New McCarthyite Congressional Investigations Coming Our Way

If you read this morning's frontpager by Mark Mazzetti and Eric Lichtblau, "C.I.A. Judgment on Russia Built on Swell of Evidence," you will find that the story does not merit the headline. The story repeats the same old stuff -- the DNC hack, the Podesta emails, the RNC hack -- and then says that CIA analysts have shifted their opinion from believing that Russia sought to sow chaos to Russia intended to elect Donald Trump. That conjecture is all there is.

Mazzetti and Lichtblau then, helpfully, mention that the FBI, the agency which is actually in charge of investigating the hacks and bringing charges against any guilty party, is unconvinced that Russia tried to steal the presidency on behalf of Trump:

And yet, there is skepticism within the American government, particularly at the F.B.I., that this evidence adds up to proof that the Russians had the specific objective of getting Mr. Trump elected.

A senior American law enforcement official said the F.B.I. believed that the Russians probably had a combination of goals, including damaging Mrs. Clinton and undermining American democratic institutions. Whether one of those goals was to install Mr. Trump remains unclear to the F.B.I., he said.

The official played down any disagreement between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and suggested that the C.I.A.’s conclusions were probably more nuanced than they were being framed in the news media.

The agencies’ differences in judgment may also reflect different methods of investigating the Russian interference. The F.B.I., which has both a law enforcement and an intelligence role, is held to higher standards of proof in examining people involved in the hacking because it has an eye toward eventual criminal prosecutions. The C.I.A. has a broader mandate to develop intelligence assessments.

Law enforcement officials said that if F.B.I. agents had the evidence to charge Russians with specific crimes, they would do so. The F.B.I. and federal prosecutors have already gone aggressively after Russian hackers, including two men detained in Thailand and the Czech Republic whom the United States is trying to extradite.

Russia has tried to block those efforts and has accused the United States of harassing its citizens.

The F.B.I. began investigating Russia’s apparent attempts to meddle in the election over the summer. Agents examined numerous possible connections between Russians and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle, including former Trump aides like Paul Manafort and Carter Page, as well as a mysterious and unexplained trail of computer activity between the Trump Organization and an email account at a large Russian bank, Alfa Bank [which turned out to be nothing].

At the height of its investigation before the election, the F.B.I. saw some indications that the Russians might be explicitly seeking to get Mr. Trump elected, officials said, and investigators collected online evidence and conducted interviews overseas and inside the United States to test that theory.

The F.B.I. was concerned enough about Russia’s influence and possible connections to the Trump campaign that it briefed congressional leaders — including Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and Senate minority leader — on some of the evidence this summer and fall. Mr. Reid, in particular, pressed for the F.B.I. to find out more and charged that the agency was sitting on important information that could implicate Russia.

But the agency’s suspicions about a direct effort by Russia to help Mr. Trump, or about possible connections between the two camps, appear to have waned as the investigation continued into September and October. The reasons are not entirely clear, and F.B.I. officials declined to comment.

Now that a partisan squall has erupted over exactly what role Russia played in influencing the election, there is growing momentum among both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill to have a congressional investigation.

“I’m not trying to relitigate the election,” said Senator Angus King, independent of Maine, who is one of the lawmakers calling for such an investigation. “I’m just trying to prevent this from happening again.”

Is this an attempted coup? I don't think so. I think it is business as usual. The Democratic Party is in serious trouble. The party leaders do not want to relinquish power to the Bernistas and they don't want the Republicans to coalesce behind Trump and pass a bunch of legislation. How can they achieve what they want in their present diminished state? Reboot the Cold War and McCarthyism. Conduct a big congressional investigation that will keep Democrats from straying from the reservation and isolate Trump from his party.

It is a desperate play, but it is the hand that Democratic leadership is playing. Read Krugman, "The Tainted Election," and the lede unsigned editorial this morning, "Russia’s Hand in America’s Election." It is not going to work, particularly when the activist base of the Democrats are getting their information from outlets that have been smeared as Kremlin dupes.

The Walter Scott Homicide: 1984 in Reverse?

With the latest video of lethal force by the police -- in this case, a South Carolina officer, Michael Slager, nonchalantly gunning down a fleeing Walter Scott -- topping the national news for a second day, the question I have is how often does this happen? It seems like every other week -- whether it is a homeless guy in Los Angeles, a kid playing with a toy gun in a snowy Cleveland park, or Michael Brown or Eric Garner, to name a few -- we are confronted with another example of the police ruthlessly committing homicide.

A problem I have with television police drama like The Shield, even though I watched all seven seasons, is the body count that the cops rack up does not seem believable to me. Certainly they would be suspended constantly pending interminable investigations conducted by the local department, the FBI or the Justice Department. Right?

Well, apparently not because the Justice Department and the FBI don't know how many of these shootings take place. So, in answer to the question, "How often does a Walter Scott incident take place?" We don't know.

As Michael Schmidt explores today in "Scant Data Frustrates Efforts to Assess Number of Shootings by Police":

Under current federal laws, there is nothing requiring any of the 18,000 police departments and other law enforcement agencies across the country to report to the public or to the Justice Department anything about shootings involving officers.

Roughly 91 percent of departments and agencies in the country voluntarily report crimes like murders, rapes, car thefts and burglaries to the F.B.I., which releases an annual report.

But under the current reporting systems, there is no category for episodes in which the officer’s use of force was not deemed legally justified, and there is no category to report police shootings in which the officer has not killed a person. There are categories for “justifiable” or “excusable” homicides by police officers, ones in which officers kill a felon.

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund keeps data on how often people shoot police officers, and departments willingly share that data. But the statistics on the police shooting civilians are much harder to find.

In the aftermath of police officers’ using lethal force in Staten Island, Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere last year, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, have strongly advocated changing reporting requirements. A White House task force created to look into the episodes made similar recommendations in a report released in March.

So far, though, those efforts have not provoked much interest on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers would most likely need to pass legislation to require departments and agencies to report figures to the Justice Department.

In January, Mr. Holder spoke about the issue at a Justice Department ceremony honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington.

“I’ve heard from a number of people who have called on policy makers to ensure better record-keeping on injuries and deaths that occur at the hands of police,” he said. “I’ve also spoken with law enforcement leaders, including the leadership of the Fraternal Order of Police, who have urged elected officials to consider strategies for collecting better data on officer fatalities. Today, my response to these legitimate concerns is simple: We need to do both.”

Mr. Holder said that in the 1990s, Congress passed a law that was intended to help the Justice Department collect better statistics about shootings involving officers. But that law was ultimately not effective because the reporting was optional, and local departments and agencies may not have the proper resources to be able to make reports to the Justice Department in a timely manner.

In a speech in February about the relationship between the police and minorities, Mr. Comey said that during the riots in Ferguson last summer, he had asked his staff members for figures on the number of blacks who had been shot by the police. They told him there were no uniform statistics on such shootings.

“They couldn’t give it to me, and it wasn’t their fault,” Mr. Comey said. 

Mr. Comey said that law enforcement officials and minorities “must find ways to see each other more clearly.” He added, “Part of that has to involve collecting and sharing better information about encounters between police and citizens, especially violent encounters.” 

Mr. Comey said he had spoken with the police chief in a major American city who said that he did not know whether the Ferguson police “shot one person a week, one a year or one a century.”

Since Congress is controlled by a neo-Dixiecrat GOP, I wouldn't expect a mandatory reporting law for the nation's 18,000 police departments anytime soon. Police use of lethal force overwhelming targets blacks, and that works well for the 113th Congress. The more the people are divided -- whether by race or sect -- the better for the money bags that run the show.

Another aspect of the Walter Scott murder that needs to be addressed is the positive role played by technology; here, a smartphone camera. Lately I am coming closer to the conclusion that the explosion of digital technology is creating a dystopia rather than utopia, that The Postmodern Condition leads us to a "dream machine" of endless passivity and distraction and not the upturning of old, rancid power narratives.

But smartphone videos capturing the police in the act of homicide prove that the Panopticon can be turned back on the jailers, a sort of 1984 in reverse.

Gray Lady Shines a Little Light on the Deep State

Two stories over the last two days show the ease with which the Gray Lady can illuminate the Deep State rumbling beneath our tattered democracy when she so chooses.

Today Ron Nixon has an informative expose, "Report Reveals Wider Tracking of Mail in U.S.,"
on the hoary practice of mass surveillance by the United States Postal Service. There were 50,000 requests to secretly record the information on the outside of the envelope, a surveillance program called mail covers, in 2013 alone. This information was the result of USPS audit posted without fanfare, in the spirit of Poe's "The Purloined Letter," on the Office of the Inspector General, United States Postal Service web site at the end of last May.

What makes the USPS mail covers surveillance program noteworthy is that seemingly anybody can request one, from a county sheriff to Mephistopheles himself, the National Security Agency; the request does not have to be made for national security reasons, as Nixon explains:

The mail cover surveillance requests cut across all levels of government — from global intelligence investigations by the United States Army Criminal Investigations Command, which requested 500 mail covers from 2001 through 2012, to state-level criminal inquiries by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which requested 69 mail covers in the same period. The Department of Veterans Affairs requested 305, and the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security asked for 256. The information was provided to The Times under the Freedom of Information request.

Postal officials did not say how many requests came from agencies in charge of national security — including the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection — because release of the information, wrote Kimberly Williams, a public records analyst for the Postal Inspection Service, “would reveal techniques and procedures for law enforcement or prosecutions.”

Defense lawyers say the secrecy concerning the surveillance makes it hard to track abuses in the program because most people are not aware they are being monitored. But there have been a few cases in which the program appears to have been abused by law enforcement officials.

Particularly interesting is how postal surveillance was used by anti-immigrant politician Sheriff Joe Arpaio to harass a political opponent:

In Arizona in 2011, Mary Rose Wilcox, a Maricopa County supervisor, discovered that her mail was being monitored by the county’s sheriff, Joe Arpaio. Ms. Wilcox had been a frequent critic of Mr. Arpaio, objecting to what she considered the targeting of Hispanics in his immigration sweeps. 

The Postal Service had granted an earlier request from Mr. Arpaio and Andrew Thomas, who was then the county attorney, to track Ms. Wilcox’s personal and business mail. 

Using information gleaned from letters and packages sent to Ms. Wilcox and her husband, Mr. Arpaio and Mr. Thomas obtained warrants for banking and other information about two restaurants the couple owned. The sheriff’s office also raided a company that hired Ms. Wilcox to provide concessions at the local airport.

“We lost the contract we had for the concession at the airport, and the investigation into our business scared people away from our restaurants,” Ms. Wilcox said in an interview. “I don’t blame the Postal Service, but you shouldn’t be able to just use these mail covers to go on a fishing expedition. There needs to be more control.” 

She sued the county, was awarded nearly $1 million in a settlement in 2011 and received the money this June when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling. Mr. Thomas, the former county attorney, was disbarred for his role in investigations into the business dealings of Ms. Wilcox and other officials and for other unprofessional conduct. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment on Mr. Arpaio’s use of mail covers in the investigation of Ms. Wilcox. 

In another instance, Cynthia Orr, a defense lawyer in San Antonio, recalled that while working on a pornography case in the early 2000s, federal prosecutors used mail covers to track communications between her team of lawyers and a client who was facing obscenity and tax evasion charges. Ms. Orr complained to prosecutors but never learned if the tracking stopped. Her team lost the case. 

“The troubling part is that they don’t have to report the use of this tool to anyone,” Ms. Orr said in an interview. The Postal Service declined to comment on the case. 

Frank Askin, a law professor at the Rutgers Constitutional Rights Clinic, who as a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union successfully sued the F.B.I. nearly 40 years ago after the agency monitored the mail of a 15-year-old New Jersey student, said he was concerned about the oversight of the current program. 

“Postal Service employees are not judicial officers schooled in the meaning of the First Amendment,” Mr. Askin said.

Besides mass postal surveillance another hoary aspect of the Deep State trotted out by the Gray Lady for a jog in the national consciousness was Eric Lichtblau's "In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis." This of course has been the stuff of well-researched books, Hollywood movies and comic books for decades, so much so that it is taken for granted by most citizens, but it is nice to see the "newspaper of record" weigh in with confirmation.

Lichtblau opens his story by framing the U.S.-Nazi collaboration as a memento of the Cold War:

WASHINGTON — In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show. 

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich. 

The agency hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of “minor war crimes.” 

And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official.

That CIA spy, Aleksandras Lileikis, according to Lichtblau, was implicated in

[T]he machine-gun massacres of 60,000 Jews in Lithuania. He worked "under the control of the Gestapo during the war," his C.I.A. file noted, and 'was possibly connected with the shooting of Jews in Vilna.” 

Even so, the agency hired him in 1952 as a spy in East Germany — paying him $1,700 a year, plus two cartons of cigarettes a month — and cleared the way for him to immigrate to America four years later, records show. 

Mr. Lileikis lived quietly for nearly 40 years, until prosecutors discovered his Nazi past and prepared to seek his deportation in 1994. 

When C.I.A. officials learned of the plans, a lawyer there called Eli Rosenbaum at the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit and told him “you can’t file this case,” Mr. Rosenbaum said in an interview. The agency did not want to risk divulging classified records about its ex-spy, he said. 

Mr. Rosenbaum said he and the C.I.A. reached an understanding: If the agency was forced to turn over objectionable records, prosecutors would drop the case first. (That did not happen, and Mr. Lileikis was ultimately deported.) 

The C.I.A. also hid what it knew of Mr. Lileikis’s past from lawmakers. 

In a classified memo to the House Intelligence Committee in 1995, the agency acknowledged using him as a spy but made no mention of the records linking him to mass murders. “There is no evidence,” the C.I.A. wrote, “that this Agency was aware of his wartime activities.”

There it all is, sort of the grand prize of Deep State skullduggery -- shielding a genocidal Nazi asset from prosecution and lying to Congress.

Lichtblau also tells the story of how the CIA employed and protected the SS official, Otto von Bolschwing, who mentored Adolf Eichmann:

One SS officer, Otto von Bolschwing, was a mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, architect of the “Final Solution,” and wrote policy papers on how to terrorize Jews. 

Yet after the war, the C.I.A. not only hired him as a spy in Europe, but relocated him and his family to New York City in 1954, records show. The move was seen as a “a reward for his loyal postwar service and in view of the innocuousness of his [Nazi] party activities,” the agency wrote.

Though Lichtblau's story is tainted by framing the CIA-Nazi collaboration as a thing of the past, a "boys will boys" historical curio of the Cold War, what shines through is an account of "invisible" government, the CIA and FBI, addicted to criminality and murder.  As Lichtblau says,

Evidence of the government’s links to Nazi spies began emerging publicly in the 1970s. But thousands of records from declassified files, Freedom of Information Act requests and other sources, together with interviews with scores of current and former government officials, show that the government’s recruitment of Nazis ran far deeper than previously known and that officials sought to conceal those ties for at least a half-century after the war.

Lichtblau could have drawn the government's recruitment of Nazis right up to now and what is going on in Ukraine where the U.S. worked with neo-Nazis to stage a Kiev putsch in February, setting that country on a course for civil war. We are now experiencing a New Cold War with Russia.

Institutions are organic. They have a memory. Old habits die hard, particularly when elected officials do nothing to change the offending behavior.

Hopefully now after the failed Obama presidency there is a greater appreciation of the inviolability of the Deep State. We can elect supposedly transformational popular leaders in landslide elections and nothing will change. You know the scorecard: Guantanamo Bay remains opens, domestic oil and gas consumption and extraction is soaring, U.S. troops are bombing Iraq, the entire planet is under surveillance.

Where we go from here -- Hillary vs. Jeb? -- is hard to imagine.

Deke DeLoach Dead

Deke DeLoach's obituary, written by Bruce Weber, appears in today's paper. I didn't know that DeLoach -- as the number three man at Hoover's FBI behind Hoover himself and Hoover's companion, Clyde Tolson -- was tight with LBJ (which shows that I am not as fine a student of the JFK assassination as I thought):

Mr. DeLoach had met and worked with Johnson in the 1950s, when Johnson was the Senate majority leader; he and Johnson helped push through legislation guaranteeing Hoover a salary for life. In 1963, shortly after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson called Hoover — Mr. DeLoach said it was the day after Johnson was sworn in aboard Air Force One — and requested that Mr. DeLoach be assigned to the White House.

“There was political distrust between the two of them, but they both needed each other,” Mr. DeLoach said in a 1991 oral history interview for the Johnson library at the University of Texas. “Mr. Hoover was anxious to retain his job and to stay on as director. He knew that the best way for the F.B.I. to operate fully and to get some cooperation of the White House was for him to be cooperative with President Johnson.”

“President Johnson, on the other hand,” Mr. DeLoach continued, “knew of Mr. Hoover’s image in the United States, particularly among the middle-of-the-road conservative elements, and knew it was vast. He knew of the potential strength of the F.B.I. — insofar as being of assistance to the government and the White House is concerned. As a result it was a marriage, not altogether of necessity, but it was a definite friendship caused by necessity.”

DeLoach was in charge of the bureau's public affairs during the Klan killings of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner in the summer of 1964. He was part of the FBI's campaign of spying and surveillance against the civil rights and anti-war movements. He was a college quarterback. I've got his memoir, Hoover's FBI: The Inside Story of Hoover's Trusted Lieutenant, on the shelf above my computer monitor here. Given that it's the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination I should probably get around to reading it.

DeLoach was a slick operator. I'm sure he knew where all the bodies are buried; doubtful though that there is anything revelatory in his book.

The Government Crackdown on Occupy

There is a good post today on naked capitalism; it provides a rundown on the story from last week that the FBI, in coordination with the banking sector and the Department of Homeland Security, surveilled Occupy Wall Street and turned a blind eye to an assassination plot targetting OWS participants (which David Lindorff writes about this weekend on the Counterpunch web site).

No surprise here. For a few months at the end of 2011 things looked hopeful, like the people were going to rise up and push back against the plutocracy. This of course got the domestic security apparatus scrambling.

I supported the Occupy movement in Seattle by participating in rallies at the original Westlake Park encampment. I also gave a modest amount of money every month to Occupy Seattle. My local union donated food and supplies. When the camp relocated to Seattle Central Community College I stopped by and visited Fridays after work. Originally it was a clean, well-run tent city; then, after the rains came in November, an appearance of squalor took hold. The arrival of inclement weather and Bloomberg's razing of the Zuccotti Park encampment proved to be hurdles too high for the movement to clear.