“Congress, Be Careful What You Wish For”: For Far Too Many Lawmakers, It’s So Much Easier To Criticize Than Govern
The funny thing about a dog that chases a car? Sometimes it catches the car and has no idea what to do next.
Over the last several days, members of Congress have spoken out with a variety of opinions about U.S. policy towards Syria, but lawmakers were in broad agreement about one thing: they wanted President Obama to engage Congress on the use of military force. Few expected the White House to take the requests too seriously.
Why not? Because over the last several decades, presidents in both parties have increasingly consolidated authority over national security matters, tilting practically all power over the use of force towards the Oval Office and away from the legislative branch. Whereas the Constitution and the War Powers Act intended to serve as checks on presidential authority on military intervention abroad, there’s been a gradual (ahem) drift away from these institutional norms.
That is, until this afternoon, when President Obama stunned everyone, announcing his decision to seek “authorization” from a co-equal branch of government.
It’s one of those terrific examples of good politics and good policy. On the former, the American public clearly endorses the idea of Congress giving its approval before military strikes begin. On the latter, at the risk of putting too fine a point on this, Obama’s move away from unilateralism reflects how our constitutional, democratic system of government is supposed to work.
Arguably the most amazing response to the news came from Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the chair of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterintelligence & Terrorism, and a member of the House Intelligence Committee:
“President Obama is abdicating his responsibility as commander-in-chief and undermining the authority of future presidents. The President does not need Congress to authorize a strike on Syria.”
This is one of those remarkable moments when a prominent member of Congress urges the White House to circumvent Congress, even after many of his colleagues spent the week making the exact opposite argument.
The next question, of course, is simple: now that Obama is putting Congress on the spot, what’s likely to happen next? Now that the dog has caught the car it was chasing, what exactly does it intend to do?
Lawmakers, in theory, could cut short their month-long break, return to work, and consider their constitutional obligations immediately. That almost certainly won’t happen, at least not the lower chamber — as my colleague Will Femia reported earlier, House Republican leaders have said they’re prepared to “consider a measure the week of September 9th.” There are reports Senate Democratic leaders may act sooner, but no formal announcement has been made.
The dirty little secret is that much of Congress was content to have no say in this matter. When a letter circulated demanding the president seek lawmakers’ authorization, most of the House and Senate didn’t sign it — some were willing to let Obama do whatever he chose to do, some didn’t want the burden of responsibility. Members spent the week complaining about the president not taking Congress’ role seriously enough, confident that their rhetoric was just talk.
It spoke to a larger problem: for far too many lawmakers, it’s so much easier to criticize than govern. In recent years, members of Congress have too often decided they’re little more than powerful pundits, shouting from the sidelines rather than getting in the game.
It’s one of the angles to today’s news that’s so fascinating — Obama isn’t just challenging Congress to play a constructive role in a national security matter, the president is also telling lawmakers to act like adults for a change. They’re federal lawmakers in the planet’s most powerful government, and maybe now would be a good time to act like grown-ups who are mindful of their duties.
In his first inaugural address, Obama said, “[I]n the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.” For the last four-and-a-half years, much of Congress ignored this call. Today, members received a striking reminder.
Yes, Congress is a hapless embarrassment. It can’t pass a budget; it can’t pass a farm bill; and it can barely manage to keep the government’s lights on. But institutional responsibilities don’t fade away just because radicalized GOP lawmakers are struggling through a post-policy phase.
There is a real possibility that Congress will simply decline to give the president the authorization he seeks. I suspect Obama will get the votes he needs, but note that Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), two senators who never saw a country they weren’t tempted to bomb, issued a statement this afternoon that read:
“We believe President Obama is correct that the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons requires a military response by the United States and our friends and allies. Since the President is now seeking Congressional support for this action, the Congress must act as soon as possible.
“However, we cannot in good conscience support isolated military strikes in Syria that are not part of an overall strategy that can change the momentum on the battlefield, achieve the President’s stated goal of Assad’s removal from power, and bring an end to this conflict, which is a growing threat to our national security interests. Anything short of this would be an inadequate response to the crimes against humanity that Assad and his forces are committing. And it would send the wrong signal to America’s friends and allies, the Syrian opposition, the Assad regime, Iran, and the world — all of whom are watching closely what actions America will take.”
In other words, McCain and Graham realize Obama is eyeing narrow, limited military intervention, and they’re outraged — they want a broader conflict with a massive U.S. role. They may well vote against a measure on Syria because it doesn’t go far enough in their eyes.
And that’s certainly their right. Others will oppose strikes for progressive reasons. Others still endorse the White House strategy.
The point is, the people’s elected representatives will have a debate, which is exactly what it should do. It won’t be pretty, but it’s how the United States is supposed to operate. Congress has clear responsibilities — whether lawmakers want them or not — and it’s time they exercise them.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 31, 2013
“Just Do As I Did”: Did Donald Rumsfeld Counsel President Obama To Lie So As To Create The Justification For Bombing Syria?
Every now and then, one sees something happen right before one’s eyes that defies the laws of time, space, reality and reason. Such a moment occurred yesterday during a truly remarkable appearance by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on Neil Cavuto’s Fox Fox Business News program.
During the interview, Rumsfeld appeared to criticize the Obama Administration for failing to present a supportable argument as to why an attack on Syria is in our nation’s best interest.
“There really hasn’t been any indication from the administration as to what our national interest is with respect to this particular situation,” said Rumsfeld.
On the surface, it would appear that Rumsfeld’s criticism was meant to remind the President that—before tossing in those Tomahawk missiles—he needs to present the American people (who largely oppose any American involvement in Syria) with a solid explanation as to why it is in our nation’s best interest to become involved with the Syrian civil war.
I actually agree with the substance of Rumsfeld remarks on their face. While there is nothing to confirm that President Obama has yet to make a decision to take military action in Syria, it is important that the public know all of the facts and be privy to the administration’s thinking should the President ultimately decide to become embroiled in yet more Middle East madness.
However, I say that I agree with Rumsfeld’s remarks “on their face” because I find it nearly impossible to believe that the one time Secretary of Defense would dare to offer such a remark—given his own stunningly horrendous track record on the subject—unless he had another motive entirely in offering such advice to the President—a motive I would likely not agree with in any way whatsoever.
When one has led one of the most heinous conspiracies in modern American history—a conspiracy to create such a justification for war out of whole cloth and lies for the purpose of tricking the country into supporting an unnecessary invasion—I don’t think it unreasonable to expect that this individual should forever waive the right to advise presidents, politicians or the local street sweeper on such matters. This is particularly true when that individual’s efforts to fabricate and sell a justification for war has led to the death, disfigurement or disability of thousands of Americans while wasting trillions of taxpayer dollars in the process.
Donald Rumsfeld is the perfect embodiment of such an individual and he must know it—so much so that it would seem inconceivable that a man who has committed the crimes against his fellow Americans that Donald Rumsfeld has committed could possibly have the hubris to appear on TV to advise a sitting president on the importance of justifying military action.
That is, unless Rumsfeld had something very different in mind.
Maybe Donald Rumsfeld was attempting to send President Obama a very different message—if you can’t provide the country with a fact-based, valid justification for bombing Syria in retribution for the Assad government’s gassing its own citizens in the dead of night, then do as I did and get busy creating enough facts to make it look good.
After all, who knows how to fabricate a justification for war better than Donald Rumsfeld?
In case you’ve forgotten, here are but a few of Rumsfeld’s greatest hits—
As recounted by former Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, the first order of business during the Bush Administration’s very first national security meeting was toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein. According to O’Neill, the discussion was “all about finding a way to do it. The president saying, “Go find me a way to do this.”
Bush didn’t need to tell Donald Rumsfeld twice. The record is all too clear that the Secretary of Defense gladly took up his boss’s challenge and went looking for a story he could sell to the country in order to take out Saddam Hussein.
When the 9-11 attacks happened, Rumsfeld saw his opportunity.
Before long, we were told that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he would use against American interest if we failed to topple his regime. Of course, no such weapons have ever been located.
Then we were introduced to the lie purporting that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium-rich yellowcake from Nigeria in furtherance of his plans to create atomic weapons to be used against American interests—despite ample, proven factual evidence that this was never the case.
And, of course, the greatest hit of them all, Rumsfeld and friends sought to convince us that Saddam was somehow behind the 9/11 attack despite it being crystal clear to the Department of Defense and the remainder of the government that this was never the case.
While the record is clear that Rumsfeld and Cheney sought to tie Saddam to the 9-11 attack within hours of the first plane slamming into the World Trade Center, many supporters of Rumsfeld continue to claim that this was never the case. Yet, the proof of this effort has always been available for all to see, memorialized in writing in the March 18, 2003 letter from President Bush to Congress seeking authorization to use force against Iraq.
“(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”
So outrageous is the notion that Donald Rumsfeld would appear on television and presume to offer his counsel on the importance of the administration setting forth a legitimate case to engage in military action before doing so, one struggles to understand how the irony and stomach churning result of Rumsfeld’s appearance could possibly escape him or anyone else.
Accordingly, a sane individual is left to conclude that either Donald Rumsfeld is either the most despicably clueless man in America—a real possibility, I grant you—or that he was trying to tell the current occupant of the White House to do as he did—if you want to go to war, just lie.
Either way, Donald Rumsfeld has no standing nor right to speak a word on the subject of justifying military action unless it is to provide the nation with a full confession of his own terrible sins. To presume otherwise is an unspeakable offense to the American public, particularly when it comes to those who lost loved ones in a well-packaged, falsely justified and wholly unnecessary war based solely on Donald Rumsfeld’s lies.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, August 29, 2013
“And Then There Were Three”: Was A Documentary Filmmaker The ‘Mastermind’ Behind The Snowden Leaks?
Peter Maass of The New York Times has published a long article detailing how documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras helped Edward Snowden leak thousands of classified documents detailing the National Security Agency’s global surveillance apparatus.
What it makes clear is that Poitras’ experience protecting her information enabled Snowden to begin providing documents, and her skills as a filmmaker facilitated him identifying himself.
Basically, Poitras had a much larger role in Snowden’s leaks than previously known. Here’s what we learned:
“I keep calling [Poitras] the Keyser Soze of the story, because she’s at once completely invisible and yet ubiquitous,” Greenwald, referring to the character in “The Usual Suspects” played by Kevin Spacey, a mastermind masquerading as a nobody, told Maass.
When Greenwald began conversing with Snowden in April after he had met with Poitras in New York and installed encryption software on his computer. (Poitras began speaking with Snowden in January, and he got a job as a NSA contractor for Booz Allen in March.)
At that point, Maass writes, their work “was organized like an intelligence operation, with Poitras as the mastermind.”
Greenwald said of Poitras: “None of this would have happened with anything near the efficacy and impact it did, had she not been working with me in every sense and really taking the lead in coordinating most of it.”
Poitras wouldn’t say when Snowden began sending her documents, but she initially received many more than Greenwald (who received about 20).
In May “Snowden sent encrypted messages telling the two of them to go to Hong Kong” and told them that he wanted to go public with his identity.
Glenn Greenwald discovered the top secret order compelling Verizon to hand over all of its call data to the government during the flight to Hong Kong.
Poitras and Greenwald didn’t speak with Snowden between parting ways after he outed himself on June 9 in Hong Kong and early July. He had traveled to Moscow on June 23.
So it’s now clear that the Snowden saga wouldn’t have played out as it has without Poitras.
The article also indirectly touches on a primary mystery: What happened to Snowden between the time he outed himself and when he got on a plane to Moscow two weeks later?
On June 23, with the help of an Ecuadorian travel document obtained through WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Snowden landed in the jurisdiction of Russia’s intelligence services (i.e. FSB). He has since been granted temporary asylum and began establishing his life in Russia.
During this time he has been speaking with Poitras and Greenwald — he answered questions from Maass over encrypted chat — but otherwise he has been lying low while his FSB-linked Russian lawyer has been speaking for him.
Consequently, the significance of Snowden’s arrival in Russia is still unknown.
By: Michael Kelley, Business Insider, August 13, 2013
“Pleading Ignorance”: Congress Can’t Pretend It Didn’t Know About NSA Surveillance
Having been, at one place or another in my career, on each side of the perennial debate in Washington about “who knew what and when,” I knew it was a matter of time before we started hearing it about the leaked NSA operations.
Since leaving government, I have written before about the weird dynamics of “briefing” Congress on sensitive operations, e.g., Nancy Pelosi’s claim that she didn’t know about CIA’s program of “enhanced interrogations” during the Bush Administration. Now, and perhaps ironically, we have a spate of Republicans saying they knew little or nothing of the NSA operations
So, what’s the real story behind this typical Washington play to the media?
The media, of course, has a field day because on any day, they can get someone in Congress who wants to get their face on TV to say most anything – this whips up the hysteria that gives the story legs.To them, it’s media Nirvana – it’s the Trayvon Martin case of national security, and the best thing since the “torture” scandal.
Here is what’s behind all this political smoke:
There are some traditional Republican vs. Democrat tensions at work, in that it’s an opportunity for Republicans to criticize a Democratic President.
The NSA operations are very awkward for many Democrats to support (and many don’t) because of their liberal views on personal liberties and conciliatory approaches to national security.
Likewise, Republicans – who traditionally are more aggressive in national security matters – are also reluctant to support a Democratic administration, even though they may agree with the NSA operations.
The “tea party” faction of the Republican Party opposes the NSA operations – and as such is aligned with the most liberal Democrats on the issue. Strange bedfellows indeed.
Members of the two intelligence committees, Republican and Democrat, seem generally to support the NSA operations – and they also seem to know the most about them. They should.
However, complaints that “we didn’t know about this” are now being heard from both congressional Republicans and Democrats who are not on the intelligence committees.
Coming, perhaps, are internal divisions within the intelligence committees, some Republican-Democrat spats and some between the committee leaderships and rank and file committee members. This is awkward for the intelligence committee leaderships.
The lawyers at the Department of Justice, are – uncomfortably perhaps – in bed with each other on the NSA ops, because the programs were started in the Bush administration and continued into the Obama administration. And the president himself has supported the programs in every opportunity he has had to talk about them. He clearly believes that privacy and security are in proper balance with the NSA operations – or at least not out of balance.
So, who (probably) knew what and when about the compromised NSA program?
Some relevant background: Ever since Watergate, the Church and Pike Committees, the creation of the intelligence committees and the enactment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (by the Democrats, FYI) in the 70’s, there have been various legal requirements for the intelligence community to keep the Congress informed about what they are doing. And the Congressional Seniors, often called the “Gang of Eight” (majority and minority leaders of each house and majority and minority members of the intelligence committees), get briefed in more detail on the most sensitive intelligence activities and operations.
Now, put yourself in the place of the directors of the various intelligence agencies. If you have any political sense at all (and you wouldn’t be a director if you didn’t), you are going to tell all about your agency’s various activities and operations, including all the risks – at least to the gang of eight. This way no one can later accuse you of withholding information when one of these sensitive programs goes south or is compromised. And, because the most sensitive activities and operations are often the most risky, the odds of failure or compromise are correspondingly high.
So, we can assume that – at the very least – the gang of eight was fully briefed on the NSA operations. And we can also assume that any other member of the intelligence committees who expressed interest in the programs would have likewise had a complete briefing, including on-site briefings by agency technicians, if such were requested.
How about an ordinary member of Congress who was interested in these programs? They can also get briefings if they request them, and should approach their own party leaderships if they want additional information, or go to the leaderships of their house’s intelligence committee. Are these briefings often complex, technical and time consuming? Yes, for sure.
However, the suggestion that information is somehow being withheld from them is, frankly, silly, just as it was for Pelosi, a 10-plus year member of the gang of eight and a former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, to say that she didn’t know about the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program.
They know. They may wish they didn’t when the story hits the news, but they know. In fact, it’s to the administration’s advantage – whether Republican or Democrat – that they know all the details. In short, they are all in this boat together, whether they like it or not.
By: Daniel Gallington, U. S. News and World Report, August 12, 2013
“A Self Styled Decider”: Edward Snowden Got Everything Wrong
Edward Snowden is now out of his limbo at Moscow’s airport, presumably ensconced in some Russian dacha, wondering what the next phase of his young life will bring. Having spent 30 years in the intelligence business, I fervently hope the food is lousy, the winter is cold, and the Internet access is awful. But I worry less about what happens to this one man and more about the damage Snowden has done — and could still do — to America’s long-term ability to strike the right balance between privacy and security.
Ever since Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency, leaked top-secret material about its surveillance programs, he and the U.S. government have locked horns about the nature of those programs.
But those following the Snowden saga should understand two key points. First, though many things need to be kept secret in today’s dangerous world, the line between “secret” and “not secret” is fuzzy rather than stark, and if the goal is security, the harsh truth is that we should often err toward more secrets rather than fewer. Second, despite the grumbling from Snowden and his admirers, the U.S. government truly does make strenuous efforts not to violate privacy, not just because it respects privacy (which it does), but because it simply doesn’t have the time to read irrelevant emails or listen in on conversations unconnected to possible plots against American civilians.
Incidents like the Snowden affair put my former colleagues in the intelligence community in an impossible position. Yes, the official explanations about the virtues of data-collection efforts can sound self-justifying and vague. But they’re still right. I know firsthand that Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, is telling the truth when he talks about plots that have been preempted and attacks that have been foiled because of intelligence his agency collected. I know because I was on the inside, I have long held security clearances, and I participated in many of the activities he describes.
I spent years in the middle of the effort to identify, disentangle, and ultimately attack Al Qaeda. We didn’t operate in secrecy because we were ashamed. We operated in the dark because we had to. Al Qaeda and its affiliates study our actions. They learn from our mistakes. America is safer because we’ve made a point of understanding their methods better than they understand ours.
I understand the trade-offs here. But the intelligence community isn’t keeping things from the American people because we don’t trust them, but rather because once important security information is out there, anyone can access it, including those who would do us harm.
That’s why I find the Snowden controversy so frustrating. I realize many Americans don’t trust their government. I wish I could change that. I wish I could tell people the amazing things I witnessed during my 30 years in the CIA, that I’ve never seen people work harder or more selflessly, that for little money and long hours, people took it for granted that their flaws would be scrutinized and their successes ignored. But I’ve been around long enough to know that deep-rooted distrust of government is immune to stories from people like me. The conspiracy buffs are too busy howling in protest at the thought that their government could uncover how long they spent on the phone with their dear aunt.
Let me break this to you gently. The government is not interested in your conversations with your aunt, unless, of course, she is a key terrorist leader. More than 100 billion emails were sent every day last year — 100 billion, every day. In that vast mass of data lurk a few bits that are of urgent interest and vast terabytes of tedium that are not. Unfortunately, the metadata (the phone numbers, length of contact, and so forth, but not the content of the conversations) that sketch the contours of a call to your family member may fall into the same enormous bucket of information that includes information on the next terrorist threat. As Jeremy Bash, the former chief of staff of the CIA, memorably put it, “If you’re looking for a needle in the haystack, you need a haystack.”
Unfortunately, during the Snowden affair, many news outlets have spent more time examining ways the government could abuse the information it has access to while giving scant mention to the lengths to which the intelligence community goes to protect privacy. We have spent enormous amounts of time and effort figuring out how to disaggregate the important specks from the overwhelming bulk of irrelevant data.
This is done under tight and well-thought-out strictures. I witnessed firsthand the consequences of breaking the privacy rules of my former organization, the National Counterterrorism Center. As the center’s deputy director, I had to fire people, good people, and remove others from their posts for failing to follow the rules about how information could be accessed and used. It didn’t happen often, and it was never a malicious attempt to gather private information. We had mandatory training and full-time staffers to supervise privacy regulations. We used precious resources to hire lawyers and civil liberties experts to oversee our efforts. And on those few occasions when we made mistakes, the punishments were swift and harsh.
Yes, some things that are classified probably don’t need to be. That may undermine public trust and dilute our ability to protect the data that really need protecting. But some things — especially U.S. sources and methods — must be kept secret. Snowden didn’t offer fresh insight about a massive policy failure. Rather, he took upon himself the authority to decide what tradecraft the intelligence community needs to keep his fellow citizens safe. Sadly, Snowden has captured the public’s imagination and attention, and the government’s reaction now seems too little, too late and too reactive. But the intelligence community — always a less sympathetic protagonist than a self-styled whistle-blower — actually has a good story to tell about how seriously the government takes privacy issues. We should tell it.
By: Andrew Liepman, Senior analyst at Rand Corp., was a career CIA officer; Former Deputy Director of the National Counterterrorism Center: Op-Ed Columnist, The Los Angeles Times, August 10, 2013
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