Sometimes the Tsar really doesn't!

Sargasso Sea, via WAITT Foundation.

Exactly 50 years ago:

Nov. 2, 1963: President Kennedy is stunned by a coup in South Vietnam. Details in WWR's @JFKElmStreet http://t.co/b77Qdd0d53
— West Wing Reports (@WestWingReport) November 2, 2013

Kennedy immediately blames the CIA [for the murders of President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, which was not part of the coup plans]. "I've got to do something about those bastards," he later fumes. "They should be stripped of their exorbitant power." But the President also engages in a bit of spin control, saying "We have to make it clear this is not an American coup."

Of course we didn't know that Kennedy was blaming the CIA, did we? We only knew about the part where he was lying, denying the US had anything to do with the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem. And a lot of people were quite certain he was lying, quite rightly, but it hardly occurred to anyone that the coup was against his express will as president. But we now know that that was the case. And don't even talk about Hoover's FBI, which is known to have spied on the president himself.

Now we're all expressing astonishment over claims that Barack Obama may not have known that the NSA was gathering communications data of some kind on various European and Latin American heads of government and heads of state. [jump]

Oh, really? He didn't know? Is he some kind of lazy, detached, bubble-dwelling time-server, always off at the ranch chopping brush...? Wait, wrong tirade.

An Eddie **(Image provided by the SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Flight Center, and ORBIMAGEN; courtesy of NOAA . Via MicrobeWiki.

Very widely quoted story (by Fox, Telegraph, and other equally reliable venues) from Bild am Sonntag: they claim to have a source within the NSA who was assigned to spy on Merkel and knows that Alexander personally told the president about it in 2010; "Obama didn't stop the action but let it go on." That's Bild (the worst Springer tabloid) am Sonntag (the day of the week when it's at it's worst), with the motto "Bild dir deine Meinung" which could be the direct inspiration for Rupert Murdoch's "We report, you decide, you foxy thing".

nach Informationen von BILD am SONNTAG aus US-Geheimdienstkreisen wurde der Präsident 2010 von NSA-Chef Keith Alexander persönlich über die Geheimoperation gegen Merkel informiert.

„Obama hat die Aktion damals nicht gestoppt, sondern weiter laufen lassen“, erklärte ein mit der NSA-Operation gegen Merkel vertrauter Geheimdienstmitarbeiter BILD am SONNTAG.

They happened to pick up on a source from "US secret service circles" who both ran the Berlin operation and was privy to conversations between Alexander and Obama? I don't believe this story at all, especially coming in this piece-of-shit newspaper. They would have run it if they got it from Laura Poitras in a fake beard and sunglasses.

Adventure Aquarium, Camden, NJ. Photo by Bill.

Here's Emptywheel today on the current state of NSAology:

The NYT and Guardian have similar stories out today describing the sheer breadth of NSA’s spying. The Guardian describes how NSA gleefully embraced change because it presented more opportunities for SIGINT collection.

n one of the leaked ‘State of the Enterprise’ documents from 2007, an NSA staff member says: “The constant change in the world provides fertile ground for discovering new targets, technologies and networks that enable production of Sigint.”

The official happily embraces this: “It’s becoming a cliché that a permanent state of change is the new standard. It is the world we live in – navigating through continuous whitewater.”

It’s an environment in which the NSA thrives, the official says. And adds: “Lucky for us.”

And both present the plight of someone analyzing Lashkar-e-Taiba who couldn’t read the intelligence because it was all Farsi and Arabic.

One N.S.A. officer on the Lashkar-e-Taiba beat let slip that some of his eavesdropping turned out to be largely pointless, perhaps because of the agency’s chronic shortage of skilled linguists. He “ran some queries” to read intercepted communications of certain Lashkar-e-Taiba members, he wrote in the wiki, but added: “Most of it is in Arabic or Farsi, so I can’t make much of it.”

Both, too, present how detailed our intelligence from Afghanistan has been — though the NYT noted, it doesn’t seem to have brought us success.

We are collecting enormous amounts of data, but it’s not clear what good it’s doing us.

Are you really going to persist in being afraid of these people?

Web of Evil #14, October 1954. Via The Horror of it All.

The NSA is the most desperately unsexy place in the whole US intelligence apparatus. I believe, as I've said before, that they tend to obey the law, but I doubt very much that they tell the president everything they're up to. I have no difficulty whatever believing that he didn't know about the surveillance. Any more than JFK would have known.

As to the CIA, JFK was going to be dead in three weeks time, and they never were stripped of their exorbitant power, but Obama has made the first efforts in decades at doing it, sending John Brennan to take over and start building down their paramilitary capacity and building up their functions in, ah, the thing they're the central agency of. Intelligence, that's it. And he is no doubt lying about some things, as JFK did. And you don't have to like it! But you could try to stop being so shocked at the thought.