You can read the rest of that yourself.Two former top U.S. intelligence officials tore into President Donald Trump on Friday, saying in sometimes personal terms that Trump has shown disrespect for intelligence officials and a distasteful affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin, and warning he may be endangering U.S. national security.
Politico
Too bad Clapper has disgraced himself and made anything he says unreliable by lying to Congress about NSA surveillance of Americans.Former director of national intelligence James Clapper has accused Donald Trump of placing American democratic institutions “under assault” following the sacking of James Comey.
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“I think in many ways our institutions are under assault,” Clapper told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “Both externally, and that’s the big news here, is Russian interference in our election system. And I think as well our institutions are under assault internally.”
When asked to clarify if the internal assault came from the president directly, the former spy chief added: “Exactly.”
Guardian
Politics as team sports. Will humans ever evolve beyond male teenage mentality?The bleak assessment came days after Trump claimed on Twitter that Clapper had determined “there is no collusion” with reference to his presidential campaign and Russia, a characterization that Clapper has refuted
The former national intelligence director, who served under the Obama administration from 2010 until Trump’s inauguration, said during a March interview that he had no knowledge of any collusion between the Republican’s campaign and Russian operatives. He has since clarified that during his time in office he was also unaware of an FBI investigation into such collusion, adding on Sunday: “I don’t know if there was collusion... And I don’t know of any evidence to it so I can’t refute it and I can’t confirm it.”
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In a later interview on ABC news, Clapper added that “the Russians have to consider this [Comey’s sacking] as another victory on the scoreboard for them”.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.On Saturday at least eight candidates for the vacant position met with Sessions and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein at the justice department. The list included the acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, Alice Fisher, a high-ranking justice department official in the George W Bush administration, Texas Republican senator John Cornyn, and former Republican congressman Mike Rogers, who is also a former FBI agent.
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Senate democrats are discussing the possibility of blocking Trump’s eventual nominee to replace Comey until a special prosecutor is appointed.
Uh oh. If they're not in another country, their ticket will soon be punched. And, even if they are, it will be punched; just may take a little longer.A group of hackers calling themselves “Crackas With Attitude” or CWA made headlines in October, hacking into CIA Director John Brennan’s email account and apparently getting access to several online tools and portals used by US law enforcement agencies.
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One of the group’s hackers, who’s known as “Cracka,” contacted me on Monday, claiming to have broken into [another official account].
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His latest victim is the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
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While in control of Clapper’s Verizon FiOS account, Cracka claimed to have changed the settings so that every call to his house number would get forwarded to the Free Palestine Movement. When they gained notoriety last year, Cracka and CWA claimed their actions were all in support of the Palestine cause.
Motherboard
True. Before the end of our time, the world could go up in flames.Clapper: Now is the most crisis-ridden, challenging time in past 50 years. http://blogs.cfr.org/zenko/2015/02/28/highlights-of-the-worldwide-threats-hearing/ … Think about what that covers. Vietnam, coup & slaughter in Indonesia, Prague Spring & Warsaw Pact invasion, Cultural Revolution, Six Day War, Yom Kippur War... ...(not even out of 70s yet.) 1st oil crisis, 2nd oil crisis, Iranian revolution, Mecca uprising, Iraq-Iran War, USSR coup, collapse of USSR. Could go on and on (and on) but for Clapper to say with straight face that THIS is most crisis-filled time in his career is a bad joke.
Iran might get the bomb? Mao, India, Pakistan, Israel & maybe apartheid South Africa all GOT the bomb in/near period Clapper's career covers.
ISIS is a threat? So were a dozen or more terrorist groups from '60s and '70s whose names have mostly been forgotten.
State system in Middle East collapsing? States have been collapsing (or threatening to collapse) somewhere in ex colonial world since WWII.
Overall, world is LESS violent, LESS crisis-ridden than in the '70s, '80s & '90s. http://www.prio.org/News/Item/?x=1862 …But 2 things HAVE changed that allow Clapper to peddle BS without getting called on it: a) 9/11 brought violent conflict to U.S. shores; b) global conflict now saturated with MSM coverage, which constantly, endlessly plays up the "threat to America" angle. The illusion of American invulnerability to informal nonstate conflict (i.e. terrorism) was permantently punctured by 9/11 just as illusion of invulnerability to global war was permanently punctured first by Pearl Harbor & then by Soviets getting the bomb. Americans now have to live in the same world as everybody else, but have near zero tolerance for the insecurity that goes along with that.
So when guys like Clapper say this is most dangerous time ever, what they really mean is: most dangerous to the domestic tranquility that once allowed US elites to pursue foreign policies with relatively little concern for security and/or political consequences at home.
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Of course, just cuz Clapper & Co. are full of shit now doesn't mean they'll be wrong forever. In EMs, state collapse, turbocharged by climate change, drought, tribalism & fanaticism. In DMs, plutocracy, corruption, economic stagnation. These things really COULD make mid 21st century the most conflict & crisis-ridden period Clapper's ever seen.
Which is what they do best. And take as many people with them as they can.But of course, there's nothing the national security state can do about any of that -- except freak out.
Publicly announcing that US intelligence agencies “underestimated” the presence and activity of Islamic State militants in Syria, US President Barack Obama in an interview with CBS called the country a “ground zero” for international jihadists.
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Clapper made similar comments to a Washington Post columnist earlier this month. “I didn't see the collapse of the Iraqi security force in the north coming,” Clapper was quoted as saying. “I didn't see that. It boils down to predicting the will to fight, which is an imponderable.”
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At the same time, Obama admitted that the Iraqi army’s capabilities in dealing with militant groups were also overestimated.
RT
Brilliant. Nothing to it.“We just have to push them back, and shrink their space, and go after their command and control, and their capacity, and their weapons, and their fueling, and cut off their financing, and work to eliminate the flow of foreign fighters,” he said.
Sure. Sure. Take all the time you need.At the behest of the director of national intelligence, US senators have removed a provision from a major intelligence bill that would require the president to publicly disclose information about drone strikes and their victims.
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Senate leaders have removed the language as they prepare to bring the bill to the floor for a vote, after the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, assured them in a recent letter that the Obama administration was looking for its own ways to disclose more about its highly controversial drone strikes.
Guardian
Quick. Obama has some executive orders and secret legal requirements to sign.A senior House Republican pressed Attorney General Eric Holder Tuesday to prosecute Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for perjury over testimony he gave to a Senate committee last year denying that U.S. intelligence agencies were gathering data on large numbers of Americans.
“What more do you need besides an admission from Gen. Clapper that he lied?” Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) asked, pointing to Clapper’s later remark that his denial was “the least untruthful” answer he could give.
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“I’m really not in a position to confirm whether the department is investigating any particular matter,” the attorney general said.
“Is there any circumstance under which you would prosecute a member of the administration for lying under oath to Congress?” Sensenbrenner shot back.
“Sure,” Holder replied, “…if the person lied and all the other legal requirements” were met.
Politico
Why, yes. Yes it would.“Wouldn’t it be pointless for Congress to pass new laws limiting data collection if the Justice Department and other officials are at liberty to lie about enforcing them?” said Sensenbrenner, a co-author of the Patriot Act.
That comes from Glenn Greenwald’s latest article at The Intercept where he makes numerous good points about and critiques the latest from Mr. Clapper. Check it out.[James Clapper] has medals on his chest and an important national security state position. It is simply outrageous that some people suggest that he has no right to commit felonies, and it’s infuriating that his adult son has to hear some people (almost none in the media) suggest that his criminal conduct should have the same consequences as when ordinary citizens commit less serious crimes. That’s the refusal to accept any personal responsibility, the view of powerful U.S. officials that they are and must be entirely above the law, the obsessive self-regard, that more than anything else has destroyed Washington’s political culture.
Yesterday, the German paper Bild am Sonntag reported that after President Obama ordered the NSA to cease its eavesdropping on the communications of Chancellor Angela Merkel, they responded by increasing their surveillance of her closest ministers and advisers. Aside from providing yet another illustration of the out-of-control entitlement that drives the U.S. Surveillance State, note that the report is based on “a high-ranking NSA employee in Germany”, which means that this is yet another NSA source to come forward to disclose the agency’s once-secret acts.
Oh, right. The question he’d been given previous to his testimony so he’d have time to think about it? The question he asked for clarification on when it was asked? That question?Director of National Intelligence General James Clapper has changed his story once again on why he gave a false answer in testimony before Congress while under oath. In a friendly interview with The Daily Beast Clapper changed his explanation from his previous statement that what he said was the “least untruthful” answer he could provide to now claiming he “misunderstood” the question he was being asked.
FireDogLake
Well, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Surely not illegal.The National Security Agency systematically broke its own rules and collected information it wasn't supposed to, according to 1,000 pages of highly redacted classified files released for the first time by the Obama administration.
The documents include 2009 court records in which the NSA acknowledged it improperly collected data despite repeated assurances to the contrary. The NSA engaged in what John D. Bates, the presiding judge over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, called "systemic overcollection."
RT
Yes, the"Virtually every" record generated by the program "included some data that had not been authorized for collection," the Guardian cites Bates as saying. Bates noted that the problems were endemic since the program’s inception.
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Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released the information in response to part of an on-going civil liberties lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the government's sweeping phone-record collection activities.
So Obama’s “reforms” to date include having the director of the DNI advise and report, and the DOJ make a review. Wow.The Department of Justice Inspector General is set to conduct a new review that will dig into “any improper or illegal uses” of the FBI’s surveillance activities carried out under the Patriot Act, with obvious implications for Americans’ privacy.
The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) will be delving into cases that involve possible abuse of the intelligence service’s power to collect phone records under the authority of Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
RT
If I put this in a novel, people would say no way, it's too brazen, too bullshit, it could never happen. But: the "review" Obama says he wants of NSA activities? He's going to have it run by James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence (to whom the NSA reports), the guy who lied to Congress about what the NSA is doing. So... the NSA will be functionally reviewing itself, with the head of the review someone with a proven history of lying to Congress about the NSA.
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As I said elsewhere: "Shorter Obama: the NSA will go on fucking America's ass. But we will consider using some lubricant."
I know it's not a surprise. But it's still an outrage. When the government's bullshit levels exceed what even fiction writers might consider plausible, it's probably not a good sign.
writer and ex-CIA employee Barry Eisler
So the White House is “selecting” the members by “consulting with” Clapper. So much better. (And apparently, Mr. Clapper will still be the one to make the report.)A memo issued Monday by the White House said James Clapper, the United States director of national intelligence, is to form a review group tasked to determine if the US “employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust.”
However, in a confusing turnabout, the White House said on Tuesday that Clapper is not heading the independent review.
"Director Clapper will not be a part of the group, and is not leading or directing the group’s efforts," Caitlin Hayden, a White House spokeswoman, told The Hill newspaper on Tuesday.
"The White House is selecting the members of the Review Group, consulting appropriately with the Intelligence Community," added Hayden.
Comments by the White House seemed to be aimed at distancing the review from criticism lobbed at Clapper's influence over the NSA review process despite the fact that Monday's memo indicated the report would come "through the director of national intelligence.
RT
The numbers tell the story — in votes and dollars. On Wednesday, the House voted 217 to 205 not to rein in the NSA’s phone-spying dragnet. It turns out that those 217 “no” voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 “yes” voters.
That’s the upshot of a new analysis by MapLight, a Berkeley-based non-profit that performed the inquiry at WIRED’s request. The investigation shows that defense cash was a better predictor of a member’s vote on the Amash amendment than party affiliation. House members who voted to continue the massive phone-call-metadata spy program, on average, raked in 122 percent more money from defense contractors than those who voted to dismantle it.
Wired
Which is another issue crying out for reform, along with the ruling that corporations' cash contributions amount to free speech, both of which have far less chance of reform than reining in the security state.[W]ith a few rare and noble exceptions, the Intelligence Committees in both houses of Congress are filled with precisely those members who are most slavishly beholden to, completely captured by, the intelligence community over which they supposedly serve as watchdogs. Many receive large sums of money from the defense and intelligence industries.
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In particular, the two chairs of those committees - Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate and Mike Rogers in the House - are such absolute loyalists to the NSA and the National Security State generally that it is usually impossible to distinguish their behavior, mindset and comments from those of NSA officials.
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In sum, the Senate and House Intelligence Committees are the pure embodiment of the worst of Washington: the corrupting influence of money from the very industries they are designed to oversee and the complete capture by the agencies they are supposed to adversarially check. Anything that comes out of those two Committees that is labeled NSA reform" is almost certain to be designed to achieve the opposite effect: to stave off real changes in lieu of illusory tinkering whose real purpose will be to placate rising anger.
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If I had to pick the most astonishing aspect of this episode so far, it would be that everyone now knows that the Obama administration's top national security official, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, outright lied to the Senate about NSA programs, and everyone knows that he did. And yet - as I said on ABC yesterday morning - not only isn't being prosecuted for that crime but still has his job. That, of course, is because the "law" does not apply to high-level Washington officials.
Glenn Greenwald
I think we know which direction Wyden will take.Wyden says he thinks the NSA might rein in some of its illegal, unconstitutional behavior. But what do we have to rely on in this regard? Ultimately, only the word of the NSA's representatives. And yet DNI Clapper has already proven himself willing to lie to Congress about what the NSA is up to. And Senator Wyden has proven himself willing to overlook those lies -- that is, to accept them without "a penalty or punishment for disobedience." Under these circumstances, if you were a simple Martian rather than a sophisticated earthling, how sure would you be that what the NSA tells you going forward is the truth?
If we want to have any meaningful level of confidence in the truthfulness of government officials testifying to Congress, it is essential -- it is a requirement -- that officials who are caught lying be punished for it in accordance with the law. Remove punishment -- remove the disincentive for lying -- and you guarantee lying. It's not much more complicated than that. To believe whatever the NSA says about its activities if Clapper goes unpunished is to believe in a fairy tale. If Congress is serious about its oversight function, if it wants the testimony it reveals to be truthful, it will punish Clapper in accordance with the law. If Congress does not punish Clapper, Congress is agreeing to continue to be lied to, and the NSA will continue to be democratically unaccountable.
A child would recognize all this, and certainly Wyden understands it as well. What prevents him from acting on it, I suspect, is the same sense of solidarity with other members of the ruling class that causes the New York Times to refer to Clapper's lying and perjury merely as "murky" and "misleading," that causes Walter Mondale to characterize it as "fibbing," that causes most of the establishment media to bay for the blood of whistleblowers while yawning at the notion that civilian oversight is meaningless if officials lie in their testimony to Congress. It's a kind of professional courtesy the powerful extend to the powerful, and it's extremely caustic to democracy and the rule of law.
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Wyden can't whistle past this graveyard. There really is something lurking in there, and Wyden has to confront it. If he doesn't, it won't get better. It'll get worse.
The Heart of the Matter
Really? Misunderstood it? Then how do you explain what Senator Wyden has said about the question: that he told you the question he was going to ask you a day in advance so you’d be prepared, and that afterward he gave you an opportunity to change your answer, but you declined.Acknowledging the “heated controversy” over his remark, Clapper sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 21 saying that he had misunderstood the question he had been asked. “I have thought long and hard to re-create what went through my mind at the time,” Clapper said in the previously undisclosed letter. “My response was clearly erroneous — for which I apologize.”
WaPo
Anybody who doesn’t already know that out there? No? I thought not.Out of all people, he has to understand that equal protection under the law means treating Clapper (and Alexander, who also lied to Congress) exactly the same way his administration treated pitcher Roger Clemens. Otherwise, the message from the government would be that lying to Congress about baseball is more of a felony than lying to Congress about Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights. Such a message would declare that when it comes to brazen law-breaking, as long as you are personally connected to the president, you get protection rather than the prosecution you deserve.
Salon
The list of senators who signed the letter is at the end of that article if you care to know who isn’t afraid of the NSA (yet). Had this happened during W’s reign, there would have been no Republicans, those staunch defenders of civil liberties and tireless warriors against government intrusion into private affairs. But can we assume that the Democrats who didn’t sign know that the NSA “has something on them?”A bipartisan group of 26 US senators has written to intelligence chiefs to complain that the administration is relying on a "secret body of law" to collect massive amounts of data on US citizens.
The senators accuse officials of making misleading statements and demand that the director of national intelligence James Clapper answer a series of specific questions on the scale of domestic surveillance as well as the legal justification for it.
In their strongly-worded letter to Clapper, the senators said they believed the government may be misinterpreting existing legislation to justify the sweeping collection of telephone and internet data revealed by the Guardian.
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The letter was organised by Oregan Democrat Ron Wyden, a member of the intelligence committee, but includes four Republican senators: Mark Kirk, Mike Lee, Lisa Murkowski and Dean Heller.
Guardian
The government doesn’t need a national firearms registration list. The NSA already has all the records they need. Oh, but wait, I’m being overly optimistic. The rabble would only want that part about collecting firearms sales records stricken."The Patriot Act's 'business records' authority can be used to give the government access to private financial, medical, consumer and firearm sales records, among others," said a press statement.
February 23 […] A highly classified U.S. intelligence assessment circulated to policymakers early last year largely affirms that view, originally made in 2007. Both reports, known as national intelligence estimates, conclude that Tehran halted efforts to develop and build a nuclear warhead in 2003.
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For now, U.S. military and intelligence officials say they don't believe Iran's leadership has made the decision to build a bomb.
"I think they are keeping themselves in a position to make that decision," James R. Clapper Jr., director of National Intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 16. "But there are certain things they have not yet done and have not done for some time."
LA Times
But I think the War Party is strong enough to take it and keep going.February 27 […] The anti-interventionist resistance inside the government has ways of pushing back against the War Party, and we saw that last week in the Los Angeles Times, with the revelation of the long-lost post-2007 National Intelligence Estimate, a previous version of which determined Iran has not decided to pursue a nuclear weapons program.
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By leaking the supposedly “highly classified” NIE to the media, the analysts and officials in the bowels of Langley are pushing back against the drive to drag us into another major conflict in the Middle East.
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The second to last thing President Obama wants is another war, especially one with the kind of economic consequences a military conflict with Iran is likely to have. The very last thing he wants, however, is to preside over a dramatically failing economy as the election season rolls around, while the Republicans rail at his “appeasement” of Tehran and oil prices continue to skyrocket. Never mind that those price hikes can be traced directly back to our provocations directed at Iran: the average American is likely to blame hostile foreigners rather than our own government officials for the uptick. When the political price for not attacking gets higher than the potential price of going to war, the President will cave – as he has most of the time on substantive issues.
The NIE leak gives him less room to maneuver between the contending factions within his administration, and delivers a big blow to the War Party.
Justin Raimondo
That's the director of national intelligence.[It] is the military and intelligence establishment that has quietly sought to counter politicians’ bold language about Iran’s nuclear program, which the Iranians contend is solely for peaceful purposes. At a hearing last week, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, pressed James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence.
“Do you have doubt about the Iranians’ intention when it comes to making a nuclear weapon?” Mr. Graham asked.
“I do,” Mr. Clapper replied.
“You doubt whether or not they’re trying to create a nuclear bomb?” Mr. Graham persisted.
“I think they are keeping themselves in a position to make that decision,” Mr. Clapper replied. “But there are certain things they have not yet done and have not done for some time,” he added, apparently a reference to specific steps to prepare a nuclear device.
