TBR News April 10, 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, April 10, 2017: “The discussions inside the Beltway, among old associated, is that the Syrian strike was a planned attempt to convince the renegade North Koreans that if they did not cease and desist in their efforts to develop long-range rockets and nuclear warheads, the US was quite capable of launching missile strike against them.

Note that the Russians were advised in advance of the strike as were the Syrian air force personnel so the target airfield was basically empty at the time of the attack and Syrian air force units were able to use the base the next day without a problem.

That there was a gas attack, with Sarin, is beyond a doubt but the question arises as to who was responsible for it.

Not the Russians nor the Syrians, who do not have such weapons, but since the attack, which lost half of its launched missiles into the ocean, was planned in advance, the perpetrator of the gas attack is not so much in question but unproven.

Qui bono is the most important issue here and the answer is quite obvious.”

 

Table of Contents

• What could go wrong for the U.S. in Syria? War with Russia.
• The Minerva Program: Civil Repression from Academia
• SECRECY NEWS
• Loans ‘Designed to Fail’: States Say Navient Preyed on Students
• Trump’s Base Revolts Against Syria Strike
• US-Russian honeymoon turns sour over Syria
• Burn After Reading

What could go wrong for the U.S. in Syria? War with Russia.

Pressure to escalate is only going to get worse.

April 9, 2017

by Colin H. Kahl

The Washington Post

When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson travels to Moscow this week, topic No. 1 will be Syria — and the stakes could not be higher. If the Trump administration and the Kremlin are not able to come to a meeting of the minds on Syria, it could set the two nuclear powers on a dangerous collision course.

Early Friday morning in Syria, 59 U.S. Tomahawk missiles slammed into the Shayrat air base in retaliation for the unconscionable gassing of dozens of civilians by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime two days earlier. This was a stunning turnaround for President Trump, who urged his predecessor not to attack Syria under similar circumstances in 2013, and for an administration that had signaled indifference to Assad just five days before the attack.

Trump’s forceful action met with rave reviews across Washington and among U.S. allies. But the Russians — Assad’s chief patron — were furious. The Kremlin called the attack an “act of aggression,” and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned that the strikes put the United States and Russia “on the verge of a military clash.” Meanwhile, the Russian military suspended the hotline designed to avoid incidents between U.S. and Russian forces in Syria and announced its intentions to bolster Syrian air defenses.

However justified and morally satisfying, any use of military force is serious business, and even those limited strikes could lead the United States and Russia down an escalatory path.

The expansive way in which U.S. officials have talked about the purpose of the strikes increases the prospects of mission creep. In his statement announcing the attack, Trump framed it as essential to “prevent and deter the spread and use of chemical weapons.” Other administration officials justified the strikes on similar grounds. But Trump also described his decision as part of a broader effort to “end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria,” suggesting that he may consider additional military action aimed at ending the Syrian war. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, made this explicit over the past few days, saying on Friday: “We are prepared to do more, but we hope that will not be necessary. It is time for all civilized nations to stop the horrors that are taking place in Syria and demand a political solution.”

The broader the administration’s goals in Syria, the more prone it will be to pressure to escalate there. Already, some regional allies that have long dreamed of dragging the United States into a war with Assad, such as Turkey, have described the strikes as “insufficient” and called for more forceful action. And congressional hawks, such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), are urging Trump to follow up on the strikes by providing Syrian opposition groups with more weapons, imposing a no-fly zone, and conducting further airstrikes to pressure Russia and Assad to agree to a political settlement. Meanwhile, the Syrian air force has already resumed bombing the northwestern town of Khan Sheikhoun — the same area the regime gassed last week. And as Assad continues to kill civilians, with or without chemical munitions, the calls for deeper U.S. involvement aimed at ousting Assad will mount.

If the United States goes down this road, the prospects of a military confrontation with Moscow are real. A few thousand Russian military personnel are distributed across Syria’s key military bases. Moscow has also placed some of the world’s most sophisticated air defense systems in Syria, and Russian planes police Syrian skies. So an extensive U.S. campaign aimed at coercing Assad by targeting Syrian air bases and command-and-control facilities would run big risks of killing Russian troops on the ground. The same holds for a no-fly zone, which would likely require targeting Syrian and Russian air defenses and could lead to air-to-air incidents between Russian and U.S. jets. Under any of these circumstances the prospect of spiraling conflict is enhanced by Moscow’s decision to suspend the “deconfliction” channel between the Russian and U.S. militaries.

Compounding matters, in an effort to generate counter-leverage, Russia and the Assad regime are likely to respond to further U.S. strikes or a no-fly zone by reorienting their integrated air defense network toward U.S. and coalition aircraft engaged in fighting the Islamic State or by attacking opposition areas in northern Syria, where nearly 1,000 U.S. troops are on the ground. This could derail the counter-Islamic State campaign at the very moment when the militant group’s capital, Raqqa, is under assault by U.S.-backed forces. And it could put the lives of American service members in jeopardy.

There are also significant escalation risks even if the Trump administration doesn’t go down this path and sticks to the narrower stated objective of deterring further chemical attacks.

According to news reports, before the strikes, Trump was briefed on options to retaliate against Assad. One was to launch “saturation strikes” aimed at dozens of Syrian airfields and facilities, with the goal of destroying Assad’s ability to use his air force to carry out further chemical attacks. (This option was similar to the one reportedly contemplated by President Barack Obama in 2013.)

At the urging of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Trump rejected this option in favor of cruise missile strikes against a single air base. This option was reportedly viewed as proportional and much less likely to kill Russian soldiers. (Although around 100 Russian troops were reportedly stationed at Shayrat, the administration warned Moscow ahead of time, and the missiles struck the portion of the airfield away from Russian barracks.)

In other words, Trump chose a limited strike package precisely because he and his advisers understood the grave risks if the United States attacked a broader set of targets.

But therein lies a major dilemma for Trump moving forward. Successful deterrence requires a credible threat to hit Assad’s forces again if the regime continues to use chemical weapons or commits other transgressions. Yet Trump, having already rejected a larger military response out of apparent recognition of the dangers, may find it difficult to credibly signal he is willing to deploy this option in response to further actions by Assad down the line.

In this context, the danger of miscalculation is real. The Syrian dictator (perhaps prodded by Russia or Iran) may attempt to test Trump again, hoping to prove the president is a “paper tiger.” And Trump, having invested his personal credibility in standing firm, may find himself psychologically or politically compelled to respond, despite the very real risks that it could result in a direct military clash with Russia.

Before Tillerson arrives in Moscow for meetings on Wednesday, the administration needs a clear plan to avoid stepping on this slippery slope. It starts with Trump and his team being much more precise and consistent about what U.S. objectives are. Is the goal solely to deter more chemical attacks, or are they trying to end the Syrian conflict? If the latter, will the administration insist on Assad’s departure, or are they open to other possible formulas that de-escalate the war and defuse power away from Damascus but keep Assad in power?

On Sunday, administration officials seemed to suggest all of the above. Haley insisted on CNN, “There’s not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime.” Tillerson, however, warned against regime change during an ABC “This Week” interview, and told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the Trump administration would seek to end Syria’s civil war through the creation of cease-fire zones and the resumption of a political process, saying Assad and Russia would have to participate in that solution.

Contributing to this uncertainty, Tillerson also said that the United States would not focus on initiatives to stabilize Syria until after the threat of the Islamic State has been “reduced or eliminated.”

Whatever the administration decides, their approach must blend credible military signaling with risk-mitigation steps (such as finding a way to reactivate the U.S.-Russia military channel). And the administration’s military actions must be backed by a diplomatic strategy that takes advantage of the leverage created by the strikes without overplaying Washington’s hand. Given Russia’s vital interests in Syria, Moscow is not likely to respond positively to U.S. ultimatums and maximalist positions. If the administration does not find a way to give the Kremlin a face-saving way out, conflict is much more likely than accommodation.

As the afterglow and applause of the missile strikes fade, finding a way to advance American interests in Syria while avoiding a war with Russia is the urgent task at hand. After all, sinking into a Syrian quagmire would be bad enough. World War III would be far worse.

Colin H. Kahl is associate professor in the security studies program at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a strategic consultant at the Penn-Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. From October 2014 to January 2017, he was Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser.

The Minerva Program: Civil Repression from Academia

The Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown 

April 10, 2017

by Harry von Johnston PhD

 

A US Department of Defense (DoD) research program funds American universities to model the dynamics for the repression of large-scale domestic US civil unrest.

This program, run by the Minerva Initiativ,e is under the supervision of various US military agencies and is planned to use the input to develop both immediate and long-term actions and reactions to civil resistance to the government and its various agencies

Begun in 2008 as the reacton to an international banking crisis, the DoD ‘Minerva Research Initiative’  headquartered at 875 North Randolph Street, Arlington, Virginia, works in close cooperation with various American universities “to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US.”

These projects, in sum, use tax-payer’s money to spy on, and neutralize, any signs of rebellion on the part of the same tax-payer.

Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop an empirical model “of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and contagions.”

The project’s goal is to determine “the critical mass (tipping point)” of social contagians by studying their “digital traces” in the cases of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis, the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey and the on-going socio-economic problems arising in the United States.

Another project, this awarded to the University of Washington has sought to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate, along with their characteristics and consequences.

The project, managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity.

The DoD’s Minerva Initiative has also funded a project to determine ‘Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?’ which, however, conflates peaceful activists with supporters of political violence who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on armed militancy themselves.

This project explicitly sets out to study the organizations, goals and especially, the membership in any potentially anti-government group of non-violent activists.

The actual purpose of this project states:

“In every context we find many individuals who share the demographic, family, cultural, and/or socioeconomic background of those who decided to engage in terrorism, and yet refrained themselves from taking up armed militancy, even though they were sympathetic to the end goals of armed groups. The field of terrorism studies has not, until recently, attempted to look at this control group. This project is not about terrorists, but about supporters of political violence.”

The project’s case studies each “involve extensive interviews with ten or more activists and militants in parties and NGOs who, though sympathetic to radical causes, have chosen a path of non-violence.”

The Department of Defense sees any protest movement and social activism in the United States as a threat to US national security. The Department of Defense considers political movements aiming for large scale political and economic change as a national security matter. Activism, protest, so-called ‘political movements’ and of course NGOs are an element of American society that, though initially harmless, can morph into active resistance to the government.

To quote from the official statement of intent:

“The Department of Defense takes seriously its role in the security of the United States, its citizens, and US allies and partners. While every security challenge does not cause conflict, and every conflict does not involve the US military, Minerva helps fund basic social science research that helps increase the Department of Defense’s understanding of what causes instability and insecurity. By better understanding these conflicts and their causes beforehand, the Department of Defense can better prepare for the dynamic future security environment.”

In 2013, Minerva funded a University of Maryland project in collaboration with the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to gauge the risk of civil unrest due to climate change. The three-year $1.9 million project developed the methodology to anticipate what could happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios and how to best deal with them.

An internal Minerva staff email communication referenced in a 2012 Masters dissertation reveals that the programme is geared toward producing quick results that are directly applicable to field operations. The dissertation was part of a Minerva-funded project on “counter-radical Muslim discourse” at Arizona State University.

Many independent scholars are critical of what they see as the US government’s efforts to militarise social science in the service of war. In May 2008, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) wrote to the US government noting that the Pentagon lacks “the kind of infrastructure for evaluating anthropological [and other social science] research” in a way that involves “rigorous, balanced and objective peer review”, calling for such research to be managed instead by civilian agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF).

There exist many Pentagon planning documents which suggest that National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance is partially motivated to prepare for the destabilising impact of coming environmental, energy and economic shocks.

Minerva is a prime example of the deeply narrow-minded and self-defeating nature of military ideology. DoD officials have consistently blocked any external investigation into what the DoD feels is their mission to defend an increasingly unpopular global system serving the interests of a tiny minority composed of banking and industry entities and the structure and functions of the American government. In short, American security agencies have classified the population in general as potential terrorists who need to be identified, penetrated and neutralized before they can manifest any potentially popularly acceptable anti-governement actions.

The DoD is developing the operational tools by which they can target any and all groups of social activists and protest movements, to understand their operational methodology, to infiltrate their ranks and, eventually, to neutralize them.

“Understanding the Origin, Characteristics and Implications of Mass Political Movements,” a study created at the University of Washington, is a case in point.

In Lowell, Massachusetts, researchers at the University of Massachussets there used $2 million from the Pentagon to study domestic American potential anti-government terrorist behavior.

This research is intended to identify precisely how children get involved in potential mass-movements and how to interrupt and stop the process.

SECRECY NEWS

From the FAS Project on Government Secrecy

Volume 2017, Issue No. 25

April 10, 2017

“RISK AVOIDANCE” LEADS TO OVER-CLASSIFICATION

When government officials consider whether to classify national security information, they should not aim for perfect security, according to new guidance from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Instead, classifiers should seek to limit unnecessary vulnerabilities, while keeping broader mission objectives in view.

“A Risk Avoidance strategy — eliminating risk entirely — is not an acceptable basis for agency [classification] guides because it encourages over-classification, restricts information sharing, [and] hinders the optimal use of intelligence information in support of national security and foreign policy goals,” the ODNI document said.

Rather, “All agencies should reflect in their classification decisions a Risk Management strategy — mitigating the likelihood and severity of risk — in protecting classified information over which they have [classification authority], including clear descriptions in their classification policies of how the strategy is used when making classification determinations.” See Principles of Classification Management for the Intelligence Community, ODNI, March 2017.

This risk management / risk avoidance dichotomy in classification policy has been batted around for a while. It was previously discussed at length in in the thoughtful but not very consequential 1994 report of the Joint Security Commission on Redefining Security in the post-cold war era.

“Some inherent vulnerabilities can never be eliminated fully, nor would the cost and benefit warrant this risk avoidance approach,” the Commission wrote. “We can and must provide a rational, cost-effective, and enduring framework using risk management as the underlying basis for security decision making.”

In short, it is only realistic to admit that some degree of risk is unavoidable and must be tolerated, and classification policy should reflect that reality.

But the risk management construct is not as helpful as one would wish. That is because its proponents, including the Joint Security Commission and the authors of the new ODNI document, typically stop short of providing concrete examples of information that risk avoiders would classify but that risk managers would permit to be disclosed. Without such illustrative guidance, risk management is in the eye of the beholder, and we are back where we started.

Meanwhile, there is persistent dissatisfaction with current secrecy policy within the national security bureaucracy itself.

Classifying too much information is “an impediment to our ability to conduct our operations,” said Air Force Gen. John Hyten of U.S. Strategic Command at a symposium last week (as reported by Phillip Swarts in Space News on April 6).

“We have so many capabilities now,” Gen. Hyten said. “There are all these special classifications that I can’t talk about, and if you look at those capabilities you wonder why are they classified so high. So we’re going to push those down.”

CLIMATE CHANGE: LEGAL ISSUES, & MORE FROM CRS

Federal laws and regulations underlying the U.S. government’s approach to climate change, and litigation regarding their scope and implementation, are discussed in a new report from the Congressional Research Service. See U.S. Climate Change Regulation and Litigation: Selected Legal Issues, April 3, 2017.

Other new and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following.

Filibusters and Cloture in the Senate, updated April 7, 2017

Invoking Cloture in the Senate, updated April 6, 2017

The Value of Energy Tax Incentives Across Energy Resources: Trends over Time, CRS Insight, April 6, 2017

Smith v. Obama: A Servicemember’s Legal Challenge to the Campaign Against the Islamic State, CRS Legal Sidebar, updated April 4, 2017

Military Pay: Key Questions and Answers, updated April 3, 2017

Latin America and the Caribbean: Fact Sheet on Leaders and Elections, updated April 6, 2017

Federal Disaster Assistance: The National Flood Insurance Program and Other Federal Disaster Assistance Programs Available to Individuals and Households After a Flood, April 6, 2017

FirstNet’s Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network Moves Forward, CRS Insight, April 4, 2017

What Constitutes “Sexual Abuse of a Minor” For Immigration Purposes?, CRS Legal Sidebar, April 6, 2017

Navy DDG-51 and DDG-1000 Destroyer Programs: Background and Issues for Congress, updated April 7, 2017

Navy Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) Program: Background and Issues for Congress, updated April 6, 2017

Navy Virginia (SSN-774) Class Attack Submarine Procurement: Background and Issues for Congress, updated April 6, 2017

Navy Ford (CVN-78) Class Aircraft Carrier Program: Background and Issues for Congress, updated April 6, 2017

Navy Littoral Combat Ship (LCS)/Frigate Program: Background and Issues for Congress, updated April 6, 2017

Loans ‘Designed to Fail’: States Say Navient Preyed on Students

April 9, 2017

by Stacy Cowley and Jessica SIlver-Greenberg

The New York Times

Ashley Hardin dreamed of being a professional photographer — glamorous shoots, perhaps some exotic travel. So in 2006, she enrolled in the Brooks Institute of Photography and borrowed more than $150,000 to pay for what the school described as a pathway into an industry clamoring for its graduates.

“Brooks was advertised as the most prestigious photography school on the West Coast,” Ms. Hardin said. “I wanted to learn from the best of the best.”

Ms. Hardin did not realize that she had taken out high-risk private loans in pursuit of a low-paying career. But her lender, SLM Corporation, better known as Sallie Mae, knew all of that, government lawyers say — and made the loans anyway.

In recent months, the student loan giant Navient, which was spun off from Sallie Mae in 2014 and retained nearly all of the company’s loan portfolio, has come under fire for aggressive and sloppy loan collection practices, which led to a set of government lawsuits filed in January. But those accusations have overshadowed broader claims, detailed in two state lawsuits filed by the attorneys general in Illinois and Washington, that Sallie Mae engaged in predatory lending, extending billions of dollars in private loans to students like Ms. Hardin that never should have been made in the first place.

“These loans were designed to fail,” said Shannon Smith, chief of the consumer protection division at the Washington State attorney general’s office.

New details unsealed last month in the state lawsuits against Navient shed light on how Sallie Mae used private subprime loans — some of which it expected to default at rates as high as 92 percent — as a tool to build its business relationships with colleges and universities across the country. From the outset, the lender knew that many borrowers would be unable to repay, government lawyers say, but it still made the loans, ensnaring students in debt traps that have dogged them for more than a decade.

While these risky loans were a bad deal for students, they were a boon for Sallie Mae. The private loans were — as Sallie Mae itself put it — a “baited hook” that the lender used to reel in more federally guaranteed loans, according to an internal strategy memo cited in the Illinois lawsuit.

The attorneys general in Illinois and Washington — backed by a coalition of those in 27 other states, who participated in a three-year investigation of student lending abuses — want those private loans forgiven.

In a pair of cases that could affect hundreds of thousands of borrowers, they have sued Navient. The lawsuits cover private subprime loans made from 2000 to 2009.

These cases have parallels to the mortgage crisis that helped drive the American economy into recession, both in scope — borrowers in the United States owe $1.4 trillion on student loans — and in the details of the misdeeds claimed. Working together, the lenders and colleges were preying on a vital part of the American dream, the government lawyers say: the belief that higher education can help lift people toward a prosperous future.

That was Ms. Hardin’s goal. Today, she is a 33-year-old waitress in Seattle who still owes $150,000 in student loans and pays $1,395 a month, more than her monthly rent, to Navient. If the attorneys general succeed, a chunk of her debt could be erased.

Navient, which is based in Wilmington, Del., has denied any wrongdoing and is fighting the lawsuits. It does not originate any loans itself, but when it split off from Sallie Mae, it kept most of Sallie Mae’s existing loans. It collects payments from some 12 million people — about one in four student loan borrowers.

“We have a proven track record of helping millions of Americans access and achieve the benefits of higher education,” said Patricia Nash Christel, a Navient spokeswoman.

Sallie Mae said in a statement that Navient “has accepted responsibility for all costs, expenses, losses and remediation arising from this matter.”

‘Lose a Little More’

Perhaps more than any other company, Sallie Mae is synonymous in America with student loans — and, in the years after the lending boom, crushing student debt.

It got its start more than 30 years ago as a government-sponsored enterprise, collecting payments on loans that were backed by a federal guarantee. By the mid-2000s, Sallie Mae had become a for-profit, publicly traded company no longer tied to the government, although it still made most of its money by originating federally guaranteed student loans.

But the company also had a sideline in private loans. Those came with higher interest rates and fewer protections for borrowers than the federal loans. And if the borrowers stopped paying, Sallie Mae was stuck with the loss.

Private loans were often profitable for the company, but a portion of them — the riskiest part of Sallie Mae’s portfolio — were not. The company made subprime loans to students who would not otherwise qualify, including borrowers with poor credit who took out loans to attend schools with high dropout rates.

Those subprime loans were a bargaining chip, the government lawyers said, a tool Sallie Mae used to build relationships with schools so that the company could make more federal loans to their students. The federal loans were the real prize, because they came with a built-in safety net: If a borrower defaulted, the government would step in and reimburse the lender for most of its losses.

Sallie Mae could afford to absorb the losses from its private loan business as, essentially, a marketing cost of snagging more lucrative loans. In a 2007 internal note, quoted in Illinois’s lawsuit, Sallie Mae described its strategy of using subprime loans to “win school deals and secure F.F.E.L.P. and standard private volume,” a reference to the Federal Family Education Loan program that generated most of the company’s profits.

Defaults on one set of subprime loan products were between 50 and 92 percent every year from 2000 to 2007, according to Illinois’s lawsuit. Students did not know about the risk, the state said in its lawsuit, but “this fact was no secret to Sallie Mae.”

Those defaults did not discourage Sallie Mae, the lawsuits show. From 2000 to 2006, Sallie Mae increased the number of borrowers with one kind of troubled loan to 43,000 from 165, an increase of some 26,000 percent.

Sallie Mae was not the only one with an incentive. The schools themselves often had a reason to push private loans.

Under Education Department rules, no more than 90 percent of a school’s tuition payments can come from federal funding. That means at least 10 percent must come from private sources. At for-profit schools, which rely heavily on federal lending, private loans — even ones to borrowers likely to default — were crucial for staying under the threshold.

Some schools made deals with Sallie Mae to subsidize its losses, regulatory filings show. The owner of the Brooks Institute of Photography, Career Education Corporation, once one of the largest for-profit chains in the country, had a typical arrangement: From 2002 to 2006, it agreed to repay 20 percent of Sallie Mae’s losses. In 2007, it increased its subsidy to 25 percent.

Early on, Career Education treated loan losses as a routine business expense. On an earnings call in August 2006 — the same month that Ms. Hardin began her studies — an analyst suggested that the company should “be willing to lose a little more money on some of these students to get them in the door,” according to a transcript of the call.

The company’s chief financial officer replied, “That’s absolutely our intent.”

But the next year, the tide turned. Government investigations revealed that financial aid officers had been accepting kickbacks, junkets and even stock options in return for steering students to certain lenders. A regulatory crackdown followed, just as the economy plunged into recession.

As defaults piled up and heads rolled — Sallie Mae’s chief executive stepped down — Sallie Mae abandoned its riskiest practices. In early 2008, the company ended its subprime lending and told at least seven major operators of for-profit schools, including Career Education, that it would stop making private loans to many of their students.

In 2014, Sallie Mae and Navient broke apart, and Navient retained the troubled loans the company had originated years earlier.

But for the students, containing the damage was not so easy.

Lenders can hound students for payments on their debt, or sell it to a collection firm, long after they have written the loan off as soured debt. And because student loans cannot typically be wiped away through bankruptcy, many borrowers have no choice but to continue chipping away at their balance, no matter how dire their financial situation.

Ms. Christel, Navient’s spokeswoman, defended the company’s lending practices as typical for the time.

“Hindsight is always 20/20,” she said. “We have called for tools to improve upfront borrowing decisions, and we also support bankruptcy reform that would allow struggling borrowers the option to discharge federal and private student loans in bankruptcy after a good-faith effort to repay.”

Career Education did not respond to requests for comment.

Decades of Debt

The school that Tom Panzica, 42, attended shut down nine years ago, but he is still carrying $6,000 in debt for a degree that turned out to be useless. Every month, he sends $100 to Navient.

Mr. Panzica, a firefighter in Chicago, enrolled in Medical Careers Institute to learn sonography. But the school offered no clinical training — and it neglected to tell its students that without that training, they would not be allowed to take the industry’s licensing exam.

After Mr. Panzica graduated, he discovered that he had none of the qualifications needed to land a job.

Medical Careers closed in 2008, and a group of students sued, accusing it of making false claims. The case was settled. Mr. Panzica received around $3,000, less than half of what he had borrowed from Sallie Mae to pay his tuition.

Several students, including Mr. Panzica, then sued Sallie Mae, arguing that it was unfair to expect repayment on a loan made for fraudulent goods. The case went to arbitration, where the students lost.

Students in California also lost a lawsuit against Sallie Mae. They had sought the dismissal of loans they took out to attend California Culinary Academy, a Le Cordon Bleu affiliate also owned by Career Education, which paid $42 million to settle a class-action claim that it inflated graduation and job-placement rates. (When Career Education shut down its Le Cordon Bleu culinary schools in 2015, the food-world celebrity Alton Brown posted his approval on Twitter, calling the chain “a culinary puppy mill.”)

A judge tossed out the case, and an appeals court panel upheld the decision. One of the panel’s three judges dissented, writing that the complaint plausibly suggested that Sallie Mae “knew what C.C.A. was up to.”

For Adam Wolf, the lawyer who represented the students, the decision still rankles. “Sallie Mae facilitated the fraud,” Mr. Wolf said.

Arbitration clauses, buried in the fine print of loan contracts, have largely thwarted students’ legal challenges. But the attorneys general are not bound by those clauses. Their cases may be the only avenue left for borrowers to get relief, said Edward X. Clinton Jr., the lawyer who represented Mr. Panzica.

Borrowers who take out federal loans to attend schools that misled them can apply to have their loans forgiven, but private loans lack that protection.

To Ms. Hardin, that is deeply frustrating. After eight years of payments, her balance has dropped by only $1,000.

“I’ve cried on the phone several times,” Ms. Hardin said of her regular fights with Navient.

When her husband, a chef, saw that Washington’s attorney general had sued Navient, he asked Ms. Hardin what she would do if the case somehow led to her loans being wiped away.

Again, she teared up. Since graduating, she has never had any spare cash to travel, or save or plan any further than the next month’s loan bill.

“We want to open a sandwich shop,” Ms. Hardin said. “The money could be going toward that.”

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Trump’s Base Revolts Against Syria Strike

Democrats and neocons support him – Trump’s supporters, not so much

April 10, 2017

by Justin Raimondo

AntiWar

President Trump’s former enemies in the mainstream media, which he has characterized as purveyors of “fake news,” turned on a dime the moment he bombed Syria: the Establishment was thrilled that, suddenly, he was acting “presidential.” CNN, a particular target of the President’s ire, was gushing: NBC’s Brian Williams, in a bizarre turn of phrase, hailed the “beauty” of the bombing, which killed a number of civilians. Democratic party politicians, with few exceptions, stood at attention and saluted, while Trump’s Republican critics – notably John McCain and Lindsey Graham – praised the President while taking the opportunity to agitate for more extensive military action.

On the other hand, conservative media that has been supportive of Trump reviled the  move: Breitbart readers weren’t happy, Ann Coulter was furious, and Laura Ingraham was hardly supportive. Michael Savage declared himself a “conservative peacenik,” Tucker Carlson was very skeptical, and on Twitter, the “Trump trolls” were trolling their former hero. British populist Nigel Farage, who led the Brexit referendum to victory, and who endorsed Trump, opined that Trump voters “will be scratching their heads” in bewilderment. Even over at National Review, a neocon redoubt, the voice of dissent was raised.

In short, Trump’s most vocal supporters were joining the ranks of the antiwar movement, a development the media noted with the same vitriolic disdain it had formerly reserved for Trump himself.

As Carlson noted , “on this topic the news has never been faker.” Politico ran a piece excoriating “Trump’s troll army,” in rebellion against their ostensible leader’s policy, as racists and conspiracy mongers; the New York Times denounced anti-interventionists as representative of “a “small but influential white nationalist movement” on the “far right,” while the Washington Post described them as holding “racist, anti-Semitic and sexist” views.”

“Like so much news today,” said Carlson, “this isn’t news but propaganda designed to smear and deceive rather than to inform. On this topic “the ‘news’ has never been faker.”

Fake – just like the media’s coverage of Trump himself. And now that Trump has ditched one of the pillars of Trumpism, those who took it seriously are being treated exactly like he was treated before – with a barrage of outright lies.

It serves the War Party’s agenda to frame a narrative that characterizes anti-interventionists on the right as “racists,” “conspiracy-mongers,” etc., but the reality was more accurately described by Daniel McCarthy in The National Interest:

“Before he gets more deeply involved in Syria’s civil war, Donald Trump will have to win one at home. The Republican Party was already divided after failing to repeal Obamacare. Now the conflict has spread to the White House, where Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner are at daggers drawn. Even Trump’s most loyal grassroots and media supporters are in an uproar over the president’s evolving foreign policy, which has taken a turn toward the establishment as his domestic agenda sinks into the swamp he promised to drain.

“How much damage has the Syrian attack done to Trump? He’s lost Ann Coulter, who took to Twitter to vent her outrage and retweet lesser-known supporters who felt equally betrayed. He’s lost Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com and the sizable blocs of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan activists who had flocked to Trump’s ‘America First’ banner….

“The president has lost his base, or is in grave danger of doing so. But he has also picked up new support: from John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Bill Kristol, all of whom praised the airstrike on Syria. Neoconservatism is suddenly back in fashion at the White House, or so it seems.”

While I’m not sure how “losing” little old me is significant, McCarthy is entirely correct about the President’s activist base: they are defecting in droves. And while the Syria turnabout is bad news, especially for the Syrian people, there is a bright and shining silver lining.

The millions of voters who voted for Trump based, at least in part, on his “America First” foreign policy views had to experience – and embrace – what might be called “Trumpism” before they could be react in bewilderment and disgust as he turned on a dime. Trumpism, in this sense, was a bridge they had to cross before coming to a full understanding of just what “America First” means. Trump’s many denunciations of our regime change policy in Syria, Libya, and throughout the world brought them halfway across that bridge – and his betrayal is bringing many thousands of them all the way over … to us.

This is what sectarians of all stripes refuse to understand. With their static one-dimensional view of how political change comes about, they simply see Them and Us – and never the twain shall meet. How, they asked during the presidential election campaign, can those Trumpian troglodytes possibly be opposed to our foreign policy of perpetual war? What they didn’t get – and still don’t get – is that it took a catalytic figure like Trump to explode the phony left/right paradigm and imbue his supporters with some understanding of why the Empire exploits and impoverishes them. With this sudden reversal, the President is increasing their understanding of why this is so – because they aren’t going along with it.

And they aren’t going along with it because to even consider voting for Trump, while the media was hammering away at him and the Washington Establishment was sliming him as a dangerous “isolationist,” took a not inconsiderable independence of mind. Whether Trump was sincere in making his various anti-interventionist pronouncements, particularly when it came to the Syria issue, is beside the point: the point is that millions of voters took him at his word. The idea that his supporters were “fooled” by his rhetoric is similarly irrelevant. I, for one, foresaw that he would contradict himself while in office, as I wrote back in January of this year:

“That Trump is inconsistent, and an imperfect vessel, hardly needs to be said. That the danger of war still looms over us is also a fact that none can deny. Yet all this is irrelevant in the face of the conceptual victory his winning the White House represents. Here is a candidate who campaigned against GOP foreign policy orthodoxy, explicitly rejecting the legacy of the Iraq war and even going so far as to call out the Bush administration for lying us into that war….

“Yes, the Trump administration will take many actions that contradict the promise of their victory: that is already occurring. And we are covering that in these pages, without regard for partisan considerations: and yet it is necessary to step back and see the larger picture, looking past the journalistic details of the day-to-day news cycle. In short, it is necessary to take the long view and try to see what the ideological victory that was won this past November augurs for the future.”

Well, we’re living in that future right now: I have to admit it came a little sooner than I imagined, and a bit more abruptly than I thought possible. Yet that abruptness is a good thing: it dramatically underscores the contradiction between what Trump said and what he is now doing, and his most vocal supporters – particularly among the conservative opinion-making class – aren’t taking it lying down. They are in open revolt. Taking advantage of that revolt, encouraging it and highlighting the contradictions, is the task we have before us.

As I said in my January column cited above, we have to take the long view: that is, we have to understand that we’re building a movement. And the way to build that movement is not to stand aside and denounce those who are only halfway to understanding why the Empire is an albatross around our necks, but to patiently explain and let them learn why and how their leaders have betrayed them.

Betrayal is a painful experience: it is also a useful one. Physical pain is the body telling us that there’s something in the environment that must be avoided: psychic pain plays the same instructive role. As Trump’s supporters process what is undoubtedly a painful experience for them, they will realize how and why it happened – and with a little help from Antiwar.com, the best of them will come to understand how to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

The post-Trump political landscape is far better for anti-interventionists than it was before the orange-haired real estate mogul came on the scene: there now exists a considerable faction within the GOP and its periphery that not only supports an anti-interventionist foreign policy but is also in open rebellion against the policies of the President they helped elect. They are sorely disappointed, but they are also angry – and energized. Because anger, after all – anger at injustice – is the primary motivating factor in politics, and never more so than at this moment in our history.

As I said in January:

“This isn’t about Trump, the politician, or the journalistic trivia of the moment: we are engaged in a battle of ideas – and, slowly but surely, we are winning.”

We are indeed winning, and the War Party knows it: that’s why Politico, the Washington Post, and the New York Times are doing their best to marginalize the emerging antiwar movement. They won’t succeed, but our victory won’t happen overnight. Nothing worth achieving ever does. As long as we take the long view, and adopt a movement-building perspective, the case for optimism is irrefutable.

US-Russian honeymoon turns sour over Syria

Where to now for US/Russian relations in the wake of Trump’s actions against Syria? 

April 10, 2017

by Fiona Clark

DW

So, the honeymoon might be over, but does US President Donald Trump’s decision to unilaterally bomb a Syrian airfield really mean divorce is imminent? Despite a barrage of baseless conspiracy theories bantering about the bombing being a cunning way to divert attention away from Trump’s alleged ties to the Kremlin, the view from Russia certainly appears to be one of abject disappointment.

Cries of foul play resounded with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accusing Trump of breaking international law and describing the airstrikes as “an act of aggression with an invented pretext,” which, he hoped, would not lead to irreparable damage to US-Russian relations.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev went further. He said trust was gone and that relations were “completely ruined” by an action that put them “on the verge of a military clash.”

And it seems the disappointment may only get worse. Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the UN, has indicated that the US is adding the ousting of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to its list of priorities alongside the defeat of IS in the region.

She also raised the prospect of further sanctions against Russia over its support of the Assad regime.

Tillerson’s task

The statement is going to make US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s job in Moscow this week all the more difficult. He maintains Washington’s first priority is the defeat of the “Islamic State” (IS) group, and that the United States is still hopeful it can help bring all parties to the table to begin the process of hammering out a political solution.

“If we can achieve ceasefires in zones of stabilization in Syria, then we hope we will have the conditions to begin a useful political process,” Tillerson told CBS’s Face the Nation.

A long-time friend of Moscow, Tillerson may have a shot at smoothing the troubled waters, but the underlying problem will remain.

Trump’s actions, which many see as justified as drawing a belated line in the sand against the use of chemical weapons, was, it appears, sparked by an emotional response. There appears to be no long-term strategy or plan and the risk is, if challenged again by another chemical weapons strike, he will have to take further action and end up embroiled in a regional battle he hadn’t really bargained for and that brings him into direct conflict with Russia.

Predictability, reliability and foreign policy

Russia’s support for Assad isn’t because they love the man or what he stands for – it’s about regional influence and oil. If they can find a suitable replacement for Assad who would ensure Russia’s interests in the region, they’d probably jump at it. But if the US steps in any further and rocks its boat, extending its influence beyond the Saudi-backed states further south, the Kremlin will not be happy.

So how can you have a political dialogue when you don’t know whether the people you’re negotiating with are going to uphold their end of the bargain?

As Lavrov pointed out: “An attack on a country whose government fights terrorism only plays into the hands of extremists, creates additional threats to regional and global security.”

And if Trump had considered the consequences, then he certainly didn’t care about them. Irrespective of whether the decision was right or wrong, Russia will see this as an example of US arrogance and imperialism.

Not only that, but it highlights the central problem with Trump – his unpredictability. The Kremlin may be duplicitous and opportunistic, but it’s rarely random, and it will find it very hard to deal with impulsive behavior and wavering foreign policy.

Tillerson will have his work cut out for him in trying to convince the Kremlin that Trump can be trusted.

There’s only about one certainty in all of this – as US warships steam ahead toward North Korea, President Putin may well be ruining the Kremlin’s alleged involvement in getting Trump elected. The monster it supposedly helped created may pose more problems for it than it ever envisaged.

Burn After Reading

Snowden Documents Reveal Scope of Secrets Exposed to China in 2001 Spy Plane Incident

April 10 2017

by Kim Zetter

The Intercept

When China boldly seized a U.S. underwater drone in the South China Sea last December and initially refused to give it back, the incident ignited a weeklong political standoff and conjured memories of a similar event more than 15 years ago.

In April 2001, just months before the 9/11 attacks gripped the nation, a U.S. Navy spy plane flying a routine reconnaissance mission over the South China Sea was struck by a People’s Liberation Army fighter jet that veered aggressively close. The mid-air collision killed the Chinese pilot, crippled the Navy plane, and forced it to make an emergency landing at a Chinese airfield, touching off a tense international showdown for nearly two weeks while China refused to release the two-dozen American crew members and damaged aircraft.

The sea drone captured in December was a research vessel, not a spy craft, according to the Pentagon, so its seizure didn’t risk compromising secret military technology. That wasn’t the case with the spy plane, which carried a trove of surveillance equipment and classified signals intelligence data.

For more than a decade, U.S. officials have refused to say what secrets China might have gleaned from the plane. Two years after the incident, journalists saw a redacted U.S. military report, which revealed that although crew members had jettisoned documents out an emergency hatch as they flew over the sea and had managed to destroy some signals-collection equipment before the plane fell into the hands of the Chinese, it was “highly probable” China had still obtained classified information from the plane. Attempts by journalists and academics to learn more over the years have been unsuccessful.

But now, a comprehensive Navy-NSA report completed three months after the collision, and included among documents obtained by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, finally reveals extensive details about the incident, the actions crew members took to destroy equipment and data, and the secrets that were exposed to China — which turned out to be substantial though not catastrophic.

The unredacted Navy report, supplemented by a 2001 Congressional Research Service summary of the incident, as well as The Intercept’s interviews with two crew members on board during the collision, presents the most detailed picture yet of the P-3 incident, a critical moment in U.S.-China military relations.

Although the Navy report cites a number of problems with what turned out to be ineffective efforts to destroy classified information, it vindicates the crew as well as pilot and mission commander, Navy Lt. Shane Osborn, who was hounded by critics for years — in and out of the military — who thought he should have ditched the plane and its sensitive equipment in the sea rather than land it in enemy territory. Osborn was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for showing “superb airmanship and courage” in stabilizing and landing the damaged aircraft, but in 2014 when he made a failed bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Nebraska, former military personnel popped up in the press again to revive the criticism against him.

“He was flying one of the crown jewels of the reconnaissance force,” Capt. Jan van Tol, a retired Navy officer and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told the Omaha World-Herald. “I think the right answer is he should have ditched it at sea, or taken it anyplace but China.”

Asked whether he stood by that comment today, van Tol told The Intercept that he’s hesitant to question the judgment of a pilot who was on the scene and understood the conditions better than he does, but he still feels Osborn had an obligation to better safeguard the aircraft’s secrets.

“I think there may have been another option [to land in Vietnam],” he said, trying to recall the events in 2001. “It would have been better to go to Vietnam than China.”

The collision occurred about 70 miles southeast of Hainan Island, where Osborn landed the plane; Vietnam was about 180 miles away. Although the latter wasn’t a great distance, it would have been the less attractive option to the crew, according to Osborn, given the shaky condition of the aircraft and their loss of critical flight instruments and altitude from the collision.

But the investigators who produced the Navy-NSA report didn’t fault the crew for the most part. In their assessment, they praised Osborn and his flight crew for saving the lives of everyone on board as well as the $80 million aircraft. And although they found fault with the crew’s demolition efforts and with supervisors onboard who failed to effectively coordinate and communicate with crew members during the incident, they mostly blamed the military for failing to properly prepare officers and crew for such an event.

The 117-page report, prepared by a team of investigators from the Navy and NSA, is based on interviews conducted with the crew right after their release from China and on physical re-enactments of their destruction methods — in some cases recreated with scientific precision — to determine how effective the methods might have been in preventing the Chinese from gleaning secrets.

The report describes the crew’s haphazard and jury-rigged efforts to destroy equipment without proper tools and the woefully inadequate training they received for dealing with a scenario the Navy should have considered inevitable. Even though several close encounters with Chinese fighter jets had occurred in the region before, procedures for dealing with such a situation were insufficient, and the crew never underwent emergency destruction drills. As a result, they were left scrambling in the heat of the moment to determine what needed to be destroyed and how to do it. Although the crew had about 40 minutes between the moment of collision and the landing in China — plenty of time to jettison or destroy all sensitive material, investigators concluded — there “were no readily available means or standard procedures for timely destruction of computers, electronic media, and hardcopy material.” This deficiency, along with the lack of training, investigators wrote, “was the primary cause of the compromise of classified material.”

Another stumbling block? The crew hadn’t maintained a comprehensive inventory of classified material on the plane. This made it difficult for them to ensure that everything got destroyed, and it meant that investigators had to rely on the recollections of crew members about what they had carried on the plane to determine what the Chinese might have seen.

Jeffrey Richelson, author of a number of books on the intelligence community and a senior fellow with the National Security Archive, is one person who has sought for years to uncover more information about the incident. He told The Intercept that the report adds important context and understanding to the historical record around it, adding that although the aerial confrontation may not have been a seismic event in terms of intelligence losses, it was a significant geopolitical moment in the history of U.S.-China relations. A key part of understanding this “is [knowing] what was lost and the damage assessment.” To that end, he said, the report is a “valuable document.”

Since the mid-1940s, the U.S. military has used planes to collect signals intelligence. The spy plane involved in the 2001 collision was one of 11 such aircraft the U.S. used to fill critical intelligence gaps left by satellites. Planes offered a number of benefits over satellites for signals collection. They could be maneuvered more easily to get closer and better signals reception, and their conspicuous presence spurred targeted militaries to react, thereby creating more communications to be intercepted.

The turboprop EP-3E Aries involved in the crash was built by Lockheed Martin and was equipped with receivers, antennas, and special software to capture and process a range of signals. The spy planes generally carried a crew of linguists, cryptographers, and technicians, and the one flying over the South China Sea that day carried an eighteen-member reconnaissance team from the Navy, Marines, and Air Force, in addition to the six-member flight crew.

The aircraft left Okinawa early in the morning with a mission to monitor Chinese communications as well as radar and weapon-systems signals.

It was flying at 22,500 feet along a well-worn surveillance path off Hong Kong’s coast in international airspace. The crew was five hours into a roughly  ten-hour mission when they intercepted messages from China’s nearby Lingshui air base indicating they were about to have company. About ten minutes later, two Chinese F-8 fighter jets appeared in the sky about a mile away. The plane was already nearing the end of its outbound leg and preparing to head back to base, so the pilots initiated an early turnaround with the plane in autopilot for the trip home.

One of the fighter jets approached from the rear left and stopped 10 feet away from the spy plane’s wing. Its pilot, Wang Wei, saluted the American crew, then fell back 100 feet .

The U.S. flew about two hundred reconnaissance missions a year in the region, and this wasn’t the first time PLA pilots, including Wei, had dogged U.S. spy planes. They usually just approached the American aircraft, reported what they saw to their ground crew, and returned to base. But recently they had become more aggressive. On several occasions, PLA pilots had buzzed the spy planes, overtaking them at high speed and sometimes passed beneath them before abruptly pulling up in front at close range. Wei was particularly aggressive, recalled one crew member who was on the plane but asked to remain anonymous because he’s not authorized to discuss the incident.

“[Wei] was extra crazy. He would get so close to the plane that you could literally jump from one wingtip to another wingtip,” he told The Intercept.

An American crew had captured a picture of Wei flying dangerously close on a previous occasion. In the image, he was holding up a piece of paper to the American crew displaying his e-mail address on it.

The U.S. had complained to Beijing in December and January, warning that the antics were a danger to both American and Chinese crews. But China said the U.S. was encroaching its sovereign airspace.

On April 1, Wei was at it again. After his initial approach, he advanced on the EP-3E a second time, this time stopping just five feet short of the spy plane and mouthed something to the American crew before falling back again. Then he tried a third time. On this approach, however, he maneuvered too close to the plane and got sucked in by one of the EP-3E’s propellers. The collision sliced the F-8 in half.

Shrapnel from the F-8 flew through the spy plane’s fuselage and into the nose cone, shearing it off, and damaged the spy plane’s radome — a dome that protects radar equipment — two propellers, and an engine. The Chinese fighter jet plummeted into the sea, and the spy plane rolled upside down and immediately depressurized, creating chaos inside.

“I think they keep the cabin pressured at 7,000 feet, and you go from 7,000 to 30,000 instantaneously,” said the crew member, describing the shock.

The plane plunged 14,000 feet while shaking violently.

“We’re falling like a rock and … everyone thought we were going to die,” he recalled.

As Osborn, the pilot, tried to regain control of the aircraft, he ordered everyone to prepare to bail. With wind roaring inside the cabin, warning lights flashing, and the plane plummeting, crew members struggled to communicate over the noise while donning parachutes, survival vests, and helmets. They were lined up and ready to jump into the sea, the crew member said, when Osborn managed to stabilize the plane and ordered the crew to prepare to land in the water. But then Osborn changed his mind.

“If I would have put it in the water, it would have killed us all,” he told The Intercept. “I had no flaps [to slow the plane], instruments were out, and I was overweight for a normal landing by 30,000 pounds [due to the fuel]. The airplane was coming apart. Once I thought the airplane could make it [to nearby land], that was what we needed to do.”

The only option, given that it wasn’t clear how long the plane would hold, was the PLA’s nearby Lingshui air base on Hainan Island.

The destruction efforts began once Osborn made the decision to land the plane, said the crew member. This meant the crew had about 20 minutes remaining to accomplish everything they needed before they were on the ground. The only problem was, they didn’t have a clue what they needed to do.

It wasn’t the first time cryptologic sources and methods were at risk of compromise. In 1968, North Korea captured the USS Pueblo and acquired a large inventory of highly sensitive intelligence materials from the ship. Since then, crews were supposed to be trained in emergency destruction procedures. But that didn’t happen with the EP-3E crew. Only one member of the crew had ever participated in an in-flight emergency destruction drill.

An emergency action plan for landing in hostile territory directed crews to shred or jettison sensitive material and to destroy equipment with an ax. But it didn’t describe how they should do this. As a result, the crew didn’t know hard drives should be destroyed in a special manner to prevent data recovery. “We trained parachute drills about a million times. We had fire drills. But we never practiced emergency destruction procedures for classified data,” the crew member said. “We were totally underprepared for it.”

Because the crew didn’t have a shredder onboard, they tore paper materials by hand and scattered the pieces throughout the plane, hoping the Chinese wouldn’t be able to reconstitute them. They also took cassette tapes containing intercepted data and stretched them until they tore.

The plane did have a fire ax  for breaking through the bulkhead in an emergency evacuation, but the blade was too dull and the handle too short to be wielded effectively for destroying equipment. Instead the crew improvised by dropping laptops on the floor, stomping on them, bashing them against a desk, and bending them across a chair — all methods that would have been insufficient to ensure the Chinese could not recover data from them.

“I was bashing in computer screens. People were ripping wires out of the wall,” the crew member said. “By the time we landed, the plane was in total disrepair. We had screwed up the inside of that plane as much as we could.”

The crew member said someone handed him a “super heavy” briefcase containing classified material  and told him to destroy everything in sight with it. Based on a description in the Navy-NSA report, the briefcase was likely an aluminum CMS, or COMSEC box, which contained cryptographic keying material the plane’s navigator had stuffed into it before passing it to the crew member. While using it to bash equipment, the report notes, the box sprung open, scattering its classified contents around the plane.

The crew managed to jettison some cryptographic keying material, as well as codebooks and two laptops out the emergency hatch. But 16 cryptographic keys, other codebooks and laptops, and a large computer for processing signals intelligence remained on board. As for the signals collection equipment, they destroyed the display terminals and controls but not the tuners and signals-processors, the most critical parts of the systems. The plane also had a number of cryptographic voice and data devices onboard — for securing communication and data transmissions between the plane and home base — that didn’t get destroyed, although the crew managed to zero-out the memory on them.

The crew did have one bit of luck on their side. Although other planes in the military’s spy fleet had recently undergone a major surveillance equipment upgrade, according to Osborn, their plane was still two weeks away from getting one. “The equipment we had on that plane was old and outdated and a lot of it didn’t work properly,” he said.

As the crew did their best to destroy the material, Osborn prepared to land on Hainan Island. Although the U.S. had an agreement with Moscow about what American crews should do if they had to make an emergency detour into Russian territory — including which radio frequencies and call signs to use — there was no agreement or guidance for China, investigators noted in the report. As a result, the pilot sent out a series of Mayday calls on an international distress frequency instead of the frequency the PLA used, and got no response. Osborn landed the plane at Lingshui anyway.

Military trucks met the spy plane on the ground, and steered it to the runway’s end where two-dozen Chinese soldiers surrounded the plane. Osborn kept the engines running while the crew dashed off one last message to the Pacific Reconnaissance Operations Center: They had landed safely. Then the crew zeroed-out the radio’s encryption device and exited the plane.

The emergency landing touched off a flurry of diplomacy to secure release of the crew and plane. Osborn said he and other members of the flight crew were interrogated daily, and the Chinese told Osborn that they’d be thrown into prison indefinitely if he didn’t allow the reconnaissance crew to be questioned as well. They eventually were questioned, but all refused to supply the Chinese with any substantial information, Osborn notes. After eleven days and extensive pressure from the U.S., China released the crew.

China also agreed to return the plane, but only on condition that it was dismantled first. Lockheed Martin sent technicians to separate the tail, engines, and wings from the fuselage and flew the pieces via cargo plane to an air base in Georgia. There, investigators began the process of determining what intelligence might have been lost.

Investigators uncovered a lot of surprises during their analysis of the incident. They found, for example, that the crew had a lot of unnecessary classified data onboard, which was needlessly put at risk of compromise. They had, for example, entire codebooks as well as nearly a month’s worth of top-secret keying material — which the military used to secure its communications — that wasn’t going to be put in use until well after their flight mission ended.

The exposure wasn’t detrimental since the military changed its keys daily and within 15 hours after the spy plane landed in China, authorities had retired all of that day’s keys and replaced them with new ones. But a worldwide key the military used to authenticate GPS data had 250,000 users worldwide, and they all had to be notified before the key could be replaced — this took nearly two weeks.

The concern about the exposed crypto material wasn’t that China could use the keys to decrypt that day’s U.S. communications, but that it provided insight into U.S. cryptologic methods. The U.S. used “high quality randomization and strong fail-safe designs” in its keying material and crypto devices, the investigators noted. If China studied the material to incorporate similar designs into its own systems, it would make it harder for the U.S. to analyze PRC communications in the future.

But the excess crypto keys weren’t the only unnecessary data on the plane. The crew also had the names of intelligence personnel — U.S. and foreign partners — who weren’t on the plane, including several dozen employees of the NSA and NSGA Misawa. The data included names, addresses, social security numbers, and a description of official duties for U.S. personnel. The exposure, investigators worried, could have an adverse impact on future assignments and travel plans for affected personnel.

In addition to this, the crew had a manual onboard that provided a comprehensive overview of how the U.S. exploits signals and nearly two dozen U.S. Signals Intelligence Directives, or excerpts of these directives, many of which weren’t critical to the crew’s mission. Issued by the NSA director, the directives lay out policy for SIGINT activities, and some of these included detailed instructions for collecting, processing, and distributing intercepts. Three of the directives were particularly sensitive. They included special procedures for signals-recognition and reporting; specific targets of interest for signals collection in China, North Korea, the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand; as well as information that China could have used to inject false data into intercepts.

As for materials and equipment that were critical to the crew’s mission, the plane had six carry-on computers, two of which were the most sensitive systems onboard. They contained a suite of software tools for collecting, analyzing, and processing communications intelligence, foreign instrumentation signals, and electronic intelligence signals. All of the data and software on these systems was compromised.

One of the systems was used for processing what are known as PROFORMA communications. These are communications between command-and-control centers and radar systems, weapon systems, surface-to-air missiles, anti-aircraft artillery, and fighter aircraft. The computer contained detailed information for processing more than two-dozen PROFORMA communications for North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, China, and U.S. allies.

Investigators worried the information would lead China to alter its communication methods to prevent future U.S. collection of PROFORMA communications, or help China collect and process the communications of other countries — including allies — if it wasn’t already doing so. China could also share the information with North Korea, Cuba, and Russia to help them do the same.

This wasn’t the only sensitive information about U.S. allies that was exposed. The plane also had information about the emitter parameters for allied weapon systems, and the names and locations of radar sites around the world and the radar systems installed at each —  information China could use to exploit the systems.

But the information the investigators considered the most sensitive on the plane were the tasking instructions for collecting data from China. These revealed information such as what data the U.S. was interested in collecting and the frequencies and call signs China used for its data. The investigators deemed this a serious compromise, since it could prompt China to alter its methods. And in one of the systems for collecting communications, the crew had also inadvertently left behind a tape that contained 45 minutes of encrypted and decrypted Chinese naval communications.

Jason Healey, a former signals intelligence officer who worked with reconnaissance aircraft in the Air Force and is now a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of  International and Public Affairs, said this could have potentially helped the Chinese understand U.S. decryption capabilities.

“If it’s got both encrypted and plaintext or decrypted [intercepts], it could hint how we go through the decryption process, and that would be very useful to their cryptographers to not just know that we can break it, but how we implement that in software,” he told The Intercept.

Another important secret exposed by data on the plane was the fact that the U.S. had the ability to locate and collect signal transmissions associated with Chinese submarines, and correlate them to specific vessels using direction-finding capabilities. “Although the PRC probably believed that the U.S. possessed this information it was probably not aware that the information could be derived from SIGINT collection and analysis,” the investigators wrote. The data also exposed how much the U.S. knew about China’s submarine-launched ballistic missiles program, including its organization, missile-testing operations and communications.

Despite the wealth of data and equipment that was exposed in the incident, the investigators ultimately concluded that the intelligence losses were not catastrophic. Instead, they deemed the losses medium-to-low in severity. But there was one caveat: without a complete inventory of all the classified data that was on the plane and potentially exposed to China, their assessment was inevitably incomplete.

But with regard to the secrets they knew were on the plane and exposed, they concluded that these wouldn’t help China better exploit U.S. encryption systems, though they could help it develop countermeasures to hinder U.S. surveillance by copying tradecraft the U.S. used to secure its own communication. Investigators worried, for example, that China might now augment its encryption or switch from “over-the-air transmissions to landline transmissions, or to more advanced radio communications techniques, such as frequency hopping.”

The last time China had altered its communication methods had been in the 1980s, the investigators wrote, and it had taken the NSA months to re-establish collection and analysis capabilities and the recovery was “still incomplete” in 2001 they noted.

Luckily, at the time the report was written, three months after the collision, the U.S. had not yet detected any alterations in China’s communication habits or methods. But investigators cautioned this could change in subsequent months and years. They didn’t seem too worried about it, however; they were confident that if China did employ new countermeasures, the U.S. could overcome them with a little work.

Healey said he was not surprised by the overall assessment of the intelligence losses, since he doesn’t think China learned very much it didn’t already know about what the planes were collecting. “I’m sure it would have been good for [China] to understand overall capabilities of the aircraft,” he said, “but the nature of most of the intelligence these aircraft would have been collecting would not have been a windfall for the Chinese or their Russian friends.”

Richelson agreed, and said the only real concern was whether China altered its communication methods months after the report was written. “There are worst-case fears of what a compromise might bring, and then the actual reality of what it does bring in the future,” he noted. “You can’t judge that a month after the compromise.”

It’s possible the assessment of the investigators did later change. In 2010, journalist Seymour Hersh published an article in the New Yorker asserting that the U.S. didn’t fully realize the extent of the intelligence losses from the EP-3E incident until late 2008. He writes that shortly after Barack Obama was elected president that year, the NSA picked up a barrage of intercepts from the Chinese that were intercepts of U.S. communications. “The intercepts included details of planned American naval movements,” Hersh wrote and said U.S. officials believed the Chinese wanted the U.S. to pick up the intercepts as a way to boast to the U.S. that it had the ability to decipher U.S. signals. However, Hersh did not specify why anyone believed this was connected to the EP-3E intelligence losses.

The NSA declined to comment on any aspect of the Navy-NSA report obtained by Snowden or the intelligence losses revealed in it.

In the end, there was at least one positive outcome from the EP-3E incident. The military implemented a number of measures to better protect data and equipment on spy planes and to improve crew training. But it only recently addressed another issue around the incident — the lack of an agreement with China about how to handle aircraft interactions in the region. It took until November 2014 for the U.S. and China to finally adopt a memorandum to regulate the “safety of air and maritime encounters,” after a dangerous near-miss event occurred in August that year between a Chinese fighter jet and a U.S. Navy P-8 anti-submarine warfare aircraft.

Whether that agreement will prevent future collisions is unclear. In May 2016, another close encounter occurred between China and the U.S. when two Chinese J-11 tactical planes flew dangerously close to an EP-3E. Officials said this was an anomaly, however, and that encounters in the region had become safer in the wake of the 2014 agreement. Their concern, they noted, was now focussed on a different problem area — Russian planes buzzing U.S. ships and planes in the Baltic and Black Sea regions.