‘Like Hoover on MLK’: Greenwald to Expose NSA Spying on US Muslims

AFP Photo / Getty Images / Mario Tama

From RT.com - July 3, 2014 - http://tinyurl.com/mdh6pr4

Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists with access to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, will soon expose massive NSA spying on American Muslims, the ACLU has announced.

The leaked data indicate that in public life American Muslims were “subject to the kind of surveillance that Hoover did on Martin Luther King,” ACLU executive director Anthony Romero told an Aspen Ideas Festival panel Wednesday.

He didn’t provide further details, or any deadline for the expected exposé to be published, explaining that preparing it is labor-intensive because the source material is a database rather than some materials prepared for public presentation.

“It will be interesting to see who is on this list but I don’t know,” The Atlantic reported him as saying. “It will be interesting to see if there were members of Congress on this list, what kind of judicial review was provided.”

The controversial discriminating practice of surveillance on US Muslims after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks came to public prominence in 2011, when The Associated Press reported on NYPD’s spying on Muslims in New York City and neighboring New Jersey.

The revelation sparked outrage, with dozens Muslim leaders and human rights groups speaking out against it, but the practice was not abandoned until April 2014.

The controversy remains as the practice itself was ruled by a federal court to be a lawful anti-terrorism effort that didn’t amount to civil-rights violation. The program’s efficiency, however, was dubious at best, as police admitted that it didn’t generate a single lead.

This photo released Wednesday, July 2, 2014 by New Orleans Police shows Justin Odom, named as a person of interest who is being sought in connection with a Sunday morning shooting on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, which left ten people wounded, two seriously. (AP Photo/New Orleans Police)

Injuries to nine people and the death Wednesday of a young woman stemming from a Sunday shootout between two men on New Orleans’ crowded Bourbon Streethave forced the city to plead for help to stanch the gun violence that’s plaguing black neighborhoods in the Crescent City and far beyond.

The Bourbon Street shootout, part of which was captured on video, came a month after a teenager opened fire on a high school graduation of 150 people in Gentilly, La., killing one person. This past weekend, a man in Los Angeles killed one and injured four others after firing into a pre-awards show bash at a restaurant.

But for New Orleans, Sunday's shooting marks a relapse in a lengthy struggle against crime and violence, this time striking the heart of the city’s crucial tourism sector. The birthplace of jazz, Bourbon Street is known the world over, and is usually considered to be a relative safe haven compared with some of New Orleans’ rougher neighborhoods.

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Indeed, the shootings had international implications. Caught in the crossfire was a young Australian student named Amy Matthews, who was shot but survived. Ms. Matthews told Australian media that she was surprised the US government hadn’t moved harder against what she called a deadly gun culture.

New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas summed up the incident as “two cowardly young men trying to hurt one another,” and who decided to have a gun fight “with no regard for others.”

Increased security after Bourbon Street shootingPlay Video

But as police try to track down what appears to be two men – one man was taken into custody but not charged in the shooting – the struggle to understand the mentality has caused at least one criminologist to draw a parallel between the kinds of reckless street shootings often carried out by young and poor black men and the kinds of school shootings that often feature young, middle-class white men as the perpetrators.

According to New Orleans criminologist Peter Scharf, white shooters often have problems with depression and mental illness, while black shooters have been found to have a range of untreated learning as well as mental health disorders. Those issues could be playing similarly into how black and white kids are treated by doctors and teachers, he argues, thus in how callous worldviews are shaped.

“Part of me says [the two types of shooters] are more similar than not,” Mr. Scharf told Adriane Quinlan of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Still, authorities in New Orleans and other US cities with large percentages of poor black residents are currently looking more squarely at how to quell black-on-black violence in America’s poorest neighborhoods.

So far, New Orleans police have had no luck with their tip line after the Bourbon Street incident, suggesting to some that those who may have information about the identity of the men involved are too terrorized to snitch on shooters so brazen.

This week, Mayor Mitch Landrieu took more direct action to crack down on pervasive violence that has now extended into the city’s critical French Quarter, asking Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) to send him 100 state police troopers as permanent backup to the city’s police. Mr. Landrieu also asked Washington for what he called a “surge team” of law enforcement agents to help him combat street crime.

The mayor also said he pleaded in a letter to President Obama that the federal government needs to "get back in the business of fighting crime and help stem this epidemic" of gun violence in America’s ghettos.

“This has been happening for a long time, but it needs to stop,” Landrieu said.

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Sunday's deadly shooting on Bourbon Street marks a relapse in a long struggle against crime and violence.

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REUTERS/U.S. Army/CW4 Dan McClinton

An AH-64D Apache attack helicopter from Company B, 1st Battalion, 227th Aviation Regiment, 1st Air Cavalry Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, Multi-National Division - Baghdad, flies over Baghdad providing security for U.S. ground forces nearby near Camp Taji in Baghdad, in this June 11, 2009.

The skies of Iraq are getting crowded. U.S. Apache attack helicopters and unarmed drones are beingdeployed along with the 500 American troops already ordered to the country. They're just the latest foreign aircraft to join the fight against ISIS, the jihadist group that's swept through northern and western Iraq in recent weeks.

The Syrian Air Force bombed targets that were allegedly ISIS positions in western Iraq last week. Iran has reportedly sent its entire fleet of Sukoi-24 fighter jets to Iraq. And Russia has sent jets and "advisers" to assist Baghdad.

The U.S. military is now in a situation where it likely has to work out military logistics with countries that are typically adversarial with both U.S. policy and international norms more generally.

As combat aviation expert and blogger at The Aviationist David Cenciotti explained when reached by Business Insider, " it is possible to fly Apache and drones in Iraq without any coordination with other air forces operating in the same airspace, but it would be quite dangerous For proper deconfliction of tactical assets, prior coordination and air space management and control are required."

Cenciotti notes that this could be done through "creating a coordination cell" with the other militaries present in the country, or even by "deploying a dedicated asset" like surveillance aircraft "for Airspace Control, Airborne Early Warning, ground targets identification, and mapping."

So U.S. military planners will have to coordinate their activities with other actors to avoid friendly fire incidents or other potentially dicey confrontations between countries with plenty of political and strategic baggage in their relationships with the U.S.

More than that, the deployment of U.S. combat aircraft means that the U.S. is acting as a potential force multiplier for some of the international community's most problematic actors.

The Dangers With Aligning With Iran-Russia-Assad

The Syrian government is one of the most oppressive in the world and was responsible for a chemical-weapons attack in Damascus that killed over 1,500 people in August 2013. Iran is one of the world's leading state sponsors of terrorism, according to the U.S. State Department, and has fostered violent sectarianism in Iraq through its arming of Shiite militias and support for despotic Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea got it kicked out of the G8 in March, and several Russian officials are under E.U. and U.S. sanctions over the country's expansionist policies toward Ukraine.

Yet the alliance between these three countries has transformed the Middle East in the years after the Arab Spring protests of 2011. Russian and Iranian support allowed the Syrian regime of Bashar al Assad to survive against a constellation of secular and jihadist rebel groups — feeding a war that's killed over 150,000 people and leading to the displacement of over 9 million.

The US Is Flying Right Into The Iran-Russia-Syria Plan In Iraq

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REUTERS//Pablo Martinez Monsivais

U.S. President Barack Obama (L) talks with Russia's President Vladimir Putin during arrivals for the G20 summit at the Konstantin Palace in St. Petersburg, September 5, 2013.

Iran's strong position in Syria — enabled through Russian financial, diplomatic and military support for Assad — has allowed it to turn Baghdad into a veritable client, to the point where Qods Force commander Qassem Suleimani is arguably the most powerful person in the country.

And there's been plenty of blowback from these policies throughout the Middle East, from thedestabilization of Lebanon to the ongoing falling out between the U.S. and its Gulf allies to thepotential creation of an independent Kurdistan.

The U.S.'s deployment of attack helicopters to Iraq for possible use against ISIS doesn't prove that Washington is explicitly assisting Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran in their regional ambitions, which have had such a disruptive effect on the post-Arab Spring Middle East. But that may be the likeliest effect of the U.S. joining the fight in Iraq on the side of Russia, Syria, and Iran.

Michael Doran, a former senior director at the National Security Council and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Business Insider that the Obama administration needs to stifle both Iran and ISIS's regional strategies if it wants a comprehensive solution to the problems wracking Syria and Iran. In his view, the U.S. needs to avoid taking a side in the region's larger Sunni-Shiite split — now encapsulated in the fight between Shiite Iran and its Iraqi clients, and Sunni extremists like ISIS — and work to curtail all of the region's bad actors.

"If you want to build up a non-jihadi Sunni force that is capable of commanding loyalty from people on the ground then you have to fight Assad and push against Iran, and you push back against ISIS and Iran at the same time," he said. "If you're just fighting ISIS then you're building an Iranian security system in the region."

U.S. policy could have this effect even if it isn't the Obama administration's intent to strengthen Iran's hand. Even simply coordinating intelligence with a sectarianized and Iranian-infiltrated Iraqi military could play to Tehran's advantage.

"The Iraqis are a thin membrane between the U.S. and the Qods Force," says Doran, referring to the foreign arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. "Any intelligence that we give to the Iraqis is probably going to be on the desk of Qassem Suleimani in less than a day."

With this increased commitment of U.S. military assets to Iraq, the U.S. isn't just forcing itself to coordinate logistics with the Iranian-Syrian-Russian alliance in the Middle East. It's also bringing American policy alarmingly close to that of some of the region's more destructive forces — whether Obama intends for this or not.