A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

The US of A.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald with a terrifying story that should concern any person who believes in the concept of free speech:

One of the more extreme government abuses of the post-9/11 era targets U.S. citizens re-entering their own country, and it has received far too little attention. With no oversight or legal framework whatsoever, the Department of Homeland Security routinely singles out individuals who are suspected of no crimes, detains them and questions them at the airport, often for hours, when they return to the U.S. after an international trip, and then copies and even seizes their electronic devices (laptops, cameras, cellphones) and other papers (notebooks, journals, credit card receipts), forever storing their contents in government files. No search warrant is needed for any of this. No oversight exists. And there are no apparent constraints on what the U.S. Government can do with regard to whom it decides to target or why.

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But the case of Laura Poitras, an Oscar-and Emmy-nominated film-maker and intrepid journalist, is perhaps the most extreme. In 2004 and 2005, Poitras spent many months in Iraq filming a documentary that, as The New York Times put it in its review, “exposed the emotional toll of occupation on Iraqis and American soldiers alike.” The film, “My Country, My Country,” focused on a Sunni physician and 2005 candidate for the Iraqi Congress as he did things like protest the imprisonment of a 9-year-old boy by the U.S. military. At the time Poitras made this film, Iraqi Sunnis formed the core of the anti-American insurgency and she spent substantial time filming and reporting on the epicenter of that resistance. Poitras’ film was released in 2006 and nominated for the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary.

In 2010, she produced and directed “The Oath,” which chronicled the lives of two Yemenis caught up in America’s War on Terror: Salim Hamdan, the accused driver of Osama bin Laden whose years-long imprisonment at Guantanamo led to the 2006 Supreme Court case, bearing his name, that declared military commissions to be a violation of domestic and international law; and Hamdan’s brother-in-law, a former bin Laden bodyguard. The film provides incredible insight into the mindset of these two Yemenis. The NYT feature on “The Oath” stated that, along with “My Country, My Country,” Poitras has produced ”two of the most searching documentaries of the post-9/11 era, on-the-ground chronicles that are sensitive to both the political and the human consequences of American foreign policy.” At the 2010 Sundance film festival, “The Oath” won the award for Best Cinematography.

Poitras’ intent all along with these two documentaries was to produce a trilogy of War on Terror films, and she is currently at work on the third installment. As Poitras described it to me, this next film will examine the way in which The War on Terror has been imported onto U.S. soil, with a focus on the U.S. Government’s increasing powers of domestic surveillance, its expanding covert domestic NSA activities (including construction of a massive new NSA facilityin Bluffdale, Utah), its attacks on whistleblowers, and the movement to foster government transparency and to safeguard Internet anonymity. In sum, Poitras produces some of the best, bravest and most important filmmaking and journalism of the past decade, often exposing truths that are adverse to U.S. government policy, concerning the most sensitive and consequential matters (a 2004 film she produced for PBS on gentrification of an Ohio town won the Peabody Award and was nominated for an Emmy).

But Poitras’ work has been hampered, and continues to be hampered, by the constant harassment, invasive searches, and intimidation tactics to which she is routinely subjected whenever she re-enters her own country. Since the 2006 release of “My Country, My Country,” Poitras has left and re-entered the U.S. roughly 40 times. Virtually every time during that six-year-period that she has returned to the U.S.  her plane has been met by DHS agents who stand at the airplane door or tarmac and inspect the passports of every de-planing passenger until they find her (on the handful of occasions where they did not meet her at the plane, agents were called arrived at immigration). Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke. They have exhibited a particular interest in finding out for whom she works.

She has had her laptop, camera and cellphone seized, and not returned for weeks, with the contents presumably copied. On several occasions, her reporter’s notebooks were seized and their contents copied, even as she objected that doing so would invade her journalist-source relationship. Her credit cards and receipts have been copied on numerous occasions. In many instances, DHS agents also detain and interrogate her in the foreign airport before her return, on one trip telling her that she would be barred from boarding her flight back home, only to let her board at the last minute. When she arrived at JFK Airport on Thanksgiving weekend of 2010, she was told by one DHS agent — after she asserted her privileges as a journalist to refuse to answer questions about the individuals with whom she met on her trip — that he “finds it very suspicious that you’re not willing to help your country by answering our questions.” They sometimes keep her detained for three to four hours (all while telling her that she will be released more quickly if she answers all their questions and consents to full searches).

Poitras is now forced to take extreme steps — ones that hamper her ability to do her work — to ensure that she can engage in her journalism and produce her films without the U.S. Government intruding into everything she is doing. She now avoids traveling with any electronic devices. She uses alternative methods to deliver the most sensitive parts of her work — raw film and interview notes — to secure locations. She spends substantial time and resources protecting her computers with encryption and password defenses. Especially when she is in the U.S., she avoids talking on the phone about her work, particularly to sources. And she simply will not edit her films at her home out of fear — obviously well-grounded — that government agents will attempt to search and seize the raw footage.

That’s the climate of fear created by the U.S. Government for an incredibly accomplished journalist and filmmaker who has never been accused, let alone convicted, of any wrongdoing whatsoever. Indeed, documents obtained from a FOIA request show that DHS has repeatedly concluded that nothing incriminating was found from its border searches and interrogations of Poitras. Nonetheless, these abuses not only continue, but escalate, after six years of constant harassment.

Poitras has been somewhat reluctant to speak publicly about the treatment to which she is subjected for fear that doing so would further impede her ability to do her work (the NYT feature on “The Oath” included some discussion of it). But the latest episode, among the most aggressive yet, has caused her to want to vociferously object.

On Thursday night, Poitras arrived at Newark International Airport from Britain. Prior to issuing her a boarding pass in London, the ticket agent called a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent (Yost) who questioned her about whom she met and what she did. Upon arriving in Newark, DHS/CBP agents, as always, met her plane, detained her, and took her to an interrogation room. Each time this has happened in the past, Poitras has taken notes during the entire process: in order to chronicle what is being done to her, document the journalistic privileges she asserts and her express lack of consent, obtain the names of the agents involved, and just generally to cling to some level of agency.

This time, however, she was told by multiple CBP agents that she was prohibited from taking notes on the ground that her pen could be used as a weapon. After she advised them that she was a journalist and that her lawyer had advised her to keep notes of her interrogations, one of them, CBP agent Wassum, threatened to handcuff her if she did not immediately stop taking notes. A CBP Deputy Chief (Lopez) also told her she was barred from taking notes, and then accused her of “refusing to cooperate with an investigation” if she continued to refuse to answer their questions (he later clarified that there was no “investigation” per se, but only a “questioning”). Requests for comment from the CBP were not returned as of the time of publication.

Dispiriting news. Australia, apparently so proud of exploiting resources, now wants to share this knowledge with a poor nation such as Afghanistan that is open to vulture capitalists. The Australian reports:

Afghanistan is looking to the Australian mining industry for instruction and investment as the war-torn nation stakes its stability and economic future on the success of its nascent natural resources sector.

An Afghan Ministry of Mines delegation will tour Australia in coming weeks on an industry roadshow to convince Australian mining companies that the opportunities for mineral exploitation outweigh the security risks.

The government is also seeking Australian expertise in the creation of an Afghan school of mines. Mines Minister Wahidullah Shahrani said, “Australia is a model for us”.

“The government of Australia has been very generous to help us with our technical capacity, give us scholarships for postgraduate programs in the mining area and we’ve also been sending some people to the Australian department of mines and petroleum,” he told The Australian.

Afghanistan is sitting on enormous mineral wealth.

A review of Soviet-era survey data by the US Geological Survey estimates oil reserves of three billion barrels, 15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and significant copper, gold, iron ore, gemstone and lithium deposits.

The survey valued the country’s known natural resources at about $US1 trillion ($970bn), although Mr Shahrani says it could be three times that amount given only 30 per cent of Afghan territory has been surveyed.

Three decades of war and insecurity, coupled with widespread illiteracy, have in the past prevented the successful exploitation of Afghanistan’s minerals wealth.

But with most coalition forces pulling out in December 2014, and international aid to decline after that date, Afghanistan’s future depends heavily on the successful exploitation of its minerals.

“By 2016 we expect revenues to government from mines will be at least $1.5 billion,” Mr Shahrani said.

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et security – as ever – remains Afghanistan’s biggest problem.

Major Western mining companies such as Rio Tinto are understood to view Afghanistan, even under NATO forces, as too dangerous and everyone is jittery about the post-2014 landscape when security fully transfers into Afghan hands.

The government has tried to allay those fears by creating a Mines Protection Unit that will secure all projects at the state’s expense.

But it must also convince its own population – weary of occupation and wary of strangers – that foreign exploitation of its mineral resources is the key to its future.

Mr Shahrani says involving local communities in mining projects, through local jobs and community spin-offs, is the best way to reduce risk.

In coming months Kabul will begin a public awareness campaign, sending groups of MPs, officials and journalists to Australia to see the economic benefits mining can deliver.

Mr Shahrani said: “Afghanistan has never been a major mining country, unlike South Africa, Kazakhstan or Australia, so people need to be able to understand its potential.”

Strong New York Times editorial against the shameful “terror” trials held by the US in the “land of the free”:

The Pentagon’s prosecutors formally charged Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other men last week with war crimes for planning and carrying out the murder of 2,976 people on Sept. 11, 2001, and referred their case to a constitutionally flawed military tribunal that will be convened at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, a global symbol of human rights abuses.

The conspirators have been held for more than nine years. As Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the chief military prosecutor, said in a speech at Harvard on Tuesday, the use of military commissions “has become a matter of the rule of law and of recognizing that at some point justice delayed really is justice denied.” But it is worth remembering how we got to this system and this place — the worst way to administer justice to the 9/11 terrorists.

Let’s start with the delay. All of the men could have been brought to trial years ago, but President Bush decided he could ignore the Constitution. He ordered them to be held in secret C.I.A. prisons and subjected to brutal and illegal interrogations. Mr. Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month alone. That torture produced no useful intelligence, according to virtually all accounts, except those offered by people like former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was the key architect of the Bush administration’s lawless detention and interrogation policies.

When Mr. Mohammed was moved to Guantánamo Bay, finally, with the four others, there were immediate questions about whether they could ever be tried legitimately, given how tainted the evidence was. Mr. Bush did nothing, content with arguing that Congress’s decision to declare a perpetual state of war with Al Qaeda gave him the right to hold prisoners indefinitely without any trial.

President Obama came into office pledging to close Guantánamo Bay and restore the rule of law to the treatment of terrorism suspects. He has largely failed.