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Last July, The New York Times declared, “The Ukrainian conflict has gone on far too long, and it has become far too dangerous. There is one man who can stop it — President Vladimir Putin of Russia.” In the intervening months, the media’s assessment of Putin has only grown harsher, with his actions in Ukraine being seen as a possible prelude to a full-scale Russian invasion, along the lines of his 2008 takeover of two provinces in the nation of Georgia. But this analysis is dangerously unbalanced.

While Putin has made many missteps in the Ukrainian crisis–and many in Georgia in 2008–the West is far from blameless. If, as the Times asserts, it’s all Putin’s fault, then the U.S. and its allies have few options beyond waiting for him to have a sudden change of heart. But if the West can acknowledge its own mistakes and start to rectify them, that might point the way to resolving the current conflict before it escalates further, even possibly to nuclear threats. In considering options, let’s first look at the perception that Ukraine is a repeat of Putin’s land-grab in Georgia. That in turn has been compared to Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia 70 years earlier. This analogy, with its hot-button allusion to the West’s appeasement of Nazi Germany at Munich in 1938, was promoted by, among others, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But in fact, it was one-sided coverage in the mainstream Western media that created the false impression that Putin alone was responsible for the 2008 Russian-Georgian War. Disregarded in this coverage was a finding by European Union investigators that Georgia, backed by the West, had in fact fired the first shots. The EU ultimately found blame on both sides.

In Ukraine, Putin has justified his cross-border interventions as required to protect ethnic Russians from threats by hostile neighbors. His stated concerns may be self-serving, but not necessarily as misplaced as Western governments and media make out. Key precipitating events are left out of the narrative. For example, Western media barely covered a May 2, 2014, fire in the Black Sea port city of Odessa, where dozens of pro-Russian separatists were burned alive after they barricaded themselves in a government building to escape a violent Ukrainian mob. Ukrainian nationalists surrounded the building, sang the Ukrainian national anthem, and chanted the equivalent of “Burn, Russians, burn!” while the building went up in flames. An even more egregious failure of American mainstream media coverage in Ukraine came during the February 2014 anti-government demonstrations in Ukraine’s capital of Kiev. When sniper fire killed nearly 100 Ukrainians, Western media repeatedly stated as fact that the shots came from the forces of then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who had tilted toward Russia. Outrage over the deaths fueled calls for Yanukovych’s head, and on February 21 he fled the capital, eventually ending up in southern Russia, where he remains in exile.

Hillary Clinton E-Mail Controversy Illuminates Government-Wide Failure National Security Archive Lawsuit Established E-Mails as Records in 1993 CIO Council Repeats as Rosemary "Winner" for Doubling Down On "Lifetime Failure" Only White House Saves Its E-Mail Electronically, Agencies No Deadline Until 2016

The Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council has won the infamous Rosemary Award for worst open government performance of 2014, according to the citation published today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org. The National Security Archive had hoped that awarding the 2010 Rosemary Award to the Federal Chief Information Officers Council for never addressing the government's "lifetime failure" of saving its e-mail electronically would serve as a government-wide wakeup call that saving e-mails was a priority. Fallout from the Hillary Clinton e-mail debacle shows, however, that rather than "waking up," the top officials have opted to hit the "snooze" button. The Archive established the not-so-coveted Rosemary Award in 2005, named after President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who testified she had erased 18-and-a-half minutes of a crucial Watergate tape — stretching, as she showed photographers, to answer the phone with her foot still on the transcription pedal. Bestowed annually to highlight the lowlights of government secrecy, the Rosemary Award has recognized a rogue's gallery of open government scofflaws, including the CIA, the Treasury Department, the Air Force, the FBI, the Justice Department, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Chief Information Officer of the United States Tony Scott was appointed to lead the Federal CIO Council on February 5, 2015, and his brief tenure has already seen more references in the news media to the importance of maintaining electronic government records, including e-mail, and the requirements of the Federal Records Act, than the past five years. Hopefully Mr. Scott, along with Office of Management & Budget Deputy Director for Management Ms. Beth Cobert will embrace the challenge of their Council being named a repeat Rosemary Award winner and use it as a baton to spur change rather than a cross to bear.

An EU military force is being justified as protection from Russia, but it may also be a way of reducing US influence as the EU and Germany come to loggerheads with the US and NATO over Ukraine. While speaking to the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announced the time has come for the creation of a unified EU military force. Juncker used rhetoric about “defending the values of the European Union” and nuanced anti-Russian polemics to promote the creation of a European army, which would convey a message to Moscow. The polemics and arguments for an EU army may be based around Russia, but the idea is really directed against the US. The underlying story here is the tensions that are developing between the US, on one side, and the EU and Germany, on the other side. This is why Germany reacted enthusiastically to the proposal, putting its support behind a joint EU armed force.

Previously, the EU military force was seriously mulled over during the buildup to the illegal Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 when Germany, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg met to discuss it as an alternative to a US-dominated NATO. The idea has been resurrected again under similar circumstances. In 2003, the friction was over the US-led invasion of Iraq. In 2015, it is because of the mounting friction between Germany and the US over the crisis in Ukraine.

To understand the latest buildup behind the call for a common EU military, we have to look at the events stretching from November 2014 until March 2015. They started when Germany and France began showing signs that they were having second thoughts about the warpath that the US and NATO were taking them down in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Franco-German differences with the US began to emerge after Tony Blinken, US President Barack Obama’s former Deputy National Security Advisor and current Deputy Secretary of State and the number two diplomat at the US Department of State, announced that the Pentagon was going to send arms into Ukraine at a hearing of the US Congress about his nomination, that was held on November 19, 2014. As the Fiscal Times put it, “Washington treated Russia and the Europeans to a one-two punch when it revealed its thinking about arming Ukraine.” The Russian Foreign Ministry responded to Blinken by announcing that if the Pentagon poured weapons into Ukraine, Washington would not only seriously escalate the conflict, but it would be a serious signal from the US that will change the dynamics of the conflict inside Ukraine. Realizing that things could escalate out of control, the French and German response was to initiate a peace offence through diplomatic talks that would eventually lead to a new ceasefire agreement in Minsk, Belarus under the “Normandy Format” consisting of the representatives of France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine.

Senior UN officials in Jerusalem have been accused of caving in to Israeli pressure to abandon moves to include the state’s armed forces on a UN list of serious violators of children’s rights. UN officials backed away from recommending that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) be included on the list following telephone calls from senior Israeli officials. The Israelis allegedly warned of serious consequences if a meeting of UN agencies and NGOs based in Jerusalem to ratify the recommendation went ahead. Within hours, the meeting was cancelled. “Top officials have buckled under political pressure,” said a UN source. “As a result, a clear message has been given that Israel will not be listed.”

Organisations pressing for the IDF’s inclusion on the list since the war in Gaza last summer – which left more than 500 children dead and more than 3,300 injured – include Save the Children and War Child as well as at least a dozen Palestinian human rights organisations, the Israeli rights organisation B’Tselem and UN bodies such as the children’s agency Unicef. “These organisations are in uproar over what has happened,” said the UN source

The IDF’s inclusion on the UN’s list of grave violators of children’s rights would place it alongside non-state armed forces such as Islamic State, Boko Haram and the Taliban. There are no other state armies on the list. It would propel Israel further towards pariah status within international bodies and could lead to UN sanctions.

The US has set a new record for denying and censoring federal files under the Freedom of Information Act, analysis by the Associated Press reveals. For the second consecutive year, the Obama administration more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them under the open-government legislation. The government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldn’t find documents, and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.

It also acknowledged in nearly one in three cases that its initial decisions to withhold or censor records were improper under the law – but only when it was challenged. Its backlog of unanswered requests at year’s end grew remarkably by 55% to more than 200,000. The government’s new figures, published Tuesday, covered all requests to 100 federal agencies during fiscal 2014 under the Freedom of Information law, which is heralded globally as a model for transparent government. They showed that despite disappointments and failed promises by the White House to make meaningful improvements in the way it releases records, the law was more popular than ever. Citizens, journalists, businesses and others made a record 714,231 requests for information. The US spent a record $434m trying to keep up.

The government responded to 647,142 requests, a 4% decrease over the previous year. The government more than ever censored materials it turned over or fully denied access to them, in 250,581 cases or 39% of all requests. Sometimes, the government censored only a few words or an employee’s phone number, but other times it completely marked out nearly every paragraph on pages. On 215,584 other occasions, the government said it couldn’t find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the government determined the request to be unreasonable or improper. The White House touted its success under its own analysis. It routinely excludes from its assessment instances when it couldn’t find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the request was determined to be improper under the law, and said under this calculation it released all or parts of records in 91% of requests – still a record low since Barack Obama took office using the White House’s own math.

On Tuesday 24th of June at 1pm CET, Julian Assange’s lawyers filed a request to Stockholm District Court to dismiss his detention without charge, which has kept him in different forms of deprivation of liberty since 7 December 2010 (3.5 years). The legal actions will lead to the first custody hearing since his arrest. The Julian Assange case is Sweden’s longest running pre-trial, pre-charge deprivation of liberty (the matter is formally at the ’preliminary investigation’ stage). Julian Assange is in a legal no-man’s-land: he has not been indicted so he cannot formally defend himself. The Swedish government refuses to guarantee he will not be extradited to the United States. The Swedish prosecutor, unlike in other cases, refuses to question him in London or via video link, instead demanding that Mr. Assange give up his right to political asylum and speak to her in Sweden. The UK has encricled Mr. Assange at a cost to date of over GBP 6.6 million/USD 11 million/SEK 75.000.000 (see: http://govwaste.co.uk). Assange obtained political asylum in relation to the United States criminal investigation against WikiLeaks in 2012. The United Kingdom and Sweden have both refused to give a guarantee that Julian Assange will not be extradited to the United States for his WikiLeaks activities. Earlier this week, 59 international organizations submitted complaints about the investigation against Julian Assange to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

A member of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency has been detained for possibly spying for the US. The 31-year-old is suspected of giving a US spy agency information about a parliamentary inquiry of NSA activities. (Image: PictureAlliance/DPA))German news outlets on Friday are reporting that a so-called “double agent” has been detained after confessing to investigators that he was paid by U.S. agents to spy on the German parliamentary panel now investigating the extent of U.S. National Security Agency’s surveillance inside the country. According to Deutsche Welle: During questioning, the suspect reportedly told investigators that he had gathered information on an investigative committee from Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag. The panel is conducting an inquiry into NSA surveillance on German officials and citizens. A spokesperson for the Federal Prosecutor’s office declined to provide further details about the case, according to news agency AFP. German-US relations have been on the rocks since revelations of mass surveillance not only on German citizens, but also on Chancellor Angela Merkel and other politicians made headlines last year.

Der Spiegel (Google Translate) notes that initial information indicates the individual—who worked for the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s equivalent of the NSA—had “been specifically looking for information related to the NSA investigation committee of the Bundestag and given them to his American contact man.” As journalist Glenn Greenwald immediately observed: That’d be the ultimate irony: US Govt spied on German parliamentary investigation into US Govt spying on Germans http://t.co/P9WkGT83oQ — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 4, 2014 And David Meyer, writing for Gigaom, adds: The 31-year-old was originally arrested on suspicion of having contact with Russian intelligence, but then apparently confessed to having reported back at least once to the Americans on the Bundestag committee’s activities. He reportedly did this for money. The reports raise the possibility that he may be lying, but also note that the committee has long suspected it was being spied on. If this is all true, it may turn out to be an even bigger diplomatic scandal than the NSA’s bugging of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone, a formal probe into which was announced a month ago.

On Thursday, the Bundestag’s investigative committee looking into NSA surveillance heard testimony from two U.S. whistleblowers who worked, Thomas Drake and William Binney, for the spy agency but objected to what they consider its troubling tactics. As Deutsche Welle reports, Binney—who once headed the agencies technology division—accused the NSA of having a “totalitarian mentality” and wanting “total information control” over U.S. citizens and the entirety of the global digital environment. He went on to compare the NSA’s approach to that used by dictators against oppressed populations. According to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA): Drake said the BND had become a “vermiform appendix of the NSA,” referring to accusations it had been passing data on German citizens on to the American service – an act forbidden under Germany’s constitution. “The silence of the BND is terrible,” Drake told the committee, and said people had a right to know what was going on. “You shouldn’t wait for a German Edward Snowden to lift the veil.”

Russia considers the detention of the Russian citizen Roman Seleznyov by US secret services as Washington's unfriendly step, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday. “As it became known, July 5, Russian citizen Roman Seleznyov was detained in the international airport of the city of Male, the capital of Maldives,” the ministry recalled. “On the same day, he was forced by agents of American secret service into a private jet and delivered to Guam Island. This fact has been already confirmed by the US Department of Homeland Security.” “We consider the incident as another Washington’s unfriendly step,” the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs stressed.

“It is not the first time that the US kidnaps a Russian citizen ignoring the 1999 mutual legal assistance agreement,” the ministry said. “In particular, the same occurred with Viktor Bout and Konstantin Yaroshenko, who were brought by force in the USA from third countries and convicted on questionable charges.” “Noteworthy that we are not informed about the claims lodged against our compatriots, furthermore, as in Seleznyov’s case, they don’t even inform Russia’s diplomatic agencies about their detention,” the ministry emphasized.

State Duma member representing the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR)  Valery Seleznyov has confirmed his son Roman had been detained by US secret service in the Maldives. “I am now in negotiations with the Russian Foreign Ministry. Kidnapping is a crime,” he told ITAR-TASS on Tuesday. “The country must protect its citizens, and Roman should go back to Russia.” Earlier on Tuesday, Valery Seleznyov dubbed a provocation media reports saying that his son Roman was allegedly arrested in the USA on suspicion of a cyber attack, data theft and computer-related fraud.

The Senate Intelligence Committee recently introduced the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2014. It’s the fourth time in four years that Congress has tried to pass "cybersecurity" legislation. Unfortunately, the newest Senate bill is one of the worst yet. Cybersecurity bills aim to facilitate information sharing between companies and the government, but they always seem to come with broad immunity clauses for companies, vague definitions, and aggressive spying powers. Given such calculated violence to users' privacy rights, it’s no surprise that these bills fail every year. What is a surprise is that the bills keep coming back from the dead. Last year, President Obama signed Executive Order 13636 (EO 13636) directing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to expand current information sharing programs that are far more privacy protective than anything seen in recent cybersecurity bills. Despite this, members of Congress like Rep. Mike Rogers and Senator Dianne Feinstein keep on introducing bills that would destroy these privacy protections and grant new spying powers to companies.

Aside from its redundancy, the Senate's bill grants two new authorities to companies. First, the bill authorizes companies to launch countermeasures for a "cybersecurity purpose" against a "cybersecurity threat." "Cybersecurity purpose" is so broadly defined that it means almost anything related to protecting (including physically protecting) an information system, which can be a computer or software. The same goes for a "cybersecurity threat," which includes anything that "may result" in an unauthorized effort to impact the availability of the information system. Combined, the two definitions could be read by companies to permit attacks on machines that unwittingly contribute to network congestion. The countermeasures clause will increasingly militarize the Internet—a prospect that may appeal to some "active defense" (aka offensive) cybersecurity companies, but does not favor the everyday user. Second, the bill adds a new authority for companies to monitor information systems to protect an entity's rights or property. Here again, the broad definitions could be used in conjunction with the monitoring clause to spy on users engaged in potentially innocuous activity. Once collected, companies can then share the information, which is also called “cyber threat indicators,” freely with government agencies like the NSA.

Such sharing will occur because under this bill, DHS would no longer be the lead agency making decisions about the cybersecurity information received, retained, or shared to companies or within the government. Its new role in the bill mandates DHS send information to agencies like the NSA—"in real-time and simultaneous[ly]." DHS is even barred from "delay[ing]" or "interfer[ing]" with the information, which ensures that DHS's current privacy protections won’t be applied to the information. The provision is ripe for improper and over-expansive information sharing. This leads to a question: What stops your sensitive personal information from being shared by companies to the government? Almost nothing. Companies must only remove personally identifiable information if the information is known to be US person information and not directly related to the threat. Such a willful blindness approach is inappropriate. Further, the bill does not even impose this weak minimization requirement on information shared by, and within, the government (including federal, state, local, and tribal governments) thereby allowing the government to share information containing personally identifiable information. The bill should require deletion of all information not directly related to a threat.

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, issued an extraordinary apology to leaders of the US Senate intelligence committee on Thursday, conceding that the agency employees spied on committee staff and reversing months of furious and public denials. Brennan acknowledged that an internal investigation had found agency security personnel transgressed a firewall set up on a CIA network, which allowed Senate committee investigators to review agency documents for their landmark inquiry into CIA torture. Among other things, it was revealed that agency officials conducted keyword searches and email searches on committee staff while they used the network.The admission brings Brennan’s already rocky tenure at the head of the CIA under renewed question. One senator on the panel said he had lost confidence in the director, although the White House indicated its support for a man who has been one of Barack Obama’s most trusted security aides.

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd acknowledged that agency staff had improperly monitored the computers of committee staff members, who were using a network the agency had set up, called RDINet. “Some CIA employees acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding reached between [the committee] and the CIA in 2009 regarding access to the RDINet,” he said.Asked if Brennan had or would offer his resignation, a different CIA spokesman, Ryan Trapani, replied: “No.”

McClatchy first reported the apology on Thursday.

As every schoolchild knows, there are three check-and-balance branches of the U.S. government: the executive, Congress, and the judiciary. That’s bedrock Americanism and the most basic high school civics material. Only one problem: it’s just not so. During the Cold War years and far more strikingly in the twenty-first century, the U.S. government has evolved.  It sprouted a fourth branch: the national security state, whose main characteristic may be an unquenchable urge to expand its power and reach.  Admittedly, it still lacks certain formal prerogatives of governmental power.  Nonetheless, at a time when Congress and the presidency are in a check-and-balance ballet of inactivity that would have been unimaginable to Americans of earlier eras, the Fourth Branch is an ever more unchecked and unbalanced power center in Washington.  Curtained off from accountability by a penumbra of secrecy, its leaders increasingly are making nitty-gritty policy decisions and largely doing what they want, a situation illuminated by a recent controversy over the possible release of a Senate report on CIA rendition and torture practices.

From the Pentagon to the Department of Homeland Security to the labyrinthine world of intelligence, the rise to power of the national security state has been a spectacle of our time.  Whenever news of its secret operations begins to ooze out, threatening to unnerve the public, the White House and Congress discuss “reforms” which will, at best, modestly impede the expansive powers of that state within a state.  Generally speaking, its powers and prerogatives remain beyond constraint by that third branch of government, the non-secret judiciary.  It is deferred to with remarkable frequency by the executive branch and, with the rarest of exceptions, it has been supported handsomely with much obeisance and few doubts by Congress. And also keep in mind that, of the four branches of government, only two of them -- an activist Supreme Court and the national security state -- seem capable of functioning in a genuine policymaking capacity at the moment.

In this century, a full-scale second “Defense Department,” the Department of Homeland Security, was created.  Around it has grown up a mini-version of the military-industrial complex, with the usual set of consultants, K Street lobbyists, political contributions, and power relations: just the sort of edifice that President Eisenhower warned Americans about in his famed farewell address  in 1961.  In the meantime, the original military-industrial complex has only gained strength and influence. Increasingly, post-9/11, under the rubric of “privatization,” though it should more accurately have been called “corporatization,” the Pentagon took a series of crony companies off to war with it.  In the process, it gave “capitalist war” a more literal meaning, thanks to its wholesale financial support of, and the shrugging off of previously military tasks onto, a series of warrior corporations. Meanwhile, the 17 members of the U.S. Intelligence Community -- yes, there are 17 major intelligence outfits in the national security state -- have been growing, some at prodigious rates.  A number of them have undergone their own versions of corporatization, outsourcing many of their operations to private contractors in staggering numbers, so that we now have “capitalist intelligence” as well.  With the fears from 9/11 injected into society and the wind of terrorism at their backs, the Intelligence Community has had a remarkably free hand to develop surveillance systems that are now essentially “watching” everyone -- including, it seems, other branches of the government.

Perhaps you already assume that there's some kind of twisted marriage between Wall Street megabanks and the US global surveillance regime. Why wouldn't there be? But not even a total cynic could have anticipated spymaster Keith Alexander cashing in this hard, this fast. As Bloomberg recently reported, the former National Security Agency chief, who resigned in March at the age of 62, quickly offered his cyber-security expertise at the eye-popping price of $1 million per month to an assortment of shady business lobbies. And now at least one member of Congress is probing this most delightfully dystopian of arrangements, raising the possibility that Alexander will be shamed out of the practice, if nothing else. “Disclosing or misusing classified information for profit is, as Mr. Alexander well knows, a felony. I question how Mr. Alexander can provide any of the services he is offering unless he discloses or misuses classified information, including extremely sensitive sources and methods,” Florida Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson wrote one of the business groups, the Security Industries and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), which holds it down for Wall Street in Washington. “Without the classified information that he acquired in his former position, he literally would have nothing to offer to you.”

In an interview Monday, Grayson was even more strident in his criticism. "Frankly, what the general is doing is beginning to resemble an extortion racket," he told me. "This is a man who basically lied for a living, and he continues to do that." To be clear, what's uniquely outrageous about Alexander, who has apparently lowered his asking price to $600,000, is not that he is a former US official dangling his alleged expertise and the allure of privileged access to government officials before Wall Street. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who served under Barack Obama and is the odds-on favorite to succeed him, does this all the time, usually at a rate of about $250,000 a pop. (Indeed, one might argue that the very fact she has managed to do so while enjoying a stellar national reputation is what signaled to Alexander he might as well dive headlong through the revolving door.) But the former NSA head presumably knows things about sophisticated intelligence-gathering practices that very, very few people on Earth have been privy to—information that could be useful in the private sector, which has a tendency to collude with the military in ways that made former President and World War II General Dwight Eisenhower very sad.

"What could he possibly have that's worth $1 million a month other than classified information?" wonders Melanie Sloan, founder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a good government group. "That's more than former presidents make." Indeed, even former President Bill Clinton, whose corruption since leaving office is by now the stuff of legend, doesn't have the gall to ask for that much per gig. There's a sort of "fuck it!" attitude to what Alexander is doing, seemingly kicking sand in the face of everyone angry at his surveillance regime by getting paid to reflect on the experience of assembling it. More ominously, there's the prospect that Alexander, whether deliberately or otherwise, may have left behind vulnerabilities while running the NSA so as to put himself in prime position to effectively hold the banks hostage now. Certainly, there have been reports suggesting the agency was aware of some vulnerabilities it either could or did not address.   "What is especially troubling is he might actually be worth it," says former North Carolina Democratic Congressman Brad Miller, who worked extensively on financial regulation and Wall Street reform in Congress. "He's obviously not a computer geek. Some of the things that might have seemed paranoid a few years ago now seem more than plausible given what we've already learned the NSA has been doing."

The US State Department absolved Israel of responsibility for the murder of four Palestinian children in Gaza on Wednesday, placing the blame squarely on Hamas. The four children were killed and three others badly wounded by Israeli fire as they played on a beach in Gaza on Wednesday afternoon. Dozens of international journalists stationed at the nearby Al-Deira Hotel watched in horror as after an initial strike, Israeli fire chased after the terrified children as they ran for their lives screaming for help, firing at them a second time. 

During Wednesday’s US State Department press briefing, a reporter asked, “How is an Israeli airstrike on what can only be described as a civilian target in full view of international journalists be acceptable to the US government?” State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki replied that the loss of life in Gaza is “absolutely tragic,” but she blamed Hamas for the deaths, specifically citing Hamas’ rejection of a unilateral ceasefire proposal by Egypt and Israel, which Hamas was never consulted on.  “I would remind you that yesterday there was a ceasefire proposed that was abided to by the Israelis for a couple of hours that Hamas did not abide to,” said Psaki, adding, “they’re putting their own people at risk by continuing to escalate the situation on the ground.”

Reporters continued to raise questions about the rising civilian death toll caused by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, and each time Psaki blamed Palestinian rocket fire on Israel, saying, “Hamas is putting their own people in Gaza at risk by continuing their actions.”

One year ago the Obama administration was doing their very best to build up public support for U.S. military intervention in Syria. Even though that attempt failed, no one who has been following this crisis closely believed for a moment that this was the end. They would regroup and try again from another angle. The angle they chose was surprising. Iraq has been off the media radar for so long that almost no one was factoring it in as an important geopolitical variable. ISIS (or ISIL) changed that. In our video "The Fall of Iraq What You're Not Being Told" we covered the history of U.S. tinkering in Iraq dating back to 1963, and showed how the U.S. government's push to topple Assad by funding and arming extremists in Syria enabled ISIS to gain a foothold in the region. At the end of that video we pointed to how this latest crisis in Iraq was likely to be used as a pretext for U.S. strikes in Syria.

The Obama administration confirmed this when questioned yesterday on whether the U.S. military intervention in Iraq would be extended to Syria. Their response: “We don't restrict potential U.S. action to a specific geographic space,” "The president's made clear time and again that we will take action as necessary, including direct U.S. military action, if it's necessary to defend the United States against an imminent threat," the official said. "Clearly we're focused on Iraq. That's where our ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] resources have surged. That's where we're working to develop additional intelligence," the official added. "But the group [ISIS], again, operates broadly and we would not restrict our ability to take action that is necessary to protect the United States." Oh, and this time Obama is not going to ask for permission from Congress. No one is talking about how the Syrian government (and the Washington's desire to topple it) fits into this, but once the U.S. is carrying out airstrikes in Syrian territory, it would be trivial to expand the scope of the mission to include Syrian military targets. That way there would be no need for debate on the topic. The public would just find out we were at war after the fact (and probably via youtube). It's a backdoor approach.

Another variable that has changed in the equation since last year is Russia's involvement. Due to the crisis in Ukraine, Russia has been placed on the defensive diplomatically, and as of yet it seems to be too tied up with disputes with Kiev to take an active role in the deliberations over ISIS. In the first round of the Syrian crisis both China and Russia warned the U.S. several times against military intervention, and Russia threatened that it could lead to a nuclear conflict. At this point, it's not clear whether Russia and China see where Washington is planning to take this, or if they will back up their previous threats when the time comes. It is also yet to be seen whether the relentless anti-Russia propaganda campaign that western media outlets have been pushing since the Ukraine crisis will affect Putin's ability to influence the outcome diplomatically. The annexation of Crimea will definitely be used to discredit Putin if he attempts to block airstrikes in Syria.

The National Security Agency would be required to prepare an unclassified report on “all NSA bulk collection activities,” the Senate Appropriations Committee directed in its report on the Fiscal Year 2015 Department of Defense Appropriations bill, published yesterday. The Committee told the NSA to prepare a report “describing all NSA bulk collection activities, including when such activities began, the cost of such activities, what types of records have been collected in the past, what types of records are currently being collected, and any plans for future bulk collection.” Such a report would be expected to clarify whether NSA bulk collection extends beyond the acknowledged telephone metadata program in Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. The required report is to be “unclassified to the greatest extent possible,” the Senate Committee said. In the reporting requirements that it imposed on NSA, the Senate Appropriations Committee notably went beyond what was required by the Senate or House Intelligence Committees. The Appropriations Committee also directed NSA to submit additional reports on the total number of records acquired and reviewed by NSA in its bulk telephone metadata program over the past five years, and an estimate of the number of records of U.S. persons that have been acquired and reviewed in the telephone metadata program. Another unclassified report is required to provide “a list of terrorist activities that were disrupted, in whole or in part, with the aid of information obtained through NSA’s telephone metadata program.”

Update: Identical reporting language was included by the Senate Appropriations Committee last year in its report on the FY2014 Defense Appropriations bill (h/t @byersalex), yet the required NSA reports were not produced. At Emptywheel, Marcy Wheeler questions the utility of the proposed reports, particularly since the Senate Committee language lacks a clear, unambiguous definition of “bulk collection.”

the demand of Sens. Tim Kaine and Rand Paul — that before Obama takes us back to war in Iraq, or into a new war in Syria, Congress must debate and authorize this war — is a constitutional and political imperative. The questions Congress needs to answer are obvious and numerous. Who exactly is our enemy? ISIS only, or Assad, Hezbollah and Iran as well? Will our involvement be restricted to air power — fighter-bombers, gunships, cruise missiles, drones? Or should the president be authorized to send U.S. ground troops to fight? If we are to be restricted to air power, is it to be confined to Iraq, or can it be used in Syria — and against Assad as well as ISIS? If U.S. combat troops cannot be used, what are the prospects of expelling ISIS from Iraq? And if we should drive them out, what is the probability they will come back as soon as we leave, especially if we have left them in control of northern Syria? Is annihilation of ISIS the only permanent solution? How long and bloody a war would that require? Will the president be authorized to coordinate war planning with Tehran? And if Assad is to become our de facto ally, should we end our support for the Free Syrian Army and negotiate an armistice and amnesty for the FSA?

Congress must be forced to debate and vote on this war, first, so we can hold them accountable for what is to come. Second, so we can force them to come to consensus on just what kind of outcome in this region is acceptable, and attainable, and at what cost. What will victory look like? What will be the cost in blood and treasure? How long are we prepared to fight this war, an end to which does not today seem to be anywhere in sight? How reasonable is it to expect that the Kurdish peshmerga and an Iraqi Army that fled Kirkuk, Fallujah and Mosul, will be able to recapture the Sunni regions of Iraq? Finally, why is this our fight, 6,000 miles away, and not theirs?

Despite rising criticism of his foreign policy — even from his former secretary of state — President Barack Obama’s decision last week to carry out airstrikes against Islamic State militants in northern Iraq enjoys relatively strong public support, at least so far. Over half (54 percent) of respondents in a poll released here Monday by the Pew Research Center and USA Today said they approved of the airstrikes, which appear to have helped reverse some of the gains made by Islamic State fighters against Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces earlier this month.

Thirty-one percent said they disapproved of the strikes, while 15 percent of the 1,000 randomly selected respondents who took part in the survey, which was carried out between Thursday and Sunday, declined to give an opinion. The poll found major partisan differences, with self-described Republicans markedly more hawkish than Democrats or independents, although a majority of Democratic respondents said they also supported the airstrikes. However, a majority (57 percent) of Republicans said they were concerned that Obama was not prepared to go “far enough to stop” the Islamic State, while majorities of Democrats (62 percent) and independents (56 percent) said they worried that he may go too far in re-inserting the military into Iraq three years after the last US combat troops were withdrawn. Overall, 51 percent of respondents expressed the latter fear. That concern was felt particularly strongly by younger respondents, members of the so-called “millennial” generation, whose foreign policy views have tended to be far more skeptical of the effectiveness of military force than those of other generational groups, according to a number of polls that have been released over the past two years.

The initial success of the US air campaign — 68 airstrikes have been carried out to date, according to Washington’s Central Command (CentCom) — follows Thursday’s resignation of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a critical step, in the administration’s view, toward establishing a less-sectarian government capable of reaching out to disaffected Sunnis who have joined or cooperated with the Islamic State without necessarily sharing the group’s extreme and violent ideology.

It was a Malaysian jet, carrying Malaysian passengers, flown by Malaysian pilots, yet after Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine in July 2014, Malaysia has been systematically blocked from participating in the investigation, leaving an overwhelmingly pro-NATO bloc in charge of the evidence, investigation and outcome as well as the manner in which the investigation will be carried out. Despite the integral role Malaysia has played during several pivotal moments in the aftermath of the disaster, it appears that the closer to the truth the investigation should be getting, the further Malaysia itself is being pushed from both the evidence and any influence it has on the likely conclusions of the investigation. With the downed aircraft in question being Malaysian, Malaysia as a partner in the investigation would seem a given. Its exclusion from the investigation appears to be an indication that the investigation’s objectivity has been compromised and that the conclusions it draws will likely be politically motivated.

With the Dutch leading the investigation, the logic being that the flight originated from the Netherlands and the majority of the passengers were Dutch, it has formed a Joint Investigation Team (JIT). At the onset of its creation it seemed obvious that Malaysia would too be included, considering it lost the second largest number of citizens to the disaster and the plane itself was registered in Malaysia. Instead, JIT would end up comprised of Belgium, Ukraine, and Australia, specifically excluding Malaysia. Malaysia was both surprised and has protested its exclusion from JIT, and has repeatedly expressed a desire to be included directly in the investigation.

The Malaysian Insider cited Malaysian scholar Dr. Chandra Muzaffar who believes the decision to exclude his country from the investigation is politically motivated, aiming at excluding members that may urge caution and objectivity instead of draw conclusions first and bend the investigation’s results around those conclusions. In particular, Dr. Muzaffar believes that the investigations is intentionally being skewed to target Russia. Ukraine’s involvement in the investigation is particularly troublesome. Had MH17 crashed in Ukraine under different circumstances, Ukraine’s role would be welcome. However, it was apparently shot down specifically in a conflict in which Kiev itself is a participant. With both sides of the conflict possessing anti-aircraft weapons and with Kiev itself confirmed to possess weapons capable of reaching the altitude MH17 was flying at when it was allegedly hit, Kiev becomes a possible suspect in the investigation. Kiev’s inclusion in JIT represents a monumental conflict of interest.

Israel has banned Norwegian doctor and human rights activist Mads Gilbert from entering Gaza for life. Gilbert, a professor at the University Hospital of North Norway, where he has worked since 1976, earned international renown for his philanthropic work in late 2008, during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, an attack that, according to Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, killed roughly 1,400 Gazans, including almost 800 civilians, 350 of whom were children. The aid worker, along with fellow Norwegian doctor Erik Fosse, decided to volunteer in Gaza as soon as he heard that bombing had started, on 27 December 2008. Thanks to diplomatic and economic support (in the sum of $1 million dollar of emergency funding from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), the two physicians managed to arrive in the strip by 30 December.

The Israeli government prevented all international press from entering Gaza during Cast Lead (a documentary, The War Around Us, was made about the only two foreign reporters in the strip at the time), in what Gilbert called Israel’s insidious “PR plan.” The doctor, as one of the only international aid workers in Gaza, thus devoted considerable time to speaking with local Palestinian news outlets, some of whom were reporting on behalf of foreign networks including BBC, CNN, ABC, and Al Jazeera. BBC aired an interview with Gilbert, conducted in the hospital. The questions asked, and the answers garnered, were eerily similar to those he would give just five years later, during Operation Protective Edge. The interviewer began asking him to respond to Israel’s claims that it was not targeting civilians, that it was only attacking Hamas militants. Gilbert called the claim “an absolutely stupid statement” and explained that, among the hundreds of patients he had seen at that point, only two had been fighters. The “large majority” were women, children, and men civilians. “These numbers are contradictory to everything Israel says,” he reported.

The doctor directed one heart-wrenching passage to President Obama, writing “Mr Obama – do you have a heart? I invite you – spend one night – just one night – with us in Shifa. I am convinced, 100 per cent, it would change history. Nobody with a heart and power could ever walk away from a night in Shifa without being determined to end the slaughter of the Palestinian people.” Israel later attacked Shifa hospital. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) “strongly condemn[ed]” the incursion, saying it “demonstrate[d] how civilians in Gaza have nowhere safe to go.” MSF director Marie-Noëlle Rodrigue stated, in an official statement, “When the Israeli army orders civilians to evacuate their houses and their neighborhoods, where is there for them to go? Gazans have no freedom of movement and cannot take refuge outside Gaza. They are effectively trapped.” Shifa was one of the over 10 medical facilities Israel bombed in its 50-day offensive.

Article 1, Section 6 of the Constitution establishes an absolute free-speech right for members of Congress on the floor or in committee, even if they are disclosing classified material. It states that “for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.” Within hours of Colorado Senator Mark Udall losing his reelection bid last week, transparency activists were talking about how he should go out with a bang and put the Senate intelligence committee’s torture report into the congressional record.  The report is said to detail shockingly brutal abuse of detainees by the CIA during the George W. Bush administration, as well as rampant deception about the program by top officials. But the Obama White House is refusing to declassify even a summary of the report without major redactions. And Republicans take over the Senate in January.

Udall is one of two senators — along with fellow Intelligence Committee member Ron Wyden — who have consistently demanded greater transparency from the intelligence community. If he made the report public on the Senate floor or during a hearing, he couldn’t be prosecuted. The last time any senator did anything nearly so grand was in 1971, when Mike Gravel, two years into his 12 years representing the state of Alaska, entered 4,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record just before the U.S. Supreme Court lifted an injunction on publishing them in the press.

Now, Gravel is urging Udall to join the club. “If Udall wants to call me, I can explain this to him,” Gravel, pictured above, said in a phone interview from his home in Burlingame, Calif. Gravel’s recommendation: “What he’d have to do is call a subcommittee meeting like I did, late at night.”