WaPo: the"disposition matrix" and how Obama is institutionalizing the war on terror

[Winehole23]

Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix.”

The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the “disposition” of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.



Although the matrix is a work in progress, the effort to create it reflects a reality setting in among the nation’s counterterrorism ranks: The United States’ conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/plan-for-hunting-terrorists-signals-us-intends-to-keep-adding-names-to-kill-lists/2012/10/23/4789b2ae-18b3-11e2-a55c-39408fbe6a4b_story.html

[boutons_deux]

Don't NOBODY fuck with American Empire, its fucks you back.

[Winehole23]

second in the series:


What was once a disparate collection of tactics — drone strikes by the CIA and the military, overhead surveillance, deployment of small Special Forces ground units at far-flung bases, and distribution of military and economic aid to threatened governments — has become a White House-centered strategy with Brennan at its core.


Four years ago, Brennan felt compelled to withdraw from consideration (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/25/AR2008112501028.html) as President Obama’s first CIA director because of what he regarded as unfair criticism of his role in counterterrorism practices as an intelligence official during the George W. Bush administration. Instead, he stepped into a job in the Obama administration with greater responsibility and influence.


Brennan is leading efforts to curtail the CIA’s primary responsibility for targeted killings. Over opposition from the agency, he has argued that it should focus on intelligence activities and leave lethal action to its more traditional home in the military, where the law requires greater transparency. Still, during Brennan’s tenure, the CIA has carried out hundreds of drone strikes (http://apps.washingtonpost.com/foreign/drones/?hpid=z1) in Pakistan and opened a new base for armed drones in the Arabian Peninsula.


Although he insists that all agencies have the opportunity to weigh in on decisions, making differing perspectives available to the Oval Office, Brennan wields enormous power in shaping decisions on “kill” lists and the allocation of armed drones, the war’s signature weapon.http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-veteran-john-brennan-has-transformed-us-counterterrorism-policy/2012/10/24/318b8eec-1c7c-11e2-ad90-ba5920e56eb3_story.html

[Winehole23]

Glenn Greenwald:


The central role played by the NCTC in determining who should be killed – "It is the keeper of the criteria," says one official to the Post – is, by itself, rather odious. As Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts noted in response to this story (http://privacysos.org/node/857), the ACLU has long warned (http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/biggest-new-spying-program-youve-probably-never-heard) that the real purpose of the NCTC – despite its nominal focus on terrorism - is the "massive, secretive data collection and mining of trillions of points of data about most people in the United States".

In particular, the NCTC operates a gigantic data-mining operation, in which all sorts of information about innocent Americans is systematically monitored, stored, and analyzed. This includes "records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records" – "literally anything the government collects would be fair game". In other words, the NCTC - now vested with the power to determine the proper "disposition" of terrorist suspects - is the same agency that is at the center of the ubiquitous, unaccountable surveillance state aimed at American citizens.


Worse still, as the ACLU's legislative counsel Chris Calabrese documented back in July in a must-read analysis (http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/biggest-new-spying-program-youve-probably-never-heard), Obama officials very recently abolished safeguards on how this information can be used. Whereas the agency, during the Bush years, was barred from storing non-terrorist-related information about innocent Americans for more than 180 days – a limit which "meant that NCTC was dissuaded from collecting large databases filled with information on innocent Americans" – it is now free to do so. Obama officials eliminated this constraint by authorizing the NCTC "to collect and 'continually assess' information on innocent Americans for up to five years".


And, as usual, this agency engages in these incredibly powerful and invasive processes with virtually no democratic accountability:

"All of this is happening with very little oversight. Controls over the NCTC are mostly internal to the DNI's office, and important oversight bodies such as Congress and the President's Intelligence Oversight Board aren't notified even of 'significant' failures to comply with the Guidelines. Fundamental legal protections are being sidestepped. For example, under the new guidelines, Privacy Act notices (legal requirements to describe how databases are used) must be completed by the agency that collected the information. This is in spite of the fact that those agencies have no idea what NCTC is actually doing with the information once it collects it.

"All of this amounts to a reboot of the Total Information Awareness Program that Americans rejected so vigorously right after 9/11."


It doesn't require any conspiracy theorizing to see what's happening here. Indeed, it takes extreme naiveté, or willful blindness, not to see it.


What has been created here - permanently institutionalized - is a highly secretive executive branch agency that simultaneously engages in two functions: (1) it collects and analyzes massive amounts of surveillance data about all Americans without any judicial review let alone search warrants, and (2) creates and implements a "matrix" that determines the "disposition" of suspects, up to and including execution, without a whiff of due process or oversight. It is simultaneously a surveillance state and a secretive, unaccountable judicial body that analyzes who you are and then decrees what should be done with you, how you should be "disposed" of, beyond the reach of any minimal accountability or transparency.


The Post's Miller recognizes the watershed moment this represents: "The creation of the matrix and the institutionalization of kill/capture lists reflect a shift that is as psychological as it is strategic." As he explains, extra-judicial assassination was once deemed so extremist that very extensive deliberations were required before Bill Clinton could target even Osama bin Laden for death by lobbing cruise missiles in East Africa. But:


Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/24/obama-terrorism-kill-list

[boutons_deux]

Romney’s Cold War Ponzi Scheme

Poor President Obama, as Colin Powell pointed out in endorsing him Thursday, clearly holds what should be a winning hand in the war-on-terror game, and yet Mitt Romney and his neocon speechwriters won’t cut him any slack. Suddenly it’s not Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida that matter, but rather the military threat from Red China that is killing us with slick iPhones and cheap solar panels.

Throw in some good old Russia baiting, and if Romney has his way, the military-industrial complex will get its beloved Cold War back despite the fact that the communist threat is now one of conquering space on the shelves at Wal-Mart. Obama, the naive community organizer, thinks the foreign policy debate is about national security, but Romney, the quintessential vulture capitalist, knows that it’s always been about maximizing profit.

That is the problem with the war on terror that Obama inherited from George W. Bush but has successfully reissued as his own product line; it’s got all the patriotic bells and whistles, but as a profit center, it sucks. You just can’t logically justify spending trillions of dollars on building ever more sophisticated weapons to defeat a 9/11 style enemy equipped with weapons that can be purchased at Home Depot for a couple of hundred bucks. Another $2 billion nuclear sub, in addition to the two we already turn out every year, isn’t very useful in hunting down potential hijackers based in some desert outpost or even in an apartment in Hamburg, Germany.

Bush and his neocon coterie recognized the glaring irrelevance of the Cold War era arsenal in the fight against terrorism, and that is why they invaded Iraq instead of focusing on al-Qaida and its supporters in Afghanistan. As Donald Rumsfeld put it, “there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan and there are a lot of good targets in Iraq,” meaning that we could pretend it was the Normandy landing all over again and count on an embedded media to mindlessly celebrate rolling out the mothballed war toys. There had to be another use for B-2 stealth bombers other than flying over the Super Bowl.

Saddam Hussein at least had a recognizable army and something of an air force, but even so, Bush had to invent a WMD scare to justify a hot war that would be a post Cold War bonanza for defense contractors lobbying for even more outlandish military deals. Iran now serves a similar purpose, even though the increased regional influence of the ayatollahs that Romney wildly inflates is a result of our putting Shiite political refugees, formerly living in protected exile in Iran, into power in Iraq.


But, as earlier with Iraq, the threat from Iran is a poor excuse for boosting military expenditures back to Cold War levels, and so Romney has turned to the neocons to bring China and Russia back into the threat inflation charts. As Powell said in endorsing Obama and rejecting his fellow Republican, Romney: “There’s some very, very strong neoconservative views that are presented by the governor that I have some trouble with.”

Of course, it was those same neocons who deceived Powell into sounding the false alarm in his United Nations speech over Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs, and he now knows just how treacherous they can be. The key advisers around Romney are the same folks who got Bush to trick us into a war that few Americans now defend, but their cynical appeal to Republican politicians lives on. Although Romney has been loath to identify with the now much discredited foreign policy of the former president, he is reliant on the very men who led Bush astray.

The list reads like a who’s who of the neocons who beat the drums for wasting American lives and taxpayer dollars during the Bush reign.

Key among them is John Bolton, perhaps better known for his outsized mustache than for his outlandishly hawkish views.

Another is Robert Kagan, who, like Bolton, was a key player in the infamous Project for a New American Century that was eagerly pushing for a massive increase in military expenditures even before the 9/11 attacks.

Another is Robert Joseph, the Bush era National Security Council official credited with sticking the 16 words in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech making the egregiously false claim about uranium being shipped from Niger to Iraq.

No wonder Powell is alarmed; those are the guys who fooled him once, but not twice.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/romneys_cold_war_ponzi_scheme_20121026/

[Winehole23]

off topic, boutons. this thread is about how Obama is institutionalizing the war on terror and by extension, a surveillance state that keeps tabs on us all.

[Winehole23]

start your own damn thread about Romney and the MIC if that's what you want to discuss

[TeyshaBlue]

Dont you know WH, EVERY thread is somehow about Romney and MIC!

[Winehole23]

johnny-one-note strikes again!

[TeyshaBlue]

"Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it."

Codification of these types of actions is going to be this Administrations legacy.

[Winehole23]

that and backstopping the TBTF financial sector, yeah