Trigger
Happy: Will Turkey’s Downing of Russian Jet Backfire on NATO?
November 25, 2015
Turkey must
have been eager to shoot down a Russian aircraft. Even going by the Turkish account
of what happened, as illustrated by a Turkish map of the route of the Russian
plane, it would only briefly have been in Turkish airspace as it crossed a
piece of Turkish territory that projects into Syria.
Why would
Turkey do this? Probably because Ankara has become increasingly furious,
since Russian air strikes started in Syria on 30 September, that Russian
jets were routinely invading its airspace. The Turkish
government also knows that its policy since 2011 of getting rid
of President Bashar al-Assad has failed and that it has a diminishing
influence in events in Syria as Russia, the US, France and possibly, in
the near future, Britain increase their military involvement in Syria.
Specific
events on the 550 mile-long Syrian-Kurdish role may also have played a
role. This year Turkey has seen the Syrian Kurds, whom it denounces as
terrorists as bad as Isis, take control of half of the frontier and
threaten to move west of the Euphrates. More recently, Syrian army units
backed by Russian air strikes have been attacking towards the other end of
the border near where the
Russian plane came down and the pilots were
killed.
Nato
countries will give some rhetorical support to Turkey as a Nato member, but
many will not be dismissive in private of President Vladimir Putin’s angry
accusation that Turkey is the accomplice of terrorists. Turkey’s support
for the Syrian armed opposition, including extreme groups like Jabhat
al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, has been notorious over the last three years. Its
relations with Isis are murky, but it has been credibly accused of allowing the
self-declared Islamic State to sell oil through Turkey.
Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is in a strong domestic position because of
his sweeping parliamentary election victory on 1 November. But he has seen
what appeared to be a strong Turkish position in the Middle East in
2011 deteriorate year by year as leaders and movements he supported, such
as President Morsi in Egypt and the opposition in Syria, suffer defeats.
At the same
time, it is damaging for Turkey to have bad relations with Russia and Iran,
two powerful neighbours close to its borders. Leaders of Nato countries
will want to prevent further Russian-Turkish hostilities, so they can look
for Russian cooperation in attacking Isis and ending the Syrian conflict.
[5]
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/world/trigger-happy-will-turkeys-downing-russian-jet-backfire-nato
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/patrick-cockburn
[2] http://www.counterpunch.org/
[3] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0802150276/counterpunchmaga
[4] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Trigger Happy: Will Turkey’s Downing of Russian Jet Backfire on NATO?
[5] http://www.alternet.org/
[6] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
[2] http://www.counterpunch.org/
[3] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0802150276/counterpunchmaga
[4] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Trigger Happy: Will Turkey’s Downing of Russian Jet Backfire on NATO?
[5] http://www.alternet.org/
[6] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/33621-dont-blame-edward-snowden-for-the-paris-attacks
At a recent national-security conference, C.I.A. director John Brennan was ready to point to the terrorist attacks in France in order to attack Snowden. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
Don't
Blame Edward Snowden for the Paris Attacks
By Amy Davidson, The New
Yorker
21 November 15
Soon
after John Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, took the
stage on Wednesday, at the annual conference of the Overseas Security Advisory
Council, in Washington, D.C., he suggested that members of the audience might
be aware of certain remarks he’d made in the aftermath of ISIS’s assault
on Paris last Friday. But he also thought that they might have
figured him wrong: “I invite you to look at what I said as opposed to what has
been unfortunately misrepresented in some quarters, by my friends in the fourth
estate.”
What
had been reported was that Brennan had blamed Edward Snowden, at least in part,
for the terrorist attack in Paris. What he said came in response to Josh Rogin,
of Bloomberg View, who, on Monday, at a forum held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies,
had asked about the blame for the attack. It was, of course, “primarily at the
feet of the terrorists,” but nonetheless Rogin asked, “How was this allowed to
happen? . . . What went wrong?” Brennan replied, “In the past several years,
because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over
the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there
have been some policy and legal and other actions that are taken that make our
ability collectively, internationally, to find these terrorists much more
challenging.” It is hard to tell the difference between that sentiment and
the headline assessment that he had blamed Snowden—Brennan was not being
particularly coy in his reference to “unauthorized disclosures.” As
the Times wrote in an editorial, on Wednesday, “What he calls
‘hand-wringing’ was the sustained national outrage following the 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden, a
former National Security Agency contractor, that the agency was using
provisions of the Patriot Act to secretly collect information on millions of
Americans’ phone records.” James Woolsey, Brennan’s predecessor, was even more
intemperate after the Paris attacks, saying that Snowden had “blood on his
hands.” On Thursday, Woolsey added that Snowden should be “hanged.”
And,
at the OSAC conference, Brennan was just as ready to point to Paris in
order to attack Snowden. He used, as an opening, the plight of Syrian refugees.
When the moderator asked him about the debate over whether it would be safe for
America to let in refugees—in the context of the shameful statements that Ted Cruz and others have made in recent days—Brennan noted that “we
are a country that prides itself on its tradition of welcoming people from
around the world,” and that we have “to make sure that we are able to look at
individuals who are coming into this country.” (Of course, we do: Syrian
refugees currently undergo a vetting process that can take two years, which is
one reason that we’ve admitted fewer than two thousand of them since their
country’s civil war began.) But, as Brennan went on, it became harder to tell
whether he was talking about the vetting of refugees or the monitoring of
communities and private communications in this country. There has to be
a “balance between individual rights and civil liberties and what is the
appropriate role for government in that domain”—digital communications—“to
protect its citizenry.” Otherwise, “we’re going to face a world of hurt in
the future.”
A
reporter from the Guardian then asked Brennan, “What
impact do you think Edward Snowden’s revelations had on everything you just
talked about and that debate on privacy?” Brennan’s answer was, again,
unmistakable. “I think any unauthorized disclosures that are made by
individuals who have dishonored the oath of office, that they raised their hand
and attested to, undermines this nation’s security,” Brennan said. He was
interrupted by applause, then added, “And heroizing such individuals I
find to be unfathomable as far as what it is that this country
needs to be able to do, again in order to keep itself safe.”
Perhaps
it would help Brennan to fathom the unfathomable if he remembers that,
before the Snowden revelations, James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence,
raised his hand and, in a Senate hearing, gave false testimony about whether
the N.S.A. collected information on Americans. (The Times also
pointed to false statements that Brennan made in connection with the
Senate Report on Torture and civilian deaths from drone strikes.) Or he
might read the opinion by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals declaring the phone-records program illegal, or the opinion from the
D.C. Circuit, issued just two weeks ago, that it also likely violated the
Constitution. He might try to explain why intelligence agencies chose broad
searches that could, as one judge noted, drag in and mark as suspicious anyone
who had called someone who called someone who called to order from the same pizza place as someone who had
caught the N.S.A.’s eye, when it had legal options, like individualized
warrants, available to it. In terms of the mass collection of phone records, in
particular, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which was convened
by the Administration after the revelations,found that the program wasn’t even effective, writing in its
report, “We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the
United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference
in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.” It also found that the
program broke the law. This assessment makes it a
particularly “disgraceful low,” as the Times put it,
for Brennan to connect Snowden to the deaths of more than a hundred and twenty
people in Paris. Since Snowden, the program has been modified, but only
slightly, and in ways that may actually increase its efficiency by making it
more targeted and excluding more of the noise of ordinary communications—large
bureaucracies, which the N.S.A. has become, do not tend to make judicious
choices in the absence of scrutiny.
Brennan
didn’t mention a particular leak that would have made a difference in Paris,
beyond implying that there were things the public did not know or was not
expert enough to remark upon. The argument, insofar as he and others have
articulated it, seems to be that terrorists are becoming more cautious and more
interested in encryption—something that was already true—and that Americans
regard their own intelligence agencies as less trustworthy. But Snowden’s revelations
would not have had that effect if he hadn’t also revealed breaches of trust.
One of his most important discoveries was that the N.S.A. had
crafted a body of classified legal findings to justify broader
surveillance, often by interpreting words in real laws—like “target,”
“incidental,” “relevant,” “minimize,” and even “terrorist”—in ways that were
far from their dictionary meanings and at times, frankly, absurd. In other
words, Snowden revealed the existence of secret laws, which are something a free
country is not supposed to have.
Brennan’s
rhetoric was also clearly directed at an ongoing fight between the government
and the tech companies, about whether there should be a limit on private
encryption capabilities. The government wants to be able to read everything if
it needs to; private companies point out that being asked to make systems more
vulnerable creates its own security risks, quite apart from the civil-liberties
hazards: if the government can get in more easily, so can hackers who want to steal
the private passwords of, say, a power-plant manager, or a C.I.A. director.
This is an important debate. The problem that Snowden exposed is that the
government took the authority it had to do one thing and then used it to do
much broader things. That has a cost in trust that comes due the next time the
government asks for more powers. The way to address that distrust is to
recognize that the behavior was bad, and that the public,
Congress, and the courts do have something to say—and that the intelligence
community will listen. There has to be good faith on both sides, and there has
to be informed consent.
Intelligence
agencies have an extraordinarily difficult job, and in some ways it is unfair
that, as Josh Rogin’s question to Brennan suggests, the impulse, when some
terrorists shoot up a concert hall, is to ask why those agencies failed. But
the claim that everything would have been better if only the public had never
learned that the N.S.A. was breaking the law, and if it had been allowed to
keep doing so, is not a serious argument worthy of a mature democracy. The rush
to blame Snowden suggests that Brennan and his colleagues have not learned the
correct lesson from his revelations. If they have been in any way disempowered,
the responsibility lies with them, for breaking the rules, not with the person
who caught them doing it—who saw something and said something.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
