This is your Moment of Clarity #235: The Pentagon's funding of memory erasing pills raising a difficult moral question. Do you think anyone at the Pentagon thinks so?

Keep fighting,

Lee

By Cora Currier, ProPublica

The long-troubled military trials at Guantanamo Bay were hit by revelations earlier this year that a secret censor had the ability to cut off courtroom proceedings, and that there were listening devices disguised as smoke detectors in attorney-client meeting rooms.

Now, another potential instance of compromised confidentiality at the military commissions has emerged: Defense attorneys say somebody has accessed their email and servers.

"Defense emails have ended up being provided to the prosecution, material has disappeared off the defense server, and sometimes reappeared, in different formats, or with different names," said Rick Kammen, a lawyer for Abd Al Rahim Al Nashiri, who is accused of plotting the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole.

The lawyers say they don't know exactly who is accessing their communications. And it's not yet clear whether the emails were intentionally grabbed or were scooped up mistakenly due to technical or procedural errors.

Either way, the lawyers are concerned.

In response to the apparent breaches, the military's chief defense counsel ordered defense lawyers to stop using email for privileged or confidential communications.

"This follows on the heels of the seizure of over 500,000 e-mail containing attorney-client privileged communications as well as the loss of significant amount of defense work-product contained in shared folders," Commander Walter Ruiz, one of the military defense counsels, said in an email.

The search of thousands of emails was revealed by the prosecution, attorneys say.

"The searches on their face looked to be fairly benign," Kammen said.  The defense emails turned up when prosecutors requested a search of prosecutors' own emails. "The people who were doing the searches ended up providing all manner of defense material as well." It's not clear what department, agency, or office did the search.  

It is not possible to corroborate the attorneys' accounts because the full documents are undergoing security review, and are not yet public.

The Pentagon declined to comment, citing the ongoing trial.  

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The Pentagon has deployed about 100 troops to Niger to conduct unmanned reconnaissance flights over Mali and will share intelligence with French forces fighting al Qaeda-affiliated militants.

Reuters:

Obama, in a letter to congressional leaders, said the last 40 of the approximately 100 military personnel had arrived in Niger on Wednesday and were "deployed with weapons for the purpose of providing their own force protection and security."

"This deployment will provide support for intelligence collection and will also facilitate intelligence sharing with French forces conducting operations in Mali, and with other partners in the region," the president said.

The United States and Niger signed a Status of Forces Agreement last month that governs the presence of American troops in the country, paving the way for sending unarmed drones and military personnel.

A Pentagon official said U.S. Africa Command, which handles military ties with Africa, had sent the unmanned planes to Niger "to support a range of regional security missions and engagements with partner nations."

The U.S. already has drones and surveillance aircraft stationed at several points around Africa. Niger granted permission for U.S. drones "to be stationed on its territory to improve intelligence on al Qaeda-linked Islamist fighters in northern Mali and the wider Sahara, a senior Niger government source said in January."

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Rioters stormed the U.S. embassy in Yemen on Thursday morning, breaching the wall of the embassy and setting fire to vehicles as security forces reportedly opened fire. Security forces managed to gain control of the compound in Sanaa by using the live ammunition, tear gas and water cannons, injuring several people, although protests continued outside the embassy walls. Protests have broken out throughout the Muslim world over an amateur U.S. film that depicts the prophet Muhammed as a fraud. In Cairo, protests continued for the third day on Thursday outside the U.S. embassy, with at least 10 people injured in overnight clashes. In Libya, the U.S. ambassador and three others were killed on Tuesday by riots over the film outside the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

U.S. officials say that it is "too early" to say who carried out the fatal attack in Benghazi, but members of both the House and Senate intelligence committees believe that it may well have been the work of al-Qaeda:

The attack in Libya that also killed three other U.S. personnel bore the hallmarks of al-Qaeda and may have been carried out by the group’s North Africa affiliate to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S., said Michigan Republican Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House intelligence committee.

“It certainly appears to me the significance of this date was important,” Rogers told CNN yesterday. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who heads the Senate intelligence panel, also told the network the attack may have been premeditated.

It may have been the work of al-Qaeda because “the weapons were somewhat sophisticated, and they blew a hole in the building and started a big fire, and that’s how the ambassador died, in a fire,” Feinstein said.

There is also a possibility that the attack was "planned," and that the protest was either a ruse, or the attackers took advantage of the protest as a distraction from their activities :

The chaotic scene was described by senior Obama administration officials, Libyan government officials and witnesses. Details about the attack were still emerging late Wednesday. Key facts remain unclear, particularly how Stevens died and how his body wound up at a Benghazi hospital.

Even as evidence was being assembled, the early indications were that the assault had been planned and the attackers had cannily taken advantage of the protest at the consulate.

“Was this a spontaneous act of violence, was this capitalizing on the opportunity posed by [a protest], or was this separate and apart from al-Qaeda?” asked Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the House intelligence committee. “Any of those are possible,” Schiff said, but accounts of the attack and the firepower employed “indicate something more than a spontaneous protest.”

In response, the Pentagon has ordered two warships to the Libyan coast which carry Tomahawk cruise missiles, although they have no specific mission at this time.

A plan heavily favored by Republican leaders to cut 8 percent of the Pentagon’s budget effective January 2nd now has them scrambling to undo their own handiwork. The effects the military will undergo as a result of the 10-year, $600 billion round of cuts remains unclear, but Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and other legislators have said that the belt-tightening measures, which will rein the defense budget back down to its 2007 level, would force the military to make choices that will effect local communities. “The soft underbelly that I’m trying to exploit is, ‘What does this mean to your state?’” Graham told reporters.

With the first round of cuts starting with the 2013 budget -- which begins on October 1st -- Republicans are warning that the defense cuts could be disastrous. Leading Democrats don't seem to be showing them any mercy, either.

Via:

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, has given no indication that he will undo the cuts without a broader deficit reduction deal that would include revenue increases — and no such negotiations are under way.

Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said Republicans were given the choice during the debt ceiling negotiations between automatic defense cuts or automatic tax increases in the event that the so-called supercommittee failed to reach a deficit deal. They chose the defense cuts.

“The consistent pattern here is they have chosen to defend special interest tax breaks over defense spending,” Mr. Van Hollen said. “They made that choice.”

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Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is echoing the same dire warnings as the Republicans, especially since the administration has already agreed that the Pentagon will contribute around $450 billion in deficit reduction over the next decade. "Tack on $600 billion more and the impact will be debilitating," Pentagon officials say:

Via:

Congress has already been warned that the automatic spending cuts early next year — especially from the Pentagon — could help trigger another recession.

But the $1.2 trillion ax to defense and domestic spending might trigger something else: an election loss.
...
One study showed that deep defense cuts would cost 1 million jobs nationwide — hitting heavily in California, Virginia and Florida.

Lindsay Graham of South Carolina has been warning his state, which thrives on Pentagon spending, of the impending defense cuts. It seems he may be weakening when it comes to raising taxes...

Via:

For now, Democrats and Republicans are waiting for the other side to blink. And the pressure may be working. Mr. Graham said the sentiment for raising revenues by closing tax loopholes or imposing higher fees on items like federal oil leases is expanding in his party.

Asked about the “no new taxes” pledge almost all Republicans have signed, he shrugged: “I’ve crossed the Rubicon on that.”

There have been at least 40 alleged members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous arrested during the past year. In an interview with the National Post, one of the group's last remaining leaders tips us off to the group's next planned action.

Christopher Doyon, aka "Commander X," whose name is public because he's been indicted for hacking a California county government website after government officials forcibly removed a homeless encampment from courthouse steps. Doyon faces 15 years in prison for that action. For the interview, he met with a reporter and photographer from the Post in Canada where he is a now a fugitive from the FBI.

At the end of the interview, Doyon makes a whopper of a claim, make of it what you will:

Q. What’s next for Anonymous?
A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems.

Every classified database is a bit of a stretch for me to wrap my brain around. I can't even begin to imagine how many such databases our nation uses. But remember that Bradley Manning released a few hundred thousand emails from just one such database.

The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defence who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don’t run anything anymore. It’s the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that. The fact he had the 250,000 cables that were released effectively cut the power of the U.S. State Department in half. The Afghan war diaries and the Iran war diaries effectively cut the political clout of the U.S. Department of Defence in half. All because of one guy who had enough balls to slip a CD in an envelope and mail it to somebody.

Now people are leaking to Anonymous and they’re not coming to us with this document or that document or a CD, they’re coming to us with keys to the kingdom, they’re giving us the passwords and usernames to whole secure databases that we now have free reign over. … The world needs to be concerned.

Now this claim, that the Anons next action could be the result of an inside job is quite plausible, and again, recall Bradley Manning. As we saw with Manning's Cablegate, just that one database created quite the stir for the U.S. government. Even with the "keys" to but a few of these databases would make Anonymous quite the force to be reckoned with, despite their diminished membership.

Approximately, a staggering 53 percent of U.S. tax dollars fund the military industrial complex.

It may not sound like much: A video blogger bought a toy helicopter.

But the blogger is 25-year-old Tim Pool — an internationally known journalist who attracts tens of thousands of viewers to his live-stream broadcasts from Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, DC, LA and other cities. (His feeds and archival footage are also aired on mainstream networks such as NBC.) He and his partners hope that the toy chopper — the $300 Parrot AR Drone — will be one step toward a citizen-driven alternative to mainstream news.
...

Having thoroughly figured out how to cover giant events from ground level, they are now exploring ultra-cheap alternatives to the hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollar news choppers used for aerial reporting of big events like protest marches and police clashes. In the process, the video bloggers are discovering both how far low-cost consumer technology has come and how much farther it needs to go.

Like the HD video cameras now included in the livestreamers’ cellphones, aerial surveillance drones have progressed from ultra-expensive professional gear to impulse-buy items. What was once in the Pentagon budget is now at Toys “R” Us – in a simple form, at least.

“The AR Drone is the first toy that came out,” said Sam Shapiro, a programmer from Brooklyn who is helping Pool put together the airborne news network. He says he doesn't identify with the Occupy protesters, but does support their goals.

Shapiro got involved after watching the arrests of over 700 Occupy demonstrators at the October 1 Brooklyn Bridge march. “While I can’t be involved in stuff like that, I don’t want to see my friends being beaten up because they don’t have tactical knowledge of what’s going on,” he said

More on this at Wired.