Tag: Obama

attered by weeks of criticism about surveillance abuses, President Obama has embarked on a reassurance offensive. The spy programs have been used narrowly, he said on PBS’s “Charlie Rose” program on Monday, and have been effective in stopping several terror plots.

He promised to press for more declassification of intelligence work, and he said he would energize a dormant civil liberties board. Despite all the existing oversight, he said, “the public may not fully know, and that can make the public kind of nervous, right?”

The president is right that many Americans are nervous about what they have recently learned, and his assurances will have to go much further to allay those fears. His promises lacked specificity, and some of his descriptions of domestic spy work verged on the misleading.

Mr. Obama said that no phone or Internet conversation can be monitored without a warrant from the court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Asked whether that process should be more transparent, Mr. Obama responded with this astonishing statement: “It is transparent, that’s why we set up the FISA court.”

Perhaps the court is transparent to him and the intelligence agencies, but it is utterly opaque to the public. All decisions by the court are top secret. The court has refused to release its interpretations of federal law, even in summary form, and without identifying details.

If the president is serious about declassifying some secrets, he should have said he would start with the court. And at the top of the list should be its opinion that broadened the Patriot Act to allow the collection of every phone record, a power that surprised even the Republican lawmakers who wrote the act. The opinion is the subject of a federal lawsuit, and the Obama administration has fought its release. Mr. Obama should publicly support a bill, sponsored by a bipartisan group of at least eight senators, that would require the court’s opinions to be made public.

The president acknowledged that the vast collection of call records “has enormous potential for abuse,” but he promised that it wasn’t being used to spy on innocent citizens. But, if that’s the case, why not promise to end the mass collection, acquiring records only in cases of suspicion? It doesn’t seem particularly effective as it is. At a hearing on Tuesday, Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency, said that 90 percent of the foiled terror plots were found through requests for Internet traffic, not through the call records.

Mr. Obama didn’t mention that he waited three years to name a full slate to the civil liberties board; Republicans delayed it by another year. The board is now up and running, but its recommendations won’t mean anything unless the president is willing to break free of the secretive intelligence world and stand for real transparency.

– New York Times

LAST ATTEMPTS by the Obama administration to start peace talks with the Afghan Taliban foundered in part because the process was not, as U.S. officials frequently claimed, “Afghan-owned and Afghan-led.” In fact, the Taliban refused to negotiate with the government of Hamid Karzai, insisting its only purpose was to arrange the complete withdrawal from the country of all U.S. and allied forces. Mr. Karzai himself strenuously objected to a plan to open a Taliban office in Qatar in late 2011, claiming he had been excluded from talks about it, and the initiative soon collapsed.

Consequently, it was modestly encouraging that the administration’s latest effort to begin a peace process, announced Tuesday, was less at odds with its slogan. An administration briefer said he expected that an initial meeting between U.S. and Taliban officials this week in Doha, where a Taliban office will open, would be “followed within days” by a meeting of the Taliban high commission and Mr. Karzai’s High Peace Council. In Kabul, the Afghan president endorsed the process, though he stressed that the talks should move “immediately” to Afghanistan, a demand that is unlikely to be met.

Direct negotiations between the Afghan government and insurgents would be a step toward a political settlement to the war. But President Obama and several of his aides were right to underline the fragility of the process. For it to succeed, the Taliban leadership will have to abandon its goal of eliminating Afghanistan’s post-2001 government and constitution and definitively break with al-Qaeda; Pakistan’s military and intelligence elite will have to conclude that such a settlement is in their interest.

There’s next to no evidence that the Taliban is prepared to undertake such dramatic reversals of its ideologies and alliances, or that it is close to being defeated on the battlefield. So the challenge for the United States will be to avoid allowing the talks to devolve into a U.S.-Taliban discussion about an abandonment of the NATO commitment to continue supporting the Afghan military with trainers and advisers after 2014. As it is, early talks may be diverted into bargaining over a prisoner exchange that would free Taliban commanders from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for a captive U.S. soldier.

U.S. officials have said they remain committed to the strategic partnership signed with Mr. Karzai’s government last year. But Mr. Obama has postponed any decision about the size or composition of a U.S. stay-on force. In a briefing Tuesday, one senior official offered a less-than-firm response to a question about the Taliban’s demand for a full withdrawal: “To the extent the talks contribute to diminishing violence and eliminating international terrorists in and around Afghanistan, that will have an impact on decisions regarding our future presence.”

Perhaps such words are meant to encourage Taliban concessions. But if there is to be a genuine political settlement in Afghanistan, the United States must drive home a different message: that it will do what is necessary to prevent a Taliban military victory for the indefinite future. If the insurgents believe they can wait out — or negotiate out — the United States, they will never engage seriously with the Karzai government.

– Washington Post

New Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll found that a majority of Americans are untroubled by revelations about the National Security Agency’s dragnet collection of the phone records of millions of citizens, without any individual suspicion and regardless of any connection to a counterterrorism investigation.

Perhaps the lack of a broader sense of alarm is not all that surprising when President Obama, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, and intelligence officials insist that such surveillance is crucial to the nation’s antiterrorism efforts.

But Americans should not be fooled by political leaders putting forward a false choice. The issue is not whether the government should vigorously pursue terrorists. The question is whether the security goals can be achieved by less-intrusive or sweeping means, without trampling on democratic freedoms and basic rights. Far too little has been said on this question by the White House or Congress in their defense of the N.S.A.’s dragnet.

The surreptitious collection of “metadata” — every bit of information about every phone call except the word-by-word content of conversations — fundamentally alters the relationship between individuals and their government.

Tracking whom Americans are calling, for how long they speak, and from where, can reveal deeply personal information about an individual. Using such data, the government can discover intimate details about a person’s lifestyle and beliefs — political leanings and associations, medical issues, sexual orientation, habits of religious worship, and even marital infidelities. Daniel Solove, a professor at George Washington University Law School and a privacy expert, likens this program to a Seurat painting. A single dot may seem like no big deal, but many together create a nuanced portrait.

The effect is to undermine constitutional principles of personal privacy and freedom from constant government monitoring. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on Tuesday, challenging the program’s constitutionality, and it was right to do so.

The government’s capacity to build extensive, secret digital dossiers on such a mass scale is totally at odds with the vision and intention of the nation’s framers who crafted the Fourth Amendment precisely to outlaw indiscriminate searches that cast a wide net to see what can be caught. It also attacks First Amendment values of free speech and association.

In a democracy, people are entitled to know what techniques are being used by the government to spy on them, how the records are being held and for how long, who will have access to them, and the safeguards in place to prevent abuse. Only then can they evaluate official claims that the correct balance between fighting terrorism and preserving individual liberty has been struck, and decide if they are willing to accept diminished privacy and liberty. If Americans have been slow to recognize the dangerous overreach of the N.S.A.’s phone surveillance, it is largely because they have scant information to judge the government’s conduct.

Even if most Americans trust President Obama not to abuse their personal data, no one knows who will occupy the White House or lead intelligence operations in the future. The government’s capacity to assemble, keep and share information on its citizens has grown exponentially since the days when J. Edgar Hoover, as director of the F.B.I., collected files on political leaders and activists to enhance his own power and chill dissent. Protections against different abuses in this digital age of genuine terrorist threats need to catch up.

– New York Times

The Obama administration has made a useful modification to its Iran policy by lifting sanctions on companies that want to sell cellphones, laptops, encryption software and other similar technology to ordinary Iranians. This should improve the ability of Iranians to circumvent their government’s unrelenting crackdown on dissenting opinion and communicate with each other and the outside world without reprisal.

The decision, announced by the State and Treasury Departments on Thursday, is a departure from the administration’s general approach, which over four years has been to increase sanctions in an effort to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear program.

The Obama administration has definitely not repudiated that approach. Along with the technology decision, it also announced sanctions on an Iranian company, a government agency and nearly 60 individuals accused of human rights abuses related to political repression. On Friday, for the first time, eight Iranian petrochemical companies were sanctioned; penalties were also levied against a company based in Cyprus and Ukraine that is accused of trying to evade Iran-related sanctions.

More sanctions are likely. But the decision to permit the export of personal communications technology suggests a welcome willingness on Washington’s part to reduce the burden of the sanctions on ordinary Iranians. The directive specifically bans government or commercial sales.

So far, the sanctions have failed to force Iran to make a deal on its nuclear program, which is advancing steadily toward a bomb-making capability. But the sanctions have badly damaged the country’s economy, and ordinary Iranians, not just the government, are paying a price.

The technology decision, which comes two weeks before Iran’s presidential election, inserts the United States into Iranian politics on the side of political freedom in a way the Obama administration did not during the last election in 2009. That election was denounced as fraudulent by the Iranian opposition, which, using various social networking services and Web sites, staged months of protests that, in turn, triggered a vicious government crackdown.

Just what impact the technology decision might have on the presidential election on June 14 is unclear. Most opposition leaders remain under house arrest, imprisoned or otherwise silenced; only eight candidates, handpicked by the state’s Guardian Council, have been allowed to run for president.

There could be delays in exporting hardware, but software updates and access to instant messaging and other online programs could be made available quickly.

This should have been done sooner. Tensions beween Iran and the United States — over Syria and terrorism, as well as the nuclear program — will almost certainly get worse, barring some unexpected new policies in Tehran. But America will be in a stronger position if it is seen as standing with the Iranian people.

– New York Times

•Hopes of an America-aided African growth fade after four years

The election of Barack Obama as the first African-American to be trusted with the presidency of the most powerful country in the world was expected to expand the opportunities open to black Americans and spur real development in Africa. Prior to the emergence of the Obama phenomenon, it was considered nigh impossible that a white-dominated United States of America would elect a disadvantaged minority to the presidency. His election was thus regarded as an opportunity of a lifetime to break other barriers that have held down the blacks and other minorities in the country.

The President and his wife, Michelle, are expected to embark on the first real African tour from June 26 to July 3, during which he is expected to meet with key government figures, private sector leaders, the youth and civil society groups. Curiously, Nigeria, being the most populous country on the African continent, and Kenya, Obama’s ancestral home, despite being sub-regional leaders in East and West Africa have been left out of his itinerary. This is generating ripples in diplomatic circles.

It is disappointing that almost five years after Obama assumed office as American President, nothing has changed in the country’s African policy. If anything, his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, proved to be better strategic partners of the African continent than Obama. Under Clinton, the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Susan Rice, said: “We have redefined the U.S. relationship with Africa. We have moved beyond Cold War competition, superpower exploitation, and patron-client mentality to establishing a partnership with Africa based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” Indeed, Clinton was seen by many as a true friend of the continent. In one of his visits, he apologised for the West and America’s infliction on pain on the continent in the past.

When he was succeeded by George W. Bush, a Republican, it was expected that the enthusiasm would wane. It did not. While not expanding the horizon, Bush introduced and funded policies to mobilise support for measures to combat the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and that mass killer, malaria.

Despite promising in 2009 that America would be a strong partner of the African people, there has been no fresh initiative to support this. On a visit to Ghana that lasted only a few hours, Obama characteristically raised hopes of a better day but soon went to sleep.

The discussion on why he left Nigeria out of the coming visit is unnecessary. As President of America, he has the right to decide where to visit and when. A visit to Nigeria would not necessarily aid the drive for prosperity and even stability in the country. The previous trip to Ghana did not yield any fruit for that country.

What we demand of the Obama administration is to live up to the promise of his election in 2008 by leaving a legacy that would enhance the place of the African Americans in the political sphere. He needs to identify and appoint more African Americans to positions of responsibility to emphasise their capacity to handle serious affairs of state. President Obama has thus far given the impression that he lacks the courage to do this.

Second, he needs to come up with concrete policy initiatives that would promote the growth and development of the African continent. Many researchers have suggested that Africa is a sleeping giant that could wake up soon. China is already positioning herself as a friend and strategic partner. It is in the interest of the United States to move if it is not to lose a golden opportunity to book a space on this moving jet.

While Kenya and Nigeria suggest themselves as natural allies who could help American interest as well as propel the development of the continent faster than Tanzania and Senegal that Obama has chosen to visit, what should be of concern to all persons of goodwill is the enunciation of clear policies to promote genuine partnership