OMNI
US LAWLESSNESS,
WAR CRIMES NEWSLETTER #3, October 14, 2016
Compiled by
Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace and Justice.
(#1 December 27, 2012; #2
May 25, 2014)
What’s at stake: An American Nuremberg
might remind us that we are not only consumers but citizens—of this country and
of the world. Owning up to our own and our
government’s failures and crimes in the war on terror might restore our hope
that we run our country. Gordon, American Nuremberg
#1 and #2 are at the end.
Contents of US Lawlessness Newsletter #3
US War Crimes (see related OMNI newsletters listed at end)
Rebecca Gordon, American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who
Should
Stand Trial for Post-9-11 War Crimes.
Stand Trial for Post-9-11 War Crimes.
Blum: US War Crimes against Iraq
Swanson,
World Beyond War: Pledge to Oppose US
Aggression and Other War
Crimes
Crimes
Dick: Andrew Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater
Middle East (for = to control their oil)
US Surveillance vs. Bill of
Rights, 4th Amendment, Privacy, International
Law
Law
Snowden’s NSA Files (also see Assange,
Wikipedia, Manning newsletters)
Glenn Greenwald, No Place
Luke Harding, The Snowden
Files
Prupis, NSA’s Own Google
What Can We Do?
Tribunals.
Contact
Our Representatives from House to White House
OMNI
Newsletters and Reports on US Lawlessness and How to Find Them
Continue
and Expand These Lawlessness Newsletters (combined, the 3 already published make
a book)
Anyone
ignorant of US lawlessness (thinks US a nation of exceptional virtue) has
chosen not to read, listen, watch, think.
American
Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for
Post-9/11 War Crimes by Rebecca Gordon (2016)
No subject is more hotly debated than the extreme measures that
our government has taken after 9/11 in the name of national security. Torture,
extraordinary rendition, drone assassinations, secret detention centers (or
“black sites”), massive surveillance of citizens. But while the press
occasionally exposes the dark side of the war on terror and congressional
investigators sometimes raise alarms about the abuses committed by U.S.
intelligence agencies and armed forces, no
high U.S. official has been prosecuted for these violations – which many
legal observers around the world consider war
crimes.
The United States helped establish the international principles guiding the prosecution of war crimes – starting with the Nuremberg tribunal following World War II, when Nazi officials were held accountable for their crimes against humanity. But the American government and legal system have consistently refused to apply these same principles to our own officials. Now Rebecca Gordon takes on the explosive task of “indicting” the officials who – in a just society – should be put on trial for war crimes. Some might dismiss this as a symbolic exercise. But what is at stake here is the very soul of the nation.
The United States helped establish the international principles guiding the prosecution of war crimes – starting with the Nuremberg tribunal following World War II, when Nazi officials were held accountable for their crimes against humanity. But the American government and legal system have consistently refused to apply these same principles to our own officials. Now Rebecca Gordon takes on the explosive task of “indicting” the officials who – in a just society – should be put on trial for war crimes. Some might dismiss this as a symbolic exercise. But what is at stake here is the very soul of the nation.
Google Search, 10-13-16
American Nuremberg - Skyhorse Publishing
skyhorsepublishing.com/titles/154-9781510703339-american-nuremberg
Apr 5, 2016 - Now Rebecca Gordon takes on the explosive task of “indicting”
the ...American Nuremberg The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial
for ...
American Nuremberg by Rebecca Gordon - Counterpunch
www.counterpunch.org/.../american-nuremberg-by-rebecc...
CounterPunch
Apr 26, 2016 - The Fearless Voice of the American ... American Nuremberg by Rebecca Gordon ... American Nightmare: the Criminal, Justice System.
American Nuremberg: Putting Washington's War Criminals on
Trial ...
www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/.../44654?...America...
Berkeley
Daily Planet
Jul 8, 2016 - The purpose of American
Nuremberg is laid out
in the subtitle: "The US Officials Who ... But the photo has been updated
for Gordon's book.
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, American War Crimes, Yesterday,
Today
www.tomdispatch.com/.../tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon,_american_wa...
Jan 7, 2016 - Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, American War Crimes, Yesterday, Today, ..... States
and the forthcoming American
Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials ...
AUDIO
- American Nuremberg: Dr. Rebecca Gordon on Bringing Bush
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNBBYber_-w
Apr 22, 2016 - Uploaded by
The World Meets America Report/w William Kern
April 22, 2016: The World
Meets America Report spoke to Dr. Rebecca Gordon about her new book American ...
The
American Nuremberg - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcRNhg-R4Sg
Apr 6, 2016 - Uploaded by
Watching the Hawks RT
Rebecca Gordon, author “American
Nuremberg,” joins us in the Hawk's Nest from San Francisco to discuss who
...
About
the author | Mainstreaming Torture
https://mainstreamingtorture.org/about/
Rebecca Gordon received her B.A. from Reed College and her
M.Div. and ... Her latest book, American
Nuremberg: The Officials Who Should Stand Trial
Putting on Trial Those Responsible for US War Crimes -
WhoWhatWhy
whowhatwhy.org/.../putting-on-trial-those-responsible-for-abu-ghraib-an...
Apr 8, 2016 - In her recent book, American Nuremberg, Gordon names the people who helped facilitate America's torture and assassination programs.
USA, IRAQ, WAR CRIMES
The Anti-Empire Report #143
By William Blum, February 5th,
2016
William Blum, “We should never forget”
The modern, educated, advanced nation of Iraq was reduced
to a virtual failed state … the United States, beginning in 1991, bombed for
much of the following 12 years, with one dubious excuse after another; then, in
2003, invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, tortured without
inhibition, killed wantonly … the people of that unhappy land lost everything –
their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their
environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs,
their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical
health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their
women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their
children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives …
More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison,
internally displaced, or in foreign exile … The air, soil, water, blood, and
genes drenched with depleted uranium … the most awful birth defects …
unexploded cluster bombs lying in wait for children to pick them up … a river
of blood running alongside the Euphrates and Tigris … through a country that
may never be put back together again … “It is a common refrain among war-weary
Iraqis,” reported theWashington Post in 2007, that things were
better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.”
The United States has not paid any
compensation to Iraq.
The United States has not made any
apology to Iraq.
Foreign policy is even more sensitive a subject in the
United States than slavery of the black people and genocide of the Native
Americans. The US has apologized for these many times, but virtually never for
the crimes of American foreign policy.
In 2014, George W.
Bush, the man most responsible for this holocaust, was living a quiet life
in Texas, with a focus on his paintings. “I’m trying to leave something
behind”, he said.
Yes, he has certainly done that –
mountains of rubble for one thing; rubble that once was cities and towns. His
legacy also includes the charming Islamic State. Ah, but Georgie Boy is
an artiste.
We need a trial to judge
all those who bear significant responsibility for the past century - the most murderous and ecologically
destructive in human history. We could call it the war, air and fiscal crimes
tribunal and we could put politicians and CEOs and major media owners in the
dock with earphones like Eichmann and make them listen to the evidence of how
they killed millions of people and almost murdered the planet and made most of
us far more miserable than we needed to be. Of course, we wouldn’t have time to
go after them one by one. We’d have to lump Wall Street investment bankers in
one trial, the Council on Foreign Relations in another, and any remaining
Harvard Business School or Yale Law graduates in a third. We don’t need this
for retribution, only for edification. So there would be no capital punishment,
but rather banishment to an overseas Nike factory with a vow of perpetual
silence. – Sam Smith
On March 2, 2014 US Secretary of State
John Kerry condemned Russia’s “incredible act of aggression” in Ukraine. “You
just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading
another country on completely trumped up pretext.”
Iraq 2003 was in the 21st century. The
pretext was completely trumped up. Senator John Kerry voted for it. Nice moral
authority you have there, John.
On the same occasion, concerning Ukraine, President Obama
spoke of “the principle that no country has the right to send in troops to
another country unprovoked”. Do our leaders have no memory or do
they think we’ve all lost ours?
Does Obama avoid prosecuting the
Bush-Cheney gang because he wants to have the same rights to commit war crimes?
The excuse he gives for his inaction is so lame that if George W. had used it
people would not hesitate to laugh. On about five occasions, in reply to
questions about why his administration has not prosecuted the like of Bush,
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. for mass murder, torture and other war
crimes, former law professor Obama has stated: “I prefer to look forward rather
than backwards.” Picture a defendant before a judge asking to be found innocent
on such grounds. It simply makes laws, law enforcement, crime, justice, and
facts irrelevant. Picture Chelsea Manning and other whistleblowers using this
argument. Picture the reaction to this by Barack Obama, who has become the
leading persecutor of whistleblowers in American history.
Noam Chomsky has observed: “If the
Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have
been hanged.”
It appears that the German and Japanese
people only relinquished their imperial culture and mindset when they were
bombed back to the stone age during World War II. Something similar may be the
only cure for the same pathology that is embedded into the very social fabric
of the United States. The US is now a full-blown pathological society. There is
no other wonder drug to deal with American-exceptionalism-itis.
US Appeal to World: Help Us
Resist U.S. Crimes
World
Beyond War 5-18-16 (WBW was founded by David Swanson, check out his books))
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States of America has
systematically violated the prohibition against the threat or use of force
contained in the UN Charter and the Kellogg Briand Pact. It has carved out a regime of impunity for its crimes based on its UN
Security Council veto, non-recognition of international courts and
sophisticated "information warfare" that undermines the rule of law
with political justifications for otherwise illegal threats and uses of force.
Former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz has compared current U.S. policy to the illegal German "preemptive first strike" policy for which senior German officials were convicted of aggression at Nuremberg and sentenced to death by hanging.
In 2002, the late U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy described post-September 11th U.S. doctrine as "a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept." And yet the U.S. government has succeeded in assembling alliances and ad hoc "coalitions" to support threats and attacks on a series of targeted countries, while other countries have stood by silently or vacillated in their efforts to uphold international law. In effect, the U.S. has pursued a successful diplomatic policy of "divide and conquer" to neutralize global opposition to wars that have killed about 2 million people and plunged country after country into intractable chaos.
As representatives of civil society in the United States, the undersigned U.S. citizens and advocacy groups are sending this emergency appeal to our neighbors in our increasingly interconnected but threatened world. We ask you to stop providing military, diplomatic or political support for U.S. threats or uses of force; and to support new initiatives for multilateral cooperation and leadership, not dominated by the United States, to respond to aggression and settle international disputes peacefully as required by the UN Charter.
We pledge to support and cooperate with international efforts to stand up to and stop our country's systematic aggression and other war crimes. We believe that a world united to uphold the UN Charter, the rule of international law and our common humanity can and must enforce U.S. compliance with the rule of law to bring lasting peace to the world we all share.
This petition will be sent to all the world's national governments.
Click here to sign as an individual.
Click here to sign as an organization that you are authorized to sign on behalf of.
After signing the petition, please use the tools on the next webpage to share it with your friends.
Former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz has compared current U.S. policy to the illegal German "preemptive first strike" policy for which senior German officials were convicted of aggression at Nuremberg and sentenced to death by hanging.
In 2002, the late U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy described post-September 11th U.S. doctrine as "a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept." And yet the U.S. government has succeeded in assembling alliances and ad hoc "coalitions" to support threats and attacks on a series of targeted countries, while other countries have stood by silently or vacillated in their efforts to uphold international law. In effect, the U.S. has pursued a successful diplomatic policy of "divide and conquer" to neutralize global opposition to wars that have killed about 2 million people and plunged country after country into intractable chaos.
As representatives of civil society in the United States, the undersigned U.S. citizens and advocacy groups are sending this emergency appeal to our neighbors in our increasingly interconnected but threatened world. We ask you to stop providing military, diplomatic or political support for U.S. threats or uses of force; and to support new initiatives for multilateral cooperation and leadership, not dominated by the United States, to respond to aggression and settle international disputes peacefully as required by the UN Charter.
We pledge to support and cooperate with international efforts to stand up to and stop our country's systematic aggression and other war crimes. We believe that a world united to uphold the UN Charter, the rule of international law and our common humanity can and must enforce U.S. compliance with the rule of law to bring lasting peace to the world we all share.
This petition will be sent to all the world's national governments.
Click here to sign as an individual.
Click here to sign as an organization that you are authorized to sign on behalf of.
After signing the petition, please use the tools on the next webpage to share it with your friends.
US War of Aggression to Control Greater Middle East Oil
"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only
an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only
from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of
the whole."
- Robert H.Jackson ,
U.S. Prosecutor, Nuremberg
- Robert H.
Andrew Bacevich. America’s War for the Greater Middle East. President Jimmy Carter provides
the beginning of this comprehensive narrative of US lawlessness in the Middle
East. “However unwittingly, Carter…inaugurated
America’s War for the Greater Middle East, compounding rather than reversing
the errors he had inherited. With no end
in sight and little prospect of achieving success, that war continues to the present
day” (xxii).
Chapter One, “War of Choice,” tells the
story. Until the 1970s, not the
Pentagon, the White House, or Congress planned to militarize US ME policy. The Cold
War and Vietnam War had preoccupied those leaders. The US had looked to ME proxy nations to
ensure the flow of oil westward.
All that changed when Jimmy Carter became
president. Carter campaigned for
freedom, peace, and human rights. But
OPEC’s increasing power was shifting alignments. A group of hawks led by Robert W. Tucker and
Edward Luttwak had been urging US “armed intervention in the Arab World” to
take “our” oil (6-8). And the Iranian
revolution in 1979 overthrew the Shah, whom the US had imposed on that country
after the CIA had arranged the overthrow of its elected leader.
New advocates of making the Persian Gulf a
high U.S. military priority (Paul Wolfowitz, Albert Wohlstetter) were becoming
influential (16-17). Carter’s national
security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, supported intervention. Carter resisted, questioning whether the
nation’s fate was bound to OPEC, including his 7-15-79 malaise speech arguing
for peace and spiritual renewal, but he was not persuasive. Wolfowitz’ argument that the US should use
soldiers rather than diplomats to secure its interests prevailed; the nation
chose access to oil; Iranian students captured the US embassy in Tehran and
students burned embassies in Pakistan and Libya; and Carter “took his country
to war.”
“So
in January 1980, [the nation] embarked upon a war for oil, which was in its way
a war to preserve the American way of life” (32). The Truman Doctrine became the Carter
Doctrine, encompassing all threats large and small and “generically referred to
as “’terrorists.’”
RESISTING
LAWLESS SURVEILLANCE
SNOWDEN’S NSA FILES
The
files reveal violations of the Bill of Rights so extreme that the damage to our
Bill of Rights and democracy seems irrevocable.
Glenn Greenwald writes: “The
government tried to justify the secret NSA program by invoking exactly the kind
of extreme theory of executive power that had motivated me to begin
writing: the notion that the threat of
terrorism vested the president with virtually unlimited authority to do
anything to ‘keep the nation safe,’ including the authority to break the law”
(pp. 1-2, No Place to Hide). [--Dick]
Snowden’s Story, Behind the Scenes
At the beginning of his book on
Snowden, Glenn Greenwald accuses President Obama of having committed crimes,
among others, of illegal wiretapping, issuing general warrants, and
particularly permitting surveillance on the Internet, “subjecting virtually all
forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive
state examination,” and he “should be held accountable for them.”
No Place
The
title of the journalist Glenn Greenwald’s impassioned new book, “No Place to
Hide,” comes from a chilling observation made in 1975 by Senator Frank Church,
then chairman of a select committee on intelligence. The United States
That
was nearly 40 years ago, and as the documents leaked last year by the former
National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed, the N.S.A.’s ability to spy on our daily lives
has grown exponentially to Orwellian proportions. The documents provided by
Mr. Snowden revealed that the agency has an ability to monitor or collect information
from hundreds of millions of
people around the
globe, that it has broken into the communications links of major data centers
across the world, that it has circumvented or cracked much of the
encryption that
protects sensitive data on the Internet, and that, according to its own
records, it has broken privacy laws or exceeded its authority thousands of
times a year. The first journalist Mr. Snowden approached by email was Glenn
Greenwald, a columnist for The Guardian
and former constitutional lawyer who had frequently written about civil
liberties, the dangers of enhanced executive power, and surveillance abuses in
post-Sept. 11 America. (Mr. Greenwald has since left The Guardian to work with Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, on
building a new media venture, which includes the news site The Intercept, of which Mr. Greenwald,
Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill are founding editors.)
In
“No Place to Hide,” Mr. Greenwald recounts the story of how he and Ms. Poitras,
a documentary filmmaker, traveled to Hong Kong to meet with Mr. Snowden and the
race to publish articles based on the documents he provided, all the while
fearful of authorities’ closing in. The outlines of this story will be familiar
to readers who followed it in real time last year, and to readers of the recent
book “The Snowden Files”
(by the Guardian reporter Luke
Harding), just as much of the material here about the N.S.A. will be familiar
to readers of articles that have appeared in The Guardian (many with Mr. Greenwald’s byline), The Washington Post and The New York Times.
“No
Place to Hide” is enlivened by reproductions of dozens of fascinating documents
from the Snowden archive that help illustrate the N.S.A.’s methodology and that
showcase its strange corporatelike boosterism (complete with sometimes corny
graphics). And Mr. Greenwald fleshes out his portrait of Mr. Snowden with fresh
observations from their exchanges. He amplifies our understanding of the
N.S.A.’s sweeping ambitions, methods and global reach, and provides detailed
insights into what he calls the agency’s “corporate partnerships,” which
“extend beyond intelligence and defense contractors to include the world’s
largest and most important Internet corporations and telecoms.”
For
instance, the agency’s Stormbrew program, Mr. Greenwald writes, “gives the
N.S.A. access to Internet and telephone traffic that enters the United States at various ‘choke points’ on U.S. U.S.
communications infrastructure — a residual by-product of the central role that
the United States U.S.
Mr.
Greenwald portrays Mr. Snowden — regarded by some as a heroic whistle-blower,
by others as a traitor — as a courageous idealist who felt he needed to act on
his beliefs. That outlook, Mr. Greenwald suggests, was partly shaped by books
Mr. Snowden read growing up — Greek mythology and “The Hero With a Thousand
Faces” by Joseph Campbell, which convinced Mr. Snowden that, in his own words,
“it is we who infuse life with meaning through our actions and the stories we
create with them.”
Mr.
Snowden also confided “with a hint of embarrassment,” Mr. Greenwald writes,
that video games had taught him certain lessons. As Mr. Snowden put it: “The
protagonist is often an ordinary person, who finds himself faced with grave
injustices from powerful forces and has the choice to flee in fear or to fight
for his beliefs. And history also shows that seemingly ordinary people who are
sufficiently resolute about justice can triumph over the most formidable
adversaries.”
In
the course of this book, Mr. Greenwald describes how he received his first
communication from Mr. Snowden on Dec. 1, 2012, though he had no idea who it
was from. The email came from someone calling himself Cincinnatus and urged Mr.
Greenwald to begin using PGP encryption so that Cincinnatus could communicate
with him securely. Busy with other projects, Mr. Greenwald procrastinated about
installing the encryption program, and Mr. Snowden was only able to make
contact with him months later, through Ms. Poitras.
According
to Mr. Greenwald, Mr. Snowden would later describe his frustration: “Here am I
ready to risk my liberty, perhaps even my life, to hand this guy thousands of
Top Secret documents from the nation’s most secretive agency — a leak that will
produce dozens if not hundreds of huge journalistic scoops. And he can’t even
be bothered to install an encryption program.”
The
most gripping sections of “No Place to Hide” recount Mr. Greenwald and Ms.
Poitras’s 10-day trip to Hong Kong , where they
and The Guardian’s veteran correspondent Ewen MacAskill met with Mr. Snowden in
his hotel room. Mr. Greenwald describes the tradecraft they employed (removing
batteries from their cellphones, or placing the phones in the minibar
refrigerator) to avoid detection; his initial five-hour, litigatorlike grilling
of Mr. Snowden; and the “giddy gallows humor” that later crept into their
conversations (“I call the bottom bunk at Gitmo,” Mr. Snowden reportedly
joked).
Mr.
Greenwald writes that Mr. Snowden said one turning point in his decision to
become a leaker came in 2010, when he was working as an N.S.A. contractor in J apan.
“The stuff I saw really began to disturb me,” Mr. Snowden recalled. “I could
watch drones in real time as they surveilled the people they might kill.” He
added: “I watched N.S.A. tracking people’s Internet activities as they typed. I
became aware of just how invasive U.S.
Substantial
sections of this book deal not with Mr. Greenwald’s relationship with Mr.
Snowden and the N.S.A., but with his combative view of “the establishment
media,” which he has denounced for “glaring subservience to
political power” and
to which he condescends as inferior to his more activist kind of journalism.
In
“No Place to Hide,” Mr. Greenwald is critical of the process by which
publications like The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Guardian
speak with government officials before publishing sensitive articles dealing
with national security issues; he contends that this process allows the
“government to control disclosures and minimize, even neuter, their impact.” He
also makes self-dramatizing boasts about his own mission: “Only audacious
journalism could give the story the power it needed to overcome the climate of
fear the government had imposed on journalists and their sources.”
In
one passage, Mr. Greenwald makes the demonstrably false assertion that one
“unwritten rule designed to protect the government is that media outlets
publish only a few such secret documents, and then stop,” that “they would
report on an archive like Snowden’s so as to limit its impact — publish a
handful of stories, revel in the accolades of a ‘big scoop,’ collect prizes, and
then walk away, ensuring that nothing had really changed.” Many establishment
media outlets obviously continue to pursue the Snowden story. Further, many of
Mr. Greenwald’s gross generalizations about the establishment media do a
terrible disservice to the many tenacious investigative reporters who have
broken important stories on some of the very subjects like the war on terror
and executive power that Mr. Greenwald feels so strongly about.
When
Mr. Greenwald turns his fervor to the issue of surveillance and its
implications for ordinary citizens’ civil liberties, he is far more credible.
Sometimes eloquent. He places the N.S.A.’s current activities in historical
perspective with the F.B.I.’s Cointelpro program
to target political groups and individuals, begun in 1956 and ended in 1971.
And he delivers a fierce argument in defense of the right of privacy, quoting
the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous dissent in the 1928 case Olmstead v. United States
NO PLACE TO HIDE
Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S.
Surveillance State
By Glenn Greenwald
Illustrated. 259 pages.
Metropolitan Books. $27.
The Snowden Files: The Inside
Story of the World's Most Wanted Man.
by Luke Harding
IT BEGAN WITH A TANTALIZING, ANONYMOUS EMAIL: “I AM A SENIOR
MEMBER OF THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY.”
What followed was the most spectacular intelligence breach ever, brought about by one extraordinary man. Edward Snowden was a 29-year-old computer genius working for the National Security Agency when he shocked the world by exposing the near-universal mass surveillance programs of theUnited States
In a tour de force of investigative journalism that reads like a spy novel, award-winning Guardian reporter Luke Harding tells Snowden’s astonishing story—from the day he left his glamorous girlfriend in Honolulu carrying a hard drive full of secrets, to the weeks of his secret-spilling in Hong Kong, to his battle for asylum and his exile in Moscow. For the first time, Harding brings together the many sources and strands of the story—touching on everything from concerns about domestic spying to the complicity of the tech sector—while also placing us in the room with Edward Snowden himself. The result is a gripping insider narrative—and a necessary and timely account of what is at stake for all of us in the new digital age. [It is not accurate to call it an “insider narrative,” since he was not there. Only Greenwald’s account is truly insider. But Harding, The Guardian’s foreign correspondent, had access at The Guardian to Greenwald’s reports and those of The Guardian’sWashington correspondent, Ewen MacAskill, who accompanied Greenwald and Poitras to Hong
Kong . --Dick]
What followed was the most spectacular intelligence breach ever, brought about by one extraordinary man. Edward Snowden was a 29-year-old computer genius working for the National Security Agency when he shocked the world by exposing the near-universal mass surveillance programs of the
In a tour de force of investigative journalism that reads like a spy novel, award-winning Guardian reporter Luke Harding tells Snowden’s astonishing story—from the day he left his glamorous girlfriend in Honolulu carrying a hard drive full of secrets, to the weeks of his secret-spilling in Hong Kong, to his battle for asylum and his exile in Moscow. For the first time, Harding brings together the many sources and strands of the story—touching on everything from concerns about domestic spying to the complicity of the tech sector—while also placing us in the room with Edward Snowden himself. The result is a gripping insider narrative—and a necessary and timely account of what is at stake for all of us in the new digital age. [It is not accurate to call it an “insider narrative,” since he was not there. Only Greenwald’s account is truly insider. But Harding, The Guardian’s foreign correspondent, had access at The Guardian to Greenwald’s reports and those of The Guardian’s
Monday, August 25, 2014
Snowden Documents Reveal NSA's 'Own Secret Google'
Agency
has been sharing more than 850 billion telecom records on foreigners and U.S.
citizens with law enforcement, documents reveal
Documents reveal unprecedented level of NSA data record collection
(Photo: Steve Rhodes)
The
National Security Agency has for years been giving hundreds of billions of
telecommunications records about foreigners and U.S. citizens to dozens of government
bureaus, the Intercept reported on
Monday.
Documents
linked to Edward Snowden's leak last year, obtained by the Intercept,
show the NSA shared and continues to share more than 850 billion records of
emails, cell phone calls and locations, internet chats, and other metadata sent
and received by people throughout the world — who have not been accused of any
wrongdoing — by using a "Google-like" search engine called ICREACH,
which was built specifically for the agency.
According
to a 2010 CIA memo on
the program, which agency colleagues "enthusiastically welcome[d],"
over 1,000 analysts from 23 government agencies had access to the NSA’s cache
of information, all of which was collected without a warrant. Records were
regularly shared with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the
CIA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, among other bureaus, the documents
reveal.
"The
ICREACH team delivered the first-ever wholesale sharing of communications
metadata within the U.S. Intelligence Community," a 2007 top-secret memo
said. "This team began over two years ago with a basic concept compelled
by the IC’s increasing need for communications metadata and NSA’s ability to
collect, process and store vast amounts of communications metadata related to
worldwide intelligence targets."
ICREACH
appears to be a separate entity from the NSA database previously reported to
collect phone records of millions of Verizon customers every day under Section
215 of the Patriot Act, the Intercept said. Rather, the search
engine "grants access to a vast pool of data that can be mined by analysts
from across the intelligence community for 'foreign intelligence'—a vague term
that is far broader than counterterrorism."
Jeffrey
Anchukaitis, a spokesperson for the Director of National Intelligence, defended
the government's widespread spying, stating that sharing information has become
"a pillar of the post-9/11 intelligence community."
The Intercept reports
that ICREACH was built under the direction of former NSA director Gen. Keith
Alexander, and was created to "allow unprecedented volumes of
communications metadata to be shared and analyzed," and give a "vast,
rich source of information" to other agencies to exploit.
ICREACH
evolved out of Project CRISSCROSS, a secret CIA-DEA joint initiative created in
the early 1990s to identify and target narcotics suspects in Latin America. But
by 1999, access to Project CRISSCROSS had expanded to include the NSA, the DIA,
and the FBI, who also contributed to the database. Eventually, a supplemental
system called PROTON was installed to support new information as analysts began
to store more and more invasive data, including codes that could identify
individual cell phones, passport and flight records, visa applications, and
information from CIA intelligence reports. In July 2006, the NSA estimated that
it was storing 149 billion phone records on PROTON, the Intercept says.
Over time, even PROTON was not sufficiently advanced technology to store and
cull all the data it held and gathered every day, leading to the creation of
ICREACH.
But
ICREACH may hold even more records than what is currently estimated. The Intercept writes:
While
the NSA initially estimated making upwards of 850 billion records available on
ICREACH, the documents indicate that target could have been surpassed, and that
the number of personnel accessing the system may have increased since the 2010
reference to more than 1,000 analysts. The intelligence community’s top-secret
“Black Budget” for 2013, also obtained by Snowden, shows that
the NSA recently sought new funding to upgrade ICREACH to “provide IC analysts
with access to a wider set of shareable data.”
This
work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
WHAT
CAN WE DO?
Rebecca
Gordon in American Nuremberg makes
the case for “a full accounting” of “the injustice of our country’s vicious war
on terror,” the victims of the war on terrorism by the US, including “a full
list of those who are responsible.” Her
book sets forth the concrete steps of redress.
But because these are unlikely at the present, she also urges citizens
to take their own actions (183).
Empanel a tribunal, a citizens US Nuremberg,
following these great precedents. 1. The
Constitution Project in 2013 published an indictment of the nation’s most
senior officials for torture of detainees.
A new panel could include “all the illegal war-making, the war crimes,
and the human rights crimes committed in the war on terror.” 2.
Emulate the International War Crimes Tribunal (the Russell Tribunal) held
in Denmark and Sweden in 1967, organized by Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul
Sartre on US crimes committed in the Vietnam War. --Dick
Contact your Representatives
None of the senators or representatives publishes his e-mail
address, but each can be contacted by filling in forms offered through his
website.
Senator John Boozman: (202)224-4843
Website Email: http://www.boozman.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/e-mail-me
Senator Tom Cotton: (202)224-2353
Website Email: http://www.cotton.senate.gov/content/contact-tom
Rep. Rick
Crawford, 1st District: (202)225-4076
Website Email: http://crawford.house.gov/contact/
Rep.
French Hill, 2nd District: (202)225-2506
Website Email: https://hill.house.gov/contact/email
Rep.
Steve Womack, 3rd District: (202)225-4301
Website Email: http://womack.house.gov/contact/
1119 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Washington, DC 20515
3333 Pinnacle Hills, Suite 120
Rogers, Arkansas 72758
Rogers, Arkansas 72758
Rep.
Bruce Westerman, 4th District: (202) 225-3772
President Barack Obama: Comments: 202-456-1111, Switchboard: 202-456-1414
The
White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Wars of Aggression, Peace Movement vs. US Global Permanent War, Roman
and US Empires. Citizens of the World.
An underlying
theme of this newsletter and of all of the newsletters pertaining to war is the
necessity of the US peace movement in all of its local organizations to be
informed, to think, and to act globally.
Often the argument is made that peacemaking must begin with the
individual search for inner equanimity, steadiness, and strength, and nobody
can deny their importance, but our leaders’ reckless lawlessness, bombing and
torturing, making the world more morally and socially violent and cruel,
destabilizes each and every one of us locally and individually, and must be
stopped. Our local leaders and citizens
work hard to make our homes and towns beautiful, rational, peaceful. But simultaneously our national leaders
operate from opposite values to disrupt, displace, and demolish in permanent
war. Already the financial and moral
costs of that chaos are affecting our local lives and hopes (we see and feel it
only partly because the money is borrowed—called national debt). So we must be engaged in more than local
beauty, order, and amity And in order
to act globally, we are not compelled to wait until we have fully matured, and
anyway a lifetime is seldom enough time to enable that ideal condition. –Dick
Oderint dum metuant –“Let them hate so long as they
fear”—was a motto of the Roman Empire .” “’…some nations are serial aggressors,’
observed The Black Commentator in the
fourth year of the war in Iraq
Citoyens du
monde: “I wonder how the foreign
policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national
boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children
everywhere as our own.” Howard Zinn, Let
us be citizens of the world.
RELATED NEWSLETTERS AND
REPORTS (there
are more)
Drones
Genocide
Human Rights
ICC, 2 doc
Iraq Wars
Iraq, Books
about, Blood on Our Hands
Torture War
Crimes
Lawlessness US
Leaders
War Crimes and
Criminals
WCC2
War Crimes
Separate docs for 1, 4, 5, 6 (2 and 3?)
War on Terror
of Terror #1-11
War on Terror
#12
Related,
Gordon, American Nuremberg: The U.S.
Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes (2016)
Newsletter
Index: http://omnicenter.org/dick-bennetts-peace-justice-and-ecology-newsletters/dicks-newsletter-index/
See:
air war, George W. Bush, carpet bombing, chemical warfare, VP Cheney, dictatorship, drone
warfare, empire of bases, Fascism, Geneva conventions, Genocide of Native
Americans, US imperialism, international law, International Network for
Abolition of Foreign Bases, Internet, Militarism, Military Industrial Complex, napalm,
National Security State, Barack Obama, Police State, General Powell, Presidential
Power, Condoleeza Rice, Secrecy, “Support the Troops,” torture, treaties, US war
crimes, wars, US weapons of mass destruction, US Westward Imperialism, and
related newsletters and blog posts.
Contents US Lawlessness
Newsletter #1, Dec. 27, 2012
US
Imperial History
Grandin,
Preparation in Latin America , Documents
Myths
Feeding US Imperialism
Lawlessness
Rise
of Imperial Presidency
US
War Crimes
John
Yoo Abusing Intellect, Justifying Crime for President Bush
Greenwald,
With Liberty
Monbiot:
Obama and Drones
Contents Lawlessness
Newsletter #2
The Present
David Swanson, Daybreak, Yearning
for Democracy and Peace
Pierce on Gregory Johnsen, Authorization for the Use of Military
Force 2001 and
the
Permanent State of War [read Dick
on AUMF in Anti-War Newsletter #3]
Adams,
McVeigh: Oppose the Drones, the War Criminals
Herman: Support Our Troops, Wars, War Criminals
Lizza
on Barron and the Kill-List
Hedges,
Violent, Homicidal Culture
The Past
James
Lucas, Deaths Since WWII
Bombing
Neutral Laos
END US LAWLESSNESS NEWSLETTER #3
No comments:
Post a Comment