Thursday, June 27, 2013
The Truth Tellers
“I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner, by saying no.”
— James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence in an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell
The question: is the lesser offender (Lesser) or the greater offender (Greater) the greater offender? It depends on one’s perspective. If the listener relies on spokesmen for the Greater (aka the government) then it is clear that the Lesser is the greater, if not indeed, the only offender. If one considers the Constitution and listens to the non-governmental commentators, the answer is less clear. It becomes even less clear when in its rush to condemn the Lesser, the Greater has been forced to acknowledge that it has lied and misrepresented things to those whom it governs. The Greater uses bluster and strong words to convince the listener that all virtue is found in its corner and none in the corner of the Lesser.
The Greater is not content to rail against its citizens who question its motives. They rail against foreign powers that fail to recognize the evils the Greater sees in the Lesser and threaten to jeopardize relations with those powers if they fail to accept the Greater’s demands with respect to Edward Snowden. Edward Snowden is, of course, the man who has forced the United States government to come clean about its activities that invade the privacy of citizen and non-citizen alike. And Mr. Snowden has not only forced the United States government to admit that it has lied to its people, it has caused the government to make blustery pronouncements to foreign countries. His actions have generated millions of words of commentary about the government’s actions.
In his daily briefing on June 24, White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney, expressed the administration’s outrage that China had not arrested Mr. Snowden after he had been formally charged by the United States with three felonies. Mr. Carney said that letting Mr. Snowden leave China for Moscow would have “a negative impact on the U.S. China relationship.” Mr. Carney failed to comment on the fact that Mr. Snowden’s disclosures have had a negative impact on the relationship many U.S. citizens have with their government. On June 17, 2013, President Obama told Charlie Rose that the cyber-hacking of U.S. companies and government agencies by China that was disclosed in a report early in 2013, could lead to a deterioration of relations between the two powers. He said that the Chinese understand “this can adversely affect the fundamentals of the US-China relationship.” Those comments were made before the South China Morning Post reported that Snowden said the NSA has hacked major telecommunication companies in China, attacked network backbones at Tsinghua University and hacked computers at the Hong Kong headquarters of Pacnet.
Thanks to Mr. Snowden we now know that the National Security Agency has lied to the Congress and to the American people about its surveillance activities. We might have learned about it many years ago but for the law that prohibits those who know the government may be breaking the law from telling the people they represent that their government is breaking the law. As The Guardian reported, for at least two years Senators Mark Udall and Ron Wyden have been publicly stating that the U.S. government is relying on “secret legal interpretations” to claim surveillance powers that are so broad that Americans would be “stunned” were they to learn of them. Since the violations of law were classified the Senators could not let their constituents know what they are. In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder 2012 they said: “We believe that most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act. As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows.”
In a letter to Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency, Sen. Udall accused the agency of providing false information in a fact sheet it gave members of Congress about its spying programs. The letter says the fact sheet has “significant inaccuracies.” Mr. Udall could not say what part of the fact sheet is inaccurate since that would “divulge classified information.” However, Mr. Udall says, “In our judgment this inaccuracy is significant, as it portrays protections for American’s privacy as being significantly stronger than they actually are. We urge you to correct this statement as soon as possible. (The Fact sheet was pulled by the agency.)
We now know that the NSA is collecting telephone call metadata on millions of Verizon customers. That contradicts Gen. Alexander who told Fox News in 2012 that the agency “does not ‘hold data’ on U.S. citizens. In a speech at the Reuters Cybersecurity Summit he said: “The great irony is we’re the only ones not spying on the American people.” It was General Alexander who told Congress that over 50 Terrorist Plots were thwarted thanks to the programs that he and his colleagues said didn’t exist. Citizens can decide for themselves whether or not to believe him.
What Senators Udall and Wyden thought citizens should know but could not disclose we now know. Not because of our elected representatives but because of a man now charged as a criminal. Go figure.
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Stung by Stingers
An old and haughty nation, proud in arms.
— John Milton, Comus
Now that the administration has decided to provide small arms to the rebels in Syria it may be useful to recall what happened back in the 1980’s when we were supplying arms to the mujahideen who back then were fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Of course Afghanistan is not Syria. In furnishing arms to the Syrian rebels we know exactly who those rebels are and how they will behave once Bashar al-Assad is no longer in power, whereas we had no idea, as it turned out, what kind of people we were arming in the 1980s. To aid our recollection we follow the perambulations of the stinger missile.
In 1978 the Communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan seized power in the Saur Revolution. Upset by their victory, the guerrilla mujahideen who were opponents of the newly installed government began a civil war in Afghanistan. In order to protect the government the Soviet Union sent in military advisors to support the government. The advisors entered in 1979 and the last Soviet troops did not withdraw, until 1989. Following the Soviet invasion, President Jimmy Carter said: “The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.” Whether he was right or wrong is unimportant for our purposes. What is more important is what the United States did following the invasion.
In order to counter the Soviets and to help the mujahideen defeat the Soviets, the CIA began a program known as Operation Cyclone. During that operation the CIA sold arms to the Afghan mujahideen. The mujahideen comprised militant Islamic groups including al Qaeda that Osama bin Laden had started that eventually brought us 9/11. Of course, that was long before 9/11 and we had no idea that, included among those we were arming, were groups that would prove to be less than friendly to us once they got rid of the Soviet troops. Even if we’d known, however, we would have continued to support that group because they were fighting Soviet troops. One thousand Stingers were sold to the Mujahideen and as one American intelligence official told the Washington Post, “We were handing them out like lollipops.”
The Stingers helped the Afghans drive out the Red Army but after the Red Army left so did a lot of the Stingers. According to some reports the lost Stingers ended up in such disparate places as Croatia, Iran and North Korea. At least 13 of the Stingers were purchased by Qatar from Iran. The 13 Stingers sold to Qatar by Iran were acquired by Iran when Iranian Revolutionary Guards ambushed a mujahideen military convoy and captured the stingers that the convoy had in its possession. Iran reportedly could not make the Stingers work, perhaps, it is surmised, because their batteries were dead. Whatever the cause, Iran was delighted to unload some of them on Qatar. Qatar was happy to get them for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with Afghanistan or Iran. They wanted the stingers because the United States had sold 70 stingers to Bahrain. That sale was made because the United States wanted Bahrain to be able to defend itself from Iran in case Iran were to use the weapons it had gotten from Reagan’s Oliver North against Bahrain. Qatar wanted Stingers to protect itself from an attack by Bahrain. Accordingly, when Iran offered to sell Qatar the Stingers that it could not make work, Qatar jumped at the chance to buy them.
The CIA did not like having stingers on the loose and wanted to buy them back. It began offering to pay twice as much as the stingers cost but was unable to recover all the ones it had sold. Part of its eagerness to recapture the stingers was because of a fear that in a future conflict the missiles might be used against the United States. One intelligence officer said that: “The things have spread so far that we don’t even know where they are anymore.”
Qatar was so proud of its Stingers that it displayed them in a military parade. Someone in the Reagan administration was watching the parade and immediately sent Richard Murphy from the State Department to Qatar to get the Stingers back. Mr. Murphy approached Crown Prince bin Khalifa al-Thani, Qatar’s defense minister and demanded that the missiles be returned to the United States. Not surprisingly, the minister declined, probably thinking that his country had paid good money for the missiles and was not obliged to return them to the United States just because the United States wanted them back.
All of the foregoing was then. This is now. None of this has any applicability to what the Obama administration now wants to give to Syrian rebels. For one thing the small arms being given the rebels do not pose the possibility of being the future hazard to our well being that the stinger missiles did. For another thing, if by chance we begin furnishing weapons like Stingers to the rebel groups we will take care to make sure that the rebel groups to which we give arms are our friends for life-not like the mujahideen who became Al-Qaeda.
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Cigarettes and Senators
For thy sake tobacco, I would do anything but die.
— Charles Lamb, (1775-1834) A farewell to Tobacco
Money talks. Frequently it finds its voice only when it is given to others. Consider Senators Mitch McConnell (R.KY) and Richard Burr (R.N.C.). Senator Burr, having received $534,000, has the distinction of being the recipient of more money from cigarette companies than any other member of Congress according to statistics compiled by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. His colleague (and the minority leader of the senate) Mitch McConnell has received $456,000. The money that cigarettes have paid the two men, as well as some of their colleagues, makes them understandably sensitive to the well-being of their donors and they have expressed their gratitude by letting Europe know that it can’t follow in Australia’s footsteps and impose restrictions on how its donors are portrayed to the public. But first, a bit of history.
In August 2012 the High Court of Australia issued an opinion that was exceedingly unfriendly to the package in which the cigarette is delivered. The court, depriving individual cigarettes of that which causes them to standout from their competitors, said all cigarettes had to be sold in uniform packages. Company logos can no longer be displayed on packages. All printing on the packages must use identical fonts and the package must have a dark brown background. To add insult to injury, the Australian Court said graphic health warnings have to cover 90% of the back of the package and 70% of the front. That ruling was especially distressing for the cigarette because it came just a few months after the United States Federal Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit had approved rules issued by the Food and Drug Administration that required graphic displays of warning images on cigarette packs. It also approved the rule that required graphic warnings to be placed on the top half of the front and back of each pack. In its opinion the court said: “We can envision many graphic warnings that would constitute factual disclosures . . . . A non-exhaustive list of some would include a picture or drawing of a nonsmoker’s and smoker’s lungs displayed side by side; a picture of a doctor looking at an x-ray of either a smoker’s cancerous lungs or some other part of the body presenting a smoking-related condition; a picture or drawing of the internal anatomy of a person suffering from a smoking-related medical condition; a picture or drawing of a person suffering from a smoking-related medical condition.” Australia plus the 6th Circuit created an air of gloom among cigarettes that no amount of smoke could dispel. The U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia dispelled it.
Ten days after the Australia Court ruled, the D.C. Court declined to approve the graphic warnings the FDA had required. Among one of the more catchy images it refused to approve was a picture of a man with cigarette smoke coming out of the tracheotomy hole in his throat. Saying that many “of the images chosen by FDA could be misinterpreted by consumers.” It suggested, as one example, that the tracheotomy image could be construed by the consumers as suggesting that receiving a tracheotomy “is a common consequence of smoking.”
Since two courts had arrived at differing conclusions it was widely assumed that the U.S. Supreme Court would weigh in and let the cigarette know which court got it right. It was not to be. On April 22, 2013, the Supreme Court let it be known it would not resolve the differences between the two Courts of Appeal. Although the domestic threat is at bay until the FDA comes up with new rules, the cigarette’s need for vigilance goes on and it is in Europe that it enlisted the aid of those it has supported.
In December 2012 the European Commission proposed significant restrictions on tobacco branding and flavoring. On the theory that for a cigarette to be fully appreciated, it should taste like tobacco and not like peppermint, it banned flavorings such as menthol. On the theory that cigarettes are harmful it said graphic warnings on the front of the package that now take up 30% of the package must be increased to 75%. The rules also require that the packages include the kinds of graphic warnings favored by the 6th Circuit and not favored by the D.C. circuit
On June 7, 2013, it was reported that Senators McConnell and Burr along with Senator Rand Paul (R. Ky.) and Kay Hagan (D. N.C.) had written to the European Union warning of dire consequences should the Union adopt the regulations on cigarette packaging it was proposing. The Senators said the proposed regulations would violate international trade rules and adversely affect trade relations with the United States. It’s good they explained. Otherwise one might have thought it had to do with all the money the cigarette companies pay them in order to preserve their friendship.