Bin Laden Found By Trolling The Weeds, Not By Torture

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Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo have a nice and fascinating article out today telling the story of a single CIA career analyst who was the critical cog in collating the information that led to Osama bin Laden’s capture and death:

He examined and re-examined every aspect of bin Laden’s life. How did he live while hiding in Sudan? With whom did he surround himself while living in Kandahar, Afghanistan? What would a bin Laden hideout look like today?

The CIA had a list of potential leads, associates and family members who might have access to bin Laden.

“Just keep working that list bit by bit,” one senior intelligence official recalls John telling his team. “He’s there somewhere. We’ll get there.”

Goldman and Apuzzo have done good work here; it is a great story, please read it in its entirety. But I want to play off their work to take it the step further that they did not. This is not just a feel good story about what worked and went right to capture bin Laden, it is an instructive primer on what didn’t work, to wit: torture.

So, while we congratulate CIA analyst “John”, let us also remember that years of effort, centuries of founding principles and an eternity of American morality was lost to the Bush/Cheney torture brigade. Ever since Osama bin Laden’s take down, the torture apologists have come out of their caves bleating at full voice in a vain attempt to justify their war crimes and save their face. Even yesterday, as the nation celebrated its founding, one of the most craven torture toadies of all, Marc Theissen, was back at it, saying the country owed the torture freaks an apology.

But torture is not what caught Osama bin Laden, good solid human intelligence and analysis were what did the trick.

That ability to spot the importance of seemingly insignificant details, to weave disparate strands of information into a meaningful story, gave him a particular knack for hunting terrorists.

Yes. Around here, we call that digging and trolling in the weeds. It is what works; not torture.

Russ Feingold Was Proved Fucking Right

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A number of you have been asking for my intro of Russ Feingold last Thursday. Here it is. Now that I’ve had a chance to see it I realize I had a number of misstatements (and a number of places where I glossed necessary detail–I guess I speak like I blog, for better or worse).

Investigating Juan Cole Rather than Ahmed Chalabi

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James Risen reports that Glen Carle, a former CIA officer, says the Bush Administration was looking for dirt on Juan Cole in 2005. In one incident, Carle’s supervisor asked whether the CIA had anything on Cole.

Mr. Carle said that sometime that year, he was approached by his supervisor, David Low, about Professor Cole. Mr. Low and Mr. Carle have starkly different recollections of what happened. According to Mr. Carle, Mr. Low returned from a White House meeting one day and inquired who Juan Cole was, making clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to gather information on him. Mr. Carle recalled his boss saying, “The White House wants to get him.”

“ ‘What do you think we might know about him, or could find out that could discredit him?’ ” Mr. Low continued, according to Mr. Carle.

Mr. Carle said that he warned that it would be illegal to spy on Americans and refused to get involved, but that Mr. Low seemed to ignore him.

“But what might we know about him?” he said Mr. Low asked. “Does he drink? What are his views? Is he married?”

Then, several months later, a CIA analyst sought information about Cole again.

Several months after the initial incident, Mr. Carle said, a colleague on the National Intelligence Council asked him to look at an e-mail he had just received from a C.I.A. analyst. The analyst was seeking advice about an assignment from the executive assistant to the spy agency’s deputy director for intelligence, John A. Kringen, directing the analyst to collect information on Professor Cole.

Now, Risen connects these two incidents with successful right wing attempts to persuade Yale not to offer Cole a prestigious position.

Cole’s critics — in The New York Sun, National Review, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, several of whom are now praising Yale for not hiring him — have maintained that they aren’t using political tests, but object to Cole’s career on a variety of grounds. They point to numerous quotes he has made (generally in his blog) that they say show a willingness to blame the United States and Israel inappropriately (Cole has said that some of the quotes are taken out of context and that others represent legitimate opinion). Several have also criticized his scholarship, saying that he is spending too much time on blogging and questioning his output of serious scholarship. (His supporters point to a long publication list.) Campus Watch, a pro-Israel group, maintains a long list of articles about Cole, most of which it endorses for their criticism of him.

But the timing also happens to coincide with Juan Cole’s correct predictions that Ahmed Chalabi would not win the 2005 Iraqi elections. We know from AJ Rossmiller that the intelligence community made great efforts to ignore Cole’s predictions.

Chalabi won just .5% of the vote. Iyad Allawi, in whom the Administration also invested their hopes, won just 8% of the vote. And the Shiite coalition dominated by SCIRI and the Sadrists got 41% of the votes. In his book, Still Broken, AJ describes that he saw this coming.

After Iraq’s winter elections, the results validated the predictions contained in the paper I’d written in the fall. It created something of a stir because the paper turned out to be remarkably accurate, far more so than the forecasts of other agencies and departments. Before the election occurred, a high-ranking official requested a follow-up evaluation of our assessments, and I wrote a memo that described our precision. The memo made its way up through the chain, and a few days later the office got a note from Stephen Cambone, the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, praising both the prediction and the self-evaluation.

Unfortunately, the bulk of the last half of AJ’s book describes how such accurate predictions are generally weeded out by higher-ranking analysts worried that their office’s work product might piss off the Administration.

[snip]

When AJ was asked how he got the 2005 election right, one of the things he pointed to, half-seriously, was the open source work of Juan Cole.

I began to write the explanation of our methodology, and I tried to resist the temptation to criticize other agencies while explaining how and why we did things differently. State, in particular, was very sensitive about their screwup, and I didn’t want to piss anybody off.

“Sir, can’t I just say that I copied and pasted Juan Cole?”

Now, I’m not suggesting that the White House was digging dirt on Juan Cole because he correctly predicted Ahmed Chalabi would get smoked in a democratic election.

But it’s probably worth noting what opinions Cole expressed that generated this attention in the first place.

 

Robert Mueller: Civil Liberties Don’t Need a “Fresh” Review

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This exchange last Thursday between Senator Al Franken and FBI Director Robert Mueller was frustrating enough–Senator Franken’s questions were the only ones on civil liberties Mueller faced, and the Director seemed pretty miffed to be questioned on the subject in the first place.

But I’m even more troubled by the exchange now that we’ve learned about the FBI’s new investigative guidelines that allow, among other things, database searches without any record and new powers to coerce informants.

After all, Mueller’s response to Franken’s concern about NSLs boasted that they had implemented a compliance system for NSLs and “other areas” where FBI might “fall into the same habits.” (What do you suppose those other areas are? Is he addressing FISC concerns?)

But perhaps as important if not more important, we set up a compliance program to address not just [National] Security Letters, but other areas such as National Security Letters where we could fall into the same, the same pattern, or habits. And so the National Security Letters I believe we addressed appropriately at the time, and it was used as a catalyst to set up a compliance program that addresses a concern in other areas comparable to what we had found with regard to National Security Letters.

Getting rid of the records on database searches would seem to eliminate any compliance system. And Mueller knew he was planning to do so (as did, I presume, Franken) when he gave this answer.

And in response to Franken’s question about infiltration of mosques and peace groups, Mueller assured Franken that FBI complied with its own guidelines.

I’m not certain it needs a fresh, a fresh, uh, look because I’m very concerned whenever those allegations arise. I will tell you that I believe that in terms of surveillances of religious institutions we have done it appropriately and with appropriate predication under the guidelines in the applicable statutes, even though there are allegations out there to the contrary. I also believe that when we have undertaken investigations of individuals expressing their First Amendment rights, we have done so according to our internal guidelines and the applicable statutes. And so, whenever these allegations come forward, I take them exceptionally seriously, make sure our inspection division or others look into it to determine whether or not we need to change anything. And I will tell you that addressing terrorism, and the responsibility to protect against attacks, brings us to the point where we are balancing day in and day out civil liberties and the necessity for disrupting a plot that could kill Americans and it’s something that we keep in mind day in and day out.

But of course, FBI is about to change those guidelines, making it easier for the Agents to attend political meetings undercover and track innocent people. And it doesn’t much matter if FBI complies with its own guidelines if those guidelines support abusive investigations. Mueller is basically insisting that he doesn’t need to reconsider FBI’s actions because FBI complies with its own guidelines and therefore the underlying guidelines themselves don’t need any more scrutiny.

And that canard about balancing civil liberties with the necessity of disrupting a plot (there’s zero evidence of course, that the FBI’s surveillance of peace groups has any tie to a plot, save against political speech)? Not only is this not a zero sum game, but the FBI doesn’t take similar civil liberties-infringing actions to disrupt right wing plots.

When he was gently, respectfully challenged to defend his civil liberties record, Mueller instead resorted to that same old terror fear-mongering. Given the new permissive guidelines, such an attitude is even more troubling.

More Security Theater as Play

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Some weeks back, I posted on a Disney ride that offers riders the opportunity to be “verbally accosted by a security droid.” Now, kids can play at being a TSA-worker themselves with a security wand:

There’s nothing cooler than being a TSA agent for Homeland Security and now the Spy Gear Security Scanner lets kids live out their dreams. It’s a handheld security wand whose LED lights flash and an alarm goes off when it detects metal, just like the real thing!

Now, frankly, I’m less disturbed by this than by the Disney ride. There’s nothing wrong with being a TSA worker; it’s the rules they have to follow that are the problem. And I’d rather kids learn to be a TSA worker than to believe submitting to abusive ones is fun.

That said, it’s just one more indication of the way our culture is normalizing security theater by making it “play” for children.

FBI Aspires to Be the Stasi

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Charlie Savage describes changes the FBI is making to its Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide. On its face, the changes he describes are downright bad. The changes allow FBI agents to:

  • Make a database “assessment” search of a group or person “proactively” without making a record of that search
  • Tail people during a “proactive” assessment more than once
  • Search a potential informant’s trash to gather information to use to force the informant to snitch for the government
  • Attend up to five meetings of a group undercover
  • Eliminate extra supervision of investigations of politicians or journalists if they are witnesses, not suspects, in the investigation
  • Eliminate such protection altogether for “low-profile” blogs

These new rules allow all sorts of fishing expeditions of people based on nothing more than a lead. Moreover, it would make it easy for the FBI to surveil targets with almost no evidence against them until they could be trumped up on some crime.

To some degree they feel like an effort to clean up past illegal activity (as the FBI did with its exigent letters program).

But consider how much worse these guidelines are in consideration of what else we know, or suspect.

We suspect, after all, that our government collects generalized databases of geolocation using Section 215. Since that information need only be “relevant” to a foreign intelligence investigation, it may well include records on all of us.

These new rules would allow the FBI to search such a database without recording that search. Aside from the obvious invitation for abuse–some agent wondering whether his girlfriend was hanging out with his best friend–it also eliminates the evidence that the FBI used such a controversial technique as geolocation as the premise for further investigation. It makes it easier for the FBI to investigate someone because of nothing more than who they know.

Then there’s the new rules allowing the FBI to conduct investigations of what a journalist “witnessed” without supervision. Remember that after the FBI decided James Risen had “witnessed” a leak of classified information, they collected his business records and emails, collecting much of the evidence they needed to indict Jeff Sterling. This rule would seem to virtually eliminate any real protection for journalists’ sources.

Finally, there’s the invitation to snoop through a potential informant’s trash. As I have pointed out, as far back as 2002, the government explicitly described using FISA to collect information, even on potentially unrelated crimes like rape, on potential informants so they could blackmail them into serving as snitches. Taken together, these rules would allow the FBI to search through existing databases (potentially including telecommunications metadata showing who a person communicated with and hung out with, as well as some financial information) to find potential snitches. The agent could search those databases with no apparent limits or record. And then the agent could sift through the potential informant’s trash to get the evidence to blackmail him to become an informant.

These rules seem ripe to snare a bunch of totally innocent people in the FBI’s investigative web. And even if it doesn’t, it may well serve to increase the paranoia of average people.

The Government’s Thomas Drake Case Crumbles

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As I noted the other day (and Josh Gerstein first reported), the government has chosen to withdraw two exhibits and redact discussion of a certain technology from another in the Thomas Drake case.

Ellen Nakashima appears to reveal that those three documents were three of the five charged documents.

According to people following the case, the government may have to drop two Espionage Act counts that relate to information that Drake submitted to the Defense Department inspector general between 2002 and 2004 to buttress colleagues’ complaints about waste, fraud and abuse of a bungled NSA data-sifting program, Trailblazer. He and his former NSA colleagues thought the complaints were confidential.

The evidence for those two counts is contained in Exhibits 42 and 43, according to the sources. Prosecutor William M. Welch II, in a letter Sunday to Bennett, a U.S. District Court judge in Baltimore, said those exhibits will be withdrawn. The letter was first reported by Politico.

Another exhibit, numbered 41, also consisting of information Drake submitted to the inspector general, is intended to support a third Espionage Act count that may also be dropped, the sources said. That exhibit will be redacted, the prosecution has said.

So two, maybe three charges out the door there. And, as Nakashima reminds, the other two charged documents are the ones NSA declassified not long after they were found on Drake’s computer.

Apparently, the government plans to get up before a jury with three documents in a trash can, two others that appear to be a classic case of overclassification. Another charge alleges that Drake lied about passing classified information to Siobhan Gorman; the government will have to prove that with either now-declassified information or information they can’t enter into evidence. Then there’s the charge that alleges that Drake lied about bringing classified documents home; if I understand Nakashima’s story right, then the government is in the process of throwing out the three purportedly classified documents they found at his home.

There are a few more charges: for example, after complaining to the jury that Drake left classified documents lying around at his home, they’re going to ask the jury to convict him for destroying classified information so it wouldn’t just be lying around his home.

Mind you, they might dink and dunk a charge here or there. But in the process they’re going to look like loony-bins, sniffing around in a guy’s basement for not-really classified information.

Robert Mueller: Anna Chapman and Mohamed Mohamud Are Bigger Threats than Lloyd Blankfein

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As part of Robert Mueller’s reconfirmation hearing, he stated–and then was repeatedly asked–what threats face our country. Here’s how he described these threats in his hearing statement:

The FBI has never faced a more complex threat environment than it does today. Over the past year, we have seen an extraordinary array of national security and criminal threats, from terrorism and espionage to cyber attacks and traditional crimes. These threats have ranged from attempts by Al Qaeda and its affiliates to place bombs on airplanes bound for the United States to lone actors seeking to detonate IEDs in public squares and subways, intent on mass murder.

A month ago, the successful operation in Pakistan leading to Usama bin Laden’s death created new urgency for this threat picture. While we continue to exploit the materials seized from bin Laden’s compound, one of the early assessments from this intelligence is that Al Qaeda remains committed to attacking the United States. In addition, we are focused on the new information about the homeland threat gained from this operation.

We also continue to face the threat from adversaries, like Anwar Alaqui, who are engaged in efforts to radicalize people in the United States to commit acts of terrorism. In the age of the Internet, these radicalizing figures no longer need to meet or speak personally with those they seek to influence. Instead, they conduct their media campaigns from remote regions of the world, intent on fostering terrorism by lone actors here in the United States.

Alongside these ever-evolving terrorism plots, the espionage threat persists as well. Last summer, there were the arrests of 10 Russian spies, known as “illegals,” who secretly blended into American society in order to clandestinely gather information for Russia. And we continue to make significant arrests for economic espionage as foreign interests seek to steal controlled technologies.

The cyber intrusion at Google last year highlights the ever-present danger from a sophisticated Internet-attack, Along with countless other cyber incidents, these attacks threaten to undermine the integrity of the Internet and to victimize the businesses and people who rely on it.

In our criminal investigations, the FBI continues to uncover massive corporate and mortgage frauds that weaken the financial system and victimize investors, homeowners, and ultimately taxpayers. We are also rooting out insidious health care scams involving false billings and fake treatments that endanger patients and fleece government health care programs.

The violence in Mexico remains a threat for the United States, as we saw with the murder of three individuals connected to the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Juarez in March 2010 and the shooting earlier this year of two DHS Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Mexico.

And throughout, we are confronted with instances of corruption that undermine the public trust and violent gangs that continue to take innocent lives. [my emphasis]

So Mueller’s list, in order, is:

  • Al Qaeda-launched attack like the Undie-bomber
  • Self-radicalized attacks like Mohamed Osman Mohamud
  • Spies like Anna Chapman
  • Cyber attacks allegedly launched by China
  • Massive corporate fraud committed by people like Lloyd Blankfein that weakens our financial system
  • Health care scams
  • Drug cartel violence
  • Public corruption

Now, I take the order here as some sort of prioritization. And that view is born out by Mueller’s answers to several questions about the threats facing the US. He always mentioned terrorism, including terrorism committed by people self-radicalized via the Internet. He mentioned cyber attacks. He raised the risk of drug cartel violence again.

But unless I missed it, in his extemporaneous descriptions of the threats facing our nation, Mueller did not again mention financial fraud. Update: In a response to Amy Klobuchar’s version of this he said FBI had a,

backlog of mortgage fraud and white collar criminal cases that we are assiduously working through.

So maybe that includes Blankfein (though mortgage fraud usually means garden variety local fraud).

In other words, in spite of his concession that the banksters’ “massive corporate frauds … weaken the financial system and victimize investors, homeowners, and ultimately taxpayers,” Mueller seems to think that a hapless teenager framed by the FBI represents a bigger threat to our country than Goldman Sachs crashing our entire economy.

Too bad for the American people that Congress is falling all over itself rushing to reconfirm Mueller.

The Un-Patriot Acts of Harry Reid

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As you undoubtedly know by now, the furious rush to extend the Patriot Act is once again in full swing. The Patriot Act is an odious piece of legislation that was birthed by fearmongering and the imposition of artificial drop dead, if we don’t pass this today the terrortists are gonna OWN us, artificial time emergencies. Then it was extended the same way. That is not a bug, it is indeed a feature.

When the government, through its executive and compliant Congress, wants to cut surveillance and privacy corners out of laziness and control greed, and otherwise crush the soul of the Constitution and the 4th Amendment, demagoguery and fake exigencies are the order of the day. And so they are again. Oh, and of course they want to get out of town on their vacation. And that is what has happened today.

Senators Wyden and Mark Udall had a superb amendment proposed to narrow the Patriots core provisions ever so slightly so as to maintain some Constitutional integrity. Marcy explained the details here. But, because that would engender real and meaningful debate on the efficacy of Patriot, it had to be quashed, and that is exactly what has occurred. Harry Reid and Diane Feinstein gave a couple of hollow and meaningless “promises”, of unknown content, to Wyden and Udall and strongarmed them into withdrawing their amendment. The citizens are simply not entitled to meaningful debate on their Constitution.

Spencer Ackerman, over at Wired’s Danger Room, shredded Reid for his unPatriotic act. Gloriously:

Remember back when a Republican was in the White House and demanded broad surveillance authority? Here’s Reid back then. ”Whether out of convenience, incompetence, or outright disdain for the rule of law, the administration chose to ignore Congress and ignore the Constitution,” Reid said about Bush’s warrantless surveillance program. When Bush insisted Congress entrench that surveillance with legislation in 2008, Reid turned around and demanded Bush “stop fear-mongering and start being honest with the American people about national security.” Any claim about the detrimental impact about a lapse in widespread surveillance were “scare tactics” to Reid that ”irresponsibly distort reality.” (Then Reid rolled over for Bush.)

That’s nowhere near the end of Reid’s hypocrisy here. When the Senate debated renewing the Patriot Act in 2006, Reid, a supporter of the bill’s surveillance procedures, himself slowed up the bill’s passage to allow amendments to it — the better to allow “sensible checks on the arbitrary exercise of executive power.” Sounding a whole lot like Rand Paul, the 2006-vintage Reid registered his “objection to the procedural maneuver under which Senators have been blocked from offering any amendments to this bill” and reminded his colleagues, ”the hallmark of the Senate is free speech and open debate.”

Reid could hardly be more of an opportunist here. He favors broad surveillance authorities — just as long as those scary Republicans stop being mean to liberals. When Attorney General John Ashcroft warned civil libertarians that their “phantoms of lost liberty… only aid terrorists,” Reid told CNN on December 8, 2001 that “people should just cool their jets” — but not that Ashcroft was actually, you know, wrong. By contrast, the ultra-conservative pundit Bob Novak said Ashcroft made “one of the most disreputable statements I have heard from an attorney general.”

Exactly right. But it gets worse. Rand Paul also had an amendment, but he, unlike our fine Democratic Senators, was not willing to quietly go off into the night. Paul stood his ground and now Reid has agreed to let Paul’s amendment to exempt gun purchases from Patriot’s scope have a vote:

Senate Democratic leadership seems poised to acquiesce to Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) demand that the chamber vote on an amendment that would restrict national security officials from examining gun dealer records in their efforts to track potential terrorists.

The Kentucky Republican had been insisting that such language at least receive a vote as an addition to the extension of the USA Patriot Act.

So, that is where the Democratic party, Democratic Senate Leadership and the Obama Administration are on protecting the Constitution and its 4th Amendment. Sane and intelligent amendments to narrow focus and appropriately protect American’s privacy are squashed like small irritating bugs under a hail of fearmongering and demagoguery – from Democratic Leadership – and terrorists’ rights to buy guns with impunity and privacy are protected because just one GOP senator has the balls to actually stand up and insist on it.

Hanoi Harry Reid is on point and leading this clown car of civil liberties insanity, and so deserves a healthy chunk of the blame, but he is certainly not alone. For all the noise they made, why cannot Ron Wyden and Mark Udall stand up in a similar fashion? Where are the other Democrats who used to have such alarm when it was the Bush/Cheney Administration doing these things? Where is Russ Feingold, I miss him so, but I am sure that Obama and Reid are glad he is gone on days like today. Exactly why Feingold was, and is, so important.

UPDATE: There is late word Reid may have talked Mitch McConnell and GOP Senate leadership into putting a clamp on Rand Paul and holding up his amendment debate demand. We shall see.

Navy SEALs Beat Osama bin Laden … and Then Mickey

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And here I thought the 83 year old Mouse was tougher than the graying terrorist watching home videos with all the kids. But it turns out that the Navy SEALs bested Mickey Mouse just as handily as they killed Osama bin Laden. (h/t JL)

Walt Disney Co. said Wednesday that it will withdraw its applications to trademark the term “SEAL Team 6” for use on toys, games, and other consumer products.

[snip]

The Navy filed its own applications for the terms “SEAL Team” and “Navy SEALs” 10 days later, explaining in the filings that the phrases denote “membership in an organization of the Department of the Navy that develops and executes military missions involving special operations strategy, doctrine, and tactics.”

“We are fully committed to protecting our trademark rights,” said Commander Danny Hernandez, the chief Navy spokesman.

A Disney spokesman said the company was withdrawing the applications “out of deference to the Navy.”

So if you want to go through a fantasy ride about nabbing Osama bin Laden, you’re just going to have to act it out yourself, with water pistols in your backyard. And if you want to indoctrinate your children into violence from a young age, you’ll just have to stick with the weekend cartoons.

Look on the bright side, though! There are at least some things taxpayers have paid for that the government will insist on keeping!