What's Pashto for "Contra"?

Apparently the U.S. intelligence community is organizing and funding something - either "paramilitary units" or "death squads" - in Afghanistan.

"The U.S. has trained and supported paramilitary groups in Afghanistan that have committed summary executions, forcibly disappeared people and have been behind more than a dozen serious abuse cases in the last 18 months, a human rights organization said Thursday.

Afghan strike forces, which have been accused of raiding medical facilities and killing civilians in night raids on their homes, sometimes in front of their families, are largely trained and overseen by the CIA, Human Rights Watch said in a report released Thursday."

Here's the thing.

We the People have never really come to any sort of sensible terms our use of mercenary militias in places like Vietnam or Nicaragua. The covert ops guys descended from Donovan's OSS have always had a fondness for using local jamokes to do the dirty work that regular joes either can't or won't, or, worse, get all fucked up personally or organizationally from doing.

Guerrilla wars are filthy because of their very nature. They're civil wars, and civil wars are fundamentally ugly. Adding irregulars and guerrillas just adds to the basic ugliness.

The problem I have with this isn't so much that it's a thing. If Afghans are going have a civil war, I'd just as soon that it be with Afghans and not Americans. And if they're going to have a guerrilla war, I'd just as soon it be with Afghan guerrillas and not Americans leading or driving Afghan guerrillas.

And it's not the basic brutal ugliness of this fight, either. Are these militias murdering people and doing other war-crime stuff? Sure they are. That's what happens when you give people firearms and turn them loose on people who don't have them without some sort of organizational control. "Militia" is just a sanitized term for "mob of murderous fucksticks" that lurks inside every armed group of people who have no institutional control over how they use those arms.

No, it's that we don't seem to learn that arming one mob to kill another mob (along with poor random bastards that have what "our" armed mob wants, or just for pure shits-and-giggles) doesn't do a goddamn thing geopolitically to solve civil war problems without some sort of genuine political solution available. There were negotiations going on that were supposedly leading to some sort of heading-towards-a-solution back in late summer, but part of the Art of the Deal appears to be screwing up that sort of deal, so we're back to Square Zero, only with...death squads?

Honestly. It's like we're the fucking Bourbons ("Personne n'est corrigé; personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien apprendre.") except with worse taste in entertainment and mistresses.

Fruit of the Poison Tree

See, here's the thing.

Torture corrupts.

Call it what you want; "enhanced interrogation", "extraordinary measures", "psikhushka". The systematic infliction of suffering is inherently corrupting to the people who administer it and the organizations that employ it.

Because torture is not interrogation.

Interrogation is intended to gain information.

Torture is intended to gain confessions. Confessions that the torturers want to hear.

A person that uses torture to gain confessions becomes useless as an interrogator and deaf to information. The agonized babble of a person suffering beyond coherence quickly becomes meaningless noise. If you are tortured you will say anything, everything, to make the torture stop. If you are the torturer you lose the ability to find the truth amid the pain and fear.

An organization that employs torture and torturers quickly becomes a servant of the propaganda that the torture is meant to support and the presumptions that the torture is designed to confirm.

Armies that use torture begin to become instruments of that propaganda rather than instruments of policy. Intelligence agencies that use torture begin to become guardians of the secrets of and defenders of the barbarities of torture rather than cold instruments of state. Nations that use torture quickly find how useful it is in generating results that they want in the short term. And the spiral of torture, and lying to hide the torture, and lying to excuse the torture, and lying to hide and excuse the lies, works deeper and deeper into the culture of the army, and the intelligence agency, and the nation.

Until first the torturers end up running the intelligence agency.

And then the torturers become the generals.

And, finally, the torturers become the presidents and prime ministers.

The toxic "war on terror" has been the ground that has nursed this poison tree, and has given it the night and fog it needed to grow. To our shame We the People have never insisted on throwing open the doors, letting in the light that would have killed this noxious weed, never dug deep and uprooted and thrown it and the torturers on the fire. In our fear and hate we have let it grow.

If shame were still a permissible public emotion we should be ashamed of ourselves.

But we will not.

And, instead, we will nurture the fruit of that poison tree in our hands and our hearts.

3 decembre 1627

...is the date on the fictional lettre de cachet that Dumas' Richelieu gives his agent, a get-out-of-jail-free card that authorizes any sort of skulduggery for "the good of the State".

It's that sort of secret lawlessness that has always been considered the hallmark of despots and autocrats. In theory, at least, We the People of the United States have always insisted that that sort of extralegal business is off-limits. That's the theory.

In fact, and especially since 2001, we've been playing a dangerous game with these things under the name "National Security Letters" or NSLs.

The misuse of these imperial orders has been somewhat downplayed in the past several years but it seems that the secret snooping continues, most recently at the website Reddit, which must have received one some time during 2015.

That got me thinking about these things.

An interview at the website boingboing contains what I consider a telling statement:

"After I sued the Department of Justice over the constitutionality of NSL's in 2004, the DoJ's inspector general released a report detailing FBI's use of NSLs. In that report they looked at the years 2003-2006 if I recall correctly. And in that time period, the FBI had issued something like 192,000 NSLs. If you do some quick math, that's getting close to one NSL per 1000 Americans. And FBI has continued to issue 10's of thousands of NSLs every year since."

Why telling?

Because there's a military saying; who attempts to be strong everywhere is strong nowhere. Nearly 60,000 of these things a year? 200 a day? That's nuts. There's no possible way that any intelligence analyst could spend enough time to extract any value from that mass of raw data, let alone draw together the connections between the disparate pieces of a threatening covert operation.

This bluing the landscape with these fucking secret letters? It's worse than a crime; it's a mistake. There's no possible way to process that much raw intel, and the intelligence agencies must be wasting a ridiculously huge number of manhours trying.

But it's also a damn crime, because (as I wrote five years ago);

"We cannot know if the lettre de...excuse me, the "national security letter" has been misused...because those against whom it has been used cannot speak of their misuse, and if they attempt to do so they will find themselves in another modernization of Bourbon justice, the Chateau d'If of the "secret prison".

Can you imagine a United States with "secret prisons"? With nameless prisoners, latter-day Monte Cristos but in their orange jumpsuits and hoods? With secret letters demanding secret interrogations, carried on in secret and then buried below further layers of secrecy, lowered into a well a midnight, never to be known?

Is this the United States we pledged allegiance to as children? And if not, why not? Because of some raggedy Islamic fantasists plotting in some dumpy motel in Lahore?"

Given all the other panics we've been pummeled with this sneaky spying may seem trivial, but I'd argue that this - more than Muslims, more than immigration, more than Mexican rapists, more than terrorism - is how a republic dies, when it's supposed-civil-servants can carry out any act and, when questioned, present the questioner with:

"It is by my order and for the good of the state that the bearer of this has done what he has done."

Go Beavers!

Damn proud of my Oregon Senators.

Wyden argued in an impassioned floor speech that intelligence officials have failed to provide estimates on how often Americans' email or phone communications have been swept up during foreign surveillance carried out under the law. He offered an amendment that would require intelligence agencies to report that information.

"I think, when you talk about oversight, and you can't even get a rough estimate of how many law-abiding Americans had their communications swept up by this law ... the idea of robust oversight, really ought to be called toothless oversight if you don't have that kind of information," Wyden said.

In addition to Wyden, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) has offered an amendment that would require the government to declassify the FISA Court's opinions on surveillance requests. The amendment is aimed at shedding more light on how the court interprets the surveillance law since the court's opinions are currently classified.

It would seem ridiculously obvious to anything with a functioning hindbrain that without actually knowing how many of these FISA orders have swept up Joe telling Molly about his Egyptian vacation we have no idea whether these FISA orders actually are sweeping innocent people's conversations into the spy vs. spy games we're playing.

That fact that the Senate GOP would reflexively oppose the revelation of any such knowledge says pretty much all you need to know about the fucking Senate GOP.

That, and, for the record, I'd like to make it clear that I consider Feinstein (D-CA) the most worthless oxygen-thieving skinbag currently caucusing with the Congressional Dems. Sheesh.

Update 12/30: As expected, the Senate voted to reauthorize all this snooping and pooping. Also, disgustingly, it voted to remain consciously ignorant of what the hell all these snoops and spies are doing:

"In the Senate, they actually voted not to know what the law does by rejecting an amendent that would have made the government state how many Americans have been spied on without a warrant."

And so it goes; in pursuit of fantastical enemies we imbue with powers beyond reason we empower our own government with powers beyond our own understanding.

We are fools, and of we are despoiled by our own fooling it will be our just reward. Thanks to my Oregon senators for trying, at least, to prevent my countrymen from hitting ourselves on the head with a hammer just because it feels so good when we stop.

Sheesh.

Small World: Super Secret Spy Edition

Unearthed an odd bit of buried past the other day.

It started with one of those gawdawful Facebook "memes". Even ran into one of them? Blogging tends to get them, though I haven't run across one for ages.

This one was about "how you met me", and it was mildly entertaining hear from old friends and see who remembered how who met whom all those years ago.

But in the process a name came up; a person I knew many years ago and was slightly friendly with in a very passant sort of way.

Her name is Susan Leslie Ireland, and she was just appointed the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis. As such she is "...responsible for the receipt, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence related to the Department's mission to safeguard the international financial system from abuse and to combat threats to U.S. national security."

And I knew her when. Howboutthat?

Anyway, the interesting thing is that when we were in college together I remember her as a painfully serious, intelligent, darkly pretty young woman. She roomed in a group with a clutch of other very bright and clever women, many of whom acted in our college Green Room and, as you might expect, caprioled joyfully with the sort of creative lunacy that has characterized thespians since Aristophanes' time.

Sue - as she was known in those days - was not quite of the same metal as her sisters; "forlorn" is how one of my contemporaries remembers her. She never seemed as...vivid...as her hallmates. And she seems to have had a very fraught relation with them; another former classmate of mine recalls her saying, within earshot of those long-time rooming hall associates and companions "Those people are not my friends..."; a remark almost as sad as it was tactless.I will admit to crushing on her a bit, back in those times; even callow and stupid I had a bit of a thing for seriously smart Dark Ladies. And she was - and is, it seems - very smart. And, as her picture testifies, still Dark and serious.

But I was too immature, and she too otherwise-engaged, and so we drifted away.

But after her name suddenly returning to my attention what I recalled vividly was that several years after graduation we met for a lunch.

She was already working in D.C. in a covert position - I believe probably with the National Security Agency - and I was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division, a line medic for the 1/505th Infantry. I was headed north on a brief leave, called her up, and we made the time to meet at some indifferent lunch place somewhere in Georgetown.

She was still dark, still handsome, and very excited about her work. I was less hairy - still callow, but leaner, and harder - and gaining in both worldly and emotional maturity. So there we were; the young spy and the young paratrooper, sitting chatting on a bright sunny spring morning while a Reagan morning broke across America.We talked of ourselves, and the world's wagging. We discussed parachuting, which it seems that she had to learn as part of her own "basic training" in intelligence - it seems that even in the Eighties U.S. spies still hung on to bit of their OSS heritage. We talked about old friends, and future plans.

There was absolutely not a flint's worth of spark between us.

We enjoyed a pleasant spring day and parted with the usual promises to keep in touch and, as usual, failed to keep them. I went on to become a paratroop sergeant, and then, in succession, a graduate student and husband, a professional geologist, teacher, senior NCO, husband (again) and father.

Sue - or, rather, S. Leslie, as she prefers to be known - continued to find her way through the Hall of Mirrors; "Executive Assistant to the Director and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence and in various analytical and management portfolios at CIA related to the Middle East and weapons of mass destruction....also detailed to the Office of the Secretary of Defense as Country Director for Iran and Kuwait." She also served as the "Iran Mission Manager" for the Director of National Intelligence.

It's strange to think of my old acquaintance as a Power herself; one of the Thrones and Dominations, a Beltway Insider, making reality, as the Bushies were wont to say, with the force of her knowledge, her judgement - one hopes - and her wiles at the subtle and deadly bureaucratic infighting in the halls of the great and the mighty.

But there she is, and, what's more, one of the "Iran Hands"; one of the fonts of intelligence wisdom on that contentious and troubled land.

And now, I wonder; what secrets is she telling to those seats of power?

Because had my life gone in other directions I might be one of those whose fate depended on that tall and serious Dark Lady. On what she said, and what she did not say, to those whose decrees sway the wide world.

To those whose words move armies and fleets, and who might well have sent First Sergeant Lawes plummeting out into the night sky over Qom, on the advice of the sloe-eyed young woman who thirty years ago sat across the cheap formica table from the young sergeant who was him, on that sunny spring Georgetown day, those fine eyes glowing as she described how much she had enjoyed the adventure of her brief "combat training" at Quantico, and the fearsome power she felt as the machinegun lept and thundered in her hands.And I wonder.

What will she say?