Zach Epstein

BGR - Hackers associated with well known hacker-activist group “Anonymous Operations” have released a massive cache of data they say was obtained when they hacked a website belonging to the United States Department of Justice. “Today we are releasing 1.7GB of data that used to belong to the United States Bureau of Justice, until now,” Anonymous wrote in a statement on its website. The hackers claim the file contains emails as well as “the entire database dump” from the DOJ website.

“We do not stand for any government or parties, we stand for freedom of people, freedom of speech and freedom of information,” the hackers wrote. ”We are releasing data to spread information, to allow the people to be heard and to know the corruption in their government. We are releasing it to end the corruption that exists, and truly make those who are being oppressed free.”

TomDispatch/TruthDig, By Chris Hellman & Mattea Kramer, May 22

Recent months have seen a flurry of headlines about cuts (often called “threats”) to the U.S. defense budget. Last week, lawmakers in the House of Representatives even passed a bill that was meant to spare national security spending from future cuts by reducing school-lunch funding and other social programs.

Here, then, is a simple question that, for some curious reason, no one bothers to ask, no less answer: How much are we spending on national security these days? With major wars winding down, has Washington already cut such spending so close to the bone that further reductions would be perilous to our safety?

In fact, with projected cuts added in, the national security budget in fiscal 2013 will be nearly $1 trillion—a staggering enough sum that it’s worth taking a walk through the maze of the national security budget to see just where that money’s lodged.

Chicago spent $1 million on riot control equipment in anticipation of the NATO summit, and funded, at unknown cost, a secret police control center where "officials from more than 40 different agencies sit side by side with a giant central screen before them". Bernard Harcourt, Julius Kreeger professor of law at the University of Chicago and chair of the political science department there, writes for the Guardian that "The Nato summit will come and go, but Mayor Emanuel has authorised a 'new normal' of militarised social control in Chicago."

First, it is astounding – but sadly, not surprising – that the City of Chicago would deny protest permits or make protest so difficult in Chicago because of alleged inconveniences to traffic and ordinary business. Our new Chicago lockdown belies any suggestion that the city cares about such inconveniences. While Mayor Emanuel has bent backwards for Nato, first amendment free speech receives dramatically less accommodation.

Second, this police state serves, in reality, as our new welfare state. The security mania represents our truly unique way of stimulating the economy, of employing piece labor, of creating government jobs and subsidized contracts. Just think of the amount of overtime pay that we are disbursing with all this policing. Instead of investing in schools and education, in job training, or in re-entry programs, this is how we invest in our future. And we never think of it as government welfare because it falls in that sacred space of security – because, essentially, of the American paradox of laissez-faire and mass punishment.

Third, and finally, all of this is, sadly, here to stay. Nato will come and go, but the new anti-protest laws, the new riot-gear, the two LRAD sound cannons, and all the normalization of this police state … that will be with us for a long time.

This is, I'd contend, in perfect tune with the Obama administration's continuation of the notion of the Imperial Presidency, which holds simply that if the President's doing it then it's not illegal and that the "elected monarch" has veto powers over the Constitution. Such a mindset stems from 1%-er dislocation from the people and is absolutely to be expected from members of the elite like Emmanuel too. If only we'd asked the damn question.

Eli Clifton | Washington | May 18

Think Progress - The House of Representatives this morning took a hard line against efforts by Democrats and libertarian Republicans to limit the president’s power to indefinitely detain terrorism suspects captured in the U.S.

An amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by Reps. Adam Smith (D-WA) and Justin Amash (R-MI) would have barred military detention of terrorism suspects arrested in the U.S. regardless of their nationality. Smith outlined the argument for his amendment last night:

What we’ve learned in the last 10 years is one power [the president] does not need the power to indefinitely detain or place in military custody people in the United States. Our justice system works.

But House Republicans hit back hard at the bipartisan amendment, attacking it as providing additional rights to foreign terrorists. This morning, the House defeated the Smith-Amash amendment in favor of a competing amendment sponsored by Reps. Jeff Landry (R-LA), Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Scott Rigell (R-VA). Their amendment, which passed this morning, prohibits the government from denying U.S. citizens their constitutional rights.

Oh, good, amendment explicitly upholds constitution!

A small step forward towards undoing all the harm done by fearmongering and jingoism in the last decade:

A U.S. judge on Wednesday blocked enforcement of a recently enacted law's provision that authorizes indefinite military detention for those deemed to have "substantially supported" al Qaeda, the Taliban or "associated forces."

U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest in Manhattan ruled in favor of a group of civilian activists and journalists who said they feared being detained under a section of the law, which was signed by U.S. President Barack Obama in December 2011.

"In the face of what could be indeterminate military detention, due process requires more," the judge said.

She added that it was in the public interest to reconsider the law so that "ordinary citizens are able to understand the scope of conduct that could subject them to indefinite military detention."

By issuing a preliminary injunction, the judge prevents the U.S. government from enforcing section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act's "Homeland Battlefield" provisions.

Washington Post In The Loop Blog, By Emily Heil, May 14

Seems no one is immune from the tender mercies of the TSA pat-down. First, we learned that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was subjected to a handsy search. And now we learn of the latest high-profile search-ee: former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Yeah, the guy who was once an advisor to presidents, the one who helped negotiate the end to the Vietnam War...and, oh yeah, he’s got a Nobel Peace Prize.

But not, apparently, in his pocket.

CNN, By Fareed Zakaria, May 6

Whatever you thought of President Obama's recent speech on Afghanistan, it is now increasingly clear that the United States is winding down its massive military commitments to the two wars of the last decade.

Former Director of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center Robert Grenier makes the case against a stepped-up drone campaign in Yemen over at Al Jazeera:

I do not claim deep knowledge of developments in Shabwa Privince, but when I hear significant numbers of tribal militants being referred to as al-Qaeda operatives, and AQAP, a small organisation dominated by non-Yemenis, being alleged to have political control of significant parts of Yemen, I react with some scepticism, and some suspicion.

One wonders how many Yemenis may be moved in future to violent extremism in reaction to carelessly targeted missile strikes, and how many Yemeni militants with strictly local agendas will become dedicated enemies of the West in response to US military actions against them. AQAP and those whom it trains and motivates to strike against civilian targets must continue to be resisted by the joint efforts of the civilised world. But the US would be wise to calibrate its actions in Yemen in such a way as to avoid making that obscure and relatively limited and containable threat into the Arabian equivalent of Waziristan.

the militarization of US counter-terrorism policy over the past decade has meant that turning a local problem group into one fixated on the "far enemy" of America, whether it be by occupation or drone strikes, is a regular occurence.

Greg Miller & Karen DeYoung | May 10

WaPo - The United States launched airstrikes in Yemen on Thursday that killed as many as seven militants, the second American missile attack in the country since the CIA and other spy agencies disrupted an al-Qaeda airline bomb plot, U.S. officials said.

The strike came as new details surfaced about the foiling of the plot, including the disclosure that the operative who posed as a willing suicide bomber and later turned the device over to authorities was a British citizen, according to Western officials.

BBC Newsnight, By Peter Taylor, May 9

Secret CIA video tapes of the waterboarding of Osama Bin Laden's suspected jihadist travel arranger Abu Zubaydah show him vomiting and screaming, the BBC has learned.

The tapes were destroyed by the head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, Jose Rodriguez.

In an exclusive interview for Newsnight, Rodriguez has defended the destruction of the tapes and denied waterboarding and other interrogation techniques amount to torture.

The CIA tapes are likely to become central to the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, at Guantanamo Bay.

...I think.

As you no doubt have heard by now, the US foiled a new and improved underwear bombing scheme dreamed up by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (apparently, Al Qaeda has a franchise operation.)

Jingoistic heel-clicking aside, the counterterror operation involved human intelligence and a double agent:

(CBS News) NEW YORK - It's a stunning revelation in the foiled plot to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner: The triggerman chosen by al Qaeda was actually a double agent who was working for the CIA and Saudi intelligence services.

The formerly-gagged FBI translator-turned-whistleblower's new memoir is 'a masterpiece revealing corruption and unaccountability in Washington, D.C.' and 'a rotten barrel of toxic waste that will sooner or later infect us all'...

The Brad Blog, By David Swanson, May 2

Sibel Edmonds' new book, Classified Woman, is like an FBI file on the FBI, only without the incompetence.

The experiences she recounts resemble K.'s trip to the castle, as told by Franz Kafka, only without the pleasantness and humanity.

I've read a million reviews of nonfiction books about our government that referred to them as "page-turners" and "gripping dramas," but I had never read a book that actually fit that description until now...

Anyone watching the news recently cannot be unaware that "cyber-war' is one of the new buzzwords in national security reporting, mostly because various government agencies are after larger slices of budget and bureaucratic power. So Mark Clayton's latest for the CS Monitor is interesting: "A major cyber attack is currently underway aimed squarely at computer networks belonging to US natural gas pipeline companies" (H/t Cheryl Rofer)

But I can't decide whether this story is about a serious threat to the pipeline control systems themselves, a serious attempt to do industrial espionage by someone who wants to know how the US does things in the NG pipeline business, or just over-inflated hype leaked for corridors-of-power reasons. This section in particular gives me pause:

Beyond indicating that multiple companies were targeted and some other systems compromised, neither the alerts nor the public notice indicate just how many companies have been infiltrated. The documents also do not indicate that any companies' pipeline operations – or their vital computerized industrial control systems that run pumps – have yet been affected.

But other cyber security experts familiar with the alerts warn that access to a company's corporate system can eventually allow a hacker to wind through a corporate network and into the vital industrial control processes. Those systems, if infiltrated, could allow hackers to manipulate pressure and other control system settings, potentially reaping explosions or other dangerous conditions.

"There's not enough information available yet to tell exactly what is the target or goal here," says Jonathan Pollet, founder of Red Tiger Security, who specializes in industrial control system security and who has worked extensively in the oil and gas industry. "But it's a concern because if they access the corporate network it's often just a short step to the next level and right into their control system network."

I've bolded what seems to me to be hype. What do you think? Real or threat over-inflation?

WaPo| Greg Miller| May 3

Newly released documents recovered from the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed show that al-Qaeda’s core leaders were divided over how to manage an emerging group of distant affiliates that showed little discipline or willingness to take direction.
* Bin Laden documents (PDF)

Gareth Porter:Finding Bin Laden: The Truth Behind the Official Story - Truthout has been able to reconstruct the real story of bin Laden's exile in Abbottabad, as well as how the CIA found him, thanks in large part to information gathered last year from Pakistani tribal and ISI sources by retired Pakistani Brig. Gen. Shaukat Qadir. But that information was confirmed, in essence, in remarks after the bin Laden raid by the same senior intelligence official cited above - remarks that have been ignored until now.

Somewhere out there, there should be a T-shirt that says "My government spent $150 billion on missile defense and all I got was this lousy Flash game."

Missile Defense has so far cost the US as much as the Apollo Project to put a man on the Moon did, and is still "highly fragile and brittle and will intercept warheads only by accident, if ever."

(H/t Martin Butcher)

60 Minutes, By Leslie Stahl, April 29

Jose Rodriguez has no regrets about the CIA using "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- methods that some consider torture - on suspected al Qaeda members detained and questioned after 9/11. Lesley Stahl interviews the former head of the CIA's Clandestine Service about waterboarding and other methods he says were essential to getting information from suspected terrorists, and he denies claims that these harsh measures caused detainees to provide false or unreliable information that misled the CIA. In fact, Rodriguez says that high-level detainees Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah provided their best information only after harsh treatment, a claim that the CIA's own investigator general has challenged.

Video and transcript at the link.

Kristin Rawls has a great piece up at GlobalComment on how the quick, tidy resolution of Ted Nugent's now-infamous insurrectionist meltdown on behalf of Mittens at this year's NRA convention stands in stark contrast to serious attention paid on the seemingly innocuous left-ish types that have been or are currently under federal surveillance.

Excerpts cannot do justice, but I think her conclusion deserves highlighting (with a strict caveat to, as they say, read the whole damn thing):

Ultimately, we know that government surveillance has increased tremendously since September 11, 2001 altogether. So, it is hard to make a definitive claim as to whether or not government investigations have a rightwing bias that specifically targets leftist activists. It seems as if the government may simply have stepped up its investigations of us all. But considering the magnitude of rightwing crime in the United States, the infiltration of vegan potlucks and peace groups seems pretty overzealous. Not only that, but the public money poured into such investigations seems, at best, wasteful. And in a time of debt crisis, surely we should be casting a critical gaze on this kind of federal spending. Maybe the question isn’t really: “Does government investigation have a rightwing bias?” Perhaps we should instead be asking, “Should the government be investigating today’s almost uniformly non-violent leftwing movements at all?”

Alas, such nagging, all-too inconvenient questions of government surveillance, civil liberties, & homeland (in)security are(still) entirely out-of-step with the noun-verb-9/11 DC zeitgeist -- domestically, at least (cough).

The Public Record, By Andy Worthington, April 14

On Monday, the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall University School of Law in New Jersey released a new report, “National Security Deserves Better: ‘Odd’ Recidivism Numbers Undermine the Guantánamo Policy Debate” (PDF), which analyzes the fundamental problems with the claims made by the Pentagon and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) regarding the numbers of alleged “recidivists” freed from Guantánamo — in other words, those who, in the words of the DNI, have been involved in “planning terrorist operations, conducting a terrorist or insurgent attack against Coalition or host-nation forces or civilians, conducting a suicide bombing, financing terrorist operations, recruiting others for terrorist operations, and arranging for movement of individuals involved in terrorist operations.”

As I have been explaining since May 2009, when the New York Times published a misleading front-page story claiming that 1 in 7 released prisoners had engaged in recidivism, there have been two main problems with the recidivism claims: firstly, that, over the last three years, little effort has been made to distinguish between “confirmed” and “suspected” cases of recidivism; and secondly that, as the claims became more outrageous in 2010 and 2011, with completely unsubstantiated allegations that 1 in 5 of the released prisoners were recidivists, and then 1 in 4, the mainstream media unquestioningly repeated these claims, even though they were not backed up with even a shred of evidence.

Tom Whitehead & Martin Beckford | Strasbourg, France | April 10

The Telegraph - In a landmark victory for the UK, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) said extraditing the terrorism “recruiting sergeant” Hamza and others would not lead to inhuman treatment in the US.

The Strasbourg court unanimously dismissed claims that conditions in American “supermax” jails were degrading but rather luxuries such as televisions, phone calls and arts and crafts “went beyond” what was provided in most European prisons.

One of the more extreme government abuses of the post-9/11 era targets U.S. citizens re-entering their own country, and it has received far too little attention. With no oversight or legal framework whatsoever, the Department of Homeland Security routinely singles out individuals who are suspected of no crimes, detains them and questions them at the airport, often for hours, when they return to the U.S. after an international trip, and then copies and even seizes their electronic devices (laptops, cameras, cellphones) and other papers (notebooks, journals, credit card receipts), forever storing their contents in government files. No search warrant is needed for any of this. No oversight exists. And there are no apparent constraints on what the U.S. Government can do with regard to whom it decides to target or why.

In an age of international travel — where large numbers of citizens, especially those involved in sensitive journalism and activism, frequently travel outside the country — this power renders the protections of the Fourth Amendment entirely illusory. By virtue of that amendment, if the government wants to search and seize the papers and effects of someone on U.S. soil, it must (with some exceptions) first convince a court that there is probable cause to believe that the objects to be searched relate to criminal activity and a search warrant must be obtained. But now, none of those obstacles — ones at the very heart of the design of the Constitution — hinders the U.S. government: now, they can just wait until you leave the country, and then, at will, search, seize and copy all of your electronic files on your return. That includes your emails, the websites you’ve visited, the online conversations you’ve had, the identities of those with whom you’ve communicated, your cell phone contacts, your credit card receipts, film you’ve taken, drafts of documents you’re writing, and anything else that you store electronically: which, these days, when it comes to privacy, means basically everything of worth.

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba | April 4

Al Jazeera - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other alleged co-conspirators face death penalty if convicted by military court.

The US has announced charges against Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on its territory, along with four other alleged plotters, vowing to seek the death penalty in the military trial.

The five suspects will face charges of terrorism, hijacking aircraft, conspiracy, murder in violation of the law of war and other counts.

Jason Leopold & Jeffrey Kaye | Washington | April 3

Truthout - In May of 2002, one of several meetings was convened at the White House where the CIA sought permission from top Bush administration officials, including then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, to torture the agency's first high-value detainee captured after 9/11: Abu Zubaydah.

The CIA claimed Zubaydah, who at the time was being held at a black site prison in Thailand, was "withholding imminent threat information during the initial interrogation sessions," according to documents released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in April 2009.

So, "attorneys from the CIA's Office of General Counsel [including the agency's top lawyer John Rizzo] met with the Attorney General [John Ashcroft], the National Security Adviser [Rice], the Deputy National Security Adviser [Stephen Hadley], the Legal Adviser to the National Security Council [John Bellinger], and the Counsel to the President [Alberto Gonzales] in mid-May 2002 to discuss the possible use of alternative interrogation methods that differed from the traditional methods used by the U.S."

Why Does The Department Of Homeland Security Need 450 MILLION Hollow Point Bullets?

What in the world is the DHS going to do with 450 million rounds? What possible event would ever require that much ammunition? If the United States was ever invaded, it would be the job of the U.S. military to defend the country, so that can't be it. So what are all of those bullets for? Who does the Department of Homeland Security plan to be shooting at?

..... Business Insider is also reporting that the Department of Homeland Security is seeking to buy 175 million rifle ammunition rounds.

..... Since Barack Obama first took office, gun sales in America have risen to extraordinary levels.

Overall, more than 10 million guns were sold in the United States during 2011.

According to Gallup, 41 percent of all Americans said that they owned a gun in 2010. But when that question was asked again in 2011, that number had risen to 47 percent. More at the link

Paul Harris | New York | March 29

The Guardian - A group political activists and journalists has launched a legal challenge to stop an American law they say allows the US military to arrest civilians anywhere in the world and detain them without trial as accused supporters of terrorism.

The seven figures, who include ex-New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, professor Noam Chomsky and Icelandic politician and WikiLeaks campaigner Birgitta Jonsdottir, testified to a Manhattan judge that the law – dubbed the NDAA or Homeland Battlefield Bill – would cripple free speech around the world.

They said that various provisions written into the National Defense Authorization Bill, which was signed by President Barack Obama at the end of 2011, effectively broadened the definition of "supporter of terrorism" to include peaceful activists, authors, academics and even journalists interviewing members of radical groups.

Ian Cobain | London | March 27

The Guardian - The US government shut down a series of court cases arising from a multimillion pound business dispute in order to conceal evidence of a damning intelligence failure shortly before the 9/11 attacks, MPs were told.

Moreover, the UK government is now seeking similar powers that could be used to prevent evidence of illegal acts and embarrassing failures from emerging in court, David Davis, the former shadow home secretary, told the Commons.

The Justice and Security green paper [PDF] being put forward by Ken Clarke's justice ministry has already faced widespread criticism from civil rights groups, media representatives and lawyers working within the secret tribunal system that hears terrorism-related immigration cases.