Mike Allen’s obsequious, pay-to-play Playbook newsletter was once hailed by The New York Times as a must-read for Washington’s “elite set of political and news-media thrivers and strivers.” For me, it’s most useful as a shameless chronicle of what that elite group cares about — and how it lives.

In particular, Allen frequently documents how intimately and seamlessly connected the members of the media aristocracy are with other members of Washington’s ruling elite, whether they come from the intelligence community, the super-wealthy, big banks, the lobbying community, or top levels of government.

To the elite media itself, all this is just background noise. But I’m increasingly thinking the noise is the signal.

Allen had a canonical example in in Sunday’s edition:

CHARLIE ROSE’S WASHINGTON: Charlie Rose, the man who’s always working, got to just enjoy himself last night – tieless, and rocking sneakers. D.C. friends walked down a red carpet to the elegant terrace of the rarely seen estate of Franco Nuschese, owner of Café Milano, who was honoring Charlie with a dinner celebration and garden party after he delivered the Georgetown commencement address and received an honorary doctorate of humane letters.

Franco’s three and a half acres, in the Northwest D.C. neighborhood of Forest Hills, include a view down the same hill as the Italian ambassador’s residence. In a toast, Charlie said Franco is the best traveling companion in Italy – aside from two of the evening’s guests, CIA Director John Brennan and former deputy CIA director Michael Morell.

 –SPOTTED: Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba, Don Baer and Nancy Bard, Bret and Amy Baier, CIA Director John Brennan and Kathy Pokluda Brennan, Charlie Cook, Jan Crawford, Henry Davis, E.J. Dionne, Tom Donilon, Jim and Deb Fallows, Tom and Ann Friedman, Georgetown College Dean Chester Gillis, Tammy Haddad, Al Hunt and Judy Woodruff, Walter and Cathy Isaacson, Chris and Jennifer Isham, Vernon and Ann Jordan, Tommy Kaplan, Jonathan Karl, Katty Kay, Samantha Kulok, Jennifer Lawson of Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Margot McGinness, Frank Milwee, Michael Morell, Norah O’Donnell and Geoff Tracy, Roxanne Roberts, John F.W. Rogers, Sally Quinn, Hilary Rosen and Campbell Spencer, Chelsea Royal, David Sanger, Bob and Pat Schieffer, Justin Smith, Ellen Tauscher, George Tenet and Stephanie Glakas-Tenet, Yvette Vega, Chitra Wadhwani and more.

–WHAT FRANCO SERVES AT HOME: hand-carved prosciutto; eggplant parmesan; roasted sea scallops, eggplant and basil; buffalo mozzarella; pecorino cheeses; roasted veal in tuna sauce; assorted cold cuts; calamarata pasta, fresh oregano, tomatoes and zucchini; oysters; steamed shellfish with vegetables; mixed greens salad; octopus, peaches, green beans and mint salad; tuna, salmon and amberjack tartar; plus a bar and desserts.

A lot of those names are widely recognizable from your TVs, being prominent media figures, political fixers, and national security advisers: Brett Baier of Fox News, E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post, Tom Friedman and David Sanger of The New York Times, Al Hunt of Bloomberg, Judy Woodruff of PBS, Jonathan Karl of ABC, Norah O’Donnell of NBC, Bob Schieffer of CBS, Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute, Tom Donilon the national security adviser, etc.

But some are possibly only familiar to readers of Playbook. Consider: that Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba is from the United Arab Emirates; Don Baer is worldwide chair and chief executive officer of the strategic communications firm Burson-Marsteller and chair of the research firm Penn Schoen Berland; Tom Kaplan, I’m gonna guess, is this billionaire mining investor (UPDATE: This may be poor guesswork on my part, in part due to bad spelling on Mike Allen’s, as I’m now informed by email that there was a Tommy Caplan at the party, a non-billionaire area novelist. Of course maybe they were both there); John F.W. Rogers “might be one of the most important people at Goldman Sachs“; and, as Allen put it, more.

I have to wonder: Was there any tension between members of the media who were there, and other guests?

Did people talk politics? Were there any visible or audible signs of discomfort or disagreement? Did the powerful political players spend one second worried that the media figures might ask them an uncomfortable question? Or did everyone just mingle and share friendly chatter?

Sitting there, eating hand-carved prosciutto and octopus salad, was there a palpable sense of a common bond?

If it were me, I’d go right up to Brennan and call him a goddamned liar, ask him why he won’t own up to the CIA’s role in torture, what he’s got on Obama, and why he doesn’t resign immediately in shame. Of course, that’s probably one of the many reasons why I’m not invited in the first place.

Sometimes people ask me: Why do smart, elite journalists quote people who they know are lying, or being moronically stupid, but not call what they say lies and stupidities? Why do they engage in split-the-difference false equivalence in political coverage that leaves readers terribly uninformed about what’s really going on?

And I say: One big reason is the cocktail parties.

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The post The Infernal Cocktail Party Corruption of Washington’s Elite Media appeared first on The Intercept.

Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), in a floor speech (transcript; video) that Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) immediately called the most important he had heard in his career, said the CIA had searched through computers belonging to staff members investigating the agency’s role in torturing detainees, and had then leveled false charges against her staff in an attempt to intimidate them.

“I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principle embodied in the United States Constitution, including the speech and debate clause,” she said. “It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function.”

She concluded: “The recent actions that I have just laid out make this a defining moment for the oversight of our intelligence community. How Congress responds and how this is resolved will show whether the Intelligence Committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation’s intelligence activities, or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee. I believe it is critical that the committee and the Senate reaffirm our oversight role and our independence under the Constitution of the United States.”

She also accused the CIA of obstructing her committee’s torture inquiry in general, and of disputing findings that its own internal inquiry had substantiated.

The document at the heart of this confrontation is an internal review conducted by the CIA of the materials it had turned over to Feinstein’s committee during the course of the four-year congressional investigation into the Bush-era torture practices.

Feinstein said the document, which has become known as the Panetta Review after then-director of the CIA Leon Panetta, was first discovered by committee staff using CIA-provided search tools in 2010. It became particularly relevant later, after the committee completed a scathing 6,300-page report in December 2012, and the CIA sent its official response in June 2013.

The committee’s detailed report is still classified, but it is known to be highly critical of both the CIA’s role in the torture regime and its campaign to deceive Congress about it. The CIA vehemently took issue with those conclusions.

“Unlike the official response, these Panetta review documents were in agreement with the committee’s findings. That’s what makes them so significant and important to protect,” Feinstein said.

Based on the CIA’s extensive record of removal and destruction of evidence, which Feinstein detailed in her floor speech, committee staff decided “there was a need to preserve and protect” a copy of the review, which meant bringing it back from the CIA-leased offices in Virginia where staff had been forced to conduct their investigation to secure facilities in a Senate office building.

In December of 2013, Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.)  revealed that the intelligence committee was aware of the internal report, which he noted “is consistent with the Intelligence committee’s report, but amazingly it conflicts with the official CIA response.”

Feinstein said that a month later, John Brennan, the current director of the CIA, informed her that CIA personnel had conducted a search of the committee’s computers in the Virginia facility, including the standalone network that contained the committee staff’s own internal work product and communication.

The senator was outraged, she said, and fired off a letter expressing her concerns that the action was illegal and unconstitutional.

“I have asked for an apology and a recognition that this CIA search of computers used by its oversight committee was inappropriate. I have received neither,” she said.

“Besides the constitutional implications, the CIA search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”

Feinstein said she later learned that the CIA’s own inspector general had made a criminal referral to the Justice Department regarding the search of the congressional computers by CIA personnel.

But what seemed to really set her off was the CIA’s counter-charge, made through acting CIA general counsel Robert Eatinger, that her staff had illegally accessed and removed the document.

“Our staff involved in this matter have the appropriate clearances, handled this sensitive material according to established procedures and practice to protect classified information, and were provided access to the Panetta Review by the CIA itself,” she said.

“As a result, there is no legitimate reason to allege to the Justice Department that Senate staff may have committed a crime. I view the acting counsel general’s referral as a potential effort to intimidate this staff, and I am not taking this lightly.”

She added: “I should note that for most if not all of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, the now-acting general counsel was a lawyer in the CIA’s counterterrorism center, the unit within which the CIA managed and carried out this program. From mid-2004 until the official termination of the detention and interrogation program in January 2009, he was the unit’s chief lawyer. He is mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our study.

“And now, this individual is sending a crimes report to the Department of Justice on the actions of Congressional staff — the same Congressional staff who researched and drafted a report that details how CIA officers, including the acting general counsel himself, provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice about the program.”

Feinstein’s fighting words were in stark contrast to her role as a champion of NSA surveillance. In most cases, Feinstein has served as an example of how badly oversight over the intelligence community has failed, serving as an accessory to the very kind of excesses her committee was established, in the 1970s,  to prevent.

But torture has been the exception for Feinstein, who in stark contrast to President Obama has demanded an authoritative, official accounting of what happened during the Bush years.

Feinstein made it clear that she is eager for her committee’s report to become public. “If the Senate can declassify this report, we will be able to insure than an un-American, brutal program in interrogation and distension will never again be permitted.”

When Feinstein concluded, Leahy called for dramatic action. “We are supposed to be the conscience of the nation,” he said of the Senate. “Now let’s stand up for this country.”

In a statement, Leahy later continued: “This is not just about getting to the truth of the CIA’s shameful use of torture. This is also about the core founding principle of the separation of powers, and the future of this institution and its oversight role. The Senate is bigger than any one Senator. Senators come and go, but the Senate endures. The members of the Senate must stand up in defense of this institution, the Constitution, and the values upon which this nation was founded.”

Brennan, in remarks at a Council on Foreign Relations, said the CIA wants to put the torture controversy behind it. “Even as we learn from the past, we must also be able to put the past behind us.”

Misrepresenting Feinstein’s charge as one of CIA “hacking”, he denied it. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “We wouldn’t do that. That’s beyond the scope of reason.”

And he said he would leave it to the Justice Department to sort out the dueling referrals, and figure out who was in the wrong.

UPDATE:  Virginia Sloan, president of The Constitution Project, a bipartisan legal watchdog group, issued the following statement:

We are outraged by Senator Feinstein’s description of repeated efforts by the CIA to thwart critical and legitimate congressional oversight through delays, attacks, intimidation and attempts to conceal. This is not a partisan issue. Such conduct strikes at the heart of our nation’s constitutional system of separation of powers.

This is truly a defining moment, not only for congressional oversight of the intelligence community, but also for President Obama’s legacy on torture. The White House cannot allow the CIA to drive this process any longer. The president must ensure that the committee’s report is declassified to the fullest extent possible, as well as the CIA’s response to the committee’s study and the so-called Panetta review. But President Obama should not stop there; he should declassify the rendition, detention and interrogation program itself.

UPDATE 2 at 2:34 p.m. ET: 

Statement from Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.):

The actions the chairman outlined are the latest events that illustrate why I directly pushed CIA Director Brennan to acknowledge the flaws in and misrepresentations about the CIA’s brutal and ineffective detention and interrogation program. Unfortunately, the CIA responded by trying to hide the truth from the American people about this program and undermine the Senate Intelligence Committee’s oversight role by illegally searching committee computers. The U.S. Constitution is clear and Coloradans agree: The separation of powers and aggressive oversight are fundamental to our democracy, and Coloradans can count on me to continue to protect these foundational pillars no matter who is in the White House.

Statement from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.):

I commend Chairman Feinstein for shining a light on the unprecedented invasion by the CIA into computers used by Senate Intelligence Committee investigators.  The CIA’s own recent court filing makes clear that the work product on these computers was and is ‘the property of the Committee.’ I share her concern that this search may have violated both federal law and the US Constitution.  In addition to the grave implications for the Constitutional separation of powers, I am extremely troubled that the CIA leadership has neither responded to specific questions about this search nor even acknowledged that it was inappropriate.  This is simply not acceptable in a democracy.

I will continue to support Chairman Feinstein’s efforts to get more answers and accountability from the CIA about this search.  In my judgment, the Intelligence Community leadership’s misleading statements on interrogation and many other issues has undermined their credibility. I will continue to work with my colleagues to ensure that the facts about the CIA’s detention and interrogation program are made public, so that the American people can make up their own minds about what happened and prevent the mistakes of the past from being repeated.

White House spokesman Jay Carney, meanwhile, said “The president has great confidence in John Brennan and confidence in our intelligence community and in our professionals at the CIA.”

Also see: The Inverse of Oversight: CIA Spies On Congress, March 5, 2014

The post CIA Search of Congressional Computer Sparks Constitutional Crisis appeared first on The Intercept.

In his ruling Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge William J. Martini simultaneously demonstrated the willingness of the judiciary to give law enforcement alarming latitude in the name of fighting terror, greenlighted the targeting of Muslims based solely on their religious beliefs, and blamed the media for upsetting people by telling them what their government was doing.

The NYPD’s clandestine spying on daily life in Muslim communities in the region — with no probable cause, and nothing to show for it — was exposed in a Pulitzer-Prize winning series of stories by the AP. The stories described infiltration and surveillance of at least 20 mosques, 14 restaurants, 11 retail stores, two grade schools, and two Muslim student associations in New Jersey alone.

In a cursory, 10-page ruling issued before even hearing oral arguments, Martini essentially said that what the targets didn’t know didn’t hurt them:

None of the Plaintiffs’ injuries arose until after the Associated Press released unredacted, confidential NYPD documents and articles expressing its own interpretation of those documents. Nowhere in the Complaint do Plaintiffs allege that they suffered harm prior to the unauthorized release of the documents by the Associated Press. This confirms that Plaintiffs’ alleged injuries flow from the Associated Press’s unauthorized disclosure of the documents. The harms are not “fairly traceable” to any act of surveillance.

The NYPD didn’t publicize the program, the judge wrote. “The Associated Press covertly obtained confidential NYPD documents and published unredacted versions of these documents, as well as articles interpreting the documents.”

The AP declined to comment.

Martini, a one-term Republican congressman from New Jersey, was appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush in 2002. Previous critiques of his judicial conduct have been unusually blunt and public, including repeated rebukes at the appellate level and the local U.S. attorney’s describing him in court filings as “misguided” and “irrational.”

Nevertheless, Martini is still on the bench (it’s very hard to unseat a federal judge). And his ruling was perhaps the most extreme example yet of what is becoming the nearly standard reaction by the modern American political and law-enforcement elite’s reaction to exposure of secret conduct that merits public scrutiny: trying to shoot the messenger.

“In a suit like this, the complaint is that the government did the surveillance, not that it became public knowledge,” Gregg Leslie, legal defense director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told The Intercept.

“The fact that the surveillance occurred is what causes a constitutional violation, so it’s very disingenuous to say that any harm was done by any reporting on it. The harm was done when they violated the Constitution by spying on them.”

Tom Rosensteil, executive director of the American Press Institute, told The Intercept that there are indeed cases where journalists should not publish everything they know. “These issues are not always so clear cut,” he said.

But the key question, he said, is “Is the publication of the story in the public interest?” Does the benefit outweigh the harm?

“The notion that the press shouldn’t be watching, and shouldn’t be providing some healthy skepticism and check on government overreaching? We want the press to do that. Any inference that we don’t want the press to be writing about these things would be a mistake,” Rosensteil said.

Martini’s ruling was also notable for its embrace of guilt by association:

Plaintiffs must plead sufficient factual matter to show that the City adopted and implemented the surveillance program not for a neutral, investigative reason but for the purpose of discriminating on account of religion. … [T]he Plaintiffs in this case have not alleged facts from which it can be plausibly inferred that they were targeted solely because of their religion. The more likely explanation for the surveillance was a desire to locate budding terrorist conspiracies. The most obvious reason for so concluding is that surveillance of the Muslim community began just after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The police could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself.

But as Samuel Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan and former official in the civil rights division of the Justice Department, told MSNBC’s Adam Serwer, that’s not the way it works. For instance, he said, “A police department cannot specifically target African-Americans for surveillance on the ground that the department is seeking to identify crime within the black community.”

The case, Hassan v. City of New York, was filed by Muslim Advocates and the Center for Constitutional Rights, on behalf of a broad group of American Muslims, including a decorated Iraq war veteran and the former principal of a grade school for Muslim girls.

“In addition to willfully ignoring the harm that our innocent clients suffered from the NYPD’s illegal spying program, by upholding the NYPD’s blunderbuss Muslim surveillance practices, the court’s decision gives legal sanction to the targeted discrimination of Muslims anywhere and everywhere in this country, without limitation, for no other reason than their religion,” Center for Constitutional Rights legal director Baher Azmy said in a statement. “It is a troubling and dangerous decision.”

“The fight is not over by any means. The surveillance program violates the Constitution, and we are confident that this decision will not hold up to review upon appeal,” Glenn Katon, legal director of Muslim Advocates, said in a statement.

I really hope this decision doesn’t stand,” the lead plaintiff in the suit, Syed Farhaj Hassan, an Iraq war veteran, told the New Jersey Record. “I have dedicated my career to serving my country, and this just feels like a slap in the face — all because of the way I pray.”

The post Judge Tosses Muslim Spying Suit Against NYPD, Says Any Damage Was Caused by Reporters Who Exposed It appeared first on The Intercept.

All three (the third being cyberwar) have a lot in common. Despite their staggering implications, Obama has proceeded to establish the rules for them unilaterally, almost entirely in secret, based on dubious legal arguments, largely unchecked by judicial or congressional oversight, and with a seemingly unshakeable yet remarkably unfounded faith in their value.

But one of the many major takeaways from the eight-month-and-counting exploration of the  trove of secret NSA documents Edward Snowden gave journalists is that what may seem like good ideas within the confines of a like-minded military-intelligence establishment look very different when exposed to overdue public scrutiny.

Only then do you find out they don’t work so well. Or that they aren’t really legal, or constitutional. Or that they do more harm than good.  Or that the government relies on them too much, at the expense of things that might actually work.

History has shown time and again that secrecy and bad decisions go hand in hand.

So the fact that two new, secret U.S. government war-making abilities when used in tandem have particularly disastrous consequences for innocent civilians is newsworthy – but unfortunately not that surprising.

Because of the Obama administration’s refusal to disclose its selection or targeting criteria in any detail, it’s impossible to determine with any confidence which or how many of the civilian massacres by drone were the product of an overreliance on SIGINT rather than, say, a HUMINT asset settling a personal score or a government official eliminating possible rivals, or just plain user error.

But it’s probably more than the Obama administration would like you to think. The White House’s record of truth-telling when it comes to drone warfare is appalling. Years of administration arguments that civilian casualties in drone attacks have been inconsequential have proven again and again to be specious. Before Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s March 2013 assurance to Congress that the government wasn’t collecting data on Americans in bulk, the administration’s single biggest whopper might have been White House counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan’s assertion in June 2011 that over the previous year there had not been a single collateral death from drone strikes.

Exhaustive independent studies by the British Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the New America Foundation and the Long War Journal have documented that civilian casualties are endemic – the latest count is at least 440 since the drone campaigns began, according to the BIJ.

And countless journalistic accounts have described how the strikes are counterproductive, increasing civilians’ sympathy for al Qaeda and its allies in Yemen today as in Pakistan and Afghanstan before, and as in Somalia next.

Obama himself is hardly unaware of the dreadful downside of errant drone strikes. As Daniel Klaidman reported in his book, “Kill or Capture,” Obama authorized his very first drone strike on the third full day of his presidency, after having been assured by then-CIA director Michael Hayden that the targets were high-level al Qaeda and Taliban commanders. The Hellfire missile he sent into a compound in Pakistan instead killed a prominent pro-government tribal elder and four members of his family, including two children.

Klaidman wrote that Obama was “understandably disturbed” when he found out what happened, and insisted on some procedural changes. But civilian casualties continued. And each time, Obama evidently convinced himself that it wouldn’t happen again.

His most recent public assurance came in an October 2013 speech to the United Nations, where he announced that he had “limited the use of drones so they target only those who pose a continuing, imminent threat to the United States where capture is not feasible, and there is a near certainty of no civilian casualties.”

Less than two months later, missiles fired by a U.S. drone killed 13 people in a convoy of vehicles headed to a wedding party in Yemen.

How Obama’s faith in his military and intelligence leaders was restored or remained unflagging after all these incidents, despite the skepticism that he so clearly displayed during his first presidential campaign, is surely one of the great mysteries facing his supporters today, and historians tomorrow.

The spirited and informed public debate we need to have over these new ways of war has been stifled by the Obama administration, which has not only made a mockery of its promises of transparency, but has set new records in terms of its hostility toward journalistic leaks.

Congress, meanwhile, has shirked its oversight duties, in an unholy alliance of complicit leaders, happy campaign contributors, Republican ultra-hawks and partisan Democrats who don’t want to attack their president, even when he has enshrined precisely the kind of radical militaristic and anti-civil libertarian policies they convinced themselves during the Bush years were temporary aberrations.

And the elite Washington press corps, not yet recovered from its abdication of adversarial journalism after 9/11, has done an astonishingly poor job of raising and pressing important questions.

Where does that leave us?

Here. In a place and time where the only way to have the debate the country so desperately needs is for whistleblowers to speak up, and for independent journalists to make sure that they are heard.

The post The Terrible Toll of Secrecy appeared first on The Intercept.