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study by Stanford Law School and New York University’s School of Law notes the number of Islamic terrorists killed as a percentage of total casualties in drone strikes stands at a paltry 2 percent. The study also casts doubts on Washington’s claims that these attacks produced few civilian casualties. An investigation by the human-rights group Reprieve indicates that drone bombings on al-Qaida members in Pakistan resulted in the death of 874 innocent men, women and children. In Yemen 17 men were targeted and 273 people (seven of them children) were killed in the process. The use of drone warfare is a disaster-in-the-making. When you kill people who are not the enemy, you simply create more enemies.

Runners and dog-walkers in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park were greeted with an unusual sight yesterday morning: a 4-foot tall bust of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. The pair of anonymous artists responsible tapped arts and culture blog ANIMAL New York to film the guerrilla installation, which was covered and eventually taken down by the city parks officials by mid-day Monday. The artists’ developed a contingency plan that involved 3-D printing “an army of mini-Snowden heads.” Although, to-date, no such back-up forces have arrived, a group of locally-based political artists known collectively as The Illuminator projected a holographic image of Snowden in the place where the bust had briefly stood last night.

Before dawn, the small crew donning construction attire hauled the 100-pound statue, made by a sympathetic sculptor on the West Coast, into the Prison Ship Martyr’s monument, built to commemorate the 11,000 American soldiers who died on British ships during the Revolutionary War. Snowden’s likeness was placed atop an empty column. Rather than bronze, the statue was constructed out of hydrocal, a substance often used in Las Vegas casinos to replicate castles and Romanesque statues in gaudy displays. They spared no detail, ensuring that the color of the bust and Snowden’s last name, spelled out at the column’s base, fit perfectly into the rest of the monument. The placement was not incidental. In a statement entitled “Prison Ship Martyrs 2.0,” the New York-based artists write, “We have updated this monument to highlight those who sacrifice their safety in the fight against modern tyrannies.” “All too often,” they added,” “figures who strive to uphold these ideals have been cast as criminals rather than in bronze.”

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has published the list of senators who so far have agreed to co-sponsor the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013, aka the Wag the Dog Act of 2014. You’ll recall that the initial list, which was introduced by its principal engineers, Sens. Mark Kirk and Robert Menendez, Dec 19, included 26 co-sponsors equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, to which newly elected New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker quickly added his name. Since then, 20 other senators — all Republicans, unsurprisingly — have added their names, for a grand total of 47 — still short of a majority, let alone one that could survive an Obama veto that the White House has already committed the president to cast if the bill is passed in its present form. According to the AIPAC list, which is reproduced below, 53 senators, including 36 Democrats and the two independents who normally vote with the Democratic caucus, have not agreed to co-sponsor the bill, or, in the dreaded moniker used by AIPAC to score lawmakers’ voting records (presumably for the benefit of the “pro-Israel” PACs that decide how to dole out campaign cash), are labeled “DNC.” They will undoubtedly be the top targets for AIPAC’s legendary powers of persuasion when the Senate reconvenes early next week.

What is remarkable about this list, however, is that very few of the 47 co-sponsors have chosen to publicize their support for the bill to their constituents through local media or other means. A handful of the original co-sponsors put out press releases, as did Rob Portman, a late joiner. Lamar Alexander, another late-comer, courageously “tweeted” his backing for the bill. “If this were a bill senators were excited about; that is, something they thought they’d earn a lot of credit for — and not draw a lot of heat — from their voters, you’d think all of the co-sponsors would be proudly touting their support,” one veteran Hill observer told me. “Clearly, even for the Republican [co-sponsors], that doesn’t seem to be the case with this bill.” In other words, the co-sponsors appear to be targeting a very narrow constituency — AIPAC, which is now touting their names — rather than  their voters back home, most of whom probably have no idea of what their senator’s position is or what may be at stake. Which raises an interesting question: If the folks back home knew that their senator was supporting a bill that would make another war in the Middle East more, rather than less likely, would there be an outcry as there was after Obama (and AIPAC) asked Congress to approve military action against Syria? Would some senators feel compelled to reassess their support?

One other point: others — most recently and convincingly, Colin Kahl and Paul Pillar — have argued just how counter-productive and potentially dangerous this bill is, and we have republished their arguments for the benefit of LobeLog readers in recent days. But it should be stressed that the 47 co-sponsors of this bill, most notably the 14 Democrats who have signed on to it, have effectively decided that Bibi Netanyahu and AIPAC are more credible sources about Iran and what it is likely to do in the P5+1 negotiations if this sanctions bill becomes law than either the U.S. diplomats who are directly involved in the talks or the U.S. intelligence community. Which is a rather startling fact, especially given, for example, Bibi’s predictive record on Iraq in the run-up to the U.S. invasion and his quarrels with his own intelligence community with respect to Iran. U.S. officials beginning at the top with Obama, then running through John Kerry and Wendy Sherman have stated repeatedly that the passage of a new sanctions bill — even one that would take effect prospectively — would not only violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the Nov. 24 agreement; it would also call into serious question Washington’s good faith; quite possibly isolate the U.S. within the P5+1 with disastrous results for the existing sanctions regime; and sufficiently strengthen hardliners in Tehran to force its government to toughen its demands at the negotiating table, if not abandon the diplomatic path altogether (and with it the chances of a peaceful diplomatic settlement). As the most recent assessment by the intelligence community, for which these same 47 senators have approved annual budgets ranging as high as 70 billion dollars in recent years, concluded: “[N]ew sanctions would undermine the prospects for a successful comprehensive nuclear agreement with Iran.” Of course, that’s precisely why Netanyahu and AIPAC are pushing the new sanctions package.

A “top secret” Israeli intelligence memo from 2000 concluded that the “disappearance” of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would be beneficial to Israel. The memo, revealed in a book to be published this week by British-Israeli political scientist Ahron Bregman, adds evidence to support the thesis that Arafat, who died in November 2004 in a French military hospital, was assassinated. The Electronic Intifada obtained an advance copy of Bregman’s book, Cursed Victory: A History of Israel and the Occupied Territories (Penguin).

Bregman himself is circumspect about whether Israel had a hand in Arafat’s death, but sees a number of clues, including public statements by then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that Israel wanted him dead and was prepared to kill him. Yet Bregman finds a “clear indication that the Israelis did intend to kill Arafat” in a “Top Secret” document dated 15 October 2000 – a few months before Sharon came to power and a few weeks into the second Palestinian uprising – from the Shabak, Israel’s General Security Service (also known as Shin Bet).

Bregman then describes the document’s reasoning and conclusions: After going through “why Arafat is necessary,” and then “why Arafat is not necessary,” the document says that “the damage [Arafat] causes is bigger than his benefits….” And the subsequent conclusion is straightforward: “7. Arafat, the person, is a serious threat to the security of the state. His disappearance outweighs the benefits of his continuing existence.” And yet, even this Shabak “Top Secret” report does not provide us with enough evidence of assassination and we will probably have to wait for more information to ascertain what really killed Arafat.

Last week, the country’s biggest mortgage lenders scored a couple of key victories that will allow them to ease lending standards, crank out more toxic assets, and inflate another housing bubble.  Here’s what’s going on. On Monday,  the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), Mel Watt, announced that Fannie and Freddie would slash the minimum down-payment requirement on mortgages from 5 percent to 3 percent while making loans more available to people with spotty credit. If this all sounds hauntingly familiar, it should. It was less than 7 years ago that shoddy lending practices blew up the financial system precipitating the deepest slump since the Great Depression. Now Watt wants to repeat that catastrophe by pumping up another credit bubble.

Here’s the story from the Washington Post: “When it comes to taking out a mortgage, two factors can stand in the way: the price of the mortgage,…and the borrower’s credit profile.” On Monday, the head of the agency that oversees the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac outlined … how he plans to make it easier for borrowers on both fronts. Mel Watt, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, did not give exact timing on the initiatives. But most of them are designed to encourage the industry to extend mortgages to a broader swath of borrowers.

Here’s what Watt said about his plans in a speech at the Mortgage Bankers Association annual convention in Las Vegas: Saving enough money for a downpayment is often cited as the toughest hurdle for first-time buyers in particular. Watt said that Fannie and Freddie are working to develop “sensible and responsible” guidelines that will allow them to buy mortgages with down payments as low as 3 percent, instead of the 5 percent minimum that both institutions currently require.”

What’s worse: Launching a disastrous military campaign under false pretenses to achieve goals you wrongly believe are attainable? Or launching a disastrous military campaign you know is doomed in order to help your party win an election? I ask in light of today’s New York Times story about how President Obama asked the CIA a while back whether arming rebel forces – pretty much the agency’s signature strategy — had ever worked in the past. He was told that it almost never has. But then in June, once the political pressure for intervention in Syria got too great, he did just that — sending weapons to rebels fighting the Syrian military. Yes: He knew better, but he did it anyway.

Obama’s biggest such decision killed a lot of American servicemembers who he sent to fight and die in Afghanistan. During his 2008 presidential campaign, which was marked by his opposition to the war in Iraq, then-Senator Obama’s vow to re-engage in Afghanistan was seen by many as a ploy to avoid being cast as a dove, first by Hillary Clinton and then by John McCain. What’s not clear to this day is precisely when Obama knew better; when he realized that the war in Afghanistan was hopeless. By inauguration time, that conclusion seemed fairly obvious to many foreign-policy watchers. So why not him?

But one month into his presidency, Obama announced he was sending more troops there – 30,000, as it would turn out. Despite the obvious lack of what he himself had frequently described as a must — an exit strategy – he increased the number of troops in Afghanistan by 50 percent. And the monthly death tolls shot up. Over 1,600 American servicemembers  have died in Afghanistan since the summer of 2009 — well over half of all the dead during the entire war – along with countless Afghans. There were public signs in November 2009 that Obama was “rethinking” his plan. David Sanger, in his book Confront and Conceal, wrote that Obama actually began a “reassessment of whether the war was as necessary as he first believed” even earlier, in the summer of 2009. (At an off-the-record June 2009 dinner with historians the “main point” his guests tried to make was “that pursuit of war in Afghanistan would be for him what Vietnam was to Lyndon Johnson,” Garry Wills wrote  later.)

What is more troubling is the greater geopolitical agenda driving both of these seemingly “internal” conflicts – and that they both lead back to a single source beyond China’s borders. With the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) now implicated in receiving, training, and employing terrorists from China’s Xinjiang province, and considering the fact that ISIS is the result of an intentional, engineered proxy war the US and its allies are waging in the Middle East, along with the fact that the unrest in Hong Kong is also traced back to Washington and London, presents a narrative of an ongoing confrontation between East and West being fought on the battlefield of fourth generation warfare.

If one was asked to name a global-spanning military and intelligence operation opposed to Syria, Iran, Russia, and China, they might say the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US Government – and they would be right. But they could also easily answer by saying the “Islamic State” or ISIS/ISIL as it is also known. This is especially true after revelations surfaced that US-backed Uyghur separatists in China’s western-most province of Xinjiang have joined ISIS for training with intentions of leading an armed rebellion against Beijing upon their return. Reuters in their article, “China militants getting IS ‘training’,” would claim: Chinese militants from the western region of Xinjiang have fled from the country to get “terrorist training” from Islamic State group fighters for attacks at home, state media reported on Monday. The report was the first time state-run media had linked militants from Xinjiang, home to ethnic minority Uighur Muslims, to militants of the Islamic State group of radical Sunni Muslims.

However, it isn’t just China’s government that claims militants in Xinjiang seek to carve out an independent state in western China – the militants themselves have stated as much, and the United States government fully backs their agenda to do so. Indeed, first and foremost in backing the Xinjiang Uyghur separatists is the United States through the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED). For China, the Western region referred to as “Xinjiang/East Turkistan” has its own webpage on NED’s site covering the various fronts funded by the US which include:

Last year saw the highest number of terrorist incidents since 2000, according to the latest Global Terrorism Index released by the Institute for Economics and Peace. Worldwide, the number of terrorist incidents increased from less than 1,500 in 2000 to nearly 10,000 in 2013. Sixty percent of attacks last year occurred in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria.

The report suggests that U.S. foreign policy has played a big role in making the problem worse: "The rise in terrorist activity coincided with the US invasion of Iraq," it concludes. "This created large power vacuums in the country allowing different factions to surface and become violent." Indeed, among the five countries accounting for the bulk of attacks, the U.S. has prosecuted lengthy ground wars in two (Iraq and Afghanistan), a drone campaign in one (Pakistan), and airstrikes in a fourth (Syria).

The U.S. will invest somewhere between $4 and 6 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with untold additional resources spent on anti-terrorism efforts elsewhere, according to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. While we haven't suffered any major terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11, the Global Terrorism Index numbers cast considerable doubt on whether that money's been well-spent. And they give some credence to the notion that our ham-handed foreign policy is actually a destabilizing factor in world affairs.

CIA Director John Brennan, under fire over the Senate report on the CIA’s use of torture, is facing new heat over his role in what a senior lawmaker calls an apparent coverup involving bogus intelligence used by the George W. Bush administration to help justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.Carl Levin, D-Mich., who’s ending 36 years in the Senate, plans to press Brennan one last time to fulfill a pledge to support the full declassification of a CIA cable debunking the claim that the leader of the 9/11 hijackers met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in the Czech capital of Prague just months before the attacks.“Director Brennan’s apparent refusal to do what he has committed to do – to ask the Czech government if it objects to release of the cable – now takes on the character of a continuing coverup,” Levin plans to tell the Senate on Thursday, according to a draft of his speech obtained by McClatchy.

At a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters on Wednesday, Levin said he’s been told by Czech officials that “they have no objection” to the release of the cable.Levin also pointed out that the former chief of the Czech counterintelligence service, who was in the post at the time of the alleged meeting, published a memoir this year in which he asserted that the CIA pressured him to confirm the encounter and that U.S. officials pressured the Czech government when he couldn’t do so.“Without any regard to us, they used our intelligence information for propaganda press leaks. They wanted to mine certainty from unconfirmed suspicion and use it as an excuse for military action,” wrote Jiri Ruzek. “We were to play the role of useful idiot.”The CIA declined to comment. But a U.S. intelligence official said that Levin had been told that releasing the full cable couldn’t be done without damaging intelligence sources.

The March 13, 2003, cable was sent by CIA field officers in response to a request for more information on a single-source intelligence report of a meeting in a Prague park between Atta and al Ani. The cable warned that U.S. government officials shouldn’t cite the unverified report.Even so, Cheney continued to give the report credibility in media interviews, telling CNN in June 2004 that the truth of the report hadn’t been resolved.“Those statements were simply not true,” Levin said in the draft. “The vice president was recklessly disregarding the truth, and he did so in a way calculated to maintain support for the administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq.”During his February 2013 hearing to be confirmed as CIA director, Brennan was urged by Levin to ask the Czech government if it would object to the release of the cable. “Absolutely, Senator, I will,” Brennan replied.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration announced on Wednesday that it would ban hydraulic fracturing in New York State because of concerns over health risks, ending years of uncertainty over the controversial method of natural gas extraction.State officials concluded that fracking, as the method is known, could contaminate the air and water and pose inestimable dangers to public health.That conclusion was delivered during a year-end cabinet meeting convened by Mr. Cuomo in Albany. It came amid increased calls by environmentalists to ban fracking, which uses water and chemicals to release natural gas trapped in deeply buried shale deposits.

New York has had a de facto ban on the procedure for more than five years, predating Mr. Cuomo’s election. Over the course of his first term, Mr. Cuomo at times sent conflicting signals about how he would proceed.In 2012, Mr. Cuomo flirted with approving a limited program in several struggling Southern Tier counties along New York’s border with Pennsylvania. But later that year, Mr. Cuomo bowed to entreaties from environmental advocates, announcing instead that his administration would start the regulatory process over by beginning a new study to evaluate the health risks.

The question of whether to allow fracking has been one of the most divisive public policy debates in New York in years, pitting environmentalists against others who saw it as a critical way to bring jobs to economically stagnant portions of upstate.

Buried in the SSCI’s report is an arresting passage that suggests that the CIA was quietly releasing information about the torture program to journalists while it was contending in court that release of such information to the public would compromise national security. After the April 15, 2005 National Security Principals Committee meeting, the CIA drafted an extensive document describing the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program for an anticipated media campaign.  CIA attorneys, discussing aspects of the campaign involving off-the-record disclosures, cautioned against attributing the information to the CIA itself.  One senior attorney stated that the proposed press briefing was “minimally acceptable, but only if not attributed to a CIA official.”  The CIA attorney continued: “This should be attributed to an ‘official knowledgeable’ about the program (or some similar obfuscation), but should not be attributed to a CIA or intelligence official.”

Referring to CIA efforts to deny Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for previously acknowledged information, the attorney noted that, “[o]ur Glomar fig leaf is getting pretty thin.”  Another CIA attorney noted that the draft “makes the [legal] declaration I just wrote about the secrecy of the interrogation program a work of fiction.” The reference to the “Glomar fig leaf” related to an argument the CIA was making in ACLU litigation that was pending before Judge Alvin K.  Hellerstein in the Southern District of New York.  In connection with Freedom of Information Act requests we’d filed in October 2003 and June 2004, we were seeking, among other things, three documents we’d learned of from media reports: the Memorandum of Notification (MON) in which President Bush had authorized the CIA to establish black sites overseas, and two memos in which lawyers from the Office of Legal Counsel had concluded that CIA interrogators could lawfully torture prisoners in their custody.  The CIA responded with a “Glomar” response—it argued that the existence or non-existence of the three documents was a properly classified fact. 

As the SSCI report makes clear, CIA lawyers didn’t really believe what the agency was saying in its sworn declarations.  They understood that the sworn declarations the agency was filing in federal court were “work[s] of fiction.”  The agency was telling the courts that nothing could be disclosed about its torture program without compromising national security, but at the same time, it was providing quotations and “facts” to the media in order to persuade the public that its activities were lawful, necessary and effective. If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because the CIA is now doing precisely the same thing with respect to the targeted-killing program. To the courts, the CIA says that any disclosure about the program will gravely compromise national security.  To the media, it supplies a continuous stream of cherry-picked facts meant to cast the program in the most favorable light.

You could still type http://www.piratebay.se into your browser, but without a working DNS record, you wouldn't be able to find the site itself. If a takedown notice could blacklist a site from every available DNS provider, the URL would be effectively erased from the internet.

No one's ever tried to issue a takedown notice like that, but this latest memo suggests the MPAA is looking into it as a potentially powerful new tool in the fight against piracy. "A takedown notice program, therefore, could threaten ISPs with potential secondary liability in the event that they do not cease connecting users to known infringing material through their own DNS servers," the letter reads. "While not making it impossible for users to reach pirate sites (i.e., a user could still use a third-party DNS server), it could make it substantially more complicated for casual infringers to reach pirate sites if their ISPs decline to assist in the routing of communications to those sites." The full document is embedded below.

The MPAA’s legal argument centers on the claim that DNS records are working as an index or directory rather than simply routing data. If that argument holds, then the DNS links could be vulnerable to the same takedown notices used to strike torrent links from Google searches. The net effect would be similar to site-blocking, making it as easy to unplug a URL as it is to take down a YouTube video. It would also cast DNS providers as legally responsible for all the sites on the web, the same way YouTube is responsible for every video uploaded to its network. For many providers, simply managing the flood of notices might create a logistical nightmare.

November 21, 2014

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is progressives' runaway favorite for president in 2016, with Sen. Bernie Sanders in second place, a new poll shows.Sanders, I-Vt., who says he's considering a presidential run, edged out former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, 24 percent to 23 percent, according to Democracy for America's first 2016 Presidential Pulse poll of its members.More than 42 percent of respondents wanted Warren to run for president, although she has said she's not running. Warren's strong showing wasn't a surprise, but Sanders' placement ahead of Clinton shows "the race for the Democratic nomination is far from locked" among progressives, according to the group, founded by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean."If they decide to get in the race, our poll clearly shows that any number of candidates could win Democracy for America members' support, especially if they focus their campaign on combatting income inequality, the driving issue of the 2016 campaign," Charles Chamberlain, DFA's executive director said in a statement.

From Nov. 6-to18, the group's members cast 164,733 votes for potential candidates, with members able to rank their votes for up to three potential candidates. The group released a portion of the poll on Thursday.Behind Clinton came former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich at 3 percent and Vice President Joe Biden at 2 percent.

he CNN poll conducted from Friday to Sunday – just as Israel was launching its ground operation in the conflict, which started July 8 – found that 57 percent of Americans see Israel’s actions as justified, with 12 percent among those respondents saying Israel is not using enough force. CNN noted that the same percentage, 57 percent, believed Israel was justified in its use of force during the previous conflict with Hamas in Gaza in 2012, and 63 percent thought it was justified during the 2008-2009 Cast Lead conflict. The survey carried out by ORC International found, however, that Israel’s unfavorables were climbing, with 38 percent saying that they had an unfavorable opinion of the country, up 14 percent from February, and 60 percent posting a favorable opinion, down from 72 percent in February. The telephone poll of 1,012 Americans had a margin of error of three percentage points.

he Israeli Police Foreign Press Spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, appears to have falsified the Israeli government’s claim that Hamas was responsible for the killing of three Israeli settler teens in June, by saying responsibility lies with a lone cell that operated without the complicity of Hamas’ leadership. The kidnapping and subsequent killing of three Israeli settler teens last month is considered to be a flashpoint for the escalated violence in Gaza -- that as of day 19 of the conflict has left 926 Palestinians, mostly civilians, dead. At the time Israeli authorities placed the blame squarely on Hamas, with Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu saying "They were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood by animals in human form. Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay." Friday however, there appeared to be break in the official line when BBC journalist Jon Donnison tweeted a series of statements he attributed to the Israeli Police Foreign Press Spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld.

“Israeli police MickeyRosenfeld tells me men who killed 3 Israeli teens def[initely] lone cell, Hamas affiliated but not operating under leadership1/2.” “Seems to contradict the line from Netanyahu government. 2/2” The journalist then goes on to tweet a further statement from Rosenfeld which, given that Israeli authorities used Hamas’ culpability as a pretext for its crackdown of the West Bank that saw hundreds of Palestinians arrested and several killed, could cast serious doubts on the Israeli government’s justifications. “Israeli police spokes Mickey Rosenfeld also said if kidnapping had been ordered by Hamas leadership, they'd have known about it in advance.”

What beats me is why more Democrats aren’t deeply troubled by the legacy of Clinton’s foreign policy blunder in Honduras. Maybe you’ve forgotten what happened in that small country in the first year of the Obama administration — more on that in a moment. But surely you’ve noticed the ugly wave of xenophobia greeting a growing number of Central American child refugees arriving on our southern border. Some of President Barack Obama’s supporters are trying to blame this immigration crisis on the Bush administration because of an anti-trafficking law George W. signed in 2008 specifically written to protect Central American children that preceded an uptick in their arrivals. But which country is the top source of kids crossing the border? Honduras, home to the world’s highest murder rate, Latin America’s worst economic inequality, and a repressive U.S.-backed government. When Honduran military forces allied with rightist lawmakers ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya in 2009, then-Secretary of State Clinton sided with the armed forces and fought global pressure to reinstate him.

Washington wields great influence over Honduras, thanks to the numerous military bases built with U.S. funds where training and joint military and anti-drug operations take place. Since the coup, nearly $350 million in U.S. assistance, including more than $50 million in military aid has poured into the country. That’s a lot of investment in a nation where the police, the military, and private security forces are killing people with alarming frequency and impunity, according to Human Rights Watch. In short, desperate Honduran children are seeking refuge from a human rights nightmare that would cast a dark cloud over Clinton’s presidential bid right now if the media were paying any attention. That wouldn’t give Republicans a big advantage, of course. Until they stop alienating a majority of female voters and communities of color, I find it hard to see the party of Mitt Romney and John McCain winning the White House.

Given the Democratic Party’s demographic edge, progressives have nothing to lose by seizing on the GOP field’s weakness and pressing for a viable alternative to another Clinton administration. Senator Elizabeth Warren could prove a contender. Unfortunately, the consumer-rights firebrand and Massachusetts Democrat lacks any foreign policy experience. And foreign policy is no afterthought these days. Israel — the recipient of $3.1 billion a year in U.S. military aid — is waging a ground war in Gaza, and the stakes in the Russia-Ukraine conflict just grew following the downing of that Malaysia Airlines jet. Plus, Iraq is growing more violent and unstable once more. On all these issues, Clinton is more hawkish than most of the Democratic base. But other Democrats with a wide range of liberal credentials and foreign policy expertise are signaling some interest in running, especially if Clinton ultimately sits out the race. Even if Clinton does win in 2016, a serious progressive primary challenge could help shape her presidency. As more and more Honduran kids cross our border in search of a safe haven, voters should take a good look at her track record at the State Department and reconsider the inevitability of another Clinton administration.

Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post. Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else. Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.

In order to allow time for analysis and outside reporting, neither Snowden nor The Post has disclosed until now that he obtained and shared the content of intercepted communications. The cache Snowden provided came from domestic NSA operations under the broad authority granted by Congress in 2008 with amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA content is generally stored in closely controlled data repositories, and for more than a year, senior government officials have depicted it as beyond Snowden’s reach. The Post reviewed roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts.

Taken together, the files offer an unprecedented vantage point on the changes wrought by Section 702 of the FISA amendments, which enabled the NSA to make freer use of methods that for 30 years had required probable cause and a warrant from a judge. One program, code-named PRISM, extracts content stored in user accounts at Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and five other leading Internet companies. Another, known inside the NSA as Upstream, intercepts data on the move as it crosses the U.S. junctions of global voice and data networks.

Gallup, 2000: “A new Gallup poll conducted November 13-15, 2000 finds that nearly seven out of 10 Americans (69%) believe that sending troops to Vietnam was a mistake.” Gallup, 2013: “Ten years have passed since the United States and its allies invaded Iraq, and it appears the majority of Americans consider this a regrettable anniversary. Fifty-three percent of Americans believe their country ‘made a mistake sending troops to fight in Iraq’ and 42% say it was not a mistake.” Gallup, 2014: “For the first time since the U.S. initially became involved in Afghanistan in 2001, Americans are as likely to say U.S. military involvement there was a mistake as to say it was not.” New York Times, today: “The Obama administration is preparing to carry out a campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria that may take three years to complete, requiring a sustained effort that could last until after President Obama has left office, according to senior administration officials.”

CNN, today: “Americans are increasingly concerned that ISIS represents a direct terror threat, fearful that ISIS agents are living in the United States, according to a new CNN/ORC International poll. Most now support military action against the terrorist group.” A few points: (1) I’ve long considered this September, 2003 Washington Post poll to be one the most extraordinary facts about the post-9/11 era. It found that – almost 2 years after 9/11, and six months after the invasion of Iraq – “nearly seven in 10 Americans believe it is likely that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks . . . .  A majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents believe it’s likely Saddam was involved.”

Is it even possible to imagine more potent evidence of systemic media failure than that (or systemic success, depending on what you think the media’s goal is)? But in terms of crazed irrationality, how far away from that false belief is the current fear on the part of Americans that there are ISIS sleeper cells “living in the United States”? (2) If the goal of terrorist groups is to sow irrational terror, has anything since the 9/11 attack been more successful than those two journalist beheading videos? It’s almost certainly the case that as recently as six months ago, only a minute percentage of the American public (and probably the U.S. media) had even heard of ISIS. Now, two brutal beheadings later, they are convinced that they are lurking in their neighborhoods, that they are a Grave and Unprecedented Threat (worse than al Qaeda!), and that military action against them is needed.

he British army is creating a special force of Facebook warriors, skilled in psychological operations and use of social media to engage in unconventional warfare in the information age. The 77th Brigade, to be based in Hermitage, near Newbury, in Berkshire, will be about 1,500-strong and formed of units drawn from across the army. It will formally come into being in April. The brigade will be responsible for what is described as non-lethal warfare. Both the Israeli and US army already engage heavily in psychological operations.

Against a background of 24-hour news, smartphones and social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, the force will attempt to control the narrative. The 77th will include regulars and reservists and recruitment will begin in the spring. Soldiers with journalism skills and familiarity with social media are among those being sought. An army spokesman said: “77th Brigade is being created to draw together a host of existing and developing capabilities essential to meet the challenges of modern conflict and warfare. It recognises that the actions of others in a modern battlefield can be affected in ways that are not necessarily violent.” The move is partly a result of experience in counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan. It can also be seen as a response to events of the last year that include Russia’s actions in Ukraine, in particular Crimea, and Islamic State’s (Isis) takeover of large swaths of Syria and Iraq.

The Israel Defence Forces have pioneered state military engagement with social media, with dedicated teams operating since Operation Cast Lead, its war in Gaza in 2008-9. The IDF is active on 30 platforms – including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Instagram – in six languages. “It enables us to engage with an audience we otherwise wouldn’t reach,” said an Israeli army spokesman. It has been approached by several western countries, keen to learn from its expertise.

Argentine Chief of Cabinet Jorge Capitanich accused U.S. Republican senator Marco Rubio of “imperialist behavior,” after the right-wing politician expressed doubts about the Argentine government's ability to conduct the investigation into the death of the prosecutor Alberto Nisman.  “The Republic of Argentina is an autonomous, sovereign and independent country, Marco Rubio with his imperialist vision fails to recognize the United Nations charter since the meddling in the affairs of other states constitutes imperialist interference,” Capitanich said Friday during a press conference. On Thursday, Rubio urged U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to support the creation of an “independent, internationally assisted investigation” into the case.  “I am increasingly concerned about the ability of the Government of Argentina to conduct a fair and impartial investigation into his death, or its capacity to ensure the independence of a prosecutor that would continue Mr. Nisman's work,” said Rubio, who has spearheaded the push for hostile policies towards left-leaning governments in Latin America. “I thus urge the Administration to support the establishment of an independent, internationally assisted investigation into Mr. Nisman's suspicious death.” Capitanich called the proposal “unwarranted meddling” into the South American country's affairs.

Cables revealed by Wikileaks suggest that Nisman was being advised by U.S. and Israeli intelligence services, and Argentina officials investigating Nisman's death say the attorney’s 300-page report indicate he was manipulated and being fed him false information. Officials also say rogue agents from Argentina own intelligence services were behind the death.  President Cristina Fernandez, whose husband and late President Nestor Kirchner ordered the investigation into the AMIA bombing, was quick to cast doubt on the apparent suicide of the attorney.