Trump Says What’s Wrong With Collusion? »

The Robert Mueller cohort did not rule on collusion — it's not a legal term — and could not find evidence of contact between the Trump campaign or transition that rose to the level of conspiracy or coordination — which are legal terms — but there were certainly repeated instances of "a secret understanding between two or more persons to gain something illegally" during those months, that being a definition of collusion. The Mueller report abounds in examples.

With Mitch McConnell trying to bury the subject, unilaterally decreeing "case closed", the president, in an Oval Office interview with… Read More »

Should Snowden Be Pardoned? »

Hero or traitor? Should Edward Snowden be honored for exposing a government that for a decade had been secretly collecting privileged data from all Americans, as well as a more widespread program
called PRISM, covered here, or should he be imprisoned for revealing to the world the spying our government conducts around the globe in the cause of national security?

With three months left in President Obama's term, the Internet abounds in e-mail that asks you to join petitions to Obama to add Snowden to the list of persons a departing president traditionally exonerates as a final act of office. The ACLU, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have banded together to run at least one full-page ad in The New York Times asking for contributions at pardonsnowden.org. There's even a movie: It's no coincidence that Oliver Stone chose this moment to release "Snowden" (in theaters, but he'd have had a bigger audience on television). As if to undercut it, the House intelligence committee released a summary of its report on the Snowden affair the day before the movie's release.

Snowden wants to come home. And the administration would apparently like to put an end to the problem. The counsel to national intelligence chief James Clapper (the latter the one who lied to Congress about National Security Agency surveillance, and with no consequences) has reportedly floated the idea of a five year prison term if Snowden would plea to one felony count (in place of the three lodged) but he has refused, partly out of concern that it would deter future whistleblowers.

That's a marked turnabout from the reflexive reaction to Snowden when the NSA's snooping was first revealed. John Boehner, House Speaker at the time, called Snowden "a traitor”. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, “I think it’s an act of treason”. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Snowden should “be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law”, claiming that “each of these programs is authorized by law, overseen by Congress and the courts, and subject to ongoing and rigorous oversight” — which was shown not to be true. "For personal gain, he's now selling his access to information", House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) told journalists.

Rogers belongs to an element in this country that dismisses facts and prefers the bile of its gut feelings. They vilify Snowden because, where did he go? He went to Russia and there's no question he's sold his trove of secrets to Putin, after doing the same in Hong Kong. In fact, to this day there is no evidence of his selling anything; he's rebuffed offers of cash for interviews and even refused book deals.

They forget that Moscow was a stopover on Snowden's way to seek asylum in South America, that he was stranded for days in the international transit lounge when Obama annulled his passport. "The Obama administration has now adopted a strategy of using citizenship as a weapon", said Snowden after a week in Russia. "Although I am convicted of nothing, it has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person".

The Russia bias persists. Just now, in an editorial snidely titled "Snowden Misses Us", the The Wall Street Journal calls him "Comrade Snowden" and assumes he decided to "flee to Russia". The new House report cited earlier voices the same lie: He "fled to Russia".

Mr. Snowden said he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met with in Hong Kong. He says he kept none of them. He's a very careful man. Having fulfilled his objective of getting the information out to the world, what would have been the purpose of keeping a copy? He doubtless reasoned he should not make himself a target of foreign intelligence agencies by carrying the material with his person. He also asserted that he could guard against the documents falling into China’s hands because of his knowledge of that nation’s intelligence techniques; as an NSA contractor he had targeted Chinese operations and had taught a course on Chinese cyber-counterintelligence.

But that Journal edit wants to keep suspicion alive asking "if Mr. Snowden provided his documents, intentionally or otherwise, to Russian or Chinese intelligence services" and, like some Donald Trump nonsense endlessly repeated after proven a lie, says that, "none of what he exposed was in any way criminal".

Yet it was. Snowden's explosive revelations led to a federal court judge ruling that the NSA's activity — the wholesale collection of so-called metadata of America's phone calls — numbers called, time, duration — was “almost clearly unconstitutional” and “almost Orwellian”. (That another judge said the NSA's actions were "constitutional" was baffling inasmuch as there's a statute that says if you eaves drop on Americans without a Fourth Amendment warrant you go to prison for five years, and for each offense.)

The NSA argued that the snooping was essential for national security. Then NSA head Gen. Keith Alexander and Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Ca) even made the fanciful claim that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented had the program been in effect then (it was authorized by the George W. Bush administration in reaction to 9/11). Alexander testified to the committee that more than 50 terrorist attacks had been disrupted by the NSA phone program and pledged to come up with "a list" in a matter of days that would support his claim. He didn't.

Much later, Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was apparently handed such a list which he said did not show that “dozens or even several terrorist plots” had been thwarted and concluded. "If this program is not effective, it has to end".

End it did. Obama had set up a blue-ribbon commission which recommended 46 changes to surveillance and security practices and last year, after forty years of hands off, Congress curtailed the government’s surveillance liberties, passing a year ago June the USA Freedom Act. It requires NSA to obtain a court order to obtain phone traffic for numbers belonging to suspected terrorists. NSA ceased wholesale phone data collection at the end of last November.

In other words, Mr. Snowden made a convincing case that the government was in serious violation of constitutionally provided civil liberties. In recognition of what he had brought to light, laws were changed.

Snowden reminds his critics that he released nothing to the public. He turned over his trove of documents to four journalists and it was the newspapers represented by two of them, Britain's The Guardian and The Washington Post, that decided what to publish. Both won Pulitzers. In a stunning display of hypocrisy, the Post has just come forth with a editorial that says "No pardon for Edward Snowden".

“This is a man who has betrayed his country”, Secretary of State John Kerry said to NBC’s Brian Williams. Like Daniel Ellsberg, a patriot who stayed in the U.S. to “face the music”, Snowden should “stand in our system of justice and make his case”, was Kerry’s pronouncement.

It was former Attorney General Eric Holder's view that, "Snowden performed a public service" and for that he said he should come back and a face trial that would certainly reward that service with prison. Obama's previous press secretary, Jay Carney, said Snowden should be returned to the United States "where he will be granted full due process and every right available to him as a United States citizen facing our justice system under the Constitution". The Washington Post says in its editorial:

Ideally, Mr. Snowden would come home and hash out all of this before a jury of his peers. That would certainly be in the best tradition of civil disobedience, whose practitioners have always been willing to go to jail for their beliefs.

He wouldn't for a moment be able to hash out much of anything. He has been charged with violations of a law meant for spies, the WWI-era Espionage Act. It does not distinguish between selling secrets to foreign governments and leaks to the press of one's own country. It has no provision for defendants to make a case that they had acted in the public interest. The government is not required to demonstrate harm from the release of the classified materials.

Under the Act, Snowden would not be permitted to make the case that his actions led to reforms, nor to argue that he exposed government wrongdoing, as a federal district court had already ruled — violations well beyond what Section 215 of the Patriot Act allowed. The government would invoke the state secrets privilege to suppress any evidence presented by Snowden’s attorneys as endangering “national security”, no matter that the classified documents are already in the public domain. And forget about the Supreme Court weighing the question of whether the Espionage Act can be applied to leaks to the American public; it has ducked matters of press freedom under the First Amendment for the last 45 years.

Each of the two counts against Snowden, plus a third charge of theft of government property, carries a maximum prison sentence of ten years, but the government would assuredly pile on as many fabricated and redundant charges as needed to guarantee a life sentence. Look to the case of Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning: Charges against him were padded with "Classified cable — 2 years", "Classified memos — 10 years", "Military records — 10 years", Military records [again] — 10 years", "Army record — 10 years".)

Kerry refers to Ellsberg as if nothing has changed. Ellsberg was free on bail to inveigh against the Vietnam war for the entire 23 months he was under indictment, and then he was acquitted — both being unimaginable outcomes for Snowden, who would certainly be imprisoned without bail and isolated in solitary confinement while awaiting trial. Once convicted, he would likely remain in solitary for the entirety of his sentence. The United Nations Special Rapporteur found that the U.S. was guilty of cruel and inhuman treatment of Manning. He was kept in solitary confinement and isolated 23 hours a day for months, was kept naked and chained to a bed, and was subjected to sleep deprivation techniques, all three well known forms of torture.

As for that pardon, not under this president, who has granted few pardons and has acted with a vengeance toward whistleblowers and the press that has led him to bring criminal charges in eight cases under the Espionage Act, whereas all the presidents combined in the last 100 years have resorted to the Act only three times.

You might want to read what we have reported about how Thomas Drake was treated by this administration after exposing government waste to the press; or John Kiriakou for inadvertently revealing the name of a CIA agent, with no appreciation for his heroic takedown in a shootout of the most wanted terrorist of the moment in Pakistan; or James Risen of The New York Times for refusing to confirm a source already known to the government; or Fox News' James Rosen, accused as an "aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator” when he reported that North Korea was about to conduct another nuclear test. (You can find all these stories in detail in our November 2013 article, "Obama v. Leakers and the Press: Bad as Nixon Says Journalism Group").

And so we would say that, if Snowden ever expects to come home, he is best advised to take another look at the deal that may have been offered. Those in his camp extol what he has done. He has been steadfast and uniquely courageous. No one will hold acceptance against him. But given the government's treatment of political prisoners, he'd better spell out in exacting detail and make public the contractual terms of his confinement right down to what brand of toothpaste he'd be allowed to use.

Would-Be 9/11 Hijacker Says Saudi Royals Funded al Qaeda »

He is believed to have been the intended 20th hijacker
Zacarias Moussaoui
in the 9/11 attacks had he not been arrested weeks before. He has now testified from his federal "supermax" prison in Colorado that members of the Saudi royal family were contributors to al Qaeda in the 1990s. Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, also says that in Afghanistan he once discussed with a member of the Saudi embassy in Washington how the American president's aircraft, Air Force One, might be brought down with a Stinger missile. He said he was supposed to return to Washington with the embassy official to scout for shoot down locations, but his arrest intervened.

In September we reported in this story, "Bush Removed Section from Congressional Probe to Protect Saudis", that the George W Bush administration had removed 28 pages from a joint Congressional investigation of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Moussaoui's testimony, if true, suggests that what is in those classified pages may prove to be far more incendiary than previously imagined. In response to his allegations, the Saudi embassy here called him a "deranged criminal...whose words have no credibility". However, there has long been speculation about Saudi funding of al Qaeda. Moussaoui's testimony moves those claims into the royal family itself.

The case was originally brought in 2002 and has dragged on so long, fought strenuously by the Saudis who have claimed sovereign immunity, that The New York Times likens it to Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of Charles Dicken's "Bleak House".

Asking to testify, Moussaoui had sent a letter to the presiding judge in a lawsuit brought against Saudi Arabia by relatives of those killed in the attacks. Proof enough that he was not prompted to do so is that "lengthy negotiations with Justice Department officials and the federal Bureau of Prisons" preceded his being allowed to come forward, as well as President Obama continuing to quash release of the 28 pages so as to avoid any contretemps with the Saudis.

Justice Department lawyers came away with 100 pages of testimony in which Moussaoui says he had acted as a messenger for Osama bin Laden. That had caused him to come in direct contact with various members of the Saudi royal family. Most notable among them, he says, was Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who just became king of Saudi Arabia. The purpose was to raise money, first for militants fighting the Russians in Afghanistan and then for what they became: al Qaeda.

Bin Laden had Moussaoui develop a database of donors to al Qaeda. Moussaoui says his list included the Saudi intelligence chief, Saudi clerics who promoted an extreme brand of Islam called Salafism, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, long the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. and a close friend of the Bush family. According to journalist Craig Unger's book, "House of Bush, House of Saud", business deals were made over decades that gave the U.S. "lucrative oil deals" in exchange for American military protection of Saudi Arabia. Prince Bandar "was so close to George H. W. Bush, that he was considered almost a member of the family".

What followed Moussaoui's arrest in the U.S. became sensational. He was detained in Minneapolis on immigration charges weeks before 9/11. A flight school there alerted the FBI in August 2001 that a student wanted to learn only how to steer an airliner, not how to take off or land. Agents urged superiors in Washington to obtain a warrant to search Moussaoui's belongings, arguing that he appeared to be an Islamic extremist. The warrant was refused. He was later found to have the telephone number in Germany of a ringleader of the terrorist cell that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.

The FBI’s arrest of Moussaoui on Aug. 17, 2001, was relayed by the FBI-CIA counter-terror center to the highest levels of the CIA, including Director George Tenet, the 9/11 Commission reported, but “the news had no evident effect of warning”. Had Moussaoui's name been run through British intelligence files, the CIA would have discovered he had undergone training with Al Qaeda.

Despite urgings for seven months by chief White House counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke in 2001, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice delayed convening what is called a "principals meeting" between the heads of State, Defense, the FBI and the CIA. The only Bush administration pre-9/11 meeting on counter-terrorism was therefore not held until until Sept. 4, 2001. Moussaoui was not mentioned.

At the time of his trial, his defense lawyers had Moussaoui diagnosed as mentally ill, but he was deemed competent enough to stand trial. In the recent testimony "my impression was that he was of completely sound mind — focused and thoughtful", according to Sean Carter, a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the deposition.

The The New York Times gave full-length treatment to the new revelations in these four full-length stories, the first a front page lede. The Wall Street Journal ran only 132 words and in it gave equal weight to the Saudi disclaimer that "his own lawyers presented evidence that he was mentally incompetent".

There seems to be general agreement that the 28 pages should be declassified, and again we'll refer to our original story for the fuller account of the document, the Bush administration facilitating the departure of bin Laden family members immediately after 9/11, and the Obama administration still sitting on an incriminating document that "absolutely shocked" two members of Congress whose committee was allowed to read it.

Both the Bush and Obama administrations run interference for the Saudi regime that has funded a virulent form of Islam throughout the Muslim
Obama with King Salman
world and we now hear has reportedly funded al Qaeda from the highest levels of the royal family. That has metastasized into ISIS which, while Sunni like the Saudis, poses a serious threat to the kingdom by considering itself the new Islamic Caliphate, which by definition means overtaking Islam's two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, both in Saudi Arabia.

Yet the Saudis do nothing for the coalition; its F-16s sit on the tarmac while they complain, as we previously said, that the U.S. isn't doing enough. So what explains America's deference? Obama even broke off a state visit to India to go running to the funeral of King Abdullah and greet the new King Salman. We all know the answer and so does Deadline Poet Calvin Trillin at The Nation:

        "So why did we remain steadfastly loyal
        To this repressive, autocratic royal
        Whose nation's where jihadist teachers thrive?
        Two hints: It's black. Without it, cars can't drive."

The Surveillance State Is Here To Stay »

“Everything has changed”, they said after the 9/11 attacks. And indeed everything did. Congress immediately discarded a number of civil liberties in the Patriot Act, renewed with only a couple of small changes ever since. Congress then tacked onto the National Defense Authorization Act a provision for indefinitely
retaining even Americans in military prisons without trial for as little as suspicion that they might be associated with a terrorist. And, as Edward Snowden revealed last June, the National Security Agency began years ago to spy on just about everyone.

But seven months after Snowden began the release of secret documents, the President, saying that a “fresh examination of our surveillance programs" is in order, outlined in mid-January the changes he hoped to make. There was a moment of surpassing irony when he said at the conclusion of his 5,500 word talk, “the… Read More »

In Congress, Our Intelligence Overseers Cheerlead the NSA »

Oversight committees in the Senate and the House should engage in constant and probing questioning, yet the posture of the two intelligence committees, hoodwinked by the runaway NSA, is essentially “why didn't they tell us?”.

Instead of realizing that theirs is an adversarial role that calls for deep suspicion and pressing for answers, both Dianne Feinstein (D-Ca) and Mike Rogers (R-Mi), the chairs of their respective Senate and House committees, have become shills for the sixteen (yes, there are sixteen) intelligence gathering fiefdoms. They've been taken by surprise as each day brings revelations of further snooping they knew nothing about — the Google and Yahoo transmissions, 70 million digital communications inside France in a single month, taps on the cell phones of heads of state, possibly the Pope.

mother hen at the senate

No one told Sen. Feinstein about NSA’s spying on Angela Merkel, and it's been going on since 2002, well before… Read More »

General Alexander Lied to Congress About Success of Phone Spying »

But let's first roll back lest one fundamental point is not lost in the fusillade of news:

A month ago, we challenged the statement by Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, about his testimony before the House Select Intelligence Committee that more than 50 terrorist attacks had been disrupted by the NSA program that has been collecting the phone records of every American for years.

He had pledged to come… Read More »

The Biggest Cover-Up of All — Saudi Royals’ Links to 9/11 »

With U.S.-Saudi relations at low ebb, the bill moving through Congress — just passed unanimously by the Senate — that would permit the families of 9/11 victims to sue the kingdom for its alleged involvement has led to threats. As retaliation the Saudi foreign minister came to Washington to say the kingdom would unload some $750 billion of U.S. assets lest they might be frozen if the lawsuit were allowed to go through.

The Obama administration has lobbied hard against the bill, infuriating those families, who effectively represent some 2,600 Americans and almost 400 from 90 countries who lost their lives in the September 11, 2001 attacks, and who find it inexplicable that their government favors the Saudis over… Read More »

Terror on the Homefront: It’s Only the Beginning »

Immediately after the attack at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, in which three people were killed and nine wounded with a semi-automatic rifle, out came the pleas from the conservative wing for Congress to pass mental health reform as the cure.

Five days later 14 died and 21 were injured in San Bernardino, California, when a radicalized Islamist couple sprayed a community center with two .223-caliber
assault rifles and two 9-millimeter semi-automatic pistols. Mental health reform was not the ready answer this time, so the cause shifted to President Obama not doing enough to keep America safe.

When Obama and others on the left brought up the failure to pass gun control laws, they were accused of politicizing a tragic event. A Wall Street Journal editorial called it "intellectual poverty" to bring up the gun issue. In the same sentence a call for "shaking up federal mental-health policy" that "GOP leaders should move on" was somehow not politicizing.

Claims that the Colorado killer was influenced by the campaign against Planned Parenthood was denounced as phony "rhetoric" by those on the right. That the shooter was heard by a senior law enforcement official to say "no more baby parts" somehow was unrelated to the hidden camera videos on the Internet where we heard a Planned Parenthood factotum talk about shippping fetal tissue.

Two months ago, a man with a history of mental illness gunned down nine people at Umpqua Community College. In August, a former employee with a grievance shot and killed, on the air, a reporter and a cameraman at a Virginia television station and used a cell phone strapped to his Glock 19 to make a video of their deaths for YouTube. In July, another man with a record of mental problems killed two and wounded nine in a Lafayette, Louisiana, movie theater. In June, a 21-year-old used a loophole in the federal background-check system to acquire the weapons he used to kill nine parishioners in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

What all the killings have in common is guns. Without them, the mentally ill, the racist, the Islamic terrorist, would be in something of a quandary trying to figure out how to go about killing people en masse, and might well forego the attempt if there were no semi- or fully-automatic weapons to make killing so easy. Guns are the great enabler. That is incontrovertible.

Making mental health the remedy, as did House Speaker Paul Ryan after the Colorado shooting, is doing the business of the National Rifle Association because that is the NRA's standard deflection away from guns whenever there is an "incident". That fanciful solution would have us embark on what would be a long, slowly progressing program at best, in the hope that everyone's psychosis will be cured or that we will at least identify and head off mass killers, which of course is as likely as most Utopian schemes.

The other NRA solution is more guns. Its executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, declared after the school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 children and six educators in 2012, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” That notion lives on. As authorities probed for the facts of the killings in the San Bernardino community center, Fox News' way right malcontent Andrea Tantaros quoted a doctor saying, "'Those 14 didn't have a chance', and I thought, you know what, they could have had a chance ... if they would have been armed." Obama's incredulous reaction was to say, there is “a gun for roughly every man, woman and child in America. So how can [anyone] with a straight face make the argument that more guns will make us safer?”

Four days after San Bernardino, the President gave a rare address to the nation from the Oval Office. Part of it outlined a U.S. strategy that continues to avoid sending troops:

"We should not be drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria. That’s what groups like ISIL want…They also know that if we occupy foreign lands, they can maintain insurgencies for years, killing thousands of our troops, draining our resources, and using our presence to draw new recruits… The strategy that we are using now — airstrikes, Special Forces, and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country — that is how we’ll achieve a more sustainable victory. And it won’t require us sending a new generation of Americans overseas to fight and die for another decade on foreign soil."

The commentariat's critique was, once again, that there is no strategy, that nothing has changed, as if the San Bernardino slaughter should have changed everything at the other end of the world. We are not aggressive enough against ISIS say 68% in a CNN/ORC poll. A majority now wants American troops to return to Iraq.

A columnist for The Washington Times named Charlie Hurt noted the next day that it was the Pearl Harbor anniversary and brought up Roosevelt's speech that called December 7th, 1941, "a date which will live infamy". "There was no comparison at all", wrote Hurt about Obama's talk.

Indeed there wasn't, and that this simpleton sought to draw a parallel showed his abysmal ignorance of history and offered an example of the right wing's twisting everything against Obama. Roosevelt spoke before a joint session of Congress the day after the Japanese had killed 2,400 Americans and sunk or damaged half the United States navy. San Bernardino was no Pearl Harbor.

Republicans had a new message to parrot. Pete Snyder trotted out the Roosevelt comparison on Fox News's "Happening Now", his credential being a failed candidate for Virginia's lieutenant governorship. And that night there was Michael Mukasey, saying the same on the PBS NewsHour:

"If FDR had gone before Congress and given the kind of speech that President Obama delivered last night, and told the American people that the folks who attacked us at Pearl Harbor were not representative of the peaceful Shinto religion and that we must be very careful not to discriminate…he would have been hooted off the podium".

Like Donald Trump proposing that Muslims be banned from entering the United States, Mukasey, a former attorney general of the United States under George W. Bush, was as good as saying that Obama should have come out against all Muslims.

Fed up with politicians and their ritualistic piety — “Praying for the victims, their families & the San Bernardino first responders,” tweeted Jeb Bush, "Praying" said Mike Huckabee, “My thoughts & prayers go out to those impacted”, wrote John Kasich — the New York Daily News ran one of its nothing held back front pages, which upset Peggy Noonan at The Wall Street Journal. "It is hard to pray, much harder than it is to punch out a series of tweets", she wrote. She thought Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy "sent out what struck me as the most manipulative message of recent political history":

"Your ‘thoughts’ should be about steps to take to stop this carnage. Your ‘prayers’ should be for forgiveness if you do nothing—again.”

Noonan hadn't yet heard what Trump was about to say. But she did redeem herself in her column with the second thought that

"What actually is irritating about politicians saying they’re sending thoughts and prayers is the suspicion you sometimes have that they’re not, actually, thinking or praying. Maybe someone could ask Jeb Bush if he really prayed."

That suspicion of hypocrisy squares with what happened in the Senate the very day after the California assault. Every one of her Republicans except Mark Kirk of Illinois voted against legislation to prevent people on the FBI's consolidated terrorist watch list from purchasing guns or explosives. A bill expanding background checks to gun buyers at gun shows and online also failed. All four senators running for president slipped back into Washington to vote against these measures. All four would-be presidents thus show themselves to be afraid of the NRA. As for policy, "Those same people who we don't allow to fly can go into a store in the United States and buy a firearm", says an exasperated Obama.

It's true. The Government Accountability Office and The Washington Post’s Wonkblog reported that more than 2,000 on the watch list of terrorism suspects did in fact buy guns in this country between 2004 and 2014. Democrats who have repeatedly tried to close that loophole have been defeated by the NRA and its captive Republicans who view desperate Syrian refugees as the ones to be feared.

"If you can't name your enemy, you'll never defeat your enemy, and the enemy is radical Islam", says Rand Paul. "What the President should do is clearly define what we are fighting. President Obama refuses to say the words 'radical Islamic terrorism'". Jeb Bush in a television campaign ad says, "Here's the truth you will not hear from our president, we are at war with radical Islamic terrorism". Donald Trump in D.C. suggesting there may be a link between events in San Bernardino and his failure to say "radical Islamic terrorism". Believe it.

The candidates probably got the three-little-words trope from Fox News, where it has been repeated continuously for months. One would think from this fetish that if Obama were only to say those words, the radical Islamist movement would collapse. In fact it shows how ill-equipped these candidates are to deal with the world. What what the President says is listened to around the world. Obama therefore chooses his words carefully in the sure knowledge that words that imply we are at war with all of Islam's 1.6 billion adherents around that world is not a good idea.

Whereas George W. Bush supposedly kept America safe, will we now begin to hear that President Obama hasn't, that San Bernardino somehow proves that we are now more vulnerable than before? The instrument of that vulnerability, however, will primarily continue to be guns — pistols and assault rifles that can carry high-capacity magazines or can be modified to do so where illegal, as was the case in San Bernardino.

So what is Obama's record? Following Newtown, Obama implored Congress to pass at least a law requiring background checks for all gun purchases. When the Senate flagged in that effort after a few months, he brought together relatives and friends of victims of gun violence in the East Room of the White House and said, “Shame on us if we’ve forgotten. I haven’t forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten.”

A strong bill actually received a majority of votes in the Senate but not enough to overcome a Republican filibuster. The NRA was at work relentlessly, with its threat to give low ratings to senators from states heavy with single-issue gun voters or to swamp their next re-election campaign with negative television ads. The bill got only a single Republican vote — once again Illinois' Mark Kirk. It would have stood no chance against the Republican majority in the House in any event, where the NRA and lobbyists for gun manufacturers held sway.

Thus did the Congress go completely against the American public which showed itself in favor of background checks in percentages never seen in polls: 87% in one, 92% in another.

Obama is still trying:

We also need to make it harder for people to buy powerful assault weapons like the ones that were used in San Bernardino. I know there are some who reject any gun safety measures. But the fact is that our intelligence and law enforcement agencies — no matter how effective they are — cannot identify every would-be mass shooter, whether that individual is motivated by ISIL or some other hateful ideology. What we can do — and must do — is make it harder for them to kill.

Republicans objected to his bringing up the subject as politicizing, "a cynical gesture exploiting another mass murder" in The Wall Street Journal's view.

The American public response is the opposite. The FBI was deluged with having to background check the 185,345 who bought guns on this year's Black Friday - and that was before San Bernardino. It tops the record set after the Newtown massacre. Fox News reporter William Jeunesse says that a record 21 million guns, double the number in the year the President was elected, will be sold this year, "fueled by Obama". That's how the folks at Fox assign cause instead of attributing the gun mania to the conspiracy paranoids who have always thought — fueled by NRA advertising campaigns — that Obama is coming for their guns. Seven years on in his presidency nothing of the sort has happened and the United States continues to have the most relaxed gun laws in the developed world. In fact, laws have gone in the opposite direction, too. States allowing Americans to openly carry firearms now number 34, almost twice the number of 10 years ago.

That ISIS hailed the San Bernardino pair as "supporters" says that they were probably operating on their own, and for them to have been so effective without direct help and training by ISIS tells us that we have more to fear from so-called "lone wolves" that we thought. "Every instinct of this Administration, starting with the President, has been to minimize the terror risk on U.S. soil", says a Journal editorial. We can think of no instance to support that statement. (When has Obama or the administration ever said, "nothing to worry about"?) That confused editorial says that the ability of the San Bernardino pair to stockpile weapons while leading "seemingly average lives" indicates that "the U.S. may have a larger problem of homegrown terrorism than the government has wanted to admit". Really? The government has known about sleeper cells all along but kept them secret? "President Obama’s failure to respond forcefully enough", it goes on. Against what? The unknown?

Once again, that enormous metadata of telephone calls produced no advance awareness of the radicalized couple, which says that what's needed is a meta expansion of human intelligence by law enforcement and intelligence services. But Tom Joscelyn, senior editor of the Long War Journal, says "I think our law enforcement and intelligence officials are undermanned right now". The 9/11 Review Commission, which follows up on the recommendations of the original commission, concluded that the budget crisis that led to sequestration cutbacks have resulted in a hiring freeze at the FBI and other intelligence agencies which has "severly hindered" intelligence-gathering efforts. (One is left wondering just what those hundreds of thousands in the Department of Homeland Security do.)

But we're sure to hear Congress members blame the administration for security failures rather than acknowledge the consequences of its own budget austerity. After all, if these cells are inspired by ISIS, it must be Obama's fault for pulling all of our troops out of Iraq so that ISIS could rise. That lie is advanced reflexively by seemingly everyone on the right, as we documented in this piece last year.

So that's where we are, hurling blame about in a society that calls any attempt to block the dangerous from getting guns or blocks every attempt to get rid of the most dangerous guns an attack on our "second Amendment constitutional rights", the clause about a militia having been unconstitutionally crossed out. Nothing will be done. Nothing will change. Those on the watch list just got the word, if they already didn't know, that Congress has again allowed them to buy any gun and load it with however many rounds of ammo they choose. With the next shooting we will again ask why can't something be done, and do nothing again, so we had better realize that mass killings will continue to be an ever more frequent feature of daily life in the America that we have created.

Federal Court Throws Down Gauntlet Challenging NSA »

The Supreme Court has several times deployed stratagems that insure that the government or corporations may continue unimpeded to do as they choose without interference from a pesky public. The Court has more than once ruled against class actions, leaving individuals to combat corporations on their own, and has ruled that plaintiffs do not have “standing” to sue the government. That is, they cannot sue on principle to right a wrong if not damaged themselves, and if they cannot prove they were affected because a secret government action prevents them from knowing of it, they have no right to challenge.

The explosive revelations by Edward Snowden of massive spying by the NSA should change that — which is not to say that anything will in fact change, given this Court’s posture. But the justices will need to come up with some convoluted logic to again rule — when one or more of several cases reach their chambers — that plaintiffs still have no standing. This time they will have to explain to us why the protection against “searches and seizures” of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution speaks of something that absolves the collection and retention of five years of some 300 million Americans’ phone call contacts.

The first case to obtain a ruling at the federal court level was decided in mid-December against the government and in favor of the several parties who brought the suit, principally Larry Klayman, a conservative activist and founder of Freedom Watch. Judge Richard Leon of the D.C. federal district… Read More »

Why Snowden Fled: Maybe Because He’s Sane »

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said on CBS's "Face the Nation" that Edward Snowden is no whistleblower and should "come back and face the music".

Taking care to stay on the right side of government to preserve his access to the mighty, Fareed Zakaria, said on his Sunday “GPS” television program that Edward Snowden “is no hero” because “he has tried by every method possible to escape any judgment or punishment for his actions”. He cited Gandhi
and Nehru, who had been imprisoned, and Daniel Ellsberg who “did not hop on a plane to Hong Kong or… Read More »

Our Comments on Leaks and Government Secrecy »

The blockbuster exposé by The Guardian and The Washington Post that the National Security Agency (NSA) is capturing phone and Internet traffic squares fully with what we reported three months ago, that the government intends to store all digital traces of everyone's activities and is building a huge secret facility in Utah to conduct these operations and store terabytes of our private lives. That story was an outgrowth of a Supreme Court ruling that government surveillance cannot be challenged. You can find it here.

The media is only now becoming aware of the Utah installation. Over the weekend after the sensational leaks The New York Times mentioned it and showed a photo. A search showed only a single prior mention in the paper, and that was in an op-ed. Bill O’Reilly repeatedly expressed astonishment over the “million-square-foot” facility, calling it “ultra serious”. By now it is finally general knowledge.

Greenwald: "We didn't tell terrorists anything they didn't know, we told American citizens".

Catch-22: In response to requests that the public be told about how the secretly obtained data has thwarted terrorist actions, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Ca), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, laments, “Here’s the rub. The instances where this has …disrupted plots, prevented terrorist attacks, is [sic] all classified. That’s what’s so hard about this”. The government says 'sorry', it cannot account for whether its spying program is justified because, well, everything is secret. Next question?

John McCain (R-Az) was asked by CNN’s Candy Crowley whether the revelations of government spying bother him. He replied, “Not really. I do believe that if this were September 12, 2001, we might not be having the argument that we are having today”. John Oliver of the “Daily Show” reacted with, “Yeah, but that’s not really the point, is it? The standard of what constitutes the best decisions cannot be, what decision would we make on our most vulnerable and panicked… Read More »