The Past is Prologue

“There is a rank due to the United States, among nations, which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity; it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.” — George Washington, Fifth Annual Message — 1793

Today is the 14^th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and the failed attack on the Capitol. Most everyone over the age of twenty can remember where they were and what they were doing at 8:45 a.m. (EDST) on a clear Tuesday morning, an American Airlines Boeing 767 loaded with 20,000 gallons of jet fuel crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.

It was a mere 18 minutes after the first plane hit, a second Boeing 767–United Airlines Flight 175–appeared out of the sky, turned sharply toward the World Trade Center and sliced into the south tower near the 60th floor. The collision caused a massive explosion that showered burning debris over surrounding buildings and the streets below. America was under attack!

As millions watched the events unfolding in New York, American Airlines Flight 77 circled over downtown Washington, D.C., and slammed into the west side of the Pentagon military headquarters at 9:45 a.m. Jet fuel from the Boeing 757 caused a devastating inferno that led to the structural collapse of a portion of the giant concrete building. All told, 125 military personnel and civilians were killed in the Pentagon, along with all 64 people aboard the airliner.

Less than 15 minutes after the terrorists struck the nerve center of the U.S. military, the horror in New York took a catastrophic turn for the worse when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed in a massive cloud of dust and smoke. The structural steel of the skyscraper, built to withstand winds in excess of 200 miles per hour and a large conventional fire, could not withstand the tremendous heat generated by the burning jet fuel. At 10:30 a.m., the other Trade Center tower collapsed. Close to 3,000 people died in the World Trade Center and its vicinity, including a staggering 343 firefighters and paramedics, 23 New York City police officers and 37 Port Authority police officers who were struggling to complete an evacuation of the buildings and save the office workers trapped on higher floors. Only six people in the World Trade Center towers at the time of their collapse survived. Almost 10,000 others were treated for injuries, many severe.

Meanwhile, a fourth California-bound plane–United Flight 93–was hijacked about 40 minutes after leaving Newark International Airport in New Jersey. Because the plane had been delayed in taking off, passengers on board learned of events in New York and Washington via cell phone and Airfone calls to the ground. Knowing that the aircraft was not returning to an airport as the hijackers claimed, a group of passengers and flight attendants planned an insurrection. One of the passengers, Thomas Burnett Jr., told his wife over the phone that “I know we’re all going to die. There’s three of us who are going to do something about it. I love you, honey.” Another passenger–Todd Beamer–was heard saying “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll” over an open line. Sandy Bradshaw, a flight attendant, called her husband and explained that she had slipped into a galley and was filling pitchers with boiling water. Her last words to him were “Everyone’s running to first class. I’ve got to go. Bye.”

The passengers fought the four hijackers and are suspected to have attacked the cockpit with a fire extinguisher. The plane then flipped over and sped toward the ground at upwards of 500 miles per hour, crashing in a rural field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:10 a.m. All 45 people aboard were killed. Its intended target is not known, but theories include the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland or one of several nuclear power plants along the eastern seaboard.

The attackers were Islamic terrorists from Saudi Arabia and several other Arab nations. Reportedly financed by Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist organization, they were allegedly acting in retaliation for America’s support of Israel, its involvement in the Persian Gulf War and its continued military presence in the Middle East. Some of the terrorists had lived in the United States for more than a year and had taken flying lessons at American commercial flight schools. Others had slipped into the country in the months before September 11 and acted as the “muscle” in the operation. The 19 terrorists easily smuggled box-cutters and knives through security at three East Coast airports and boarded four flights bound for California, chosen because the planes were loaded with fuel for the long transcontinental journey. Soon after takeoff, the terrorists commandeered the four planes and took the controls, transforming ordinary commuter jets into guided missiles.

The man behind these attacks was Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden the son of a Saudi billionaire. Osama bin Laden was a radical Islamic terrorist who began his terrorist career fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan with the assistance of our CIA and U.S. Weapons. One would imagine he would have been grateful to the U.S., but that was not the case. As soon as the Soviets left Afghanistan he turned on his benefactors with a vengeance. He wanted the U.S. out of Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Muslim world.

Our CIA and other intelligence agencies knew who and what bin Laden was. There was even a small group within the CIA charged with tracking bin Ladens moves, tactics and alliances.

On February 26, 1993, a truck bomb was detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The 1,336 pounds urea nitrate–hydrogen gas enhanced device was intended to send the North Tower (Tower 1) crashing into the South Tower (Tower 2), bringing both towers down and killing tens of thousands of people. It failed to do so but killed six people and injured more than a thousand. The mastermind behind this attack was bin Laden’s second in command, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This was the opening shot by bin Laden and al Qaida against the United States. Soon after there were attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killing hundreds. Then there was the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. During the 2000 presidential run up bin Laden and his al Qaida crew attacked the USS Cole (a U.S. Warship) in the Yemeni port of Aden. 17 American sailors were killed, and 39 were injured.

All of these attacks were masterminded by bin Laden and al Qaida yet the U.S. intelligence and criminal agencies were not reading the signs of things to come or ignoring them. We were going about our business as usual more concerned with hanging chads and domestic issues. The signs were there. The United States was in denial.

After the 9/11 attacks President George W. Bush issued orders to send Special Forces into Afghanistan to search for bin Laden with no success. Soon after the U.S. invaded Iraq following faulty intelligence that Sadam Hussein processed weapons of mass destruction. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars were long a bloody giving the U.S. thousands of causalities.

As these wars wound down under the Obama administration a new threat began to surface. This threat came from ISIS (or ISIL). ISIS is a Salafi jihadist extremist militant group and self-proclaimed Islamic state and caliphate, which is led by and mainly composed of Sunni Arabs from Iraq and Syria. They are much more brutal than al Qaida and have no problem killing Muslims who oppose them. Also, ISIS is supported by Iran, the leading sponsor of terrorism in the world.

While the Obama administration forces his deal with Iran on the United States against the will of the majority of Americans ISIS continues its march towards a caliphate through Syria millions of refugees are being created. These refugees are flooding into Europe creating a mass problem. Germany's plan to take in 500,000 Middle East refugees per year is being hailed as humanitarian around the world, but uneasy critics inside the European power fear the huge influx could not only skew the nation’s demographics in a hurry, but could also include terrorists hiding among the war weary masses.

The United States is making plans to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees in the coming budget year, a significant increase from the 1,500 migrants that have been cleared to resettle in the U.S. since civil war broke out in the Middle Eastern country more than four years ago, the White House said Thursday.

There are various explanations for the hundreds of thousands flocking to Europe, but the ultimate responsibility for the crisis is the Western refusal to commit itself to two issues: a solution to the strife and Islamist control of a considerable part of Iraq, and ending the slaughter in the civil war in Syria. That war has so far led to about 250,000 deaths and millions being displaced inside and outside Syria. The whole world is threatened by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (IS) and the self-styled caliphate that organization has established.

The main problem in the area is the contending Arab and Muslim political and religious groups, yet the refusal of the West, particularly the U.S., to play a role is crucial. In 2003 a major mistake was made, during the Bush administration, by Paul Bremer when he disbanded the Iraqi army and the Baath party in Iraq, leading to unemployment, resentment, and the empowerment of a corrupt and inefficient Shiite minority.

But even more important has been the overly cautious foreign policy of Obama. Somewhat surprisingly, it was Hillary Clinton, after she was secretary of state, who remarked that Obama's phrase "Don't do stupid stuff" is not an organizing principle for foreign policy. It is true that no policy can solve all problems. However, it is now apparent that the initial Obama mistake was the failure to build up or to aid a credible fighting force of those originally opposing the Assad regime in Syria.

Many in the U.S. applauded Obama's refusal to commit ground troops of any kind to the region. Yet the total withdrawal of the Obama administration from Iraq and refusal to render sufficient help to Syria, as well as the refusal of European countries to intervene directly after the Arab Spring, meant losing the opportunity for moderate elements to emerge in the Arab world.

As a result, the countries of the EU had neither the will to participate nor the willingness to secure their borders sufficiently to prevent smuggling of people, some of whom were terrorists, from North Africa and the Middle East. Those countries, except Germany, are today hesitating — partly for economic reasons, but even more for political and security reasons — to absorb the mass of migrants.

Those migrants will exacerbate conditions in and among European countries. First, the migration has caused friction among the European countries because of the difficulty in agreeing on a quota system for claims for asylum. It will put pressure on economic resources as far as welfare and benefits are concerned. It will almost inevitably increase the strength of the anti-immigrant, far-right parties, with unfortunate consequences in both national and global politics.

Moreover, the danger of the migration influx has already become apparent. Media reports have shown migrants in Bulgaria, and some on a train in France, shouting "Allahu Akbar" and obscene language in struggles with police. Migrants in a camp near Milan have resorted to violence, destroying traffic signals and attacking shops in riots over "poor living conditions." The Greek island of Lesbos, six miles from the Turkish shore, has been invaded by thousands and become a war zone, with frequent violence and riots. Mytilene, the main town of Lesbos, has become a public urinal.

Despite media coverage that plasters images of women and children on this centuries-old invasion, it is worthy to note that, per the United Nations, 72% of these “Mediterranean sea arrivals” are single men. (“Mediterranean sea arrivals” being innocuous terminology for Islamic conquest.)

Breitbart also reports: “They are young. They are fit. They clearly know what they want. Yes, there are families. Plenty with young children. But if you stand and take a rough count it is hard not to come to the conclusion that young men are in the overwhelming majority.”

Without a doubt, young Muslim males often pose a special kind of threat. However Muslim women present a risk, as well, because traveling with them and their children is a totalitarian ideology that is incompatible with Western values. And that is the problem.

When many in the West look at photographs of Muslims arriving en masse to the southern shores of Europe they fail to see the hatred that lies in the hearts of many of these imports from Islamic nations – hatred, I might add, for us, our values, and our way of life. Hatred we have seen played out here and across Europe, from creeping Sharia to overt acts of terror and everything in between.

And so, not unexpectedly, this mash up of Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa are causing an outbreak of violence across Europe, along with a hefty dose of entitlement as these conquerors make demands.

The U.S. role cannot be misunderstood. Candidate Barack Obama on July 14, 2008 called for the phased redeployment of combat troops that he had long advocated, which he thought was needed for long-term success in Iraq and the security interests of the United States. He pledged that, if elected president, on his first day in office, he would give the military a new mission: to end the war. On January 21, 2009, his first full day in office, he did as he promised by asking the U.S. military leadership to plan for a responsible military drawdown from Iraq.

U.S. policy must take account of present realities: the threat of Islamic terrorism and militancy, essentially in the case of Iran but more immediately with the Islamic State. ISIS, originally an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq, had been weakened after 2006 but became stronger with the emergence of Baghdadi as leader in 2010 and his merger of the various jihadist groups in 2013. This happened during the Obama administration, which failed to appreciate this development and did little to help destroy the caliphate that IS established. With control over some 80,000 square miles and a population of 10 million, and a fighting force of more than 30,000, ISIS has created a brutal state based on Islamic law and made notorious by its cruelty, public beheadings, full veils for women, and special taxes imposed on non-Muslims.

So on Thursday, September 10, 2015 after Republican leaders spent months colluding with the Democrats, the Washington cartel ensured that our children and grandchildren will live in a world with a nuclear Iran. This is to be Obama’s legacy as bin Laden was Clinton’s legacy and Iraq and Afghanistan is Bush’s legacy. None of these legacies are based on solid intelligence and an understanding of the radical Islamic mind or goals. Iran, under its current leadership (and no doubt its future leadership) will not live up to is agreements. Obama will be gone to Hawaii and his Presidential Library will be full of propaganda but Iran and ISIS will remain for the next man or woman to occupy the White House.

Addressing the Republican’s role in Thursday’s outcome, Mark Levin had this to say:

“And I want Mitch McConnell to know something. You will have blood on your hands for the rest of your life and so will the Republican Party. You have taken a once great party, that stood on principle, that stood against slavery, that stood against segregation, that stood against the Nazis and the fascists, that stood against the communists, led by great men…And you, Mr. McConnell, you’re a quisling. You’re a little man. You’re a no nothing.

And this is on your head. You could have stopped this simply by following the Constitution. You claim to support the Constitution. You don’t support it any more than Barack Obama…You violated the Constitution. You’re no better than him. As a matter of fact, you’re worse than him. We know what he is. And you pretend to be something that you’re not.

The wrath of the nation should fall on your head, Mr. McConnell. And all the fools, all the lemmings who follow you over the cliff in the Republican party in the Senate.

And these fools will be all over TV this evening. They’ll be all over TV tomorrow and over the week-end, lamenting Barack Obama, lamenting what the Senate Democrats did, lamenting how dangerous this all is when they created the circumstances for this.

They have a majority. A majority in the Senate means everything. All they had to do was say this is a treaty in every respect. We’re going to treat it as a treaty…Obama can treat it as a cucumber. He can do whatever he wants. We’re going to treat it as a treaty. And you need 67 out of 100 votes, or 2/3rds of the senators present to get it ratified.

McConnell didn’t want to do it.

McConnell didn’t want to stand up, this man of very few brains; very inarticulate. This is a man who wouldn’t even have an Assistant Managers job at McDonalds. Look how high he’s gone in the Byzantine world of the United States Senate.

And so we now not only have a 9/11, but a 9/10 – when our leaders sold us down the river. Yet again. But this time the stakes are as high as they get.”

Today, as in the past 12 years there are ceremonies for the victims of 9/11. There are museums and memorials. There will be speeches by politicians and bureaucrats and comments by analysts. There will be the laying of wreaths and the playing of taps. Then all will be forgotten until next year when we will do it all over again.

Perhaps many elected officials don’t care about America, their oath of office, or our children. Apparently their allegiance to party and power trump concern for even their own children.

Yes, Mark Levin is right. The wrath of the nation should fall upon them.

Yes, the Past is Prologue.

Has The Dam Finally Burst

"You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said. “We're going to have to make some choices as a society." — Barack Hussein Obama, June 7, 2013

Until last week there was a steady drip, drip, drip of reports in the press about the scandals revolving about the Obama administration. It seemed as though each day a new report was coming forth about the Benghazi, DOJ, and IRS scandals.

Then we had the NSA bombshell dropped on our head. Last Wednesday a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the Central Intelligence Agency told the Guardian about the National Security Agency’s super-secret PRSIM program’s collection of huge amounts of private Internet and telephone data

Subsequently on Sunday the Guardian identified the source as Edward Snowden, who has worked at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee for various defense contractors. He has most recently worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense contractor, the newspaper said.

The Guardian said it was revealing Mr. Snowden’s identity at his own request. In an interview with the newspaper, Mr. Snowden, who is currently staying in a hotel in Hong Kong, said he expected that the American government would seek to prosecute him for disclosing top-secret documents detailing the Obama administration’s extensive surveillance program.

“I have no intention of hiding who I am,” he was quoted as saying, “because I know I have done nothing wrong.”

Mr. Snowden’s disclosures to The Guardian and The Washington Post over the last week have reignited the long-smoldering controversy over the scope of government surveillance of American citizens, which appears to have expanded substantially since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In recent days, the Obama administration and other proponents have defended the surveillance program, revealing that it had helped to thwart terrorist plots, in order to bolster assertions that such data collection was necessary to keep Americans safe.

In a video accompanying the Guardian article, Mr. Snowden seemed slightly tense but articulate and well spoken. He wore glasses, a dark gray shirt open at the neck, and had a slight growth on his chin and upper lip.

Asked what fears he might have about his future, he said, “I could be rendered by the C.I.A., I could have people come after me.”

“We’ve got a C.I.A. station just up the road in the consulate here in Hong Kong, and I’m sure,” he said with a nervous laugh, “that they’re going to be very busy for the next week, and that’s a fear I’ll live under for the rest of my life.”

He said he came to Hong Kong, an autonomous Chinese territory, because he believed it was independent and had “a strong tradition of free speech.”

“The people of Hong Kong have a long tradition of protesting in the streets, of making their views known”, he said in a video interview. “The Internet is not filtered here, no more so than in any other Western government.”

The National Security Agency is collecting records of every domestic and cross-border Verizon phone call between now and July 19th. The secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over these records has been leaked to the Guardian.

You may find that outrageous. 1984 has arrived. Big Brother is watching you.

But the author of this story is not George Orwell. It’s Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, Senator Diane Feinstein of California, and you.

Here’s what I mean: In June of last year, Representative Smith (R) introduced H.R. 5949, the FISA Amendments Act Reauthorization Act of 2012. Its purpose was to extend the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 for five years, continuing the government’s authority to collect data like this under secret court orders. The House Judiciary Committee reported the bill to the full House a few days later. The House Intelligence Committee, having joint jurisdiction over the bill, reported it at the beginning of August. And in mid-September, the House passed the bill by a vote of 301 to 118.

Sent to the Senate, the bill languished until very late in the year. But with the government’s secret wiretapping authority set to expire, the Senate took up the bill on December 27th. Whether by plan or coincidence, the Senate debated secret surveillance of Americans’ communications during the lazy, distracted period between Christmas and the New Year.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D) was the bill’s chief defender on the Senate floor. She parried arguments doggedly advanced by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) that the surveillance law lacks sufficient oversight. Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez reported at the time that modest amendments proposed by Wyden and others would improve oversight and in no way compromise security. But false urgency created by the Senate’s schedule won the day, and on December 28th of last year, the Senate passed the bill, sending it to the president, who signed it on December 30^th with little coverage in the press. This bill consisting of over 300 pages was given to the senators on the same day that the vote was called. There was no possible way they could have read and digested the entire bill.

The news that every Verizon call is going to the NSA not only vindicates Senator Wyden’s argument that oversight in this area is lacking. It reveals the upshot of that failed oversight: The secret FISA court has been issuing general warrants for communications surveillance.

That is contrary to the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which requires warrants to issue “particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” When a court requires “all call detail records” to be handed over “on an ongoing daily basis,” this is in no sense particular. Data about millions of our phone calls are now housed at the NSA’s super-secret billion dollar facility in Utah. Data about calls you make and receive today will be housed at the NSA.

The reason given for secret mass surveillance of all our phone calls, according to an unofficial comment from the Obama administration, is that it is a “critical tool” against terrorism. These arguments should be put to public proof. For too long, government officials have waved off the rule of law and privacy using “terrorism” as their shibboleth. This time, show us exactly how gathering data about every domestic call on one of the largest telecommunications networks roots out the tiny number of stray-dog terrorists in the country. If the argument is based on data mining, it has a lot to overcome.

The ultimate author of the American surveillance state is you. If you’re like most Americans, you allowed yourself to remain mostly ignorant of the late-December debate over FISA reauthorization. You may not have finished digesting your Christmas turkey until May, when it was revealed that IRS agents had targeted groups applying for tax exempt status for closer scrutiny based on their names or political themes.

Privacy advocates and surveillance experts have suspected for years that the government was using an expansive interpretation of the Patriot Act’s §215 “business record” authority to collect bulk communications records indiscriminately. We now have confirmation in the form of a secret order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to Verizon — and legislators are saying that such orders have been routinely served on phone carriers for at least seven years. (It seems likely that similar requests are being served on Internet providers — increasingly the same companies that provide us with wireless phone services).

Some stress that what is being collected is “just metadata” — a phrase I’m confident you’ll never see a computer scientist or data analyst use. Metadata — the transactional records of information about phone and Internet communications, as opposed to their content — can be incredibly revealing, as the recent story about the acquisition of Associated Press phone logs underscores. Those records, as AP head Gary Pruitt complained, provide a comprehensive map of reporters’ activities, telling those who know how to look what stories journalists are working on and who their confidential sources are. Metadata can reveal what Websites you read, who you communicate with, which political or religious groups you’re affiliated with, even your physical location. In essence metadata is the family tree of the contained data.

In a way, the ground was prepared for this indiscriminate collection of Americans’ data way back in the 1970s, when the Supreme Court held, implausibly, that we surrender our expectation of privacy — and with it, the protection of the Fourth Amendment — just by using modern technology that leaves traces of our activity on someone else’s computers. But Americans were also sold a false bill of goods when Congress passed and reauthorized the Patriot Act powers used here — which we were repeatedly assured were only intended to be used to track “bad guys.” What we weren’t told was that, if the government thinks data mining ALL our records might help identify “bad guys,” then that information too is “relevant” to an investigation. A relevant example might be if there was a burglary in your home town and the police rounded up every one living in the town as “persons of interest.”

This collection is probably well enough intentioned. The problem is that these records are likely to be retained in databases indefinitely. Which means we don’t just need to worry about whether the government’s motives are pure when they collect the information. Even if they are, someone with access to that data, maybe in five or ten years, may be unable to resist the temptation to use that information for other purposes. Just look at what has happened to Sarah Palin. That could mean investigating ordinary crimes: If you can data mine for suspicious terrorist activity patterns, which is likely to be extremely difficult — you can plug in “suspicious patterns” that may identify drug dealers and tax cheats as well. Still more disturbing is the possibility that, the intelligence community has repeatedly done historically, those records could be exploited for illegitimate political purposes, or even simple greed. (Imagine probing communications for signs of an impending corporate merger, product launch, or lawsuit.)

We are, predictably, being told that this program is essential to protecting us from terrorist attacks. But the track record of such claims is unimpressive: They were made about fusion centers, and the original NSA warrantless wiretap program, and in each case collapsed under scrutiny. No doubt some of these phone records have proven useful in some investigation, but it doesn’t follow that the indiscriminate collection of such records is necessary for investigations, any more than general warrants to search homes are necessary just because sometimes searches of homes are useful to police.

In the short term, we should hope for an Inspector General audit of this program, both to look for abuses — as a similar audit of National Security Letters uncovered “widespread and serious” misuse of authority—and to skeptically interrogate the claim that such sweeping collection is somehow indispensable to national security. In the longer term, we need to follow the suggestion of Justice Sotomayor in United States v. Jones, (regarding the attachment of a GPS device to your car), and think hard about the “third party doctrine,” which leaves all this increasingly voluminous and revealing metadata stripped of constitutional protection.

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, spurred extraordinary efforts intended to protect America from the newly highlighted scourge of international terrorism. Among the efforts was the consideration and possible use of “data mining” as a way to discover planning and preparation for terrorism. Data mining is the process of searching data for previously unknown patterns and using those patterns to predict future outcomes.

Information about key members of the 9/11 plot was available to the U.S. government prior to the attacks, and the 9/11 terrorists were closely connected to one another in a multitude of ways. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (9/11 Commission) concluded that, by pursuing the leads available to it at the time, the government might have derailed the plan. Its primary conclusion was that the failures of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation permitted the terrorist attacks to occur and that had these agencies acted more wisely and more aggressively, the attacks could potentially have been prevented. A lack of intelligence was not the problem it was the compartmentalization, risk within the bureaucracy, and failure to act on the intelligence by the Clinton administration that was the problem

Though data mining has many valuable uses, it is not well suited to the terrorist discovery problem. It would be unfortunate if data mining for terrorism discovery had currency within national security, law enforcement, and technology circles because pursuing this use of data mining would waste taxpayer dollars, needlessly infringe on privacy and civil liberties, and misdirect the valuable time and energy of the men and women in the national security community.

What the 9/11 story most clearly calls for is a sharper focus on the part of our national security agencies — their focus had undoubtedly sharpened by the end of the day on September 11, 2001 — along with the ability to efficiently locate, access, and aggregate information about specific suspects.

Asked point-blank last July whether the National Security Agency’s new, billion-dollar Utah installation would hold the data of American citizens, General Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, responded flatly: “No.”

“While I can’t go into all the details of the Utah Data Center,” he said at the American Enterprise Institute, “we don’t hold data on U.S. citizens.”

But the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers (R-MI), tells a different story. “Within the last few years, this program was used to stop a terrorist attack in the United States,” he says.

However, civil libertarians and some members of Congress say the National Security Agency surveillance programs to hunt terrorists were too broad and collected too much information about innocent Americans.

As to Rodger’s claim I cannot help but harken back to an incident that happened in Berlin in 1933 — the Reichstag fire. The fire was used as evidence by the Nazis that the Communists were beginning a plot against the German government. Van der Lubbe and four Communist leaders were subsequently arrested. Adolf Hitler, who was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany four weeks before urged President Paul von Hindenburg to pass an emergency decree to counter the "ruthless confrontation of the Communist Party of Germany". With civil liberties suspended, the government instituted mass arrests of Communists, including all of the Communist parliamentary delegates. With their bitter rival Communists gone and their seats empty, the National Socialist German Workers Party went from being a plurality party to the majority; subsequent elections confirmed this position and thus allowed Hitler to consolidate his power. I am not comparing the Bush or Obama administrations with the Nazis, but excuses for government overreach due to a particular incident is legend — just ask the Christians when Nero set Rome alight.

The government is accessing “meta data” about millions of our phone calls. Don’t let the technical-sounding term confuse you. That’s information about who called you, and who you called. It’s what time your conversations happened, and how long your conversations continued. If you’ve made a call in the last few months, if you called a lost love, a counselor, a doctor, psychologist, or psychiatrist, the National Security Agency probably has that information.

The IRS scandal reminds us that government agents don’t always have our interests at heart. IRS agents investigated hopeful non-profit groups aiming to weed out those that might challenge government orthodoxy and power. Who’s to say that there isn’t someone in the NSA — or an entire program in NSA — with these same motives?

General Alexander might say his agency is unlike the IRS. So might Chairman Rogers. But who should we believe?

If General Alexander’s statement about not having American citizens’ data is true, how can Rogers’s be? And if Rogers’s statement about this program preventing an attack is true, General Alexander’s statement must be false.

Most likely, General Alexander is equivocating on language. Being Orwellian, in a word.

When General Alexander denied having data about American citizens — or appeared to — he said “we don’t hold data on U.S. citizens.” That preposition, “on,” is perfectly ambiguous, and it exploits gaps in the way we talk about personal data.

General Alexander might argue that all he has are phone numbers. That’s not information about people — just millions of phone numbers and the relationships among them.

It’s time to come clean as to whether the National Security Agency holds data about American citizens.”

But people who understand communications and information technology know that a phone number is an identifier. In fact, your cell phone number more directly identifies you than your name, which probably refers to a number of people in this big world. When the NSA analyzes information about our calls, it is just one, short inferential step from reaching us directly, by name, address, and the other identifiers we’re familiar with. In the modern world, phone numbers are better than names for identifying people.

Clearing up Chairman Rogers’s claims is a different ball of wax. Chairman Rogers should put his claims about security successes to public proof. How do millions of telephone records revealing the relationships of law-abiding citizens across the nation help with law enforcement and counterterrorism? Why can’t the same results be achieved with targeted investigation of genuine leads?

The only reason one might want access to the vast quantity of data collected in this program is for “data mining” — discovering the patterns that appear in data that are indicative of terrorism.

Data mining works with credit card fraud. There are thousands of examples per year from which to build models of what credit card fraud looks like in data. And the cost of getting it wrong is low. Credit card companies may call a customer or cause them a modest inconvenience by cancelling a card.

Data mining won’t work for terrorism because terrorism is too rare. There aren’t patterns reflecting terrorism planning or execution. Each plan and each attack, successful or unsuccessful, has been very different from the others. And the cost of false positives is high. Law enforcement personnel waste their time chasing false leads. Wrongly accused people are investigated, questioned, placed on no-fly lists or other derogatory lists, and sometimes people are wrongly arrested.

If Chairman Rogers can show otherwise, now is the time to do so. Language is important and too easy to exploit, so let’s make clear at the outset that “telling” isn’t “showing.”

And it’s time for General Alexander to come clean as to whether the National Security Agency holds data about American citizens. Along with “on” and “about,” one hopes that everyone knows what the meaning of the word “is” is.

In a June 7^th report from TheBlaze, NSA Whistleblower: The Government Is Still Telling You an ‘Outright Lie’ About Its Spying Programs:

“The federal government’s “totalitarian”-like surveillance of American citizens has been going on for more than a decade — you’re just now hearing about it, NSA whistleblower William Binney told Glenn Beck on his radio program Friday.

Binney, who was with the NSA for almost four decades, said it was “unfortunate” that he had been proven 100 percent correct on the spy agency’s surveillance capability. He has been blowing the whistle for some time, however, his warnings had been dubbed “conspiracy theories” by some.

Binney said the feds’ spying program began in mid-to-late October 2001. It started by pulling in phone records of various U.S. citizens across the country. He estimates the NSA is collecting data on 3 billion phone calls every single day.

And when the Obama administration says it is only collecting bare data, not the content of your phone calls or emails for example, that’s an “outright lie,” according to Binney.

“Their statement about, ‘we don’t have content’ is an outright lie,” he explained, adding that emails, videos and other type of content are also covered under NSA and FBI’s secret “PRISM” program.

To those who argue they don’t mind the government compiling all their data because they aren’t doing anything wrong, Binney reminded Beck’s audience that total surveillance is how “totalitarian states” have started throughout history. But no country has ever had the massive amount of surveillance capability that the U.S. is currently implementing.

“There wouldn’t be a Jew alive on the planet today if they had this information,” Beck said, referring to Nazi Germany.

Binney went on to say that the spy program could easily be used to target political opposition, just as the IRS targeted conservative groups.

“If you wanted to know who was involved in the Tea Party, this kind of activity would lay our their entire structure and everyone who is involved in it, no matter where they are inside the country,” he said. “That information could then be passed to the IRS to target people.”

Congressional intelligence briefing sessions have not included details about President Barack Obama’s data-gathering programs, despite claims by the president that Congress approved the measures and “every member” knew about them, Republican Rep. Aaron Schock said.

“I can assure you the phone number tracking of non-criminal, non-terrorist suspects was not discussed,” the Illinois lawmaker told Politico. “Most members have stopped going to their classified briefings because they rarely tell us anything we don’t already know in the news. It really has become a charade.”

Responding to the furor over the National Security Agency’s data monitoring programs, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky introduced legislation Friday that requires a warrant be issued before any government agency can search phone records of Americans.

Paul calls the revelation of the program to collect phone records of millions of Verizon customers “an astounding assault on the Constitution.”

But meanwhile, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle deny Obama’s claims that they knew about plans to monitor cell phone and Internet use of Americans, and many said they either learned of the programs through the news or after asking specifically to be briefed.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said that the average member of Congress doesn’t receive such briefings, and would not have know about programs to monitor cell phone records and Internet use unless they were on an intelligence committee, like Schock, were in special sessions in 2011 or asked to be briefed.

Durbin said he only learned about the two programs after asking for a briefing after being urged by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).

And while Obama said members of Congress “could raise those issues very aggressively,” Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland told Attorney General Eric Holder Thursday that the news that Congress was “fully briefed” came as a surprise to her and other lawmakers.

“This ‘fully briefed’ is something that drives us up the wall, because often ‘fully briefed’ means a group of eight leadership; it does not necessarily mean relevant committees,” Mikulski said.

In addition, nine senators and 61 congressmen have taken office after the 2010 and 2011 briefings, and new members like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas say they were not informed of either program without asking about it.

“Americans trusted President Obama when he came to office promising the most transparent administration in history,” Cruz said Friday. “But that trust has been broken and the only way to earn it back is to tell the truth.”

"The Department of Justice is in the initial stages of an investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified information by an individual with authorized access," Justice Dept. spokeswoman Nanda Chitre said in a statement late Sunday.

New York Republican Representative Peter King, chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterintelligence and Terrorism and a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said: "If Edward Snowden did in fact leak the NSA data as he claims, the United States government must prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law and begin extradition proceedings at the earliest date. The United States must make it clear that no country should be granting this individual asylum. This is a matter of extraordinary consequence to American intelligence."

Snowden told The Post Hong Kong that he now intends to ask for asylum from "any countries that believe in free speech and oppose the victimization of global privacy.”

Hong Kong has an extradition treaty with the United States that took force in 1998, according to the U.S. State Department website.

"The government could subject him to a 10 or 20 year penalty for each count," with each document leaked considered a separate charge, Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer who represents whistleblowers told the Associated Press.

Snowden told the Guardian he believes the government could try to charge him with treason under the Espionage Act, but Zaid said that would require the government to prove he had intent to betray the United States, whereas he publicly made it clear he did this to spur debate. The difference between Bradley Manning, now on trial before a military court for leaking classified documents to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, is that Manning leaked information about specific actions while Snowden released information about a government program.

Snowden, a 29-year old high school dropout, is quoted as saying he hopes the publicity of the leaks will provide him some protection and that he sees asylum, perhaps in Iceland, as a possibility. It is reported that Snowden earned $200,000 per year at Booz-Allen-Hamilton

"I feel satisfied that this was all worth it. I have no regrets," Snowden told the Guardian

Whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor is yet to be determined. No doubt he will be somehow taken into custody by U.S. law enforcement agents and somehow extradited to the United States. He will probably be charged with a multitude of crimes against the United States. No doubt there will be cadre of civil libertarian lawyers chaffing at the bit to take on his case. The nation will be divided on Snowden’s actions as the case unfolds and politics may trump justice. In any event what has Snowden done is burst the dam on the Obama administration and now we can add the NSA to the scandals surrounding the State Department, IRS, and Justice Department.

As Lloyd Marcus stated in American Thinker:

“If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If the Obama administration breaks the law at will, lies to the American people, uses every government agency at its disposal to punish its conservative/Republican enemies and no one does anything about it, does the administration make a sound? Yes it does -- resulting in devastating consequences for the American people.

Despite a trifecta of scandals, Obama and company continue to stonewall, lie, or refuse to answer questions -- in essence, giving Congress and the American people the finger. Pundits are shocked and taken aback by the unprecedented arrogance of the Obama administration.

Such pundits are a bit late coming to the dance, as we in the Tea Party have been well aware for years of the lawlessness and arrogance of this bunch of thugs from Chicago. Have these surprised pundits forgotten Obama's unprecedented overreaches into the private sector -- nationalizing General Motors, bullying banks, ignoring the ruling of federal judges, trashing the Constitution, and more?

Still, pundits are missing the much greater horrifying picture. My fellow Americans, we are in deep, deep trouble. The cold reality is that until someone steps forward in real opposition to Obama governing according to his will while ignoring all the laws, checks, and balances, we are defenseless, expendable supplicants of a tyrannical dictator.

Remarkably, the mainstream media is complaisant with Obama acting like our king rather than our president because he is liberal, he is black, and his presidency is historic. Obama's agenda fits neatly with the mainstream media's socialist/progressive agenda. So they are elated to have a Teflon liberal black guy in the White House furthering their cause.

The people in the Obama administration are emboldened to do whatever they please: bully conservative groups and individuals, secretly invade our privacy, target reporters, and thumb their noses when they get caught -- all without any real political push-back or consequences. We the American people are in deep excrement.

Ponder that, folks. As long as the mainstream media provides cover for Obama and keeps his poll numbers high by making sure no bad news is linked to Obama (Limbaugh Theorem), our president is empowered to function as a supreme ruler, free to do whatever he pleases to us. Dear God, help us!”

My concern is not so much about this President who spends more time on the golf course and in Air Force One, but about those minions under him. Under President Obama, we have seen an Internal Revenue Service harass conservative, Jewish, and Christian groups. We have seen the Department of Homeland Security label tea party activists, evangelicals, and veterans returning from abroad as threats. We have seen the Environmental Protection Agency show favoritism to liberal groups and obstruct conservative groups. We have seen a Department of Justice sell arms to Mexican drug cartels, turn a blind eye to the New Black Panthers, and target journalists. We have seen a State Department bungle its handling of Benghazi and engage in a cover-up of the details of just how badly they screwed up. We have seen the Department of Agriculture frivolously dole out taxpayer dollars in the scandalous Pigford program. And this is not a complete list.

The President has maintained for five years that the buck does not stop with him. He routinely promotes, praises, or otherwise gives a pass to those who have screwed up, abused the rights of American citizens, and squandered American tax dollars. If not the President — and most Americans do still hold him in high regard — his administration has abused the trust of the American people.

Further, for the last several years the President has been telling the American public not to worry. Terror incidents like the Ft. Hood shooting have been classified as “work place violence.” The War of Terror is over. Terrorism is now man-made disaster. The rhetoric of this Administration for the last several years has routinely downplayed threats, trumpeted the lack of attacks, and suggested that the dark clouds of devastation have blown by — Boston bombing aside (and this program does not seem to have helped prevent that).

Is the PRISM program working as intended and, if so, how does it really work. Or is it security theater like the TSA screenings at airports. We have yet to learn that the TSA, for all its theater and prostate exams of passengers, has actually obstructed something harmful. What of the NSA? If we have compromised our privacy, to what end and result have we done so that makes such a compromise necessary and worthwhile? I venture to say for all the elaborate burdens of the TSA, all we have done is make air travel more of a burden.

Why should we trust the National Security Agency? How can we be sure that this one department, unlike the largely nonpartisan IRS, is not engaging in an abuse of data? How can we be sure the NSA will not leak the private details of American citizens to political groups as the IRS did? With the government expanding its reach into the lives of every American with the implementation of ObamaCare, how can we be sure that the metadata that suggests someone may be having a medical issue is not flagged, leaked, or otherwise abused? For now that’s a reach. But a year ago most Americans thought it was a reach to claim the IRS was willfully and maliciously targeting conservative groups.

We cannot trust the government. This Administration has lost the respect of the American people. Compounding the problem, the Congress, which has been overseeing the program, has neither the trust nor respect of the American people. Neither party cares much for its own or the other party in Congress. Diane Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss telling the American people to trust them should be a big red flag that we should not trust them. They do not have our trust.

The coming year will see Republicans and Democrats alike fight over this issue. Rand Paul will make it a campaign issue for his Presidential race. How to balance national security and privacy is no easy thing. While we should all be willing to show some sympathy, if disagreement, with Presidents Bush and Obama and the difficult balancing act they have faced and continue to face, we would not be in such a spot at this time had the present administration not so badly let its own bureaucrats misbehave.

Even those of us who might err on the side of security over privacy must now concede it is time to consider recalibrating the balance. The constitutional rights of American citizens in the United States should be abridged only ever so carefully.

For conservatives, there must be one last note — the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald, and Edward Snowden should not be made heroes. Glenn Greenwald is not “anti anti-terror” as the New York Times portrays him. He is deeply hostile to the United States and routinely sides with every bad actor on the planet when their interests conflict with the United States. The left-wing Guardian is no better.

And Edward Snowden, who fled to communist China after leaking, like Bradley Manning before him, shows Millennials probably cannot be trusted with the mature responsibility of supporting and defending our nation. He has said that China is not a threat, but is our friend as we trade with them. He has also been quoted as say our largest threat was from global climate change — something the Chinese don’t give a damn about.

His was not a courageous act. His was an act of sabotage and ego whereby he decided to be judge, jury, and executioner of an intelligence program that violated his sensibilities, but maybe not the constitution. Then he leaked it to a man and organization deeply hostile to the United States before himself fleeing to a communist nation, praising that nation’s support for free speech.

Just as we cannot trust this administration’s honesty and candor, we surely cannot trust the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald, and Edward Snowden. That leaves American citizens in a frustrating place in need of many more answers than we have at present or are likely to get from those peddling an anti-American agenda or, quite frankly, from the Obama Administration.

America is built on the principle of “ordered liberty”, which seeks to maximize both security and freedom at the same time. The art of governance, then, is to establish rules that let the good guys get the bad guys without infringing on the freedom of the people. The Constitution doesn't give us a rule book to do that. Instead, it sets up security and freedom to fight it out with each other, constantly, like two indefatigable pit bulls. The struggle is intentional, so neither side wins out, but neither gets compromised. Freedom and security tear at each other until we get answers that reasonably address both. So, if people stop raising objections every time security might look like it's winning out, the system will fail. In short, neither full transparency nor just eschewing big data will work to secure both security and freedom. We don't and shouldn't trust government to follow its own rules on its own, but we need government to do its job right and find means to assure us it's doing its job in compliance with the law. That is a hard task, and sadly we have an administration with a mediocre track record of getting it right.

President Obama said Friday that the programs have made a difference in tracking terrorists and are not tantamount to "Big Brother."

"You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said. “We're going to have to make some choices as a society."

The question is what will those choices be — liberty or tyranny?

If the question is should Snowden have leaked such closely held secrets, I would reluctantly answer "yes." But if you are going to deliberately break the law in a civil society, you must be prepared to accept the consequences. Snowden ran away from those consequences. That does not make him a hero in my book. It makes him a criminal. Why didn't Snowden leak the information and then turn himself in? That would have been heroic. Instead, despite his protestations that he doesn't want the story to be about him, he comes off as a glory hound, an attention getter.

If you believe the ends justifies the means, then the rule of law is meaningless. We've had administrations in the past use that excuse, as well as intelligence agencies and the military. Whatever good we think may flow from his criminal acts, we cannot justify them or applaud them — especially since we don't know if these revelations will prove to be catastrophic in the sense that they might facilitate a terrorist attack that may otherwise have been thwarted.

No easy answers. And the questions raised by Snowden's actions aren't a cakewalk either. But what's done is done — whatever his reasons and motivations. Let the law deal with Snowden while we debate what he has revealed and try to salvage a proper balance between surveillance and privacy.

Zero Dark Thirty — Some Truth, Some Fiction

“Nothing is so contagious as opinion, especially on questions which beget in the mind a distrust of itself.” — James Madison

Last night my wife, daughter and I ventured out to see the movie Zero Dark Thirty. For those of you who live in a forest somewhere Zero Dark Thirty is the controversial movie about the hunt and rake down of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2011.

I had heard and read a myriad of opinions on this film — everything from it being a homage to Barack Obama to a glorification of torture. It was neither. It was a well-crafted film by the Oscar winning director Kathryn Bigelow and her writer Mark Boal. The film chronicles the decade-long hunt for al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden (Referred to as Usama bin Laden in the film, which is correct) after the September 2001 attacks, and his death at the hands of the Navy SEAL Team 6 in May, 2011.

Critics on the left and right have lambasted this film due to their political agendas. First and foremost it is a theatrical movie not a documentary. If you want a documentary watch the numerous accounts of the hunt and take down of bin Laden on the History, Military, or National Geographic channels. I have seen most of those documentaries and even though crafted with care and with no obvious agenda they don’t always tell the entire story. In fact the entire story will not be known for years just as the full story of the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy are still evolving. So with that in mind here is my humble take on the film.

After seeing the movie, it becomes obvious that Americans might now understand what was needed to make sure the homeland remained safe. The crowds in the theatre are subdued during the movie and afterward. There is no hissing, no yelling, and no cheering. But at the end of the film there was a round of applause for the film. Perhaps this was due to the fact that I saw the film in a more conservative neighborhood in Riverside County. I doubt if there was any such applause in Westwood. As the audience exits, there is an eerie quiet, maybe because the movie brought home the fact to Americans that these were very dangerous times.

Jose Rodriguez, Jr., who headed the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and then became director of the National Clandestine Service, believes that the reaction of the audience was due to people realizing that what CIA officials have been saying for years is a reality: "it was necessary and needed to be done to keep Americans safe."

The film opens with scenes of “enhanced interrogation” of a captured al Qaeda terrorist at an undisclosed CIA black site in 2002. Maya (played by Jessica Chastain) is a CIA operative whose first experience is in the interrogation of prisoners following the Al Qaeda attacks against the U.S. on the 11th September 2001. She is a reluctant participant in extreme duress applied to the detainees, but believes that the truth may only be obtained through such tactics. For several years, she is single-minded in her pursuit of leads to uncover the whereabouts of Al Qaeda's leader, Osama Bin Laden. Finally, in 2011, it appears that her work will pay off, and a U.S. Navy SEAL team is sent to kill or capture Bin Laden. But only Maya is confident Bin Laden is where she says he is. You can read a full synopsis of the plot by clicking here.

As I stated above the film opens with scenes of enhanced interrogation of a captured al-Qaeda terrorist. The scenes of waterboarding and physical beatings are quite graphic. If you have a weak stomach come in about 15 minutes late to the 157—minute long film. This is no doubt the most controversial part of the film and where I take some umbrage with Bigelow and Boal.

As the author of Hard Measures: How the CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, Rodriguez details in the book the actual tactics of the Enhanced Interrogation Program. He does not agree with the movie depiction of the interrogation scenes since. Rodriguez stated in an easy published in the Washington Post about the film:

“The CIA did not torture anybody under the enhanced interrogation program. I know, because I actually supervised it myself from 2002 until 2007. The torture scenes in the movie did not happen. My biggest beef with this film is that millions of people around the world after seeing this movie will conclude that the CIA tortures, which is very unfair and not true."

Rodriguez went on to say:

“Indeed, as I watched the story unfold on the screen, I found myself alternating between repulsion and delight.

First, my reasons for repulsion. “Zero Dark Thirty,” which will open for Washington audiences Friday, inaccurately links torture with intelligence success and mischaracterizes how America’s enemies have been treated in the fight against terrorism. Many others object to the film, however, because they think that the depiction of torture by the CIA is accurate but that the movie is wrong to imply that our interrogation techniques worked.

“They are wrong on both counts. I was intimately involved in setting up and administering the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program, and I left the agency in 2007 secure in the knowledge not only that our program worked — but that it was not torture.

One of the advantages of inhabiting the world of Hollywood is that you can have things both ways. In the publicity campaign for the movie, the director and the screenwriter have stressed that “Zero Dark Thirty” was carefully researched and is fact-based. When discussing the so-called torture scenes, director Kathryn Bigelow has said: “I wish it was not part of our history, but it was.” Yet when pressed about inaccuracies, screenwriter Mark Boal has been quick to remind everyone: “This is not a documentary.”

What I haven’t heard anyone acknowledge is that the interrogation scenes torture the truth. Despite popular fiction — and the fiction that often masquerades as unbiased reporting — the enhanced interrogation program was carefully monitored and conducted. It bore little resemblance to what is shown on the screen.

The film shows CIA officers brutalizing detainees — beating them mercilessly, suspending them from the ceiling with chains, leading them around in dog collars and, on the spur of the moment, throwing them on the floor, grabbing a large bucket and administering a vicious ad hoc waterboarding. The movie implies that such treatment went on for years.

The truth is that no one was bloodied or beaten in the enhanced interrogation program which I supervised from 2002 to 2007. Most detainees received no enhanced interrogation techniques, and the relative few who did faced harsh measures for only a few days or weeks at the start of their detention. To give a detainee a single open-fingered slap across the face, CIA officers had to receive written authorization from Washington. No one was hung from ceilings. The filmmakers stole the dog-collar scenes from the abuses committed by Army personnel at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. No such thing was ever done at CIA “black sites.”

The CIA did waterboard three of the worst terrorists on the planet — Abu Zubaida, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — in an effort to get them to cooperate. Instead of a large bucket, small plastic water bottles were used on the three men, who were on medical gurneys. The procedure was totally unlike the one seen in the movie but was consistent with the same tactic used, without physical or psychological damage, on tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel as part of their training.”

Bill Harlow, the former CIA director of public affairs, believes that the movie confuses incidents such as Abu Ghraib with the CIA program. For example, there is a scene where a CIA officer puts a dog collar on a terrorist detainee and walks him like a dog. Harlow was offended by this untruth because it happened at Abu Ghraib, completely contrary to the situation shown in the movie. "So many people seem to accept this as a given. It is annoying to me that they don't ask. Did this really happen that way? The beating scenes did not happen and were put in the movie for dramatic content. We never beat the crap out of people. Had anyone done those things shown in the movie, they would have been prosecuted."

Harlow goes on to state:

“It would have been more accurate and still intense if the movie put in the actual enhanced interrogation techniques. Unlike in the movie's description, Zubaida was put in a box only once — but one large enough to allow him to sit up. As for waterboarding, it was done to only three terrorist detainees, and to none after 2003. Anyone waterboarded had his vital signs monitored, which was not portrayed in the movie. The technique in the film of asking a question, pouring large buckets of water, and then asking another question is not how it was done. In reality, small plastic water bottles were used, with only drops of water being poured over the subject. Once someone agreed to cooperate, the enhanced interrogation techniques stopped as was demonstrated in the film.”

Yet the movie implies, by using the clip of President Obama saying Americans do not torture, that enhanced interrogation is torture. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, for his part, feels that Jose Rodriguez's op-ed is the definitive piece on this issue. Rodriguez made it clear that those senators who are yelling and are threatening an investigation about the film's sources are trying to rewrite history because "they are denying that enhanced interrogation worked and call it torture." Hayden also was struck with the fact that these "senators wanted to investigate the Agency — not for the classification of what they told the filmmakers, but because they disagreed with the conclusions suggested by the film. The senators appear to be fixated on this issue."

The film correctly portrays that the hunt for bin Laden was a ten-year marathon, not a sprint. For a while people believed it was all Obama. It was the CIA's focus and hard work that eventually allowed us to find bin Laden. Many women deserve a chunk of the credit for their focus, tenacity, intensity, and being detailed-oriented, including Jennifer Matthews, chief of the Khost Afghanistan base at Camp Chapman. I have written a detailed account of how Ms. Matthews (called Jessica and played by Jennifer Ehle in the film) was killed by a Jordanian suicide bomber. For more information on this attack that killed 7 CIA agents, including Ms. Matthews and wounded 7 others click here. I think it will give you better understanding of the culture within the CIA at the time.)

According to Robert Baer, an ex CIA operative, writing in GQ Magazine Michael Scheuer, “her first boss in Alec Station, the CIA unit that tracked bin Laden, told me she had attended the operative's basic training course at the Farm, the agency's training facility, and that he considered her a good, smart officer. Another officer who knew her told me that despite her training at the Farm, she was always slotted to be a reports officer, someone who edits reports coming in from the field. She was never intended to meet and debrief informants.”

Baer continued:

“Matthews knew that there was a time when only seasoned field operatives were put in charge of places like Khost. Not only would an operative need to have distinguished himself at the Farm; he or she would've run informants in the field for five years or more before earning such a post. He probably would have done at least one previous tour in a war zone, too. And he would have known the local language, in this case Pashto. Matthews skipped all of this”.

According to all of the reports I have read on this incident Ms. Matthews was portrayed correctly in the film as was the entire incident at Khost. It is quite a shocker in the film.

Now to the main character in the film known as Maya and played by Jessica Chastain. Maya is not her real name and the CIA will not release her real name as there is a price on her head from al-Queda. The Navy SEAL who wrote the controversial book detailing the assassination of Osama bin Laden credits a 'feisty' female CIA analyst for leading them to their target, after spending five years hunting him.

Author Matt Bissonnette – whose identity was revealed even though he wrote the tell-all book No Easy Day under the pen name of Mark Owen – only refers to the woman using the pseudonym ‘Jen’ in his book. According to Bissonnette, as reported in The Guardian, Jen", was convinced Bin Laden was hiding at the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was found.

She travelled with the Seals to Afghanistan ahead of the raid and briefed them on what they were likely to find. "I can't give her enough credit. In my opinion she kind of teed up this whole thing," Owen told CBS's 60 Minutes in an interview to be broadcast Sunday.

Owen described Jen as "wicked smart, kind of feisty". She was 100% sure that bin Laden was hiding in the Abbottabad compound, according to Owen. President Barack Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta and others had said they were only 70% sure Bin Laden would be found at the compound. Owen told 60 Minutes that all of her predictions proved to be exactly right. This is portrayed in the film where Maya is part of a group seated around a conference table and Director Panetta polls the operatives and analysts on their confidence that bin Laden is at the Abbottabad compound. The men’s responses range from 50 to 70 percent and when Maya is asked she responds with 100% positive, but downgrades to 95% saying nothing in the intelligence world is 100%.

In his book, Bissonnette writes that he sat next to the woman during one of the long-haul flights as they headed to Pakistan for the mission, and his brief description paints a picture of a young and extremely dedicated analyst.

'Recruited by the agency out of college, she'd been working on the Bin Laden task force for the last five years. Analysts rotated in and out of the task force, but she stayed and kept after it.

'After the al-Kuwaiti phone call, she'd worked to put all the pieces together. she had been our go-to analyst on all intelligence questions regarding the target,' he writes.

Jen is the real-life heroine of the CIA hunt for Osama bin Laden, a headstrong young operative whose work tracking the al-Qaida leader serves as the dramatic core of Zero Dark Thirty. It should also be pointed out that according to the Mail Online Jen is the person the character Carrie Mathison (played by Clare Danes) in the Golden Globe and Emmy award winning Showtime series Homeland is modeled after. Danes said that while researching her role as Mathison she met one of the men who led the raid on bin Laden.

Danes hinted at a connection during an interview about the research she did to prepare for her role as Carrie Mathison.

“There’s a woman Carrie is loosely modeled on and she’s a CIA officer and so I met with her and she took me to Langley and introduced me to some of her colleagues,” Danes told The Wall Street Journal.

The Homeland protagonist is described as being stubborn, headstrong, and outspoken. The same appears true for the female agent Jen.

“Jen wasn't afraid to share her opinion with even the highest officers,” Bissonnette wrote in the book. “This was her baby. Jen and her team spent five years tracking him to get us where we were now.”

Her CIA career has followed a more problematic script, however, since bin Laden was killed.

The operative, who remains undercover, was passed over for a promotion that many in the CIA thought would be impossible to withhold from someone who played such a key role in one of the most successful operations in agency history.

The real life Jen stirred up a bit of a firestorm when she blasted some of her fellow CIA compatriots with an e-mail. According to the Washington Post:

“The operative, who remains undercover, was passed over for a promotion that many in the CIA thought would be impossible to withhold from someone who played such a key role in one of the most successful operations in agency history.

She has sparred with CIA colleagues over credit for the bin Laden mission. After being given a prestigious award for her work, she sent an e-mail to dozens of other recipients saying they didn’t deserve to share her accolades, current and former officials said.

The woman has also come under scrutiny for her contacts with filmmakers and others about the bin Laden mission, part of a broader internal inquiry into the agency’s cooperation on the new movie and other projects, former officials said.

Her defenders say the operative has been treated unfairly, and even her critics acknowledge that her contributions to the bin Laden hunt were crucial. But the developments have cast a cloud over a career that is about to be bathed in the sort of cinematic glow ordinarily reserved for fictional Hollywood spies.”

Colleagues said the on-screen depiction captures the woman’s dedication and combative temperament.

“She’s not Miss Congeniality, but that’s not going to find Osama bin Laden,” said a former CIA associate, who added that the attention from filmmakers sent waves of envy through the agency’s ranks.

“The agency is a funny place, very insular,” the former official said. “It’s like middle-schoolers with clearances.”

This spring, she was among a handful of employees given the agency’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal, its highest honor except for those recognizing people who have come under direct fire. But when dozens of others were given lesser awards, the female officer lashed out.

“She hit ‘reply all’ ” to an e-mail announcement of the awards, a second former CIA official said. The thrust of her message, the former official said, was: “You guys tried to obstruct me. You fought me. Only I deserve the award.”

Over the past year, she was denied a promotion that would have raised her civil service rank from GS-13 to GS-14, bringing an additional $16,000 in annual pay.

Officials said the woman was given a cash bonus for her work on the bin Laden mission and has since moved on to a new counterterrorism assignment. They declined to say why the promotion was blocked.

The move stunned the woman’s former associates, despite her reputation for clashing with colleagues.

This is just another example of how the CIA has mutated from its origins of the OSS and the Cold War into a massive bureaucratic government organization as has the Department of Defense. As a person who held a security clearance and worked with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency I can attest that there are many bureaucrats in the intelligence business who are more concerned with budgets and achieving their next GS ratings so they can retire with a larger pension. Decisions are had to come by from these bureaucrats. They don’t like to make waves or rock the boat. To them doing nothing is playing it safe and looking for someone else to point a finger at is standard operating procedure. That’s why 9/11 happened.

Overall, both Harlow and Rodriguez encourage Americans to see the film. They are hoping that what people will realize is that instead of supporting rights for terrorists, as some senators seem to be encouraging, those at the CIA chose to do what was right and legal to make sure terrorist plots were foiled. Although they wish the filmmakers consulted with them about the interrogation scenes, the movie realistically showed that here are those at the Agency who are patriotic, very disciplined, and smart, and that they are risk-takers when it comes to making sure Americans are kept safe.

Despite its flaws, inaccuracies and shortcuts, I do believe this film is well worth seeing. Theatergoers should understand, however, that “Zero Dark Thirty” is more than a movie and less than the literal truth. It is more about Maya and her 10-year hunt for bin Laden and all of the hurdles, both external and external, she had to jump. This is especially apparent in the final scene, with Maya in tears, drained, not sure where to go or what to do next.

And finally we come to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — the folks who pass out the Oscars to their BFFs. David Clennon, an Emmy Award-winning actor and member of the AMPAS, announced in an op-ed for the leftist website Truthout that he would not be voting for “Zero Dark Thirty” in any Oscar categories because of its torture scenes.

“At the risk of being expelled for disclosing my intentions, I will not be voting for ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ – in any Academy Awards category,” Clennon wrote. “Torture is an appalling crime under any circumstances. ‘Zero’ never acknowledges that torture is immoral and criminal. It does portray torture as getting results.”

Clennon, who is best known for his work on TV series' "Thirtysomething," "Almost Perfect" and "The Agency" won an Emmy for a guest spot for "Dream On" in 1993. A longtime political activist, his remarks caused something of a furor since Academy members are specifically encourage by AMPAS not to reveal who they are voting for (assuming they are even voting). It's unclear whether Clennon will be reprimanded for his revelation.

But Sony executive Amy Pascal pushed back against Clennon’s assertions, stating bluntly: “Zero Dark Thirty does not advocate torture. To not include that part of history would have been irresponsible and inaccurate.”

Pascal said the studio is “outraged that any responsible member of the Academy would use their voting status in AMPAS as a platform to advance their own political agenda.”

“This film should be judged free of partisanship. To punish an Artist’s right of expression is abhorrent. This community, more than any other, should know how reprehensible that is,” she said.

According to The Wrap Zero Dark Thirty” roared out of the gate in its nationwide expansion Friday, taking in $9 million. That puts Sony’s controversial drama on pace to easily win the weekend box office race with $25 million.

It was running safely ahead of the weekend’s two debuting movies, Warner Bros.’ star-studded “Gangster Squad” and the horror spoof “A Haunted House,” the two R-rated films in a battle for No. 2. The period mob drama opened to $6.6 million from 3,103 theaters and is looking at a roughly $19 million weekend, just under analysts' projections. Marlon Wayans' comedy brought in about $6.7 million from 2,160 theaters, which puts it on pace for $17 million, in line with expectations.

In conclusion the film is worth ten bucks and a couple hours of your time if you like action thrillers based on actual events and to see the outstanding performance of Jessica Chastain. Theatrical movies are not made for the study of history, but they can motivate the viewer to research the events portrayed in the film and learn for themselves.