Greg Mitchell | The Nation

Attorney General Eric Holder speaks about a strategy to fight cyberstealing in February. AP has protested the seizure of its phone records in a letter to Holder. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin.)

When the news broke yesterday afternoon it was at first hard to believe, yet, when one thought about it for a bit, it seemed all too part of a pattern. The Associated Press itself broke the news that the US Department of Justice had notified AP last Friday that it had secretly obtained telephone records for more than twenty separate telephone lines assigned to AP journalists and offices (both cell and home phone lines).

Their report continued, “AP is asking the DOJ for an immediate explanation of the extraordinary action and for the records to be returned to AP and all copies destroyed. AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt protested the massive intrusion into AP’s newsgathering activities in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder…. Prosecutors have sought phone records from reporters before, but the seizure of records from such a wide array of AP offices, including general AP switchboards numbers and an office-wide shared fax line, is unusual and largely unprecedented.”

Of course, the Obama administration has aggressively gone after leakers and brought six cases against whistleblowers, more than previous administrations combined.

Pruitt (who I met several times a few years back when he headed McClatchy), wrote:

There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know. We regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.

Kathleen Carroll, the longtime AP executive editor, said on MSNBC this morning: “I’ve been in this business more than thirty years and our First Amendment lawyers and our lawyers inside the AP and our CEO is also a well-known First Amendment lawyer—none of us have seen anything like this.”  Glen Greewwald at The Guardian hits the DOJ, as you might expect.

While no explanation was given, speculation quickly centered on an AP scoop from last May about a foiled terror plot coming out of Yemen, involving plans to blow up an airliner bound for the United States.

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Response was swift and angry—from left and right (the latter perhaps mainly happy to have another Obama “scandal” to exploit), all the way to The Daily Show late in the dayBen Wizner, director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project called it an “abuse of power.” The Newspaper Association of America, a leading trade group, declared, “These actions shock the American conscience and violate the critical freedom of the press protected by the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

Others defended the move, noting that it had been handled through proper channels—that is, a judge had approved it. The White House said it had no involvement in the action at all.

This New York Times story offers a fair look. Ex–newspaper reporter Charles P. Pierce calls for Eric Holder’s resignation. Here’s a tough response from EFF, including:

It is disturbing enough that the government appears to have violated its own regulations for subpoenas to the news media. However, this revelation also shows that we have a severe problem in protecting the privacy of our communications. It is critical to update our privacy laws and our understanding of the Constitution, and reflect the realities of what law enforcement can determine from our records and other metadata about our communications stored with our communications providers, be they phone companies, ISPs or social networks.

Greg Mitchell’s current books are So Wrong for So Long (on media failures and Iraq war) and the wild tale of MGM and Harry Truman scuttling a 1947 anti-nuclear epic, Hollywood Bomb. His personal blog, updated several times day, is Pressing Issues.

A Titan II ICBM in an underground silo. (Steve Jurvetson/Flickr, CC 2.0.)

It’s been a wild news week, what with Israel’s attack on Syria, the gruesome kidnap/rape tragedy emerging from Cleveland and then the circus surroundiing the Benghazi hearings. We won’t even mention Jodi Arias, whoever that is. Sadly overlooked, however, was an exclusive from the Associated Press. Oh, no big deal. Just “rot” and “crisis” and a wave of firings in one program you especially don’t want to witness this in: our nuclear missle launch program.

At Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota the commander confirmed, as the story put it, “the willful violation of safety rules—including a possible compromise of launch codes—was tolerated.” Seventeen members of launch crews have been fired, an unprecedented action in its scope.

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Lt. Col. Jay Folds, deputy commander of the 91st Operations Group, responsible for Minuteman 3 missile launch crews at Minot, cited disturbingly poor reviews that they received in a March inspection. “We are, in fact, in a crisis right now,” Folds wrote in the e-mail to his subordinates. Yet beyond routine publishing for the AP scoop, little media attention followed.

Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel demanded an explanation. Senator Dick Durbin said the issue “could not be more troubling.” The Air Force, perhaps trying to calm fears but only stoking them, revealed that the missiles were still on war footing.

As I’ve done for, oh, the past thirty years, in numeous articles and three books, this is where I remind readers that the US still has a first-strike nuclear policy, and thousands of nuclear weapons, more than two decades after the end of the Cold War—and that we have used nuclear weapons before, setting (and for most Americans, defending) a precedent.

Greg Mitchell’s new book is Hollywood Bomb. His previous books on this subject were Atomic Cover-up and, with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America.

The New York Times is again pushing for war in the Middle East, while McClatchy news outlets are again advising caution, Greg Mitchell writes.

New York Times columnist Bill Keller has now called for the United States to launch missiles at Syrian government installations. (Reuters/Phil McCarten.)

Hail, hail, the gang’s nearly all here. Michael Gordon, Thomas Friedman, now Bill Keller. Paging Judy Miller! The New York Times in recent days on its front page and at top of its site has been promoting the meme of Syria regime as chemical weapons abuser, thereby pushing Obama to jump over his “red line” and bomb or otherwise attack there. Tom Friedman weighed in Sunday by calling for an international force to occupy the entire country (surely they would only need to stay one Friedman Unit, or six months).

Now, after this weekend’s Israeli warplane assaults, the threat grows even more dire.

And Bill Keller, the self-derided “reluctant hawk” on invading Iraq in 2003, returns with a column today stating right in its headline, “Syria Is Not Iraq,” and urging Obama and all of us to finally “get over Iraq.” He boasts that he has.

The Times in its news pages, via Sanger, Gordon and Jodi Rudoren, has been highlighting claims of Syria’s use of chem agents for quite some time, highlighted by last week’s top story swallowing nearly whole the latest Israeli claims. Days later, Obama said evidence was far from certain—even if chemicals were used it was very limited—and some of our allies who made same claims also expressed new skepticism. The Times editorial page urged caution. Jon Stewart mocked the hawks. But that hardly halted the foreign desk!

Yesterday, Reuters reported on one of the four United Nations investigators stating that if sarin was used in Syria it was more likely by the the rebels, not the regime. Still, David Sanger, later Sunday, continued (at least in his early drafts) to push the chem claims at the top of his story—while not noting the UN prober’s charge. He also highlighted John McCain’s calls for fast action, while burying contradictory claims, an old trick for the Times and The Washington Post from the run-up to Iraq war.

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Then Bill Keller posted his Monday column. He declared that our mistakes in that country should not prevent us from intervening in Syria, which is “not Iraq.” He says he was gun-shy after his Iraq flub—but no more! Now he derides Obama for “looking for excuses to stand pat.” He also provides several reasons why Syria is “not Iraq,” and how now his hawkishness is based on reality: This time we really can hurt the terrorists gathered there, really can calm tensions in the region, and so on. Instead of a “mushroom cloud,” he warns of the next chemical “atrocity.” And he claims there’s a broader coaiition of the willing this time.

He even revives the good old “domino theory,” endorsing the view that if we don’t do something in Syria it will embolden China, North Korea and Iran. And I love this one, straight from 2003: Doing nothing “includes the danger that if we stay away now, we will get drawn in later (and bigger), when, for example, a desperate Assad drops sarin on a Damascus suburb….” If a surge in aid for those Al Qaeda–lovin’ rebels fails against Assad, then we “send missiles against his military installations until he, or more likely those around him, calculate that they should sue for peace.” Yeah, how did that work out in Iraq in the long run?

At least Keller provides some comic relief when he admits, “I don’t mean to make this sound easy.” (To grasp why Keller is turning “hawk” on Syria, see my review of his recent column on his FUBAR re Iraq.)

Keller concludes: “Whatever we decide, getting Syria right starts with getting over Iraq.” Then we can get over Syria—with Iran? Remember when Iraq was supposed to help us “get over” Vietnam?

See my book So Wrong for So Long on how the media—including the Times and Keller—helped get us into that mess for ten years.

Israel’s throwing a big war in the Middle East, and the United States is invited. Read Robert Dreyfuss on Israel’s bombing of Syrian government forces.

A drone flies above Kandahar, Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesorth, File.)

Few observers or writers are better qualified to discuss the impact of drone warfare not just on our policies but on our psyche than Robert Jay Lifton. Since the 1950s, the famed psychiatrist—and often, activist—has produced one landmark study after another on vital issues of our day, from nuclear weapons to Nazi doctors, from soldiers at war to policymakers who send them into battle. As it happens, I have written two books with Lifton, Hiroshima in America and Who Owns Death? (on capital punishment).

Lifton recently wrote what I consider the most far-reaching and important essay on the many dangers, and ethical challenges, of drone warfare (in two parts, here and here). Nothing reveals more about this subject than the famous phrase he introduced to our language decades ago: ”psychic numbing.” This week I interviewed him about that and another aspect: the media failure to cover this extremely important issue in any kind of deep, sustained way.

Lifton called his lengthy piece for Huff Post three weeks ago “Ten Reflections on Drones.” He introduced it this way: “Drones have entered our consciousness. Suddenly they seem to be everywhere. The following reflections—they could as easily be called meditations—do not address legal, political, or military issues, though these have great importance. Rather I seek to begin a conversation about our relationship as human beings to these robotic objects as weapons.”

To give you some of the flavor, here are a few of his ten reflections:

The lure of an intelligent, nonhuman killing machine. We can give the job of killing to an advanced technological entity, a compelling robotic instrument entirely devoid of feelings, and thereby suppress our own feelings in relation to that killing.

The illusion that we can fight wars without our own people, our soldiers, dying. As a military man (quoted by P. W. Singer) put it: “When a robot dies, you don’t have to write a letter to its mother.”

Another illusion is that of the drones’ capacity for what is called “targeted” or surgical killing, meaning the dispatching of a particular person and no one else.

Another illusory stance, also associated with a static view of history, is that of ignoring highly negative responses or blowback. Yet 97 percent of Pakistanis oppose our drones policy, as do high percentages of people in other Middle Eastern countries.

The illusion of a “rescue technology” that can turn around a failed policy. Drones have become a cure for the disarray and defeat associated with our doctrine of counterinsurgency warfare.

The ultimate issue of human and nonhuman agency. We are in a sense sharing human agency with a robot. There are accounts of varying degrees of loss of human control over the drones. And there are envisioned more and more occurrences in which action would be so rapid as to allow no time for human intervention and the drones would have to make “decisions” on their own.

Our interview follows.

Why did the media, until recently, provide little in-depth coverage of drones, even fail to confront official secrecy?

The media have had difficulty covering this subject and that’s partly because it is a revolutionary technology of killing and the media have trouble confronting what it is. There is now a certain amount of discussion of the political and legal side of drones. That’s important but not itself fully sufficient. One has to look at why drones are so much depended on and so much an expression of executive power in our use of them. And one does have to raise legal questions about using them against American citizens but also others—especially when the purposes are not tied to war but to assassination.

Yes, some of the more thoughtful media have raised these questions but almost no one has raised the fundamental questions about drones—questions of the mind and technology. And I’m struck by the basic illusion of fighting a war without undergoing casualties. That’s at the heart of things. What that means is you don’t have to undergo the pain of losing young men and women or the related requirement of insisting that they “did not die in vain.” That’s the central image of any war fighting. No one asks whether a drone died in vain when it explodes.

This illusory release from that level of meaning is dangerous in a democracy because a major means of preventing military belligerence and war-making is that painful sentiment for the citizens, and the media, of our soldiers being sent to die for an insufficient reason or to die in vain. And that hasn’t been discussed by the media to speak of. And that’s a major illusion.

And we don’t seem worried that drones can be turned on us.

That’s the added danger of enabling war-making to be made easier. It’s an illusion because there are seventy-five countries with drones now. Even non-governmental groups, including terrorists, could readily acquire and use them

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We have a sense of American ownership of the technology, like with nuclear weapons after World War II. But no technology, as we’ve found, is limited to any country, no matter how big a part they had in developing it.

The other thing that is so illusory that is not emphasized sufficiently: the extremity of the destruction. The accuracy of drones has been enormously exaggerated. And they terrify and enrage people and bring about a quality of humiliation and fear. This strange object in the sky that can wreak havoc causes a particular amount of humiliation—and that more than any other emotion can be a source of a retaliatory impulse.

These are the things that the media on the whole have not probed. But then, they are generally lazy and collapse before power. There has been great secrecy and barriers to coverage, true. Now the issue is surfacing, and suddenly the drones are in our consciousness and all over the place. Given today’s information structure, given the Internet and other sources, you can’t keep these things as secret for long.

Why such weak coverage of the attacks themselves? Hard to get to the scene?

You can’t say the media can’t go investigate on the ground—the Stanford group [that produced a valuable recent study] did. What better way to cover them than to see what they’re causing? That’s negligent behavior on the part of the media. Some investigative journalism groups have sent people on the ground. So that’s not an excuse.

You’ve made connections to capital punishment in the US.

This death-by-drone, carried out by killing professionals, is the idea of a speedy, “humane” killing, like with our death penalty. Every new means of putting people to death is always described as more humane than the last, from hanging to the electric chair to the gas chamber to lethal injections. By engaging in what is considered more humane killing the claim can lead to more willingness to kill, as it does with the drone.

Apart from news coverage, what about media commentary pieces?

Much of the analysis concerns a president’s right to conduct drone killing and raises the question of executive power. There have been some good pieces. One a few months ago captured some of the drone subculture around the White House. It conveyed the sense of the president involving himself so actively in the use of drones so he could be a kind of restraining force. That may be accurate, but the problem is that the claim of restraint legitimates the use of drones, and seems to eliminate the legal considerations that should be invoked.

Other commentaries find professionals endorsing drones or expressing legal opinions to say they are okay—like the legal briefs sought by the Bush administration to endorse torture.

It seems the focus of complaints, even by many liberals, is often limited to concerns about targeting Americans.

Using them on our own citizens can be held out as an egregious action, turning a technology of killing against our own people. But I agree that using them anywhere in the world against anyone deserves careful legal and ethical consideration. It’s easier for media to look critically at use of drones against Americans and thereby avoid the use of drones to kill anyone. The seemingly more egregious violation is easier to criticize but the larger significance of drone warfare is overlooked or suppressed.

I’ll go along with the Stanford report—it makes you almost proud to be an academic. It found drone warfare is causing more harm for our national security than whatever it is accomplishing. It’s a dubious technology and the pinpoint targeting is illusory.

So should all use of drones be banned?

It’s the responsibility of the press to look very critically at the use of drones in any case. We need sanctions against their use. We also need international law standards.

One has to quickly now look at drones as an international, human issue. It is a revolutionary technology and it has to be controlled. It will effect humankind, not just Americans and terrorists, and one has to examine critically the psychological aspects, such as getting the machines to do the killing for us and exonerating us ethically.

Greg Mitchell’s latest book, published last week, is Hollywood Bomb: The Unmaking of ‘The Most Important Movie’ Ever Made.