Joshua Foust has styled himself as the "anti-Greenwald," criticizing the Snowden leaks, and as far as some gullible media is concerned he is "the only one" doing this -- because of course the bloggers he cribs from like Streetwise Professor or Jeremy Duns or me or LibertyLynx or anyone else on Twitter don't matter.
And that's as it should be, in a way, as tweeting and blogging shouldn't matter as much as mainstream or liberal/left established media -- except here's the thing. To get published in Business Insider or The Atlantic or Talking Points Memo, you have to tack left when the tacking is noticeable -- just enough to establish cred, and you have to tack pro-Administration when that's required -- and that can be understood as "progressive" (pro-Obama) or "establishment" (but hey, not neo-con).
It's quite a game, and Foust is getting better at it, but it still hasn't landed him a job. I'm confident it will eventually, and we should all wish for that -- indeed, we should all be sending out Foust's resumes to any job openings -- because an unemployed and increasingly rabid and desperate Foust is not good for civil society. This is like the problem of unemployed Soviet nuclear engineers. Make sure they're adequately employed, and under supervision!
So Foust's expert tacking with every passing wind of doctrine isn't just about holding one's finger to the wind and moving about like a weather vane, although Foust can do that, too. This is a method -- and a method he used to his advantage on the drones issue.
Oh, you human rights activist emos! You shouldn't be against those innocent, even effective non-animated machines, he would opine. If you don't like drone collateral damage -- and who does! -- why, go back to the policy-makers in Congress. THEY are the problem. After all, the military is just following its civilian guidance.
That way he can excuse himself from ever confronting the moral imperatives around unmanned weapons and remote control, and also never have to confront military commanders, either. Oh, it's the American people. They're to blame.
In the same way, as we can see from this highlighted quote in the Verge, he plays the Snowden story. Oh, yes, Snowden=bad -- and even Snowden=bad with Russians. But, well, if you don't like the NSA, well, reform the NSA or go to their masters -- oh, Congress again.
Why, if Clapper lied, why, try him for contempt of court. Of course, Foust doesn't come clean on whether he himself believes Clapper lied, but just by tagging that base, he can get street cred with all those people in Twitterland who do think he lied. That's how it works!
I don't think Clapper lied. When I watch the tape, I see a tired man with his head down who has been barraged with questions that aren't of his doing and even of Congress' initiative, but which came about because -- as I put it on Twitter - a coup. The idiot @jmcest (what a name!) and his friends contemplated whether the US military was active on US soil now and could the NSA powers lead to a military coup.
Well, a contractor for the NSA -- which is a military agency when all is said and done, it does SIGINT -- on his own initiative or with secret others we don't know stole data and leaked it with a band of anarchist coders, film-makers and adversarial journalists. That is a coup. The coup already happened. And it was from inside, even if not very high up in the palace. The plumber, if you will -- but a plumber with a top view of all the kitchens and bathrooms and keys to them all. And now they've set up a revolutionary junta and they are deciding all matters of domestic and foreign policy, when and as they please -- the rest of us can only play catch-up.
Who is deciding foreign policy now? Obama? Kerry? Power? None of them -- not when Glenn can spin the dial and decide today it's France who will be mad; tomorrow it will be Spain. Will it be the Netherlands the next day?
Foust pretends to oppose this arbitrary Greenwald rule, but he doesn't see it so starkly, because he imagines a reformed NSA with a place for himself in or around it -- so he himself becomes part of what undermines the NSA in the name of reform -- and by selectively telling the story. If the currents are such that "everybody" is clamouring for reform -- even people inside the NSA that themselves leak to journalists -- then Foust will chime in. If "everybody" decides that the NSA has to be locked up tighter, he will fall mum, too.
I don't think Clapper lied, because he answered "no" to the question of whether the government was keeping dossiers on Americans. The government is not keeping dossiers on Americans. It is targeting some persons of interest in terrorist or other criminal cases. It is doing due dilligence tracking enemies, and that means foreigners with ties to the US. In the process of doing this, yes, Americans' phone meta-data is swept for matches. So what? This does not intrude on the privacy of the phone call. If the government has metadata about whom I've called or emails and found that, oh, it's six jumps away from Anna Chapman or even Edward Snowden, this hasn't impacted my freedom of speech or movement. There's no evidence that the government has used that capacity or read the jumps with human intelligence or dipped into the emails or phone calls further. And that's just it -- there's no story here until Team Snowden comes up with a case.
So Foust makes it sound like he's for bashing Snowden but also reforming the NSA -- and that plays nicely into the position that former NSA officials John Schindler and Tom Nichols have maintained about reforms that are needed -- except it's not quite the same thing (because Foust is opportunistic, and they aren't -- they speak from deep experience. Foust was not in intelligence; he was a defense contractor, which is different). And I get where the former NSA professors are coming from because they know a lot more of the innards that we civilians do. They can speak knowledgeably about reform while remaining loyal to their oath and their country. Greenwald cannot. What I appreciate about the two former NSA men is their deep understanding of our real and formidable enemy Russia and the inroads the Kremlins has made.
As Michael Weiss put it beautifully today:
Russia wants a port in Egypt, arms sales to Iraq, a nuclear plant in Jordan, new arms sales to Iran, Assad forever. The US wants a puppy.
— michaeldweiss (@michaeldweiss) October 28, 2013
But every time anyone hobnobs and retweets Foust, they are ensuring that an unprincipled person gets that much closer to employment in or near our government, and that's worrisome -- but for the mandate of finding Foust employment -- and a proper menter -- as a public necessity.
Even if Clapper turns out to have "misled" people or felt regret that he didn't explain himself in the way his interlocutor wanted him to, it would really, really be a stretch to charge him with "lying". After all, "lying" suggests preparation, stealth, concealment, subterfuge -- and all Clapper did was answer the question immediately, the best he knew how under the circumstances. When he felt that it was misleading later, he doubled back to clarify, even if it made him look bad. That's why I respect him. I'm sorry he felt he had to do that, but that's not a case of "lying" for me. It's a case of having a secret agency that did secret things -- rightfully so -- which are now being questioned *by force* by a kind of junta now in power over it. Yes, that's how we should see it.
Perhaps Foust thinks collection of metadata should end. I don't. If it was useful in tracking Muhtorov, good! But of course, Foust doesn't agree that Muhtorov is a legitimate case. And that's another example of his gaming the system and his methodology -- he says just enough to gain the street cred of all the progs and terrorism-minimizers in Washington, DC by sounding "outraged" that someone be arrested "Interneting while Muslim," but then if it turns out he is found guilty, and found guilty with FISA intel, why, he'll just tell everyone they should go back and change the law and have better oversight. Yes, you have to be nimble to keep shifting focus to the particulars of one case to the generalities of how the system might change but memory is short on Twitter.
Then Foust concludes with an airy and superior little dig at Congress -- which is always the easy target to blame because he's never had anything to do with Congress, doesn't anticipate looking for work with Congress, and doesn't care about Congress:
But as long as Congress is comfortable giving national security agencies a free pass on those issues, we’re unlikely to see any change coming out of it.
But Congress isn't giving a pass. Foust himself today highlighted Dianne Feinstein who was described as "driving a bus" over the NSA -- and then backing up and driving over again.
Why? Because she conceded that the NSA shouldn't have been spying on heads of state. I'm not sure she's right about that - and I don't believe for a minute this nonsense about Obama not knowing for five years or five minutes. He gets intel briefs and of course is aware of the chain that produces them. The NSA is merely falling on its sword here to save the president, which is about saving the American people's trust. I don' t know if they should bother because Obama does not have that trust.
The NSA was doing its job, and at some point, the political leadership has to say, "We're sorry this is so unpleasant, but you do it, too, and ultimately, you guys in Europe do have to choose and stop having it both ways. Either you're for Israel or Palestine (ok, right, you've chosen Palestine, so noted, okay, you are our adversary then). Either you're for us or for Russia (okay, we noticed that already, so -- enjoy!"). And so on...
Now here's where it will be interesting to see what Foust does -- the Muhtorov story. In his old job as Central Asian expert, which meant full-time tweeting, posting on Registan frequently and appearing on Al Jazeera -- and occasional security paper-writer for American Security Project, his nominal day job -- Foust took the position that Muhtorov was unlawfully arrested. The government had no probable cause. If they used intelligence they got without a warrant, secretly, then the case was no good. Throw it out, because the IMU is a nothing, he said.
In his new position as freelancer aspiring to land a real intelligence/security job, Foust probably won't be so reckless. After all, he can't sound like an intelligence expert and a security expert if he completely discounts what the FBI or NSA or anybody has done on this case. So what will he say? He's likely to wave his jazz hands and say that if people don't like the outcome of the Muhtorov case, or the fact of his arrest, why, go back and blame the Patriot Act and other anti-terrorist legislation and the NSA "unreformed" practices. We're not likely to hear stories of "Interneting while Muslim," however, from him anymore.
Let's see.
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