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Even Navy Secretary’s Subservience Couldn’t Save Him

Even Navy Secretary’s Subservience Couldn’t Save Him

The trick to surviving in Donald Trump's administration is being a shameless toady, willing at any moment to lavish praise on the president. But acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly found that staying on Trump's good side can be impossibly tricky. He resigned Tuesday in the apparent realization that his strenuous self-abasement was not enough to appease the president.

Last week, Modly relieved the commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, who had emailed higher-ups pleading for the evacuation of sailors aboard the aircraft carrier because of an outbreak of COVID-19. After the letter was leaked to the press, Modly sacked Capt. Brett Crozier for showing "extremely poor judgment" and letting the situation "overwhelm his ability to act professionally."

Then the secretary flew to Guam to deliver a denunciation of Crozier, whose own sailors had cheered him as he left the ship. Modly boarded the carrier and used its public address system to inform the crew that the captain was "was either too naive or too stupid to be a commanding officer of a ship like this."

Why would Modly go to such trouble and use such inflammatory language to excoriate an officer who was trying to protect his personnel — and to rebuke the sailors who thought highly of him? Probably because Trump had expressed dissatisfaction with Crozier, and Modly wanted to demonstrate his utter devotion to the president.


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Judge Rules Navy Underestimated Threat To Marine Mammals From Sonar

Judge Rules Navy Underestimated Threat To Marine Mammals From Sonar

By Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

A federal judge has ruled in favor of environmentalists who assert the Navy has vastly underestimated the threat to marine mammals posed by its use of sonar and explosives during training off Southern California and Hawaii.

U.S. District Judge Susan Oki Mollway in Hawaii ruled Tuesday that the National Marine Fisheries Service violated environmental laws when it decided that the Navy’s training would have a “negligible impact” on whales, dolphins, other mammals, and sea turtles.

The ruling appears to set the stage for an appeal or for the Navy to resubmit its application to the fisheries service for a permit. Other options would be for the Navy to relocate its training or adopt greater safeguards to protect sea creatures.

The ruling was hailed by environmental groups, which have long asserted that the Navy is needlessly harming whales and other animals and has resisted making changes to train in less “biologically sensitive areas.”

“The court’s ruling recognizes that, to defend our country, the Navy doesn’t need to train in every square inch of a swath of ocean larger than all 50 states combined,” said David Henkin, the Earthjustice attorney representing several groups that filed the lawsuit.

“The Navy shouldn’t play war games in the most sensitive waters animals use for feeding and breeding,” said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Navy spokesman Mark Matsunaga said the service was studying the ruling and could not comment on its details.

“It is essential that sailors have realistic training that fully prepares them to fight tonight, if necessary, and (with) equipment that has been thoroughly tested before they go into harm’s way,” Matsunaga said.

“The Navy has been training and testing in the Hawaii and Southern California ranges for more than 60 years without causing the harm alleged by the plaintiffs in this case.”

The lawsuit was aimed at curtailing Navy training from Dana Point to San Diego, off Coronado’s Silver Strand, and in the area between various Hawaiian islands.

The Navy holds a major multinational exercise off Hawaii every two years. The next is set for 2016. The Hawaii exercise, called Rim of the Pacific, and exercises off Southern California allow sailors to train in using sonar to detect submarines in shallow water, not unlike the conditions in the Persian Gulf, the Navy has said.

Much of the judge’s ruling details with the dueling interpretations about how many animals over a five-year period of training would be hurt.

The Navy asserts that training will kill 155 whales over five years. The environmentalists say the number of those killed or crippled would be much higher.

In her 66-page decision, the judge conceded the difficulty in parsing the claims and counter-claims.

She wrote that she feels like the sailor in Samuel Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” who, while trapped on a ship in a windless sea, laments, “Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.”

Photo: Official U.S. Navy Page via Flickr

Mortgaging The Pentagon

Mortgaging The Pentagon

Say you really want a sports car, a vacation, a big new house, or some other fancy thing you can’t really afford. You know that if you buy it, you’ll bust your budget. It would mean a ramen noodle diet and a threadbare closet from now to eternity for you and your family.

So maybe you daydream a little. Or hope to win the lottery. What you don’t do — if you’re responsible — is mortgage everything you own to acquire that one thing you want.

Well, that’s not how things work for the Pentagon.

In its budget request for the next fiscal year, the Pentagon has made clear that it’s ready to break the bank for the fancy thing it really wants — the F-35 joint strike fighter program.

This platinum-plated spork of an aircraft is intended to replace the F-16, F-15, F/A-18, and A-10 jets now in use by the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marine Corps.

But it’s hard for anyone to argue with a straight face that the Pentagon can afford to spend $1.5 trillion on a single aircraft program, as the Congressional Budget Office predicts this obsession will eventually cost.

It’s hard for most of us to even visualize $1.5 trillion. A trillion is a thousand billions or a million millions. But let’s put just the Pentagon’s latest procurement request for the F-35 into perspective.

The U.S. military wants to buy 57 F-35s in fiscal year 2016. That’s 19 more than the 38 they got in the previous year’s bill.

If you count just the procurement of those airframes and spare parts alone, you’re looking at $9 billion. The total Pentagon request for procurement is $108 billion.

So that means fully 8.5 percent of all Pentagon spending to buy systems from A to Z — from Apache helicopters to Zumwalt destroyers — is devoted to a single aircraft program. It’s staggering.

There are more ways to slice the budgetary salami. If you look at overall aircraft procurement and research and development costs, you’ll see that 35 percent — more than a third of the total — is dedicated to the F-35’s mammoth tab.

If you break it down by service, you’ll find that over a quarter of the Navy’s “combat aircraft” account for 2016 goes to the F-35. And for the Air Force, it’s 100 percent. Yes, every dime.

This much is clear: The Pentagon — particularly the Air Force — is mortgaging the future of not just other aircraft programs, but all Pentagon procurement, to buy this exorbitant plane.

I sure hope it works, because that’s one pricey, lonely egg in that basket.

Ryan Alexander is president of Taxpayers for Common Sense (Taxpayer.net).

Distributed by OtherWords.org

Photo: createordie via Flickr

Child-Porn Conviction Is Tossed: Navy Surveillance Is Blamed

Child-Porn Conviction Is Tossed: Navy Surveillance Is Blamed

By Mike Carter, The Seattle Times

SEATTLE — Navy criminal investigators repeatedly and routinely peeked into the computers of private citizens in Washington state and elsewhere, a violation of the law so “massive” and egregious that an appeals court says it has no choice but to throw out the evidence against an Algona, Washington, man sentenced to 18 years in prison for distribution of child pornography.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a decision handed down last week, said the 2012 prosecution of Michael Allan Dreyer by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle demonstrated Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) agents “routinely carry out broad surveillance activities that violate” the Posse Comitatus Act, a Reconstruction-era law that prohibits the military from enforcing civilian laws.

The court called the violations “extraordinary” and said evidence presented in Dreyer’s prosecution appears to show that “it has become a routine practice for the Navy to conduct surveillance of all the civilian computers in an entire state to see whether any child pornography can be found on them, and then to turn over that information to civilian law enforcement when no military connection exists.”

That is what happened to Dreyer, now 60, who became the target of an NCIS investigation in 2010 when Agent Steve Logan, who was stationed in Georgia, used a law-enforcement software program called “RoundUp” to troll for child pornography on computers in Washington using a legal file-sharing network called “Gnutella.”

According to court documents, Logan identified a computer sharing suspicious files, downloaded three of them, then got a subpoena for Comcast, which identified Dreyer as the IP address owner.

Logan, according to court documents, checked to see if Dreyer was a member of the armed forces and determined he was not.

Logan then summarized his investigation and forwarded it to the NCIS office in Washington state, which turned it over to the Algona Police Department, according to the documents.

The case was filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in federal court, where Dreyer faced up to 40 years in prison due to a prior conviction.

Dreyer was arrested in April 2011 and fought to suppress the evidence, which included explicit videos of adults having sex with preteen boys and girls.

U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman allowed the videos to be used and Dreyer was convicted of possession and distribution of child pornography after a four-day jury trial in September 2012. Dreyer — who previously had served 27 months for a federal child-pornography conviction in 2000 — was sentenced to 18 years in prison and a lifetime of supervised release when he gets out.

However, the 9th Circuit judges found the NCIS behavior so outrageous that it “demonstrates the need to deter future violations” and sent Dreyer’s case back to the district court with an order that Pechman exclude the NCIS evidence against him.

Erik Levin, the former federal public defender who represented Dreyer during his trial and appeal, said the ruling likely means he will go free.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office is considering asking the case be reheard by the entire Court of Appeals. U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan, whose office prosecuted Dreyer and argued the appeal, said Wednesday it is possible the court misunderstood some of the technology the agent was using and the scope of his searches.

Durkan said some information in the 9th Circuit’s opinion “is wrong.”

Otherwise, she said she could not comment on pending litigation.

Telephone and email messages sent to NCIS headquarters in Washington, D.C., were not returned Wednesday.

The government, in its appellate briefs, argued Logan was a civilian employee of the NCIS, and that his role in the investigation was peripheral and fell within exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act.

The panel unanimously, and strongly, disagreed.

Senior 9th Circuit Judge Andrew Kleinfeld found that the case “amounts to the military acting as a national police force to investigate civilian law violations by civilians.”

“There could be no bona fide military purpose to this indiscriminate peeking into civilian computers,” Kleinfeld wrote. “Letting a criminal go free to deter national military investigation of civilians is worth it.”

The judges also excoriated the government for defending the role of the NCIS and its investigation and said the court has warned the Justice Department about it before. This time, the court said, the violation comes with a price to get the government’s attention — Dreyer’s release from prison.

“Such an expansive reading of the military role in the enforcement of civilian laws demonstrates a profound lack of regard for the important limitations on the role of the military in our civilian society,” wrote Judge Marsha Berzon.

Logan, the NCIS agent, had argued he had chosen to scan computers in Washington partly because of the state’s many military bases.

While he initially was only able to identify the suspect’s whereabouts within a 30-mile radius of the IP address he identified, he wrote in a search warrant that the “large [U.S. Navy/Department of Defense] saturation” indicated a “likelihood” the suspect was in the military.

By that logic, Berzon said, Posse Comitatus would be “rendered meaningless.”

“To accept that position would mean that NCIS agents could, for example, routinely stop suspected drunk drivers in downtown Seattle on the off-chance that a driver is a member of the military, and then turn over all information collected about civilians to the Seattle Police Department for prosecution.”

The opinion comes as the reach of government and law enforcement has come under fire after a series of disclosures of domestic surveillance by former National Security Administration systems analyst Edward Snowden.

Levin, who now practices law in Berkeley, California, also noted the controversy over the so-called “militarization of police” in the aftermath of the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting death by police of a black teenager. Exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act allow the military to provide some equipment to police.

“This,” Levin said, “is the real militarization of police — when the military becomes the police.”

AFP Photo/Greg Wood

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