Conservative commentator James Taranto, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on Monday night, detailed a set of allegations of sexual assault in the military before concluding that they amounted to a “he-said/she-said dispute” that only revealed “a political campaign against sexual assault in the military that shows signs of becoming an effort to criminalize male sexuality.” All of it, he argues, amounts to a “war on men.”

Taranto tried, without much success, to tie his grievances to Sen. Claire McCaskill’s (D-MO) attempt to stall the nomination of a Lt. Gen. Susan Helms to be vice commander of the Air Force Space Command. McCaskill is holding up the nomination because Helms once granted clemency to a man in the military accused of sexual assault.

But ultimately, Taranto’s greivances — which are simply against a changing culture that is starting to hold men accountable for treating women like objects — came through in his piece. And they had nothing to do with McCaskill’s, or Helms:

It’s fair to say that Capt. Herrera seems to have a tendency toward sexual recklessness. Perhaps that makes him unsuitable to serve as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. But his accusers acted recklessly too. The presumption that reckless men are criminals while reckless women are victims makes a mockery of any notion that the sexes are equal.

What’s worse, Taranto followed up his op-ed with an appearance on Wall Street Journal’s video channel, where he argued that “female sexual freedom” is responsible for a “war on men,” and that war is embodied in allegations of sexual assault. During that interview, he also said that a woman alleging assault and a man denying it “differed… on whether she consented.” Taranto also cast doubt on the report because someone present “didn’t even hear this going on.”

“What does female sexual freedom mean?” Taranto added, “It means, for this woman, that she had the freedom to get drunk and get in the back seat of a car with this guy.”

NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander (Credit: AP)

The head of the National Security Agency (NSA) on Tuesday admitted that government surveillance programs contributed to but were not fully responsible for preventing terrorist plots.

Since their revelation, the programs — which involve the collection of metadata of every phone call in the United States and monitoring Internet content of foreign nationals outside of the U.S. — have sparked a massive debate over the scope of the programs, their initial secrecy, the manner in which they were revealed, and particularly whether they’re the most effective way to discover potential terrorist attacks before they occur.

To counter these critiques, NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that more than 50 potential terrorist plots were foiled, of which “just over ten” were within the United States, through the use of the controversial data-gathering projects. While promising to bring forward documents detailing those plots to the committee in a later classified hearing, Alexander and his colleagues gave new details about four plots they say were halted through the surveillance. These include a previously disclosed plot to conduct an attack on the New York City subway system and a newly revealed plan to bomb the New York Stock Exchange.

The officials’ testimony gave the clearest picture yet how the NSA’s surveillence operates, but not all of the committee members were willing to accept vague guarantees that the metadata collection was vital in halting these plots. “I don’t think its adequate to say that 702 and 215 authorities ‘contributed to’ our preventing fifty episodes,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) told Alexander, referring to the sections of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and PATRIOT Act that greenlight the NSA programs under scrutiny. “I think it’s really essential that you grade the importance of that contribution,” he went on, before directly asking how many of the fifty plots would not have been stopped were it not for the NSA’s surveillance.

In response, Gen. Alexander clarified that only the slightly more than ten plots that had a “domestic nexus” would have been able to be targeted using the metadata program Hines asked about. Of the other plots, the ability to view Internet content under the FISA’s ‘contributed’ to 90 percent of the cases, according to Alexander, without providing the grade Himes requested. The general was also unable to pin down just how critical the NSA’s ability to gain access to business records under the PATRIOT Act, such as the metadata gathering from Verizon that set off the whole scandal, to preventing those attacks. “If we now look at those [domestic cases], the vast majority of those had a contribution by business records FISA,” Alexander said.

Himes tried to press further for a clear answer on which plots the data gather was essential to stopping, but was rebuffed by Deputy FBI Director Sean Joyce. “I would just add to Gen. Alexander’s comments and I think you ask an almost impossible question, to say how important each dot was,” Joyce said, claiming that every tool covered during the hearing is essential and vital. “You ask ‘How can you put the value on American life?’ and I can tell you it’s priceless,” Joyce concluded.

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden (Credit: The Guardian)

The revelations to the Guardian of the NSA’s secret court orders to siphon metadata from the majority of Americans’ cell phone conversations launched wide-ranging concern over the program. That only increased with the disclosure of further programs from the agency — with codenames like PRISM and BLARNEY — that allow access to the content of information sent across some of the Internet’s most popular platforms. The response from privacy advocates across the political spectrum has been condemnation of the programs’ secrecy and overarching intrusiveness on the part of the federal government.

However, that focus on the potential violations of civil liberties is being undercut the more former NSA contractor Edward Snowden reveals. The shift began with the news that President Obama had signed off on a directive to begin planning for how the United States could bring to bear offensive capabilities in cyberspace and against whom. A summary of the directive had been made public months earlier, but the directive itself had remained classified and secret until it was first reported in the Guardian. While the previous leaks had been related to the public’s right to know about what actions the government was taking against U.S. citizens, the cyberwar document could not be considered the same.

Likewise, the next scoop featured what was touted as an all-seeing system through which the NSA could easily sort through where the communications data it collects came from — including the United States. Its existence has caused no small amount of trouble for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who had previously indicated to Congress that the NSA did not collect this type of information from Americans without a warrant. “Not wittingly, there are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly,” Clapper told Congress at the time. What the program — known as Boundless Informant — revealed, however, went beyond the information collected on U.S. citizens, instead also detailing the NSA’s collection work from networks in Iran, India, and Pakistan.
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