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate. So I think he's learned from experience. And part of that experience was the Democrats having a terrible showing last election.

And here he is on counterterrorism and drones:

As I say, I think he's found it necessary to be more sympathetic to the kinds of things we did. They've gotten active, for example, with the drone program, using Predator and the Reaper to launch strikes against identified terrorist targets in the various places in the world.

Okay, one point at a time:

Historians, raise your shovels

At the groundbreaking of the Bush spin museum, Dick Cheney cracked, "This may be the only shovel-ready project in America.”

I know of one project for which Americans -- or let us say, American historians -- ought to ready their shovels. That is burying Dick Cheney -- destroyer of this nation's liberties, economy, soft power, hard power --and thousands of its finest men and women, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

Even as his ideological brethren place destroying Obama ahead of national and global security.

Look, ma no lies: Palin smears with hypotheticals

Is there a method to Palin's loopy syntax? She inspired a fresh round of indignation and glee by suggesting on Fox on Monday that Obama has been soft on BP because he's received oil industry campaign contributions, and for seeming to suggest that he attracted more oil money than a Republican President would.

In fact, while Palin's Fox riff was a smear (impugning Obama's motives with no factual basis) it did not include an actual lie -- she didn't say that Obama got more money from the oil industry than any given Republican. In elusive, allusive convoluted fashion, she piled hypothetical on hypothetical.  After asking why the media doesn't ask "if there's any connection with the contributions made to President Obama and his administration and the support by the oil companies to the administration" (literally, a connection between the oil industry's support for Obama and the oil industry's support for Obama, but you know what she meant), she goes from speculation about what is (or could be) to counterfactuals about what might have been or could yet be:

now, if this was President Bush or if this were a Republican in office who hadn't received as much support even as President Obama has from B.P. and other oil companies, you know the mainstream media would be all over his case in terms of asking questions why the administration didn't get in there, didn't get in there and make sure that the regulatory agencies were doing what they were doing with the oversight to make sure that things like this don't happen.

Palin seems to be dreaming up a hypothetical Republican who hasn't been massively supported by the oil industry. We are literally in fantasyland, where it's natural to body forth the possibility that Obama has been influenced by oil money and then conjure a Republican president who's received "even less" than Obama but whom the media will assume (as it would have with Bush, who received proportionately more of the industry's dollars, but never mind...) is more influenced than Obama is (was).  And just as the slip about "support by the oil companies to the administration" suggests the opposite of what she purportedly means, so the "even" in "even as much," taken literally, would seem to suggest that Obama hasn't received much from the oil industry.  Palin gets lost in her own funhouse.

State-Croft in the Obama Administration, cont.: the Deputies' Committee

A detailed portrait of the Obama administration's foreign policy apparatus by the FT's Edward Luce and Daniel Dombey presents a mixed bag, a work in progress.  One key facet  has an interesting pedigree: personnel from the Clinton administration slotted into a structure adapted from the administration of George Bush, Sr.  That is the "deputies' meetings":

Mr Obama’s character is also stamped on the inter-agency process, set up and managed by Tom Donilon, deputy national security adviser. The nitty-gritty of foreign policy-making is done at these frequent “deputies’ meetings”, which can sometimes consume four to six hours a day
.
Described by one insider as “the most powerful man in the White House whose name isn’t widely known”, Mr Donilon, who was an official in the Clinton administration, is the man who keeps Mr Obama’s trains running on time. And there are a lot of trains. Last year, Mr Donilon held 270 deputies meetings – a workload described as “clinically insane” by a former senior diplomat under Bill Clinton.

Bush's mentor, the Dementor

There's been no shortage of denunciations of Dick Cheney for  his series of  attacks on Obama , and he deserves all of them. But today, Gail Collins dispatches "the demented vice president" (Dowd, 2004) with a throwaway line worth a dozen polemics:

No matter how difficult the issue, Obama has been sensible, deliberative. Just look at Dick Cheney swooping around like a dementor from Harry Potter, and you have to appreciate how much things have improved.

Meanwhile...today Times' report on the army's own official history of the failure of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan since early 2002 sheds an interesting light on Cheney's October charge that Obama was "dithering" over Afghanistan:

When Obama stole a line from Cheney

One of the defining moments of the 2008 campaign came in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse, when John McCain announced that he was suspending his campaign and called on Obama to postpone their upcoming debate while al hands were called on deck to deal with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's request for $700 billion to bail out the megabanks. Obama's response - a President has to be able to do more than one thing at a time -- exposed McCain for the shallow showboating bully that he is.

Who noticed at the time that Obama was quoting his distant cousin, Dick Cheney?  I just stumbled on this exchange in a Tim Russert interview with Cheney on March 16, 2003, days before the U.S. attacked  Iraq:

MR. RUSSERT: In order to pay for this war, would the president consider suspending his proposed tax cut?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: We don’t believe that’s the right course of action, Tim. This is one of those times when as important as the war on terror is and as important as the problem of Iraq is, we’ve also got a lot of other balls in the air. And an American president these days doesn’t have the choice of focusing on only one thing. We’ve also got to deal with the Middle East peace process, with Israelis and Palestinians which we did this week. We’ve got to deal with the domestic economy. It’s very important to get the economy growing again. And one of the reasons we’ve had a fall-off in revenue, obviously, is a slow economy and we need to get growth started again....

I imagine that in one form or another, the observation that a President has to focus on many issues simultaneously is a truism going back many decades, if not a couple of centuries.

BTW, a look back at the Russert interview highlights what we lost with his untimely death.  He asked Cheney every question he should have -- whether he disagreed with the International Atomic Energy Agency's assessment that Iraq had no nuclear program, whether the U.S. was alienating allies, whether the invasion would stimulate anti-American feeling and terrorism among Muslim populations, whether we would need hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground to secure the country after invasion, whether the war mightn't cost $100 billion, whether Brent Scowcroft's vocal criticism of the rush to war gave him pause -- and, per above, whether war might require scaling back tax cuts..   You can't accuse Cheney of being unwilling to engage these questions, either -- though you may marvel how wrong he was about everything.

Interrogation "light"

“I’ve seen man at his worst, and man at his best.  I can tell you that in the darkest of moments, there are those who provide a light.  Never forget that a small beam of light is enough to overpower a whole room of darkness.  Never underestimate the impact that you alone, sticking to your principles, can have.”

      - Ali Soufan, former FBI rapport-based interrogator extraordinaire, nemesis of the Cheney torture regime
       Commencement Address, Mansfield University, Dec. 19 [?], 2009

Ali Soufan goes nuclear on Cheney

Four months ago Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator who extracted reams of actionable intelligence from Abu Zubaydah using rapport-based techniques before the CIA took over and commenced torturing him, broke a seven-year silence to assert that the CIA's torture regimen interrupted and undercut effective noncoercive interrogation and never yielded any actionable intelligence that could not have been gleaned without coercion.

Today, in a second Times op-ed, Soufan goes further, suggesting that the U.S. failed to capture top al Qaeda leadership because it turned to ineffective torture:

It is surprising, as the eighth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, that none of Al Qaeda’s top leadership is in our custody. One damaging consequence of the harsh interrogation program was that the expert interrogators [e.g., Soufan] whose skills were deemed unnecessary to the new methods were forced out.

Mr. Mohammed knew the location of most, if not all, of the members of Al Qaeda’s leadership council, and possibly of every covert cell around the world. One can only imagine who else we could have captured, or what attacks we might have disrupted, if Mr. Mohammed had been questioned by the experts who knew the most about him.

There's a fearful symmetry here: Cheney claims that torture prevented further terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Soufan suggests that torture prevented the capture of top Al Qaeda leadership.

This inflammatory claim follows a point-by-point demolition of the various claims made for torture-based interrogation: that it led to foiling a plot to fly a plane into the tallest building on the West Coast; that it led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; that torture induced KSM to give up new information about Al Qaeda's organizational structure. According to Soufan's parsing of the CIA inspector general's report of 2004 and the two CIA memos on intelligence gained from detainees, virtually all actionable intelligence cited by torture's defenders came from "pocket litter" and from captives' assumption that they were giving up information their questioners already had.

Soufan is plainly tormented by the conviction that he personally had what it took to get the highest-value information out of the top-level detainees, and that he and other informed and skilled interrogators were prevented from doing so by the thugs at the top who imposed the torture regime. Of course he can never prove what he might have accomplished -- just as torture's defenders can't prove that any info gained once the"program" commenced could not have been gained by other means. But Soufan does know a) what was gained in the interrogations he did conduct; what is false in most of the explicit claims about knowledge gained under torture; and c) a good deal about the psychology of the top detainees and the knowledge in their possession at the time of capture.

Philip Zelikow, who interviewed Soufan for the 9/11 Commission, says that he "seemed to us to be one of the more impressive intelligence agents -- from any agency -- that we encountered in our work." Soufan is a far more credible witness than Cheney and his henchmen.

The strange lies of Dick Cheney

Dick Cheney's extended attack on the Obama Administration in his 8/30 interview with Chris Wallace, focused chiefly on the Justice Dept. investigation into whether some CIA interrogators violated the limits set on interrogation techniques by the depraved torture memos, is full of lies. The repeated master lie, providing the theme and structure of Cheney's attack, is easily debunked. Here are three iterations:

We had the president of the United States, President Obama, tell us a few months ago there wouldn't be any investigation like this, that there would not be any look back at CIA personnel who were carrying out the policies of the prior administration. Now they get a little heat from the left wing of the Democratic Party, and they're reversing course on that.

Instead, they're out there now threatening to disbar the lawyers who gave us the legal opinions, threatening contrary to what the president originally said. They're going to go out and investigate the CIA personnel who carried out those investigations.

But my concern is that the damage that will be done by the President of the United States going back on his word, his promise about investigations of CIA personnel who have carried those policies, is seriously going to undermine the moral, if you will, of our folks out at the agency.

Reality check: when the Obama administration released the torture memos on April 16, both Obama and Holder made it very clear that they intended to rule out prosecuting CIA personnel who relied on Justice Department guidance when carrying out interrogations -- that is, who stayed within the limits imposed by the torture memos. Obama's April 16 statement said:

In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution. The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world. Their accomplishments are unsung and their names unknown, but because of their sacrifices, every single American is safer. We must protect their identities as vigilantly as they protect our security, and we must provide them with the confidence that they can do their jobs.

Holder was more explicit about the boundaries of this forbearance:

"It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department," said Attorney General Eric Holder.

Also untrue: that "threatening to disbar" authors of the torture memos for their tortured legal reasoning that authorized the obvious abrogation of U.S. treaty obligations and violations of U.S. law constitutes going back on a promise. Obama indicated early that he would prefer not to prosecute the authors of the memos. The draft report by the Justice Dept.'s Office of Professional Responsibility, completed by May of this year, does not recommend prosecution. The still-unreleased report is, according to the Times, (May 6), "likely to ask state bar associations to consider possible disciplinary action, which could include reprimands or even disbarment, for some of the lawyers involved in writing the legal opinions."

As a corollary lie to the lie that Obama has reversed himself, Cheney added this:

We ask those people [intelligence operatives] to do some very difficult things. Sometimes, that put their own lives at risk. They do so at the direction of the president, and they do so with the -- in this case, we had specific legal authority from the Justice Department. And if they are now going to be subject to being investigated and prosecuted by the next administration, nobody's going to sign up for those kinds of missions.

Again, Holder has directed the investigation at those who exceeded the boundaries imposed by the torture memos.

Cheney also lied regarding the import of the declassified CIA memos assessing the effects of the CIA interrogation program:

But the interesting thing about these is it shows that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah provided the overwhelming majority of reports on Al Qaeda. That they were, as it says, pivotal in the war against Al Qaeda. That both of them were uncooperative at first, that the application of enhanced interrogation techniques, specifically waterboarding, especially in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is what really persuaded him. He needed to cooperate.

As Wallace himself indicated in the phrasing of his question, the CIA reports do not show that "the application of enhanced interrogation techniques...is what really persuaded him." Here's how Wallace put it:

While they say that the overall program got absolutely crucial information, they do not conclude whether the enhanced interrogation programs worked. They just are kind of agnostic on the issue.

Every news organization that has reported the release of these documents has noted that they provide no information as to what techniques yielded what information. And it's a flat-out lie that Abu Zubaydah was "uncooperative at first." Zubaydah's first interrogator, the FBI's Ali Soufan, has written and testified that Zubaydah gave up reams of precious information in interrogations led by Soufan before the CIA intervened and began its escalating series of abuses and torture techniques. No one has contradicted Soufan's testimony.

There were other lies and distortions and misleading innuendos - e.g., that the torture memos provided direction as to how to keep the interrogation program in compliance with U.S. international treaty obligations, when in fact they simply denied the treaties' authority over the President's "article II" authority to conduct war in any way he sees fit; that the FBI is unfit to play the lead in detainee interrogation; that the Bush Administration did not deliberate in detail over the conduct of the interrogation of key detainees; and that the Obama Administration has not stepped up pilotless drone attacks on suspected Taliban leaders )fro better or worse).

Debunking Cheney's lies and distortions is a potentially limitless exercise -- worthwhile only because his slurs sit like time bombs, ready to detonate into full-scale "stab-in-the-back" paranoia after the next major terrorist attack.

Keep talking, Cheney

Galling in a way that coverage of Obama's major address on national security is universally yoked to the delusive self-serving bilge of the former Vice President:

Cheney Repudiates Obama on Terrorism Policy (NYT)
Obama and Cheney's remarks on terrorism (LAT)
Obama, Cheney Offer Rival Security Visions (WSJ
Spin Meter: Obama vs. Cheney (AP)
Obama, Cheney offer competing views on national security (CNN)
Compare and Contrast: Obama and Cheney's Divergent Views on National Security (FoxNews)

But then reflect: Obama's approval ratings more than triple Cheney's. Cheney's speech is full of lies, distortions and delusions that Americans have broadly rejected. And the hammering Obama's taking from civil rights activists is in some measure neutralized by this assault from the authoritarian side.

Obama sticks the shiv in Cheney

I gasped as I watched a smiling Obama unload this in his White House Correspondent's Dinner speech:

Dick Cheney was supposed to be here but he is very busy working on his memoirs, tentatively titled, "How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People." (Laughter.)

That looks like carefully calculated (and calibrated) payback for Cheney's loud, frequent assertions that Obama is risking the country's security by abjuring the Cheney torture regimen. But does it sound like Obama? Am I crazy -- is this just bonhomie, in a class with comparing Biden to an eager puppy dog? Or did Obama deliver the deadliest insult leveled by one national politician against another in recent memory? He implicitly summed up Cheney's career as an exercise in treachery and torture.

Training in torture

Atul Gawande's long look at solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, Hellhole, asks, "is solitary confinement torture?" and provides overwhelming empirical evidence that the answer is yes. Solitary confinement brings on psychosis and hallucination; it makes the mind effectively disintegrate; it causes lasting psychological damage.

In addition to documenting this torture's effects, Gawande also chronicles its explosion in the U.S. prison system since the early eighties, the same period in which the prison population as a whole has exploded:

The number of prisoners in these facilities has since risen to extraordinary levels. America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons. An additional fifty to eighty thousand are kept in restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation, too, although the government does not release these figures. By 1999, the practice had grown to the point that Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Virginia kept between five and eight per cent of their prison population in isolation, and, by 2003, New York had joined them as well. Mississippi alone held eighteen hundred prisoners in supermax—twelve per cent of its prisoners over all.

Reading this made me think that like most disasters, the Bush Administration's embrace of more physically abusive forms of torture in its treatment of hundreds if not thousands of detainees from Bagram to Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib had no single simple cause -- say, a rogue Vice President and Secretary of State -- but came at the end of a chain of systemic failures. In some sense that needs to be explored further, we have trained ourselves to accept brutal treatment of those we deem to have forfeited their rights. A politics and society that embraces ever more punitive measures against prisoners and illegal immigrants is part and parcel with one that removes regulatory restraint from elites, from Wall Street to the executive branch, that gleefuly redistributes wealth upwards, and that plots to privatize and eviscerate our common measures for sharing risk.

We have changed course. How successful, lasting and thoroughgoing will Obama's counterrevolution be? For better and worse, we're living in interesting times..

The incredible Mr. Cheney

Among a long litany of self-serving distortions in Dick Cheney's assessments of the Bush and Obama Administrations on CNN tonight, one in particular encapsulates Cheneythought: the conflation of diverse real and imagined threats into a monolith that justifies the most extreme response. Here's how he justified the invasion of Iraq to John King:

The circumstances, though, that in terms of whether or not this was worth doing, I think it was. I think if you hark back and look at the biggest threat we faced after 9/11, it was the idea of a rogue state or a terrorist-sponsoring state with weapons of mass destruction — say, nukes, for example — and providing those to terrorist organizations. What happened in Iraq is we’ve eliminated that possibility. We got rid of one of the worst dictators in the 20th century. We got rid of his government. There is no prospect that Iraq is going to become a place where once again they produce weapons of mass destruction or support terrorists..

This account conveniently omits a few facts: that Iraq did not support the terrorists who attacked on on 9/11, it did not have weapons of mass destruction when we attacked, and there was virtually no prospect that Saddam would either develop WMD or support al Qaeda.

Justifying the war for removing a nonexistent threat provides Cheney with the added benefit of justifying the Bush Administration's massive deficit spending:

Eight months after we arrived, we had 9/11. We had 3,000 Americans killed one morning by al Qaeda terrorists here in the United States. We immediately had to go into the wartime mode. We ended up with two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of that is still very active. We had major problems with respect to things like Katrina, for example. All of these things required us to spend money that we had not originally planned to spend, or weren’t originally part of the Stuff happens. And the administration has to be able to respond to that, and we did...We always said — I always said that wartime scenario is cause for an exception in terms of spending. It was appropriate in World War II, certainly, and I think it’s appropriate nowbudget. Stuff happens. And the administration has to be able to respond to that, and we did...

It's in this context that Cheney's claims that information gained from the torture regime he implemented prevented major terrorist attacks against the U.S., and that future attacks can't be prevented without torture, must be judged:

KING: But another 9/11, because of a tactic like waterboarding or a black site, can you say with certainty you stopped another attempt to do something on that level?

CHENEY: John, I’ve seen a report that was written based upon the intelligence that we collected then that itemizes the specific attacks that were stopped by virtue of what we learned through those programs. It’s still classified. I can’t give you the details of it without violating classification, but I can say there were a great many of them. The one that has been public was the potential attack coming out of Heathrow, when they were going to have several American planes with terrorists on board, with liquid explosives, and they were going to blow those planes up over the United States.

The claim that info gained through torture prevented further attacks can't be absolutely disproved, at least not without mountains of declassified evidence. But look at the way Cheney continues to misrepresent the threat posed by Saddam, and consider the source.

Update: against Cheney's insistence on the indispensability of torture stands the testimony of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (courtesy of Andrew Sullivan, linking to a long review by Mark Danner of the International Committee of the Red Cross's Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody):

I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop.... I'm sure that the false information I was forced to invent...wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the US," - Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, one of the high-value terrorists tortured by president George W. Bush, to the ICRC.

Proper care and feeding

Oh, I do enjoy Gail Collins on a sunny Saturday morning. Her latest gift to political discourse is this memorable analogy:

picking a running mate is — no disrespect intended — like picking a pet. How much time are you planning to spend with the little fellow? How much exercise will he be getting on an average day? On one extreme, you have the William Wheeler model (“There’s the living room. Go find a corner and sleep in it.”) On the other end, there’s the Cheney version in which the pet takes over the checkbook, diversifies the family investment portfolio and starts strafing at the neighbor’s cat.

Of course, flip is not always fair:

And then there was Charles Dawes, Calvin Coolidge’s veep, who wrote the melody to the song “It’s All in the Game” and got a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on stabilizing the German economy after World War I.

Yes, I know. That last one didn’t work out too well. The song is nice, though.

Stabilizing the German economy after the post-WW1 hyperinflation was a tremendous achievement, whoever deserves the credit. It was the Depression that kicked the continent back into crisis.