Dronestrike-led foreign policy - bad timing?

[Rawedge Rim]

RR,

A year with IRA bombs going off in the UK and Ireland. During thise years were US authories cracking down on jars in Irish pubs "for the boys back home"?

and again I ask, how many years ago was this, and does the US have the same policy?

[SerScot]

RR,

Throughout the 70s and 80s and for at least a portion of the 1990s. What do you mean "does the US have the same policy"? We sure as hell go after the financiers of terrorist bombings.

[Cail]

RR, I can tell you that I was in several bars in Boston, Manhattan, and DC during that time period and there were always jars on the bar "for the lads back home fighting' the good fight". There were 50/50 raffles and all sorts of other fundraisers too. It wasn't uncommon to see the same sorts of things in fire and police stations.

I'd bet that if we dug a little, we could probably find cases in which people were recruited to go to Belfast and "fight the good fight".

There's no doubt whatsoever that the IRA and Sinn Fein were supported by American money during The Troubles. Based on current US policy, Thatcher would have been completely justified bombing parts of DC, New York, and Boston.

[Zarathustra]

Do we actually bomb people for doing the equivalent of putting money in jars? Is that even something you could see happening with a drone?

There are lots of organizations that we've loosely tied to terrorism via funding, like the Muslim Brotherhood. Are we bombing those groups wherever they are, based on this loose connection? I wasn't aware of such bombings.

[Rawedge Rim]

RR,

Throughout the 70s and 80s and for at least a portion of the 1990s. What do you mean "does the US have the same policy"? We sure as hell go after the financiers of terrorist bombings.

and no policies have changed since then?

[Cail]

Do we actually bomb people for doing the equivalent of putting money in jars? Is that even something you could see happening with a drone?

There are lots of organizations that we've loosely tied to terrorism via funding, like the Muslim Brotherhood. Are we bombing those groups wherever they are, based on this loose connection? I wasn't aware of such bombings.

We haven't bombed anyone that I'm aware of....We've focused on tracking the money.

Given the broad scope of the AUMF (Section 2)....

That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

......It would appear that we certainly could start bombing fundraisers.

Remember though that it was a very different world in the '80s and the surveillance tech wasn't remotely close to what we have now. Everyone knew what was going on, so it would have been no big stretch to see MI6 over here blowing up Irish pubs.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

I was referring to posts like this [my emphasis]:

Now...let's consider the opposing view to my own.

If it's fine for some to go "all in," then WF's point becomes relevant, namely, why are we worrying over collateral damage of innocents? It also raises the question of why we're worried about violating national sovereignty.

Please note that I was extrapolating the viewpoint opposite to the one I hold.

I do think we should do it by the Constitution, so that the President doesn't have unchecked power to wage war for indefinite periods against unlimited targets. But that's not because I'm concerned about violating other countries' sovereignty. The decision to go to war is itself a decision to violate their sovereignty.

Agreed. The only difference is that declaring war is the truthful way to go about fighting with your neighbor, should you decide that a fight is necessary. The sneaky, underhanded way we are conducting the (non)War on Terror is the coward's way of fighting with someone.

The whole point is to leave room for compromise, so that you don't feel forced into either/or extremism like: a) isolationism or b) utterly destroy any country that has a terror cell which they don't feel compelled to root out themselves. Sometimes compromise looks like hypocrisy. But it's also true that sometimes hypocrisy is less dangerous than ideological purity.

Again, we are in agreement here. That being said, the cowardly way we are conducting the WoT is the worst possible solution--a half-hearted and endless stream of pointless attacks against targets of little value in places where the heart of terrorism does not reside.

Given the broad scope of the AUMF (Section 2)....

That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

......It would appear that we certainly could start bombing fundraisers.

Start giving money to some Islamic charities or organizing fundraisers for them and let us know what happens.

[Rawedge Rim]

Do we actually bomb people for doing the equivalent of putting money in jars? Is that even something you could see happening with a drone?

There are lots of organizations that we've loosely tied to terrorism via funding, like the Muslim Brotherhood. Are we bombing those groups wherever they are, based on this loose connection? I wasn't aware of such bombings.

We haven't bombed anyone that I'm aware of....We've focused on tracking the money.

Given the broad scope of the AUMF (Section 2)....

That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

......It would appear that we certainly could start bombing fundraisers.

Remember though that it was a very different world in the '80s and the surveillance tech wasn't remotely close to what we have now. Everyone knew what was going on, so it would have been no big stretch to see MI6 over here blowing up Irish pubs.

Frankly, I'm quite sure that MI6 could easily come over to Boston and caused much havoc without much chance of getting caught, and maybe disrupted what little funding was coming from Boston. (yeah I know to you and me it was a lot, but to the IRA, it really was more of a PR thing that a funding thing). I imagine that Britain decided that the bad PR of getting caught doing such a thing would have been much worse than actually just letting the money flow.

Having said that....would there have been, in your minds, a difference between giving to the IRA, and giving to Sinn Fein?

[Cail]

Having said that....would there have been, in your minds, a difference between giving to the IRA, and giving to Sinn Fein?

No. Sinn Fein was no different than Hamas.....The "legitimate" political front for terrorists.

Hashi, I'm neither insane nor stupid. As trigger-happy as this administration is, I wouldn't consider it.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Start giving money to some Islamic charities or organizing fundraisers for them and let us know what happens.

Hashi, I'm neither insane nor stupid. As trigger-happy as this administration is, I wouldn't consider it.

No, I wouldn't recommend that anyone do those things at this time. I was being facetious and engaging in leg-pulling.

The AUMF allows the Administration to target American citizens.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Speaking of targeting people with drones....it appears that we don't target people; rather, all that NSA metadata that gets collected (as we discuss elsewhere) is used to target cell phones, regardless of who might be carrying them at the time.

In the first exposé for their new venture, First Look Media’s digital journal The Intercept, investigative journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald reveal the National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes. The NSA identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cellphone tracking technologies, an unreliable tactic that has resulted in the deaths of innocent and unidentified people. The United States has reportedly carried out drone strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cellphone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike. Scahill and Greenwald join us in this exclusive interview to discuss their report and the launch of their media project.
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to a breaking news story about the National Security Agency and its secret role helping the military and CIA carry out assassinations overseas. According to journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald, the NSA is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

A former drone operator for JSOC, the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, said the NSA identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cellphone tracking technologies, but it’s proven to be an unreliable tactic that’s resulted in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people. The U.S. has reportedly carried out strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cellphone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike. The former drone operator, who was a source in the story, said, quote, "It’s really like we’re targeting a cell phone. We’re not going after people—we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy," the quote says.

Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald have also revealed the NSA has equipped drones and other aircraft with devices known as "virtual base-tower transceivers." These devices create, in effect, a fake cellphone tower that can force a targeted person’s device to lock onto the NSA’s receiver without their knowledge.

Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald’s article appears in the new online publication, TheIntercept.org, published by First Look Media, the newly formed media venture started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Glenn and Jeremy co-founded The Intercept with filmmaker Laura Poitras.

Here is the key part of the entire interview:

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, Amy, we’re living in the era of pre-crime, where President Obama is continuing many of the same policies of his predecessor George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. And there’s this incredible reliance on technology to kill people who the United States thinks—doesn’t necessarily know, but thinks—may one day pose some sort of a threat of committing an act of terrorism or of impacting U.S. interests. And the U.S. wants to shy away from having its own personnel on the ground in countries like Yemen or Pakistan or Somalia, eventually Afghanistan, and so what’s happened is that there’s this incredible reliance on the use of remotely piloted aircraft, i.e. drones.

What we discovered in the course of talking to sources, including this new source that we have who worked with both the Joint Special Operations Command and the National Security Agency, is that the NSA is providing satellite technology and communications intercept technology to the U.S. military special operations forces and the CIA that essentially mimics the activities of a cellphone tower and forces individual SIM cards or handsets of phones—there’s two separate devices. When you have your telephone, your mobile phone, you have a SIM card in it, and that can be tracked, but also the device itself can be tracked. And what they do is they force the SIM card or the handset of individuals that they’re tracking onto these cellphone networks, and the people don’t know that their phones are being forced onto this cellphone tower that is literally put on the bottom of a drone and acts as a virtual transceiver. And so, when they are able to triangulate where this individual is, they can locate or track them to within about 30 feet or so of their location.

And what we understand is that under the current guidelines issued by the White House, President Obama gives a 60-day authorization to the CIA or the U.S. military to hunt down and kill these individuals who they’ve tracked with these SIM-card-tracking technologies or handset-tracking technologies, and that they only have to have two sources of intelligence to indicate that this is the individual that they’re looking for. Those two sources cannot—can be signals intelligence, which is what I’ve just been describing, and they can also be what’s called IMINT, or imagery intelligence, meaning just a satellite image of an individual that they think to be this suspected terrorist. They do not require an actual human confirmation that the individual SIM card or phone handset that they’re tracking is in fact possessed by the person that they believe is a potential terrorist. And so, what we understand is that this is essentially death by metadata, where they think, or they hope, that the phone that they’re blowing up is in the possession of a person that they’ve identified as a potential terrorist. But in the end, they don’t actually really know. And that’s where the real danger with this program lies.

And the reason that our source came forward to talk about it is because he was a part of this program and was a participant in operations where he knew the identity of one individual that was being targeted, but other people were killed alongside of that person. And he also said that he just felt incredibly uncomfortable with the idea that they’re killing people’s phones in the effort to kill them and that they don’t actually know who the people are that are holding those phones.

So, when a drone operator is sending the drone in to kill someone he is proceeding with the death based on a guess based on collected metadata, not actual intelligence about someone who is actively carrying out any sort of terrorist plot.

When are we finally going to stop all this nonsense? When is enough revenge and payback enough?

Continuing on....

AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t the spokesperson also say, though, confirming that human intelligence was used—

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —tried afterwards, but not before—after attack?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. I mean, I’m not sure that they’re aware of the kind of twisted irony of the statement that they issued to us, because on the one hand they’re refusing to acknowledge that they don’t actually need to confirm the identity of people who they’re trying to target for death; on the other hand they say, "Oh, well, when we kill someone, we do actually confirm whether or not civilians were killed by using human intelligence." So, it basically is—the standard is: We can kill you if we don’t know your identity, but once we kill you, we want to figure out who we killed.

Is it just me or is that ridiculous?

Mr. Greenwald sheds some insight into reporters publishing classified material they might obtain during an investigation:

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. The position of the U.S. government is that it’s illegal to publish any kind of classified information that you are not authorized to receive. It’s of course illegal, in their view, for a government employee or contractor to leak it without authorization. But their view, as well, is that it’s actually illegal, even if you’re a journalist, to publish it. And they believe that’s especially the case if the information pertains to what they call signals intelligence. And if you look at the Espionage Act of 1917 and other relevant statutes, it does seem to say that it is illegal in the United States to publish that kind of information.

The problem for that view is that there’s a superseding law called the Constitution, the First Amendment to which guarantees that there shall be a free press and that Congress and no other part of the government has the right to interfere with it. And one of the reasons why the government has been so reluctant about prosecuting journalists for publishing classified information, at least up until now, is because they’re afraid that courts will say that application of this statute, or the statutes that I’ve described, to journalists is unconstitutional in violation of the First Amendment, and they want to keep that weapon to be able to threaten or bully or intimidate journalists out of doing the kind of reporting that they’re doing.

So, every media lawyer will tell you that before you publish top-secret information, it’s a good practice, for legal protection, to ask the government if they want to tell you anything they think you should know about the implications of publishing this material. They always say, "If you publish it, it will harm national security." But if you’re a minimally decent journalist, that isn’t good enough. You need specific information about what innocent people will really be harmed if you publish. They virtually never provide any such information. They didn’t in this case. And so, it was very—it was an easy call to make, as journalists, to tell the American people about the methods that their government are using that result in the death of innocent people in ways that are easily preventable.

[Avatar]

Colour me not surprised at all.

--A

[Hashi Lebwohl]

If you have an iPhone you might want to get this app before Apple removes it. The app, Metadata+, is a database of all the drone strikes carried out by the United States. The app's creator, Josh Begley, had submitted the app five times under the name Drones+ but it was always rejected. This time, though, he changed the name and submitted the empty app--which was approved--and then uploaded the data to it. Conclusion: the previous failures were politically-motivated because Apple didn't want to host the data or make it widely available.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

In a new update, it appears that a Federal Appeals court in Manhattan is going to force the Obama Administration to make public its internal memos which outline their "Constitutional" argument that killing American citizens without due process is justifiable. The key to the victory in the case, filed jointly by the ACLU and the New York Times, is that when the White House started talking about the memo existing, then subsequently released a "white paper" about it, they waived their right to keep the actual memo a secret.

Let us reexamine President Obama's remarks about Mr. Al-Awlaki:

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: But when a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens, and when neither the United States nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot, his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a SWAT team.

He is clearly comparing apples and oranges. To say that someone is "actively plotting" something is significantly different than a sniper actually firing on a crowd. In the first instance the people are only plotting to do something, which means they are thinking about it and about how to carry it out. Based on that evidence alone, the government could justify killing me--I have actually outlined, in a permanent Internet form, how a certain type of attack could be undertaken with relative ease and success. In the second instance you have someone actively engaging in terrorist or terror-like activity. Even if you have gun trained on someone and your finger is on the trigger, until you actually pull the trigger you haven't done anything.

I cannot reiterate this point often enough: to kill someone for something they are planning to do is to try and act like the Thought Police or Pre-Crime a-la Minority Report. It is wrong.

[Vraith]

Even if you have gun trained on someone and your finger is on the trigger, until you actually pull the trigger you haven't done anything.

I cannot reiterate this point often enough: to kill someone for something they are planning to do is to try and act like the Thought Police or Pre-Crime a-la Minority Report. It is wrong.

On the first: I'm not at all sure that that is true, in general. I know for certain it is not true in particular ways. For instance, it is perfectly legal/justifiable in many...probably most...places and situations for me to kill someone who is pointing a gun at me. All I have to do is reasonably believe they plan to kill me or someone else nearby.

On the second: you can make a damn good case for that in many contexts.
But I think it becomes something different, and the case you could make weak at best, when the person in question has publicly stated that they plan for violent acts, and that the person has previously participated in planning and executing violent acts. It's no longer a matter of mind-reading or thought crime. [with your sniper in the first...would you argue that you can't take action if the person had stated that they plan to kill, and that they had previously killed? Do you have to wait...and for what, exactly...cuz he isn't currently in the process of firing?]

I'm sure that not all those targeted by drones had fulfilled such conditions/circumstances...
But some definitely have.

I do want to read the doc's though.

[Avatar]

If they're previously executed violent acts, then get them for that.

--A

[wayfriend]

There is sufficient evidence that these organizations will execute what they plan. And if they could be arrested, captured, or shut down, we would do that instead. If the nation they were hiding in would or could do that, we would have them do so instead.

[Fist and Faith]

Wiki says:

In common law, assault is an act which causes a person to apprehend immediate unlawful person violence.[1]

An assault is carried out by a threat of bodily harm coupled with an apparent, present ability to cause the harm.

No way is pointing a gun at me with your finger on the trigger not assault. I'm certainly going to press charges.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

There is sufficient evidence that these organizations will execute what they plan. And if they could be arrested, captured, or shut down, we would do that instead. If the nation they were hiding in would or could do that, we would have them do so instead.

But do we have the right--the legal right--to cross someone else's borders to get known terrorist operatives? In the case of Pakistan, if I recall there is or was some sort of agreement that they would let us in to find them but lately they have wanted to cancel that deal. I think in other places we skirt around that notion by merely launching a drone--we didn't actually set foot inside the country even though some of our technology violated their sovereign airspace.

Still....what happens when a known and wanted terror suspect is hiding in a country that refuses to let us go in even by launching a drone? I am thinking specifically of Saudi Arabia here. What if a terror suspect is able to flee to Beijing? We can't even drone there without risking a war. (note: I don't suspect the Chinese would want them, either, but they could decide to ignore his presence in their country)

The world is never going to run out of terrorists. There will always be someone willing to kill to advance a cause, oppose a different cause, or just to see things get blown up.

I'm with Vraith--I am looking forward to reading the documents, as well. I hope they aren't heavily redacted (but I suspect they will be).

[wayfriend]

Still....what happens when a known and wanted terror suspect is hiding in a country that refuses to let us go in even by launching a drone?

I imagine that then there is no drone strike.

We either get permission, get assistance, get a war, or get walked on.