Obama officials, Senate intelligence panel spar over deletions from torture report | National Security & Defense. WASHINGTON — The Obama administration and the Senate Intelligence Committee are sparring over the administration’s deletions of fake names from the public version of a long-awaited report on the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation methods on suspected terrorists, McClatchy has learned. The outcome of the debate could impact the clarity and narrative flow of the report, the product of the most intensive congressional investigation of CIA operations since lawmakers examined the agency’s role in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal of the Reagan presidency. “Redactions are supposed to remove names or anything that could compromise sources and methods, not to undermine the source material so that it is impossible to understand,” Sen.
Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., a member of the committee, said Sunday in a statement. “Try reading a novel with 15 percent of the words blacked out. But Tom Mentzer, a spokesman for the committee’s chairwoman, Sen. The CIA declined comment. Top senator rejects CIA torture report redactions ahead of public release. The key senator behind a landmark congressional investigation into the CIA’s use of torture has rejected redactions made by the Obama administration ahead of a planned public release of the politically charged report. In the latest struggle between senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the intelligence committee, and the CIA, Feinstein said she would delay a heavily anticipated disclosure of portions of the report in an attempt to reverse redactions that “eliminate or obscure key facts that support the report’s findings and conclusions”.
“Until these redactions are addressed to the committee’s satisfaction, the report will not be made public,” said Feinstein, who added that she intended to outline the committee’s desired disclosures in a private letter to President Barack Obama. Clapper left the door open to a “constructive dialogue with the committee.” Despite Clapper’s statement, the committee has never proposed making more than a fraction of its inquiry public. US cites security more to censor, deny records.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press. The administration cited more legal exceptions it said justified withholding materials and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.
Most agencies also took longer to answer records requests, the analysis found. The government's own figures from 99 federal agencies covering six years show that half way through its second term, the administration has made few meaningful improvements in the way it releases records despite its promises from Day 1 to become the most transparent administration in history. "I'm concerned the growing trend toward relying upon FOIA exemptions to withhold large swaths of government information is hindering the public's right to know," said Sen. After Rep. Online: Court Rebukes White House Over "Secret Law" DC District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle yesterday ordered the Obama Administration to release a copy of an unclassified presidential directive, and she said the attempt to withhold it represented an improper exercise of “secret law.”
The Obama White House has a “limitless” view of its authority to withhold presidential communications from the public, she wrote, but that view is wrong. “The government appears to adopt the cavalier attitude that the President should be permitted to convey orders throughout the Executive Branch without public oversight– to engage in what is in effect governance by ‘secret law’,” Judge Huvelle wrote in her December 17 opinion. “The Court finds equally troubling the government’s complementary suggestion that ‘effective’ governance requires that a President’s substantive and non-classified directives to Executive Branch agencies remain concealed from public scrutiny,” she wrote.
She criticized the government for “the unbounded nature” of its claim. Seymour M. Hersh · Whose sarin? · LRB 8 December 2013. Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack.
In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. The Surveillance Reforms Obama Supported Before He Was President. Sen. Barack Obama in 2005. The White House has opposed efforts to rein in NSA snooping, but as a senator, Obama supported substantial reforms. (Scott Olson/Getty Images) Obama co-sponsored [2] a 2007 bill, introduced by Sen.
Russ Feingold, D-Wis., that would have required the government to demonstrate, with “specific and articulable facts [3],” that it wanted records related to “a suspected agent of a foreign power [4]” or the records of people with one degree of separation from a suspect. The bill died in committee [5]. We now know the Obama administration has sought, and obtained, the phone records belonging to all Verizon Business Network Services subscribers [7] (and reportedly, Sprint and AT&T subscribers [8], as well). The measure Obama supported in 2007 is actually similar to the House amendment [10] that the White House condemned earlier this month.
The 2007 measure is also similar to current proposals introduced by Conyers [12] and Sen. The amendment failed 35-63 [18]. Timeline: How Obama Compares to Bush on Torture, Surveillance and Detention. Sealing Loose Lips: Charting Obama’s Crackdown on Leaks. Bradley Manning’s conviction under the Espionage Act is the latest development in the Obama administration’s push to prosecute leaks.
We’ve updated our timeline with the most recent events. Despite promises to strengthen protections for whistleblowers, the Obama administration has launched an aggressive crackdown on government employees who have leaked national security information to the press. With charges filed against NSA leaker Edward Snowden this June, the administration has brought a total of seven cases under the Espionage Act, which dates from World War I and criminalizes disclosing information “relating to the national defense.”
Prior to the current administration, there had been only three known casesresulting in indictments in which the Espionage Act was used to prosecute government officials for leaks. The administration has also targeted journalists. A spokesman for the Department of Justice told us the government “does not target whistleblowers.” Daniel Ellsberg Stephen Kim. Under Obama, Patriot Act Sneak-and-Peek Outpaces Bush Use (and is mostly about Drugs) Revealed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily | World news.
The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April. The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries. The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing. The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.
The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Obama’s Game of Chicken. November/ December 2012Obama’s Game of Chicken The untold story of how the administration tried to stand up to big agricultural companies on behalf of independent farmers, and lost. By Lina Khan In May 2010, Garry Staples left his chicken farm in Steele, Alabama, to take part in a historic hearing in Normal, an hour and a half away. The decision to go wasn’t easy. The big processing companies that farmers rely on for their livelihood had made it known that even attending one of these hearings, much less speaking out at one, could mean trouble. For a chicken farmer, that’s no trivial thing. Getting on a processing company’s bad side can deal a serious blow to a farmer’s income—and even lose him the farm entirely. Staples and other farmers described a system that is worse in certain respects than sharecropping.
As Staples explained, a processing company can require a farmer to assume substantial debt to pay for new chicken houses, tailored to the company’s exact specifications. Health Care Law to Allow States to Pick Benefits. Obama Admin Gives Up Pretense of Competitive Market for ACA Health Insurance Exchanges. HHS and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) believe in fairies and insurance markets The notion that the health insurance exchanges required by the Affordable Care Act would reduce health care costs using “competition” between concentrated health insurers was always one or more unbridgeable chasms away from a plausible theory.
But the myths of competitive markets are so deeply ingrained in our political discourse it was inevitable that a nominal Democratic President not constrained by conceptual coherence and a corrupt Congress would try to sell us the conceit as the only politically feasible model for health care reform. The economists — not to mention international experience — told us it was gibberish, but nobody cared. Now, however, the Obama Administration has given up even the pretense of a competitive model for the state-administered private insurance exchanges. From Saturday’s New York Times (i.e, a Friday night news dump): What Mr. Whom are they kidding? Hands Off Social Security
Pornoscanner CEO flew with Obama to India. Barack Hoover Obama: The best and the brightest blow it again—By Kevin Baker. Obama: A New Argument About The President's Legal Philosophy. On March 29, 1989, at a time when many of his fellow first-year law students were beginning to prepare for the spring semester’s looming examinations, Barack Obama paid a visit to the office of eminent constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe. Obama had not dropped by to brush up for a test. In fact, he had yet even to enroll in an introductory constitutional law course, a gratification Harvard Law School denies its students until the second year of study.
Obama’s call was purely extracurricular: He wanted to discuss Tribe’s academic writings. That a young man on the make would attempt to win a distinguished professor’s favor is, of course, an utterly unremarkable event at Harvard. That institution is not principally known for attracting individuals lacking in either ambition or self-regard. On the basis of that meeting, Tribe took Obama on as one of his research assistants. Today, a little more than three years later, such statements sound histrionic. The Annotated Frank Rich - The President’s Failure to Demand a Reckoning From the Moneyed Interests Who Brought the Economy Down. After 9/11, Rudy Giuliani went on Saturday Night Live to give New Yorkers permission to laugh again. But Mayor Bloomberg never did tell us when we could resume conspicuous consumption after the crash of 2008. And so, as we stumble through the second year of the official “recovery,” it’s been an improvisational return to high-end carousing in Manhattan.
A case in point was the late-May celebration of the centennial rededication of the New York Public Library. Surely no civic institution could be a more unimpeachable beard for a blowout. The dress code—no black tie—was egalitarian. The Abyssinian Baptist Church Gospel Choir, the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, and that cute chorus from P.S. 22 in Staten Island—Glee diversity on steroids—were in the house along with some 900 invited guests, marquee names included (Toni Morrison, Jonathan Franzen). Bloomberg delivered a pre-dinner benediction from an altarlike perch on the main reading room’s balcony. David Bromwich, George W. Obama? | TomDispatch - Obama's Prisoner Dilemma: Reject Torture, Defend Torturers | Threat Level. President Barack Obama finds himself in a quandary of sorts over his public position opposing torture and secret detentions. The new U.S. president has renounced those Bush administration practices, but government lawyers continue to defend the previous administration’s top officials accused of authorizing and carrying out those policies.
"The Obama administration, from day one, said waterboarding is torture," says Mary Dryovage, a civil rights lawyer who represents federal employees suing the government. "How can one simultaneously state waterboarding is a crime and represent one of the architects of one of the legal arguments in support of waterboarding, which is defined in the Geneva Conventions as a war crime? " Chief among those enjoying a taxpayer-funded defense is John Yoo, now a Boalt Hall School of Law scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. The Justice Department declined comment. "In my personal opinion," Musell said, "this is just another example of a bailout. " Obama Bucks Congress on Guantánamo in Signing Statement. By Steven T. Dennis Roll Call Staff Dec. 23, 2011, 4:50 p.m. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call File Photo President Barack Obama warned Congress this afternoon that he considers numerous provisions of the megabus spending bill to be unconstitutional, including provisions relating to detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
“My Administration has repeatedly communicated my objections to these provisions, including my view that they could, under certain circumstances, violate constitutional separation of powers principles,” Obama wrote in a signing statement today as he departed for his family vacation in Hawaii. “In approving this bill, I reiterate the objections my Administration has raised regarding these provisions, my intent to interpret and apply them in a manner that avoids constitutional conflicts, and the promise that my Administration will continue to work towards their repeal.” Inside a Secret DOD Prison in Afghanistan. In a new report (PDF) by the Open Society Institute, human-rights researcher Jonathan Horowitz contrasts the official prison system that the Pentagon has constructed in Afghanistan—where they often arrange press briefings and invite journalists on tours—with the super-secret facility run on the periphery of Bagram Air Base, the “Tor” or “Black Jail.”
[M]edia outlets in late 2009 and 2010 reported allegations of detainee abuse at a smaller facility on Bagram Air Base which Afghans refer to as the “Tor Jail” or “Black Jail” that is physically distinct from DFIP or the BTIF. (“Tor” is Pashtu for “black”). These reports included accusations of sleep deprivation, holding detainees in cold cells, forced nudity, physical abuse, detaining individuals in isolation cells for longer than 30 days, and restricting the access of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)—all of which raise serious concerns about U.S. compliance with domestic and international rules on detainee treatment.
4 More Drones! Robot Attacks Are on Deck for Obama's Next Term | Danger Room. How Liberal Is President Obama? Obama's regressive record makes Nixon look like Che. Panetta: Obama Can Unilaterally Use Military to Protect ‘National Interests’ Panetta: Obama Personally Approves Killings Of Americans Suspected Of Terrorism. Jack Lew’s union-busting past. Obama officials' spin on Benghazi attack mirrors Bin Laden raid untruths | Glenn Greenwald. If You Thought Obama's Drone Godfather Was Powerful, Wait 'Til He's At the CIA | Danger Room. The mythos of Obama and Osama. The Obama GITMO myth. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki Death - Tom Junod on the Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama. President Obama has been a disaster for civil liberties - latimes.com. Obama's "Twisted Version of American Exceptionalism" Laid Bare. Proof Obama will sign NDAA 1031 Citizen Imprisonment Law in a few days. Jim Garrison: Martial Law by Executive Order.
Serial Abuser of Executive Branch “Flexibility,” John Brennan, Making Veto Case on Detainee Provisions. Obama Signs NDAA Military Bill | Truthout. Obama Tears Up While Addressing Campaign Staff. Obama Has Granted Clemency More Rarely Than Any Modern President. Obama expands his Islamophobia to include Sikhs as well. Obama and Egypt. FRONTLINE: obama's war. Obama's war by drone. New and worse secrecy and immunity claims from the Obama DOJ - Glenn Greenwald. Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S. Top Secret America | FRONTLINE. Shut Up: It's Still A Secret - The Atlantic Politics Channel. In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ's New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush's.
Rescind President Obama's 'Transparency Award' now | Open letter. Assessing Progress Toward a 21st Century Right to Know.