The United Nations on Wednesday released its annual report on children and armed conflict and the results are grim, with more than two dozen groups cited as intentionally targeting children in their fighting.

Every year, the Secretary-General of the United Nations is mandated to provide an update to the body’s General Assembly and Security Council on the countries and groups that still utilize child soldiers when waging war. The report also has to include information on how children are affected by armed conflict more broadly, and detail instances if and when their human rights are violated in conflicts around the world. Unfortunately, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s report for 2013 seems to indicate that this was a banner year in each category.

Fifty-five groups made the United Nations’ “List of Shame” this year, contained in an annex at the end of the report, naming those who either actively recruit child soldiers to their ranks or intentionally target children for harm. These range from rebel groups like the M23 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to terrorist groups such as Ansar Dine in Mali, to government security forces including the Afghan National Police. Twenty-nine of those groups have been listed in every report for the last five years, earning them the title of “persistent perpetrators.”

“The absence of clear front lines and identifiable opponents, the increasing use of terror tactics by some armed groups and certain methods used by security forces have made children more vulnerable,” the report laments, describing instances of schools under attack, children arrested and tortured, and sexual violence committed against youth. Details of abuses against children in twenty-four countries around the world are made harrowingly clear throughout. Secretary-General Ban in particular called attention to the situation in Syria, calling the toll on children “unacceptable and unbearable.”

The report also worries about the introduction of armed drones into warfare. Citing not only reports of children being killed in drone strikes, including reports of at least 50 children dying in strikes in Yemen, it also examines the psychological effect that their use has on youth. “Reports further indicate that the use of drones has a wider impact on children, especially their access to education,” the report warns, adding that “in some situations, both boys and girls have ceased attending school owing to the fear of drone strikes.”

Not everything contained in the report is negative, however, as several groups have been removed from the List of Shame this year. Myanmar, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo all signed action plans with the United Nations in 2012, pledging to remove children from within the ranks of their armies. This is outweighed though by the addition of 14 new groups and governments to the list this year.

The Turkish government has issued fines to a number of Turkish media companies for broadcasting footage of the protests against the razing of a public park in Istanbul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government.

Turkey’s mainstream media outlets have been widely criticized for paying little attention to the mass demonstrations. CNN Turk — which has a franchising agreement with CNN but operates editorially independent from the U.S.-based news network — famously aired a documentary about penguins while other networks, including CNN International, carried live footage of the protests. (Penguins have since become the symbol of protest among many demonstrators against the media’s lack of coverage.) The day after tens of thousands flooded Istanbul’s Taksim Square to protest, Turkey’s top-selling newspaper, owned by Erdogan’s son-in-law, ran a front page story on the Prime Minister’s antismoking campaign.

While many Turks have turned to Twitter and Facebook instead (Erdogan recently called Twitter a “menace to society“), other TV news outlets have also helped fill the void. But according to the Turkish daily newspaper Hurriyet, the government’s Radio and Television Supreme Council fined them for doing so, claiming that they were “harming the physical, moral and mental development of children and young people” by broadcasting coverage of the protests in Istanbul’s Gezi Park.

One of the channels fined included Halk TV, which according to the New York Times, “has ties to an opposition political party known by its Turkish acronym, C.H.P.,” and “has been broadcasting nearly continuously with live footage of the protests.”

Erdogan’s government has been notorious for cracking down on dissent and limiting press freedom. In 2009, Turkish authorities fined the Doğan Group, then the largest media company in Turkey, $2.5 billion in unpaid taxes in what a recent CAP report notes “was widely viewed as a political move to punish Doğan for its media outlets’ negative coverage” of Erdogan and his political party, the Justice and Development Party, or AKP.

And because big media companies in Turkey are owned by conglomerates that have larger interests in other industries such as construction or energy, parent companies have been more likely to comply with pressure to lay off government criticism in order to avoid jeopardizing access to large government contracts.

The chief executive of Dogus Media, the parent company of one of Turkey’s largest TV news channels, NTV, apologized this week to viewers and employees for the channel’s lack of coverage of the protests. “Our audience feels like they were betrayed,” Cem Aydin said to employees according to the Times. “Our professional responsibility is to report everything in the way it happens. The pursuit of balance within the imbalanced environment affected us, as it did the other media outlets,” he said, adding, “We owe you and our audience an apology.”

In a seeming effort to tamp down perceptions that the government has responded too harshly against the protesters, Erdogan reportedly met with some of the movement’s leading figures this week and offered a compromise, according to the Times, “proposing a public referendum to decide the fate of the park, where the government plans to build a mall designed to look like an Ottoman-era army barracks.” But the Prime Minister isn’t waiting too long and on Thursday issued a “final” warning to the demonstrators to clear Gezi Park and Taksim Square.

Just one day before the Iranian election, Google’s security blog warned of a rise in email-based phishing campaigns targeting Iranian users. According to a company statement:

“For almost three weeks, we have detected and disrupted multiple email-based phishing campaigns aimed at compromising the accounts owned by tens of thousands of Iranian users. These campaigns, which originate from within Iran, represent a significant jump in the overall volume of phishing activity in the region. The timing and targeting of the campaigns suggest that the attacks are politically motivated in connection with the Iranian presidential election on Friday.”

Reuters notes that the company “posted a screenshot of a phishing email [seen above] purporting to be from Google administrators. The email, sent from the account ‘Email.Settings@gmail.com,’ contained a link to a fake sign-in page that asked for the user’s Gmail credentials.”

While Google did not go so far as identify the Iranian government as the source of the phishing, it does imply a connection: “Protecting our users’ accounts is one of our top priorities, so we notify targets of state-sponsored attacks and other suspicious activity, and we take other appropriate actions to limit the impact of these attacks on our users,” Google said.

The government and opposition groups alike have claimed to be the victims of cyberattacks in the lead up the election. Government forces reportedly previously engaged in cyberattacks against “enemies” of Iran and actively recruit hackers to boost its efforts.

Iran’s cyber-capabilities combined with its exclusion from global economy have led some to believe it could be one of the greater cybersecurity threats on the global stage because of its tendency for disruptive action, like the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack targeting global financial institutions last winter.

Iran blocked Google services in September 2012, relenting on Gmail access after a complaints from public officials. The government also reportedly cut off its eight million plus internet users from most virtual private networks (VPNs) in March as part of its attempt to divert internet traffic to a closed intranet system.

While speaking at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on enduring cybersecurity threats, National Security Agency (NSA) Director Gen. Keith Alexander called claims made by NSA leaker Edward Snowden about his personal wiretapping abilities at the Agency “false.”

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) asked directly, “I saw an interview in which Mr. Snowden claimed that due to his position at NSA he could tap into virtually any American’s phone call or e-mails. True or false?” Alexander responded unequivocally, “False, I know of no way to do that.”

Collins’ appeared to be referencing a statement made by Snowden in an interview where he claimed “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal e-mail.”

According to earlier reports, Snowden was essentially a contracted IT guy for the NSA rather than an intelligence officer.

A top House Republican calling for the prosecution of journalists who leaked classified details of the NSA’s eavesdropping programs clarified on Wednesday that he wants the U.S. government to go after one in particular: the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald.

Greenwald and reporters for the Washington Post originally broke news last week about secret NSA surveillance programs. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) said on Tuesday that they should be prosecuted for doing so. But when asked about that statement on Fox News on Wednesday, the New York Republican said he just wants Greenwald taken down, because, King claimed, Greenwald said will release the names of CIA operatives around the world:

HOST MEGYN KELLY: To take it another step and to say the journalists who published the information, the guys who published what he leaked, that they should face prosecution that is news. Do you believe that? Do you stand by that, both Greenwald and the Washington Post reporter?

KING: I’m talking about Greenwald. Greenwald, not only did he disclose this information he has said that he has the names of CIA agents and assets around the world and they’re threatening to disclose that. [...]

KELLY: What is the difference between Glenn Greenwald who broke this story in the Guardian who is an American citizen but he’s living abroad and James Rosen and the Associated Press?

KING: James Rosen never said he was going to release information that was going to kill Americans. He was never going to disclose the names of CIA agents and operatives around the world the way Greenwald is saying he is threatening to do.

Watch the interview clip:

While Greenwald has said that he will report on more newsworthy secret information that was allegedly provided to him by a former NSA contractor, he has never said he plans to expose or out any CIA agents. And as this blog has previously noted, there is no known example of a U.S. official prosecuting a journalist for their own reporting or publication of material. Doing so would be an unprecedented expansion of government invasion into the free press, and would prompt an immediate deluge of constitutional challenges as a violation of the First Amendment.

Transcript:

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Debate is set to begin on Wednesday among the full House of Representatives over if and how to amend their version of the Fiscal Year 2014 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Nearly 300 amendments were submit to the House Rules Committee, which polices the terms of the debate.

Many of the more concerning provisions within the NDAA are already baked in, thanks to the Republican control of the House Armed Services Committee. President Obama has already issued his now-annual veto threat against the NDAA for certain provisions that his administration finds unacceptable. To date, the President has signed every NDAA that has come across his desk, but that’s never a guarantee.

ThinkProgress has already highlighted some of the amendments offered that can improve the House’s bill. But there are still several amendments that, if accepted into the final bill, could render the NDAA truly indefensible:

1. Ban Gitmo detainee transfers to Yemen.

President Obama recently announced, as part of his renewed efforts to close down Guantanamo Bay, that he would lift the moratorium for transferring cleared detainees to Yemen. At present, 59 Yemeni citizens have been vetted and approved for transfer back to their home country. Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-IN) wants to prevent such a move from taking place, however, filing an amendment that would ban any use of Defense Department funds to facilitate these prisoners moving from Guantanamo back to Yemen.

2. Eliminate military aid to Pakistan.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and Pakistan don’t precisely get along. He’s been declared persona non grata for his urging the Balochistan region to declare independence from Islamabad and therefore is barred from setting foot in the country. So it’s understandable that Rohrabacher submit an amendment to ban all military aid to Pakistan. In 2012, the administration spent $371.9 million in Pakistan, of which more than 95 percent went to USAID programs providing assistance to some of Pakistan’s poorest. Only $1.9 million of that was spent on aid to Pakistan’s military, making it unclear why Rohrabacher sees the need to pass a full ban into law.
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The deadline for House members to submit their proposed amendments to the Lower Chamber’s version of the Fiscal Year 2014 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed on Tuesday, leaving an avalanche of offered changes in its wake. While the House NDAA will still need to be merged with its eventual Senate counterpart in conference committee, many of its provisions will likely find themselves in the final bill.

A total of 291 amendments were sent to the House Rules Committee, which will decide on Wednesday how the floor debate will proceed and how many of these amendments will be discussed. ThinkProgress read through them all so you don’t have to, pulling out some of the amendments that would do the most to improve the bill that moves forward:

1. Repeal the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF).

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) frequently touts the fact that she was the only member of Congress to vote against the AUMF when first written in 2001. Now, twelve years later, Lee is still fighting to repeal it, but now she has President Obama’s backing — in principle. Obama has expressed an interest in revising the AUMF before it’s eventual repeal, but Lee’s amendment jumps straight to the end. If passed, it would have the AUMF repealed on Jan. 1, 2015 or when the war ends in Afghanistan, whichever comes first.

2. Set up a framework to close Gitmo.

Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) serves as the Ranking Member on the House Armed Services Committee, a position from which he has long advocated the closure of the military prision at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This year, he and several of his colleagues are attempting to insert language into the NDAA doing just that. While it’s a long shot, if it passed Smith’s amendment would add into the NDAA the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility Closure Act of 2013, which would lift the ban on transferring detainees into the U.S. for imprisonment or trial and cutting off all funding to the prison after 2014.

3. Add more oversight to the administration’s targeted killing program.

House Armed Services Committee Vice-Chair Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) won passage in committee of his provision to have the Secretary of Defense brief his committee and its Senate counterpart every time the administration conducted a kill or capture operation outside of Afghanistan. Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wants to expand that oversight even further. Under Engel’s amendment, Foreign Affairs as well as the House’s Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence would also have to receive the same briefing, increasing the members of Congress in the know.
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One week after the Senate Armed Services Committee’s hearing on sexual assault in the military, the committee’s chairman is offering a proposal to counter a bill that would remove authority to prosecute sexual assault cases from the military chain of command.

The proposal from Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), which he will offer in the committee on Wednesday, would automatically send any general’s decision not to prosecute sexual assault to the next level of command for review. It would also make retaliation against anyone who reports sexual assault a federal crime. Levin’s proposal comes as a direct response to an alternate bill from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), the Chair of the Subcommittee on Personnel and a leading advocate on the issue.

Levin told reporters on Tuesday that he was offering his alternative proposal “because you’ve got to rely on the chain of command to change the culture, and so I don’t want to take away a club they have, which is the threat of prosecution or going to a court-martial.” The idea of removing authority from the chain of command faced universal pushback from the assembled military chiefs at the Senate hearing on military sexual assault last week.

Gillibrand’s bill, the Military Justice Improvement Act, would remove decision-making authority on serious crimes, including sexual assault, from the alleged victim’s chain of command. Cases would instead be reported to and handled by trained military prosecutors. The bill has gathered 24 co-sponsors so far, including four Republicans and nine of the Senate’s 17 female members. Gillibrand’s subcommittee approved her proposal by a voice vote on Tuesday, highlighting its popularity.

Currently, victims who wish to report their cases must do so up the chain of command, a policy that has proven controversial as military sexual assault has been scrutinized in Congress in recent weeks. The Pentagon estimated that 26,000 active duty members faced unwanted sexual contact in 2012. Twenty-five percent of female victims and 27 percent of male victims said that their assailant was someone in their chain of command. Only 3,347 cases were officially reported.

Current policy also allows the convening authority, the senior official who called the court-martial, to throw out cases for any reason, as was seen in a controversial case in February where an Air Force general overturned a jury’s sexual assault conviction by blaming the victim. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel proposed changes that would strip the convening authority of this power in April, which are included in Gillibrand’s bill and a bill passed by the House Armed Services Committee. Gillibrand’s proposal would further remove the chain of command’s authority to decide whether or not the case should go to trial in the first place.

The Armed Services Committee will debate the NDAA markup on Wednesday, during which both Levin’s and Gillibrand’s proposals will be considered. Approval from the full committee is required before the can head to the Senate floor with either proposal included.

Kumar Ramanathan is an intern at ThinkProgress.

A Republican congressman claimed on the House floor on Tuesday that members of Muslim communities in the United States have not condemned acts of Islamic extremist terrorism against the U.S. and therefore are complicit in those and any future attacks.

Noting that it has been two months since the Boston Marathon bombing, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) said the supposed silence from Muslim leaders on terrorism is “deafening,” adding that it’s “sad, but perhaps most importantly it’s dangerous.” Listing off a number terrorist acts committed by Islamic extremists, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and several more recent failed plots, Pompeo blamed the leaders of the Islamic community for not doing more to prevent these actions, hinting that they could be complicit in the deaths they’ve caused. “Instead of responding, silence has made these Islamic leaders across America potentially complicit in these acts, and more importantly still, in those that may well follow,” Pompeo accused.

“I know not all Muslims support these actions,” Pompeo said, but lamented that “the silence in the face of extremism coming from the best funded Islamic advocacy organizations and many mosques across America is deafening.”

Watch his full statements here:

But Muslim leaders in the U.S. have been anything but silent in the face of extremism. Immediately after the identity of the alleged Boston bombers was revealed, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a statement in response condemning terrorism. “As Americans, we are a united force against any form of tyranny, whether it be in the form of terrorism or otherwise,” CAIR executive director Basim Elkarra said. “Terrorism has no allegiance to faith or ethnicity, and we have been witness to that over the past few years. What happened in Boston and Watertown last week does not reflect on anyone except for those who carried it out. It is not a reflection of ethnic identity, religion, or national affiliation.”

Likewise, Muslim communities around the country have made clear their disdain for terrorism. In the aftermath of Boston, the All Dulles Area Muslim Society began organizing a workshop to prevent further Muslim youths from being radicalized on the Internet. Similarly, the Muslim Public Affairs Council partnered with the New America Foundation to work on the issue of tackling extremism and promoting moderate Islam in an age of digital radicalization. In fact, in the years since 9/11, Muslim-American leaders have condemned terrorism — from the failed Christmas Day bombing of a plane landing in Detroit to the 2005 London bombings to the very idea of terrorism — unequivocally. Pompeo’s questioning their stance against terror shows a deafness that affected his colleague Rep. Peter King (R-NY) and indeed many Americans over the last decade.

Pompeo also misses that Muslim communities have actually been instrumental in thwarting more than a dozen terrorist attacks since 2001. Across the border, in Canada, the Toronto Muslim community was key in preventing an attack on a joint U.S.-Canadian railway line. In the most recent Pew Research Center survey of the U.S. Muslim community, taken in 2011, found that 64 percent of U.S. Muslims felt there was little or no support for extremism in their communities. Instead, Muslims found themselves targets of increased violence and harassment after Boston.

As the international community continues to struggle with how to respond to the ongoing violence in Syria, the Pentagon has developed a new doctrine on how to use military force in preventing and ending mass atrocities.

In August 2012, the Department of Defense updated its doctrine on “Peace Operations,” dictating the recommended procedures for participating in multilateral peacekeeping or peace-enforcing efforts. While the doctrine’s update was completed last year, it remained completely hidden from the public, until the Federation of American Scientists obtained it through a Freedom of Information Act request. In revising Joint Publication 3-07.3, the Pentagon opted to create a new appendix on what they refer to as “Mass Atrocity Response Operations” (MARO).

Going beyond the normal scale of fighting seen in civil wars and other conflicts, mass atrocities according to DOD consist of “widespread and often systematic acts of violence against civilians by state or non-state armed groups, including killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, or deliberately inflicting conditions of life that cause serious bodily or mental harm.”

The document stresses that the military can and should incorporate MARO considerations into its planning and operations whenever appropriate. To facilitate this, the doctrine lists a variety of considerations military planners and strategists should keep in mind when developing operations, including the requirement for a high degree of situational understanding — knowing precisely who the actors are in the conflict, how they interact, and what other forces are at play — and designing a strategic communications plan to both explain the situation and influence the perpetrators.

It also determines five phases that MARO goes through and provides planners with seven approaches that can be mixed and matched in ending atrocities:

1. Area Security — secure a large area with sufficient force deployed in unit sectors.

2. Shape-Clear-Hold-Build — systematically secure limited areas and expand when able.

3. Separation — establish a DMZ or similar buffer zone between perpetrators and victims.

4. Safe Areas — secure concentrations of vulnerable populations such as IDP camps.

5. Partner Enabling — provide advisors, equipment, or specialized support such as deployment or airpower to coalition partners, host nation, or victim groups.

6. Containment — influence perpetrator behavior with strikes, blockades, or no-fly zones.

7. Defeat Perpetrators — attack and defeat perpetrator leadership and/or capabilities.

Joint Publication 3-07.3 makes clear that the decision on whether a situation should be categorized as “an actual or potential” mass atrocity is one that should be left up to national level leadership. It also includes several warnings about the ways in which any military intervention, even when conducted for the best of reasons, can have unpredictable second- and third-order effects.

“MARO may create moral dilemmas for the PO [Peace Operations] force, including whether potential courses of action to halt a mass atrocity that might assist a perpetrator’s long-term aims,” it warns. Even something as basic as protecting civilians could prove to be detrimental, as if “seen to be defending civilians who are linked to only one of the parties, without adjusting to ensure protection for all civilians, both victims and perpetrators will perceive the PO force as anything but impartial.”

The timing of the release means it comes just as the international community prepares to meet once again in Geneva to determine a course of action in ending the civil war in Syria. So far, the conflict has cost the lives of at least 80,000 Syrians, with the vast majority dead at the hands of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s security forces.
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The top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations committee sent a letter to President Obama on Monday urging him to send arms to moderate Syrian rebels quickly, fearing that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces are beginning to turn the tide of the war.

According to Yahoo News, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) — a co-sponsor of a recent bill passed out of his committee calling on the U.S. to arm the rebels — told Obama that “[a]cting now and offering lethal aid directly to our allies in the opposition will shift momentum away from radical Islamist groups, the Assad regime and its militias toward more moderate elements and could help alter the balance of power on the ground at a time when negotiations over a political settlement have stalled.”

Syrian rebels made urgent pleas over the weekend to the U.S. to send arms after losing control of a city near the Lebanese border to Hezbollah militants allied with Assad’s forces. A State Department official said the Obama administration is “taking a closer look” at what the U.S. can do to help the opposition. But experts say the U.S. may be running out of time.

“I think the rebels are in trouble,” Jeffrey White, a former Middle East analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency who is now a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the New York Times. “Speed is of the essence. The regime’s momentum needs to be brought to a halt.”

A senior member of the House Intelligence committee announced on Monday that he plans to introduce a bill to repeal the Authorization of Military Force (AUMF) Congress passed in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The proposal — put forth by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) — notes that many of al-Qaeda core’s top leaders and those responsible for the attacks — including Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — are either dead or in prison and that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has said that AQ core has been so “degraded” that “probably unable to carry out complex, large-scale attacks in the West.” The measure proposes sunsetting the 9/11 AUMF to coincide with the transition of U.S. military forces out of Afghanistan at the end of 2014.

“Schiff’s legislation finds that the [AUMF] now poorly defines those who pose a threat to the country, and that it should expire concurrent with the end of our combat role in Afghanistan,” a statement on Schiff’s website says:

“When Congress passed the AUMF shortly after 9/11, we did not intend to authorize a war without end,” said Rep. Adam Schiff. “The cessation of our combat mission in Afghanistan next year is a logical end point for an authorization that now provides a poor description of the groups which threaten us, and an increasingly precarious legal rationale for going after them. As the President observed recently, if we don’t define the nature of the threat we face, it will define us.”

In his major national security speech last month, President Obama said he wanted to work with Congress on changing or repealing the AUMF because the nature of counterterrorism has changed and the authority granted by Congress has become outdated.

“The AUMF is now nearly 12 years old. The Afghan war is coming to an end. Core al Qaeda is a shell of its former self,” Obama said. “Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states.”

Congress is responding to calls to rein in the more far-reaching aspects of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism polices. Democrats are joining Republicans in calling for more oversight of the targeted killing program and the Hill recently reported that some “defense lawmakers” are considering a measure to tighten the scope of those individuals the program targets. (HT: Lawfare)

Last week, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin hailed the arrival of “a strong new player in the pro-Israel community,” Concerned Women for America. It’s “music to the ears of Israel and her friends,” Rubin wrote, “that a 500,000-strong conservative group that has mostly focused on social and economic issues has adopted defense of Israel as part of its core mission.”

What Rubin doesn’t mention is that, in addition to a number of other very right-wing causes, CWFA has a history of anti-Muslim activism. In particular, the group pushes the “creeping sharia” conspiracy theory, which holds that Islamic religious law represents an imminent threat to the United States, and which my colleague Wajahat Ali and I debunked in a 2011 brief.

An announcement for a CWFA event in Iowa last November claimed, “Islam is more than a religion; it is a military strategy and a political and socio-economic system,” and asked, “Would you recognize Sharia Law in your community? Can we coexist like the bumper stickers suggest? Can true freedom survive if Islam thrives?”

A recent CWFA podcast on “Confronting the threat of Islam” — not “Islamism” or “Islamic extremism,” but Islam itself — featured Tom Lynch, Director of Mission Advancement for the Thomas More Law Center, another organization with a history of anti-Muslim activism.

“Today the Trojan horse is Islam,” said Lynch. “It’s entered America disguised as a religion. It’s ultimate objective is political, and that’s to destroy America and establish an Islamic nation under Allah and sharia law.” Thanks to “unprincipled career politicians that are corrupting our government,” Lynch warns, Islam threatens to corrupt America’s vital essence. “If you expect to remain free, it’s out duty as Americans, and the duty of everyone, to become informed about the threat of Islam within our gates.”

CWFA has been at active in lobbying for anti-sharia legislation, most recently in North Carolina, where they promoted “American Laws for American Courts,” template legislation created by attorney David Yerushalmi, who has advocated making it “a felony punishable by 20 years in prison to knowingly act in furtherance of, or to support the, adherence to Islam.”

In an op-ed in North Carolina’s News Observer last week, Faiza Patel and Amos Toh of the Brennan Center for Justice wrote that the measure would “create a series of damaging, unintended consequences for North Carolinians of all faiths.” (Patel, Toh and I examined some of these consequences in a recent report. A 2011 Center for American Progress report Fear, Inc: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, also detailed the various groups and individuals pushing anti-Islam measures.)

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon recently vetoed a nearly identical measure, saying it “seeks to solve a problem that does not exist.” Christian and Jewish groups have also opposed the measures on the grounds that they infringe religious liberty, particularly for religious minorities.

Supporters of Israel might want to think twice before embracing a group with this sort of extremist agenda. They might also want to ask why Rubin didn’t think it worth mentioning.

The Sunday afternoon revelation that former Booz Allen Hamilton employee Edward Snowden was behind the leaks that set off the last week’s string of stories on potential overreach on the part of the National Security Agency (NSA) has led to many questions about the world he inhabited. Why would a contractor have access to such highly secret materials? What was a contractor doing at the NSA in any event? Who is Booz Allen Hamilton and why do they have such reach? Here’s what you need to know:

Number of private contractors exploded since 2001. After 9/11, the budgets of the Pentagon and intelligence community grew to almost double their 1998 rates. To keep pace with this expansion, without bringing more federal workers into the fold, federal contractors were signed up to provide the labor instead.

Private contractors may be more expensive than government employees. Many former government employees make the switch into private contracting, which can serve to drive up the amount they wind up costing the American taxpayer. A 2007 report to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that the average government employee working as an intelligence analyst cost $126,500, while the same work performed by a contractor would cost the government an average $250,000 including overhead. The total annual budget of the intelligence community is itself secret; only the top line is reported to the public. For Fiscal Year 2014, the Obama administration requested $48.2 billion for the National Intelligence Program, encompassing “six Federal departments, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.” Of that amount, according to a 2007 article, an amazing 70 percent goes towards private contractors.

There are thousands of companies in the game. Of the more than one thousand contracting firms competing for federal dollars, Booz Allen Hamilton is just one of the largest, earning $1.3 billion, 23 percent of their total revenue, from intelligence contracts over the last fiscal year. Booz Allen shares that tier with names like Northrup Grumman and Science Applications International Corporation. It also includes companies like Lockheed Martin, which in addition to selling airplanes and missiles to the government, also provides staffers to man the programs the various departments set up.

Contractors are prevalent in the intelligence sector. Analysts looking for patterns among information, technology staffers building IT systems and making sure the networks stay functioning, front office administrative workers, sometimes even the intelligence collection specialists themselves are all positions contractors fill. This takes place across the range of intelligence collection including signals intelligence (SIGINT), of the sort that the NSA performs and has led to the current scrutiny, as well as human intelligence gained directly from sources and geographic intelligence gathered from spy satellites.

Contract work extends throughout the government. Outside of the intelligence sphere, contractors fill positions in nearly every part of the federal government. From the Department of Defense, to the Department of Homeland Security, to the Department of Health and Human Services, private contractors are in the business of actually executing a large portion of what the government is lawfully obligated to do. These positions exist for even the most shadowy of operations, including openings for human targeting analysts, who help the military and intelligence community determine who to place in the cross-hairs of drone strikes.

More than half a million private contractors can access the country’s secrets. A large degree of surprise also was related to the fact that Snowden had access to many of the documents he obtained so soon after beginning to work for Booz Allen. Once obtained, a clearance is a relatively hard thing to lose, so long as you remain employed by a company that does work requiring you to hold one. These clearances also only need to be renewed every five years while active. According to a 2013 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a total of 483,263 contractors held Top Secret clearances in 2012, the highest level one can obtain, with another 582,524 holding them at the Confidential and Secret levels.

As the military continues to grapple with addressing an ongoing sexual assault crisis — an issue that one Army General recently referred to as a “cancer within the force” — some veterans are re-living the pain that resulted from their own rapes. After years have passed without any improvement to the military’s sexual assault policies, one rape survivor says that she has been “re-victimized” by the military’s inability to learn anything from what happened to her twenty years ago.

Lisa Wilken, an Air Force veteran who was raped by a fellow airman when she was 22 years old, is frustrated that she hasn’t seen much positive change in the two decades since her own sexual assault.

Wilken said that she and her fellow rape survivors were forced to navigate a military penal system that doesn’t believe them, blames them for the crimes perpetrated against them, and allows their assailants to go unpunished. Wilken herself was told that her sexual assault wasn’t “violent enough” to justify jailing her rapist. “The damage that has been done to me hasn’t been by the act of the assault, it has been the treatment that I have received through the process,” Wilken explained in an interview with USA Today. “It basically re-victimizes you.”

A recent report from the Pentagon revealed there were an estimated 26,000 incidents of sexual assault in the military last year, as well as an alarming spike in sexual crimes that went unreported. Several high-profile scandals in which military leaders are accused of assaulting their subordinates have come to light over the past several months. According to Wilken, that news is enough to trigger her memories of her own painful sexual assault.

“It is a wound that doesn’t ever heal,” she told USA Today. “You can make it feel better, but it doesn’t take much to rip the top off it and there it is again.”

Still, Wilken isn’t exactly surprised that the sexual assault crisis is gaining national attention. In some ways, it’s a good thing for the issue to get more exposure. “It’s kind of been the military’s dirty little secret for way too long,” she explained. “The culture is that if they can figure out a reason why you asked for it, or you are lying or maybe you deserved it, then it makes everybody feel better about looking the other way.”

Fortunately, the increased attention to the issue might help encourage some of the changes that Wilken and her fellow veterans have been pushing for. President Obama has called the rate of sexual assault in the armed forces “an outrage,” and both military leaders and members of Congress have agreed that action needs to taken to fix it. Last week, the House passed the Ruth Moore Act, which would help ensure that military rape survivors can receive the disability benefits they need to cope with the trauma resulting from sexual crimes. And the Air Force just named a woman to head its sexual assault prevention program — which will hopefully be an improvement over the last director, who was himself arrested on charges of committing a sexual assault.