The Commentariat -- Aug. 30, 2013
NEW. Anthony Faiola of the Washington Post: "BREAKING NEWS: Secretary of State John F. Kerry says the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made preparations three days before last week's chemical weapons attack on the outskirts of Damascus and fired the rockets from regime-controlled areas. This story will be updated shortly." ...
... UPDATE by Karen DeYoung & Anthony Faiola: "Secretary of State John F. Kerry made a forceful case Friday for U.S. military intervention in Syria, saying that U.S. intelligence has information pinning responsibility for last week's chemical weapons attack squarely on the government of President Bashar al-Assad. In a speech at the State Department, Kerry said U.S. intelligence has 'high confidence' that the Assad government was responsible for the attack based partly on knowledge of regime officials' conversations about the attack and the tracking of movements of regime personnel before and after the strike":
... Julian Pecquet of the Hill: "Thursday night's briefing by top Obama administration officials exposed divisions among key lawmakers on what to do in Syria. Lawmakers on the unclassified conference call said the officials made it clear that President Obama is still weighing his options but believes 'beyond a doubt' that Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces used chemical weapons 'intentionally' in an attack last week that rebels say killed more than 1,000 people. They left convinced that Assad's forces were responsible for using chemical weapons, and that Obama should respond. But they were split on the timeline...." ...
... AFP: "French President Francois Hollande said Friday he remained committed to a firm response on Syria despite Britain's surprise rejection of armed intervention. 'France wants firm and proportionate action against the Damascus regime,' he said in an interview with Le Monde daily to be published Saturday. Hollande said all options were on the table and did not rule out military strikes within days...." ...
... Michael Gordon of the New York Times: "The goal of the cruise missile strikes the United States is planning to carry out in Syria is to restore the smudged 'red line' that President Obama drew a year ago against the use of poison gas. If carried out effectively, the strikes may also send a signal to Iran that the White House is prepared to back up its words, no small consideration for an administration that has proclaimed that the use of military force remains an option if the leadership in Iran insists on fielding a nuclear weapon." ...
... Mark Landler, et al., of the New York Times: "President Obama is prepared to move ahead with a limited military strike on Syria, administration officials said Thursday, despite a stinging rejection of such action on Thursday by America's stalwart ally Britain and mounting questions from Congress. The negative vote in Britain's Parliament was a heavy blow to Prime Minister David Cameron, who had pledged his support to Mr. Obama and called on lawmakers to endorse Britain's involvement in a brief operation...." ...
... Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post: "The administration insisted Thursday that President Obama has both the authority and the determination to make his own decision on a military strike against Syria, even as a growing chorus of lawmakers demanded an opportunity to vote on the issue and Britain, the United States' closest ally, appeared unlikely to participate." ...
... Paul Lewis & Spencer Ackerman of the Guardian: "Barack Obama's plans for air strikes against Syria were thrown into disarray on Thursday night after the British parliament unexpectedly rejected a motion designed to pave the way to authorising the UK's participation in military action.... The timing of the British vote, 272 to 285 against the government, was disastrous for Obama. Less than 30 minutes after the vote, senior intelligence officials began a conference call with key members of Congress, in an attempt to keep US lawmakers on side." ...
... This "guidance" issued by the Prime Minister, outlines the government's legal position re: its right to take action against Syria. ...
... Mike Lillis of the Hill: "... dozens of liberal Democrats joined scores of conservative Republicans in warning the administration that any strikes without congressional approval would violate the Constitution. In a letter to [President] Obama, 53 liberal Democrats -- including a long list of Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) members -- argued that, while the human rights atrocities being committed by the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad are 'horrific,' they alone 'should not draw us into an unwise war -- especially without adhering to our own constitutional requirement.'"
... ** SNAFU. Josh Rogin of the Daily Beast: "The Obama administration has refused to send gas masks and other chemical-weapons protection gear to Syrian opposition groups, despite numerous requests dating back more than a year and until the reported chemical-weapons attack that struck the Damascus suburbs August 21.... One former Obama-administration official said the national-security staff ... ruled out providing gas masks, though thousands sit in Defense Department warehouses all over the region, left over from the war in Iraq." ...
... ** Another Reason Obama Should Call a Special Session of Congress before Attacking Syria. David Atkins of Hullabaloo: "Those of us who know it's unfair tend to look down on those who think the Presidency is essentially an elected kingship, and who believe that the President can simply enact universal healthcare, deftly reduce the deficit and end student loan debt with a wave of his hand. But why shouldn't they believe that, after all, when the President can simply decide to drop bombs on another country without an act of Congress?" ...
... David Rieff in the New Republic: "Orwell famously said that 'if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.' Posing the question of how to respond to the Assad's regime's use against its own people of the most terrible weapon that exists, apart from nuclear bombs, in terms of punishment is a prime example of this. Such metaphors are prophylactics against thought. The United States is neither the world's parent..., with the unwelcome but necessary responsibility of administering a spanking to a delinquent child, and still less is it the world's judge, jailer, or, to judge by the Weekly Standard letter..., its executioner, tasked with putting the Assad regime to death.... I remain entirely convinced that the correct course would be to refrain from any military action against the Assad regime.
Richard Esposito, et al., of NBC News: "Edward Snowden accessed some secret national security documents by assuming the electronic identities of top NSA officials, said intelligence sources." ...
... CW: This article by Keith Wagstaff of the Week is very helpful in explaining how Snowden managed to access & download documents. I had thought his position as "systems administrator" meant he headed up a group of systems analysts, programmers &/or other systems personnel. That's not it at all; Snowden was even lower on the totem pole than I thought. Wagstaff cites Kevin Roose of New York: "The sysadmin is in charge of setting account permissions, creating and deleting accounts, and routing information to the correct people and places." Wagstaff writes, "Once Snowden had access to sensitive documents, his position as a system administrator allowed him to do what other NSA employees couldn't -- download files onto an external hard drive.... As ZDNet's Larry Seltzer notes, with only two levels of 'security access, "Top Secret" and "Unfettered", it's surprising that a Snowden-like leak didn't happen long ago.'" ...
... Barton Gellman & Greg Miller of the Washington Post: "U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government's top secret budget. The $52.6 billion 'black budget' for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from ... Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses those funds or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.... The summary [budget] describes cutting-edge technologies, agent recruiting and ongoing operations. The Washington Post is withholding some information after consultation with U.S. officials who expressed concerns about the risk to intelligence sources and methods. Sensitive details are so pervasive in the documents that The Post is publishing only summary tables and charts online." ...
... CW: read the very last section of the report, titled "Counterintelligence." Oh, the irony. ...
... Here are the charts & "selected pages" of the "black budget" the Post has chosen to publish. CW: Again, bear in mind that Snowden gave the Post the entire black budget, including material that the Post was convinced could compromise national security. And Snowden has (or had) those compromising documents on him while he's living in Russia. ...
... Here's an interactive breakout of the national security budget, by agency. ...
... Joan McCarter of Daily Kos: "Tim Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire points out where a huge percentage of the money has gone: 'ODNI confirmed that 70% of the intel budget goes to contractors. With the new WaPo numbers, that's $36.8 billion in 2013 to BOOZ SAIC et al.' It's sustaining the intelligence/industrial complex, much like the grift that made plenty of millionaires out of the Iraq war. As with so many of the military contractors in Iraq, this is happening with very little oversight from Congress and -- until now -- no scrutiny from the public." ...
... Craig Timberg & Barton Gellman of the Post: "The National Security Agency is paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to U.S. companies for clandestine access to their communications networks, filtering vast traffic flows for foreign targets in a process that also sweeps in large volumes of American telephone calls, e-mails and instant messages.... New details of the corporate-partner project ... confirm that the agency taps into 'high volume circuit and packet-switched networks,' according to the spending blueprint for fiscal 2013.... Voluntary cooperation from the 'backbone' providers of global communications dates to the 1970s under the cover name BLARNEY, according to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. These relationships long predate the PRISM program disclosed in June..." ...
... Kevin Poulson of Wired: NSA Director James "Clapper writes in a line [of a summary report on the budget] marked 'top secret,' 'we are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic.' The Post's article doesn't detail the 'groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities' Clapper mentions, and there's no elaboration in the portion of the document published by the paper. But the document shows that 21 percent of the intelligence budget -- around $11 billion -- is dedicated to the Consolidated Cryptologic Program that staffs 35,000 employees in the NSA and the armed forces. In a WIRED story in March of last year -- the pre-Snowden era of NSA reporting — James Bamford reported that the NSA secretly made some sort of 'enormous breakthrough' in cryptanalysis several years earlier." ...
... Craig Whitlock & Barton Gellman of the Post: "The U.S. commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden was guided from space by a fleet of satellites, which aimed dozens of receivers over Pakistan to collect a torrent of electronic and signals intelligence as the mission unfolded, according to a top-secret U.S. intelligence document [which Edward Snowden provided to the Post]." ...
... Just Ask Ed. CW: When Ed Snowden gets through releasing all these top-secret documents, & the various media outlets get through publishing them, no other government will ever have to ask, when blindsided by some U.S. maneuver, "How'd they do that?"
Elections Matter -- 1, 2, 3
(1) Treasury Department: "The U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) today ruled that same-sex couples, legally married in jurisdictions that recognize their marriages, will be treated as married for federal tax purposes. The ruling applies regardless of whether the couple lives in a jurisdiction that recognizes same-sex marriage or a jurisdiction that does not recognize same-sex marriage.
(2) Department of Health & Human Services: "Today, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a memo clarifying that all beneficiaries in private Medicare plans have access to equal coverage when it comes to care in a nursing home where their spouse lives. This is the first guidance issued by HHS in response to the recent Supreme Court ruling, which held section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional. 'HHS is working swiftly to implement the Supreme Court's decision and maximize federal recognition of same-sex spouses in HHS programs,' said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. 'Today's announcement is the first of many steps that we will be taking over the coming months to clarify the effects of the Supreme Court's decision and to ensure that gay and lesbian married couples are treated equally under the law.'"
(3) Brady Dennis of the Washington Post: "The Obama administration on Thursday said it will not stand in the way of Colorado, Washington and other states where voters have supported legalizing marijuana either for medical or recreational use, as long as those states maintain strict rules involving distribution of the drug. In a memo sent Thursday to U.S. attorneys in all 50 states, Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole detailed the administration's new stance, even as he reiterated that marijuana remains illegal under federal law."
David Catanese of the New Republic: Democrats should invest more in trying to regain the House & less in holding the Senate. CW: Catanese rather obliquely explains why. I think the real argument is that there are enough Republican Senators who aren't Tea Party-crazy that the Senate, no matter who holds it, could work with the House & President to pass legislation. But here's the thing: right now there are enough Republicans & Democrats in the House to pass legislation in a number of area, though such legislation would necessarily be more conservative than we like. It's just that the House leadership won't allow that. The trick is to finesse Boehner, et al. Democrats don't seem to be trying very hard to do that. ...
... BUT. Lori Montgomery of the Washington Post: "The Obama administration and a group of Republican senators abandoned efforts Thursday to hammer out a budget deal and avoid a showdown over the national debt, saying they had failed to resolve their long-standing dispute over taxes."
Tim Egan: media figures like Rush Limbaugh & Matt Drudge stoke racism every time they hear of a black-on-white crime, & Internet sites anywhere in the nation instantly bring to mind an "Alabama Klan meeting."
Republican Means Never Having to Tell the Truth. Tommy Christopher of Mediaite: "One of the controversies surrounding the 50th anniversary celebration of the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King's 'I Have A Dream' speech has been the absence of Republicans at the event, despite many of them having been invited. One prominent Republican, Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) [the only African American senator], told Roll Call through a spokesperson that he had not been invited, but the paper reported, Thursday afternoon, that an email confirms that Sen. Scott's office declined an invitation to the event earlier this month." Here's the Roll Call story.
Camille Dodero of Gawker comments on the reported execution of Hyon Song-wol, the ex-lover of North Korea's dear boy-leader. See also yesterday's News Ledes.
Senate Race
It seems Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who is running for the U.S. Senate, has an imaginary friend -- a drug-dealer whom he named "T-Bone" & whom Booker used to mention regularly in his speeches & interviews. Eliana Johnson broke the story at the National Review, but J. K. Trotter of Gawker debunks her source's claim that a New Jersey dealer would not adopt the handle "T-Bone." Gawker commenter "Not a Snort" sez, "... Back in the mid-90's, I used to hang out with a friend who was a Newark native, called himself Sirloin, and we would buy heroin together in some of the roughest neighborhoods there. Our regular dealer was a fellow named Rib Eye. His girl was an exotic dancer from Queens who went by the handle of N.Y. Strip. I remember being terrified of his 300 lb enforcer named Ground Round and his apprentice, Chuck. We used to meet up at a shooting gallery called the Porter House and just get wasted all day. Good times, if you overlooked all the bad cholesterol that was in the air."
Local News
Michael Barbaro of the New York Times: "Frustration with New York City's unaffordability and its aggressive police tactics is elevating Bill de Blasio, once dismissed as a left-leaning long shot, into the lead of the Democratic mayoral primary field, according to a poll by The New York Times and Siena College. Christine C. Quinn, the longtime front-runner in the nomination contest, is now lagging far behind Mr. de Blasio and struggling to connect with members of her own party: forty-five percent of likely Democratic voters view her unfavorably."
News Ledes
New York Times: "Seamus Heaney, a widely celebrated Irish poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, died at a hospital in Dublin on Friday after a short illness, according to a statement issued on behalf of his family. He was 74."
Washington Post: "The FBI has arrested a man accused of making violent threats against freshman Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) -- threats that included her decapitation."
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Reader Comments (8)
Just a thought, but I surely hope Obama holds off on his Executive privileges and consults Congress on this one. Given the rabid Teabaggers already frothing at the mouth over calls of impeachment, a unilateral Team Obama strike could potentially open up a Pandora's box of impeachment visions of breaking international law and abusing executive powers, etc.
This could make little W.'s armpits a little sweaty since he clearly set the illegal precedent, but he's already been pardoned by the powers that be.
And I see even Rumsfeld has slithered out of his cave to put his two cents in claiming Obama has yet to "justify" an intervention. Very true Rummy now go back to your corner and wait for your reserved place in Hell.
The Brits are out, no official Arab League backing, UN would get vetoed, the EU is fractured as usual, the French are still on board for what it's worth, but this is basically turning out be a solo mission without any clear objectives other than to "make a point," without a clear indication of what that point is.
Soooo, President Obama is going to teach Assad a lesson ie. that he can't kill Syrians with chemical weapons.
We are going to teach him this lesson by killing Syrians with cruise missiles and bombs. Yeah, I'm sure that will impress him. He'll be sorry.
My hat is off to the English for showing some backbone to Cameron.
I don’t think this has been posted here. If it has, I apologize for the redundancy. It’s an analysis of the Syrian dilemma from the Onion by way of David Atkins at Hullabaloo.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/so-whats-it-going-to-be,33662/
This about-to-bomb Syria fiasco has all of us so 'round the bend that I am sending a link to lighten everyone's sad days. This is about our favorite 'lil "journalist," AKA, "Fluffy."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/30/this-week-wins-meet-the-press-ratings-trouble_n_3842723.html?igoogle=1
"This could make little W.'s armpits a little sweaty...." Safari. Ewww. I'll take a bar of soap with that sentence.
If Obama doesn't call Congress back in session to debate this, he's crazy. As others have commented, the impeachment crowd will be out in force. As Syria has not attacked the US, where's the justification. Now if Assad were to attack Turkey, as a NATO ally, that would be different.
This brings back memories of CBR (Chemical Bilogical Radiological) training. The main glaring difference: we had protective equipment--the Syrian civilians don't. I did read somewhere someone (MSF?) is attempting to get atropine injectors to them, which we had in quantity. Gas was effective in WWI because the armies were fairly static.
Why are we so incensed about the Syrians, when St. Ronald of Reagan's regime gave targeting intel to Iraq so they could more effectively use CW on Iran.
Meanwhile, in Cairo:
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/30/5695522/in-egypt-the-press-turn-yellow.html
If this article is true, which I have no real reason to believe otherwise, our military-cybersecurity-complex is so run amok that it's a ticking time bomb of incompetence. These bureaucratic machines are so loaded with money rakers sucking on Uncle Sam's pork tits that its gotten totally out of control. With all the money in the world, our Army can't even set up a secure computer network.
Bring on more Mannings and Snowdens, the bosses deserves it.
WTF are we coming to?
http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/exclusive-army-admits-to-major-computer-security-flaw