On Wednesday afternoon, in a letter to Congress, Attorney General Eric Holder for the first time formally acknowledged that U.S. drones had killed four U.S. citizens -- including Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son. Bearing out long-held concerns in the human rights community over the description of these strikes as "targeted" killings, only one of these U.S. citizens (al-Awlaki senior) was on the government's kill list.

The New York Times' typically administration-friendly report suggests that Obama's speech will hail the dawn of a new age of high precision, unproblematic drone strikes. The language used in Holder's letter, however, alongside recent disturbing comments from top Pentagon officials, give us reason to doubt that the boundless, limitless War on Terror is coming to any sort of clean end.

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The AP spying scandal must be contextualized (as Kevin Gosztola pointed out): This administration is waging a war on whistle-blowers and First Amendment protections. A creeping surveillance state is being codified, under which the Fourth Amendment is also desecrated and journalists hardly stand alone as objects of surveillance.

As NSA whistle-blower Thomas Drake -- one of a record six individuals to be indicted under the Espionage Act during Obama's presidency -- told me recently, this government's approach to security resembles a "hoarding complex." His point was borne out by comments from CIA’s chief technical officer, Gus Hunt, who recently explained the spy agency’s strategy for a broad surveillance dragnet in a New York speech:

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"Even given the significant public interest in enforcing criminal laws that protect our national security, seeking toll records associated with media organizations is undertaken only after all other reasonable alternative investigative steps have been taken," Cole wrote.

After a "comprehensive investigation" by the Justice Department, the letter continues, the DOJ decided to subpoena the records. "The subpoenas were limited to a reasonable period of time and did not seek the content of any calls," Cole continued. "In addition, these records have been closely held and reviewed solely for the purposes of this ongoing criminal investigation. The records have not been and will not be provided for use in any other investigations."

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Carl Bernstein, famed investigative journalist who broke the story on the Watergate scandal with Bob Woodward, appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and declared this is a “matter of policy.” It goes right up to the president and the people who surround him, the very officials who have waged an unprecedented war on whistle-blowers and leaks.

He also explained, “The object of it is to try and intimidate people who talk to reporters, especially on national security matters. National security is always the false claim of administrations trying to hide information that people ought to know.”

Over 100 Journalists’ Phone Communications Collected

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That's one of the big - if deliberately ignored - takeaways from the reaction to news that the Internal Revenue Service allegedly targeting conservative organizations for extra scrutiny in their larger review of political groups' tax exempt status. In the last few days, the allegations have generated a wave of national headlines, a congressional investigation, federal legislation and ever-louder calls for impeachment.

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As Ryan Devereaux reported for the Guardian, in the third quarter of 2009 alone "Dang made a total of six arrests out of his 127 stops. He wrote one summons. He found contraband once. He never recovered any weapons and he only stopped people of color, primarily African Americans, 115 times to be exact. He never stopped a white person." Dang's record here is stunning enough alone. More telling still is the justifications he recounted to the court for making many of his stops, referring to repeated observation of individuals' general behavioral patterns, including "furtive movements" -- a vague policing phrase regularly stretched beyond the limits of all reasonableness. "We have a general idea of their behavior," Dang testified.

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Critics have always been right that Ambassador Susan Rice's talking points were wrong; rather than the attack being caused by a spontaneous protest, as she claimed on several Sunday morning talk shows after the attack, it was a terrorist plot. But the fundamental question was whether the administration knew it was a terror attack and intentionally lied when it blamed the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens on a deadly protest instead.

The e-mails Karl reveals today do not make this case. While references to terrorism were removed at the behest of the State Department, the CIA's original draft of the talking points stated that the attack was "spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo." In fact, all 12 drafts did.

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The ruling bolsters recent claims made by U.N. human rights expert Ben Emmerson Q.C., following a visit to Pakistan, that authorities in the country gave no consent, tacit or otherwise, for the CIA strikes to be carried out in its tribal regions. However, reporting by Mark Mazzetti suggests that a secret deal, forged between the CIA and the Pakistani military, gave the go-ahead for U.S. drone strikes in return for the initial targeting of an enemy of the Pakistani state (not an al-Qaida operative).

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Wednesday's ad hoc drone hearing, called by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is a dim flicker of light shed against dense shadows surrounding the Obama administration's lethal drone strike program. While lawmakers including Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., have made dubious claims about the precision of drone strikes and limited civilian casualties, and while CIA Director John Brennan has vowed that reports of civilian death are seriously investigated, rarely is testimony from those who've seen the first hand plight of drone struck regions heard on Capitol Hill. Written and video testimony was released to Salon in advance of the hearing.

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The agent's potential promotion angered human rights advocates who have long noted that CIA leaders overseeing torture programs have not only faced no recriminations under Obama, but have maintained high-ranking positions in the government agency. It was thus politically expedient for Brennan to choose an agent with a past less muddied with Bush-era CIA counterterror practices.

According to the AP, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, personally "urged" Brennan not to promote the woman, given the agent's history entrenched in extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation. Via the AP:

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Yet, right now, President Obama is preventing you from learning any of this, by keeping the report classified.

Before the end of the Bush administration, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. — then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee — started investigating the torture program. When Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., took over as chairwoman of the committee in 2009, she intensified the investigation and negotiated with the CIA to get access to its files. After almost four more years of work and reviewing 6 million pages of documents, the committee voted out the report in December on a mostly party line vote.

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Then this Sunday, the foundation that oversees the still-unopened September 11 National Memorial and Museum at ground zero voted to charge visitors an admission fee of $20 to $25, because it can’t cover the museum’s projected operating cost of $60 million a year with donations alone.

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These questions are timely, following Vice President Joe Biden’s dismissive description of the Boston Marathon bombers as “knockoff jihadis.” Mere amateurs, these brothers, who were capable of murdering several marathon participants, maiming scores more and shutting down a major city and even rail lines for hours or days. The real amateurism, it might be suggested, is that of the pundits and journalists trying to psychoanalyze the Tsarnaev brothers and their relations from a distance.

But there are already reports that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving killer, has said that he and his brother acted in response to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — wars that they considered to be attacks on Islam. What if this really was the motive? What if these brothers really were sincere Islamist revolutionaries, like the thousands of others who have rallied to militant jihadism in the past several decades, whether they were connected to international Islamist networks or acting on their own? That doesn’t exonerate their brutal crimes in any way. But surely Islamist terrorists are best understood in terms of the common Islamist ideology they share, rather than personal or familial experiences that are unique to each.

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The information, which has been known to the administration and some members of Congress for weeks, isn't solid enough to warrant quick U.S. involvement in the 2-year-old conflict, the White House said. Officials said the assessments were made with "varying degrees of confidence" given the difficulty of information gathering in Syria, though there appeared to be little question within the intelligence community.

As recently as Tuesday, when an Israeli general added to the growing chorus that Assad had used chemical weapons, White House spokesman Jay Carney said the administration was continuing to monitor and investigate but had "not come to the conclusion that there has been that use."

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Whether the Senate hearing will yield answers to crucial questions about Obama's drone wars is unclear. Witnesses scheduled to testify include retired Gen. James Cartwright of United States Marine Corp; activist and journalist Farea Al-Muslimi of Sana’a, Yemen; Peter Bergen, director of the National Security Studies Program at the New America Foundation; and a number of legal experts. Although the Senate committee tried to have a witness appear from the Justice Department, this request was denied.

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After the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, he was surprised to discover that the essential global structure of that other Cold War colossus, the American superpower, with its vast panoply of military bases, remained obdurately in place as if nothing whatsoever had happened.  Almost a decade later, when the Evil Empire was barely a memory, Johnson surveyed the planet and found “an informal American empire” of immense reach and power.  He also became convinced that, in its global operations, Washington was laying the groundwork “all around the world... for future forms of blowback.”

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