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Excellent piece by Kevin Gosztola. I agree with Jeremy Scahill here. I very much thought that Brennan-Feinstein colloquy seemed not exactly scripted but planned with an agenda.
Brennan’s CIA Confirmation Hearing as ‘Kabuki Oversight’ & Anwar al-Awlaki’s Posthumous Trial
Scahill was on “Democracy Now!” this morning and reacted:
..[I]f you look at what happened yesterday at the Senate Intelligence Committee, I mean, this is kabuki oversight. This was basically a show that was produced by the White House in conjunction with Senator Feinstein’s office. I mean, the reality was—is that none of the central questions that should have been asked of John Brennan were asked in an effective way. In the cases where people like Senator Angus King or Senator Ron Wyden would ask a real question, for instance, about whether or not the CIA asserts the right to kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, the questions were very good. Brennan would then offer up a non-answer.
Scahill said, after watching the exchange, that he believed Feinstein’s office had “coordinated this moment with the White House to put on a show trial because of the deadly serious questions surrounding the killing of a U.S. citizen without due process.” He added, “What we saw play out there was absolute theater, where you had Anwar Awlaki being posthumously tried, with no evidence. And what came after the clip you just played is Feinstein and Brennan agreeing, quite happily, that Anwar Awlaki was a bad man and that it was justified to take him out and kill him.”
A short excerpt from Scahill's interview on DemocracyNow:
"Total Kabuki Oversight": Jeremy Scahill on Lovefest Between Senators & John Brennan
Short excert of interview with Medea Benjamin on DemocracyNow.
Medea Benjamin: The CIA Has "Become a Death Squad"
A short excerpt of the interview with Melvin Goodman, former CIA analyst, on DemocracyNow.
"Very Disturbing": Former CIA Analyst On Cozy Relation Between John Brennan and Senators
Full interview with Jeremy Scahill on DemocracyNow.
Jeremy Scahill: Assassinations of U.S. Citizens Largely Ignored at Brennan CIA Hearing
Full interview with Medea Benjamin about her conversation with John Brennan at his house. Benjamin and Code Pink are attempting to get information from Brennan and Feinstein about specific people who were killed by drone. She also speaks about her book on drone warfare and her trip to Pakistan with other activists where she interacted with people who live under the drones and family/neighbors of drone strike civilian victims.
CODEPINK Repeatedly Disrupts Brennan Hearing Calling Out Names Of Civilians Killed in Drone Strikes
Full interview with Melvin Goodman, a former CIA analyst.
"He Was The Agency": Ex-CIA Analyst Questions Brennan Claim He Couldn't Stop Waterboarding, Torture
DemocracyNow.org - CIA nominee John Brennan was repeatedly questioned about torture at his CIA confirmation hearing, including the use of waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques. He refused to say waterboarding was a form of torture, but said he has come to oppose the technique. Under George W. Bush, Brennan served as deputy executive director of the CIA and director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center. "Remember he was the cheerleader for some of these onerous policies -- particularly renditions and extraordinary renditions. So for John Brennan, today, to say he read the Senate committee intelligence report on torture and he learned things he never knew before and that he was shocked with what he learned -- this is a case of incredible willful ignorance," says Melvin Goodman, former CIA and State Department analyst.
Michael Ratner on TheRealNews. This is a two-part interview on the legal argument for targeted assassinations.
Brennan Hearings: What is the Legal Basis for Drone Targeted Killings?
Michael Ratner: There's no reason why the legal argument defending targeted killing should not be made public
I'm not buying what they are selling here, but it's been reported in several different places (including the marvelous DailyBeast propaganda piece) and it is also one of those stories where I hope I'm wrong and that the CIA will be getting out of the assassination by drone business. I wonder if Philip Giraldi is the same source that was used in the DailyBeast and other articles or if this has been more broadly planned/discussed.
JOHN BRENNAN’S LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH DRONES
Brennan had indicated that he wanted to see big changes in control of the drone program even before his confirmation hearing on Thursday. Under his watch as White House counterterrorism coordinator, Brennan’s former employer, the CIA, has become much more of a “paramilitary” organization, and he wants to return the agency to its roots. “John thinks that the traditional role of the CIA is to be the biggest, baddest, most effective human-intelligence collection facility on the planet,” says a senior administration official, who would discuss Brennan’s views only on condition of anonymity. “That’s the tradition of the CIA he grew up in, and that’s what he thinks the CIA in its essence should be.”
“A lot of what’s driving Brennan, from what I’ve heard, is that he feels the [drone] program has run its course as a CIA operation,” says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism official. “He feels that basically the collateral damage is causing more problems than any success coming out of the program.” Meanwhile, the debate over the ethics — and, perhaps more significantly, the efficacy — of targeting rogue American citizens and others abroad is going to grow more intense, too. “My sense is there is a growing recognition that these strikes can hurt organizations but they are rarely the main reason for the end of the organization,” says Seth Jones, a counterterrorism expert at the Rand Corp.
‘Left, Right & Center’: Drones and the Saturday Mail Shocker
Joining Scheer and host Matt Miller on this week’s show are Byron York and Chrystia Freeland.
Here is another piece from the nextgov.com site. I am not very familiar with this site yet but it looks interesting.
PROSPECTS FOR COMPREHENSIVE CYBER REFORM ARE QUESTIONABLE
Congress is unlikely to pass a comprehensive cybersecurity reform bill this year, largely because public concern about computer hacking doesn’t sway elections, a recently-departed House Homeland Security Committee senior aide said. That prospect is likely to change only after an event involving major property damage, casualties and a direct connection to malicious network activity, said Kevin Gronberg, who as former senior counsel to the committee, helped draft key cybersecurity legislation that failed in 2012.
[...]
Andrew Grotto, a staffer for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, took a less pessimistic view: “I’m not sure we need a 9/11-like incident to yield legislation,” he said.
Earlier this week, in a speech at Georgetown University, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta took lawmakers to task for failing to pass reforms in 2012 that would help the Pentagon and other agencies respond to a critical national security imperative: “Cyber is now at the point where the technology is there to cripple a country, to take down our power grid system, to take down our government system, take down our financial system and literally paralyze the country,” he said.
[...]
Grotto said the views of corporate executives are changing. Companies now routinely contact members of Congress to share concerns about computer security and economic espionage. Asked if he thought Panetta was overstating the threat, Grotto said, “No, I don’t.”
Why Social Movements Should Ignore Social Media
Future Perfect:
The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
By Steven Johnson
Riverhead, 233 pp., $26.95
There are two ways to be wrong about the Internet. One is to embrace cyber-utopianism and treat the Internet as inherently democratizing. Just leave it alone, the argument goes, and the Internet will destroy dictatorships, undermine religious fundamentalism, and make up for failures of institutions.1
Another, more insidious way is to succumb to Internet-centrism. Internet-centrists happily concede that digital tools do not always work as intended and are often used by enemies of democracy. What the Internet does is only of secondary importance to them; they are most interested in what the Internet means. Its hidden meanings have already been deciphered: decentralization beats centralization, networks are superior to hierarchies, crowds outperform experts. To fully absorb the lessons of the Internet, urge the Internet-centrists, we need to reshape our political and social institutions in its image.
[...]
Once the elusive logic of the Internet has been located, it is not uncommon to see Internet-centrists move to deflate its actual novelty. Thus, Yochai Benkler, a Harvard legal scholar and an exquisite purveyor of Internet-centrism, can marvel at the worlds of Wikipedia, open-source software, and file-sharing—which he, too, takes to represent the logic of the Internet—and then proceed to weave them into a larger narrative about human nature. For Benkler, the Internet proves that humans are collaborative, well-meaning creatures, and that our political institutions, shaped in accordance with a much darker Hobbesian view of human nature, have never been adequate for facilitating meaningful social interaction.
It's interesting to read through this piece from MoonofAlabama about their early reports on a U.S. drone base in Saudi Arabia and about other articles that were later edited or censored. Others reported about this drone base too. I don't know how long ago it was but I know that I've known about (or at least the speculation, high likelihood of it) for many months. When we are cooperating with other governments and do drone strikes in their countries, are we hitting only the targets that we consider to be a threat to the U.S. or do we also allow them to target their own military and/or political enemies? I would think it would be difficult to justify those kinds of targets as imminent threats against the U.S. But if it is done in secrecy under the CIA, maybe not so hard after all. I never did understand why we had such an intense interest in Yemen but it's easy to see why the
Saudis and/or Israelis would. MoA also talks about Anwar al-Awlaki.
Brennan's Saudi Drone Base: Censorship, Assassinations, More Terrorists
The administration's counterterrorism policies are leading to media censorship, refutation of basic rights and to more terrorism. The man responsible for these consequences should not become head of the CIA.
Today the Washington Post's homepage tries to sell this item as news:
[U.S. has secret drone base in Saudi Arabia]
[...]
Moon of Alabama, unlike the self censoring Washington Post and other media, reveled that such a base is in Saudi Arabia in June 2011.
[...]
So it was only after some government lawyer opined that the president can kill Americans who are “senior, operational leader” of al-Qaeda and after Awlaki was killed that he was designated as such. Note that there is zero proof in the public that Awlaki was anything but an outspoken cleric who used his first amendment rights. And if Awlaki was not seen as “senior, operational leader” before September 2011 what was the justification for the failed attempt to kill him on May 5 2011?
Here is another story from MoonofAlabama on Syria. I'm wary about sources of information about Syria but like to read MoA to get a sense of things. For instance, I used to trust al Jazeera for a lot of Middle East related stories but I no longer use them on anything related to Syria or Libya. I don't claim to have a good understanding of what is happening in Syria but I think that what happens there might give us some sense of where we are headed with respect to our Middle East clusterf*k and Iran.
Syria: The Druze Are Not Joining The Opposition
[...] Why is a Washington Post reporter writing about a "battalion" when that "battalion" doesn't even have 5% of the nominal size of a real on? And how does he know that these are indeed Druze?
There are thousands of such videos of such groups, often multiple ones of the ever same folks and their sole purpose is exaggerate the size of the insurgency. They are sheer propaganda. [...]
All of these piece are based on insurgency sources and all of them are false. The Druze know very well that they, as a religious minority, would be in much more trouble should the insurgency win then they have ever been and ever will be under Bashar al-Assad.
Indeed instead of more people joining the opposition we see the opposition falling apart. Not only the exile opposition which never manages to unite, but also on the ground. This video shows a brawl between Free Syrian Army and Jabhat al-Nusra protesters in Idleb with the Nusra supporters tearing up FSA flags.
As their situation on the ground worsens we are likely to see more such fights, even deadly ones, between those various opposition groups.
From the
Telegraph, last week.
If Israel strikes Syria again, all bets are off
Shashank Joshi is an Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). He is also a doctoral student of international relations at Harvard University’s Department of Government.
To Syria’s south, Jordan – which has just finished holding elections – faces a near unprecedented influx of Syrian refugees. To the east in Iraq, tens of thousands of Sunni demonstrators – many of whom identify with the largely Sunni uprising next door, and cheered on by an Al Qaida-linked group – blocked a major road in western Iraq in protest against the Shia-dominated government. To the north, today’s bombing at the US embassy in Ankara has been blamed on a banned Left-wing group, the DHKP-C, but most early lists of suspects included Jabhat-al-Nusra, Al Qaida’s Syrian front, while relations between Turkey and Syria are their lowest ebb.
The most volatile of all issues, however, may be Israel’s intervention into the Syrian crisis this week. It appears that Israeli jets bombed not just a convoy of Russian-supplied SA-17 anti-aircraft batteries, located at a military base northwest of Damascus, but other targets also, including a biological weapons research centre.
[...]
Israel’s policy towards Syria has, for two years, consisted of keeping its distance and sending warnings to Assad. As the Syrian state weakens and, at the same time, it has less and less to lose, Israel will find it increasingly difficult to insulate itself from events next door. If air strikes recur, this policy is going to fall apart.
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
Evening Blues
A History Lesson on a Cold Evening
Occupy Boston Protesters: Guilty and Sentenced Without Trial
Reforming Prison’s Harshest Tactic –The Angola 3 case may help change the...
RFK and the Drone Strike White Pape
The Fallacy of "Drill, Baby, Drill" - Additional Evidence
Doing the Math: California Poised to Delay Climate Action for 80 Years.
Renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels in Australia
And then the Wall Street Journal reports on the jokes in the Twitterverse. Who knew?
Young-Holt Unlimited - Soulful Strut