Nonetheless on her facebook page, Naomi Wolf set out her case. She is basing her concerns on her experience with high level political messaging. She makes the following points:

a) He is super-organized, for a whistleblower, in terms of what candidates, the White House, the State Dept. et al call ‘message discipline.’ He insisted on publishing a power point in the newspapers that ran his initial revelations. I gather that he arranged for a talented filmmaker to shoot the Greenwald interview. These two steps — which are evidence of great media training, really ‘PR 101″ — are virtually never done (to my great distress) by other whistleblowers, or by progressive activists involved in breaking news, or by real courageous people who are under stress and getting the word out. They are always done, though, by high-level political surrogates.

b) In the Greenwald video interview, I was concerned about the way Snowden conveys his message. He is not struggling for words, or thinking hard, as even bright, articulate whistleblowers under stress will do. Rather he appears to be transmitting whole paragraphs smoothly, without stumbling. To me this reads as someone who has learned his talking points — again the way that political campaigns train surrogates to transmit talking points.

c) He keeps saying things like, “If you are a journalist and they think you are the transmission point of this info, they will certainly kill you.” Or: “I fully expect to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.” He also keeps stressing what he will lose: his $200,000 salary, his girlfriend, his house in Hawaii. These are the kinds of messages that the police state would LIKE journalists to take away; a real whistleblower also does not put out potential legal penalties as options, and almost always by this point has a lawyer by his/her side who would PROHIBIT him/her from saying, ‘come get me under the Espionage Act.” Finally in my experience, real whistleblowers are completely focused on their act of public service and trying to manage the jeopardy to themselves and their loved ones; they don’t tend ever to call attention to their own self-sacrifice. That is why they are heroes, among other reasons. But a police state would like us all to think about everything we would lose by standing up against it.

d) It is actually in the Police State’s interest to let everyone know that everything you write or say everywhere is being surveilled, and that awful things happen to people who challenge this. Which is why I am not surprised that now he is on UK no-fly lists – I assume the end of this story is that we will all have a lesson in terrible things that happen to whistleblowers. That could be because he is a real guy who gets in trouble; but it would be as useful to the police state if he is a fake guy who gets in ‘trouble.’

e) In stories that intelligence services are advancing (I would call the prostitutes-with-the-secret-service such a story), there are great sexy or sex-related mediagenic visuals that keep being dropped in, to keep media focus on the issue. That very pretty pole-dancing Facebooking girlfriend who appeared for, well, no reason in the media coverage…and who keeps leaking commentary, so her picture can be recycled in the press…really, she happens to pole-dance? Dan Ellsberg’s wife was and is very beautiful and doubtless a good dancer but somehow she took a statelier role as his news story unfolded…

f) Snowden is in Hong Kong, which has close ties to the UK, which has done the US’s bidding with other famous leakers such as Assange. So really there are MANY other countries that he would be less likely to be handed over from…

g) Media reports said he had vanished at one point to ‘an undisclosed location’ or ‘a safe house.’ Come on. There is no such thing. Unless you are with the one organization that can still get off the surveillance grid, because that org created it.

h) I was at dinner last night to celebrate the brave and heroic Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Several of Assange’s also brave and talented legal team were there, and I remembered them from when I had met with Assange. These attorneys are present at every moment when Assange meets the press — when I met with him off the record last Fall in the Ecuadoran embassy, his counsel was present the whole time, listening and stepping in when necessary.

It is fair enough to question the credibility of any source. If he wished, and thought it worthwhile, as he may do if these allegations get traction, Glenn Greenwald would be able to rebut these points.

• It seems to me, that some do not not want to acknowledge, Edward Snowden is very smart person, and he has been thinking about this for some time.
• Hong Kong turns out the perfect place to go, neatly timed for the meeting between the leaders of the USA and PRC. There is a point in his interview where he does tangle up his lines, but he is able to correct himself, which suggested to me he had rehearsed them.
• Glenn Greenwald, who a New York constitutional litigator (I assume that means he is a barrister) interviewed him for five hours. He chose the people to whom he would disclose his information carefully.
• The hierarchical state depends on fear and secrecy. The drumbeat of terrorism and 9/11 works very effectively to engender fear. Secrecy is more important than fear. They can disrupt widespread protest, as might have happened with the OWS movement. Even Congress, not to mention public opinion, recognizes that they were operating without any accountability with a corporate nexus.

A conspiracy theory can always be constructed, if alternative explanations are not actively considered. David Lindoff at Counter Punch concludes:

Unless and until someone comes up with a single hard fact seriously suggesting that Snowden is a fake, this kind of fantasizing should halt. Wolf should apologize for her self-aggrandizing tripe and make a generous donation from her book sales to the Snowden defense fund — unless of course she has evidence that the Progressive Change Campaign Committee is an NSA or CIA front group.

The Guardian has run an online interview with Edward Snowden. He remains pretty much on message. He makes a number of statements in answers to questions. It is clear to me that he is the author of them. To quote a few.

In response to why he chose HK:

1) First, the US Government, just as they did with other whistleblowers, immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home, openly declaring me guilty of treason and that the disclosure of secret, criminal, and even unconstitutional acts is an unforgivable crime. That’s not justice, and it would be foolish to volunteer yourself to it if you can do more good outside of prison than in it.

Second, let’s be clear: I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn’t declared war on the countries – the majority of them are our allies – but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we’re not even fighting? So we can potentially reveal a potential terrorist with the potential to kill fewer Americans than our own Police? No, the public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the “consent of the governed” is meaningless.

2) All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.

Why release the documents now?

Obama’s campaign promises and election gave me faith that he would lead us toward fixing the problems he outlined in his quest for votes. Many Americans felt similarly. Unfortunately, shortly after assuming power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.

On being called a traitor, shows he is capable of humour.

US officials say this every time there’s a public discussion that could limit their authority. US officials also provide misleading or directly false assertions about the value of these programs, as they did just recently with the Zazi case, which court documents clearly show was not unveiled by PRISM.

Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to acheive that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we’ve been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.

Further, it’s important to bear in mind I’m being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

On the treatment of other whistle blowers, makes a revealing comment about the importance of conscience, which at least in a Common Law tradition provides a legal defence:

Binney, Drake, Kiriakou, and Manning are all examples of how overly-harsh responses to public-interest whistle-blowing only escalate the scale, scope, and skill involved in future disclosures. Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it. Instead, these draconian responses simply build better whistleblowers. If the Obama administration responds with an even harsher hand against me, they can be assured that they’ll soon find themselves facing an equally harsh public response.

This disclosure provides Obama an opportunity to appeal for a return to sanity, constitutional policy, and the rule of law rather than men. He still has plenty of time to go down in history as the President who looked into the abyss and stepped back, rather than leaping forward into it. I would advise he personally call for a special committee to review these interception programs, repudiate the dangerous “State Secrets” privilege, and, upon preparing to leave office, begin a tradition for all Presidents forthwith to demonstrate their respect for the law by appointing a special investigator to review the policies of their years in office for any wrongdoing. There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny – they should be setting the example of transparency.

And in the final response, I think he gets things back to front:

Thanks to everyone for their support, and remember that just because you are not the target of a surveillance program does not make it okay. The US Person / foreigner distinction is not a reasonable substitute for individualized suspicion, and is only applied to improve support for the program. This is the precise reason that NSA provides Congress with a special immunity to its surveillance.

Perhaps and Congress and specifically the Gang of Eight provide the NSA with special immunity for surveillance.

What Ammo Do Snowden and Greenwald Detractors Really Have? As usual Cenk Uygur is expressive:

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Related articles

• Is Naomi Wolf working for the NSA? (counterpunch.org)

There are now many reports, including from Declan McCullagh at C/Net:

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA’s formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.

Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler’s disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.

Possibly when President Obama declared  this was not widespread, he had not been told, or he did not know.  And in an unprecedented way, The New York Times throws caution to the wind. Peter Ludlow declares:

If there is one thing we can take away from the news of recent weeks it is this: the modern American surveillance state is not really the stuff of paranoid fantasies; it has arrived.

The revelations about the National Security Agency’s PRISM data collection program have raised awareness — and understandably, concern and fears — among American and those abroad, about the reach and power of secret intelligence gatherers operating behind the facades of government and business.

Surveillance and deception are not just fodder for the next “Matrix” movie, but a real sort of epistemic warfare.

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But those revelations, captivating as they are, have been partial —they primarily focus on one government agency and on the surveillance end of intelligence work, purportedly done in the interest of national security. What has received less attention is the fact that most intelligence work today is not carried out by government agencies but by private intelligence firms and that much of that work involves another common aspect of intelligence work: deception. That is, it is involved not just with the concealment of reality, but with the manufacture of it.

The realm of secrecy and deception among shadowy yet powerful forces may sound like the province of investigative reporters, thriller novelists and Hollywood moviemakers — and it is — but it is also a matter for philosophers. More accurately, understanding deception and and how it can be exposed has been a principle project of philosophy for the last 2500 years. And it is a place where the work of journalists, philosophers and other truth-seekers can meet.

There is the worrying aspect involving private contractors, who conveniently are not subject to the restrictions that otherwise might be imposed on government, and who have their own “business” agendas. Cenk Uygur is on the case, speaking not in future perfect but in past tense:

Lee Fang, as quoted, writes in The Nation:

Could the sprawling surveillance state enable government or its legion of private contractors to abuse their technology and spy upon domestic political targets or judges?

This is not a far off possibility. Two years ago, a batch of stolen e-mails revealed a plot by a set of three defense contractors (Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and HBGary Federal) to target activists, reporters, labor unions and political organizations. The plans— one concocted in concert with lawyers for the US Chamber of Commerce to sabotage left-leaning critics, like the Center for American Progress and the SEIU, and a separate proposal to “combat” WikiLeaks and its supporters, including Glenn Greenwald, on behalf of Bank of America— fell apart after reports of their existence were published online. But the episode serves as a reminder that the expanding spy industry could use its government-backed cybertools to harm ordinary Americans and political dissident groups.

The episode also shows that Greenwald, who helped Snowden expose massive spying efforts in the United States, had been targetted by spy agency contractors in the past for supporting whistleblowers and WikiLeaks.

Edward Snowden was concerned that his warning would be ignored. Some are taking notice, including members of Congress, would have been keep from any information by the secrecy provisions that if not enacted have been applied.

Related articles

• Micah Lee, How Dozens of Companies Know You’re Reading About those NSA Leaks (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
• This episode of Law and Disorder Radio is worth a listen.
• James Petras, The Deeper Meaning of Mass Spying in America (FireDogLake)
  

  Most civil libertarians focus on the violations of individual rights, constitutional guarantees and the citizen’s privacy rights. These are important legal issues and the critics are right in raising them. However, these constitutional–legal critiques do not go far enough; they fail to raise even more fundamental issues; they avoid basic political questions.

• NSA Admits Listening to U.S. Phone Calls Without Warrants (cryptogon.com)
• AND NOW: Private ‘Blackwater-Type’ Spy Agencies (Video) (infiniteunknown.net)
• NSA Discloses the Breathtaking Scope of Its Claimed Powers, Or, Maybe Snowden Was Right! (patterico.com)
• NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants (thedestructionist.wordpress.com)
• Wow, the NSA now admits it listens to US phone calls without warrants. This raises serious constitutional problems. http://t.co/Z8uGla2xaM (news.cnet.com)

The landscape is more man-made than it might appear. There was an active coal mine here twenty-five years ago. The crusher and all the other activity ceased to be replaced by the silent testimony of the gum trees. The original vegetation, which featured red cedars and had particular use in making furniture and building (resistant to white ants but not borer, I am told), which were  extensively felled, has been mostly replaced, although there must still be some remaining. The water in the creek has been tested without causing concern.

We managed to survive another week, and perhaps our outings are been recorded elsewhere on the basis of their deep encoded messages. That is part of their secret life – and ours.

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Leonard Cohen, “In My Secret Life”:

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Tomorrow morning, we will board Friday Ark – just to remind me it is still Friday somewhere.

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Picasa was used to organize the photos.

After conceding there is no process to determine secrecy classification, Professor Geoffrey Stone wrote at the Huffington Post that Edward Snowden’s conduct was “more than unacceptable, it was criminal, forgetting by that legal test that everyone of the founders of the American Republic in 1776 were equally criminal. And that is the point of the US Constitution, that public officials swear allegiance to. Furthermore, the Bill of Rights is not merely afterthought, but further evidence to world at large of the justice of their cause. Specifically, the Fourth Amendment is set in the context of a grievance of the powers that were exercising a general warrant to rummage at will through personal effects, correspondence and privacy.

So I am inclined to accept Edward Snowden’s declaration he is an American, and I hope that is an inclusive concept. He has been prepared to accept personal suffering, which in the eyes of some makes him a narcissist, and the possibility of death. The later is very believable,if what happened to John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King is remembered. The state propaganda machine will go to work with the tall poppy syndrome, but the message will cut through the clutter, the distraction and the disinformation, as it always does in similar cases. And in this case, the issue is global, so Hong Kong is as strategic an international destination and cultural entrepot as any other.

At Common Dreams, Robert Shetterley adds to Edward Snowden’s nonviolent credentials:

I was thinking about asymmetry this week as the story of Edward Snowden unfolded. This story, one young man pitted against our national security state, is an extreme asymmetry, but the disparity is not between lesser and greater violent forces. And, for that reason, it could not properly be called a David versus Goliath confrontation. David was small but armed with sling & stone. Edward’s only “weapons” are courage and truth.

In asymmetric warfare, the powerful say, “Come out and fight on our terms! We’ll show you who’s stronger!” The weaker say, “Not on your life! We plan to win, not commit suicide.”

Conversely, in a contest of asymmetric courage, the lone whistleblower says to the powerful institutions, “Come out and fight on my terms — ethics, courage, truth, law!” And there is deafening silence from the powerful institutions because with all their secret knowledge and secret money, their special forces and spies, their torture and secret prisons, they have not courage. They have not ethics, truth or law. They are muscled up with conformity, with arrogance, with self-congratulatory winks and nods. They have the power to easily crush the person of courage, to discredit him in the media, to arrest and convict him in a kangaroo court, to torture him, disappear him, force feed him. They have secret protocol and secret policy, the power to change the law to legalize atrocity. But they have no courage. They have the pathetic vanity of a steroid-pumped-up robots flexing in front of a mirror. With satisfied smirks they ask rhetorically, “Who’s the strongest in the world?” But they have no courage.

I don’t wish to be hypocritical, but it seems that those of us who exist even in what we imagine to be comfortable conformity, are not called on to display courage, or to “not cooperate with evil”.

Dr Martin Luther King addresses the issue of nonviolence with respect to the rule of law:

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Related articles

• Michael Riley, US  Agencies Said to Share the Data with Thousands of Firms (Bloomberg)
• Thomas Drake, Snowden Saw What I Saw: Surveillance Criminally Subverting the Constitution (The Guardian)In relation to the argument that Snowden should have gone through official channels, Thomas Drakes testifies from his experience:

• I differed as a whistleblower to Snowden only in this respect: in accordance with the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, I took my concerns up within the chain of command, to the very highest levels at the NSA, and then to Congress and the Department of Defense. I understand why Snowden has taken his course of action, because he’s been following this for years: he’s seen what’s happened to other whistleblowers like me.

  By following protocol, you get flagged – just for raising issues. You’re identified as someone they don’t like, someone not to be trusted. I was exposed early on because I was a material witness for two 9/11 congressional investigations. In closed testimony, I told them everything I knew – about Stellar Wind, billions of dollars in fraud, waste and abuse, and the critical intelligence, which the NSA had but did not disclose to other agencies, preventing vital action against known threats. If that intelligence had been shared, it may very well have prevented 9/11.

• Edward Snowden – Whistleblower or Traitor? (pbdemocrats.wordpress.com)
• Historic Challenge to Support the Moral Actions of Edward Snowden by Norman Solomon (zcommunications.org)

The problem, and it is a problem that must be taken seriously, is who gets to decide when classified information should be made public? Who gets to put the national security at risk? The solution must be the creation of a clearly defined and credible procedure through which would-be leakers can bring their concerns to an independent panel of experts who can make a formal and professional determination whether the information at issue should be declassified. The absence of such a procedure leaves would-be leakers, who think they are acting heroically, with no recourse but to keep silent or plunge ahead in ignorance, with potentially grievous consequences for the nation.

In the absence of such a procedure, what should Edward Snowden have done? Probably, he should have presented his concerns to senior, responsible members of Congress. But the one thing he most certainly should not have done is to decide on the basis of his own ill-informed, arrogant and amateurish judgment that he knows better than everyone else in government how best to serve the national interest. The rule of law matters, and no one gave Edward Snowden the authority to make that decision for the nation. His conduct was more than unacceptable; it was criminal.

And in debating the case on Democracy Now, he was similarly categorical. Amy Goodman prefaced his response by quoting Martin Luther King:

“One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”

She then asked what defence Edward Snowden might have, to which he answered:

Legally, I don’t think he has—honestly, I don’t think he has any legal arguments that would be a defense to the charge that he violated the law about government contractors not disclosing classified information to persons who are not authorized to receive it. I don’t think he has a defense. Some people commit a crime, and they committed the crime. And I don’t know that there’s any defense sometimes.

. . . on the merits of the charge as they presently—as it presently stands, I think it’s a sentencing question, not a criminality question.

Julian Bogler writing in The Guardian describes the nature of the 1917 Espionage Act, which as he points out was designed for another time, but would be used in the case of Edmund Snowden. After quoting legal opinions, he suggests that Edward Snowden’s best option would be to seek asylum. He writes:

Manning’s treatment while in solitary confinement, which was described by the UN special rapporteur on torture as “cruel, inhuman and degrading”, may now bolster Snowden’s precarious chances of avoiding a US trial altogether by fighting extradition.

“In terms of seeking asylum, Snowden would definitely qualify in terms of fear of persecution,” Radack said. “Bradley Manning would be exhibit A in that argument.”

Allowing that Geoffry Stone is a distinguished legal expert, I think there are problems in what he says. As alluded to by Amy Goodman, the American Civil Liberties Union has undertaken a lawsuit against the government based on the disclosures in the media. Brett Max Kaufman a senior fellow for the ACLU writes:

As an organization that advocates for and litigates to defend the civil liberties of society’s most vulnerable, the staff at the ACLU naturally use the phone—a lot—to talk about sensitive and confidential topics with clients, legislators, whistleblowers, and ACLU members. And since the ACLU is a VBNS customer, we were immediately confronted with the harmful impact that such broad surveillance would have on our legal and advocacy work. So we’re acting quickly to get into court to challenge the government’s abuse of Section 215.

The ACLU’s complaint filed today explains that the dragnet surveillance the government is carrying out under Section 215 infringes upon the ACLU’s First Amendment rights, including the twin liberties of free expression and free association. The nature of the ACLU’s work—in areas like access to reproductive services, racial discrimination, the rights of immigrants, national security, and more—means that many of the people who call the ACLU wish to keep their contact with the organization confidential. Yet if the government is collecting a vast trove of ACLU phone records—and it has reportedly been doing so for as long as seven years—many people may reasonably think twice before communicating with us.

The kind of personal-data aggregation accomplished through Section 215 also constitutes an unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment. Last year, in a case on GPS tracking by police, five members of the Supreme Court indicated support for the common-sense notion that government collection of individual bits of seemingly innocuous personal information over a long period of time could amount to such a complete invasion of privacy that it would be unconstitutional. The surveillance program that came to light with the release of the FISC order constitutes precisely that kind of unreasonable incursion into Americans’ private lives.

Finally, the ACLU’s complaint charges that the executive branch’s use of Section 215 violates the plain language of the statute itself. The statute requires that records seized under its authority be “relevant” to an authorized foreign-intelligence or terrorism investigation. But while that language imposes a real limitation on when the government can use Section 215, the FISC order covering all VBNS customers demonstrates that this “relevance” restraint is shockingly inadequate. Similarly, the FISC order shows that the government—with the FISC’s secret approval—is acquiring future records of telephone subscribers based on the same “relevance” requirement, even though the statute uses words that clearly show it was only meant to cover “tangible things” already in existence.

The very fact that the ACLU can argue on the basis of defending fundamental legal and democratic rights, would at least suggest that Edward Snowden acted appropriately as a democratic citizen. He was preformed a duty as a citizen that others could not have enacted. He has made the information available to the media in the form of The Guardian and The Washington Post, who are protected by The First Amendment. Could he as suggested have made the information available to Congress? In which case it would not be published. And the relevant person in Congress would be sworn to secrecy. And while Geoffrey Stone may be an eminent authority on the relevant law, how can he really say that Edmund Snowden judgement was “ill-informed, arrogant and amateurish”. Perhaps, as Chris Hedges suggested Professor Stone “was engaged in character assassination”

So did Edward Snowden incriminate himself by his statement he made in an interview with Glenn Greenwald, or establish the integrity of his action, which we are told cannot be recognized in court?

Perhaps, Professor Stone did not get to view this interview, and that might have been it was not featured in any of the media he purveyed. “Turnkey Tyranny”, is quite a phrase. So what is the price of patriotism?

ELSEWHERE:

For those who proclaim, “Get over it” and similar nostrums consider the testimony of Christopher Pyle, a whistle blower from 1971, when the Army, not the FBI was spying on protests. In CounterPunch he wrote:

Secret government was curbed in the 1970s. President Nixon was driven from office. The NSA’s watchlist was shut down; the FBI was returned to law enforcement. Wiretapping was brought under the supervision of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Assassinations were forbidden by executive order, and the campaign to punish leakers ended when White House aides were caught trying to suborn Ellsberg’s judge. Both Houses of Congress created intelligence committees to oversee our secret agencies.

Unfortunately, these efforts at oversight have largely failed. Judge Vinson’s order to Verizon proves beyond cavil that the secret FISA court is a rubber stamp for the indiscriminate seizure of all sorts of personal records. President Obama would have us believe that all members of Congress have been properly briefed, but even Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, admits that she does not know how the data being siphoned off fiber optic cables and out the side doors of Internet servers is actually being used. Classified briefings, of course, are the perfect way to silence critics. Once briefed, however vaguely, committee members are bound to secrecy. They can’t talk about what they learned, even with members of their own staff.

Seventy percent of the federal government’s intelligence budget now goes to private contractors. Far from overseeing the agencies, members of Congress court them, hoping to obtain business for companies that contribute generously to their campaigns. House Intelligence Committee member Randy “Duke” Cunningham and CIA Executive Director Kyle Foggo both went to prison for illegally steering government contracts to the same defense contractor. Senator Feinstein was embarrassed in 2009 when one of her fundraisers invited fellow lobbyists to lunch with her and boasted — in writing, on the invitation — that the intelligence committee’s work would be “served up as the first course.”

Americans can no longer trust the President, Congress, or the courts to protect them, or the reporters, whistleblowers, and politicians on whom our democracy relies. Our government has been massively compromised by campaign contributions and executive secrecy.

At this stage, the only remedy is for more employees of the NSA, CIA, and FBI to undertake Thomas Drake’s kind of whistleblowing. This is what Edward Snowden has done: “I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

No doubt the Obama administration will come after Snowden, as it did Drake. If it is going to defend our corrupt system of secrecy, it has to. But if it does, it will further discredit itself, again proving Justice Louis Brandeis’s dictum that, in politics, “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

As he points out, private contractors engaged in the racket of siphoning off public money, are not bound by The Fourth Amendment. Now there is global data collection. So “get over it” right?

And at Common Dreams he succinctly summarizes the situation:

This scandal is not just about Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency, and Snowden’s profiteering bosses at Booz Allen Hamilton. It is about secret government in general, the militarization of intelligence, the privatization of governmental functions, and the role of secret campaign contributions to prevent adequate oversight of the executive branch and its pet companies.

As to the sentencing/criminality problem suggested by Professor Stone this radio discussion widens that issue as well as providing alternative views. I find it extraordinary, that a lawyer would not offer a defence for the potential client’s action, where  in this case it would  seem obvious that Edward Snowden, in his mind, was acting as a whistle blower, at considerable cost to himself in the interest of the common good. James Cassidy, in The New Yorker, writes (via War In Context):

I wish these ventures, and the attorneys who pursue them, well. As I said at the beginning, not all lawyers are on the side of power. (I should also point out that this column is not directed at my friend and colleague Jeffrey Toobin, a lawyer and journalist who has been critical of Snowden but who was also one of the first to write about the expansion of executive power after 9/11.) Still, I won’t be holding my breath for the Administration’s legal challengers to succeed. The lawyers who put together the statutes enabling the FISA court rulings surely knew they would be challenged at some point, and they made it very difficult for such endeavors to succeed. It’s not clear that the plaintiffs will be able to clear the first hurdle of being heard in court and granted standing to sue. Even if they were, the Administration could ask a judge to dismiss the suits on the grounds that they are potentially damaging to national security. Can the government really do this under the law? Yes, it can, and the court might well accede to its requests.

Americans’ faith in the law is touching. In this instance, it is misplaced. If we want to stop the government spying on us, we are probably going to have to do it through the political system rather than the legal system. That won’t be easy either, but it may be the only way ahead.

The problem with that prescription is that the political system is broken, or more accurately has been reconfigured to advantage the wealthy few at the expense of the increasingly impoverished many.

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Related articles

• Kevin Drum, Some Questions For and About Edward Snowden (Mother Jones). So what does ES know, and does he not know?
• Lana Lam, Edward Snowden: US Government Has been Hacking Hong Kong and China for Years (South China Morning Post)
• Alexander Reed Kelly, Chris Hedges on Edward Snowden: Hero or Traitor? (Truthdig)
• ACLU Sues Obama Administration Over NSA ‘Dragnet’ Surveillance Revealed in Historic Leaks (commondreams.org)

The military trial of Bradley Manning is a judicial lynching. The government has effectively muzzled the defense team. The Army private first class is not permitted to argue that he had a moral and legal obligation under international law to make public the war crimes he uncovered. The documents that detail the crimes, torture and killing Manning revealed, because they are classified, have been barred from discussion in court, effectively removing the fundamental issue of war crimes from the trial. Manning is forbidden by the court to challenge the government’s unverified assertion that he harmed national security. Lead defense attorney David E. Coombs said during pretrial proceedings that the judge’s refusal to permit information on the lack of actual damage from the leaks would “eliminate a viable defense, and cut defense off at the knees.” And this is what has happened.

Manning is also barred from presenting to the court his motives for giving the website WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables, war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, and videos. The issues of his motives and potentially harming national security can be raised only at the time of sentencing, but by then it will be too late.

The draconian trial restrictions, familiar to many Muslim Americans tried in the so-called war on terror, presage a future of show trials and blind obedience. Our email and phone records, it is now confirmed, are swept up and stored in perpetuity on government computers. Those who attempt to disclose government crimes can be easily traced and prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Whistle-blowers have no privacy and no legal protection. This is why Edward Snowden—a former CIA technical assistant who worked for a defense contractor with ties to the National Security Agency and who leaked to Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian the information about the National Security Council’s top-secret program to collect Americans’ cellphone metadata, e-mail and other personal data—has fled the United States. The First Amendment is dead. There is no legal mechanism left to challenge the crimes of the power elite. We are bound and shackled. And those individuals who dare to resist face the prospect, if they remain in the country, of joining Manning in prison, perhaps the last refuge for the honest and the brave.

The latest whistleblower, Edward Snowden, now in Hong Kong has not as yet been frog marched before the tender mercies of the independent and impartial judicial process (Of course, I might be conflating the justice, including right of appeal, on offer in military and civil courts). Seemingly, those who, have the prerogatives to torture and imprison patriots who wish to save the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Daniel Ellsberg comments on developments as they unfold, most recently in The Guardian:

In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an “executive coup” against the US constitution.

Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended.

The government claims it has a court warrant under Fisa – but that unconstitutionally sweeping warrant is from a secret court, shielded from effective oversight, almost totally deferential to executive requests. As Russell Tice, a former National Security Agency analyst, put it: “It is a kangaroo court with a rubber stamp.”

For the president then to say that there is judicial oversight is nonsense – as is the alleged oversight function of the intelligence committees in Congress. Not for the first time – as with issues of torture, kidnapping, detention, assassination by drones and death squads –they have shown themselves to be thoroughly co-opted by the agencies they supposedly monitor. They are also black holes for information that the public needs to know.

The expectation has been muted, that Edward Snowden, as with others, most notably Osama Bin Laden, will now after needling the vaunted military industrial complex, will simply be disappeared. Habit and judicial process are more deeply entwined than might be recognized. It is the kind of judicial process that would have done Joe Stalin proud, in fact, he could claim to have established some precedents. Edward Snowden did not entirely place the prospect beyond the bounds of possibility. Furthermore, what are corporations, such as Booz Allen Hamilton doing acting on behalf of the NSA, and one presumes the CIA?

What then is “due process of law”? What constitutes a fair trail? These are questions that are embarrassing to ask. It surely cannot be what either the executive or legislature say it is? It surely does not involve anything that could be construed as torture, or other violations of human rights, or the presumption of innocence? Some have suggested, fatuously, that the American system was designed that way, and not been deliberately broken. So who is responsible? Office holders such as the presidents and members of Congress who take an oath to defend the Constitution?

By contrast Fox News got into the act, declaring that innocent Americans had nothing to fear, and that those who commit treason should be killed. Treason has been made cool.

(Is this actually an interview? Perhaps it is not intended to be.)

Juan Cole comments on the role of corporations, not simply as contractors as part of the military-industrial complex, but as subsuming the electoral agenda. He writes:

If US Federal agents swooped into Google’s headquarters in SWAT gear and raided Google’s file cabinets without a warrant, the Republicans in Congress and the anchors at Fox would all have brain aneurysms. But if Federal agents swoop into Google’s servers and read the email of ordinary people, that seems to be all right. Our Constitutional rights increasingly only extend to Corporate citizens; the rest of us are second class.

I don’t think you have to be a fourth amendment fundamentalist to find this government intrusion unconstitutional and creepy

I am genuinely puzzled as to why the Fourth Amendment is no longer taken seriously, much less literally, by any significant faction in American politics. My hypothesis is that whereas the gun manufacturers clearly make big bucks off their weird absolutist interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, there is no set of corporations that would lose billions of dollars if the government snoops into your phone records or email traffic. Oh, Google might suffer versus Yahoo among consumers if the former let the NSA have access to its servers but the latter did not, but the government has neutralized that issue by dragooning both of them. (They deny it, but they are forced to deny it by the terms of the PATRIOT Act, which disallows victims’ disclosure of government bullying).

Since what counts in American politics is campaign dollars, there’s no real pressure for the Fourth Amendment. There are no corporate coffers at stake, only harm done to everyday citizens like you and me, and the system no longer serves us.

Daniel Ellsberg appeared on CNN, where he suggests it is likely in his opinion that Edward Snowden will be put of trial:

Kieran Healy illustrates how metadata can be used.

Crickey’s editorial makes the straightforward case that Fox News somehow misses, even though one of its own journalists was caught up in the surveillance web:

Why do Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass internet and phone surveillance by America’s National Security Agency matter to you?

Say you don’t mind that every google search you do, every Facebook update you post, every gmail you send, every Skype call you make, is being sent through an NSA filter. You’re not a terrorist. You’re not an agitator or protester. You’re not a criminal. You’re just an ordinary citizen leading an ordinary life. Right?

Well, you have a right to privacy, and it’s a right that doesn’t need to be justified or explained. “You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide” is the thinking that leads to demanding defendants prove their innocence. Governments and companies must justify anything that breaches privacy. They rarely do.

How much do you trust agencies and governments when they operate entirely in secret? If it wasn’t for Edward Snowden, most of us would be unaware of the vast extent of NSA spying on Americans (and anyone else with an internet connection), because the US government shrouds its surveillance in secrecy.

How much do you trust agencies and governments when they use the information produced by surveillance not to chase terrorists, but to pursue journalists who have merely embarrassed them? That’s what the administration of Barack Obama has done.

When governments spy on their populations, and do so in secret, it is inevitable those actions will corrupt government and undermine a free media — as well as destroying the privacy to which citizens of democracies are entitled to.

Here is another video with Julian Assange and John Perry Barlow on UK Sky TV. The issues associated with the data mining systems, such as PRISM are set out:

It turns out that what Edward Snowden has done is confirm in detail what was known and flagged and available to the viewers of, for example, James Corbett’s Report at Boiling Frog. com:

ps: For whatever reason, perhaps experimentation or impatience, I deleted this post. This explains why there are two entries as Blogtariat.
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Related articles

• Bill Blum, Is The Surveillance State Constitutional? (Truthdig) – Catch 22.
• Robert Scheer, One American Who Isn’t for Sale (Truthdig)
• Steve Chapman, The Real Problem with the  NSA’s Indiscriminate Syping (Reason.Com)
• Julian Assange praises Edward Snowden as a hero (guardian.co.uk)
• Hong Kong ‘not a safe harbour’ for U.S. surveillance whistleblower (cbc.ca)
• The Judicial Lynching of Bradley Manning by Chris Hedges (dandelionsalad.wordpress.com)
• Manning trial resumes as new leak scandal unfolds (cnsnews.com)
• Edward Snowden: more conscientious objector than common thief (guardian.co.uk)
• Edward Snowden leaked selectively, Bradley Manning did not (telegraph.co.uk)

Associated Press, via The New Zealand Herald, reports on the latest state of play of the flooding in Europe:

The crest of the flood-swollen Danube River surged toward the Hungarian capital of Budapest, while communities along the Elbe in Germany braced for high water as the river churned toward the North Sea.

Elsewhere in central Europe, communities were beginning to count the cost of devastating floods that have hit Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic.

At least 19 people have died over the past week, and experts say the economic damage in Germany alone could top 11 billion euros.

The Danube’s crest left Austria on Friday and entered Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban warned that water levels were above the all-time highs.

“It is now certain that we will face the largest-ever flood on the Danube, so we must be prepared for the worst,” Orban said Gyor, a western city on the Danube.

The crest was expected to reach Budapest on Monday, and Mayor Istvan Tarlos said in a worst-case scenario up to 55,000 people may need to be evacuated.

But he was confident that only the lowest-lying areas of the city would be exposed to the Danube’s surge.

The report noted that the Elbe was surging northward leaving flooding in it’s wake.

According to Euractiv, the European Environmental Agency has no doubt as to the causes. They are expecting repeat of the widespread flooding in future years. The EEA has issued a statement, <em>Flood Risk in Europe – the Long-term Outlook. The article further observes:

The EEA sees this as part of a trajectory of ever-increasing extreme weather events and natural disasters since the 1980s. It refers to the growing costs associated with tackling extreme weather events caused by climate change.

. . .

But the EU body concedes that it needs more and better data to be scientifically certain of the role climate change has played. “To confirm the exact role played by climate change in flooding trends in past decades, it would be necessary to have more reliable, long-time series data for rivers with a natural flow regime.”

None of these events is likely to register in the upcoming Australian Election, but it would appear that the Europeans are going to intensify there efforts to strike at the trigger mechanism of climate change – greenhouse gas emissions.

EuroNews reports, but does not mention Climate Change:

UPDATE:

UPDATE: 10 June 2013

Deutsche Welle reports:

HISTORIC FLOODS LEAVE TRAIL OF DESTRUCTION:Germany mobilizes

Some 70,000 firemen, 11,000 soldiers and an immense number of volunteers are fighting the floodwaters. In Magdeburg, the capital of Saxony-Anhalt, the Elbe River has reached its highest point ever in the 1,200 year history of the city. Tens of thousands of people were called upon to leave their homes in Germany’s east and south.

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Related articles

• Dykes strengthened to protect Budapest from floods: Hungary PM (worldbulletin.net)
• Floods in Central Europe Continue to Create Havoc (theepochtimes.com)

Still time moves on. While Dexter is starting to show his age, and perhaps it is now not too bad that he kept on the lead. I still believe the call of freedom would be stronger than anything I would have to say on the subject. Hannah is still in prime condition, although she does not stray far, and waits sometimes for the slow coaches.

Here are some photos from our excursions this week:

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Gordon Lightfoot sings, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald“:

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We expect Friday Ark to be sailing, and again seek to board again this week.

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Picasa made the photo selection possible.

And the legacy of Obama and the cohort surrounding him, including the military,  will be a profound departure from the rule of law, and what might hereto might have been understood as values fundamental and entrenched in the American Republic. It will not be the killing of Osama bin Laden, or the extensive killing of the drone missile terror attacks, but the life imprisonment of Bradley Manning, a genuine American hero, that is to be the plumb on the pudding.

Julian Assange is surely accurate in describing what is passing for a judicial procedure currently underway concerning the case of  Bradley Manning as a show trial. He writes:

We no longer need to comprehend the “Kafkaesque” through the lens of fiction or allegory. It has left the pages and lives among us, stalking our best and brightest. It is fair to call what is happening to Bradley Manning a “show trial”. Those invested in what is called the “US military justice system” feel obliged to defend what is going on, but the rest of us are free to describe this travesty for what it is. No serious commentator has any confidence in a benign outcome. The pretrial hearings have comprehensively eliminated any meaningful uncertainty, inflicting pre-emptive bans on every defense argument that had any chance of success.

Bradley Manning may not give evidence as to his stated intent (exposing war crimes and their context), nor may he present any witness or document that shows that no harm resulted from his actions. Imagine you were put on trial for murder. In Bradley Manning’s court, you would be banned from showing that it was a matter of self-defence, because any argument or evidence as to intent is banned. You would not be able to show that the ’victim’ is, in fact, still alive, because that would be evidence as to the lack of harm.

But of course. Did you forget whose show it is?

The government has prepared for a good show. The trial is to proceed for twelve straight weeks: a fully choreographed extravaganza, with a 141-strong cast of prosecution witnesses. The defense was denied permission to call all but a handful of witnesses. Three weeks ago, in closed session, the court actually held a rehearsal. Even experts on military law have called this unprecedented.

Bradley Manning’s conviction is already written into the script. The commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces, Barack Obama, spoiled the plot for all of us when he pronounced Bradley Manning guilty two years ago. “He broke the law,” President Obama stated, when asked on camera at a fundraiser about his position on Mr. Manning. In a civilized society, such a prejudicial statement alone would have resulted in a mistrial.

To convict Bradley Manning, it will be necessary for the US government to conceal crucial parts of his trial. Key portions of the trial are to be conducted in secrecy: 24 prosecution witnesses will give secret testimony in closed session, permitting the judge to claim that secret evidence justifies her decision. But closed justice is no justice at all.

What cannot be shrouded in secrecy will be hidden through obfuscation. The remote situation of the courtroom, the arbitrary and discretionary restrictions on access for journalists, and the deliberate complexity and scale of the case are all designed to drive fact-hungry reporters into the arms of official military PR men, who mill around the Fort Meade press room like over-eager sales assistants. The management of Bradley Manning’s case will not stop at the limits of the courtroom. It has already been revealed that the Pentagon is closely monitoring press coverage and social media discussions on the case.

This is not justice; never could this be justice. The verdict was ordained long ago. Its function is not to determine questions such as guilt or innocence, or truth or falsehood. It is a public relations exercise, designed to provide the government with an alibi for posterity. It is a show of wasteful vengeance; a theatrical warning to people of conscience.

I am not sure about the show trial tag. For that to be true the free mainstream press would have to be covering it. They are not. Nothing to see. Very much, I suppose, as in the infamous “Collateral Damage”, war crimes video of the shootings in a Baghdad square. Nothing to see there either. And that certainly was the judgement of the Pentagon.

However concessions have been made. Freedom of the Press Foundation has been given permission to have a professional stenographer record proceedings – saving The New York Times the expense of sending a journalist to cover the trial, if they were to deem it news fit to print. I am not sure it is so easy to make sense of the full result. The trial is expected to last three months.

Say what you like but Government repression seems to be working, or that is what EuroNews suggests:

Maybe it is not newsworthy, since conviction can be envisaged, as suggests Ed Pilkington in The Guardian as a foregone conclusion, with no effective avenue of appeal. He suggests:

One of the major differences between military and civilian trials is that in the military context the right to appeal is far more limited. In a civilian criminal case, a convicted prisoner can appeal right up to the US supreme court, the highest judicial panel in the land. No such right exists in military cases. Here, the convicted party can ask for a review by the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (CAAF), but if it declines the case there is no equivalent route to the US supreme court.

Eugene Fidell, an expert in military justice at Yale law school, pointed out that even Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected architect of the 9/11 attacks, has greater rights of appeal than Bradley Manning. “If he’s convicted by a military commission in Guantánamo, KSM will get a straight shot at the US supreme court,” he said. “By contrast, if CAAF denies Manning a review as it does in most cases, he will be out in the cold.”

Back two years ago, when Manning was being tortured, in the considered opinion of the UN Rapporteur, President Obama was acting judicially as head of the armed forces had declared him guilty. Of course, Obama may have genuine concerns that he like Kennedy will be executed. And for that matter like Martin Luther King, except MLK had the courage to say and do what he believed despite the threat. Obama will leave a legacy of executive lawlessness, more entrenched than George Bush, and so almost irreversible.

Government has ceased to be accountable or transparent. It is a government of the Military-Industrial Complex and the large corporations. As is the pattern that increasingly evident elsewhere democracy has become a farce, a mere shadow play, to disguise the interests for whom power is exercised and legislation written. The crime of the Iraq Invasion goes forgotten and repented without reparations. One solution to the problem provided by the evident moral bankruptcy and corruption is to break the country up into three, five, or more parts in the belief that original constitution along with the Bill of Rights will be replicated with a more truly representative congresses and measures to protect the democratic process from intrusion by corporate money power. In this case,it might be accurately said that we had to destroy the nation in order to save it. (There are practical problems, but is an interesting thought experiment. I am just try to stake out a position ahead of those radical Americans.)

The report on The Real News Network placed emphasis on the Collateral Damage video, and presumably it will be the prosecution’s intent not to give prominence to it during the long trail after the extraordinary time between arrest and trail:

ELSEWHERE:

In retrospect, I suppose it is best to be cautious in accepting without question that Bradley Manning would not have recourse to the court system, particularly the Supreme Court. Firstly, he is charged with “aiding the enemy”, which is tantamount to treason for which, I believe , there are specific conditions set in the US Constitution. Secondly, as suggested by Majorie Cohn in Truthout, he had a duty to report war crimes. Thirdly, it might be suggested, he was subject to “cruel and unusual punishment”. More will be revealed  over the next three months.

Norman Soloman effectively exposes the hypocrisy at he centre of the case against Manning. He writes:

Of all the charges against Bradley Manning, the most pernicious — and revealing — is “aiding the enemy.”

A blogger at The New Yorker, Amy Davidson, raised a pair of big questions that now loom over the courtroom at Fort Meade and over the entire country:

* “Would it aid the enemy, for example, to expose war crimes committed by American forces or lies told by the American government?”

* “In that case, who is aiding the enemy — the whistleblower or the perpetrators themselves?”

When the deceptive operation of the warfare state can’t stand the light of day, truth-tellers are a constant hazard. And culpability must stay turned on its head.

That’s why accountability was upside-down when the U.S. Army prosecutor laid out the government’s case against Bradley Manning in an opening statement: “This is a case about a soldier who systematically harvested hundreds of thousands of classified documents and dumped them onto the Internet, into the hands of the enemy — material he knew, based on his training, would put the lives of fellow soldiers at risk.”

If so, those fellow soldiers have all been notably lucky; the Pentagon has admitted that none died as a result of Manning’s leaks in 2010. But many of his fellow soldiers lost their limbs or their lives in U.S. warfare made possible by the kind of lies that the U.S. government is now prosecuting Bradley Manning for exposing.

In the real world, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, prosecution for leaks is extremely slanted. “Let’s apply the government’s theory in the Manning case to one of the most revered journalists in Washington: Bob Woodward, who has become one of America’s richest reporters, if not the richest, by obtaining and publishing classified information far more sensitive than anything WikiLeaks has ever published,” Greenwald wrote in January.

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Related articles

• Bradley Manning’s WikiLeaks trial: what are the key issues at stake? | Ed Pilkington (guardian.co.uk)
• Bradley Manning Trial Begins – Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com)
• Michael Ratner, lawyer for Julian Assange and Wikileaks (indiavision.com)
• Download BRADLEY MANNING’S WAR for Free (mikedaisey.blogspot.com)
• Editorial: Case of Bradley Manning is not America’s finest hour (independent.co.uk)
• Obama’s War on Whistle Blowers – The Trial of Bradley Manning (dissidentvoice.org)

Deutsche Well reports:

According to reports from German TV news show “Panorama” and the daily newspaper “Süddeutsche Zeitung,” the US use their German military bases to conduct attacks and targeted killings. The United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), based in Stuttgart since 2008, and the US Air Force base Ramstein in particular are said to play substantial roles in the drone war.

AFRICOM coordinates all US missions on the African continent from Germany. Within this context, the reports said, it’s safe to assume that AFRICOM also coordinates the use of drones in Africa. Drones were used to kill suspected terrorist in Somalia, for example. Since 2007, up to 27 people, some of them civilians, have died there in attacks by the unmanned planes, according to the London-based “Bureau of Investigative Journalism.”

Ramstein is important because it is the military base with a satellite relay link to the United States.For attacks in Africa, drones fly from bases in Djibouti, Niger, Ethiopia and on the Seycelles. The personnel who are required to pilot the aircraft are “reportedly” based in Germany, as well presumably as the US. This gives a new twist to the “imperialism of bases”, a phrase coined by Chalmers Johnson.

Deutsche Wella notes:

Most experts agreed that the use of drones outside of war zones, including Somalia, is not acceptable under international law.

“The targeted killing of persons through drones would be impermissible here,” Andreas Zimmermann, professor of international law at the University of Potsdam, said on the German public radio station Deutschlandradio Kultur.

Thilo Marauhn, an international law activist, took the argument even further. “When the German government knows about the killing of a terror suspect by drone outside a war zone and doesn’t protest against it, this could constitute a violation of international law,” Marauhn said in the “Panorama” report.

The  German Government  in a typical way finds cover in confusion:

The opposition demanded clarification from the government. “The government has to get to the bottom of this,” said Paul Schäfer, a member of the parliament’s defense committee for the Left Party. “Otherwise, the suspicion that Germany is part of international law violations remains. That cannot be left out there,”

There seems to be not a lot the German government can do at the moment though, because of a statute that governs the presence of US troops in Germany.

“We’d have to start new negotiations about the troops statute,” Schäfer told DW. “I’m afraid that currently, the German government’s opportunities to intervene are limited. We lack the legal authority.”
Government spokesman Steffen Seibert said in Berlin that there was an on-going dialog with US officials. “The result is that we don’t have any evidence for behavior that violates international law,” Seibert said. “Speaking for the German government, I cannot confirm the claims that were made in the media.”

Mattias Maass gave the following presentation in Baltimore. He distinguishes the roles of drones as surveillance and attack technologies:

The implications of the drone missile attacks launched in remote locations inhabited often, if not always, by tribal societies are at least twofold. Whether intentional or not, they serve to undermine national sovereignty, and not simply countries in the countries of the third world. Secondly, drone attacks are an ultimate development in asymmetrical warfare, limited to those who control the global satellite resources. In summary, they represent a new dimension in political violence and subversion of the rule of war. “Terrorism” hardly describes their effect and impact.

ELSEWHERE:

Glenn Greenwald observes:

A mere six days after President Obama’s much heralded terrorism speech, a US drone fired a missile in Pakistan that killed four people. On Saturday, another US drone killed seven people, this time in Yemen. There was some debate about whether Obama’s speech really heralded a more restrictive standard for drone use; the early results, though not dispositive, seem to suggest it is business as usual.

Surprisingly, Julian Assange appears in The New York Times to caution, in the new age of technology, “know your enemy”.

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Related articles

• Akbar Ahmed, The Drone War is Far fromOver (The New York Times)
• Is Germany Assisting America’s Drone Wars? (warnewsupdates.blogspot.com)
• Berlin not aware of U.S. drone strikes from Germany (dailystar.com.lb)
• German govt not aware of strikes via US bases in country (worldbulletin.net)
• US drone attacks are further radicalising Pakistan | Imran Awan (guardian.co.uk)
• Drones Strikes: A country led by cowards has no sovereignty (urdumail.wordpress.com)