“The Buffoon Speaks Again”: John McCain Says Ignorant, Belligerent Things, Press Swoons
I’ll admit that I know next to nothing about Ukrainian politics. And when it comes to the current crisis there, I don’t have any brilliant ideas about how the United States could solve this problem, but that’s partly because the United States probably can’t solve this problem. My limited knowledge and lack of transformative ideas puts me on equal footing with John McCain. Yet for some reason, McCain is once again all over the news, now that the situation in Kiev is turning uglier by the hour. What does McCain have to say? Well, he believes that it’s all Barack Obama’s fault. “This is the most naive president in history,” he said, citing as evidence the fact that five years ago, the Obama administration said it wanted to “reset” relations with Russia. Got ’em there, John. Obviously, if a certain someone was president, and he’s not naming any names here, this whole thing could be wrapped up in an afternoon.
What does McCain actually think we should do about Ukraine? We’ll get to that in a moment. But if you had to sum up John McCain’s foreign policy beliefs in a single word, that word would probably be “Grrrr!” Whatever the situation is, McCain’s view is always that we should be tougher than whatever the White House is doing. This applies to both Republican and Democratic presidents. If we’re already bombing somebody, McCain’s answer to any challenge is that we should bomb harder. If we haven’t yet commenced action but are seriously thinking about it, he thinks we should start bombing. If we’re engaging in diplomacy, McCain thinks we should ditch all that talk, which is for pussies anyhow, and get “tough” with whoever it is that needs getting tough with.
That is, I promise you, the extent of the sophistication of McCain’s foreign policy thinking. Despite the fact that he is regularly lauded by the reporters who have worshipped him for so long as an “expert” in foreign policy with deep “knowledge” and “experience,” I have never heard him say a single thing that demonstrated any kind of understanding of any foreign country or foreign crisis beyond what you could have gleaned from watching a three-minute report on the Today show. And this one? Well, McCain’s got the solution: “This thing could easily spiral out of control into a major international crisis,” he says. “The first thing we need to do is impose sanctions on those people who are in leadership positions.” You mean, Senator, what the Obama administration already did? Or the ones they’re preparing with our EU allies?
Once somebody clues McCain in to that, you can bet he’ll come back and say that it isn’t tough enough, and we have to get tougher. And dozens of media outlets will run stories titled “McCain Calls for Tougher Stance Toward Ukraine,” as though he were some kind of wise and influential foreign policy voice, and not a buffoon.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 21, 2014
“The Turbulence Of The Post-Soviet Period”: Sochi’s Opening Ceremony Forgot To Mention A Few Things About Russian History
It’s fair to say that by the time the opening ceremonies began last night at 20:14, they were facing an uphill battle to impress. Russia, via Western journalists, had shown the world just how very corrupt and incompetent it is: $51 billion and years of preparation yielded upside-down toilet lids and yellow water and busted-through bathroom doors made of cardboard. There’s even a popular hashtag for the debacle: #SochiProblems.
And yet, the Russians put on a lush and wonderful show. It was grand pageantry and exquisitely choreographed theater, the kind the Russians have been so exceptional at for a century. The giant figure skating stuffed animals were a bit weird, “vodka” was missing from the alphabet of Russian cultural treasures that opened the show, and there was only one glitch to speak of: only four of the snowflakes turned into Olympic rings, a muck-up the Russians managed to fix via spliced rehearsal footage from the rehearsal. But on the whole, it was yet another exhibit, if any were needed, in the long show window proving the fantastic might of Russian artistry.
But the show was a very specific view of Russia, one that glossed over some of the cruelest parts of its history. Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg, for instance, was all ships and marching cadets, without the bones and swamp on which the city was built. World War II, which is a hallowed, painful spot for all Russians merited just a sentence on the destruction—”the scariest hour in Russia’s 1000 year history”—and some searchlights slicing through the darkness. The Russian Revolution got the mixed treatment it deserved: it was portrayed as a gathering snow storm over the sumptuous imperial waltz of tsarism broken through by a locomotive glowing red as it screamed into the stadium. The benefits of the Revolution were praised, and its costs received an elliptically diplomatic acknowledgment: “The color red reigns, even though it is the color of blood,” the announcer intoned dramatically. “The country is galloping forward, but at what cost?” Early Soviet history was all gorgeous red constructivism and machinery, the perfect ode to the revolution in technology and the arts that it brought to the country. Malevich and the Constructivists were lauded, even though the Revolution that enabled them eventually turned on them and labeled their art counter-revolutionary.
This, by the way, is a curious, bitterly ironic element of contemporary Russian pride in its artistic figures. These days, Aeroflot planes are named for the poet Osip Mandelstam, who was brutally murdered by the state in 1938. So too the opening ceremony praised Leo Tolstoy, who became an outcast for giving up his landowner status. It reveled in Sergei Diaghilev, the flamboyant ballet master, who stayed abroad after the Revolution and whom the new Soviet state condemned in perpetuity. The opening of the opening gave the letter “N” in the alphabet to Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote his most famous works in English and outside a country where it was too dangerous for a son of the aristocracy to remain. When showing the post-War period, the ceremony showed the stilyagi in their poodle skirts, swinging and boogie-woogie-ing. They too were condemned for their emulation of Western “bourgeois” trends. And so on and so forth.
The spirit carried over into the march of the athletes, where the announcers on state-owned Channel 1, the biggest Russian channel, tried to take credit for every athlete with any Russian heritage, though, of course, there are usually profound economic and political reasons that so many millions of Russians—like me, for example—ended up living not in Russia, but in the West. (The announcers also took credit for the hats of the British team—”those are our Russian hats!”—but that’s another story.)
One glaring omission throughout the parade of Russian culture was any pretense of cultural diversity. The announcers importantly declared how big Russia is—”the biggest country in the world, as big as the ocean”—and that it contains multitudes, “180 nations, each with their own culture and language,” but we saw only one of them: the ethnic Russians. The world saw only traditional Slavic garb, with its lush brocade and big head pieces (kokoshniki), but nothing of the lezginka, the dance of the North Caucasus, or, say, the throat singing of Tuva. Putin is, after all, a Soviet man, and in the Soviet Union, the Russians were the first among the brothers of all the Soviet nations.
Missing also was the post-Communist period, the period that created Vladimir Putin. The world did not see how Russians see themselves today, but only that, even now, they view themselves as products of their history, forged in the cruel smelter of the centuries. It is a deft way of glossing over the turbulence of the painful, post-Soviet period, one that has produced very little of the kind of art and music and national treasure that Russia can flaunt before the world. (In fact, we did see modern Russia—in the upside-down toilet lids.)
And this is the cornerstone of Putin’s Russia: a historically significant nation but one that is still climbing back up to its historic heights after a historic fall, one that has many nations but of which one is dominant. Throughout Putin’s reign, this vision has been brought to life by his main showman, Konstantin Ernst, the head of Channel 1 and the director of the Opening ceremony. Joshua Yaffa wrote in The New Yorker of Ernst’s vision:
Programming on Channel One, Floriana Fossato, who worked on media projects in Moscow in the aughts and now studies Russian television at University College London, said, showed “people surviving a cruel but, to a certain extent, necessary system.” Above all, Fossato told me, Russia was shown as a heroic nation. Viewers could hear about some of the country’s mistakes but remain secure that, as she put it, “we didn’t waste our lives.” The picture onscreen should be grand, proud, and, most important, attractive.
And Ernst achieved it, this time, for a wider audience.
By: Julia Ioffe, The New Republic, February 8, 2014
The Reality Versus The Imaginary”: Does It Matter If Edward Snowden Is A Russian Spy?
We already know that Edward Snowden is dependent on the Russian government to keep him out of reach of the American justice system. But accusations have recently been made that Snowden’s relationship with the Kremlin goes much deeper than we previously suspected.
On Sunday, House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) strongly suggested that Edward Snowden stole NSA secrets with help from Russia, though Rogers declined to provide any evidence to back that suggestion.
The following day, The New Republic‘s Sean Wilentz published a harsh profile chronicling the backgrounds of Snowden and his muckraker allies Glenn Greenwald and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, discerning a common thread of “paranoid libertarianism” that has paradoxically intertwined these self-proclaimed defenders of human rights with a brutal Russian autocracy.
And while Wilentz stops short of accusing Snowden of espionage, Business Insider‘s Michael Kelley also explored Snowden’s ties to Russia, eventually asking, “Is the fact that his life is now overseen by a Russian security detail more than an extraordinary coincidence?”
It bears repeating: No one has produced evidence that Snowden was on Russia’s payroll when he stole the NSA’s secrets. But suppose he was — would it matter?
To answer that question, we need to separate two different controversies surrounding the world’s most famous whistleblower.
First, to resolve the debate over whether Snowden deserves some form of clemency, his motivations and actions are integral. If it is found that he passed national security secrets to Russia or China, that would completely outweigh whatever benefits he has provided to Americans in better understanding the scope of NSA surveillance. Since that question is far from resolved, the New York Times editorial board and others are premature in promoting clemency.
Indeed, Slate‘s Fred Kaplan, in his argument against clemency, flagged that Snowden has not leaked “any documents detailing the cyber-operations of any non-allied countries, especially Russia or China,” even though he presumably would have had access to NSA information regarding their operations. He even leaked information about American operations against the Taliban, which, as Wilentz noted, has nothing to do with protecting American civil liberties, but instead helps Snowden and his allies “damage their bugaboo national security behemoth.”
As Wilentz argued, Snowden, Greenwald, and Assange possess an extreme libertarianism, driving them to undermine American foreign policy. The three, wrote Wilentz, “have unleashed a torrent of classified information with the clear intent of showing that the federal government has spun out of control…an imperial power, drunk on its hegemonic ambitions.”
On the flip side, if Snowden could somehow prove that he is an American-as-apple pie idealist who simply wants to share information with his fellow citizens, the argument for clemency gains more weight.
However, to resolve the debate over what forms of surveillance are constitutionally sound and effective at counter-terrorism, Snowden’s motivations are fundamentally irrelevant. One could simultaneously believe that Snowden deserves the electric chair for aiding foreign powers, and that the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata violates the Fourth Amendment. Or, that Snowden acted in good faith, yet what he uncovered merely shows an NSA properly focused on terrorism and operating within the bounds of the Constitution.
Yet the latest revelations about Snowden may help clear a path to having a more rational debate about the NSA. The latest reporting suggests that his motivations are at least ideologically suspect and possibly unpatriotic, which makes it easier to sideline Snowden and simply focus on the NSA itself.
Most Americans, regardless of their views on the NSA, don’t possess the reportedly extreme views of Snowden, and don’t see America’s actions on the global stage as deserving of more scorn than Russia or China.
Much is at stake, both in terms of our liberty and our security, as we discuss whether President Obama’s NSA reforms are either appropriately mild or insufficiently drastic. It is in our interest to premise the discussion on what the NSA is doing — not what is being imagined by political extremists, or just possibly, anti-American spies.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, January 23, 2014
“Snowden Conspiracies Are The Left’s Benghazi”: Much Ado About Terrible Crimes That Haven’t Actually Happened
Moscow has always been hard on idealists. So it’s no surprise to find the world-renowned civil libertarian Edward Snowden feeling shaky midway through his first Russian winter. In a televised Christmas message recorded by Britain’s Channel 4, Snowden waxed alternately as grandiose and apocalyptic as a Dostoyevsky character.
On one hand, the former NSA analyst who stole a hoard of classified documents from the spy agency and passed them around to selected journalists sees himself as a world historical figure.
“The mission’s already accomplished,” he told the Washington Post. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated … I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”
On the other hand, we’re all doomed. Even George Orwell had no clue. Snowden insists that government surveillance has far outstripped anything dreamed of in the dystopian novel 1984.
“The types of collection in the book — microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us — are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go,” Snowden said. “Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person.”
“A child born today,” he lamented, “will … never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves (or) an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought.”
Probably not, because they’ll post it on Facebook, along with kitten videos and photos of their lunch.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Frankly, I wonder if Snowden actually read 1984, which is less about surveillance techniques than the police state mentality: Big Brother, “War is Peace,” the Two Minutes Hate, children informing on their parents, etc.
Indeed, Snowden himself appears to exhibit a classic case of what Orwell called “doublethink.”
“To know and not to know,” Orwell wrote, “to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic … to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy.”
Or, to put it another way, to flee the totalitarian excesses of the U.S. government while taking refuge in countries where the concept of “privacy” scarcely exists. To condemn NSA snooping while handing its secrets to China, the world’s leading practitioner of computerized military and commercial espionage.
This is “mission accomplished”?
So no, I’m not buying Edward Snowden the savior. Whatever the man’s motives, he’s a traitor. The real scandal is how he got a security clearance to start with.
Anyway, despite the melodrama, it’s not technology that threatens freedom of conscience. Quite the opposite. While in Russia, Snowden should read Vasily Aksyonov’s Generations of Winter to understand the repression Stalin achieved with gadgets even more primitive than Orwell depicted.
Something else that didn’t exist in George Orwell’s day, of course, were jihadist websites exporting criminal conspiracies worldwide. It was also much harder to transfer money and to communicate from halfway around the world, and in nothing like real time.
Bomb-making instructions weren’t easily available on the Internet, making mass murder harder to bring off from remote locations. International terrorism existed, but on a far less dangerous scale.
Certainly the terrorist threat can be exaggerated. However, unless you really don’t want your government doing all it can to prevent mass casualty strikes, most of what the NSA does appears both necessary and inevitable.
Here’s something else the melodramatic Mr. Snowden said: “Recently we learned that our governments, working in concert, have created a system of worldwide mass surveillance watching everything we do.”
This is such sheer, self-dramatizing humbug I can’t think why anybody pretends to believe it. At worst, your telephone “metadata” and mine are stored in a huge NSA database, where it will be purged after five years unless you start dialing 1-900-HotVirgins in Yemen — at which point the FBI might seek a search warrant to check you out.
That sensor in your pocket tracking your whereabouts 24/7? It’s the GPS function in your cellphone. You want to hide from the government (or your wife)? Shut it off or hang it from the dog’s collar.
“I don’t know what he’s up to, Sergeant, but he’s still under the front porch.”
For that matter Amazon and Citicard know a lot more about me personally than the NSA, using information I’ve willingly given them. So do Verizon, Facebook and my bank. But nobody makes me read on a Kindle or pay for things with a credit card. As long as the data exists, it can theoretically be abused.
NSA would be a rare bureaucracy if it didn’t overstep its bounds. However, until I see genuine victims of government abuse, I’ll keep thinking the Snowden affair has become the left’s equivalent of the Benghazi delusion: much ado about terrible crimes that haven’t actually happened.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 5, 2014
“Beyond An Honest Whistleblower”: Edward Snowden’s Relationship With WikiLeaks Should Concern Everyone
Amid calls for the clemency of Edward Snowden, many questions remain about the 30-year-old’s flight from America and asylum in Russia.
One major unresolved issue is the relationship between “the most dangerous leaker in American history” and WikiLeaks, an organization with an admitted antagonism toward the U.S. and a cozy history with the Kremlin.
Given WikiLeaks penchant for facilitating U.S. government leaks, its early involvement in the Snowden saga deserves scrutiny.
After the NSA contractor outed himself in Hong Kong on June 9, he parted ways with the journalists he met there and went underground.
On June 12, the same day he leaked specific details of NSA hacking in China to the South China Morning Post, Snowden contacted WikiLeaks. The organization subsequently paid for his lodgings and sent top advisor Sarah Harrison to help.
Harrison accompanied Snowden as he met with Russian officials (perhaps in the Kremlin consulate), and WikiLeaks bought his ticket to Moscow on June 23.
(Some suspect Russia and/or WikiLeaks contacted Snowden before June 12, but there is no clear evidence of that.)
Snowden and his closest supporters contend that he was on his way to Latin America when the U.S. government stranded him in Moscow, but there are several reasons to doubt that claim.
First, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Janet Reitman of Rolling Stone that he advised Snowden against going to Latin America because “he would be physically safest in Russia.”
Second, the U.S. revoked Snowden’s passport by June 22, and the unsigned Ecuadorian travel document acquired by Assange was void when Snowden landed in Moscow.
WikiLeaks told BI that the Ecuadorian document was meant to help Snowden leave Hong Kong. The organization has not explained why it would send the American to Russia knowing he was carrying a void passport and a bunk travel document.
On July 12, Snowden’s Moscow lawyer Anatoly Kucherena explained that Snowden “is in a situation with no way out. He has no passport and can travel nowhere; he has no visa.”
Third, even if Snowden had proper travel documentation, it’s unclear if Russia’s post-Soviet security services (FSB) would have allowed an NSA-trained hacker who beat the NSA vetting system and stole a bunch of intel to simply “pass through the business lounge, on the way to Cuba.”
On August 1 Kucherena, who is employed by the FSB, explained why Russia granted Snowden temporary asylum: “Edward couldn’t come and buy himself tickets to Havana or any other countries since he had no passport.”
Beyond its role in Snowden’s getaway and its friendliness with Russia, WikiLeaks is also connected to three of the main people with access to the leaked NSA files. This fact does not necessarily tarnish their reporting, but it is intriguing in light of Wikileaks’ deep involvement with Snowden.
Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, two journalists contacted by Snowden and then given tens of thousands of documents by Snowden in Hong Kong, sit on the board of a foundation that launched in December 2012 to crowd-source funding for WikiLeaks.
Jacob Applebaum, a close friend of Poitras and lead author of at least one Der Spiegel story citing the Snowden leaks, is known as “The American WikiLeaks Hacker” and has co-authored others articles drawing from “internal NSA documents viewed by SPIEGEL.”
Applebaum is not a journalist and does not hide his disdain for the NSA. This week he ended a talk — during which he presented never-before-seen NSA documents — by saying: “[If] you work for the NSA, I’d just like to encourage you to leak more documents.”
Assange told the same audience to “join the CIA. Go in there. Go into the ballpark and get the ball and bring it out … all those organizations will be infiltrated by this generation.”
That is the same man largely credited with saving Snowden from extradition to the U.S. by sending him to Moscow. The 42-year-old Australian has also hosted a Kremlin-funded TV show. And his political party recently met with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who is staunchly backed by the Kremlin.
No wonder Greenwald told Rolling Stone that “Julian stepping forward and being the face of the story wasn’t great for Snowden.”
Snowden also hurt his own cause. Although he initiated an important debate, his statements and actions also pushed him beyond honest whistleblower.
All things considered, Snowden’s affiliation with Assange and WikiLeaks raises a legitimate question: Is the fact that his life is now overseen by a Russian security more than an extraordinary coincidence?
Given that we still don’t know how many classified documents Snowden stole or when he gave up access, that question should concern everyone.
By: Michael Kelley, Business Insider, January 4, 2014
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