Jason Ditz / AntiWar.com & Olivier Knox / Yahoo News & Seumas Milne / The Guardian – 2013-10-25 01:53:38
NSA Chief: Reporters Must Be Stopped
Jason Ditz / AntiWar.com
(October 24, 2013) — NSA Chief Gen. Keith Alexander gave a long interview today with the Pentagon’s “Armed With Science” blog, calling on the world to find some way to stop international media outlets from reporting about his agency’s surveillance programs based on leaked documents.
“We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to do that,” Alexander insisted, saying that the ability of media outlets to report on the NSA “just doesn’t make sense” to him.
The focus of Alexander’s comments to the military blog was insisting that all media reports on the NSA were a “dramatic, convenient lie,” followed by an admonition for troops not to “give into the hype” and to trust the NSA unconditionally.
Alexander’s comments during the NSA scandal have mostly been blanket denials, and even after some of those denials have been proven flat out untrue he has stuck to that story. He seems to still be holding out hope that after months of confirmed reports based on official documents, everyone will somehow be convinced to forget about everything and just trust him.
Not the Quiet Car! Ex-NSA Chief Spills Secrets while Riding Amtrak?
Olivier Knox / Yahoo News
Oh, the things you hear on Amtrak’s Acela service! Screaming kids, complaints about Wi-Fi and — oh yeah — a former director of the National Security Agency and the CIA seemingly spilling secrets to reporters.
We learn this from the Twitter feed of Tom Matzzie, former Washington director of MoveOn.org Political Action, who sat near retired Gen. Michael Hayden. Matzzie’s tweets suggest that Hayden took calls from reporters digging into the ongoing NSA spy scandal and asking about President Barack Obama’s BlackBerry and CIA secret prisons overseas.
Hayden apparently insisted on being quoted anonymously.
“FAIL,” as they say.
Here is Matzzie’s story, as tweeted from Amtrak Acela 2170, which left Washington at 3 p.m.:
Former NSA spy boss Michael Hayden on Acela behind me blabbing “on background as a former senior admin official” Sounds defensive.
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
Hayden talking about a famous blackberry now.
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
Hayden was bragging about rendition and black sites a minute ago.
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
Michael Hayden on Acela giving reporters disparaging quotes about admin. “Remember, just refer as former senior admin” #exNSAneedsadayjob
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
On Acela: Michael Hayden was talking to Massimo Calabresi at TIME I am pretty sure. Does he tweet?
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
On Acela: former NSA spy boss Michael Hayden just ended last of handful of interviews bashing admin.
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
On Acela listening to former NSA spy boss Michael Hayden give “off record” interviews. I feel like I’m in the NSA. Except I’m in public.
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
On Acela: phone ringing. I think the jig is up. Maybe somebody is telling him I’m here. Do I hide?
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
New call. I am totally busted I think.
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
I think I’m safe. Just passed Philly. No rendition yet. Do I have the balls to ask him for a photo? #haydenacela
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
There is a faint smell of sulfur on the train. #Haydenacela
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
#HaydenAcela pic.twitter.com/BV7Y3QshqH
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
New call just came in.
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
On Acela:
Hayden’s comments to press were clearly about NSA spying on foreign allies. #haydenacela
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
Win pic.twitter.com/tsJHqjv1LM
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
For the record, I am not a reporter.
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
I just had a very nice conversation with Michael Hayden. He was a gentleman and we disagree.
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
For those asking, this was not the quiet car. So he wasn’t THAT guy.
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
On the pic. His office called him and then he graciously offered me an interview. We talked around the 4th amendment and foreign spying.
— Tom Matzzie (@tommatzzie) October 24, 2013
It’s the Spies, Not the Leaks, that Threaten our Security
Seumas Milne / The Guardian
(October 23, 2013) — The war on terror has been a boon to the British intelligence services. After decades in which they became notorious for “counter-subversion” operations against political activists and trade unionists, colluding with death squads in Northern Ireland and helping the US to overthrow elected governments around the world, the spooks have at last had a chance to play the good guys.
Instead of the seedy anti-democratic gang that plotted against a Labour prime minister, they can claim to be the first line of defence against indiscriminate attacks on the streets of Britain. MI5 has well over doubled in size in the past 10 years.
Glamorised beyond parody in TV dramas such as Spooks, the spying agencies’ uncheckable pronouncements about their exploits and supposed triumphs are routinely relayed by the media as fact. The same has been true in the US, but on a far larger canvas.
So faced with the avalanche of leaks from the National Security Agency and GCHQ about the epic scale of their blanket electronic surveillance, both at home and abroad, the masters of Anglo-American espionage have played the “national security” card for all it’s worth. The revelations of NSA contractor Edward Snowden in the Guardian have been a “gift” to terrorists, the head of MI5 Andrew Parker claimed, eagerly supported by the prime minister.
The leaks were the “most catastrophic loss to British intelligence ever”, insisted David Omand, the former head of GCHQ. They were cheered on by the trusties of the British press — a fertile recruiting ground for British intelligence and the CIA over many years. National security has been imperilled, they all warned, as Tory demands for the Guardian to be prosecuted have grown.
In reality, national security is a catchphrase so elastic as to be meaningless. As MI5 helpfully explains, government policy is “not to define the term, in order to retain the flexibility … to adapt to changing circumstances” — in other words, political expediency.
If it simply meant protecting citizens from bombs on buses and trains, of course, most people would sign up for that. But as the Snowden leaks have moved from capability to content, it’s been driven home that much of what NSA and GCHQ (virtually one organisation) are up to has nothing to do with terrorism or security at all, but, as might be expected, the exercise of naked state power to gain political and economic advantage.
In the past few days the French have discovered (courtesy of Le Monde) that the NSA harvested 70m digital communications in France in one month, with special focus on French-American telecoms firm Alcatel-Lucent, while the Mexicans have learned (via Der Spiegel) that their president’s emails were hacked into by US intelligence to “plan international investments” and strengthen US diplomatic leverage.
Something similar happened to Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff, just as world leaders were targeted at the G20, while India and Germany were among other countries treated to the full electronic harvest treatment. Terrorism was clearly well down the priority list.
The protests of French and other western governments, which of course have their own, less effective espionage capability and collude with the US across the board, are largely for public consumption.
France was among several European states that cravenly bowed to US pressure to force the Bolivian president Evo Morales’s aircraft to land this summer, in a hamfisted attempt to kidnap the elusive whistleblower Snowden.
But it is the scale and reach of the NSA-GCHQ operation — and the effective global empire it is used to police — that sets it apart. And when it comes to terrorism, the evidence is that the US and British intelligence agencies are fuelling it as much as fighting it.
Take drone attacks, which are Obama’s weapon of choice in the new phase of the war on terror. They are reckoned to have killed up to 3,613 (926 of them civilians, including 200 children) in Pakistan alone. Amnesty International this week argued that US officials should stand trial over evidence of war crimes in the Pakistan drone campaign. Human Rights Watch has made a similar case over the slaughter in Yemen.
The drone war is run by the CIA and US military. But, as the Snowden leaks confirm (this time in the Washington Post), the NSA is intimately involved in what are often anything but “targeted killings” — as is GCHQ, now facing legal action in London over war crimes brought by the son of a Pakistani victim of a 2011 drone attack. Drones have, as the New York Times put it, “replaced Guantánamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants”, cited as justification by jihadists for attacks on western cities.
The same goes for the role of US and British intelligence, serviced by the NSA and GCHQ, in a decade of torture and state kidnapping. As the evidence of MI5 and MI6 complicity with CIA black sites, “extraordinary rendition”, waterboarding and genital mutilation has built up — from Bagram to Guantánamo, Pakistan to Morocco — court case has followed police investigation. You might call it a recruitment “gift” to al-Qaida. But neither the agencies nor the politicians supposed to supervise them have yet been held to account.
Meanwhile, despite its multiple failures, the war on terror keeps expanding, spreading terror as it goes. The new front is Africa, where the US military is now involved in 49 out of 54 states. Two years after what was supposed to have been a successful intervention in Libya, the country is again on the brink of a new civil war, its prime minister begging to be rescued from the backlash over another US kidnapping.
It’s a democratic necessity that the Snowden leaks are used to bring some genuine accountability to the NSA-GCHQ machine and its lawless industrial-scale espionage. But to frame the controversy as a trade-off between security and privacy misses the wider picture.
The main western intelligence agencies are instruments of global dominance, whose role in the rest of the world has a direct impact on their own citizens. It’s not the revelations that threaten our security, but the agencies and their political masters themselves.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
