Chasing Snowden

By Donald Lambro

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

The hunt for fugitive Edward Snowden, wanted on espionage charges, has all the elements of a John le Carre spy novel.

As of Tuesday, Snowden has given U.S. authorities the slip in an international cat-and-mouse chase from the U.S. to Hong Kong to Moscow, with well-laid plans to fly on to South America (by way of Havana), where he is hoping to be given asylum by Ecuador, the country that is harboring WikiLeaks fugitive Julian Assange in its London embassy.

It is a twisted tale in a sea of ironies and hypocrisies in which Snowden sees himself as the lone champion of civil liberties and freedom of speech as he nonetheless seeks protection among some of the world's worst despots and anti-free speech governments, including Communist China and Russia, where you are sent to prison or forced labor camps for daring to criticize the government or its leaders.

In Ecuador, which Snowden hopes will be his ultimate destination and safe harbor from U.S. prosecution, he will be embraced by President Rafael Correa, a vehement and hateful enemy of the U.S. Since his election in 2007, he's launched a war on freedom of the press, imposing a strict new media law aimed at muzzling his critics, dragging them into court with libel suits, and launching a vindictive crusade to weaken media outlets.

Secretary of State John Kerry said it was "no small irony" that Snowden was seeking protection from countries like Russia and China that place strict government limits on Internet access and human rights.

But Snowden's deceptive narrative about what motivated him to steal and expose our most secret defenses against terrorist attacks was as phony as a $3 bill. In interviews,he said he had gradually come to the conclusion that the U.S. international surveillance programs he worked on were a threat to Americans' freedoms and right to privacy.

In fact, in a June 12 interview with the South China Morning Post published Monday, Snowden said that from the very beginning, he sought the subcontractor job with Booz Allen in order to obtain evidence about its surveillance methods.

"My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked. That is why I accepted that position about three months ago," he told the Post.

And what about this administration's feeble efforts to capture Snowden and bring him to justice?

Attorney General Eric Holder made repeated phone calls to his counterpart in Hong Kong, as did other Justice Department attorneys and FBI officials, urging them to detain Snowden, only to be left twisting slowly in the wind for more than a week by foot-dragging Chinese requests for more information and explanations.

It wasn't until Saturday that senior aides to the President, including national security adviser Tom Donilon, reluctantly got into the act, attempting to pressure Hong Kong to respond.

But it was clear from the beginning that Hong Kong, a semi- autonomous island city that sits within the jaws of China, was taking direct orders from Beijing's leaders who saw Snowden as a thorny problem in relations with the US that they did not want.

A shadowy envoy was sent from the mainland to Hong Kong to tell Snowden to leave the country. He was soon on a Russian Aeroflot flight for Moscow with the help of WikiLeak agents, hoping to catch a flight to Havana and from there to Quito and into Correa's welcoming arms.

But something happened at a transit area in Moscow's airport that delayed plans to fly to Havana, raising suspicions that President Vladimir Putin took advantage of the opportunity to insert himself into the story and make the Obama administration squirm.

There was something pathetic about Secretary of State Kerry pleading with Moscow Monday "to do the right thing. We think it's very important in terms of our relationship."

What relationship? Putin opposes us on the civil war in Syria, is Bashar al-Assad's chief weapons supplier, and never misses an opportunity to stick it to us. This week was no exception.

As for Kerry's plea to "follow the rule of law," Putin made it clear Tuesday that Snowden will not be extradited to the United States because Russia has no extradition pact with us. Moreover, he argued, Snowden was in the transit area of the international airport, had not technically crossed the Russian border, and thus was free to travel anywhere he wants.

Clearly Putin -- like Beijing -- was ready and willing to assist Snowden in any way he could to escape to Ecuador without getting embroiled in a messy extradition dispute.

Meantime, it's still not clear how much material China and Russian intelligence authorities obtained from the remaining top-secret documents Snowden is believed to have in his possession.

Putin said Tuesday that Russian intelligence agencies "didn't work and aren't working" with Snowden, but you can't believe anything this former KGB agent says.

The former NSA worker was undoubtedly debriefed by Chinese intelligence about how we had hacked into their computer files during the month he stayed in Hong Kong and by Russian agents during his stopover in Moscow.

And quite likely they have downloaded everything that is stored in Snowden's laptop. "That stuff is gone," a former senior U.S. intelligence official who served in Russia told the Washington Post. "I guarantee the Chinese intelligence service got their hands on that right away," he said, adding, "the Russians have that stuff now," too.

But we still do not know how many more unrevealed intelligence documents he still possesses and how much additional damage he can inflict on our national security before he is caught. And he will be caught.

Meantime, we know that terrorist organizations have already changed the way they communicate as a result of his disclosures. And that has significantly raised the risks of future attacks on our homeland.

Dems Struggle With Scandals; GOP Can't Agree on Policy

By Michael Barone

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

The two political parties are in disarray. The Democrats are disheartened. The Republicans are disunited.

Start with (because they're first in alphabetical order) the Democrats. The Barack Obama they were so enthusiastic about in 2008 has been disappointing many of them lately.

Not many happy Obama voters envisioned last November that his presidency would be faced with multiple scandals six months later.

During the campaign, most of the media provided voters with little information about the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi.

But now it's apparent to anyone paying attention that Obama and Hillary Clinton repeatedly misled Americans about the nature of the attack and their response.

Strong partisans try to ignore that kind of information about their leader. But it's getting harder to do so.

It's even harder to ignore the Justice Department's actions against The Associated Press and Fox News's James Rosen. (Disclosure: I'm a Fox News contributor.)

As for the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups, prominent Democratic officeholders, including Obama, have appropriately condemned it. Polls suggest that most Democratic voters take that view, as well.

I have seen no evidence yet that anyone in the White House ordered the targeting. But it does seem peculiar that IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman and his chief of staff attended hundreds of meetings in the White House complex.

And then there's the news that the National Security Agency has been data mining and intercepting communications between suspected terrorists abroad and persons in the United States.

The latter used to be called "domestic wiretapping" during the Bush administration. Barack Obama denounced it vigorously.

But as president he's kept it up and now, perfunctorily, defends it. History shows that there is more continuity to U.S. foreign and defense policy than partisan rhetoric suggests. But Democratic voters were led to expect discontinuity -- "hope and change." Many are surely disheartened by this and by his decision to provide some arms to Syrian rebels.

Democrats' disillusion comes on top of some disenchantment during Obama's first term. Sluggish economy growth and the unpopularity of Obamacare contributed to that.

It's been little noticed, but Obama got 3.6 million fewer votes in 2012 than he did in 2008. In contrast, George W. Bush was re-elected with 11.6 million more votes than he won four years before.

Obama's job approval now is just about identical to Bush's at this point in his second term. It may not fall as far as Bush's did. But the numbers and the news don't suggest that Democrats will flock enthusiastically to the polls in 2014 and 2016.

At the same time, it's not apparent that Republican voters are taking heart from these developments. Their party seems divided even more than is usual for a party that's been out of the White House for five years.

Republicans are split on immigration, with Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida rallying the Senate Gang of Eight bill and other Republicans denouncing it as amnesty. They're divided, as we saw in the House last week, on the farm/food stamps bill.

They're divided especially on foreign policy. Sen. John McCain of Arizona and others labeled as neoconservatives have long called for military aid -- perhaps a no-fly zone -- for the Syrian rebels. They've defended the administration's surveillance programs.

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has been shrewdly seeking attention, takes an opposite view. He's against involvement in the Middle East and decries the use of drones and data mining.

Republicans had a weak field of presidential candidates in 2012, and the strongest of them, Mitt Romney, won only 1 million more votes than McCain had in 2008.

The party seems likely to have a much stronger field in 2016 -- and one with a wide range of positions and platforms.

House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin has put forward fiscal plans that have been backed by almost all House Republicans. But there could still be wide disagreement on economic issues in the presidential primaries.

There could be disagreement on health care, as well. No one is sure how the rollout of Obamacare will go. It could be a disaster, or it could produce just minor "glitches and bumps," in the president's words.

Republican politicians are united in opposing Obamacare. They are, unsurprisingly, not united on how to respond to a rollout that hasn't happened yet.

Often one of the two major parties is in disarray. Today, unusually, both of them are.

Obama in Berlin

By Paul Greenberg

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

There are times when all a president of the United States must want to do is to get away from it all. Far away. An ocean away. Not just for a weekend at Camp David or a fundraiser in San Francisco. But off to some place where it really doesn't matter what he's talking about so long as it isn't anything relevant, at least not to his troubles or the country's. Yes, some place where people aren't concerned with American domestic politics and its presidential scandals. And if there isn't such a place any more in this internetted and globalized 24/7 blogosphere, it needs to be a place where POTUS can at least pretend nobody knows or cares about the trouble he's in at home.

. .

Even a president of the United States, especially a president of the United States, needs a trip to some fantasy island of his choice when things at home get hard to take, and what he really wants to do is change the subject. Maybe someplace he associates with better times, when his administration was just a-borning and everything was bright and promising and bustin' out all over with prospects of Hope and Change -- someplace like Berlin, where they loved him at the start of his presidency. Heck, they loved him in Washington back then.

. .

Yes, a little visit to Berlin would be perfect just now, travel-poster perfect. It would offset that bust of a G8 summit somewhere unpronounceable in Northern Ireland that our president had to attend the other day. Which produced all those dreary communiqués that communicated so little. Yes, he needed to go to Berlin, absolutely, and Jawohl(Yes sir)! It must have been great fun being liked again.

. .

Who could blame our president for taking a little side trip to see the Brandenburg Gate again and take a break from sordid reality? Except maybe the kind of spoilsports who wish he would tackle his problems at home head-on -- instead of pretending they don't exist, and that he really had nothing to with them, being only president of the United States. And, as such, only an innocent bystander. And not responsible for every misadventure his administration, silly thing, has gotten itself into. After all, he only heads it.

A president's most pressing need at such a time is to talk about something else, anything else, other than his administration's scandals. Like the weather, maybe.

. .

This is scarcely the first time it has dawned on the country's chief executive that now would be the perfect time to get out of Dodge.

It was back in 1974, the year when Watergate finally boiled over, having gone from minor irritant to a full-blown crisis, that Richard Nixon decided to see the pyramids at last. So off he went to Cairo and points east to talk about ... well, I can't remember just what he talked about except that it had nothing to do with what he'd once dismissed as an overblown, second-rate burglary at some office complex in Washington called Watergate.

Think back to June of 1974. That would have been after President Nixon had declined to release those famous or rather infamous Watergate Tapes except in edited form, and even that turned out to be a bombshell. For even those limited, selected, and sanitized notes on his White House conversations with intimates revealed something of what Richard M. Nixon, aka Tricky Dick, was thinking in private -- never a pretty picture. Let's just say that those selected excerpts, strewn with expletive-deleted phrases and a general coating of vulgarity, were less than elevating.

Everyone knew by then that more was to come, as layer after layer of this cover-up would be peeled back. All wanted to see what was underneath, and at the same time didn't want to see it. For back then there was still an aura of awe, even reverence, about the presidency of the United States, an aura it would never regain after that Watergate summer. The House Judiciary Committee had already begun impeachment hearings in May of that year and now....

Yes, now was the perfect time for that president to leave the country. Just what he said in Cairo is hard to remember now, but Americans still haven't forgotten Watergate. It was a watershed not just for Richard Nixon, but for the American presidency.

Fast forward to June of 2013. This time an American president goes to Berlin, but it's scarcely John F. Kennedy speaking in June of 1963 ("Ich bin ein Berliner!") or Ronald Reagan in June of 1987. ("Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!")

Instead it's Barack Obama talking about, sure enough, the weather. Specifically, about Climate Change, the reigning secular theology of the age, complete with its own vision of the Apocalypse: famines, floods, vanishing coastlines, refugees from natural disasters ... the whole "Soylent Green" scenario. ("This is the future we must avert. This is the global threat of our time!")

At a time when the whole Middle East is threatened by a real calamity, by widening war and chaos, and a real refugee crisis is already upon us there, our president chose to spoke about, yes, the weather. Which must have been a nice change from not speaking of the succession of scandals on his watch back home.

No matter. All those congressional committees will be talking about those scandals all summer long -- the IRS' own enemies list, the administration's going after the press for doing its job, the bloody debacle that was Benghazi, and who knows what more to come. There'll be time enough to discuss all that. It's going to be a long, hot summer.

This stopover in Berlin has been just an intermission in the continuing drama he's trying to escape from back home. Working title: "Obama Agonistes."

Welcome home, Mr. President. You've been missed.

Edward Snowden: Traitor or Hero?

By Rachel Alexander

Monday, June 24, 2013

A whistleblower has exposed the National Security Administration’s warrantless spying on millions of ordinary Americans, and conservatives are divided in their reactions. Dick Cheney and Michele Bachmann are calling former NSA contractor Edward Snowden a traitor. This may be the only time I ever disagree with them.

Snowden revealed that judges are approving warrants allowing the government to obtain “inadvertently acquired” information without a search warrant. This includes the contents of emails and listening in on phone conversations. It is ostensibly authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

This is terrifying when you consider how easy it could be for the government to target someone, then make it look like they “inadvertently acquired” their confidential information after poring through gobs of information. The government is permitted to retain the information for up to five years. As an attorney who formerly handled public records requests for the government, I assure you it is easy to retain records for longer than that without anyone noticing. Snowden said that he had access to obtain this information from virtually anyone with a personal email address.

This administration cannot be trusted not to abuse its authority and target political enemies. The government has already been caught using the IRS to target conservatives, so it should not be trusted with wide access to the average American’s personal information without a warrant. As someone who has been targeted by a fishing expedition – the State Bar of Arizona demanded to know everything I had ever blogged, including anonymously, over a period of five years - I greatly fear giving the government the ability to conduct fishing expeditions that violate the Fourth Amendment. Because technology has become so vast, and the laws have become so vague - many no longer require intent - one civil liberties attorney argues that it can easily be shown that the average American commits three felonies a day. Put this all together and it becomes very easy for the government to target anyone.

Doug Hagmann, a columnist with Canada Free Press, was told by an anonymous employee at the Department of Homeland Security that the Obama administration is already spying on and targeting conservative reporters, bloggers and whistleblowers. “If you are a website owner with a brisk readership and a conservative bent, you’re on that list.” The Obama administration will claim any surveillance is related to terrorism, “but it’s a political dissident list, not an enemy threat list.”

The advance of technology has given the government many new ways to monitor our activities. Yet the Founding Fathers drafted the Fourth Amendment in order to protect us from the government spying on us in our homes. The NSA surveillance allows the government to monitor what we are doing on our computers inside our homes.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who was appalled by the surveillance, contrasts the privacy of mailing letters through the Post Office with today's modern email: there is no similar expectation of privacy with email, even though it is just a modern day version of a letter. He lamented how excessive government monitoring of people is what we used to abhor about communist Russia.

The government is essentially giving itself broad powers to spy on us, and justifying it with the vague excuse of combating terrorism. Snowden advises investigative journalists, “How many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source?”

Snowden leaked the story to the UK Guardian because none of the big newspapers in the U.S. had the guts to break such an incriminating story against the Obama administration. Snowden said he released evidence of the surveillance because he was tired of seeing “lies from senior officials to Congress.” Now Snowden has fled to Hong Kong, and the Obama administration is trying to track him down and try him for being a traitor.

Contrast this with how the Obama administration has bent over backwards transferring terrorists to U.S. courts where they will receive the full panoply of constitutional rights. Yet when it comes to Snowden, merely a whistleblower, the government is already declaring him guilty of treason, filing a criminal complaint against him on Friday. Snowden told the UK Guardian in an interview that he no longer stands a chance at a fair trial in the U.S.

Two U.S. senators, Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), both members of the Senate intelligence committee, have asked the administration how many Americans were subjected to this surveillance, but the administration refuses to provide the information, unbelievably asserting it doesn't have it. Other members of the House and Senate, on both sides of the aisle, are introducing bills that would declassify the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinions that authorized these programs. This will reveal how the court interpreted the Patriot Act so broadly as to justify the surveillance.

Some on the right are concerned that Edward Snowden has revealed classified information that could damage our security efforts. But what has been damaged exactly? Snowden has not revealed any U.S. operations against legitimate military targets. Let's not forget what happened to liberal journalist Geraldo Rivera when he actually did reveal U.S. troop movements in Iraq – he wasn't even prosecuted. Snowden merely “pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses.”

There probably wasn’t anything else he could do to stop the government surveillance – it is highly unlikely that reporting it to another government agency would have accomplished anything but getting him fired.

The Patriot Act was fraught with potential civil liberties violations when it was first passed. But most of them were addressed and the law was changed. Now it appears another loophole has been found in it that must be changed to protect our Fourth Amendment right. The government should not be able to casually access the personal information of Americans it has no reason to suspect are involved with crime or terrorism.

What Snowden has done can be distinguished from the actions of Pfc. Bradley Manning. Manning released videos and documents relating to our military fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as a video of an American helicopter firing on a group of men in Baghdad, which many believe provoked terrorists. Manning revealed the military's combat role in fighting terrorism, whereas Snowden revealed massive spying on average Americans, two very different things. Snowden contributed $500 to Ron Paul’s presidential campaign in 2012, clearly no American-hating lefty.

If Snowden is really a traitor, then why is Obama now saying things need to change? Obama said in an interview on the PBS Charlie Rose show PBS last week, “We’re going to have to find ways where the public has an assurance that there are checks and balances in place, that they have enough information about how we operate that they know their phone calls aren’t being listened to, their text messages aren’t being monitored, their e-mails are not being read by some Big Brother somewhere.” Obama formed a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and met with it last week to address this. Also as a result of Snowden’s exposure, Google and Facebook are opening up about what information they disclose to the U.S. government.

If this surveillance is not curtailed, conservative activists should seriously consider switching to encrypted email. I have a feeling the government is not really going to stop this. And just like Obama’s denial that ordinary Americans’ phone calls were being listened in on, Obama will deny that surveillance is increasing.

Pandering Is Bad Politics

By Dan Holler

Monday, June 24, 2013

As evidence by last week’s rush to embrace a phony border security amendment, too many in the Republican Establishment are fixated on immigration reform as merely a quick fix political strategy. Earlier this month, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) became just the latest to reiterate this failed outlook:

    “We’re in a demographic death spiral as a party, and the only way we can get back in good graces with the Hispanic community, in my view, is pass comprehensive immigration reform. If you don’t do that, it really doesn’t matter who will run, in my view.”

Not only is that the wrong way to view immigration reform, but it all but ensures terrible policy outcomes and continued political defeat.

In the days following the election, a list of who’s who among the Republican Establishment sounded off on the need for immigration reform. To be clear, there are plenty of good reasons to reform our immigration system, but many of these folks had one thing on their minds: winning the White House in 2016.

President Obama predicted this very reaction in his October 2012 interview with the Des Moines Register, claiming Republicans would “have a deep interest” in embracing amnesty after his reelection, which was secured because the “Republican nominee and the Republican Party have so alienated the fastest-growing demographic group in the country, the Latino community.”

Republican strategists – many of the same folks in charge of the 2008 and 2012 campaigns – looked at the top line numbers and decided the President was right. Mitt Romney had lost the Hispanic vote by 44 points, the largest gap since Bob Dole lost by 21 points to Bill Clinton in 1996. They concluded that given the projected growth in Hispanic voting population, a continued shift away from the GOP could spell electoral disaster. In their minds, they had to act…fast.

Enter the Senate’s Gang of Eight.

Former attorney general Edwin Meese says the bill The Heritage Foundation explains “should sound familiar” because “it’s quite close to the path and provisions” put forth in the 1986 amnesty passed by a Democrat Congress and signed by Republican President Reagan.

Following that amnesty – an amnesty signed by a Republican president – Democrats’ advantage among Hispanics jumped from 24 points to 39 points in the 1988 presidential election. Although the GOP won the election, they lost ground among Hispanics voters.

It was a similar story in 2008. Despite having been the driving force behind an amnesty proposal in 2007, GOP nominee John McCain lost the Hispanic vote by 36 points to a Democrat who helped derail the bill. In 2004, Democrats won Hispanics with just an 18-point margin.

Presidential electoral history is clear: the Republican Party does not gain politically when it embraces amnesty.

This should come as no surprise, though. As Pew explained following the 2012 election, 60% of Hispanic voters “identified the economy as the most important issue (of four listed) facing the country today.” Prior to the election, a FoxNews poll of likely Hispanic voters found that just 6% would vote based on immigration.

Nonetheless, left-leaning pundits are happy to indulge the logic, proclaiming that if the Republicans are to survive as a major political party, they needed to embrace comprehensive immigration reform (read: amnesty).

Democrats understand what Republican strategists seemingly do not: if the GOP wants to make gains among Hispanic voters, they must treat them like adults and take the time to win a policy argument. President Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer understand GOP acquiescence on amnesty will not result in a sudden swing of Hispanics toward the GOP.

Pandering isn’t a political solution; instead we must put forth policy solutions.

Hispanics still believe America is the land of opportunity, and it is incumbent upon conservatives to explain how our policy solutions promote growth, opportunity and freedom. While polls suggest Hispanic voters are not as skeptical of government as Republicans at large, their faith is not blind.

We must explain how conservative policy solutions improve the family budget, increase the quality and decrease the cost of health care, and how our kids’ future will be brighter if they have a quality education and less debt.

If the Republican Party is to succeed at the ballot box, they must prove the positives, not spend a year and hundreds of millions trying to prove a negative. This is how you make inroads with Hispanic voters (and other disaffected Americans), not pandering in search of a quick political fix.