July 26, 2013| News | Lucy Steigerwald

06paul-blog480New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie recently trashed Sen. Rand Paul, and other members of the more freedom-friendly corner of the GOP (like Rep. Justin Amash and his noble effort to reign in the NSA). Christie, sounding like Rudy Giuliani circa 2007, said that pro-privacy folks like Paul need to stop all their dangerous libertarianish thoughts because it’s offensive to 9/11 victims and it endangers us all. Christie also spoke approvingly of both Bush and Obama’s security efforts. Terrorism, to the Gov., is still such a big threat that it justifies certain scary-sounding, privacy-violating programs. And he’s not alone in believing that nonsense.

It is nonsense. But what if it were true? What if terrorism was as big a threat as security hawks claim, and that we could — at least — believe that the NSA is working to protect the American people from being killed? What if the FBI was actually stopping more threats than it was inciting? And what if they and other law enforcement hadn’t failed to stop planned attacks from the Boston Bombing to 9/11? What if secret courts, secret laws, and secret interpretations really could be trusted because they’re “legal”? And what if the NSA only searched through the metadata of millions of Americans when they were really, really, looking for something serious? They need the haystack to find the needle, but maybe they really have no interest in a few million innocent needles?

Even if this narrative about national security and the level of threat presented by terrorism were true — and of course it isn’t — powerful people simply do not keep these serious violations of privacy under glass until the most dire emergency. Consider, for a moment, the drug war’s history in the decline of the Fourth Amendment.

In 1971, Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs and tested the waters with a DC bill that made no-knock raids legal on private homes. Some years later, Ronald Reagan stepped up that war, and unlike Nixon, most of the powers that Reagan claimed — and the Supreme Court frequently confirmed — were not ever taken away. The cop, court, and Constitutional drug war mess needs more detail than there is space here (check out Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop, as well as Antiwar’s interview with him for more of that history) but  really, once upon a time, when terrorism wasn’t keeping the paranoid up at night, a bunch of people decided that enemy number one was drugs. And no violation was too serious, no quarter was to be given in this fight. Sound familiar?

The effects of that decision to go to “war” can now be seen in the prison-industrial complex, militarized police and their mission creep, and our comatose Fourth Amendment.

Here are just a few figures: in 2012 87 percent of state and federal law enforcement wiretaps were over narcotics, with stats from the past decade showing similar numbers. ”Sneak and peak” warrants — legalized by the PATRIOT Act — between 2009 and 2010 were used for narcotics investigations 76 percent of the time. And what is the NYPD’s contentious “stop and frisk” policy if not a massive violation of the privacy of (mostly black and Hispanic) New Yorkers?

Previously at Antiwar I critiqued libertarian John Stossel’s bizarre refusal to admit that the NSA spying is dangerous. But Stossel did indeed have a point within the madness –the drug war started it. Not only are terror-fighting tools used to investigate drug crimes much of the time, but many privacy protections were already chipped away by the drug war decades before 9/11.

Recently Rand Paul pestered the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for clarification about their use of domestic drones. The FBI responded with a few details including that drones have been used for “eight criminal cases and two national security cases” since 2006.  The most notable thing mentioned in their report is that the FBI did not see fit to get a search warrant for their drone use, since the targets of their investigations didn’t have an expectation of privacy. This isn’t particularly surprising, more a depressing confirmation of what we would already have suspected.

As noted by The Verge, the Supreme Court ruled in Florida v. Riley (1989) — a drug war case! — that a warrant wasn’t necessary when the police wanted to use a helicopter to hover 400 feet above a suspect’s property. If the Fourth Amendment has withered in the face of the cops’ need to catch those damn weed growers, it’s difficult not to feel frightened at the prospect of cheap, quiet, drones in the thousands creeping into our airspace; technology getting ahead of any lingering protections the Fourth Amendment still offers. And there is no doubt that the same people now defending the NSA, wiretapping, and anything else done in the name of keeping us safe from big bad terrorists will not say a word when drones become the next tool in fighting the lunatic war on drugs.

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July 26, 2013| News | Eric Garris

Angela gave a concise explanation of the Antiwar.com lawsuit against the FBI to RT America this afternoon:

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July 25, 2013| News | John Glaser

Carl-Levin

Robert Golan-Vilella at The National Interest notes that the government has a long list of dangerous enemies threatening America, all of whom fit under the language of the 2001 AUMF. But…that list is classified.

A number of senators have pledged in recent months to update the 2001 AUMF, written to authorize the use of force against those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, on the grounds that it’s too broad and serves as a blank check to wage unlimited war against whatever groups of terrorists the government can haphazardly claim qualify.

At a Senate hearing in May, writes Golan-Vilella, “Senator Carl Levin asked the administration to provide the committee with an ‘existing list of groups that are affiliated with al Qaeda’ and to let the committee know when changes are made to the list, and the witnesses promised to do so.”

And now, according to former Bush administration legal adviser Jack Goldsmith, the Defense Department has provided that list to Levin. But it’s secret, so Levin can’t make it public – presumably the purpose behind his request.

Back in May, I laid out the reasons the government wants to keep the AUMF intact:

First, the 2001 AUMF was a wet dream for the Masters of War in Washington who yearn for the day when any and all constraints on their actions in the realm of “national security” would evaporate. It carries with it immense, unchecked power that they are wont to preserve.

Second, in order to continue to carry out their Imperial Grand Strategy, they need to perpetuate a bogeyman. Without a monster to destroy, the public is much less apt to grant the state carte blanche to make war at will and keep it secret.

In an interview last year, former Secretary of State Colin Powell lamented, in a moment of candor, the fall of the Soviet Union. He described, admittedly with some irony, how apparently remorseful he and others in the military establishment were that America “lost our best enemy.” He said it was “one of the biggest challenges” he “ever faced” when the Cold War ended. That is, when we became much safer as opposed to when we might have faced a new enemy.

Absent the pretext of the Soviet threat, the thinking goes, how will we justify the expanding military and national security state? Powell says of the trumped up Soviet “threat” in no uncertain terms, “we’ve got a good thing going here.” The system – the “whole structure,” as he calls it, far from aiming to eliminate threats, “depended on there being a Soviet Union that might attack us.”

I believe these all still stand. But it is doubly Orwellian that even the names of the groups that allegedly pose a threat to us are classified. It makes the government’s eagerness to perpetuate false bogeymen all the more transparent.

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July 25, 2013| News | John Glaser

US Navy fleet in Asia-Pacific

US Navy fleet in Asia-Pacific

One of the predictable consequences of Obama’s Asia-Pivot is that, by boosting support to all of China’s U.S.-allied neighbors, those countries are emboldened to stand up to China as an enemy and China is likewise emboldened to counter the onslaught. Needless to say, this makes conflict more likely.

The Washington Post:

China’s most daring adversary in Southeast Asia is, by many measurements, ill-suited for a fight. The Philippines has a military budget one-fortieth the size of Beijing’s, and its navy cruises through contested waters in 1970s hand-me-downs from the South Vietnamese.

From that short-handed position, the Philippines has set off on a risky mission to do what no nation in the region has managed to do: thwart China in its drive to control the vast waters around it.

So, tiny little Philippines is angling for a fight with China despite a military budget one-fortieth the size of Beijing’s. Are we surprised?

Throughout 2012, the U.S. increased its military and economic support for the Philippines government while at the same time expanding the American military presence in the country. This at a time when the Obama administration publicly pledges to support any U.S. ally that is threatened by China and vocally chastises Beijing for subtly staking claims to contested maritime territories. Undoubtedly, Manila got the right message.

But the militaristic response to 21st century China was not obvious to all Filipinos. “Analysts say the Philippines’ strategy, in standing up to Asia’s powerhouse, is just as likely to backfire as succeed,” the Post continues. “But it provides a crucial test case as smaller countries debate whether to deal with China as a much-needed economic partner, a dangerous maritime aggressor, or both.”

And there is the rub. Conceivably, China and its neighbors could be getting along great through further economic trade and interdependence. The same goes for the U.S.-China relationship, but Washington has instead aimed to turn peaceful economic exchange into a casus belli – and encouraged its smaller Asian allies to do the same.

Related: See my recent piece in The Washington Times, The Asia Pivot: Making an Enemy of China.

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July 24, 2013| News |

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July 24, 2013| News | Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

Not more than a year ago Lockheed Martin’s Bob Stevens was all but pulling at his hair and gnashing his teeth in anticipation of sequestration. Clearly doing the Republican warhawks’ bidding ahead of the presidential election, he warned that Lockheed may not be able to support U.S forces in the field and that working families might be devastated by layoffs — 123,000 in fact — if congress didn’t do something to stave off the $459 billion in prospective budget cuts over the next decade.

Stevens, who took home more than $23 million in compensation in 2011, wasn’t the only defense contractor CEO to play chicken little last year, but he was one of the most melodramatic, threatening to issue 123,000 layoff notices before the major contractor even scheduled any. He also joined an immense lobbying effort that peddled the hyper-narrative (based in part on this industry-generated report)  that sequestration would shave  1% off the U.S. gross domestic product, raise the unemployment rate by 0.7%, and kill 1 million jobs.

Well we knew the layoff notices were a kabuki dance from the beginning, and that was confirmed when Stevens’ abruptly withdrew the threat just before the election. We also got an inkling that things couldn’t be so bad when it was reported in April that CEOs from all these major contractors were getting raises, including Stevens, whose compensation went up to $27.5 million in 2012.

Now, according to The Washington Post this morning, we’ve learned that these defense contractors have been “weathering the federal budget sequester far more easily than they projected, in part because they have gradually eliminated jobs over the past few years in anticipation of spending cuts.”

That’s right, while they tried to keep our attention on the falling sky, these cry babies had been trimming budgets for years (plenty of people were reporting this, by the way) to whether the storm. The bloviation and bluster was all a political show. In fact, good old Lockheed reported $859 million in profit in the second quarter of 2013, a 10 percent increase year-over-year.  It also reported $1.6 billion in profit for the last six months ending in June, up 12 percent over the year before. In addition:

Lockheed Martin had predicted that sequestration would wipe out $825 million in revenue this year, but it no longer expects such a big hit. In fact, the company said, profit will be higher than initially projected.

Of course, none of the contracts that were already set before sequestration were affected, a small fact that also got lost amid the roar of lamentations inside the Beltway last summer and fall. So far, no major programs have been eliminated or big cuts exacted where it could really count. All that is still being deliberated with much hand wringing and more political theater. But for right now, the only ones who seem to be really suffering are the 650,000 civilian defense workers slapped with 11 days of unpaid leave, resulting in a 20 percent cut in their paychecks from now until September or maybe longer.

That includes people like LaWanda White, a DoD employee and single mom, who says she is struggling to keep up with her bills and had to seek help through the Federal Employee Education & Assistance Fund to pay the rent. Maybe she is in a better place than say, the Lockheed workers who had been laid off over the last five years, but she is infinitely worse off than CEO Bob Stevens and his multimillion dollar pay package.

Interestingly, The Washington Post story noted that while being at a standstill, the Beltway defense contractor job market is holding relatively steady.

“..the region and the industry are not experiencing anything close to the economic cataclysm that defense lobbyists warned about,” the paper said.

Yeah, the real pain may be “trickling down” as analysts note, but let’s face it, “trickling up” might be a better phrase right now. Basically, the whole thing just exposes the industry for what it is: a bunch of crybabies who turn blue to get what they want, and then play “baby alright now” when no longer politically necessary or when soothed and coddled by their nanny benefactors.

Yuck.

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