To Get a Truce, Be Ready to Escalate

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/18/opinion/to-get-a-truce-be-ready-to-escalate.html?_r=0


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine
Date: Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 8:15 AM
Subject: re: To Get a Truce, Be Ready to Escalate
To: "letters@nytimes.com"


To the Editor:
   "For every complex problem" H. L. Mencken warned us,  "there is a
solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." Who could oppose President
Obama acting as a catalyst to birth a free, stable Syria?  But a
catalyst--by definition--emerges unchanged from the transformation
that it assists. And therein lies the rub. General Clark proposes that
we should be prepared to escalate (i.e. kill and bleed) to drive
Bashar al-Assad to the negotiating table. That might indeed be the
best course we can plot. But to pretend that we could sail through
unchanged ourselves is dishonest.
Barry Haskell Levine

Find more of my (largely one-sided) correspondence with the New York Times at:
htt://forgottencenter.blogspot.com/
Or write a letter of your own. Democracy only works when we engage in
the issues of our day

To Get a Truce, Be Ready to Escalate
By WESLEY K. CLARK

Published: June 17, 2013


FOLLOWING the Obama administration’s conclusion last week that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have used chemical weapons, the talk in Washington is all about military assistance toSyria’s rebels. That aid is necessary, but observers have overlooked a crucial point: the American decision to give rebels lethal aid, though it might eventually contribute to the overthrow of Mr. Assad, opens an opportunity for concerted diplomacy to end the bloodshed.


President Obama’s decision to supply small arms and ammunition to the rebels is a step, possibly just the first, toward direct American intervention. It raises risks for all parties, and especially for Mr. Assad, who knows that he cannot prevail, even with Russian and Iranian military aid, if the United States becomes fully engaged. We used a similar strategy against the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo in 1999, where I commanded American forces, and showed that NATO had the resolve to escalate. With a brutal dictator like Mr. Assad, only the knowledge that he cannot prevail will force him to negotiate an exit.

Mr. Obama has sought a diplomatic solution for some time, but has been reluctant to take steps that might lead to military intervention. Rightly so. No one wants more death and disruption in the Middle East, nor another open-ended military commitment — and certainly not the Pentagon. Despite the humanitarian tragedy in Syria, most of the conditions that have allowed previous interventions to succeed are absent. Legal authorization from the United Nations is unlikely, given opposition from Russia and China. Syria’s rebels are fragmented politically and militarily; some are religious extremists with professed ties to Al Qaeda.

What would follow Mr. Assad’s departure is unclear, which is why he has managed to retain support from Shiites and other minorities, besides his own Alawite sect, who fear the consequences of a Sunni-led takeover. Iranian agents, along with their allies from Hezbollah, are involved, as are the Russians, who have a naval port at Tartus.

But inaction is not an option. The bloodletting — more than 90,000 are estimated to have died so far — has deepened the region’s longstanding Shiite-Sunni struggle. It has become a proxy war, with Sunni Arab states backed by the West, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, challenging Iran’s reach to the Mediterranean via a proxy, Hezbollah, and Syria.

The risk of going beyond lethal aid to establishing a no-fly zone to keep Mr. Assad’s planes grounded or safe zones to protect refugees — options under consideration in Washington — is that we would find it hard to pull back if our side began losing. Given the rebels’ major recent setbacks, can we rule out using air power or sending in ground troops?

Yet the sum total of risks — higher oil prices, a widening war — also provide Syria (and its patrons, Iran and Russia) a motive to negotiate. If Mr. Obama can convince Iran that he is serious, and is ready to back up his new promise of aid with additional forces, Iran and Russia will know the risks: Mr. Assad could lose his regime, and most likely his life. Higher oil prices would cost China, which has blocked anti-Syrian initiatives at the United Nations, dearly.

In 1999 in Kosovo, the West used force as leverage for diplomacy. There, a limited NATO air campaign began after diplomatic talks failed to halt Serbian ethnic cleansing. The bombing lasted 72 days, and plans for a ground invasion of Serbia were under way when Mr. Milosevic finally bowed to the inevitable.

Of course, the Middle East is not the Balkans, the Russian government is more confident now than it was then, and Americans are tired after a decade of war. But there are similarities: The Kosovars, too, bickered among themselves, and some were said to be terrorists. The Russians backed Serbia — and at one point suggested that their naval fleet in the Black Sea would intervene. Like Mr. Assad, Mr. Milosevic was rational and calculating — he, too, wanted to survive.

Mr. Assad knows that Mr. Obama can be surprisingly resolute, as in his approval of drone strikes and the military operation to kill Osama bin Laden. While the United States begins to supply the rebels, there is a crucial opening for talks. Russia or China could recalculate and help lead Syria to a real peace process, as Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, a former Russian prime minister, did in Kosovo in 1999. Iran could emerge from a truce with Hezbollah’s power in Lebanon (and its strong links to Iran) intact.

The formula for diplomacy is clear: a cease-fire agreement; a United Nations presence; departure of foreign fighters; disarmament of Syrian fighters; international supervision of Syria’s military; a peaceful exit for Mr. Assad, his family and key supporters; a transitional government; and plans for a new Syria.

The conflict, and the diplomacy needed to end it, are likely to play out simultaneously. All parties will be recalculating their options and risks, so any assurance Mr. Obama gives Americans that he will limit our engagement would reduce the chances of success. This is a nerve-racking time, but the consequences of inaction are too high. Working together, America, Russia and China can halt Syria’s agony and the slide toward wider conflict. Mr. Obama’s decision might be the catalyst to get that done.

Wesley K. Clark, a retired Army general and former NATO supreme allied commander for Europe, is a senior fellow at the Burkle Center for International Relations at the University of California, Los Angeles.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/opinion/keller-living-with-the-surveillance-state.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 8:08 AM
Subject: re: Living With the Surveillance State
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   Bill Keller would keep us focused on threats in some vague future, while assuring us that intrusive surveillance in the present is tolerable because "evidence of data malfeasance" is only reported  "[f]rom time to time".  

     Attentive readers will find two flaws with this: 1-we can't know how tiny a fraction of actual data malfeasance is escaping government suppression of secret programs. and 2-Mr. Keller himself has himself been a key player in this, quashing the story of widespread criminal wiretapping in direct violation of the FISA statute for over a year at Dick Cheney's behest.

    That FISA statute was enacted in response to an earlier Imperial presidency. Failing to enforce that law is killing our republic.

Barry Haskell Levine

Find more of my (largely one-sided) correspondence with the New York Times at:
htt://forgottencenter.blogspot.com/
Or write a letter of your own. Democracy only works when we engage in
the issues of our day

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Living With the Surveillance State

By BILL KELLER

Published: June 16, 2013 

MY colleague Thomas Friedman’s levelheaded take on the National Security Agency eavesdropping uproar needs no boost from me. Hiscolumn soared to the top of the “most e-mailed” list and gathered a huge and mostly thoughtful galaxy of reader comments. Judging from the latest opinion polling, it also reflected the prevailing mood of the electorate. It reflected mine. But this is a discussion worth prolonging, with vigilant attention to real dangers answering overblown rhetoric about theoretical ones.

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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Bill Keller

For Op-Ed, follow@nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow@andyrNYT.

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R.O. Blechman

Tom’s important point was that the gravest threat to our civil liberties is not the N.S.A. but another 9/11-scale catastrophe that could leave a panicky public willing to ratchet up the security state, even beyond the war-on-terror excesses that followed the last big attack. Reluctantly, he concludes that a well-regulated program to use technology in defense of liberty — even if it gives us the creeps — is a price we pay to avoid a much higher price, the shutdown of the world’s most open society. Hold onto that qualifier: “well regulated.”

The N.S.A. data-mining is part of something much larger. On many fronts, we are adjusting to life in a surveillance state, relinquishing bits of privacy in exchange for the promise of other rewards. We have a vague feeling of uneasiness about these transactions, but it rarely translates into serious thinking about where we set the limits.

Exhibit A: In last Thursday’s Times Joseph Goldsteinreported that local law enforcement agencies, “largely under the radar,” are amassing their own DNA databanks, and they often do not play by the rules laid down for the databases compiled by the F.B.I. and state crime labs. As a society, we have accepted DNA evidence as a reliable tool both for bringing the guilty to justice and for exonerating the wrongly accused. But do we want police agencies to have complete license — say, to sample our DNA surreptitiously, or to collect DNA from people not accused of any wrongdoing, or to share our most private biological information? Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project and a member of the New York State Commission on Forensic Science, says regulators have been slow to respond to what he calls rogue databanks. And a recent Supreme Court ruling that defined DNA-gathering as a legitimate police practice comparable to fingerprinting is likely to encourage more freelancing. Scheck says his fear is that misuse will arouse public fears of government overreach and discredit one of the most valuable tools in our justice system. “If you ask the American people, do you support using DNA to catch criminals and exonerate the innocent, everybody says yes,” Scheck told me. “If you ask, do you trust the government to have your DNA, everybody says no.”

Exhibit B: Nothing quite says Big Brother like closed-circuit TV. In Orwell’s Britain, which is probably the democratic world’s leading practitioner of CCTV monitoring, the omnipresent pole-mounted cameras are being supplemented in some jurisdictions by wearable, night-vision cop-cams that police use to record every drunken driver, domestic violence call and restive crowd they encounter. New York last year joined with Microsoft to introduce the eerily named Domain Awareness System, which connects 3,000 CCTV cameras (and license-plate scanners and radiation detectors) around the city and allows police to cross-reference databases of stolen cars, wanted criminals and suspected terrorists. Fans of TV thrillers like “Homeland,” “24” and the British series “MI-5” (guilty, guilty and guilty) have come to think of the omnipresent camera as a crime-fighting godsend. But who watches the watchers? Announcing the New York system, the city assured us that no one would be monitored because of race, religion, citizenship status, political affiliation, etc., to which one skeptic replied, “But we’ve heard that one before.”

Exhibit C: Congress has told the F.A.A. to set rules for the use of spy drones in American air space by 2015. It is easy to imagine the value of this next frontier in surveillance: monitoring forest fires, chasing armed fugitives, search-and-rescue operations. Predator drones already patrol our Southern border for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. Indeed, border surveillance may be critical in persuading Congress to pass immigration reform that would extend our precious liberty to millions living in the shadows. I for one would count that a fair trade. But where does it stop? Scientific American editorializedin March: “Privacy advocates rightly worry that drones, equipped with high-resolution video cameras, infrared detectors and even facial-recognition software, will let snoops into realms that have long been considered private.” Like your backyard. Or, with the sort of thermal imaging used to catch the Boston bombing fugitive hiding under a boat tarp, your bedroom.

And then there is the Internet. We seem pretty much at peace, verging on complacent, about the exploitation of our data for commercial, medical and scientific purposes — as trivial as the advertising algorithm that pitches us camping gear because we searched the Web for wilderness travel, as valuable as the digital record-sharing that makes sure all our doctors know what meds we’re on.

In an online debate about the N.S.A. eavesdropping story the other day, Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, pointed out that we have grown comfortable with the Internal Revenue Service knowing our finances, employees of government hospitals knowing our medical histories, and public-school teachers knowing the abilities and personalities of our children.

“The information vacuumed up by the N.S.A. was already available to faceless bureaucrats in phone and Internet companies — not government employees but strangers just the same,” Posner added. “Many people write as though we make some great sacrifice by disclosing private information to others, but it is in fact simply the way that we obtain services we want — whether the market services of doctors, insurance companies, Internet service providers, employers, therapists and the rest or the nonmarket services of the government like welfare and security.”

Privacy advocates will retort that we surrender this information wittingly, but in reality most of us just let it slip away. We don’t pay much attention to privacy settings or the “terms of service” fine print. Our two most common passwords are “password” and “123456.”

From time to time we get worrisome evidence of data malfeasance, such as the last big revelation of N.S.A. eavesdropping, in 2005, which disclosed that the agency was tapping Americans without the legal nicety of a warrant, or the more recent I.R.S. targeting of right-wing political groups. But in most cases the advantages of intrusive technology are tangible and the abuses are largely potential. Edward Snowden’s leaks about N.S.A. data-mining have, so far, not included evidence of any specific abuse.

The danger, it seems to me, is not surveillance per se. We have already decided, most of us, that life on the grid entails a certain amount of intrusion. Nor is the danger secrecy, which, as Posner notes, “is ubiquitous in a range of uncontroversial settings,” a promise the government makes to protect “taxpayers, inventors, whistle-blowers, informers, hospital patients, foreign diplomats, entrepreneurs, contractors, data suppliers and many others.”

The danger is the absence of rigorous, independent regulation and vigilant oversight to keep potential abuses of power from becoming a real menace to our freedom. The founders created a system of checks and balances, but the safeguards have not kept up with technology. Instead, we have an executive branch in a leak-hunting frenzy, a Congress that treats oversight as a form of partisan combat, a political climate that has made “regulation” an expletive and a public that feels a generalized, impotent uneasiness. I don’t think we’re on a slippery slope to a police state, but I think if we are too complacent about our civil liberties we could wake up one day and find them gone — not in a flash of nuclear terror but in a gradual, incremental surrender
.

Earlier Denials Put Intelligence Chief in Awkward Position

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/us/nsa-disclosures-put-awkward-light-on-official-statements.html

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 8:59 AM
Subject: re: Earlier Denials Put Intelligence Chief in Awkward Position
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

     Dear Mr. President,

     Once again, history presents you the occasion for a great speech. You get to explain that we the people are sovereign here, that we need to know what is done in  our name and that we should never live in fear of our own public servants. But that would require replacing James Clapper and prosecuting him for lying to Congress.

   Or, you could concede that you are a hostage of your own Intelligence Community and that our republic is a sham.

    Either way, it will be a memorable speech. The world is listening.

    Godspeed,

     America

Joint Chiefs’ Answers on Sex Crimes Dismay Senators

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/us/politics/joint-chiefs-testimony-on-sexual-assault-dismays-senators.html

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 11:52 AM
Subject: re: Joint Chiefs’ Answers on Sex Crimes Dismay Senators
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   On July 26 1948, president Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981. From that date forward, the armed forces of the United States were colorblind.  Decades ahead of the larger American society, minorities in our armed forces enjoyed the same rights as anyone else in the services. Any officer unwilling to enforce this policy was invited to resign his commission immediately.

   President Obama as Commander in Chief of our armed forces has it in his power to ensure that rape of our sons and daughters in the services is treated as a crime and not as a youthful indiscretion.  To do so he would not have to buck public opinion as Truman did; we're way out ahead of him on this one. He would merely have to show spine enough to embrace Truman's precedent. I'm not holding my breath.

Barry Haskell Levine

Find more of my (largely one-sided) correspondence with the New York Times at:
htt://forgottencenter.blogspot.com/
Or write a letter of your own. Democracy only works when we engage in
the issues of our day

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/us/politics/joint-chiefs-testimony-on-sexual-assault-dismays-senators.html

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 9:23 AM
Subject: re: Joint Chiefs’ Answers on Sex Crimes Dismay Senators
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

     The culture of our military has always been different from that of our society at large. As Senator Levin summarized "discipline is the heart of the military culture".  But where these two cultures conflict, we don't have to extemporize. Civilian control of the  military has been our established principal for two hundred years.

   So let the Joint Chiefs of Staff bluster.  We the People are determined that our sons and daughters in the military should enjoy legal protection from sex crimes no less than they would out in the larger world.  And that means due process or prosecutors and courts, not the old boys' handshake.

Barry Haskell Levine

Find more of my (largely one-sided) correspondence with the New York Times at:
htt://forgottencenter.blogspot.com/
Or write a letter of your own. Democracy only works when we engage in
the issues of our day

Joint Chiefs’ Answers on Sex Crimes Dismay Senators

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert, center, chief of naval operations, testified with other military leaders Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

Published: June 4, 2013HIS COLLEAGUES ON THE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE QUESTIONED ONE MILITARY LEADER AFTER ANOTHER ON TUESDAY ABOUT WHAT THEY WERE DOING TO ADDRESS THE PROBLEM OF SEXUAL ASSAULT IN THE MILITARY, AND THEN ASSESSED THEIR RESPONSES: “STUNNINGLY BAD.”

Multimedia

Senator McCaskill on Military Assaults

In particular, Mr. Blunt chided Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert, the chief of naval operations, for displaying scant knowledge of how military allies of the United States had dealt with sexual assault in their ranks, and for thanking Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, for “the tip” that other countries had grappled with the issue.

“Has anybody who works for you been asking this?” Mr. Blunt, Republican of Missouri, asked with clear exasperation.

In a rare appearance together, a majority of the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — as well as the commandant of the Coast Guard and other military officials — testified before the committee about how the military should approach the problem as Congress prepares to vote on several measures that would significantly change military policy.

“Discipline is the heart of the military culture, and trust is its soul,” said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and the chairman of the committee. “The plague of sexual assault erodes both the heart and the soul.”

Senators from both parties pressed the leaders, at times using strong language, about why, decades after the full integration of women into the military, the problem seems to have worsened. Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, recalled meeting with a woman whose daughter was considering entering the military if Mr. McCain, a former naval aviator, could offer his “unqualified support” of the choice. “I could not,” he said.

Over hours of testimony, each officer expressed remorse. “I took my eye off the ball in the commands I had,” said Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

But they collectively resisted some of the more robust changes that have been proposed. “I recommend a measured approach,” said Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff.

The hearing followed several weeks of reports of sexual assault in the armed forces and aPentagon survey that estimated that 26,000 people in the armed forces were sexually assaulted last year, up from 19,000 in 2010. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, who on Tuesday called sexual assault in the military “beyond the pale,” said the Senate would move to address the problem in the coming defense bill. “Something has to be done about it,” he said.

Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, has introduced the most sweeping proposal, which would give military prosecutors, rather than commanders, the power to decide which sexual assault cases to try. She has said the measure is principally intended to increase the number of people who report crimes without fear of retaliation and professionalize the process, but it has been largely rejected by military brass.

“Making commanders less responsible and less accountable will not work,” General Odierno said.

Among other measures that the committee is considering are those that would limit a military commander’s ability to change or dismiss a court-martial conviction for sexual assault, require dismissal or a dishonorable discharge for anyone in the military convicted of rape or sexual assault, and expand to all service branches an Air Force program that provides a special counsel to victims of sexual assault.

This week, the House Armed Services Committee is expected to pass provisions aimed at combating sexual assault within its Defense Authorization Act; the full House is scheduled to consider that bill next week. The provisions include one similar to the Senate measure that would limit a commander’s ability to overturn sentences and another that would require minimum sentences for sexual assault convictions.

Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, is particularly interested in the ability of commanders to overturn sexual assault convictions, and repeatedly questioned why a service record could mitigate such a conviction. Ms. McCaskill called a letter from Lt. Gen. Craig A. Franklin explaining his reversal of a fighter pilot’s conviction “astoundingly ignorant.”

Ms. Gillibrand also chided the leaders for sometimes understating the gravity of some of the crimes before them, noting that one commander had told a victim that he believed her assailant had not “acted like a gentleman” but had not committed a crime. “Not every commander can distinguish between a slap on the ass and a rape,” Ms. Gillibrand said.

Several advocates for victims of sexual assault also testified, in some cases offering chilling testimony about women and men who had been sexually abused and then lost their careers by seeking justice. “The military does not create rapists,” said Anu Bhagwati, who served as a Marine captain and is executive director of the Service Women’s Action Network. But, she said, it does “condone sexual violence.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/opinion/keller-secrets-and-leaks.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 10:56 AM
Subject: re: Secrets and Leaks
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  Bill Keller wants fervently to believe that the Press as a privileged institution is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. To do so, he flouts two hundred years of legal reasoning.  In case after case, the SCOTUS has found that "freedom of the press" means that Americans' expression should be protected in print (or on-screen) just as it is when spoken.

    Mr. Keller is himself "exhibit A" to the court's wisdom. It was he who personally quashed news of illegal wiretapping at the behest of his patrons in the Cheney/Bush administration until after the elections of '04.  No doubt he would like to wield such power legitimately. But it would be at the expense of the People's sovereignty.

Barry Haskell Levine

Secrets and Leaks

By BILL KELLER

Published: June 2, 2013 157 Comments

CONGRESSMAN Ted Poe and I are not what you’d call kindred spirits. He’s a shrink-the-government-then-drown-it-in-the-bathtub Texas Republican, a global warming denier, an N.R.A. 100-percenter, a devout foe of abortion rights. He comes from a political tribe that regards the mainstream media as a hive of Bolsheviks. Yet Poe and I see eye to eye on one thing. He is the main House sponsor of a bill intended to protect journalists from being compelled to give up information about their government sources, even when the sources have divulged matters of national security.

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Nicholas Blechman

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For Poe and quite a few like-minded conservatives, a law to shield confidential sources is not about pampering the press. It is about maintaining a check on a big government that has been known to abuse its powers.

“We cannot allow our government to arbitrarily abolish the First Amendment in the name of ‘state secrets,’ ” Poesaid last month, responding to the Justice Department’s fishing expedition into the phone records of The Associated Press.

Thanks in part to the outrage over two aggressive government leak hunts — the A.P. case and the electronic tracking of a Fox News correspondent — there is now a flicker of hope that Poe’s bill will become law. President Obama, as part of his professed intention of softening the security state he inherited and enhanced, has revived the idea of a federal shield law. Scandals at the Internal Revenue Service and a few other federal agencies have reminded everyone of the need for a probing press. And that Fox News case has given the conservative wing of our national press a more personal stake in the matter. (The Fox anchor Megyn Kelly sounds like Daniel Ellsberg these days.)

A federal shield law has been a goal of news organizations for decades. Such legislation has passed the House twice with large bipartisan majorities, and in 2009 a version won the approval of the Senate Judiciary Committee — only to stall after the hemorrhage of classified documents from the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

A lot of people I respect, including some eminent journalists, have questioned the idea that Congress should exempt reporters from the civic duty to give evidence. Anthony Lewis, the Times correspondent, columnist and self-taught legal scholar who died this year, worried six years ago that giving reporters an inviolable right to protect sources might make it hard for someone who had been ruined by false allegations to find his accuser and get justice. Walter Pincus, the veteran Washington Post investigator who has himself been a target of leak-hunting subpoenas, argues that a shield law would make the press too beholden to Congress and subject to a worrisome degree of government regulation. He insists that the right to protect sources already exists in law. (The Supreme Court, in its 1972 ruling in Branzburg v. Hayes, failed to find such a right in the Constitution, but a few federal judges have found it in common law. The fact that every state in the country except Wyoming offers a measure of protection for confidential sources has persuaded some judges that this is society’s will, even if Congress has not yet said so.)

Pincus and other critics complain that a sanctimonious press is quick to wrap itself in the First Amendment but often slow to acknowledge that some secrets are worth keeping. A closer look at the two cases currently fueling media indignation suggests they have a point.

In the first case, The Associated Press disclosed last year that the C.I.A. had thwarted a terrorist plot to blow up an airliner. The initial scoop uncorked a gusher of sensitive details as other news organizations raced to advance the story and the Obama administration tried to supply some self-serving context. So we now know this: A C.I.A.-Saudi-British operation planted a mole inside the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen. The agent volunteered to blow up an airliner using a new bomb designed to get past airport security. Instead, he turned over the device to his handlers.

At the C.I.A.’s request, The A.P. held its story for several days — apparently so the agency could use information from the infiltrator to locate and kill a top Qaeda official — and then the story spilled into many headlines. It’s hard to imagine the mole, having failed to blow up an airliner, was ever going to be welcomed back into the bosom of Al Qaeda. But the administration argues that the disclosure of his role at least put the terrorists on high alert and made future infiltration more difficult. In its hunt for the leakers, the F.B.I. secretly studied two-months’ worth of calls on phones used by 100 A.P. reporters.

In the second case, James Rosen of Fox News reported in 2009 that, according to the C.I.A.’s sources in Pyongyang, North Korea was contemplating another nuclear test. Not earthshaking news, but the feds feared this story would tip off North Korean leaders that we have the ability to intercept their conversations. So they seized Rosen’s e-mail records and traced the movements of his electronic State Department visitor’s badge to zero in on his source. The government kept this surveillance a secret on the grounds that Rosen was “an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator” in violation of the Espionage Act. Rosen was not indicted, but the language revealed an ominous mind-set.

I think the Justice Department had ample reason to find these particular leaks troubling. At the very least, both put enemies on guard. In neither case was the leak hunt launched to silence a whistle-blower or hide official malfeasance; on the contrary, both leaks revealed intelligence agencies doing their jobs. And in pursuing the leakers, the Justice Department was doing its.

The question is whether the leaks justified such an extensive invasion of journalists’ activities, with no advance notice and no independent oversight. That is exactly the kind of dispute a shield law is meant to resolve. Before compelling a journalist to testify or surrender records, the government would be obliged to meet the journalist’s lawyers in front of a judge. The prosecutors would have to make a good case that they had no other way to find the leak, that they would not cast their net so widely as to intrude on other reporting operations, and that identifying the leak was more important than the public value of the story. It’s not clear whether a shield law would have thwarted the government’s surveillance of The A.P. or Rosen. But it would have taken away the prosecutors’ power to decide unilaterally.

“Judges are not always wise,” Anthony Lewis wrote in 2007, endorsing the kind of compromise contained in Poe’s measure. “But in our system they are the ones we trust to weigh acutely conflicting interests.”

Sadly, the current Senate version of the shield law, which has been laboriously massaged to accommodate both media companies and secrecy hawks, has an intolerably large loophole for cases in which the government claims national security is at risk. That would leave the government with a free hand not only in the A.P. and Rosen cases, but in genuinely notorious revelations such as warrantless eavesdropping, secret prisons and torture, which would not have been disclosed without confidential sources.

To be sure, nothing Congress is likely to pass will satisfy First Amendment absolutists. Some judges will side with the government reflexively. We may occasionally see a principled journalist going to jail rather than obey a court order to divulge a source.

But I would settle for a law like Poe’s that at least requires government secrecy to be weighed against our need to know what the government is up to and that puts that judgment in the hands of someone other than our chief prosecutor. Even an imperfect shield law would restore a little balance in the perpetual struggle between necessary secrets and democratic accountability.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/us/politics/goals-to-fulfill-and-foes-to-foil-keep-holder-going.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 8:59 AM
Subject: re: Seeking a Fresh Start, Holder Finds a Fresh Set of Troubles
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

   When president Obama won the White House on a platform of "CHANGE", many of us anticipated that he would "take care that these Laws be faithfully executed" as the Constitution provides in his job description. Four years later, no one has been prosecuted or extradited for torture.  No matter how he strains to change the topic, failure to do that job won't go away.

  As the nation's top law-enforcement officer, AG Holder can't be blameless here. If it is not in his power to bring the prosecutions, it is still within his power to resign. The rest is whining.

Barry  Haskell Levine

Find more of my (largely one-sided) correspondence with the New York Times at:
htt://forgottencenter.blogspot.com/
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Seeking a Fresh Start, Holder Finds a Fresh Set of Troubles

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is said to have earned President Obama’s appreciation for his integrity and policy battles.

By PETER BAKER, CHARLIE SAVAGE and JONATHAN WEISMAN

Published: June 1, 2013 141 CommentsWASHINGTON — At the end of last year, with the election decided and the Obama administration in office for four more years, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. considered stepping down. He decided against it, in part because before he left he wanted to move beyond the disputes that had characterized his tenure, accomplish some of the goals he had set for the job and leave on his own terms.

If Mr. Holder really thought he could escape controversy, the last few weeks have reinforced how inescapable controversy has become for the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. A furor over tactics in leak investigations, including secretly obtaining phone logs for reporters at The Associated Press and Fox News, has again engulfed the attorney general in allegations, investigations and calls for resignation.

Over the course of four and a half years, no other member of President Obama’s cabinet has been at the center of so many polarizing episodes or the target of so much criticism. While the White House publicly backed Mr. Holder as he tried to smooth over the latest uproar amid new speculation about his future, some in the West Wing privately tell associates they wish he would step down, viewing him as politically maladroit. But the latest attacks may stiffen the administration’s resistance in the near term to a change for fear of emboldening critics.

The White House views the attacks on Mr. Holder as a “political agenda” and “would not hasten the departure of someone who’s competent and runs the department and is a friend because there’s a drumbeat,” said William M. Daley, a former White House chief of staff under Mr. Obama. “Whoever Barack Obama puts in there, these people will try to drumbeat him out of there, no matter what.”

But that does not mitigate the frustration of some presidential aides. “The White House is apoplectic about him, and has been for a long time,” said a Democratic former government official who did not want to be identified while talking about friends.

Some advisers to Mr. Obama believe that Mr. Holder does not manage or foresee problems, the former official said. “How hard would it be to anticipate that The A.P. would be unhappy?” the former official said. “And then they haven’t defended their position.”

Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, said through a spokesman Saturday that Mr. Holder “has the intellect, experience and integrity to efficiently run the Department of Justice and not get distracted by the partisans who seem more interested in launching political attacks than cooperating with him to protect the security and constitutional rights of the American people.”

Mr. Holder declined through a spokeswoman to be interviewed for this article.

His saving grace through years of controversies has been the friendship of two women close to Mr. Obama. Valerie Jarrett, the president’s senior adviser, grew close to Mr. Holder during the 2008 campaign and, as one former Obama adviser put it, “was always his protector” inside the White House. Michelle Obama has become good friends with Mr. Holder’s wife, Sharon Malone, and the two couples go out to dinner from time to time.

The president is also said to appreciate Mr. Holder’s integrity and his positions during some of the big debates over antiterrorism policies and other volatile issues. The White House also points to his department’s successful defense of the president’s health care program before the Supreme Court and prosecutions in high-profile terrorism, financial crimes and corporate wrongdoing cases.

Moreover, advisers said, Mr. Obama after a full term in office is less likely to worry about political flare-ups that will eventually die down. “It’s very easy sitting in that town to overestimate the longevity and impact of these issues,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s political strategist, said from Chicago. “I don’t think Americans are sitting around their kitchen tables clamoring for Holder’s head because of the A.P. or Fox subpoenas. It’s not water-cooler discussion.”

But it is more fuel for Republican critics on Capitol Hill, who have had repeated clashes with Mr. Holder and his Justice Department.

Under his leadership, the department scaled back a voter-intimidation lawsuit from the Bush era involving the New Black Panther Party, a decision that conservatives used to portray the black-nationalist fringe group as a political ally of the Obama administration. He reopened criminal investigations into the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogations of terrorism suspects and tried to prosecute five men accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks in civilian courts rather than military tribunals, which provoked accusations that he was soft on terrorism. And he abandoned the legal defense of a law barring federal recognition of same-sex marriage that social conservatives viewed as a bulwark against attacks on the traditional family.

The party-line furor peaked with hearings into Operation Fast and Furious, a botched gun-trafficking investigation by federal agents based in Arizona. When Mr. Holder, after Mr. Obama invoked executive privilege, refused to provide department e-mails relating to the fallout after the operation ended, the House voted to hold him in contempt of Congress. A report by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general essentially exonerated Mr. Holder of accusations that he had sanctioned risky investigative tactics that were used in the case, but that did not satisfy Republican lawmakers who are still pressing for a court order for the e-mails.

The eruption last month over the investigations into news leaks added to the burdens. Representative Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican and longtime critic of Mr. Holder, said the trouble facing the attorney general was different now.

“There is a coalescing of the disappointments,” Mr. Gowdy said. “The longer you stay in any office, the tougher it gets.”

More so than in the past, Democrats have joined in on the criticism. “I am very leery about any investigative tool that involves even the appearance of an investigation directed at journalists,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Yet Democrats remain reluctant about furthering what they see as a partisan campaign against the attorney general. “There is a set of recurring patterns on the Republican side trying to grind him into the dust, so we’re a bit dubious of their complaints,” said Representative Peter Welch of Vermont.

Friends said Mr. Holder did not look forward to leaving the government because he did not particularly enjoy private practice. Mr. Holder grew up in the Justice Department and has said wistfully that he recognizes that this will be his final position there. As the first black attorney general, he also cares deeply about civil rights law and, according to the friends, wants to stay on the job long enough to participate in this month’s 50th anniversary commemoration of the integration of the University of Alabama by two black students, one of them his sister-in-law, who died in 2005.

And, in Mr. Holder’s view, last year’s presidential re-election was a cathartic event that would cool some of the passions of the first term and give him a chance to make progress on a policy agenda, like revising lengthy prison sentences for some nonviolent and older inmates.

Though several factors drove Mr. Holder to stay, Tracy Schmaler, his spokeswoman until she stepped down in March, said one of them “was to get some distance from the controversies of the first term, to continue to work on the issues that matter to him into a second administration, and still accomplish what he would like to do so that he could leave on his own terms.”

Mr. Holder seems to have wavered on how long that would be; some friends said they had heard this fall, others after the 2014 elections. But he signaled that he would move ahead on his remaining priorities, including voting rights, gun-safety measures and sentencing changes in the criminal justice system. “Too many people go to too many prisons for far too long for no good law enforcement reason,” he said in a speech in April.

To that agenda, he has added tightening Justice Department rules for leak investigations to increase protections for journalists. He spent recent days meeting with editors, reporters and media lawyers to explore changes, making clear that he believed the department had gone too far.

But he is also clearly irritated that the issue has revived the first-term disputes. At a contentious May 15 hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, he gave almost as much as he got.

Confronted by one of his Republican tormentors, Representative Darrell Issa of California, the attorney general said the lawmaker’s behavior was “too consistent with the way in which you conduct yourself as a member of Congress. It’s unacceptable, and it’s shameful.”

When another Republican, Representative J. Randy Forbes of Virginia, pressed him on Operation Fast and Furious, Mr. Holder retorted: “Hindsight is always 20/20. It’s always accurate. And it’s an easy thing to stand up or sit up where you are and do that. I’ve got to run an agency of 116,000 people.”

And after Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, suggested that the Justice Department was culpable in the Boston Marathon bombings because the F.B.I. had failed to fully pursue a tip from the Russian government, Mr. Holder responded assertively.

“You don’t have access to the F.B.I. files,” he said, later adding: “I know what the FBI did. You cannot know what I know.”