Tag Archives: foreign policy

Abandoning Americans

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Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, tells of a shameful failure by our government—this time centered on the State Department.  Recall this case: an American citizen, Saeed Abedini, travelling in Iran, was arrested by the Revolutionary Guard, tortured for being a Christian, convicted of being a Christian, and sentenced to eight years in one of Iran’s most brutal prisons for being a Christian.

Last Monday, the UN Human Rights Council met in Geneva.  Sekulow describes the salient parts of that meeting.

The Report of the U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran mentioned Pastor Saeed by name.

The Council permitted our ACLJ affiliate, the European Centre for Law and Justice,  to address the Council on Pastor Saeed’s behalf twice.

Australia spoke out for Pastor Saeed.

[T]he European Union—representing collectively the largest economic entity in the world—called for Pastor Saeed’s release by name[.]

Then came the US remarks:

[…]

Silence.  Not one word.

By refusing to petition for Pastor Saeed’s release before the UN Human Rights Council, our State Department acted like a lawyer who advocates for his client on the courthouse steps but won’t say anything at all to the judge.

This is just cowardice.

Obama and the Iranians

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If you have to deny that you’re bluffing, it’s pretty clear that you are bluffing.  Yet Vice President Joe Biden ran exactly that line in front of last week’s AIPAC conference.  America’s policy, he said,

is to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, period.  President Barack Obama is not bluffing.  He is not bluffing.

The next day, General James Mattis, Commander US Central Command, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, which included this exchange:

Senator James Inhofe (R, OK):  Are the current diplomatic and economic efforts to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapons capability, are they working?
General Mattis: No sir…[Tehran’s] nuclear industry continues.

Indeed, the sanctions may well be hurting the Iranian people.  However, the Iranian government cares more about getting nuclear weapons than it does about the welfare of its people.  Since the sanctions aren’t hurting the government, they cannot work.

Informed by this mindset, the Iranian government is quite satisfied that the US is bluffing.  They’ve seen in all these years (not limited to the Obama years) no evidence that the US is serious on the matter of a nuclear armed Iran, no evidence that we will ever become serious, no evidence that we will go beyond sanctions to real moves to stop them.

The Efficacy of Government-Held Databases on Citizens

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Here’s an all too likely outcome from letting government maintain databases on its citizens, ostensibly for the safety of those citizens.

A Muslim US Air Force veteran who had trouble entering the country last year to visit his terminally ill mother was barred again Saturday from trying to return home to Qatar, the second time this month that he’s been prohibited from boarding a flight in Oklahoma City because his name appears on a government no-fly list.

The reason?  There isn’t one, really:

[Saadiq, who is an American citizen as well as a vet] Long said a TSA agent told him that he was “still on the list” and he would have to contact the FBI.

Pass that buck.  But

Long said the FBI has not told him why he is on the no-fly list[.]

It’s entirely possible this is on the up and up.  There’s no information to support that thesis, though.  On the other hand, database errors happen, but it’s deucedly hard to get government to correct their errors.  Bureaucracy, don’t you know.

PRC Cyberwar

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Here’s an example of the People’s Republic of China’s war on us, here in cyberspace, described in BusinessWeek.

In 2011, [Dell SecureWorks Director of Malware Research, Joe] Stewart turned his sights on China. “I thought I’d have this figured out in two months,” he says.  Two years later, trying to identify Chinese malware and develop countermeasures is pretty much all he does.
…
Malware from China has inundated the Internet, targeting Fortune 500 companies, tech startups, government agencies, news organizations, embassies, universities, law firms, and anything else with intellectual property to protect.  A recently prepared secret intelligence assessment described this month in the Washington Post found that the US is the target of a massive and prolonged computer espionage campaign from China that threatens the US economy.  With the possible exceptions of the US Department of Defense and a handful of three-letter agencies, the victims are outmatched by an enemy with vast resources and a long head start.
…
Stewart tracks about 24,000 Internet domains, which he says Chinese spies have rented or hacked for the purpose of espionage. … He catalogs the malware he finds into categories, which usually correspond to particular hacking teams in China.  He says around 10 teams have deployed 300 malware groups, double the count of 10 months ago. “There is a tremendous amount of manpower being thrown at this from their side,” he says.

The intel assessment to which the BusinessWeek article referred was summarized here.

The National Intelligence Estimate identifies China as the country most aggressively seeking to penetrate the computer systems of American businesses and institutions to gain access to data that could be used for economic gain.

The report, which represents the consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community, describes a wide range of sectors that have been the focus of hacking over the past five years, including energy, finance, information technology, aerospace and automotives, according to the individuals familiar with the report, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the classified document. The assessment does not quantify the financial impact of the espionage, but outside experts have estimated it in the tens of billions of dollars.

An example of the cascade effects of China’s war, from that intel summary:

In 2011, when Chinese hackers attacked network security company RSA Security, the technology stolen was used to penetrate military-industrial targets.  Shortly after, the networks of defense contracting giant Lockheed Martin, which used RSA security tokens, were penetrated by Chinese hackers.

There are a couple of questions remaining in this cynic’s mind.  One concerns the apparent ease with which Stewart and his Indian follow-on tracked down this Chinese hacker (an effort described in the BusinessWeek article).  I have to wonder whether the “hacker” was a honeypot and how well the two trackers covered their own tracks—or whether they left their employers exposed.

The other flows from that first question.  Assuming no honeypot, it seems apparent that the hacker was discovered because he was careless, and not because our guys were better at the cyber combat.  Is the US helplessly bringing a jackknife to a combined arms assault?  Is that why our government’s efforts to protect us—and to counter and retaliate—are so infantile?  And the latter so timid:

[T]he Obama administration is seeking ways to counter the online theft of trade secrets, according to officials.  Analysts have said that the administration’s options include formal protests, the expulsion of diplomatic personnel, the imposition of travel and visa restrictions, and complaints to the World Trade Organization.

Pleas and chit-chat, nothing serious.

How did we get so helplessly far behind?  Our government (not just the present administration) has had no understanding at all of the threat posed.  A former government official said,

The problem with foreign cyber-­espionage is not that it is an existential threat, but that it is invisible, and invisibility promotes inaction.

Understanding how our weapons work so they can be neutralized, knowing where and how to plant malware to shut down our financial, transportation, and energy infrastructure—and having the malware to plant—threatens our sovereignty.  That it’s “invisible” is simply an aspect of any war: camouflage and stealth.  The government has first to understand that we’re in a war with the Chinese for our independence; then the fact of invisibility for the Chinese combatants will be understood for what it is—just a technique for advancing their attacks.

Obama and our Constitution

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Michael Mukasy, President George Bush the Younger’s last Attorney General, in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed described President Barack Obama’s leaked (should I say “surreptitiously released?”) white paper memo concerning presidential authority to conduct drone warfare, including against American citizens overseas.  Mukasey had this to say, in part, about the memo:

The memo mentions the president’s constitutional responsibility under Article II to defend the country, but it grounds the president’s authority to act not in the Constitution but in “the inherent right of the United States to national self-defense under international law…and the existence of an armed conflict with al-Qa’ida under international law.”

A moment’s reflection yields the insight that the US government’s powers are defined by the Constitution, not by international law, and that in any event international law is a highly elusive concept, there being no universally recognized source for it.  Yet here the Obama administration seems to prefer abandoning the Constitution altogether rather than relying on an inherent presidential power….

Because the Constitution is more than 100 years old, hard to understand, and not binding on anything, anyway.  And a law “professor” says we ought to just do away with it.  Plainly, our president buys that line, too.