Here I was steeling myself for a big rebuttal from Benjamin Wittes to my “Drone War on Westphalia” post on the implications of our use of drones. But all I got was a difference in emphasis.

In his response, Wittes generally agrees that our use of drones has implications for sovereignty. But he goes further–arguing it has implications for governance–and focuses particularly on the way technology–rather than the increasing importance of transnational entities I focused on–can undermine the nation-state by empowering non-state actors.

I agree emphatically with Wheeler’s focus on sovereignty here–although for reasons somewhat different from the ones she offers. Indeed, I think Wheeler doesn’t go quite far enough. For it isn’t just sovereignty at issue in the long run, it is governance itself. Robotics are one of several technological platforms that we can expect to  greatly enhance the power of individuals and small groups relative to states. The more advanced of these technological areas are networked computers and biotechnology, but robotics is not all that far behind–a point Ken Anderson alludes to at a post over at the Volokh Conspiracy. Right now, the United States is using robotics, as Wheeler points out, in situations that raises issues for other countries’ sovereignty and governance and has a dominant technological advantage in the field. But that’s not going to continue. Eventually, other countries–and other groups, and other individuals–will use robotics in a fashion that has implications for American sovereignty, and, more generally, for the ability of governments in general to protect security. [my emphasis]

Given DOD’s complete inability to protect our computer toys from intrusion, I’ll wager that time will come sooner rather than later. Iraqi insurgents already figured out how to compromise our drones once using off-the-shelf software.

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

It may not take long, then, for a country like Iran or an entity like a Mexican drug cartel to develop and disseminate a way to hack drones. And given the way other arms proliferate, it won’t be long before drones are available on the private market. (Incidentally, remember how some of the crap intelligence used to trump up a war against Saddam involved a balsa-wood drone? Great times those were!)

So Wittes and I are in pretty close agreement here; he even agrees that the larger issue “ought to be the subject of wider and more serious public debate.”

But shouldn’t it be, then, part of the question whether facilitating this process serves national security or not?

In the interest of fostering some disagreement here–er, um, in an interest in furthering this discussion–I wanted to unpack the thought process in this passage from Wittes’ response to Spencer with what appears to be Wittes’ and my agreement in mind:

The point with merit is the idea that drones enable the waging of war without many of the attendant public costs–including the sort of public accounting that necessarily happens when you deploy large numbers of troops. I have no argument with him on this score, save that he seems to be looking at only one side of a coin that, in fact, has two sides. Ackerman sees that drones make it easy to get involved in wars. But he ignores the fact that for exactly the same reason, they make it easier to limit involvement in wars. How one feels about drones is partly conditioned by what one believes the null hypothesis to be. If one imagines that absent drones, our involvement in certain countries where we now use them would look more like law enforcement operations, one will tend to feel differently, I suspect, that if one thinks our involvement would look more like what happened in Iraq. Drones enable an ongoing, serious, military and intelligence involvement in countries without significant troop commitments.

As I read it, the logic of the passage goes like this:

1. Drones minimize the costs of involvement in wars
2. We will either be involved in these countries in a war or a law enforcement fashion
3. Therefore, we’re better off using drones than large scale military operations

Now, before I get to the implications of this logic, let me point out a few things.

First, note how Wittes uses “what happened in Iraq” as the alternative kind of military deployment? As I said in my last post in this debate, I do think Iraq may end up being what we consider our last traditional nation-state war for some time, so I suppose it’s a fair invocation of an alternative. But Iraq was also characterized, for years, by willfully insufficient planning, and it was an illegal war of choice in any case. If the only option is military intervention, why not compare drones with a more effectively-run more legitimate war, like the first Gulf War? Or why not admit the possibility of what we’ve got in Afghanistan, another incompetently executed war (largely because Bush moved onto Iraq before finishing Afghanistan) which now seems almost to serve as an incredibly expensive excuse to keep drones in the neighborhood.

Also, note the things Wittes doesn’t consider among the possibilities here, such as diplomacy or non-involvement. We’re not using drones (not yet, anyway) against Syria, Bahrain, or Ivory Coast, all of which share some similarities with Libya. So why–aside from the oil–should we assume we have to get involved in any case? Shouldn’t we first consider using tools that don’t create more failed states?

And even if we’re going to be involved militarily, there’s the additional choice of using just special forces, which has the same kind of small footprint and low cost, but–up until the point you use them to kill Osama bin Laden–slightly different legal and strategic implications than drones (though ultimately someone is going to capture members of our special forces and treat them as unlawful enemy combatants).

Mind you, I’m not saying these alternative tools necessarily are the ones we should be using, but we ought to remember the choice isn’t as simple as war versus law enforcement.

That said, Wittes is coming to this–and to the larger question of counterterrorism–from a perspective supporting significant (though not complete) use of a war framework. For those who do, doesn’t that make the logic I laid out above–added to the seeming agreement that drones are one new development undermining the nation-state–look something like this (the additions are in bold)?

1. Drones minimize the costs of involvement in wars but undermine nation-states
2. We will either be involved in these countries in a war or a law enforcement fashion
3. Given that binary choice, we favor a military involvement in these countries
4. Therefore, we’re better off using drones than large scale military operations
5. A consequence of that choice will be popularizing a technology that will undermine nation-states, including our own

Admittedly, I may be pushing the logic here, as well as the extent to which Wittes and I agree about the implications of drones. Nevertheless, this logic summarizes the reason we need more debate here–partly because we’re using tools without consent, partly because we’re not considering potential unintended consequences–particularly in the form of more failed states–of our choices. But also because, in the name of “national security,” we seem to be pursuing policies that will weaken our own nation-state. (Compare this with cyberwar, where, after we ratcheted up the strategy with Stuxnet, we are at least now–perhaps cynically–trying to establish an international regime to cover the new strategy.)

Now consider what’s happening at the same time, in the absence of a real debate about whether we need to launch drones against another country. We had 159 and 238 Americans die in tornadoes this year that were almost certainly an early example of the kinds of severe natural disasters we can expect from climate change; but we’re doing nothing as a country to prepare for more such events (including the historical flooding and its significant economic cost), much less to try to prevent climate change. We continue to let multinational banks guide our national policy choices, in spite of warnings that such an approach will bring about another crash. And no matter how relatively inexpensive drones are, we are spending billions on them, even while we’re firing the teachers that should be educating our next generation of engineers–eating our national security seed corn, if you will–because of budget woes.

In short, in a push to address one diminishing threat using the least costly military means, we may be hurting the viability of our nation-state. We’re fighting a transnational threat by empowering transnational threats. Meanwhile, the US is betraying its responsibility to provide its citizens security in the face of a number of much more urgent threats.

If the state is crumbling–and ours seems to be, literally, politically, and legally–then what becomes of the responsibility for national security? And how do you define the nation that national security must serve?

Update: Balsa for balsam fixed per Synoia.

Leon Panetta kicks off his new job as Secretary of Defense with a trip to Afghanistan. On the plane over there this morning, he told reporters that we just need to kill 10 or 20 leaders of al Qaeda and we will “strategically defeat” al Qaeda. (h/t Spencer)

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared Saturday that the United States is “within reach” of “strategically defeating” Al Qaeda as a terrorist threat, but that doing so would require killing or capturing the group’s 10 to 20 remaining leaders.

Heading to Afghanistan for the first time since taking office earlier this month, Panetta said that intelligence uncovered in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May showed that 10 years of U.S. operations against Al Qaeda had left it with fewer than two dozen key operatives, most of whom are in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa.

“If we can be successful at going after them, I think we can really undermine their ability to do any kind of planning to be able to conduct any kinds of attack on this country,” Panetta told reporters on his way to Afghanistan aboard a U.S. Air Force jet. “That’s why I think” that defeat of Al Qaeda is “within reach,” he added.

To kill or capture those 20 leaders, mind you, we’ve got 100,000 troops in Afghanistan–where none of these key al Qaeda leaders are, according to Panetta–and will have 70,000 there after we withdraw the surge troops. So I’m guessing Panetta isn’t really promising we’ll end the war; we’ll just have tens of thousands of troops in harms way to do … something.

Compare Panetta’s characterization of what we’re up against with Charlie Savage’s description of the government’s justification for capturing Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame. As you read this, remember that Warsame was captured on April 19, over a week before the government killed Osama bin Laden and started analyzing the intelligence at OBL’s compound. Though, according to ProPublica, we already knew that OBL nixed a suggestion to make Anwar al-Awlaki the head of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Savage suggests that we nabbed Warsame on his way back to Somalia from a meeting with al-Awlaki.

Meanwhile, new details emerged about Mr. Warsame’s detention on a Navy ship after his capture in April aboard a fishing skiff between Yemen and Somalia, and about internal administration deliberations on legal policy questions that could have implications for the evolving conflict against Al Qaeda and its affiliates.

A senior counterterrorism official said Wednesday that Mr. Warsame had recently met with Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical cleric now hiding in Yemen.

The Administration justified capturing Warsame based on an argument not that we’re at war against al-Shabaab as a group, but that a handful of al-Shabaab leaders adhere to al Qaeda’s ideology and “could” conduct attacks outside of Somalia.

While Mr. Warsame is accused of being a member of the Shabab, which is focused on a parochial insurgency in Somalia, the administration decided he could be lawfully detained as a wartime prisoner under Congress’s authorization to use military force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to several officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss security matters.

But the administration does not consider the United States to be at war with every member of the Shabab, officials said. Rather, the government decided that Mr. Warsame and a handful of other individual Shabab leaders could be made targets or detained because they were integrated with Al Qaeda or its Yemen branch and were said to be looking beyond the internal Somali conflict.

“Certain elements of Al Shabab, including its senior leaders, adhere to Al Qaeda’s ideology and could conduct attacks outside of Somalia in East Africa, as it did in Uganda in 2010, or even outside the region to further Al Qaeda’s agenda,” said a senior administration official. “For its leadership and those other Al Qaeda-aligned elements of Al Shabab, our approach is quite clear: They are not beyond the reach of our counterterrorism tools.”

Now, logic dictates that this handful of leaders of a group that did not exist on 9/11 (and therefore couldn’t logically be included in the authorization of force against those who planned the attack) includes the Somalian al-Shabaab leaders included in Panetta’s 10-20 targets.

That is, among the 20 or so people we need to kill or capture to declare victory and go home try to invent some justification to keep 70,000 troops in Afghanistan, are people who simply “could” attack outside of Somalia, but may not have yet. And of course the nexus here seems to focus on al-Awlaki, a guy the Administration has declared a state secret, yet still feels free to leak details with impunity.

Don’t get me wrong, if Panetta is preparing to declare victory and come home, I’m all for it (if the Secretary of Defense actually brings these men and women home, which there’s no plan to do yet).

But there’s something fishy underlying even his claim we need to get these 10-20 leaders.

Greg Sargent has a post arguing that complaints about David Plouffe’s comments about unemployment are being distorted.

It seems Plouffe was actually asked a question about whether and how the unemployment rate would impact the Presidential race. He replied by claiming that the number itself wouldn’t impact people’s votes. In other words, Plouffe himself didn’t initially establish the political context. Plouffe then launched into a discussion about how the anemic recovery is experienced by people on a personal level. It was in that context that Plouffe reiterated that people won’t vote based on the numer alone.

You can accuse Plouffe of being wrong in claiming that people won’t vote based on the percentage of unemployed — I tend to think it may loom in people’s minds. You can argue that it was a misstep in that the quote does sound tone-deaf when reproduced without the surrounding context, and it’s understandable why people would see it as insensitive when viewed without that context.

But as Dave Weigel notes, the quote in isolation is widely being distorted in the media as a sign that Obama’s advisers have their heads in the sand about the economy.

Except that the transcript Sargent includes actually proves that Plouffe does have his head in the sand about the economy. After explaining that people don’t think of the economy in terms of unemployment numbers or GDP (I agree), he claims that people are actually feeling better about the economy.

The average American does not view the economy through the prism of GDP or unemployment rates or even monthly jobs numbers.

In fact, those terms very rarely pass their lips. So it’s a very one-dimensional view. They view the economy through their own personal prism. You see, people’s — people’s attitude towards their own personal financial situation has actually improved over time. You know, they’re still concerned about the long-term economic future of the country, but it’s things like “My sister was unemployed for six months and was living in my basement and now she has a job.”

There’s a — a “help wanted” sign. You know, the local diner was a little busier this week. Home Depot was a little busier. These are the ways people talk about the economy. [my emphasis]

Problem is, there’s a way to measure people’s attitude about their own personal situation, and it is not improving. Two key measures of consumer confidence, at least, show people’s attitude about their own personal situation has declined in the last month.

The consumer-sentiment gauge fell to 71.5 at the end of June from 74.3 in May. A preliminary June reading had pegged sentiment at 71.8.

The sentiment reading, which covers how consumers view their personal finances as well as business and buying conditions, averaged about 87 in the year before the start of the most recent recession.

[snip]

Earlier this week, a separate report showed that consumer confidence fell in June to the worst level in eight months on concerns about employment and income.

The Conference Board’s consumer-confidence index fell to 58.5 for the month from an upwardly revised 61.7 in May. Generally, when the economy is growing at a good clip, confidence readings are at 90 and above.

Now, consumer confidence may well turn around, and it has been going up with small hints of a turnaround. But it is not up right now–the Conference Board survey is worse than it has been for months.

Look, I’m not trying to make it easy for Mitt Romney to attack Barack Obama. But at every turn, the Administration does seem deaf to the complaints of ordinary people. Mitt’s no more in touch with those complaints, I’m sure. But that doesn’t mean Obama and his aides don’t have to start listening to the pain of real people.

At today’s press conference responding to the lousy jobs report, Obama offered a few suggestions for how to create jobs: patent reform, infrastructure investment, confidence fairies and … “free trade.”

But as the Economic Policy Institute has shown, these trade deals would actually cost jobs, particularly in the manufacturing sector, which has finally begun to turn around. Colombia wouldn’t even be required to end its tolerance for the murder of labor organizers, as was originally going to be required. Not only that, but Republicans (the ones who actually want these trade deals) are now balking on funding Trade Adjustment Assistance as part of the deal, so workers whose jobs get sent to Korea can get training that will help them find a new one.

In short, Obama’s “solution” to the jobs crisis is–at least as Republicans envision it–a way to send jobs to a country where workers get killed for standing up to their employers without, at the same time, trying to help Americans adjust to losing their jobs.

Somehow, suggesting we address the jobs crisis by sending them overseas doesn’t make me believe in the confidence fairy.

BLS:

Total nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged in June (+18,000). Following gains averaging 215,000 per month from February through April, employment has been essentially flat for the past 2 months. Employment in most major private-sector industries changed little in June, while government employment continued to trend down.

[snip]

Employment in government continued to trend down over the month (-39,000). Federal employment declined by 14,000 in June. Employment in both state government and local government continued to trend down over the month and has been falling since the second half of 2008.

Meanwhile, wages declined.

In June, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls decreased by 1 cent to $22.99. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 1.9 percent. In June, average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees declined by 1 cent to $19.41.

And DC’s solution is going to be to fight about corporate jet tax breaks for another week while cutting more government jobs.

Well, I guess this will add to the evidence that Visa is refusing to accept donations from DataCell because it works with WikiLeaks.

For a few hours on Thursday, credit card donations once again flowed to WikiLeaks through a payment gateway at Icelandic hosting company DataCell. Then Visa shut it down again.

DataCell CEO Andreas Fink said his company had found a new payment acquirer, Valitor, willing to process payments to WikiLeaks, and accepted thousands of donations to the whistle-blowing website before running into problems around 3.30 a.m. Icelandic time.

[snip]

According to Visa representative Amanda Kamin, “An acquirer briefly accepted payments on a merchant site linked to WikiLeaks. As soon as this came to our attention, action was taken with the suspension of Visa payment acceptance to the site remaining in place.”

DataCell’s contract with Valitor contains no terms that forbid DataCell from accepting donations on behalf of WikiLeaks, Fink said.

It’ll be interesting to see whether Valitor’s brief acceptance of DataCell donations will get it in trouble under Visa’s merchant agreements. Or whether they got written threats of trouble.

Because that’s the kind of thing that might make Europe more concerned about this abuse of Visa and MasterCard’s monopoly position.

Scarecrow, Digby, and Jon Walker rightly took David Plouffe’s promises that a 9% unemployment rate won’t hurt Obama’s reelection chances to task.

But I’m at least as appalled by this part of Plouffe’s statement:

The White House’s top political adviser, downplaying the significance of the unemployment rate in the 2012 election, said the Republican candidates are offering the same policies that caused the economic crisis and targeted one potential opponent — Mitt Romney.

“So all of them are basically just bringing out the same old war horses,” senior adviser David Plouffe said yesterday at a Bloomberg Breakfast in Washington. “Let Wall Street kind of run amok, cut taxes for the wealthy, starve investment in things like education, research and development.”

Let Wall Street run amok. Check.

Cut taxes for the wealthy. Check.

And while Obama hasn’t as obviously starved investment in education and R&D (indeed, the stimulus he doesn’t like to talk about increased investments in both), by insisting on deficit reduction at the same time as states have had (or pretended they had to) cut education and R&D to balance their budgets, he has allowed such cuts to happen on his watch.

It troubles me a bit that David Plouffe doesn’t even see the irony of his statement.  Sure, the Republicans will be running on all those things. But so will, to a large extent, Obama.

The Guardian is reporting that former News of the World editor and David Cameron flack Andy Coulson received notice today to show up at a London police station to be arrested tomorrow.

Andy Coulson has been told by police that he will be arrested on Friday morning over suspicions that he knew about, or had direct involvement in, the hacking of mobile phones during his editorship of the News of the World.

The Guardian understands that a second arrest is also to be made in the next few days of a former senior journalist at the paper.

Leaks from News International forced police to speed up their plans to arrest the two key suspects in the explosive phone-hacking scandal.

The Guardian knows the identity of the second suspect but is witholding the name in order to avoid prejudicing the ongoing police investigation.

[snip]

Evidence leading to the two imminent arrests has come from a cache of emails recently uncovered during NI’s internal investigation into phone hacking.

[snip]

The Guardian understands that NI had promised the police not to reveal the existence of evidence identifying Coulson and the other journalist, but that detectives began to fear the information would be leaked, after reports appeared suggesting that Coulson approved payments to police officers.

So not only has News International known that Coulson was in trouble, but someone has leaked tidbits of it.

I’m not sure closing News of the World is going to help News Corp–or Scotland Yard–avoid this much longer.

Remember that suit Wikileaks’ hosting company, DataCell was about to file? Today was the day they were planning to do so. And surprise surprise, Visa and MasterCard have suddenly decided to start processing payments from DataCell again.

Late last week, WikiLeaks and DataCell gave me a copy of a legal complaint the group had planned to file Thursday with the European Union Commission, accusing the card companies and their Danish payment processor Teller of abusing their market positions by cutting off WikiLeaks’ financial sources.

Neither Visa nor MasterCard has responded to that threat, and even now a Visa spokesperson merely tells me that the company is “looking into the situation.”

But in the meantime, Visa, MasterCard and American Express payments have all inexplicably opened to DataCell and WikiLeaks through another payment processor, according to DataCell.

“Today we have observed that an alternative payment processor that we have contracted with, has in fact opened the gateway for payments with Visa and Mastercard, and now also for American Express Card payments, which is an option we did not had before,” DataCell wrote in a statement on its website.

We’ll see how long it lasts. But it says something about the due process used here if the mere threat of legal action has opened up the credit processing already.

As Marcy noted Tuesday afternoon, and has been large in the news the last two days, there is a new terrorism prosecution announced by Eric Holder and the Obama DOJ. The case concerns Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, and is interesting in that Warsame is alleged to be a member/leader of al-Shabaab, and none of the allegations involve acts of plots against the US or its citizens directly.

In fact, the only significant nexus to the United States contained within the indictment unsealed against Warsame is that he:

…conspires with a national of the United States…

This is unusual as to the complete lack of description and details about the “national of the United States” and the complete absence of any information indicating the nature of conspiracy and/or contact with the “national of the United States. To be fair, a charging document is not legally required to be a “speaking indictment” that fully lays out every minute detail of the jurisdiction, venue and facts; although this one is one of the more silent ones I have seen in a long time from the DOJ.

But, what is really fascinating is this today from Charlie Savage at the New York Times:

Meanwhile, new details emerged about Mr. Warsame’s detention on a Navy ship after his capture in April aboard a fishing skiff between Yemen and Somalia, and about internal administration deliberations on legal policy questions that could have implications for the evolving conflict against Al Qaeda and its affiliates.

A senior counterterrorism official said Wednesday that Mr. Warsame had recently met with Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical cleric now hiding in Yemen. After his capture, he was taken to the Boxer, an amphibious assault ship that was steaming in the region and has a brig, a senior military official said.

While Mr. Warsame is accused of being a member of the Shabab, which is focused on a parochial insurgency in Somalia, the administration decided he could be lawfully detained as a wartime prisoner under Congress’s authorization to use military force against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to several officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss security matters. (emphasis added)

So, we have Warsame allegedly “conspiring” with a “national of the United States” in the indictment with the identity and circumstances being unusually and ridiculously guarded and vague; and now we have Warsame having had contact with Awlaki.

Gee, I wonder what the odds are they are one in the same person???

Because, as you may remember, Awlaki is so secret that the US government saw fit to declare state secrets rather than explain to Awlaki’s parents why they feel justified to violently assassinate their son, a US citizen, without so much as a speck of due process. Now, I guess a guy that secret is someone the government might just be really vague about in an indictment of some tangential corollary person, say Warsame, for instance.

So, is it truly the case that Awlaki is indeed the unnamed “national of the United States” here in the Warsame indictment? I don’t know for certain, but it sure as heck fits the facts as we know them and the depraved refusal of the American government to talk about or let the public know its basis for impunity in marking an American citizen for extrajudicial termination with prejudice.

Now, back to the Warsame indictment for one last thought. While I agree with Marcy, Ben Wizner of ACLU and Adam Serwer that the Obama Administration decision to bring Warsame in front of an Article III court for trial was a brave one in relation to establishing credibility of traditional terrorism prosecutions, I wonder if Warsame is really the right case to do that with?

In Warsame, all the overt acts, heck all the acts period, took place outside of the US, and none of them, none, were particularly directed at all, much less with malice, at the US or US citizens. al Shabaab is a nasty group of terrorists to be sure, but is this really the use we want to make of US Article III courts? Shouldn’t the prosecutions the Administration uses to establish credibility have some, even minimal, overt act nexus to the United States and the Southern District of New York?