The highlight to any trip to Tehran—if you can manage it—is a visit to the scene of the most spectacular hostage-taking in recent history, the US embassy, which Iranian students stormed in November 1979, holding 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, and dumping US diplomatic correspondence on the street in a spectacular premodern WikiLeak.
The balance sheet for 2014 and the prospects for 2015 provide us with a complex panorama of negative and positive outcomes. In most cases the advances, are not earth-shattering but open possibilities for further progress. The negative developments, however, have greater and more threatening systemic outcomes.
Most of us know that the NSA is spending billions of our taxpayer dollars to track our every move, though the data is collected and only used if some hired dude, following procedures that look for programmed threats, decides you’re doing something suspicious. We know that companies like Amazon follow your moves on its website so that it can plaster your Internet Protocol (IP) path with purchase recommendations. They use your Tracking Cookies or Browsing history to determine your past inquiries.
[GTMO Interrogation and Control Element Chief] Mr. [David] Becker also told the Committee that, on several occasions, MG [Major General] Dunlavey had advised him that the office of Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz had called to express concerns to him about the insufficient intelligence production at GTMO. Mr. Becker recalledMG Dunlavey telling him after one of these calls, that the Deputy Secretary himself said that GTMO should use more aggressive interrogation techniques.
The US Senate Report documenting CIA torture of alleged terrorist suspects raises a number of fundamental questions about the nature and operations of the State, the relationship and the responsibility of the Executive Branch and Congress to the vast secret police networks which span the globe – including the United States.
CIA: The Politics of a Global Secret Police Force
The view is from room 300, level 3 of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. The sunlight has long vanished, leaving the twinkling lights of the old castle quarter, Hradčany, to do their magic outside the windows. The students funnel in. The chalk is waiting to be used. The topic is something that is already wearing thin, not because it lacks weight, but because it has begun to disappear into the ether. What effect did Mr. Edward Snowden have, notably in states with a previous history of massive surveillance?
Somebody on CNN suggested the other day that the dismissal of Chuck Hagel as Defense Secretary spells the end of Barack Obama’s notion of a “team of rivals.” (Recall how that term was used after the 2008 election to refer to the new president’s decision to include former rivals, notably Hillary Clinton, in his administration. It was derived from the title of a book by presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet formed in 1860 that included three former opponents.)
It seems like dystopian mayhem: the US airspace, riddled with opportunistic drones, surveillance vehicles, hell fire missiles and other such lethal projectiles manned by ruthless, unhinged operators. There is also something far less intrusive or lethal: the delivery of purchased items, amateur filming, and the taking of aerial photos.
Sunday, November 30, Ferguson, Missouri. The governor of Missouri declared a state of emergency on November 17, and this is what’s been happening in Ferguson and St. Louis County, Missouri:
Yesterday the USA Freedom Act was blocked in the Senate as it failed to garner the 60 votes required to move forward. Presumably the bill would have imposed limits on NSA surveillance. Careful scrutiny of the bill’s text, however, reveals yet another mere gesture of reform, one that would codify and entrench existing surveillance capabilities rather than eliminate them.
