Destroying the Right to Be Left Alone

Published on Monday, September 23, 2013 by TomDispatch.com

Destroying the Right to Be Left Alone

 

The NSA Isn’t the Only Government Agency Exploiting Technology to Make Privacy Obsolete

by Christopher Calabrese and Matthew Harwood

 

 

 

(Photo: Pawel Kopczynski/ Reuters/ File)

 

 

For at least the last six years, government agents have been exploiting an AT&T database filled with the records of billions of American phone calls from as far back as 1987. The rationale behind this dragnet intrusion, codenamed Hemisphere, is to find suspicious links between people with “burner” phones (prepaid mobile phones easy to buy, use, and quickly dispose of), which are popular with drug dealers. The secret information gleaned from this relationship with the telecommunications giant has been used to convict Americans of various crimes, all without the defendants or the courts having any idea how the feds stumbled upon them in the first place. The program is so secret, so powerful, and so alarming that agents “are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” according to a recently released government PowerPoint slide.

 

You’re probably assuming that we’re talking about another blanket National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program focused on the communications of innocent Americans, as revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. We could be, but we’re not. We’re talking about a program of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a domestic law enforcement agency.

 

The American public and the legal system have been left in the dust when it comes to infringements and intrusions on privacy.

 

While in these last months the NSA has cast a long, dark shadow over American privacy, don’t for a second imagine that it’s the only government agency systematically and often secretly intruding on our lives. In fact, a remarkable traffic jam of local, state, and federal government authorities turn out to be exploiting technology to wriggle into the most intimate crevices of our lives, take notes, use them for their own purposes, or simply file them away for years on end.

"Technology in this world is moving faster than government or law can keep up," the CIA’s Chief Technology Officer Gus Hunt told a tech conference in March. "It's moving faster I would argue than you can keep up: You should be asking the question of what are your rights and who owns your data."

 

Hunt’s right.  The American public and the legal system have been left in the dust when it comes to infringements and intrusions on privacy.  In one way, however, he was undoubtedly being coy.  After all, the government is an active, eager, and early adopter of intrusive technologies that make citizens’ lives transparent on demand.

Increasingly, the relationship between Americans and their government has come to resemble a one-way mirror dividing an interrogation room. Its operatives and agents can see us whenever they want, while we can never quite be sure if there’s someone on the other side of the glass watching and recording what we say or what we do -- and many within local, state, and federal government want to ensure that no one ever flicks on the light on their side of the glass.

 

So here’s a beginner’s guide to some of what’s happening on the other side of that mirror.

 

You Won’t Need a Warrant for That

 

 Have no doubt: the Fourth Amendment is fast becoming an artifact of a paper-based world.

 

The core idea behind that amendment, which prohibits the government from “unreasonable searches and seizures,” is that its representatives only get to invade people’s private space -- their “persons, houses, papers, and effects” -- after it convinces a judge that they’re up to no good. The technological advances of the last few decades have, however, seriously undermined this core constitutional protection against overzealous government agents, because more and more people don’t store their private information in their homes or offices, but on company servers. 

Consider email.

 

In a series of rulings from the 1970’s, the Supreme Court created “the third-party doctrine.” Simply stated, information shared with third parties like banks and doctors no longer enjoys protection under the Fourth Amendment.  After all, the court reasoned, if you shared that information with someone else, you must not have meant to keep it private, right? But online almost everything is shared with third parties, particularly your private e-mail.

 

Back in 1986, Congress recognized that this was going to be a problem.  In response, it passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). That law was forward-looking for its day, protecting the privacy of electronic communications transmitted by computer. Unfortunately, it hasn’t aged well.

 

Nearly three decades ago, Congress couldn’t decide if email was more like a letter or a phone call (that is, permanent or transitory), so it split the baby and decreed that communications which remain on a third party’s server -- think Google -- for longer than 180 days are considered abandoned and lose any expectation of privacy. After six months are up, all the police have to do is issue an administrative subpoena -- a legal request a judge never sees -- demanding the emails it wants from the service provider, because under ECPA they’re considered junk.

 

This made some sense back when people downloaded important emails to their home or office computers and deleted the rest since storage was expensive. If, at the time, the police had wanted to look at someone’s email, a judge would have had to give them the okay to search the computer where the emails were stored. 

 

Email doesn’t work like that anymore. People’s emails containing their most personal information now reside on company computers forever or, in geek speak, “in the cloud.” As a result, the ECPA has become a dangerous anachronism. For instance, Google’s email service, Gmail, is nearly a decade old. Under that law, without a judge’s stamp of approval or the user ever knowing, the government can now demand from Google access to years of a Gmail user’s correspondence, containing political rants, love letters, embarrassing personal details, sensitive financial and health records, and more. 

 

And that shouldn’t be acceptable now that email has become an intimate repository of information detailing who we are, what we believe, who we associate with, who we make love to, where we work, and where we pray.  That’s why commonsense legislative reforms to the ECPA, such as treating email like a piece of mail, are so necessary. Then the police would be held to the same standard electronically as in the paper-based world: prove to a judge that a suspect’s email probably contains evidence of a crime or hands off.

 

Law enforcement, of course, remains opposed to any such changes for a reason as understandable as it is undemocratic: it makes investigators’ jobs easier. There’s no good reason why a letter sitting in a desk and an email stored on Google’s servers don’t deserve the same privacy protections, and law enforcement knows it, which is why fear-mongering is regularly called upon to stall such an easy fix to antiquated privacy laws.

 

As Department of Justice Associate Deputy Attorney General James Baker put it in April 2011, “Congress should also recognize that raising the standard for obtaining information under ECPA may substantially slow criminal and national security investigations.” In other words, ECPA reform would do exactly what the Fourth Amendment intended: prevent police from unnecessarily intruding into our lives.

 

Nowhere to Hide

 

"You are aware of the fact that somebody can know where you are at all times, because you carry a mobile device, even if that mobile device is turned off," the CIA’s Hunt explained to the audience at that tech conference. "You know this, I hope? Yes? Well, you should."

 

You have to hand it to Hunt; his talk wasn’t your typical stale government presentation. At times, he sounded like Big Brother with a grin. 

 

And it’s true: the smartphone in your pocket is a tracking device that also happens to allow you to make calls, read email, and tweet. Several times every minute, your mobile phone lets your cell-phone provider know where you are, producing a detail-rich history of where you have been for months, if not years, on end. GPS-enabled applications do the same. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell for sure how long the companies hang onto such location data because they won’t disclose that information.

We do know, however, that law enforcement regularly feasts on these meaty databases, easily obtaining a person’s location history and other subscriber information. All that’s needed to allow the police to know someone’s whereabouts over an extended period is an officer’s word to a judge that the records sought would aid an ongoing investigation. Judges overwhelmingly comply with such police requests, forcing companies to turn over their customers’ location data. The reason behind this is a familiar one: law enforcement argues that the public has no reasonable expectation of privacy because location data is freely shared with service or app providers. Customers, the argument goes, have already waived their privacy rights by voluntarily choosing to use their mobile phone or app.

 

Police also use cell-phone signals and GPS-enabled devices to track people in real time. Not surprisingly, there is relatively little clarity about when police do this, thanks in part to purposeful obfuscation by the government. Since 2007, the Department of Justice has recommended that its U.S. attorneys get a warrant for real-time location tracking using GPS and cell signals transmitted by suspects’ phones. But such “recommendations” aren’t considered binding, so many U.S. Attorneys simply ignore them.

 

The Supreme Court has begun to weigh in but the issue is far from settled. In United States v. Jones, the justices ruled that, when officers attach a GPS tracking device to a car to monitor a suspect’s movements, the police are indeed conducting a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. The court, however, stopped there, deciding not to rule on whether the use of tracking devices was unreasonable without a judge’s say so.

In response to that incomplete ruling, the Justice Department drew up two post-Jones memos establishing guidelines for its agents and prosecutors regarding location-tracking technology. When the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a Freedom of Information Act request for those guidelines, the Justice Department handed over all 111 pages, every one of them redacted -- an informational blackout.

The message couldn’t be any clearer: the FBI doesn’t believe Americans deserve to know when they can and cannot legally be tracked. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor drove home what’s at stake in her concurring decision in the Jones case. “Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms,” she wrote. “And the Government's unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse... [and] may ‘alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.’”

 

The ability of police to secretly track people with little or no oversight is a power once only associated with odious police states overseas. Law enforcement agencies in the United States, however, do this regularly and enthusiastically, and they do their best as well to ensure that no barriers will be thrown in their way in the near future.

 

Sting(ray) Operations

 

During one of his last appearances before Congress as FBI director, Robert Mueller confirmed what many insiders already assumed. Asked by Senator Chuck Grassley whether the FBI operates drones domestically and for what purpose, Mueller responded, “Yes, and for surveillance.” This was a stunning revelation, particularly since most Americans associate drone use with robotic killing in distant lands.

 

And, Grassley followed up, had the FBI developed drone guidelines to ensure that American privacy was protected? The Bureau, Mueller replied, was in the beginning phase of developing them. Senator Dianne Feinstein, hardly a privacy hawk, seemed startled by the answer: “I think the greatest threat to the privacy of Americans is the drone, and the use of the drone, and the very few regulations that are on it today,” she said.

 

The senator shouldn’t have been shocked. The government’s adoption of new intrusive technologies without bothering to publicly explore their privacy implications -- or any safeguards that it might be advisable to put in place first -- isn’t an aberration. It’s standard practice. As a result, Americans are put in the position of secretly subsidizing their own surveillance with their tax dollars.

 

In July, for example, the ACLU published a report on the proliferating use of automatic license-plate readers by police departments and state agencies across the country. Mounted on patrol cars, bridges, and overpasses, the cameras for these readers capture the images of every license plate in view and run them against databases for license plates associated with stolen cars or cars used in a crime. Theoretically, when there’s a hit, police are alerted and someone bad goes to jail. The problems arise, however, when there’s no hit. Most police departments decide to hang onto those license-plate images anyway, creating yet another set of vast databases of innocent people’s location history that’s easy to abuse.

 

Since technology almost always outpaces the law, regulations on license plate readers are often lax or nonexistent. Rarely do police departments implement data-retention time limits so that the license plates of perfectly innocent people are purged from their systems. Nor do they set up rules to ensure that only authorized officers can query the database when there’s evidence that a particular license plate might be attached to a crime. Often there aren’t even rules to prevent the images from being widely shared with other government agencies or even private companies. These are, in other words, systems which give law enforcement another secret way to track people without judicial oversight and are ripe for privacy abuse.

 

As is often the case with security technology -- for instance, full-body scanners at airports -- there’s little evidence that license plate readers are worthwhile enough as crime fighting tools to compensate for their cost in privacy terms. Take Maryland. In the first five months of 2012, for every million license plates read in that state, there were just 2,000 “hits.” Of those 2,000, only 47 were potentially associated with serious crimes. The vast majority were for minor regulatory violations, such as a suspended or revoked vehicle registration.

 

And then there’s the Stingray, a device first used in our distant wars and so intrusive that the FBI has tried to keep it secret -- even from the courts. A Stingray mimics a cell-phone tower, tricking all wireless devices in an area to connect to it instead of the real thing. Police can use it to track suspects in real time, even indoors, as well as nab the content of their communications. The Stingray is also indiscriminate. By fooling all wireless devices in an area into connecting to it, the government engages in what is obviously an unreasonable search and seizure of the wireless information of every person whose device gets caught up in the “sting.”

 

And when the federal government isn’t secretly using dragnet surveillance technologies, it’s pushing them down to state and local governments through Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grants. The ACLU of Northern California has, for example, reported that DHS grant funds have been used by state and local police to subsidize or purchase automated license plate readers, whose images then flow into federal databases.  Similarly, the city of San Diego has used such funds to buy a facial recognition system and DHS grants have been used to install local video surveillance systems statewide.

 

In July, Oakland accepted $2 million in federal funds to establish an around-the-clock “Domain Awareness Center,” which will someday integrate existing surveillance cameras and thermal imaging devices at the Port of Oakland with the Oakland Police Department’s surveillance cameras and license plate readers, as well as cameras owned by city public schools, the California Highway Patrol, and other outfits and institutions.  Once completed, the system will leverage more than 1,000 camera feeds across the city.

 

Sometimes I Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me

 

What makes high-tech surveillance so pernicious is its silent, magical quality. Historically, when government agents invaded people’s privacy they had to resort to the blunt instruments of force and violence, either torturing the body in the belief it could unlock the mind’s secrets or kicking down doors to rifle through a target’s personal effects and communications. The revolution in communications technology has made such intrusions look increasingly sloppy and obsolete. Why break a skull or kick down a door when you can read someone’s search terms or web-surfing history?

In the eighteenth century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived of a unique idea for a prison. He called it a “panopticon.”  It was to be a place where inmates would be constantly exposed to view without ever being able to see their wardens: a total surveillance prison.  Today, creating an electronic version of Bentham’s panopticon is an increasingly trivial technological task. Given the seductive possibilities now embedded in our world, only strong legal protections would prevent the government from feeling increasingly free to intrude on our lives.

 

If anything, though, our legal protections are weakening and privacy is being devalued, which means that Americans with a well-developed sense of self-preservation increasingly assume the possibility of surveillance and watch what they do online and elsewhere.  Those who continue to value privacy in a big way may do things that seem a little off: put Post-it notes over their computer cameras, watch what they tweet or post on Facebook, or write their emails as if some omnipresent eye is reading over their shoulders. Increasingly, what once would have been considered paranoid seems prescient -- self-defense and commonsense all rolled into one.

 

It’s hard to know just what the cumulative effect will be of a growing feeling that nothing is truly private anymore. Certainly, a transparent life has the potential to rob an individual of the sense of security necessary for experimentation with new ideas and new identities without fear that you are being monitored for deviations from the norm. The inevitable result for many will be self-censorship with all its corrosive effects on the rights of free speech, expression, and association.

 

The Unknown Unknowns

 

Note that we’ve only begun a tour through the ways in which American privacy is currently under assault by our own government. Other examples abound. There is E-Verify’s proposed giant “right-to-work” list of everyone eligible to work in the United States. There are law enforcement agencies that actively monitor social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. There are the Department of Homeland Security’s research and development efforts to create cameras armed with almost omniscient facial recognition technology, not to speak of passports issued with radio frequency identification technology. There are networked surveillance camera feeds that flow into government systems. There is NSA surveillance data that’s finding its way into domestic drug investigations, which is then hidden by the DEA from defense lawyers, prosecutors, and the courts to ensure the surveillance data stream continues unchallenged.

 

And here’s the thing: this is only what we know about. As former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once put it, “there are also unknown unknowns -- there are things we do not know we don't know.” It would be the height of naïveté to believe that government organizations across this country -- from the federal to the municipal level -- aren’t engaged in other secret and shocking privacy intrusions that have yet to be revealed to us. If the last few months have taught us anything, it should be that we are in a world of unknown unknowns.

 

Today, government agencies act as if they deserve the benefit of the doubt as they secretly do things ripped from the pages of science-fiction novels. Once upon a time, that’s not how things were to run in a land where people prized their right to be let alone and government of the people, by the people, and for the people was supposed to operate in the open. The government understands this perfectly well: Why else would its law enforcement agents and officers regularly go to remarkable lengths, sometimes at remarkable cost, to conceal their actions from the rest of us and the legal system that is supposed to oversee their acts? Which is why whistleblowers like Edward Snowden are so important: they mount the last line of defense when the powers-that-be get too accustomed to operating in the dark.

 

Without our very own Snowdens working in the county sheriff’s departments or big city police departments or behemoth federal bureaucracies, especially with the world of newspapers capsizing, the unknowns are ever more likely to stay unknown, while what little privacy we have left vanishes.

 

© 2013 Christopher Calabrese and Matthew Harwood

Christopher Calabrese is a legislative counsel for privacy-related issues for the ACLU in Washington. He has testified before Congress and appeared in many media outlets, including CBS Evening News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Follow him on Twitter at @CRCalabrese.

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The Biggest Assault on Our Democracy Is Coming from the Center of Our Own Government

  Civil Liberties  

AlterNet / By Fred Branfman

The Biggest Assault on Our Democracy Is Coming from the Center of Our Own Government

 

The Executive justifies its actions, like all authoritarian institutions, on the grounds that it is protecting us. We must reverse the tide.

 

September 4, 2013  |  

"America no longer has a functioning democracy. This invasion of privacy has been excessive, so bringing it to public notice has probably been beneficial —President Jimmy Carter

Millions of Americans will face a basic question in the coming decade: how much loyalty do we owe a U.S. Executive Branch which extracts huge sums from us to spy upon and lie to us, on the false grounds that doing so is protecting us? Or do we owe our moral allegiance to the ideal of democracy, which requires us to fight the Executive which is its enemy?

Senate Intelligence Committee member Ron Wyden  recently issued an urgent call to "rein in this omnipresent, ever-expanding surveillance state", warning that "if we don't do it now our generation's going to regret it forever". Wyden and his colleague Mark Udall - who have revealed that even as Senators they have been consistently denied information, lied to, treated like children unable even to take notes, and are even now muzzled from revealing far more massive Executive subversions of democracy than is known - have become the canaries in the coalmine. They warn us that though still largely odorless, colorless and invisible to most of us, poisonous Executive  power is slowly destroying what remains of a "functioning democracy" in this country.

The meaning of an ex-U.S. President’s astonishing statement is clear. For the Executive’s threat is not only to "privacy" or "civil liberties" but the very structure of democracy itself.  As Wyden and Udall have demonstrated, the Executive Branch has unilaterally seized power since 9/11, behind a curtain of secrecy, in a way that has destroyed our constitutional system of legislative and judicial "checks and balances" on its power.

This threat has been ignored by many because it so counters our childhood beliefs that our government fights for democracy against foreign enemies.  But the evidence clearly indicates that it is the U.S. Executive Branch, not foreigners, which is today U.S. democracy’s main enemy. And it also clear that saving our liberties will require a new pro-democracy mass movement as  unprecedented as the Executive's post-9/11 power grab.

It is our own Executive Branch, after all, not  a foreign enemy which has unilaterally and illegally stored our phone calls and emails without even informing us let alone obtaining the constitutionally-required "consent of the governed" to do so; constantly broken the law by violating the Patriot Act,  as its Republican author has attested, and lying to the Legislative andJudicial branches; illegally accessed our private data on tens of thousands of known occasions while falsely claiming they have not - with even these abuses only "the tip of the iceberg"; attacked freedom of the press by spying on organizations like the Associated Press, intimidating journalists, and trying to jail them if they do not reveal their sources; seized emails from private companies and threatened  to jail their CEOs if they revealed it; pushed through a law giving them the right to assassinate or jail any of us for life without a trial or other opportunity to prove our innocence; classified trillions of pages annually, less than 5% of which are of any conceivable  use to a foreign enemy, so as to hide evidence of their massive waste, fraud, abuse and crimes; prosecuted unprecedented numbers of whistleblowers who reveal their secret crimes and abuses; lied  continuously to the American people whenever their mistakes and crimes have been  revealed; required millions of their own employees to inform on each other, and even threatened to fire them for simply declining to spy on their colleagues; funded SWAT teams already abusing their power, and  provided paramilitary training and equipment to police forces around the country; begun using drones domestically; anddemanded that the Judiciary make decisions based only on Executive assertions, as it withhold any evidence for them on the grounds of "national security."

As millions of us come to realize the truth of Wyden’s warning over the next decade, we will be forced to ask the most basic of questions: is this the America we grew up believing in, or want to live in now? And, if not, are we willing to fight for democracy before, as Wyden warns, it is too late? It may sound over-dramatic to the comfortable, complacent, or fearful, but he is correct. Our generation must respond to his call to arms for democracy or it will disappear.

This nation has of course faced threats to democracy in the past, in the last century from the Palmer raids and jailing ofEugene V. Debs for speaking out against World War One,McCarthyism, FBI criminality in the 1960s and beyond, the CIA abuses catalogued by Senator Frank Church in the mid-1970s, and Iran-Contra in the 1980s. And, as President Eisenhowerwarned us, the "military-industrial" complex has been slowly choking off democracy since the end of World War II.

But the Executive's current assault on democracy is unprecedented. As a result of previous unimaginable technologies of surveillance and control, and the fear generated by the attacks on 9/11, the U.S. Executive has constructed on American soil a massive apparatus of surveillance and potential population control never before seen in our history.

This apparatus includes the mammoth Department of Homeland Security and intelligence-gathering and police entities located in 17,000 buildings (1) around the nation; giant data storage and collection centers driven by ever more powerful and intrusive software storing all Americans' phone and Internet data; 72 police/military intelligence "fusion centers",  which have  already begun to target domestic dissidents; and  increasingly paramilitary-oriented police-departments, often with secret police units. While most of this apparatus is presently directed at potential threats from abroad, it is already  devoting an unprecedented amount of time and money surveilling Americans at home. And it can be increasingly turned against the American people, media, Congress and the Judiciary in the likely event of increasing  social disruption, and/or new domestic 9/11s,  in the coming decade.

And this visible threat to democracy is only part of the problem, as the Executive Branch behaves more like an Occupying Power ruling from above than a democratic institution controlled from below. In the past, it waged its wars abroad and an American middle class still prospered at home. But today its priorities are also accelerating America's economic and social decline, as its wasted  $4-6 trillion long-term on two losing wars in the past decade alone and consumes over $1 trillion annually,  as the middle class slowly disappears.

As America's  economic health, society, infrastructure,schools and social mobility continue to decline, the rich grow richer and the poor poorer, automation and the continued export of jobsleads to rising mass underemployment, our youth are increasinglyindentured by massive student debt, millions of workers can barely survive even when working two or three jobs,  and assaults on the safety net grow, it is inevitable that growing numbers of Americans will protest their conditions. And, unless we rein in the Executive, it will inevitably respond to increased protest with increased police tactics threatening democracy itself.

Self-Censorship: The Worst Abuse

And putting aside the flagrant abuses that we now know about, the creation of an Executive Branch Surveillance State already threatens to cast a subtler and ultimately more disturbing pall over the land.

Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan has properly written that " a loss of the expectation of privacy in communications is a loss of something personal and intimate, and it will have broader implications”, and then approvingly quoted the liberal "Nat Hentoff, the great journalist and civil libertarian," as saying that "Americans will become careful about what they say that can be misunderstood or misinterpreted, and then too careful about what they say that can be understood. The inevitable end of surveillance is self-censorship."

The little jokes so many now make along the lines of "this email is just between you, me and the NSA" suggest  that many Americans are already nervous about expressing views, or writing words, that might trigger government scrutiny. And self-censorship is far more pernicious than heavy-handed government censorship. And, worse, there comes a point when we don't even realize we are censoring ourselves anymore, when "dangerous thoughts" are not even brought to consciousness.

Millions of our young people, forced to seek scarce government or corporate jobs to pay off massive student loans, are increasingly fearful of political associations or activities that they fear might hurt their future employment prospects.  Many are careful about what they say or write to each other on the phone of in emails and, unconsciously, even what they think.

And, as McClatchy has reported, millions more federal employees are now required to spy and inform on each other at the risk of losing their jobs. They are not even allowed to remain silent, since employees can be fired if it is subsequently found that they could have reported a co-worker but did not. An estimated 1.4 million public and private sector employees have obtained their “top secret” security clearances by submitting to intrusive and thorough “background checks”. They have done so because such a clearance is, in Dana Priest and Bill Arkin’s words, “a passport to prosperity for life”, offering secure, high-paying jobs. They tend to live close to one another, in some of the wealthiest communities in America. (2)

The result is an increasing tendency toward  "group think" and conformity, as such individuals lose even the capacity for independent thought outside politically prescribed limits. And those charged with protecting our privacy can hardly be trusted to do so when they have already given up their own.

From “Civil Rights” to a New “Democratic Rights” Movement

The Executive’s unprecedented threat to democracy requires an unprecedented response. The great mass movements of the postwar era have involved issues of social, economic, gender, sexual and racial justice, war and peace, and the environment. "Civil liberties" have largely been left to organizations like the ACLU.

But now a new "Democratic Rights" movement. with at least as much public support  as the "Civil Rights" movement  of the 1960s, will be required for democracy to exist. And if democracy goes, so too will  social justice, the environment and peace. A "Democratic Rights" movement is a necessary precondition for everything else.

A New Politics, A New Hope

Until recently it was difficult to even imagine how Executive power could be limited, as a cowed Congress massively funded it after 9/11 while  democracy burned. But on July 24, like a bolt of lightning suddenly illuminating a dark graveyard, a surprisingCongressional vote provided the first hope for asserting democratic control over Executive power.

A  unique coalition of 111 Democrats and 94 conservatives came within only 7 switched votes of passing a bill to halt the Executive Branch's unconstitutional collection of all Americans' phone and Internet records.

 The vote's importance was not only that it was the first major challenge to the Executive's post-9/11 power grab. It also significant showed there was a difference between Congress and the Executive.  Overall, Members of Congress are controlled by the economic interests upon whose money they depend for reelection, and they have done nothing to halt climate change, growing inequality, and Executive drone and ground assassination abroad, etc. But this vote suggested that there is daylight between Congress and the Executive on the issue of surveillance and, hopefully, other issues fundamental to democracy. The hope that Congress will create a functioning democracy in America may prove to be naïve. But, if a grassroots movement can arise to support this cause,  it will be Americans' only  hope of rolling back authoritarian Executive Branch power.

 The greatest significance of the Conyers-Amash vote was that embodied a new politics entirely different from the traditional liberal vs. conservative divisions that have brought a moribund Congress to a halt.

This new politics pits both liberal and conservative opponents of government surveillance against an unholy and unprincipled alliance for authoritarianism that includes Barack Obama, Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, Eric Cantor, and John Boehner. After years of gridlock, the House experienced a sudden pushback against Executive power unlike any we have seen in our lifetimes.

This new Congressional coalition gives new meaning to the saying that politics makes strange bedfellows. Republican votes for Conyers-Amash included both principled opponents of surveillance, and those who support surveillance but want it done entirely by the private sector. And Democratic supporters for the amendment included both principled progressives who have long fought for civil liberties and peace, and more centrist types who have rubber-stamped past Executive war-making without a peep.

It is uncertain whether this unwieldy coalition can hold in coming months given these differences, the gravitational pull of the old politics, and the enormous Executive power and deception they will face. We can safely assume that military-intelligence-police firms and  the Pentagon itself are already mercilessly pressuring pro Conyers-Amash Members back in their districts and in D.C. Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi are also strongly lobbying for mass surveillance to continue, covering up their betrayal of democracy with meaningless promises of greater transparency. And even if restrictions on NSA spying on innocent Americans pass the House, they would face an uncertain future in the Senate.

But two things are certain: only if the proto-coalition that favored the amendment can hold and expand in coming years  will there be any hope of creating a "functioning democracy" in our nation.   And second, for this to happen there will need to be a new grassroots movement of similarly strange bedfellows committed to fighting for democracy.

The Amash-Conyers vote also provided dramatic evidence of how the U.S. Executive does not represent the American people. The Executive was only able to spy on Americans because it deceived them by denying it was doing so. When Americans found out about the spying, however, an Economist poll  showed Americans opposed NSA surveillance by a 59-35 margin. Americans clearly would not have agreed, had the Executive Branch honestly sought "the consent of the governed," to allow it collect all their phone and Internet records. By unilaterally, lawlessly and secretly seizing the power to do so, and lying about it when asked, the Executive Branch has clearly lost its moral legitimacy.

We may obey the Executive because, like  any people living under illegitimate power, we fear the legal consequences of disobedience.

But  it has clearly forfeited any claim to our moral allegiance.

An Illegitimate Executive Branch Is Endangering Not Protecting Us

The Executive has justified its  assaults on democracy, like all authoritarian institutions before it, on the grounds that it is protecting us. We frequently hear, for example, that we must accept less freedom in order to have more security. In fact, under present Executive rule, we have neither.

Executive officials insult reason itself when they claim that to protect us they need to collect billions of innocent Americans’ phone calls and Internet records, at a time President Obama himself has said we face a reduced foreign threat that can best be met by police work. Senators Wyden and Udall have stated that "we have not yet seen any evidence showing that the NSA's dragnet collection of Americans' phone records has produced any uniquely valuable intelligence."

On August 21,  the Washington Post reported that it took a year-long Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit to force the NSA to declassify a secret court ruling revealing they had been illegally spying on American-to-American communications in violation of every public claim they had made on the subject. The idea that this document was classified because some "foreign enemy" could use this FISA report to hurt us is silly. What possible interest could al-Qaeda have in a document proving American agencies were spying on their own people? The FISA court document, like most Executive classified material,  was obviously kept secret to hide Executive wrongdoing from Americans not "foreign terrorists".

And not only does Executive Branch spying on innocent Americans at home not protect us. As dozens of national security experts have stated), its foreign drone and ground assassination programs are in fact endangering us (please see list of experts cited at the end of Part I of this series). They have created exponentially more enemies than they have killed, strengthening U.S. foes and weakening potential allies, and increased the possibility of more domestic terrorist attacks and nuclear materials falling into terrorist hands. A U.S. foreign policy that turns nations like Pakistan into allies not enemies, e.g. by bringing them electricity rather than drones, will make possible the kind of joint police-work which alone can significantly reduce the foreign terrorist threat to America - at a fraction of present vast over-spending.

The Fundamental Moral Issue: Loyalty to Democracy Not the Executive Branch

Article One of the Federal Code of Ethics   adopted by Congress in 1958 states  that there is a fundamental distinction between loyalty to country and loyalty to any government entity: "any person in Government service should put loyalty to principles and to country above loyalty  to Government persons, party, or department."

As former Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, who lost a son fighting in Iraq, has put it in the Washington Post: "to whom do Army privates and intelligence contractors owe their loyalty? To state or to country? To the national security apparatus that employs them or to the people that apparatus is said to protect? What if the interests of the state do not automatically align with those of the country? In that event, the state pursues its own agenda. In doing so, it stealthily but inexorably accumulates power, privilege and prerogatives."  
At the start of each new Congress, members swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” This oath clearly obligates them today to fight democracy’s chief domestic enemy today: the U.S. Executive Branch.

And it is not only Members of Congress and Federal Employees who have a duty to fight to preserve democracy against the Executive.
So do we all.

Understanding Democracy's Enemy: The Problem of "True Believers"

In speaking of the U.S. Executive Branch as the enemy of democracy it is important not to demonize its leaders as individuals. They are like most Americans in their off-hours. Many are patriotic and  believe that they are protecting the American people, and their patriotism deserves respect.  They presumably love their mates, children and pets in the same proportion as does the general population, also hit Home Depot on the weekends,  and enjoy sports and "Downton Abbey" as much as any of us. We are not talking about Nazis here.

But when they go to work for the institution we call the Executive Branch, it is a very different matter. They spy on  us, we do not surveil them. They take and waste enormous sums of our money, we do not take theirs. They hide their activities from us and lie to us when they are caught - we do  not do so to them. They threaten whistleblowers and journalists, we do not. They claim the right to murder or imprison us without trial, we make no such claim on them. They have endangered us creating exponentially more enemies than they kill, we do not endanger them.

The danger they pose to democracy is not like that of previous authoritarians, who made no secret of their contempt for democracy. On the contrary. This danger arises from people who genuinely think they are protecting democracy even as they destroy it. They have a deep inner need to see themselves as does Rep. Peter King, when he referred to  "the thousands of good men and women who every day dedicate their lives to our country, and particularly General Alexander, who is as patriotic as anyone I have ever met in government or anywhere."

It is the problem of the "True Believer," one of the most dangerous of social phenomena. Their self-righteous  need to feel they are protecting us leads them to feel justified in breaking any law and  telling any lie in pursuit of their mission. Freedom of the press, telling the American people the truth, obeying the law, are irrelevant to true believers who decide they have a higher calling.
It is the same phenomenon  observed during the Iran-Contra scandal after Congress halted military aid to the Contras. Because Executive Branch officials like James Poindexter and Oliver North were so convinced that they were on the side of the angels they felt justified in operating secretly, lying about their actions, and breaking just laws.

As the Executive Comes Home, Americans Can No Longer Ignore Its Illegitimate Power

For the past 50 years many Americans, notably its political-media-intellectual elites who have known the horrific facts, have turned a blind eye to the Executive Branch's murder, maiming and making homeless over 20 million non-Americans, mainly civilians. (Please see Part 2 of this series, "The World's Most Evil And Lawless Institution? The Executive Branch Of The U.S. Government.")

CNN commentator Jeffrey Toobin recently reflected the Washington elite's indifference to this mass murder when he called for Private Manning's imprisonment because the Foreign Service Officers, " who wrote these cables have devoted their lives to making the world a better place."  Like his compatriots, he  simply ignored the fact that those Foreign Service Officers have  been an integral part of the U.S. Executive apparatus that ruined those 20 million lives, and has in many other nations propped up savage dictatorships practicing mass murder, assassination, torture and incarceration of the innocent.

Joshua Oppenheimer, producer of The Act of Killing about the Indonesian army's murder of  more than one million civilians in its 1965 coup, has reported that "you can see that the United States made it very clear that, as a condition for future aid, the Indonesian army must go after the whole Communist Party. And they had guys in the State Department compiling death lists for the army—communist leaders, union leaders, intellectuals who were left-leaning. The signal from the U.S. was clear: 'We want these people dead.'"

 But as the Executive's indifference to the rule of law and human decency now increasingly comes home, millions of us will no longer be able to ignore Executive wrongdoing. We will be forced to decide whether American democracy is worth fighting for.

Executive Branch secrecy, deception, and surveillance has reached such levels that it has become a revolutionary act simply to insist that U.S. Constitution be obeyed, i.e. that the Executive obtain the "consent of the governed" for its actions - the trailblazing concept by which America replaced the “Divine Right of Kings” with the will of the governed as the basis for legitimate rule.

The Washington political-media elite who call for jailing whistle-blowers for "breaking the law" has lacked the integrity to demand similar punishment for the far more lawless criminal behavior of such Executive Branch officials as NSA chief Keith Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
The recent FISA Court document declassified as a result of an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit, for example, stated that "the court is troubled that the government's revelations mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program."

Does anything threaten democracy more than when Executive Branch officials repeatedly deceive the Judiciary, as well as the Legislature and American people? Should not this behavior lead to criminal sanctions for General Alexander?

Many mass media journalists  ask who gave whistleblowers the right to release classified information. It is a fair question. But they have not dared ask a far more serious question: who gave Executive Branch officials the right to secretly and unilaterally collect all Americans' phone and Internet records?

It certainly wasn't Congress, almost all of whose members had no idea this was going on. The Republican head of the House Judiciary Committee, Bob Goodlatte, recently stated on  Face The Nation that "when this was made known (by) Edward Snowden, the Judiciary Committee conducted a briefing for all of the members of the House. It was very clear then that many of them did not know about these programs or how they worked, including the former chairman of the committee Jim Sensenbrenner who was the chairman when these laws were written and myself." Mr. Sensenbrenner, who wrote the Patriot Act has, stated that "as I have said numerous times, I did not know the administration was using the Patriot Act for bulk collection, and neither did a majority of my colleagues."

It certainly  wasn't the judiciary which allowed the Executive to spy on us, as the Washington Post recently reported: "the leader of the secret court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the government's vast spying programs said that its ability to do so is limited and that it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans."

And it certainly wasn’t Mr. Obama, who we now know was elected on false promises that he would bring transparency, respect for civil liberties and a free press, and whistleblower protection to the Oval Office. He clearly does not have the right to unilaterally and secretly create a Surveillance State in this country without the consent of the governed. Mr. Obama  placed his former post as a Constitutional Lecturer at the very core of his identity. Americans certainly did not give him the right to betray them, everything he claimed to stand for, and the constitution. His approval of Executive spying on Americans, and constant lying about it ever since, in no way legitimizes it.

No, the Executive Branch has seized this power simply because it could, in a lawless power grab without precedent in this country. And if democracy is to be preserved here this rule of men not laws, this practice of might makes right, must be ended.

Known Executive Abuses: Only "The Tip Of An Iceberg"

The Washington Post  recently reported on an internal NSA audit revealing  that the NSA had violated the law "thousands of times" a year since 2008 at its Fort Meade headquarters alone. And "a single `incident' in February 2012 involved the unlawful retention of 3,032 files that the surveillance court had ordered the NSA to destroy." That is, we now know the NSA had committed tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of individual abuses already.

It is important to note also that this audit was kept secret from the American people until Edward Snowden revealed it. Typically, it was not hidden because its contents would help America's enemies. It is laughable to imagine that Ayman al-Zawahari would be helped by knowing that the NSA was constantly breaking American law and lying to its citizens about it. Like the FISA Court report cited above, it was classified secret to keep its findings of NSA abuse from the American people.

This story also revealed that President Obama had again liedto the American people  when he stated eight days earlier that"I am comfortable that the program currently is not being abused". And it was quickly followed by another bombshell. Senate Intelligence Committee members Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, who have been muzzled from revealing specifics,  stated that "we have previously said that the violations of these laws and rules were more serious than had been acknowledged”, and we believe Americans should know that even these revelations were but the tip of an iceberg of far greater abuses."
We now know where the most massive Executive Branch abuses of democracy in postwar history have begun. But we have no idea yet where they will end.

A New Movement To Meet "The Generational Challenge"

The surprising support for the amendment forbidding NSA spying on innocent Americans gave hope that Congress could eventually act to curb the Executive' threat to democracy. Amazing even its own sponsors it was only stopped because Mr. Obama and Nancy Pelosi abandoned their core principles to muscle Democrats into opposing it.

In an article entitled "How Nancy Pelosi Saved the NSA Surveillance Program," Foreign Policy Magazine explained how Pelosi betrayed her own constituents, among the most pro-civil liberties voters in the nation: "Hill sources say most of the credit for the amendment's defeat goes to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi privately and aggressively lobbied wayward Democrats to torpedo the amendment".  It quoted a Democratic aide as saying that "Pelosi had meetings and made a plea to vote against the amendment and that had a much bigger effect on swing Democratic votes against the amendment than anything (NSA Chief Keith) Alexander had to say." Typically, after killing the bill, the magazine reported that Pelosi sought to cover up her misdeeds: "despite the minority leader's instrumental role in swaying the vote, you won't find her taking credit: She's busy protecting her left flank from liberal supporters of Amash's amendment."

Despite Obama and Pelosi's short-term success in beating back attempts to limit mass spying on Americans against their will, however, the bill represented a watershed in American political life. Providing a desperately needed fresh and cleansing wind blowing across a sick and dying Congress, it foreshadowed a new movement aimed at saving American democracy before it is too late.
 
In the concluding section of this series we will discuss what the basic goals of a new "Democratic Rights Movement" must be if we are to end the Executive Branch's threat to freedom in this country.

Fred Branfman's writing has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper’s, and many other publications. He is the author of Voices From the Plain of Jars, and can be reached at fredbranfman@aol.com.

Five Acts of Terror Since 9/11. By the People We Chose to Protect Us.

Published on Monday, September 9, 2013 by Common Dreams

Five Acts of Terror Since 9/11. By the People We Chose to Protect Us.

by Paul Buchheit

 

 

 

 

Accompanied by Secretary of State Colin Powell, far left, Vice President Dick Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton (far right), President George W. Bush talks with the press about the previous day's terrorist attacks during a cabinet meeting Sept. 12, 2001. (Photo: White House/Tina Hager) 



Every clear-thinking American knows that education and jobs are needed more than armed guards in poor neighborhoods. But average Americans are led to believe in a terrorist threat that may or may not exist, and that in any case is greatly exaggerated, while the corporate/military/political complex creates new forms of terror to safeguard the assets of the rich.

1. War Terror

It started with our leaders comparing notes on Iraq:

Cheney 08/26/02: There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.

Cheney 09/14/03: We never had evidence that he had acquired a nuclear weapon.

Powell 02/05/03: Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agents.

Powell 09/13/04: I think it's unlikely that we will find any stockpiles.
Bush 05/29/03: We found the weapons of mass destruction.

Bush 10/08/04: I wasn't happy when we found out there wasn't weapons.
In the first Iraqi war, two air missions per minute were conducted over 43 days, with the equivalent of seven Hiroshima bombs dropped on a largely defenseless country. Much of the slaughter was caused by "dumb bombs" that fell on civilian areas. U.S. troops attacked retreating Iraqi soldiers with cluster bombs and napalm as American pilots, adopting metaphors such as 'turkey shoot' and 'fish in a barrel,' conducted target practice from above. Some Iraqis were buried alive by bulldozers that spread tons of sand over them.

In the end, at least 190,000 Iraqi lives were destroyed in a war that cost over $2.2 trillion. A Johns Hopkins study puts the tally much higher, with an estimate of 650,000 Iraqi deaths.

2. Drone Terror

In Pakistan, civilians can hear the droning in the sky all day long. Said one resident: "I can't sleep...when the drones are there...I hear them making that sound, that noise. The drones are all over my brain." A humanitarian worker added, "I was in New York on 9/11...This is what it is like."

When bombings kill townspeople, their family and friends are often afraid to run to their aid, because standard procedure is to bomb the first responders. Afterwards the funerals are sometimes bombed.

A Pew survey reported that 75%of Pakistanis consider us their enemy. A former advisor to General Petraeus stated, "Every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement.." Indeed, militant groups have rapidly been forming, such as Lashkar, which has been attacking U.S. troops across the border in Afghanistan. The sentiment goes beyond Pakistan. A spokesperson for Yemen, also under attack, told a U.S. Senate committee, "What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant: There is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America."

The disease is spreading. There are now 737 U.S. Military Bases around the world, and over 2.5 million military personnel. Since 9/11 about 100 new generals and admirals have been added to the ranks of top brass, all with private jets and chefs and guards and secretaries and drivers.

Africa, already swollen with a U.S. military presence, is under further siege by the Pentagon. The Economist speaks of "Afrighanistan," calling it "the next front of the global war on terror."

3. Unconstitutional Terror

The Fourth Amendment guarantees the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."

Since 9/11, numerous measures have been employed in the name of national security: The Patriot Act, Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, and the National Defense Authorization Act. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has facilitated the monitoring of foreign communications in the name of anti-terrorism.

Internet privacy has been threatened by proposals like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Privacy is at risk with the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), passed in the House.

In addition, new techniques such as Iris Scans, License Plate Recognition, GPS devices in pharmaceutical products, and Facial Recognition Technology invade our privacy. Drones are flying over our homes. The National Security Agency is building a data center big enough to store every email, text, phone call, web search, and video in the United States. With the Electronic Communications Privacy Act on its side, government is authorized to take anything it can get.

4. Terror against Opponents of Unconstitutional Terror

In 1778 the Continental Congress created the first whistleblower protection law by declaring "it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States to give the earliest information to Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds, or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states."

In 2008 Barack Obama campaigned with a pledge to "strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government."

But Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning was found guilty of espionage for reporting extreme cases of war misconduct. And Edward Snowden faces prison for reporting abuses of the 4th Amendment by the NSA.

The hypocrisy continues with the proposed Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act, which would have made it an act of terror to report on the terrorizing of animals. And with the efforts of TransCanada Corporation to convince law enforcement agencies that pipeline protestors are terrorists.

Going even further, FBI documents reveal that the agency repeatedly monitored Occupy Wall Street activities, viewing them as possible acts of terrorism.

5. The Terror of Poverty

The largely imagined threat of foreign attacks is diverting billions of dollars into a Homeland Security fund that safeguards the assets of the rich, while the poverty rate for black children has risen to almost 50 percent, and unemployment among blacks has almost doubled the rate of whites.

Meanwhile, paranoia has infiltrated our schools. As K-12 education has been cut by $20 billion over five years, and as funding for guidance counselors and school psychologists has dropped to all-time lows, the Department of Justice's COPS Office has awarded over $750 million for the hiring of more than 6,500 police officers for schools, even though studies show that placing armed police in schools actually increases physical dangers to youth.

People burdened by economic oppression and authoritarian rule can begin to understand Frederick Douglass' bitter words to his own country, on behalf of the American slave: To him your boasted liberty [is] an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

 

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.

How the White House and the CIA Are Marketing a War in the YouTube Era

Published on Monday, September 9, 2013 by Common Dreams

How the White House and the CIA Are Marketing a War in the YouTube Era

by Dennis Kucinich

 

 

 


Screen grab from one of the videos distributed to Senate members by the White House. (Senate.gov) Governments have always used fear and manipulation of emotion to get the public to support wars. The Bush administration did it in 2002 in Iraq and it is happening again in Obama's push for war in Syria.

In possibly the biggest development yet in the story, we learned this weekend that the CIA has now been enlisted to sell this new war with unproven evidence. On Saturday, U.S. intelligence officials claimed they "authenticated" 13 videos that show the horrific aftermath of a chemical attack in Syria in August. What exactly did they "authenticate"?

Why are these videos suddenly news when they have been publicly circulating the web for weeks? Here's why: The videos are meant to market the war, not to "prove" who committed the atrocities. (CBS News and others have reported that the White House case for war has been described as "largely circumstantial.")

We've seen this movie before and it doesn't end well. A decade after the Bush administration used the CIA's "yellow cake" tale and other faulty evidence, the government is yet again relying on the CIA to lead a domestic propaganda effort for military action abroad. If these videos can sway American public opinion, as they're intended to do, and influence Congress to vote to attack Syria, this could become the first YouTube war.

No American could look at these horrifying videos of people suffering and dying and not be moved. But that doesn't mean a military strike is the only way to respond to the humanitarian tragedy happening in Syria. So bald-faced is the rush to war that the White House could not restrain its anticipation that the videos could be successfully employed to market the war. As the Washington Post reported, "Administration officials and their congressional allies believe the horrific scenes depicted in the videos could help sway public opinion." But CNN, which broadcast portions of the grim videos this weekend, added the qualification that they could not independently authenticate them.

The release of these graphic videos is a cynical maneuver by the White House because the rest of the case for war remains unproven, with open questions about transcripts, satellite imagery and signal intelligence under the shield of classified information. What does it mean when the government's case for war relies more on emotion than on evidence? Welcome to war marketing in the YouTube era.

Just as the White House would have us believe that others created the "red line," the administration has just shifted responsibility for the war onto the CIA, which is famous for the use of emotional and psychological warfare. To point to just one example, in the 1960s the Agency's "Operation CHAOS" spied on American anti-war activists to try to disrupt and discredit opposition to the Vietnam War in order to sway public opinion against the anti-war movement.

This is the way intelligence seems to work lately: a classified sales pitch within a broader marketing plan. In an interview this weekend, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough acknowledged the administration's case wasn't 100%: "Do we have a picture or do we have irrefutable, beyond a reasonable doubt evidence? ... This is not a court of law. And intelligence does not work that way," he said.

Actually there are laws against aggressive war and faked intelligence.
I personally witnessed this game in advance of the Iraq War. As a member of Congress, I sat in classified sessions where maps were ceremoniously produced, conjecture elevated, scenarios spun and "evidence" concocted, leading me to conclude that there was no legitimate case to attack Iraq, as I argued five months before the Iraq invasion.

The marketing of a war using the manipulation of the public's emotion is wrong. Here are immediate remedies:

• We must insist that all information presented behind closed doors to advance a war be immediately declassified and released.
• Congress must demand that the CIA desist in promoting the war and investigate its role in this domestic propaganda campaign: Who demanded the CIA "authentication" and when? Which division of the CIA supplied it?
• Congress must recall for additional testimony from James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, who oversees the CIA.
• Congressional investigators need to demand the underlying intelligence supporting the "classified" briefings.
• There must be no war based on secret information.
• The administration must be made to account for any decisions they make to go to war.

Eleven years ago the American people were lied to in the cause of war. We can't let it happen again.

© 2013 Dennis Kucinich

 

Dennis Kucinich is former US Congressman and two-time presidential candidate from Ohio who served 16 years in the U.S. House of Representatives. Visit his website at KucinichAction. Follow him on Twitter: @Dennis_Kucinich