Category Archives: Drug Cartels

When the U.S. Strategy is to no Longer Lead

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Symptomatic of when a country is war weary, the rules of engagement are re-tooled, removing hostilities and the will to win fades away, the wake of destruction becomes worse. How many times has this occurred? Korea, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria and more. If it is not up to the United States of America, then who?

Korea

Sudan

Cambodia

Sinjar Mountain, Iraq

Libya

Dafur

Syria

 

Ambassador: US handed Cambodia to the ‘butcher’ 40 years ago

American envoy, a German-born Jew, recalls horrors of Pol Pot’s regime, regrets Washington’s ‘abandonment’ of allies

PARIS (AP) — Twelve helicopters, bristling with guns and US Marines, breached the morning horizon and began a daring descent toward Cambodia’s besieged capital. The Americans were rushing in to save them, residents watching the aerial armada believed. But at the US Embassy, in a bleeding city about to die, the ambassador wept.

Forty years later and 6,000 miles (nearly 10,000 kilometers) away, John Gunther Dean recalls what he describes as one of the most tragic days of his life — April 12, 1975, the day the United States “abandoned Cambodia and handed it over to the butcher.”

Time has not blunted the former ambassador’s anger, crushing shame and feelings of guilt over what also proved a milestone in modern American history — the first of several US interventions in foreign countries climaxed by withdrawals before goals were accomplished and followed by often disastrous consequences.

“We’d accepted responsibility for Cambodia and then walked out without fulfilling our promise. That’s the worst thing a country can do,” he says in an interview in Paris. “And I cried because I knew what was going to happen.”

Five days after Operation Eagle Pull, the dramatic evacuation of Americans, the US-backed government fell as communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas stormed into Phnom Penh. They drove its 2 million inhabitants into the countryside at gunpoint, launching one of the bloodiest revolutions of modern times. Nearly 2 million Cambodians — one in every four — would die from executions, starvation and hideous torture.

Many foreigners present during the final months — diplomats, aid workers, journalists — remain haunted to this day by Phnom Penh’s death throes, by the heartbreaking loyalty of Cambodians who refused evacuation and by what Dean calls Washington’s “indecent act.”

I count myself among those foreigners, a reporter who covered the Cambodian War for The Associated Press and was whisked away along with Dean and 287 other Americans, Cambodians and third-country nationals. I left behind more than a dozen Cambodian reporters and photographers — about the bravest, may I say the finest, colleagues I’ve ever known. Almost all would die.

For the general public, the pullout is largely forgotten, overshadowed by the mass, hysteric flight from Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War three weeks later. But for historians and political analysts, the withdrawal from Cambodia signifies the first of what then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger termed “bug-outs.”

“It was the first time Americans came anywhere close to losing a war. What worries me and many of us old guys who were there is that we are still seeing it happen,” says Frank Snepp, a senior CIA officer in Saigon and author of “Decent Interval,” which depicts the final years of the Vietnam War. After Cambodia and Vietnam came Laos; there would be other conflicts with messy endings, like Central America in the 1980s, Iraq and — potentially — Afghanistan.

Today, at 89, Dean, a German-born Jew, and his French wife reside in a patrician quarter of Paris, in an elegant apartment graced by statues of Cambodian kings from the glory days of the Angkor Empire. A folded American flag lies across his knees, the same one that he clutched under his arm in a plastic bag as he sped to the evacuation site. Captured by a photographer, it became one of the most memorable images of the Vietnam War era.

In the apartment’s vestibule hangs a framed letter signed by President Gerald R. Ford and dated Aug. 14, 1975. It highlights that Dean was “given one of the most difficult assignments in the history of the Foreign Service and carried it out with distinction.”

But Dean says: “I failed.”

“I tried so hard,” he adds. “I took as many people as I could, hundreds of them, I took them out, but I couldn’t take the whole nation out.”

The former ambassador to four other countries expresses more than guilt. He is highly critical of America’s violation of Cambodian neutrality by armed incursions from neighboring Vietnam and a secret bombing campaign in the early 1970s which killed thousands of civilians and radicalized, he believes, the Khmer Rouge. Once-peaceful Cambodia, he says, was drawn into war for America’s interests, a “sideshow” to Vietnam.

The US bombed communist Vietnamese sanctuaries and supply lines along the Vietnam-Cambodia border, keeping Cambodia propped up as an anti-communist enclave, but it provided World War II aircraft and few artillery pieces to Phnom Penh forces fighting the Khmer Rouge.

“The US wasn’t that concerned about what happened one way or the other in Cambodia but only concerned about it to the extent that it impacted positively or negatively on their situation in Vietnam,” says Stephen Heder, a Cambodia expert at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Opinion on what went wrong in Cambodia remains split to this day. One view is that the country was destabilized by the American incursions and bombings; another is that Washington failed to provide the US-propped Lon Nol government with adequate military and other support.

In his memoirs, Kissinger says the US had no choice but to expand its efforts into the neighboring country, which the North Vietnamese were using as a staging area and armory for attacks on US troops in South Vietnam. And as Cambodia crumbled, he writes, anti-war elements, the media and Congress combined to tie the administration’s hands, preventing further assistance.

Dean is bitter that Kissinger and other power brokers in Washington did not support his quest to persuade ousted Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk to return from exile and forge a coalition between the Khmer Rouge and Lon Nol. It was Dean’s “controlled solution.”

“We were also on the telephone with Washington shouting, ‘Help us. We are going under. We are going to leave this country unprotected,’” Dean said in earlier oral testimony. But Washington seemed unmoved.

“Ambassador Dean never had (President Richard) Nixon’s or Kissinger’s support because both of them wanted out of Indochina,” Snepp says.

By early 1975, the embassy’s cables, most of them declassified in 2006, were becoming increasingly frantic.

Meeting me one day, a haggard Dean, who had lost 15 pounds, asked rhetorically: “Isn’t there any sense of human decency left in us?”

“Phnom Penh was surrounded by explosions and a night sky of blossoming flares and streaks of tracer bullets,” I wrote in one of my stories at that time. “Children were dying of hunger, the hospitals looked more like abattoirs and the Cambodian army lost as many men in three months as the US did in a decade of war in South Vietnam.”

The Khmer Rouge were tightening their stranglehold on the capital, shutting down the airport from which the embassy had flown out several hundred Cambodians. An April 6 cable from Dean said the Cambodian government and army “seem to be expecting us to produce some miracle to save them. You and I know there will be no such miracle.”

Congress was cutting the aid lifeline to Phnom Penh. The American public had had enough of the war.

Among Cambodians in the know, some anti-American feeling was growing.

“The Americans give temporary aid but ultimately they think only of themselves. We in Cambodia have been seduced and abandoned,” Chhang Song, a former information minister, said one night in early 1975.

But among Phnom Penh residents I found only smiles — “Americans are our fathers,” one vegetable vendor told me — along with a never-never-land mindset that things would turn out to be all right. Somehow.

“I honestly believe we did not do enough. There was something better that could have come out other than a genocide of 1.7 million people,” Dean says, explaining in part why he, a Jew, felt so strongly. “Now you must understand, I was born in Germany and suffered under Nazi oppression, so how could I turn over a people to the butcher?”

Dean’s abiding emotions are shared by others of his former staff.

Alan Armstrong, the assistant defense attache, is still trying to complete a novel to exorcise what he went through. It is called “La Chute,” “The Fall.”

“I was paid by my government to smile, break bread (with Cambodians) and then betray my friends and colleagues. That’s a heavy burden to bear no matter how many years roll by,” says the retired US Army colonel. “The downfall of the Khmer Republic not only resulted in the deaths of countless Cambodians, it has also crept into our souls.”

Historians, distant from the passions of the actors, differ over Dean’s efforts and American culpability.

Benedict Kiernan, a Yale University professor who has written extensively on Cambodia, says that given rifts within the Khmer Rouge leadership a political compromise earlier in the war might have been possible, resulting in a left-wing dominated coalition and not a fanatical revolution.

“Anything was worth trying to stop the Khmer Rouge before they got to Phnom Penh,” says Heder, the academic, who reported in Cambodia during the war and was among those evacuated from the capital.

Milton Osborne, an Australian historian and diplomat who served in Cambodia, describes Dean’s “controlled solution” as a “forlorn hope,” with the Khmer Rouge determined to win totally and execute Phnom Penh’s leaders. “By 1974, it was not a question of if, but when,” he says.

Snepp believes that Dean, desperately grasping at straws, was “living in fantasy land.”

Washington may have abandoned its ally, but the Cambodian elite also bears responsibility for its own demise. Snepp views President Lon Nol — corrupt, inept, superstitious and half-paralyzed — as one in a long line of similar leaders the United States would back in the following decades.

“What we have seen in all cases is that unless the US has a politically viable domestic partner, neither limited nor massive military intervention is going to succeed,” says Heder.

Timothy Carney, the embassy’s political officer, drawing on his record as ambassador to several countries, says that “tolerating corruption saps the legitimacy and support for whatever authority we are trying to prop up in a country.”

In the final days, Carney’s task was to persuade, unsuccessfully, Cambodian leaders to flee the country.

The night before the evacuation, Dean and his deputy drank some of the ambassador’s fine French wine so it wouldn’t fall into Khmer Rouge hands. The next morning, sitting in his office for the last time, he read a letter from Prince Sirik Matak in which the respected former deputy prime minister declined evacuation and thus sealed his own death. It read: “I never believed for a moment that you have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you the Americans.”

Dean today describes it as the “greatest accusation ever made by foreigners. It is wrenching, no? And put yourself in the role of the American representative.”

His embassy closed down at 9:45 a.m., the evacuees driven 10 blocks to a soccer field shielded by a row of apartment buildings from Khmer Rouge gunners about a mile away. The Sikorsky “Jolly Green Giant” helicopters were setting down. The Marines fanned out to form a security cordon around the landing zone.

But fears of possible reprisals by Cambodians proved unfounded.

Children and mothers scrambled over fences to watch. They cheered, clapped and waved to the 360 beefy, armed Marines. A Cambodian military policeman saluted Armstrong smartly. Disgusted and ashamed, he dropped his helmet and rifle, leaving them behind.

I tried to avoid looking into faces of the crowd. Always with me will be the children’s little hands aflutter and their singsong “OK, Bye-bye, bye-bye.”

By 12:15 the last helicopters landed on the deck of the USS Okinawa waiting off the Cambodian coast. Tactically, the 2 1/2-hour operation had been flawless.

In Phnom Penh, Douglas Sapper, an ex-Green Beret who stayed behind to save his company’s employees, recalled the reaction of Cambodians who realized what had happened: “It was like telling a kid that Santa Claus was dead.”

Five days later we received a cable from Mean Leang, an ever-jovial, baby-faced AP reporter who had refused to seek safety. Instead he wrote about the brutal entry of the Khmer Rouge into the city, its surrender and gunpoint evacuation. “I alone in office, losing contact with our guys. I feel rather trembling,” he messaged. “Do not know how to file our stories now … maybe last cable today and forever.”

Barry Broman, then a young diplomat, remembers a Cambodian woman who worked upcountry monitoring the war for the embassy who had also refused evacuation.

“One day she said, ‘They are in the city,’ and her contact said ‘OK, time to go.’ She refused. Later she reported, ‘They are in the building,’ and again refused to leave her post. Her last transmission was, ‘They are in the room. Good-bye.’ The line went dead.”

 

Tracking Phone Calls Long Before the Patriot Act

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U.S. secretly tracked billions of phone calls for decades

Starting in 1992, the Justice Department amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries, a model for anti-terror surveillance after Sept. 11, 2001.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.

For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking, current and former officials involved with the operation said. The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America.

Federal investigators used the call records to track drug cartels’ distribution networks in the USA, allowing agents to detect previously unknown trafficking rings and money handlers. They also used the records to help rule out foreign ties to the bombing in 1995 of a federal building in Oklahoma City and to identify U.S. suspects in a wide range of other investigations.

The Justice Department revealed in January that the DEA had collected data about calls to “designated foreign countries.” But the history and vast scale of that operation have not been disclosed until now.

The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA’s intelligence arm, was the government’s first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans’ privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.

More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials described the details of the Justice Department operation to USA TODAY. Most did so on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the intelligence program, part of which remains classified.

The DEA program did not intercept the content of Americans’ calls, but the records — which numbers were dialed and when — allowed agents to map suspects’ communications and link them to troves of other police and intelligence data. At first, the drug agency did so with help from military computers and intelligence analysts.

That data collection was “one of the most important and effective Federal drug law enforcement initiatives,” the Justice Department said in a 1998 letter to Sprint asking the telecom giant to turn over its call records. The previously undisclosed letter was signed by the head of the department’s Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Section, Mary Lee Warren, who wrote that the operation had “been approved at the highest levels of Federal law enforcement authority,” including then-Attorney General Janet Reno and her deputy, Eric Holder.

The data collection began in 1992 during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, nine years before his son, President George W. Bush, authorized the NSA to gather its own logs of Americans’ phone calls in 2001. It was approved by top Justice Department officials in four presidential administrations and detailed in occasional briefings to members of Congress but otherwise had little independent oversight, according to officials involved with running it.

The DEA used its data collection extensively and in ways that the NSA is now prohibited from doing. Agents gathered the records without court approval, searched them more often in a day than the spy agency does in a year and automatically linked the numbers the agency gathered to large electronic collections of investigative reports, domestic call records accumulated by its agents and intelligence data from overseas, it even use 800 numbers for business too!

The result was “a treasure trove of very important information on trafficking,” former DEA administrator Thomas Constantine said in an interview.

The extent of that surveillance alarmed privacy advocates, who questioned its legality. “This was aimed squarely at Americans,” said Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That’s very significant from a constitutional perspective.”

Holder halted the data collection in September 2013 amid the fallout from Snowden’s revelations about other surveillance programs. In its place, current and former officials said the drug agency sends telecom companies daily subpoenas for international calling records involving only phone numbers that agents suspect are linked to the drug trade or other crimes — sometimes a thousand or more numbers a day.

Tuesday, Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush said the DEA “is no longer collecting bulk telephony metadata from U.S. service providers.” A DEA spokesman declined to comment.

HARVESTING DATA TO BATTLE CARTELS

The DEA began assembling a data-gathering program in the 1980s as the government searched for new ways to battle Colombian drug cartels. Neither informants nor undercover agents had been enough to crack the cartels’ infrastructure. So the agency’s intelligence arm turned its attention to the groups’ communication networks.

Calling records – often called “toll records” – offered one way to do that. Toll records are comparable to what appears on a phone bill – the numbers a person dialed, the date and time of the call, its duration and how it was paid for. By then, DEA agents had decades of experience gathering toll records of people they suspected were linked to drug trafficking, albeit one person at a time. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, officials said the agency had little way to make sense of the data their agents accumulated and almost no ability to use them to ferret out new cartel connections. Some agents used legal pads.

“We were drowning in toll records,” a former intelligence official said.

The DEA asked the Pentagon for help. The military responded with a pair of supercomputers and intelligence analysts who had experience tracking the communication patterns of Soviet military units. “What they discovered was that the incident of a communication was perhaps as important as the content of a communication,” a former Justice Department official said.

The military installed the supercomputers on the fifth floor of the DEA’s headquarters, across from a shopping mall in Arlington, Va.

The system they built ultimately allowed the drug agency to stitch together huge collections of data to map trafficking and money laundering networks both overseas and within the USA. It allowed agents to link the call records its agents gathered domestically with calling data the DEA and intelligence agencies had acquired outside the USA. (In some cases, officials said the DEA paid employees of foreign telecom firms for copies of call logs and subscriber lists.) And it eventually allowed agents to cross-reference all of that against investigative reports from the DEA, FBI and Customs Service.

The result “produced major international investigations that allowed us to take some big people,” Constantine said, though he said he could not identify particular cases.

In 1989, President George H.W. Bush proposed in his first prime-time address using “sophisticated intelligence-gathering and Defense Department technology” to disrupt drug trafficking. Three years later, when violent crime rates were at record highs, the drug agency intensified its intelligence push, launching a “kingpin strategy” to attack drug cartels by going after their finances, leadership and communication.

THE START OF BULK COLLECTION

In 1992, in the last months of Bush’s administration, Attorney General William Barr and his chief criminal prosecutor, Robert Mueller, gave the DEA permission to collect a much larger set of phone data to feed into that intelligence operation.

Instead of simply asking phone companies for records about calls made by people suspected of drug crimes, the Justice Department began ordering telephone companies to turn over lists of all phone calls from the USA to countries where the government determined drug traffickers operated, current and former officials said.

Barr and Mueller declined to comment, as did Barr’s deputy, George Terwilliger III, though Terwilliger said, “It has been apparent for a long time in both the law enforcement and intelligence worlds that there is a tremendous value and need to collect certain metadata to support legitimate investigations.”

The data collection was known within the agency as USTO (a play on the fact that it tracked calls from the U.S. to other countries).

The DEA obtained those records using administrative subpoenas that allow the agency to collect records “relevant or material to” federal drug investigations. Officials acknowledged it was an expansive interpretation of that authority but one that was not likely to be challenged because unlike search warrants, DEA subpoenas do not require a judge’s approval. “We knew we were stretching the definition,” a former official involved in the process said.

Officials said a few telephone companies were reluctant to provide so much information, but none challenged the subpoenas in court. Those that hesitated received letters from the Justice Department urging them to comply.

After Sprint executives expressed reservations in 1998, for example, Warren, the head of the department’s drug section, responded with a letter telling the company that “the initiative has been determined to be legally appropriate” and that turning over the call data was “appropriate and required by law.” The letter said the data would be used by authorities “to focus scarce investigative resources by means of sophisticated pattern and link analysis.”

The letter did not name other telecom firms providing records to the DEA but did tell executives that “the arrangement with Sprint being sought by the DEA is by no means unique to Sprint” and that “major service providers have been eager to support and assist law enforcement within appropriate bounds.” Former officials said the operation included records from AT&T and other telecom companies.

A spokesman for AT&T declined to comment. Sprint spokeswoman Stephanie Vinge Walsh said only that “we do comply with all state and federal laws regarding law enforcement subpoenas.”

Agents said that when the data collection began, they sought to limit its use mainly to drug investigations and turned away requests for access from the FBI and the NSA. They allowed searches of the data in terrorism cases, including the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people in 1995, helping to rule out theories linking the attack to foreign terrorists. They allowed even broader use after Sept. 11, 2001. The DEA’s public disclosure of its program in January came in the case of a man charged with violating U.S. export restrictions by trying to send electrical equipment to Iran.

At first, officials said the DEA gathered records only of calls to a handful of countries, focusing on Colombian drug cartels and their supply lines. Its reach grew quickly, and by the late 1990s, the DEA was logging “a massive number of calls,” said a former intelligence official who supervised the program.

Former officials said they could not recall the complete list of countries included in USTO, and the coverage changed over time. The Justice Department and DEA added countries to the list if officials could establish that they were home to outfits that produced or trafficked drugs or were involved in money laundering or other drug-related crimes.

The Justice Department warned when it disclosed the program in January that the list of countries should remain secret “to protect against any disruption to prospective law enforcement cooperation.”

At its peak, the operation gathered data on calls to 116 countries, an official involved in reviewing the list said. Two other officials said they did not recall the precise number of countries, but it was more than 100. That gave the collection a considerable sweep; the U.S. government recognizes a total of 195 countries.

At one time or another, officials said, the data collection covered most of the countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean, as well as others in western Africa, Europe and Asia. It included Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Italy, Mexico and Canada.

The DEA often — though not always — notified foreign governments it was collecting call records, in part to make sure its agents would not be expelled if the program was discovered. In some cases, the DEA provided some of that information to foreign law enforcement agencies to help them build their own investigations, officials said.

The DEA did not have a real-time connection to phone companies’ data; instead, the companies regularly provided copies of their call logs, first on computer disks and later over a private network. Agents who used the system said the numbers they saw were seldom more than a few days old.

The database did not include callers’ names or other identifying data. Officials said agents often were able to identify individuals associated with telephone numbers flagged by the analysis, either by cross-referencing them against other databases or by sending follow-up requests to the phone companies.

To keep the program secret, the DEA sought not to use the information as evidence in criminal prosecutions or in its justification for warrants or other searches. Instead, its Special Operations Division passed the data to field agents as tips to help them find new targets or focus existing investigations, a process approved by Justice Department lawyers. Many of those tips were classified because the DEA phone searches drew on other intelligence data.

That practice sparked a furor when the Reuters news agency reported in 2013 that the DEA trained agents to conceal the sources of those tips from judges and defense lawyers. Reuters said the tips were based on wiretaps, foreign intelligence and a DEA database of telephone calls gathered through routine subpoenas and search warrants.

As a result, “the government short-circuited any debate about the legality and wisdom of putting the call records of millions of innocent people in the hands of the DEA,” American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Patrick Toomey said.

A BLUEPRINT FOR BROADER SURVEILLANCE

The NSA began collecting its own data on Americans’ phone calls within months of Sept. 11, 2001, as a way to identify potential terrorists within the USA. At first, it did so without court approval. In 2006, after The New York Times and USA TODAY began reporting on the surveillance program, President George W. Bush’s administration brought it under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the government to use secret court orders to get access to records relevant to national security investigations. Unlike the DEA, the NSA also gathered logs of calls within the USA.

The similarities between the NSA program and the DEA operation established a decade earlier are striking – too much so to have been a coincidence, people familiar with the programs said. Former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said, “It’s very hard to see (the DEA operation) as anything other than the precursor” to the NSA’s terrorist surveillance.

Both operations relied on an expansive interpretation of the word “relevant,” for example — one that allowed the government to collect vast amounts of information on the premise that some tiny fraction of it would be useful to investigators. Both used similar internal safeguards, requiring analysts to certify that they had “reasonable articulable suspicion” – a comparatively low legal threshold – that a phone number was linked to a drug or intelligence case before they could query the records.

“The foundation of the NSA program was a mirror image of what we were doing,” said a former Justice Department official who helped oversee the surveillance. That official said he and others briefed NSA lawyers several times on the particulars of their surveillance program. Two former DEA officials also said the NSA had been briefed on the operation. The NSA declined to comment.

There were also significant differences.

For one thing, DEA analysts queried their data collection far more often. The NSA said analysts searched its telephone database only about 300 times in 2012; DEA analysts routinely performed that many searches in a day, former officials said. Beyond that, NSA analysts must have approval from a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court each time they want to search their own collection of phone metadata, and they do not automatically cross-reference it with other intelligence files.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, complained last year to Holder that the DEA had been gathering phone data “in bulk” without judicial oversight. Officials said the DEA’s database was disclosed to judges only occasionally, in classified hearings.

For two decades, it was never reviewed by the Justice Department’s own inspector general, which told Congress it is now looking into the DEA’s bulk data collections.

A SMALLER SCALE COLLECTION

Holder pulled the plug on the phone data collection in September 2013.

That summer, Snowden leaked a remarkable series of classified documents detailing some of the government’s most prized surveillance secrets, including the NSA’s logging of domestic phone calls and Internet traffic. Reuters and The New York Times raised questions about the drug agency’s own access to phone records.

Officials said the Justice Department told the DEA that it had determined it could not continue both surveillance programs, particularly because part of its justification for sweeping NSA surveillance was that it served national security interests, not ordinary policing. Eight months after USTO was halted, for example, department lawyers defended the spy agency’s phone dragnet in court partly on the grounds that it “serves special governmental needs above and beyond normal law enforcement.”

Three months after USTO was shut down, a review panel commissioned by President Obama urged Congress to bar the NSA from gathering telephone data on Americans in bulk. Not long after that, Obama instructed the NSA to get permission from the surveillance court before querying its phone data collection, a step the drug agency never was required to take.

The DEA stopped searching USTO in September 2013. Not long after that, it purged the database.

“It was made abundantly clear that they couldn’t defend both programs,” a former Justice Department official said. Others said Holder’s message was more direct. “He said he didn’t think we should have that information,” a former DEA official said.

By then, agents said USTO was suffering from diminishing returns. More criminals — especially the sophisticated cartel operatives the agency targeted — were communicating on Internet messaging systems that are harder for law enforcement to track.

Still, the shutdown took a toll, officials said. “It has had a major impact on investigations,” one former DEA official said.

The DEA asked the Justice Department to restart the surveillance program in December 2013. It withdrew that request when agents came up with a new solution. Every day, the agency assembles a list of the telephone numbers its agents suspect may be tied to drug trafficking. Each day, it sends electronic subpoenas — sometimes listing more than a thousand numbers — to telephone companies seeking logs of international telephone calls linked to those numbers, two official familiar with the program said.

The data collection that results is more targeted but slower and more expensive. Agents said it takes a day or more to pull together communication profiles that used to take minutes.

The White House proposed a similar approach for the NSA’s telephone surveillance program, which is set to expire June 1. That approach would halt the NSA’s bulk data collection but would give the spy agency the power to force companies to turn over records linked to particular telephone numbers, subject to a court order.

U.S. Prisons are Radical Recruiting Centers

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The Justice Department will begin accepting clemency applications for nonviolent, low-level criminals who have served out at least 10 years of their sentence under new guidelines outlined Wednesday.
At the request of the White House, the Justice Department will put a priority on six new factors when evaluating clemency applications. The changes are expected to result in a surge of letters to President Obama, with many coming from people serving drug sentences.

Those being considered should be serving out a term that would have likely been lower if sentenced under current guidelines. They cannot have ties to criminal organizations, possess a significant criminal history, or have a violent background. The inmates must also have served out at least 10 years of their sentence and maintained good conduct while there.

*** Now for the real chilling facts.

America’s Academies for Jihad

A radical imam threatened me with death—and was later hired to preach in U.S. prisons. I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been.

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Less than a year after I moved to the United States in 2006, I was asked to speak at the University of Pittsburgh. Among those who objected to my appearance was a local imam, Fouad El Bayly, of the Johnstown Islamic Center. Mr. Bayly was born in Egypt but has lived in the U.S. since 1976. In his own words, I had “been identified as one who has defamed the faith.” As he explained at the time: “If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death.”

After a local newspaper reported Mr. Bayly’s comments, he was forced to resign from the Islamic Center. That was the last I would hear of him—or so I thought.

Imagine my surprise when I learned recently that the man who threatened me with death for apostasy is being paid by the U.S. Justice Department to teach Islam in American jails.

According to records on the federal site USASpending.gov and first reported by Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller, the Federal Bureau of Prisons awarded Mr. Bayly a $10,500 contract in February 2014 to provide “religious services, leadership and guidance” to inmates at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Md. Ten months later he received another federal contract, worth $2,400, to provide “Muslim classes for inmates” at the same prison.

This isn’t a story about one problematic imam, or about the misguided administration of a solitary prison. Several U.S. prison chaplains have been exposed in recent years as sympathetic to radical Islam, including Warith Deen Umar, who helped run the New York State Department of Correctional Services’ Islamic prison program for two decades, until 2000, and who praised the 9/11 hijackers in a 2003 interview with this newspaper.

That same year, the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism held hearings on radical Islamic clerics in U.S. prisons. Committee members voiced serious concerns over the vetting of Muslim prison chaplains and the extent of radical Islamist influences. Harley Lappin, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons at the time, said that “inmates are particularly vulnerable to recruitment by terrorists,” and that “we must guard against the spread of terrorism and extremist ideologies.”

Yet it is not clear what measures—if any—were taken in response to those concerns.

Testifying in 2011 before the House Committee on Homeland Security, Michael P. Downing, head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Counterterrorism and Special Operations Bureau, said that in 2003 it was estimated that 17%-20% of the U.S. prison population, some 350,000 inmates, were Muslims, and that “80% of the prisoners who convert while in prison, convert to Islam.” He estimated that “35,000 inmates convert to Islam annually.”

Patrick Dunleavy, retired deputy inspector of the Criminal Intelligence Division at the New York State Department of Corrections, said in testimony that prison authorities often rely on groups such as the Islamic Leadership Council or the Islamic Society of North America for advice about Islamic chaplains. Yet those groups can and have referred individuals not suited to positions of influence over prisoners. As Mr. Dunleavy pointedly testified: “There is certainly no vetting of volunteers who provide religious instruction, and who, although not paid, wield considerable influence in the prison Muslim communities.”

The problem isn’t limited to radical clerics infiltrating prisons. Radical inmates proselytize and do their utmost to recruit others to their cause. Once released, they may seek to take their radicalization to the next level.

Kevin James formed the Assembly of Authentic Islam while in New Folsom State Prison in California. In 2004 James recruited fellow prisoner Levar Washington to his cause. After being released, James developed a list of possible targets including an Israeli consulate, a Jewish children’s camp in Malibu, Los Angeles International Airport and a U.S. military recruiting station in Santa Monica. The two men pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges; Washington was sentenced to 22 years in 2008, James to 16 years in 2009.

Michael Finton converted and radicalized in an Illinois state prison while serving time for aggravated assault. Finton wanted to attack a federal government building and spoke of the need to attack members of Congress. He pleaded guilty to attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and was sentenced to 28 years in prison in 2011.

In 2009 the “Newburgh Four”—James Cromitie, Laguerre Payen, David Williams and Onta Williams—were arrested for plotting to bomb synagogues in New York City. The men also intended to shoot down military aircraft with Stinger missiles. All four had converted to Islam in prison, where they developed radical sympathies. The men didn’t know each other while in prison but met after their release while attending a local mosque connected to a prison ministry. All four were convicted on conspiracy charges and received 25-year sentences in 2011.

In January 2010 John Kerry, who was then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, released a report warning that “three dozen U.S. citizens who converted to Islam while in prison have traveled to Yemen, possibly for al Qaeda training.”

Europeans have known for some time that prisons can be breeding grounds for Islamists. The British “shoe bomber,” Richard Reid, is thought to have been radicalized while in prison for smaller crimes. Two of the gunmen in the Paris terror attacks in January—Chérif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly—came under the religious influence of Djamel Beghal, a convicted terrorist and charismatic Islamist, when serving prison sentences. Mohamed Merah, who killed three soldiers, three small children and a rabbi at a Jewish school near Toulouse, France, in 2012, apparently became a jihadist while in jail. The list is depressingly long.

The problem is that experts tend to be concerned about prison radicalization only to the extent that it ultimately results in some type of violent attack. Yet there are good reasons to be concerned about the inmates who come to cherish a radical interpretation of Islam while refraining—for the time being—from the use of violence. The boundary between nonviolent and violent extremism is much more porous than conventional wisdom allows.

What can be done to stop prisons from becoming academies of jihad? Here are four suggestions:

1) Choose better partners than the Islamic Society of North America and the Islamic Leadership Council to screen prison chaplains. The American Islamic Forum for Democracy, founded and led by M. Zuhdi Jasser, a medical doctor and former lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, would be a good choice.

2) Prevent radical clerics from coming into prisons to spread their message to susceptible inmates.

3) Ban radical Islamist literature from being disseminated in U.S. prisons.

4) Stop placing inmates in proximity to radicalized mentors.

The fact that Fouad El Bayly, an imam who publicly called for my death, was chosen to provide “religious services, leadership and guidance” at a federal prison shows that U.S. authorities haven’t learned the right lessons from a growing list of prison-convert terrorists. Bringing in radical imams to mentor vulnerable inmates will not do anyone any good—least of all prisoners looking for a better path in life.

Obama Used Bergdahl as a Pawn

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Consider this timeline:

January 2009: Obama signs executive order calling for Gitmo to be shuttered within a year, while his national security team considers if the five Taliban leaders are safe for release.

2011: White House and State Department officials open secret talks with the Taliban in Germany and the Persian Gulf to discuss their release from Gitmo as part of “peace talks.”

Jan. 3, 2012: The Taliban announce they are prepared to open a political office in Qatar to conduct peace negotiations in exchange for the release of the Taliban commanders. (“The releases would be to reciprocate for Tuesday’s announcement,” according to “The Guardian.”)

April 2012: Working with the White House, Karzai sends delegation of Afghan government officials to Gitmo to interview the Taliban prisoners and secure their oath to cut ties with al-Qaida.

Many more details here.

The matter of Qatar, the Taliban and bin Ladin has a long history that continues to be exploited by the U.S. government. It is no wonder that the Taliban created a satellite office in Doha.

April, 7, 2011 Ambassador Elizabeth McKune sent a classified cable:

S E C R E T DOHA 001093

E.O. 12958: DECL: 04/07/11
TAGS: PREL [External Political Relations], PTER [Terrorists and Terrorism], AF [Afghanistan], PA [Paraguay], QA [Qatar]
SUBJECT: TALIBAN PROPOSAL FOR BIN LADEN ISLAMIC
TRIBUNAL

REF: A) STATE 61624  B) DOHA 888  C) DOHA 1036

CLASSIFIED BY AMBASSADOR ELIZABETH MCKUNE FOR
REASONS 1.5 (B) AND (D)

¶1.  (S) AMBASSADOR PRESENTED REF A DEMARCHE TO
FOREIGN MINISTER HAMAD BIN JASIM AL THANI (HBJ) ON
APRIL 7. SHORTLY AFTER AMBASSADOR BEGAN TALKING
POINTS, HBJ INTERRUPTED AND SAID “WE DON’T WANT A
TRIAL HERE OF BIN LADEN.  THERE WILL BE NO TRIAL
HERE OR ANYWHERE ELSE, UNLESS ALL COUNTRIES ARE IN
AGREEMENT, INCLUDING THE U.S.”  HE ADDED THAT WERE
THE TALIBAN TO APPROACH THE GOQ WITH SUCH A
PROPOSAL, THE GOQ WOULD AGREE TO STUDY IT BUT
PROMISE NOTHING.

¶2.  (C) HBJ CONFIRMED THAT A TALIBAN DELEGATION
WAS ARRIVING IN QATAR TODAY (APRIL 7).  THE
AMBASSADOR REMINDED HIM THAT THE US IS THE SINGLE
LARGEST CONTRIBUTOR OF HUMANITARIAN AID TO
AFGHANISTAN. SHE ASKED WHETHER MINISTER OF STATE
AL MAHMOUD HAD BRIEFED HIM ON HER PREVIOUS
DEMARCHES ON THE TALIBAN (REFS B AND D).  HBJ
RESPONDED, “YES.”

¶3.  (C) COMMENT: HBJ GRANTED THE MEETING WITH THE
AMBASSADOR WITHIN AN HOUR OF THE REQUEST.  HE WAS
CLEARLY PLEASED THAT A/S WALKER HAD CALLED.  WE
WILL GET A READ OUT ON THE TALIBAN’S VISIT WHEN IT
IS CONCLUDED.

The Taliban chose the 5 commanders they wanted back from Gitmo, Barack Obama did not choose them but did approve the request. Congress would never have approved, then it got twisted to throw in Bergdahl for the win by the White House.

The Taliban’s conditions:

Demands

The Taliban will enter discussions with an eye on winning a few confidence-building concessions, including the release of Taliban detainees held in prisons under the control of the Afghan government. The release of the “Taliban five” held by the United States at its Guantanamo facility will also come up.

The Taliban is also expected to ask for sanctions against its members to be eased. The United Nations’ Al-Qaeda and Taliban sanctions committee has blacklisted more than 100 people linked to the Taliban, subjecting them to travel bans and asset freezes. At the request of the Afghan government, the UN Security Council has delisted several dozen names as part of a move to encourage the group to hold peace talks with Kabul.

The Taliban will seek to get formal recognition from Washington as a legitimate political entity.

The Taliban is also expected to float more contentious and ambitious demands, such as changes to the Afghan Constitution and other concessions that would give them considerable influence over the country’s social and judicial affairs.

“The Taliban are likely to want significant influence in justice, anticorruption, education, and social affairs,” says Matt Waldman, an Afghanistan analyst based in London. “These are the most notable areas where the Taliban will seek influence, in particular justice [and rule of law.] Taliban leaders feel they are best equipped to deliver justice and administer justice in Afghanistan.”

 

Chicago: How Corruption Destroys a City

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Rahm Emanuel up for re-election as mayor of Chicago. The race is not going well. When it comes to money the dollars exceed $20 billion. Could it be that the cure for Chicago is to follow a handful of other cities and to file for bankruptcy? Is the city leadership watching what happened in Detroit?

The Unraveling of Chicago

Rahm Emanuel is probably going to be reelected mayor of Chicago, but it won’t have been a pretty road to get there. He failed to garner a majority in the first round of voting, back in February—a rebuke, of sorts, from voters, who had four years ago given him 55 percent of the first-round vote. As a result, he now faces an April 7 runoff against county official Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.

When political junkies in the rest of the country think about Emanuel, they tend to focus on his legendary haughtiness. To take one example: A constituent who met with Emanuel earlier this month to protest the closing of mental-health clinics complained that the mayor had yelled, “You’re gonna respect me!” (Emanuel’s camp denied to The Huffington Post that the mayor had yelled.) Such haughtiness has certainly hurt Emanuel during this campaign. Whereas his predecessor, Richard M. Daley, was perfectly capable of arrogance, his personality didn’t seem to offend Chicagoans the same way Emanuel’s does. Daley had the bluster of the common man; Emanuel comes across as imperious. “Daley could be your brother or uncle,” one labor leader told me recently. “Rahm is more upper class.” The press in Chicago has been fond of recounting how Emanuel was seen with his extremely wealthy friend, Illinois’s Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, at a posh Montana resort carrying a bottle of wine that’s only available through an exclusive buyer’s club—which costs six figures to join.

But while Emanuel’s colorful personality has certainly been a key factor in the minds of many voters, it isn’t—or at least shouldn’t be—the real story about Chicago politics right now. Perhaps more than any other major city in America, Chicago is facing a truly grave set of problems—problems that are essentially more extreme versions of the challenges confronting city governments across the country.

The quandaries begin with Chicago’s dramatic social divide. To an even greater extent than is the case in, say, New York or Philadelphia, Chicago has become two entirely separate cities. One is a bustling metropolis that includes the Loop, Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile, and the Gold Coast, as well as the city’s well-to-do, working-class, and upwardly mobile immigrant neighborhoods. The other Chicago consists of impoverished neighborhoods on the far South and West Sides, primarily populated by African-Americans. These places have remained beyond the reach of the city’s recovery from the Great Recession.

Meanwhile, even as it grapples with this extreme gap, Chicago is suffering from a severe fiscal crisis. Like plenty of other municipalities, Chicago lacks the revenue to pay its bills, particularly its pension obligations to city workers. According to a 2013 Pew report, 61 other U.S. cities face similar difficulties, but Chicago’s situation is one of the worst. “Voters must realize we are facing the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression,” says Roosevelt University’s Paul Green, the doyen of Chicago political experts. “If something doesn’t happen, the city is beyond the abyss.”

Those problems aren’t really Emanuel’s fault, but his efforts to fix them over the past four years haven’t yielded especially good results. For his part, Garcia—who has been at the forefront of Latino politics in Chicago for four decades and who has a history of bucking Chicago’s political establishment—has run a campaign long on general populist criticism of the incumbent, but short on credible ideas about what he would do differently.

All of which means that this election won’t yield much of a mandate for dramatic solutions to Chicago’s twin crises. After April 7, however, Emanuel or Garcia will have no choice but to try. If the gaping holes in Chicago’s social and fiscal fabric can somehow be mended, the city will have created a powerful blueprint that other large urban centers could in theory follow. And if they can’t be fixed? Then Chicago may end up serving as a cautionary tale about the grim political and economic fate awaiting other U.S. cities that put off or wish away their problems.

Emanuel’s efforts to improve Chicago’s schools let to the shutdown of 49 low-performing elementary schools, which was met with protests in 2013. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

IF YOU DRIVE through the predominantly African-American neighborhoods on Chicago’s far South and West Sides, it’s difficult not to be struck by the sheer desolation. While much of the city—including Pilsen, a Mexican-American area where Garcia grew up—teems with life and commerce, swathes of the South and West Sides seem bereft of hope. Garbage is strewn on empty lots, stores are boarded up, and streets are deserted in daytime. In West Englewood, for instance, from 2008 to 2012, a third of households were below poverty, unemployment among those ages 16 and older was 34.7 percent, and 30 percent lacked high school diplomas. In Riverdale, 61.4 percent of households were below poverty, 25.4 percent were unemployed, and a quarter lacked a high school diploma. According to the Census Bureau, overall African-American unemployment in Chicago in 2013 was 25 percent, considerably higher than the African-American unemployment rates in America’s other four largest cities.

Many of Chicago’s black residents are the descendants of those who came from the South in the 1940s to work in the city’s factories, but most of Chicago’s large factories have shut down or moved over the last 40 years. The city’s key industries, primarily centered in and around the Loop, are financial services, tourism, transportation, logistics, health care, and education. In March 2012, a report of the city’s main planning group warned that “the demand for low-skilled workers continues to decrease” and that “in the years ahead, the demand for high-skilled employees will increase twice as fast the demand for lower-skilled workers.” It also predicted growing demand for “jobs that require mid-skilled workers,” but these are generally workers who at least have associate degrees from community colleges. The upshot is that those without high school degrees, or with only high school degrees, will increasingly be unable to find jobs; and it will be very difficult to persuade businesses, almost all of which now require some familiarity with computer technology, to set up shop in Chicago’s poor neighborhoods.

Emanuel’s response to this problem has primarily been to try to improve Chicago’s schools. He got the school board, which he controls, to lengthen the school day and year, and institute all-day kindergarten; in his campaign, he is promising to expand prekindergarten and give free tuition to community college for high school graduates with a B average. The school board also shut down 49 underused and low-performing elementary schools, and sought to transfer those who were displaced—12,000 predominantly low-income African-American students—to better-performing schools. While this move was initially justified on financial grounds, it was also part of a broader strategy to improve student achievement. The results were mixed: According to a University of Chicago study, 93 percent of the students transferred from third-tier to second- or first-tier schools, but only the 21 percent who attended first-tier schools showed significant scholastic improvement.

Emanuel has also made some effort to secure investments in the South and West Sides. He got Method, a company that makes cleaning products, to build a small factory on the far South Side that will create about 100 jobs. And with tax breaks, he induced upscale Whole Foods to put a store in Englewood, which, like many African-American neighborhoods, lacked grocery stores. Still, it’s unclear how much these small-scale investments, coupled with the city’s educational initiatives, can really do to ameliorate the gap between the South and West Sides and the rest of the city.

One of Garcia’s criticisms of Emanuel is that he has focused on economic development downtown, rather than in the poorer neighborhoods. Emanuel has responded by saying that it’s “a false choice to pit one part of the city against another. No great city does not have a thriving central city that supports jobs where all parts of the city go to.” Emanuel isn’t wrong, exactly. But it’s also true that he has squandered tax breaks intended for blighted areas on luxury hotels, high rises, and an arena for DePaul’s basketball team in the South and West Loop—all while luring Yelp and Motorola Mobility to downtown Chicago and putting money into McCormick Place and Navy Pier, two key tourist destinations.

Emanuel speaks to the press on Election Day in Chicago last month. He failed to garner a majority of votes. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

And yet, while Garcia and his allies have legitimate criticisms of Emanuel’s economic-development efforts, they have not produced anything resembling a viable alternative. When I asked Garcia during a recent interview in his campaign headquarters what he would do about Chicago’s socioeconomic divide, he said there was “the potential on the West Side for local businesspeople to invest in cooperative enterprises, worker-owned enterprises.” I asked him for an example, and he cited New Era Windows, which had taken over the old Republic Windows plant, and which produces replacement windows. “Check it out,” he told me. “It’s an example of what can be done if there is political will and an understanding on what needs to be done, particularly on the West and South Sides, to create opportunities.”

I checked it out midday on a sunny Thursday. I found an old building with the company’s name painted on the wall, but the parking lot was nearly deserted. A worker at a neighboring business pointed me to a door, but it was locked. In an adjoining building, someone else suggested I look in a suite of offices on the third floor, but there was no one there or on the other floors. I called the company’s number later, and the person on the phone assured me that the company is still operating, but “might have been closed” when I tried to visit. I asked her how many people the company employed, and she said 16.

To be sure, the fate of New Era Windows won’t determine the viability of Garcia’s strategy. But it points to the difficulties inherent in any attempt to revive the South and West Sides. In his debate with Emanuel, Garcia called for “attracting modern industry and manufacturing” to Chicago’s neighborhoods. If by modern industry, he means Yelp and LinkedIn, then the problem will be that these kind of firms want to locate near other financial and business services downtown. And if he means manufacturing on a scale that Chicago once enjoyed, the long-term trends in the local economy are running against such a strategy. As one head of an economic-development organization in a minority neighborhood told me, hopes of reviving manufacturing on a large scale are a “pipe dream.”

AS IF THE socioeconomic gap wasn’t hard enough to solve on its own, it’s made even more difficult by the local government’s terrible fiscal condition. Chicago’s finances, like those of some other city governments, have suffered from the boom-bust cycle of the past 20 years. The city grew complacent during the boom, failing to set aside funds for the future, and then didn’t take the necessary corrective steps when the economy faltered. The blame largely belongs to Daley, Emanuel’s predecessor, who lavished money on civic projects and doled out funds to appease aldermen without raising taxes. When finally faced with falling revenues, he undertook several controversial efforts at privatization, but the initial funds the city gained quickly evaporated.

The heart of Chicago’s current fiscal woes is its pension system. The city’s public workers, including teachers, do not receive Social Security. Instead, they get pensions from the city. The government pays for these pensions through funds that consist of employees’ and taxpayers’ contributions and what Chicago earns on investments from these contributions. According to University of Chicago public-policy expert Michael Belsky, investment earnings have generally accounted for two-thirds of the total funds.

Private pension funds are usually required to maintain assets equal to 100 percent of their total liabilities, measured as what would be required to pay benefits to existing workers and retirees; but because cities and states can count on being able to tax to cover their obligations, rating agencies and regulators believe their assets need to cover only about 80 percent of their total liabilities. Chicago’s pension funds remained at that level or above until the early 2000s. Then they began to drop precipitously. The main cause was the dot-com recession of 2001 and 2002 and the Great Recession that began in 2007—both of which caused the funds’ earnings on investments to plummet. In addition, city contributions through taxpayers, which were calculated using a fixed formula that didn’t reflect increases in liabilities, failed to keep pace; and for several years, Daley didn’t put even the tax money that the city did collect back into the funds. At the same time, the pension bill itself increased due to a greater life span among retirees and benefit increases granted to public employees. By the end of 2012, the assets in the city’s funds amounted to just 36 percent of their liabilities. There is more and you can read the balance of it here. Chicago is a broken city and there is no strategy or campaign pledge that goes deep enough to fix the city.