The Al Qaeda Slump

It's going to be a real blow to neocon efforts to frighten their way to victory, once they recognize that they may have to find a new enemy.

Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida is under heavy pressure in its strongholds in Pakistan's remote tribal areas and is finding it difficult to attract recruits or carry out spectacular operations in western countries, according to government and independent experts monitoring the organisation.

Speaking to the Guardian in advance of tomorrow's eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, western counter-terrorism officials and specialists in the Muslim world said the organisation faced a crisis that was severely affecting its ability to find, inspire and train willing fighters.

Its activity is increasingly dispersed to "affiliates" or "franchises" in Yemen and North Africa, but the links of local or regional jihadi groups to the centre are tenuous; they enjoy little popular support and successes have been limited.

This has a host of implications on our foreign policy moving forward:

• The article credits CIA drone strikes in part, although I do think they increase the amount of extremist activity in general. But there have always been extremists; Al Qaeda provided a durable network. Once which is foundering. And if the demand for extremism dries up with the lack of a durable network, then ultimately the entire project will topple upon itself.

• Of greater benefit is monitoring and law enforcement techniques, which have been proven effective in disrupting "core Al Qaeda," which is down to 6 or 8 people and maybe another couple hundred on the margins. To the extent that these techniques work, they are not labor-intensive, involve global cooperation and do not have a role for the US military to any strong extent. You do not put 100,000 troops in the field to deny 8 men safe havens. Much of the intelligence, in fact, is coming from relatives and friends, suggesting that giant military apparatuses are not required to deal with a movement that has become broadly unpopular.

• The Pakistan campaign is really helping disrupt Al Qaeda, as the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban have turned on the unit, probably because it's giving them so much trouble.

This all adds up to yet another reason why we have no need continuing escalation in Afghanistan. The local Taliban hate Al Qaeda and would not be likely to offer them safe havens should they topple the central government, which is unlikely outside the areas where they have ethnic solidarity. In Pakistan they're simply on the run. There's a better chance of Al Qaeda consolidating in a place like Somalia than Afghanistan. They don't exist there right now, and no group fighting for control wants them in place. So why are we still fighting there?

Nancy Pelosi said today that there's no support in the country for a further escalation. If people truly understood the lack of a threat from Afghanistan, how our presence has inflamed the insurgency, and how we can through a variety of containment, law enforcement and intelligence techniques maintain national security without a military footprint, that support would drop even further from the perilous point it's at right now.

Reyes Goes After Intelligence Oversight

House Intelligence Committee chair Silvestre Reyes will seek an investigation into the CIA's hiding of operations from the Congress:

After careful consideration and consultation with the Ranking Minority Member and other members of the Committee, I am announcing an official Committee investigation into possible violations of federal law, including the National Security Act of 1974.

“This investigation will focus on the core issues of how the congressional intelligence committees and Congress are kept fully and currently informed. To this end, the investigation will examine several issues, including the program discussed during [CIA] Director [Leon] Panetta’s June 24th notification and whether there was any official decision or direction to withold information from the Committee.

Note "including the program discussed." The alleged assassination squad should be seen as the latest example of the CIA acting without oversight, not the only one. The National Security Act is pretty clear about oversight responsibilities of intelligence operations, and it's been abused time and again. The Obama Administration doesn't want to change the "Gang of Eight" style of briefing, but Democrats are seeking more transparency for their members. Marcy Wheeler notes this as well:

First, Reyes says he consulted with Crazy Pete Hoekstra. I look forward to seeing how Crazy Pete spins this.

That'll be particularly interesting given the scope here. The investigation will include the reported assassination squad. But the core issue is more general--how CIA informs Congress. Which means that, in fact, this should also include whether or not CIA fullly briefed Pelosi and Goss on torture back in 2002.

Finally, the investigation will examine whether there was any "direction" to withhold information from Congress. I do hope they look at the question generally, as well as in the context of the reported assassination squad, because I suspect we'd see a pattern of Cheney instructing the Counterterrorism folks to lie to or withhold information from Congress.

The big question here is how far up the ladder they'll reach. But it's time to end the broken system of intelligence oversight and start again, and this investigation can be a catalyst.

Thing Is, The CIA Does Lie

The CIA trains their agents to lie pretty much as a matter of course, and they have a long history of at the very least concealing the truth from the American public, if not outright lying to them. I don't think anyone in the entire country could say with a straight face that the CIA tells the whole truth to anyone, be it Congress or anyone else. And now we have verbal confirmation of this fact.

Remember how CIA Director Leon Panetta said in May that members of the House Intelligence Committee “will have to determine” whether the CIA accurately and appropriately briefed Congress about the agency’s “enhanced interrogation program”? It appears that Panetta reached a conclusion himself.

On June 26, six Democrats on the committee — Anna Eshoo (Calif.), John Tierney (Mass.), Rush Holt (N.J.), Mike Thompson (Calif.), Alcee Hastings (Fla.) and Jan Schakowsky (Ill.) — wrote to Panetta, “Recently you testified that you have determined that top CIA officials have concealed significant actions from all Members of Congress, and misled Members for a number of years from 2001 to this week.” The letter — which doesn’t explain what those “significant actions” concerned — asks that Panetta “publicly correct” his May 15 statement that it isn’t CIA “policy or practice to mislead Congress.” TWI acquired a copy of the letter, which comes after CQ reported that committee chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) also nebulously stated that CIA “affirmatively lied” to the committee.

But CIA spokesman George Little says it’s “completely wrong” to say Panetta determined CIA misled Congress, as the six legislators charge. “Director Panetta stands by his May 15 statement,” Little said. “It is not the policy or practice of the CIA to mislead Congress. This Agency and this Director believe it is vital to keep the Congress fully and currently informed. Director Panetta’s actions back that up. As the letter from these six representatives notes, it was the CIA itself that took the initiative to notify the oversight committees.”

Here's more on Silvestre Reyes' claim that the CIA lied to the House Intelligence Committee.

The backstory here is that, in the wake of this seeming breakdown of information between the CIA and Congress, the House wants to change the way the CIA must brief their actions to Congress. The "Gang of Eight" process - the leaders of the intelligence committees, and the leaders of both Houses of Congress - just flat-out isn't working. And the White House has threatened a veto of the entire intelligence appropriations bill based on the changes.

The Administration strongly objects to section 321, which would replace the current “Gang of 8” notification procedures on covert activities. There is a long tradition spanning decades of comity between the branches regarding intelligence matters, and the Administration has emphasized the importance of providing timely and complete congressional notification, and using “Gang of 8” limitations only to meet extraordinary circumstances affecting the vital interests of the United States. Unfortunately, section 321 undermines this fundamental compact between the Congress and the President as embodied in Title V of the National Security Act regarding the reporting of sensitive intelligence matters – an arrangement that for decades has balanced congressional oversight responsibilities with the President’s responsibility to protect sensitive national security information. Section 321 would run afoul of tradition by restricting an important established means by which the President protects the most sensitive intelligence activities that are carried out in the Nation's vital national security interests. In addition, the section raises serious constitutional concerns by amending sections 501-503 of the National Security Act of 1947 in ways that would raise significant executive privilege concerns by purporting to require the disclosure of internal Executive branch legal advice and deliberations. Administrations of both political parties have long recognized the importance of protecting the confidentiality of the Executive Branch's legal advice and deliberations. If the final bill presented to the President contains this provision, the President's senior advisors would recommend a veto.

This is simply wrong. The Gang of Eight style of intelligence briefings facilitates abuse, and the politicization of intelligence. Obama probably sees the system as a good way for the executive to maintain control over intelligence and the CIA's actions, but if he wants money for those actions, he's going to have to stop the process that enables official lying. So the House, especially after this series of events, should go ahead and pass the intelligence appropriation as is, and if Obama vetoes it, he can go ahead and live with a CIA that has no funding.

The further context for this is that House Republicans screamed like banshees when Nancy Pelosi suggested that the CIA lied to Congress. Except they do. All the time. And whether or not it's inconvenient to say it, it's true.

Blabbermouths

So Republicans walk out of a closed intelligence briefing and directly into a waiting microphone, and Democrats are the ones who hate America?

Republicans ignited a firestorm of controversy on Thursday by revealing some of what they had been told at a closed-door Intelligence Committee hearing on the interrogation of terrorism suspects.

Democrats immediately blasted the GOP lawmakers for publicly discussing classified information, while Republicans said Democrats are trying to hide the truth that enhanced interrogation of detainees is effective.

GOP members on the Intelligence Committee on Thursday told The Hill in on-the-record interviews that they were informed that the controversial methods have led to information that prevented terrorist attacks.

When told of the GOP claims, Democrats strongly criticized the members who revealed information that was provided at the closed House Intelligence Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing. Democrats on the panel said they could not respond substantively, pointing out that the hearing was closed [...]

“I am absolutely shocked that members of the Intelligence committee who attended a closed-door hearing … then walked out that hearing — early, by the way — and characterized anything that happened in that hearing,” said Intelligence Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Chairwoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.). “My understanding is that’s a violation of the rules. It may be more than that.”

The culprits are John Kline (R-MN) and Crazy Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), who has been pushing this propaganda for weeks and frankly cannot be trusted. In fact, it would be just like him to make a wild claim, knowing that Democrats cannot respond because they actually give a crap about things like the meaning of the word "classified."

As Marcy Wheeler notes, Kline's claim that "we did gather information that did disrupt terrorist plots," disassociated from which techniques elicited what information, means nothing, and thus the entire story is pretty bogus. As for Hoekstra:

It seems to me the story from these quotes ought to be:

The Ranking Member of HPSCI thinks people should immediately talk about the content of classified briefings
The Ranking Member of HPSCI treats hearsay--the comments of his members who attended a briefing--as proof
The Ranking Member of HPSCI is politicizing intelligence

But instead, Allen seems to have followed Hoekstra down the road of taking hearsay evidence as clear proof (it's not even clear that Allen asked Hoekstra who he had talked to about the briefing).

And all of those are par for the course for Republicans. They skillfully use both the classified nature of intelligence briefing and the gullibility of the media to push BS narratives.

Bush's Turn

I guess Cheney and Bush switched undisclosed locations for a week, and now the former pResident delivered the talking points about the torture regime.

In his largest domestic speech since leaving the White House in January, Bush told an audience in southwestern Michigan that after the September 11 attacks, "I vowed to take whatever steps that were necessary to protect you."

Although he did not specifically allude to the high-profile debate over President Obama's decision to halt the use harsh interrogation techniques, and without referencing Cheney by name, Bush spoke in broad strokes about how he proceeded after the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in March 2003.

"The first thing you do is ask, what's legal?" he said. "What do the lawyers say is possible? I made the decision, within the law, to get information so I can say to myself, 'I've done what it takes to do my duty to protect the American people.' I can tell you that the information we got saved lives."

Well, those are two different things, aren't they? "What's legal" does not necessarily equal "What do the lawyers say is possible." Especially depending on the sequencing of those events. If "what do the lawyers say is possible" comes first, and it's more "what can we get the lawyers to say is possible," then "what's legal" becomes fairly irrelevant, right? Especially when combined with "I vowed to take whatever steps that were necessary to protect you." That sounds like a vow irrespective of the law.

Then there's this unprovable "the information we got saved lives" statement, and considering that George Bush himself signed the executive order barring public disclosure of specific information gained through torture, and furthermore, he could have released them himself at the time if he wanted to be vindicated. For his part, Carl Levin has called B.S.

Regarding Cheney's claim that classified documents will prove his case -- documents that Levin himself is also privy to -- Levin said: "But those classified documents say nothing about the numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of abusive techniques. I hope that the documents are declassified, so that people can judge for themselves what is fact, and what is fiction."

Pretty unequivocal. But the last thing that Bush and Cheney want would be declassification. Because their tough-guy stance that torture saves lives works out better for them than chalking intelligence up to sugar free cookies.

This got to me:

The former president earned a noisy standing ovation when asked what he wants his legacy to be.

"Well, I hope it is this: The man showed up with a set of principles, and he was unwilling to compromise his soul for the sake of popularity," he said.

By the way, I'm willing to believe that Bush didn't compromise his soul. He probably didn't know about the worst stuff, and anyway you can't compromise a soul that would say this:

In the week before [Karla Faye Tucker's] execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. "Did you meet with any of them?" I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. "No, I didn't meet with any of them," he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. "I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' "

"What was her answer?" I wonder.

"Please," Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "don't kill me."

...wonder if George would listen to the advice of his commanders on this one:

MacCallum: (Ticking time bomb scenario)

Gen. Petraeus: ....T here might be an exception and that would require extraordinary but very rapid approval to deal with, but for the vast majority of the cases, our experience downrange if you will, is that the techniques that are in the Army Field Manual that lays out how we treat detainees, how we interrogate them -- those techniques work, that's our experience in this business.

MacCallum: So is sending this signal that we're not going to use these kind of techniques anymore, what kind of impact does this have on people who do us harm in the field that you operate in?

Gen. Petraeus: Well, actually what I would ask is, does that not take away from our enemies a tool which again have beaten us around the head and shoulders in the court of public opinion? When we have taken steps that have violated the Geneva Conventions, we rightly have been criticized, so as we move forward I think it's important to again live our values, to live the agreements that we have made in the international justice arena and to practice those.

If Petraeus admits that we violated the Geneva Conventions, isn't he calling indirectly for prosecutions of those who ordered such violations?

The Sad Sack Four - Terrorist Masterminds, Or Losers?

There really is a fine line between terrorists and wayward stoners goaded by an informant into hashing out criminal plots. There's a disturbing level of what I would consider entrapment in a lot of these terrorist busts. These guys in NYC who were busted for plotting to blow up synagogues don't seem like model citizens, but they were amateurs, schizophrenics and stoners and at some point, you have to ask yourself why we are putting so much effort into getting low-lifes like this to put together plots they aren't equipped to carry out, for the expressed purpose of arresting them for those plots.

Obviously these four wanted to commit these acts, and by all accounts the informant's actions were legal. But I agree with Moe Tkacik at TPMM:

It's easy to laugh at this gang of goons -- and we've done our share of that. But, frankly, it's also hard not to feel some compassion for what looks like a group of struggling, credulous, under-educated men, existing on the fringes of society, who lacked the intelligence or willpower to avoid getting taken in by a government informant anxious to mitigate his own situation, and by their own vague understanding of radical Islam and the hole it might fill in their lives.

And as for what this might say about the threat of home-grown terror, it's almost reassuring that the biggest terror bust we've seen in a while has this sad-sack group at his center.

You cannot take this stuff for granted, but at what point to we draw the line on how much an informant can lead?

This Is A Silly Country

I can't believe that one of the biggest fights, on a bipartisan basis, in recent days has been over forcing out Chas Freeman, a knowledgeable and qualified candidate for Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, because he doesn't toe the party line of unthinking, unquestioning support for every policy Israel has ever undertaken. Not only did the anti-honest broker forces succeed, but Chuck Schumer sees fit to brag about it:

“Charles Freeman was the wrong guy for this position. His statements against Israel were way over the top and went beyond anything I have seen from any administration official. I repeatedly urged the White House to reject him, and I am glad they did the right thing.”

We have no debate on Israel inside Washington. You have to be mindlessly in support of whatever they do - in fact, you have to say that the role of the United States "is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel." Yet no country is infallible, no country is above criticism. That would be the logical view. But as a Jew expressing that, I would be called an anti-Semite and a racist. That's going to be an impediment to doing the necessary diplomacy, even with those groups we're not supposed to like, to create a stable peace in the Middle East.

Meanwhile airstrikes are STILL landing in Gaza. But it's important that someone with the capacity for critical thought isn't part of the Obama Administration.

UPDATE: Freeman is unhappy, and he has every right to be.

I have concluded that the barrage of libelous distortions of my record would not cease upon my entry into office. The effort to smear me and to destroy my credibility would instead continue. I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country. I agreed to chair the NIC to strengthen it and protect it against politicization, not to introduce it to efforts by a special interest group to assert control over it through a protracted political campaign.

There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government – in this case, the government of Israel. I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.

The outrageous agitation that followed the leak of my pending appointment will be seen by many to raise serious questions about whether the Obama administration will be able to make its own decisions about the Middle East and related issues. I regret that my willingness to serve the new administration has ended by casting doubt on its ability to consider, let alone decide what policies might best serve the interests of the United States rather than those of a Lobby intent on enforcing the will and interests of a foreign government.

Well said.

Afghans Aren't Helpless

NPR's All Things Considered featured an interview with Seth Jones, author of a fascinating new report about Afghanistan that he put together for the US Institute for Peace. The basic gist of the report is that America and its allies are losing in Afghanistan due to a lack of long-term planning and understanding about the realities on the ground and the various forces jockeying for power. The key recommendations, which Jones and his co-author call "game-changers," are here:

• Adopt a bottom-up strategy to complement top-down efforts: Security and stability in Afghanistan have historically required a balance between top-down efforts to create a central government, and bottom-up efforts to secure local support and protect the population. Since 2001, the U.S. and international community have focused predominantly on top-down security efforts, including the establishment of an Afghan National Police and Afghan National Army. But the deteriorating situation and local nature of the insurgency require supporting district-level institutions that are Afghan-led and locally appropriate, with safeguards and oversight to establish order and deliver services.

• Shift from direct action to mentoring Afghan security forces: Successful counterinsurgency efforts hinge on the competence of local security forces, not international ones. More U.S. forces in Afghanistan may be helpful, but only if they are used to build Afghan capacity and to protect the local population. One critical need is to address the international partnering gap that has plagued efforts to improve Afghanistan's police and army. There is currently a 70 percent shortfall in international mentors for the police and a 30 percent shortfall for the army. This requires a crash effort to identify, train, and support mentors. European governments, the United States, and the UN should also devote more resources to mentoring and professionalizing the Ministry of Interior.

• Adopt a robust anti-corruption strategy and end impunity by prosecuting and removing corrupt officials: Pervasive corruption at all levels of the Afghan government is one of several factors fueling the insurgency by undermining local confidence in the government. Addressing this problem requires a serious and sustained campaign to prosecute corrupt officials through the justice system. This can include building better anti-corruption guarantors in all ministries, such as inspectors general offices, with mentoring and support from the U.S. and other NATO members. Recent Afghan efforts, such as the High Office of Oversight and Anti-Corruption, have failed to undermine corruption. The Ministry of Interior is a logical place to start since corruption in this ministry has undermined police reform, counter-narcotics efforts, and border security.

• Use the Afghan central budget: The chief problem in Afghanistan is not necessarily a lack of resources, but a better use of resources and one that builds governance, not weakens it. One key change would be to coordinate assistance through the Ministry of Finance and to develop a database that compiles and monitors international assistance to the country.

• Address relations with neighboring states and improve border security: Too few programs focus resources on fortifying Afghanistan's porous borders through which insurgents, narcotics, and other illicit goods travel with ease and often with the complicity of officials from Afghanistan and neighboring states. Greater programmatic attention should be devoted to improving Afghan-Pakistan relations and stabilizing the tribal belt. Admittedly, these efforts will not succeed without dedicated efforts to persuade Pakistan to fully engage in the effort to disable the Taliban and other militant groups.

While Jones doesn't reject the need for additional forces, clearly every one of these recommendations call for the use of existing people, money and power inside Afghanistan so the locals can provide for their own security and stability and the NATO footprint can shrink. Jones explained what has worked in Afghanistan to stabilize the country in the past has been a loose federal government with widespread autonomy in the rural areas controlled by tribes and jirgas. Michele Norris, who performed the interview, couldn't get around the fact that governance is supposed to mean that a President controls from on high. That is a Western view that doesn't have a place in talking about Afghanistan. The locals have rejected both outside invaders and centralized control for hundreds of years, and imposing a foreign system won't work, as we've seen. But the most interesting part of the interview was this:

NORRIS: Since so much of the problems in Afghanistan are so widespread, this strategy would seem to require many more troops, many more advisers to work at the tribal level to gain that trust and to build some sort of security. How do you envision doing that without pouring hundreds of thousands more troops into Afghanistan?

JONES: Well, I would actually say it's quite the reverse. What we've seen historically is that local elements can a) protect themselves, and b) provide services into their areas. So actually I think this would require, if one can tap into local resources, it would require less international presence rather than more in some areas.

This is the key point. Certainly the military and also the civilian control in the Pentagon are historically way too invested in what they have to impose upon a situation rather than allowing the locals to control it themselves. Afghans have been on this Earth for as long as Westerners have, and they'll still be around afterwards. While the society may be primitive, the basic priorities of security and service is something that tribes in the rural areas can handle for themselves. Americans can facilitate that stability, but too often the perspective is that poor, helpless Afghans must have everything done for them. That's bullshit. It does foreign occupiers no good to try to defeat a local insurgency through top-down tactics. There have been two major errors in Afghanistan - propping up a corrupt central government that is now feeding the insurgency because the Taliban elements are better at providing services than Hamid Karzai; and using airstrikes that massacre civilians in addition to the intended targets, also inflaming local populations and feeding the insurgency.

Afghan security forces from the top are ineffective, and at least in Helmand province, as many as 60% of them are addicted to drugs. A bottom-up security structure led by local tribes at the district level seems to be the only way out. And if the fear is that the Taliban will eventually overrun such a system and set up a safe haven for terrorists in South Asia, um, they call that the Swat Valley in Pakistan. That ship has sailed.

To effectively reach the only goals we can seek in the region, which is to disable the ability for terrorists to project power beyond their borders, we need a comprehensive regional strategy to enlist Pakistanis and Afghans in their own fight for their future, along with intelligence-sharing to stop attacks. That is achievable by locals working in concert with intelligence professionals. The military doesn't have a de facto role.

Commanding Officer Of The Army Of Stupids

Can I just say that I love wingnut Congressman Pete Hoekstra's Twitter feed? Not just because he responds to the fact that he doesn't know how to spell the names of people he's worked with for decades on Capitol Hill by saying "lighten up, it's called Twitter" (hm?), but because he uses it to leak unauthorized national security information:

Rep. Pete Hoeksra (R-MI), the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, revealed classified intelligence information on Twitter when he reported on his “congressional trip to Iraq this weekend that was supposed to be a secret.” “Just landed in Baghdad,” messaged Hoekstra, who was part of a delegation led by John Boehner (R-OH). CQ reports, “Before the delegation left Washington, they were advised to keep the trip to themselves for security reasons."

The ironies here are rich. First, Hoekstra is the former head of the House INTELLIGENCE Committee. He has repeatedly spoken about the dangers of revealing national security information, and wanted to eliminate whistleblower protections because it would "compromise national security." Also, this isn't the first time Hoekstra has inadvertently revealed national security secrets. That was back in 2006 in perhaps my favorite wingnut FAIL. Hoekstra, who was convinced that we found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, pushed the National Intelligence Director to put internal Iraqi documents on the Web, so the "Army of Davids" could sort through them and prove, PROVE, that Iraq had WMD and ties to al Qaeda. And this is how Pete Hoekstra put nuclear secrets on a public website:

Yesterday Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, blamed the New York Times and the IAEA for the leak of sensitive Iraqi documents — a “nuclear primer” on how to build an atomic bomb — on a public government website:

Concerns by the New York Times and the IAEA prompted the government to shut down the website. The IAEA, “fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms,” privately protested last week to the American ambassador. The Bush administration shut down the site on Thursday evening, only after the New York Times “asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials.”

Hoekstra, on the other hand, was responsible for making that information public in the first place. Last November, he and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) wrote to Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and asked him to the post the Iraqi documents.

The fact that Hoekstra is retiring means that my favorite Twitter feed will be less vital, but also that American secrets won't be constantly revealed to the world, so it balances out.

All's Well That Ends Well For Those Complicit In Torture

After some damage control by the Obama transition team, Dianne Feinstein emerged satisfied with the choice of Leon Panetta for CIA Director. See if you can read between the lines on this one.

Emerging from a policy luncheon this afternoon, Senator Dianne Feinstein disclosed that she had spoken with Leon Panetta last night, after raising objections earlier this week about his qualifications to become the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Asked whether she planned to support his confirmation now — following telephone conversations initiated by both President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., she said: “I believe all systems are go.”

As far as the oversight made by Obama officials when they did not brief her on the on the selection of Panetta before the news leaked out, she said today: “I don’t really care about that. What I do care about is the agency, and that it faces many issues and it has many problems. And what I do care about is that the White House is given crisp, good, as much as possible factual, intelligence, and it is not what they want to hear necessarily but it is what the agency believes is the truth." [...]

She also noted, after speaking with both Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden and Mr. Panetta, that she believed there was a “high likelihood” that Mr. Panetta would surround himself with those who were knowledgeable about intelligence and had experience in the field. She said she would be meeting with him again next week. Specifically, when asked whether she had received assurances in these discussions that Stephen R. Kappes, the No. 2 at the agency, would remain in the job, the senator pursed her lips and wouldn’t comment directly.

In other words, the price for her support was keeping Stephen Kappes. This was clear from the Times story this morning, where transition officials assured reporters that Kappes would stay on.

While Panetta is a solid choice with all the right enemies (including some of the spooks who don't want to change their ways), Kappes stood mute in the face of torture and rendition and other illegal activities. I guess the Village thinks there's a chance that Kappes will help keep those bodies buried. If Panetta resigns in a year or two because he couldn't fight the institutional barriers, you'll know the reason why. And DiFi will have a big smile on her face.

The Panetta Saga

So now Joe Biden is acknowledging a mistake in the transition not informing the Senate Intelligence Committee chair about the choice of Leon Panetta for CIA Director, which was probably leaked, because there's no reason to intentionally antagonize the Committee Chair who will direct the confirmation hearings. I guess Obama talked it over with Feinstein, and apologized. Other committee members, including Ron Wyden, were consulted beforehand, suggesting that Obama really did want a break with the capitulationist elements of the Senate Democrats. Scott Horton considers this a plus.

So why would the Obama team, which has been so careful and thoughtful in approaching the nominations process, have failed even to consult the two Democratic senators who have the most to say about intelligence? I don’t think this was accidental. I read something else into it. The bottom line is that Jay Rockefeller was an abject failure when it came to intelligence oversight. His term as ranking member and then chair of the Senate intelligence committee was one in which Congress generally, and the Senate in particular, failed to live up to their Constitutional mandate. The intelligence community was steered by the Bush Administration into a series of criminal escapades. Effective congressional oversight would have exposed these failings and brought them to heel. But the Rockefeller-Feinstein record was little short of disastrous. I’m delighted that the Obama team didn’t consult them.

Feinstein, for her part, has commented further, saying that she understands the desire for a break with the past, but that she also wants the same guy working in Bush's CIA to stay on.

"I understand their thinking" in choosing Panetta, Feinstein explained, describing herself as "very respectful of the president's authority ... this is the man [Obama has chosen]."

I asked Feinstein whether her reticence about Panetta's lack of ties to the CIA would be mitigated by having Steven Kappes, her preferred choice for CIA director, stay on as the agency's No 2. "I believe very strongly" that Kappes should stay, Feinstein said, adding that Panetta's standing would be "very much enhanced" were Kappes to stay his deputy.

The entire point of the Panetta pick would be undermined by a #2 like Kappes. That would be a huge mistake IMO. And the idea that a CIA Director needs "experience" in intelligence matters flies in the face of history. Several good leaders at CIA had no intel experience whatsoever.

Meanwhile, Russ Feingold loves the Panetta pick.

I am pleased by reports of the nomination of Leon Panetta to be the next CIA Director. These reports indicate that President-elect Obama recognizes the need for fresh leadership for the intelligence community. Leon Panetta has a long and distinguished career in public service and there are few people of whom I have a higher opinion. He has been a strong voice opposing the interrogation practices authorized by the Bush Administration and he is well-equipped to restore our national security, which has been undermined by the current administration's policies. I look forward to closely examining his record, hearing his plans for protecting our nation against al Qaeda and other threats, and learning how he will help restore the rule of law after years of lawlessness that have undermined our national security.

This whole thing could be as simple as courtliness and some random fights in California (maybe going back to when Panetta and Jane Harman, who was up for the job, ran against one another for Governor in 1998). But the insistence on Kappes suggests this is a body-burying effort.

...Ezra Klein scores an interview with Sen. Wyden, who says that DiFi is about to introduce legislation to "end torture and close Guantanamo." Well, we shall see, but everyone trying to get to the left of one another on this issue is a good thing.

Wherein I Defend Leon Panetta

It's more than a little surprising to me that the choice for CIA Director of Leon Panetta, who I considered a card-carrying Villager if there ever was one, is ruffling such feathers inside official Washington, particularly official Democratic Washington. At first blush this looked like whining about not being informed, but it seems like there's more there. Here's the relevant section from the LA Times:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who this week begins her tenure as the first female chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said today that she was not consulted on the choice and indicated she might oppose it.

"I was not informed about the selection of Leon Panetta to be the CIA director," Feinstein said. "My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time." [...]

A senior aide to Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), outgoing chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the senator "would have concerns" about a Panetta nomination.

Rockefeller "thinks very highly of Panetta," the aide said. "But he's puzzled by the selection. He has concerns because he has always believed that the director of CIA needs to be someone with significant operational intelligence experience, and someone outside the political realm."

Most of the intelligence professionals at the top over the past eight years had plenty of "experience" and that didn't work out too well. The one who came from the political arena, Porter Goss (who was a former spy), wasn't so objectionable to Dianne Feinstein - I mean she voted to confirm him, after all. Of course, he was a Republican, which makes everything OK.

But I don't think this is about Panetta's lack of experience; it's his wealth of it, which presages a change in culture inside the agency.

Panetta's selection suggests that Obama intends to shake up the agency, which has had little public accounting of its role in detaining top terror suspects and transferring others to regimes known to use torture, a procedure known as extraordinary rendition.

The CIA, which denies subjecting detainees to torture, is part of a 16-agency intelligence community whose annual budget now exceeds $47.5 billion. The agency keeps its own budget and number of employees secret. Its successes, too, are mostly kept secret while some of its failures reach front pages.

Panetta has suggested that Obama could do much to signal a break with Bush administration policies by signing executive orders during his first 100 days that ban the use of torture in interrogations and close the Guantanamo Bay prison.

"Issuing executive orders on issues such as prohibiting torture or closing Guantanamo Bay would make clear that his administration will do things differently," Panetta wrote Nov. 9 in a regular column he published in his local newspaper, the Monterey (Calif.) County Herald [...]

"He will be an outsider and I think the president wants an outsider's perspective on the CIA," said Lee Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman and a former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence who heads the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. "The intelligence community has lost a lot of confidence with the American people and the Congress. I'm talking about 9/11, the Iraq war."

It's that he's an outsider with enough institutional power to actually make changes, and the moral compass to make those decisions based not on burying the past but rooting it out. THAT'S what has DiFi and Jello Jay spooked. In fact, they wanted Michael Hayden's right-hand man to take over.

NBC News has learned that Senate Democrats -- including Dianne Feinstein and Jay Rockefeller, who are the incoming and outgoing Intelligence chairmen -- have privately recommended a career CIA officer to head the agency.

Democratic sources indicate that both have recommended deputy CIA Director Steve Kappes, a veteran CIA intelligence officer who is widely credited with getting the Libyans to give up their nuclear program. Kappes also was former Moscow station chief [...]

One potential downside for Kappes: Like former counter-terror chief John Brennan, some critics says he had line authority over controversial decisions involving interrogation and detention. Brennan was taken out of contention for the CIA job after criticism on the Web on that issue, even though he says he privately objected to the policies and was not in the chain of command at the time.

Panetta isn't going to be sneaking through the Middle East collecting human intelligence; he's going to be managing a large bureaucracy. But moral lepers like DiFi value "experience" that will lock in the status quo over experience that will reveal the agency's sins, and by extension her own. They don't want to risk any culpability on their part from becoming public, so they'd rather "keep it in the family." By the way, the resultant fight suggests that "liberal bloggers" were only the excuse for the Obama transition to disqualify John Brennan; in fact, they wanted a strong manager with a spine who would follow the rules. That is distasteful to those Senate Dems who don't want the family secrets spilling out.

And lest this become abstract, read today's New York Times:

When Muhammad Saad Iqbal arrived home here in August after more than six years in American custody, including five at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he had difficulty walking, his left ear was severely infected, and he was dependent on a cocktail of antibiotics and antidepressants.

In November, a Pakistani surgeon operated on his ear, physical therapists were working on lower back problems and a psychiatrist was trying to wean him off the drugs he carried around in a white, plastic shopping bag.

The maladies, said Mr. Iqbal, 31, a professional reader of the Koran, are the result of a gantlet of torture, imprisonment and interrogation for which his Washington lawyer plans to sue the United States government [...]

Mr. Iqbal was never convicted of any crime, or even charged with one. He was quietly released from Guantánamo with a routine explanation that he was no longer considered an enemy combatant, part of an effort by the Bush administration to reduce the prison’s population.

“I feel ashamed what the Americans did to me in this period,” Mr. Iqbal said, speaking for the first time at length about his ordeal during several hours of interviews with The New York Times, including one from his hospital bed in Lahore.

Mr. Iqbal was arrested early in 2002 in Jakarta, Indonesia, after boasting to members of an Islamic group that he knew how to make a shoe bomb, according to two senior American officials who were in Jakarta at the time.

Mr. Iqbal now denies ever having made the statement, but two days after his arrest, he said, the Central Intelligence Agency transferred him to Egypt. He was later shifted to the American prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and ultimately to Guantánamo Bay.

Much of Mr. Iqbal’s account could not be independently corroborated. Two senior American officials confirmed that Mr. Iqbal had been “rendered” from Indonesia, but could not comment on, or confirm details of, how he was treated in custody. The Pentagon and C.I.A. deny using torture, and American diplomatic, military and intelligence officials agreed to talk about the case only on the condition of anonymity because the files are classified.

There are hundreds of human beings like this - at least the ones who are alive - who really don't care if Dianne Feinstein or Jay Rockefeller will be "embarrassed". They were flown around the world, interrogated and tortured, and in the process, America not only created thousands of new terrorists while received no actionable intelligence, but lost its soul. The road to restoration has nothing to do with the delicate sensibilities of Senate Democrats.

The CIA Endorses Marital Rape

Welcomed With Flowers, Sweets And Prescriptions

by dday

I suppose I shouldn't be alarmed by this, but I have to confess to being a little taken aback by the snickering and high-fiving in the blogosphere over the CIA's attempt to curry favor with Afghan tribal leaders by offering them Viagra.

The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.

Four blue pills. Viagra.

"Take one of these. You'll love it," the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.

The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes -- followed by a request for more pills.

There's a certain logic to using personal items as barter (or bribery, if you prefer) for warlords and tribal leaders to extract information about the Taliban insurgency. At the same time, does anyone credibly think that those four women this guy is married to are entirely willing spouses, and the consequent sex performed as a result of the Viagra entirely consensual? One of the most persistent problems in Afghanistan - indeed, one of the ostensible reasons used by people like Laura Bush to justify the invasion beyond the need to root out al-Qaeda - is the terrible life circumstances for women. I fail to see how use of erectile dysfunction pills created by men and for men improves their quality of life. Megan Carpentier gives the explanation with which I concur:

SPENCER: So what should we understand to be the anticipated effects on Afghan women of this Viagra-based counterinsurgency effort?

MEGAN: Well, one could argue that by supplying the aging warlords with Viagra, you are depriving their wives of a needed and biologically expected semi-permanent respite from performing unwanted sexual acts that would otherwise be forced upon them. In the interests of fairness, I suppose its possible that these warlords attempt to treat their wives with the utmost care and respect and provide them with sexual satisfaction instead of using them as living, visible extensions of their power over people that the warlords can additionally stick their dicks into.

SPENCER: But that's not where we should take this discussion! Are we in a situation where the expected consequence of the CIA Viagra program is marital rape? Should everyone who isn't Dennis Prager find this problematic?

MEGAN: Well, are we in a situation where we would deny that such is a possibility? I don't think we make good policy by ignoring the consequences, nor am I saying that giving the dudes Viagra is not preferable to giving them, say, weapons. But is it possible that we're providing them with the means to force themselves on their wives (who likely had no choice in being their wives) that nature has otherwise denied them? Yes. Plus, I did have to go find a way to relate it to women's issues [...]

SPENCER: Right, but now that we've got that covered: what should we do next? Stop the program?

MEGAN: Well, I'm not exactly one to go around advocating marital rape. Nor are — one assumes — operatives on the ground in any position to survey the wives of the warlords to determine whether the dick pill sex is consensual or wanted. Nor do the women in question have the vocabulary — culturally speaking, that is — to likely describe the sex as coercive or forced. In a society in which wives are expected to submit to their husbands and sex is not intended for their benefit or pleasure, nor are their moods or desires taken into account, they probably wouldn't consider a formerly impotent husband with a handful of Viagra and some impotent time to make up for much more than their unlucky lot in life. And, if the benefit — as you stated above — is not only that the formerly impotent husband doesn't take said impotence out on our troops but also refrains from taking it out physically on the wives, are they substantively better off being unhappily sexed than physically beaten? The fact that women in America have those choices and the freedom to think about them is a great thing, and handing out or not handing out Viagra to impotent warlords doesn't give Afghan women those choices or freedoms. Nor does allowing a Taliban or al Qaeda-led insurgency to win back the government. But that doesn't mean that our choices should remain unexamined.

There's a top-rated diary on Daily Kos right now entitled Dennis Prager Endorses Marital Rape. Somebody explain to me how the CIA isn't doing functionally the same thing.

And there's a larger point. We barge into foreign societies without a coherent understanding of the underlying culture and try to use whatever means to get the locals on our side, and the unintended consequences that result are never examined either before or after the fact. They are considered prices to be paid for "success," whatever that means. I think it's actually fairly impossible for me to determine the full effects of giving Viagra to Afghan warlords, in much the way that introducing a change in where a butterfly flaps its wings in the past can alter the future. But I'm fairly certain that those effects are completely ignored by the elites who think they can control events thousands of miles away through little inducements and bribes. I haven't read all of
Legacy of Ashes but I wonder if I'd find anything if I searched the index for the part where anyone games out the ripple effects of the agency's actions. Probably not.

Maybe what should be considered, instead of the boner pills, is why we're in Afghanistan in the first place. Rather than social engineering, we could use local law enforcement and intelligence sharing to limit or remove the capacity of anyone in the region striking beyond their borders, and we allow local and regional actors to determine their own way forward instead of arrogantly assuming we know what's best for these people, and trying to install a central democracy where none has ever existed. Alternatively, we could figure out what other drugs they might like.

The Place For Holder

Continuing on with a look at some of the key figures who will do the important work in Barack Obama's Administration who were introduced at yesterday's press conference, let's focus on Attorney General nominee Eric Holder. It's been interesting to see the split on the left over Holder, who has produced some strong views about closing Guantanamo and restoring the rule of law in recent years, but who has a creeping tendency to respond to power in dangerous ways. I tended to let Holder's involvement in the Marc Rich problem slide, but today's report by Eric Lichtblau and David Johnston suggests that I shouldn't.

Mr. Holder’s supporters portray him as having been a relatively uninvolved bystander caught in a Clinton-era controversy, the remarkable granting of a last-minute pardon by President Bill Clinton to a fugitive from justice. But interviews and an examination of Congressional records show that Mr. Holder, who at the time of the pardon was the deputy attorney general, was more deeply involved in the Rich pardon than his supporters acknowledge.

Mr. Holder had more than a half-dozen contacts with Mr. Rich’s lawyers over 15 months, including phone calls, e-mail and memorandums that helped keep alive Mr. Rich’s prospects for a legal resolution to his case. And Mr. Holder’s final opinion on the matter — a recommendation to the White House on the eve of the pardon that he was “neutral, leaning toward” favorable — helped ensure that Mr. Clinton signed the pardon despite objections from other senior staff members, participants said.

At the same time, Mr. Holder was not the sinister deal maker that his critics made him out to be. He let himself be drawn into the case by politically influential advocates, the review of the case shows, bypassing the usual Justice Department channels for reviewing pardon applications and infuriating prosecutors in New York who had brought the initial charges against Mr. Rich and his business partner.

I think that last paragraph makes Holder look worse. It shows he can be seduced by powerful interests into doing their bidding, which is also the concern with his advocacy for Chiquita Banana in their legal battle over their funding right-wing paramilitaries to kill labor organizers in Colombia.

Holder's recent speeches on the subject of the rule of law are first rate, and I think in general that he stands in the Democratic mainstream. My hope is that he protects the Constitution and enforces the laws of the nation. But actions speak louder than words. And while the Rich pardon is many years in the past, the way in which he acceded to the wishes of the politicially connected must be troubling.

Unless, like Glenn Greenwald, you see this as less of a character flaw and more of a symptom:

This is vintage Washington. This is the filthy, venal sleaze on which both political parties feed. It's what fuels how the Beltway operates. It's the leading cause of why it functions as a corrupt, dysfunctional, bloated, incestuous royal court. That's what Washington is. For that reason, it would be next to impossible to find people who have been a part of this system who haven't been infected -- or more accurately: who haven't infected themselves -- at one point or another with this disease.

More than anything else, Obama's endless invocation of the "change" mantra was not about promises of sharp ideological or even policy shifts -- as needed as those may be -- but instead, was about changing this core Beltway dynamic, delousing the Washington culture. A consensus has emerged, which I more or less share, that condemning the not-yet-inaugurated Obama presidency based merely on his appointments of establishment re-treads and war supporters is premature, irrational and unfair.

Obama has repeatedly said that his appointees are there to implement and carry out his agenda. There are reasons to believe Obama can and will carry through on his "change" commitments, and there are also ample, reasonable grounds for doubting that he will. Either way, though it's constructive to express views on his high-level appointments, it makes sense to wait to see what Obama himself actually does as President before assessing whether his commitments are illusory [...]

If you're someone who basically thinks that the Washington political system works fine and has been run by the Good, Serious Adults who rule over the rabble for their own good -- in other words, if you're Fred Hiatt or David Ignatius -- it makes perfect sense to celebrate these appointments. For anyone else, skepticism is warranted -- how could it not be? -- and praise and gratitude and celebratory Change parades make sense if and when they're actually warranted by actions. The closer one's proximity has been to the bipartisan Washington establishment, the less entitled they are -- not the more -- to a presumption of Magnanimous, Serious, Adult, Transformative leadership.

I think it is important to raise this skepticism, however, with a degree of balance or what have you, because we have already seen that a proper amount of pressure can actually extract results from the Obama transition. Because of pressure from the left, John Brennan will not be holding a top intelligence post, and in fact nobody associated with Bush's interrogation policies will be acceptable. I think Holder does not quite fit into that category, but there's plenty of reason to voice concern and make sure he is true to his most recent rhetoric.

Testing The Young President

A day after the Iraqi Cabinet approved a withdrawal agreement that would remove US forces entirely from the country by the end of 2011, the White House is trying to snooker the press by saying that they agreed only to "aspirational dates." There is nothing aspirational about this agreement. It is a firm deadline for withdrawal that wouldn't even allow for residual forces in the country.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is out there today claiming that no we can't leave on this kind of schedule. This is just the beginning of the pushbacks that we can expect to see from the military as we move into a new Administration.

The U.S. military would require two to three years to remove its roughly 150,000 troops and equipment from Iraq safely, and the timing of that withdrawal should be based on security conditions on the ground, the nation's top military officer said today.

"To remove the entire force would be, you know, two to three years," Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at a Pentagon news conference.

While Mullen said that he and the top commanders for Iraq and the region, Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno, were "comfortable" with the status of forces agreement signed with Iraq today, he described some logistical hurdles to a U.S. troop withdrawal along a fixed timeline.

"We have 150,000 troops in Iraq right now. We have lots of bases. We have an awful lot of equipment that's there. And so we would have to look at all of that tied to, obviously, the conditions that are there, literally the security conditions," he said.

"Clearly, we'd want to be able to do it safely."

This isn't some option thrown out at a briefing. This is a signed agreement between the US and Iraq that has very strict demands on withdrawal. Mullen is treating it like some war game scenario that he doesn't like. And he wants a word with Obama.

Mullen emphasized that he still believes any U.S. troop reductions should be based on the levels of violence in Iraq - a position that runs counter to the official Iraqi stance.

Anticipating possible policy shifts on Iraq under the Obama administration, Mullen indicated the Joint Staff was planning for a range of options. "We're always taking into consideration plans based on what we understand possibilities might be," he said.

"President-elect Obama has also said is that he would seek the counsel of myself and the Joint Chiefs before he made any decisions. And so I look forward to that discussion, look forward to the engagement," he said.

This lays the groundwork to undermine the agreement, and to push the President-elect in that effort. And by the way, the most likely outcome of this is to erode support in the Iraqi Parliament, which only trusts the US as an honest broker because of the presence of Obama. If the agreement is vacated there will be a very early showdown between militia and the occupying forces, which could prove deadly for US troops and embarrassing to the incoming President.

They have a word for this, I believe - sabotage. And this isn't the only area of military/national security issues where we might see something similar. While Obama and the military may be able to salvage a productive working relationship, we have examples like the Air Force general who is already pushing Obama on the missile defense boondoggle:

The Air Force general who runs the Pentagon's missile defense projects said that American interests would be "severely hurt" if President-elect Obama decided to halt plans developed by the Bush administration to install missile interceptors in Eastern Europe.

Lt. Gen. Henry A. Obering III, director of the Missile Defense Agency, told a group of reporters Wednesday that he is awaiting word from Obama's transition team on their interest in receiving briefings [...]

"What we have discovered is that a lot of the folks that have not been in this administration seem to be dated, in terms of the program," he said. "They are kind of calibrated back in the 2000 time frame and we have come a hell of a long way since 2000. Our primary objective is going to be just, frankly, educating them on what we have accomplished, what we have been able to do and why we have confidence in what we are doing."

Note the framing in terms of how American interests will be "severely hurt" if the incoming President, who's totally ignorant about us big boys and our big toys, by the way, cancels this program. Indeed, the contractors and the military-industrial complex are already gearing up to push back hard if one dime of military spending is cut.

The uniformed services are trying to lock in the next administration by creating a political cost for holding the line on defense spending. Conservative groups are hoping to ramp up defense spending as a tool to limit options for a Democratic Congress and president to pass new, and potentially costly, social programs, including health care reform.

They also like the idea of creating an unrealistically high baseline of expectations for defense spending that will allow them to claim President Obama has cut defense spending.

Let us be clear: There is no indication that the president-elect intends to cut defense spending, and indeed, during his campaign he promised to increase the size of the ground forces, which makes an increase in spending almost inevitable. As with any transition, there will be some adjustments to specific programs, but cutting individual weapon systems is not and has never been synonymous with cutting spending overall.

There are so many things wrong with this emerging process that it is hard to address the issue concisely. Promoting overspending on defense in order to forestall popular social spending is undemocratic - it creates a false tension between national security and other public policy goals.

The informal alliance between the services and conservative think tanks threatens to further politicize the military. The abuse of national security arguments to win political arguments is both morally suspect and threatens the security of the nation by delinking strategic assessment from public policy.

And now there's this Mullen incident, which is very reminiscent of how the JCS rolled Clinton in 1993 on the subject of gays in the military.

In yesterday's 60 Minutes interview, which had a lot of positive signs in it (including Obama's desire to keep moving forward on a new energy economy despite falling oil prices, to dismiss neo-Hooverist griping about deficit spending and instead use government to stimulate the economy, to overhaul the auto industry, and more), Obama was clear that he would have his national security team execute a drawdown policy in Iraq as soon as he entered office. Mullen is already laying down the marker that he disagrees. This tension will also spill over to the intelligence community. One of the brightest moments in the interview was this exchange:

Kroft: There are a number of different things that you could do early pertaining to executive orders. One of them is to shutdown Guantanamo Bay. Another is to change interrogation methods that are used by U.S. troops. Are those things that you plan to take early action on?

Mr. Obama: Yes. I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn't torture. And I'm gonna make sure that we don't torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America's moral stature in the world.

That is excellent news, and yet there's still the matter of implementation, and without new leadership at the top, expect similar Admiral Mullen-like scenarios as Obama attempts to climb out of the muck of the Bush Administration.

"I am confident President-elect Obama understands the need for new leadership of the intelligence community and will appoint competent, capable people who will work aggressively to ensure the safety and security of Americans without undermining our laws and Constitution," Feingold said in the statement.

"For eight years, the current Administration has shown contempt for the rule of law, including in intelligence-related matters, while repeatedly refusing to work cooperatively with Congress. At the same time, the Administration has failed to develop comprehensive strategies to protect our nation against our most immediate threat, al Qaeda and its affiliates. New leadership is needed to move our intelligence policies in the right direction," Feingold's statement concludes.

It's quite something when you see a headline like Democratic Pressure on Obama to Restore the Rule of Law. But this is not totally about Obama's instincts by themselves, but the need to fight against and, in some cases, clear out those who may have more loyalty to the status quo than following the orders of their new chief executive. This has historically been an issue for Democratic Presidents in the modern age, and in this incoming Administration it will be no different. If Obama thinks he can just use his own personality - or force of character - to stop the challenges from inside his own government, I wouldn't call him naive, but let's say he'd be shouldering a heavy burden. One that he plans to make heavier by seeding the government with even more Republicans at every level.

This is something that Obama needs to think about, IMO. A "Team of Rivals" government is a nice theory on paper, but Lincoln's era was quite different - the real "rivals" split off and formed their own government and seceded from the Union, and Lincoln's political foes were kind of thrown together by circumstance. Obama is doing this by choice, and he had better be prepared to be undermined at the highest levels. In many respects, it's already happening.

They Would Never Invade Our Privacy

Since the revelation of the illegal surveillance program in December 2005, the fundamental question - who has the government been spying on? - has yet to be answered, and with the FISA legislation providing immunity for the telecoms we thought it would forever fade into the background. But it's more likely that the truth will come out in drips and drabs; maybe not the whole truth, but enough of it to shock the conscience. Today we have another fallen domino:

Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia [...]

"These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.

Kinne described the contents of the calls as "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism."

She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and "collected on" as they called their offices or homes in the United States.

But, we were told that it was a Terrorist Surveillance Program, and Obama Osama bin Laden (darn it, I just always mix them up) would come to our ballgames and sell tainted Dodger Dogs to us if we didn't allow wise and benevolent Government access to every piece of communication in the world!

Funny how that worked out.

Turns out that the ordinary grunts listening to this stuff were passing around audio snippets to each other:

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.

"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.

And then there's this amazing statement, which kind of sums up life in the 21st-century surveillance state:

Asked for comment about the ABC News report and accounts of intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, a US intelligence official said "all employees of the US government" should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and "information assurance."

"They certainly didn't consent to having interceptions of their telephone sex conversations being passed around like some type of fraternity game," said Jonathon Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University who has testified before Congress on the country's warrantless surveillance program.

"This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law," Turley said....

"Information assurance." How pleasantly banal.

See the beginning here for who was spied on - not just military and government personnel but journalists and aid workers. That's exactly who I would target if I wanted to control the flow of information to the public. And there was no mistake here - members of the International Red Cross were surveilled and were "identified in our systems as 'belongs to the International Red Cross'," according to one of the intercept operators.

This is what everybody voted for in the Congress. Not to "protect America from harm," but to maintain and indemnify a shadow spying system so the highest levels of government can maintain control and power. It's against the law and many of our foundational principles and George Bush did it anyway, and the Congress - Democrats and Republicans - enabled him.

And they're still doing it.

It goes without saying that such attention to the calls and communications of ordinary Americans actually hurts our capacity to deal with any terrorist threat as simply a function of time management and prioritizing. Bush's Department of Homeland Security funded this report.

The government should not be building predictive data-mining programs systems that attempt to figure out who among millions is a terrorist, a privacy and terrorism commission funded by Homeland Security reported Tuesday. The commission found that the technology would not work and the inevitable mistakes would be un-American.

The committee, created by the National Research Council in 2005, also expressed doubts about the effectiveness of technology designed to decide from afar whether a person had terrorist intents, saying false positives could quickly lead to privacy invasions.

"Automated identification of terrorists through data mining (or any other known methodology) is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts," the report found. "Even in well-managed programs, such tools are likely to return significant rates of false positives, especially if the tools are highly automated."

This is true, but of course you would have to believe that the system Bush and his pals set up was in any way designed for terrorist surveillance. Based on the details we now know, I can't imagine it was. The program is an example of how authoritarian societies maintain order and power.

You'll be thrilled to know that Jay Rockefeller is going to begin an examination of this and request information from the Administration about it. I don't know what's more hysterical - that he thinks he can get one scrap of paper from the White House, or that he thinks we'll buy that he's about to sit down and investigate himself, in effect.

Greenwald has more.

It Is Designed To Obtain False Confessions

Torture as an intelligence-gathering tool is extremely counter-productive and anyone who went to elementary school knows it. If you found yourself at the mercy of some bully's full nelson you would say whatever you could to get out of it. It's insulting to the professionals who actually work as interrogators to tell them to use torture instead of their tested and true techniques.

Torture as a tool of intimidation, as a tool which gives the illusion of progress in gathering intelligence, is quite good. And the evil men and women running policy in Washington knew that, and installed it to that purpose. Today we learned that the interrogators at Gitmo designed a program of torture specifically to obtain false confessions.

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners [...]

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

You can see the old Air Force study here. We already knew that the techniques were based on SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), so this isn't that new. But the fact that the Koreans used this program to obtain false confessions is extremely telling. This is why the bigwigs in Washington quashed any reviews and tried to hide the evidence. The US government was using torture for exactly the same purpose as the Koreans. By obtaining false confessions, they can pretend to be successfully fighting the war on terror, justify the masses of people swept up into prison camps, and "send a message" to the rest of the world about how big and bad they are. This was the goal. It's all that Arab mind bullshit the right has swallowed whole for decades.

This is now starting to come out on these cretins, on the techniques they used to debase our country and imperil our national security. And their excuses are pathetic.

Throughout this ugly drama, U.S. leaders have assured the public that the extreme interrogation measures used on detainees have thwarted acts of terrorist and saved thousands of American lives. The trouble with such claims is that professionals who know something of interrogation or intelligence don’t believe them. This is not just because the old hands overwhelmingly believe that torture doesn’t work -- it doesn’t -- but also because they know that torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralize.

The administration’s claims of having “saved thousands of Americans” can be dismissed out of hand because credible evidence has never been offered -- not even an authoritative leak of any major terrorist operation interdicted based on information gathered from these interrogations in the past seven years. All the public gets is repeated references to Jose Padilla, the Lakawanna Six, the Liberty Seven and the Library Tower operation in Los Angeles. If those slapstick episodes are the true character of the threat, then maybe we’ll be okay after all.

As the above-linked report makes clear, the CIA is STILL doing some of this crap. There are going to be consequences, and as the writer says "It may be impossible for the next administration to fix what has happened to the CIA in the last seven years. It may be a broken brand. Perhaps the only way to proceed next January will be to start over afresh, with a new intelligence structure and new institutions."

That's not just true for the CIA.

...as a postscript, am I the only one to be a little sick of these writers, who want desperately to be as manly as Ernest Hemingway, that cannot believe for certain whether or not waterboarding is torture until they do it themselves? How arrogant (not surprising for Hitchens) to assume that the literally thousands of years of data on the tactic is incomplete until an out-of-shape writer cements it for certain. Hitchens came to the same conclusion as the victims of the Inquisition and the judges at the Nuremberg trials, so what was the point? That anyone feels the need to dignify the brain-dead sadists on the right by calling the efficacy of waterboarding up for question is beyond me.

Spies Like Us

Turns out that, even before overhauling the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, we're engaging in plenty of foreign surveillance - of the Iraqi Army. Nothing says confidence in your allies more than tracking all of their movements.

Caught off guard by recent Iraqi military operations, the United States is using spy satellites that ordinarily are trained on adversaries to monitor the movements of the American-backed Iraqi army, current and former U.S. officials say.

The stepped-up surveillance reflects breakdowns in trust and coordination between the two forces. Officials said it was part of an expanded intelligence effort launched after American commanders were surprised by the timing of the Iraqi army's violent push into Basra three months ago.

The use of the satellites puts the United States in the unusual position of employing some of its most sophisticated espionage technology to track an allied army that American forces helped create, continue to advise, and often fight alongside.

Maybe the whole war isn't working out so great if we feel the need to spy on the Army that's supposed to give us the ability to leave. The White House can spin yarns about success all they want, but this is really the proof. We have no confidence in the Iraqi security forces to maintain order in the country, we have not progressed on the underlying causes of violence, and we're prolonging the inevitable at great cost in lives and treasure.

Meanwhile, one of the most depressing things about our surveillance state is that we're not even that good at it, or at least not as good as the Iranians.

David Ignatius has the gem down low in today's Washington Post column, which describes a half-hearted, even feckless U.S. covert action program to send operatives from Iraq into Iran.

"The danger of these cross-border activities was explained to me by one intelligence source," Ignatius writes.

He said the Iranians had recently captured several dissident Iranian operatives who had been recruited by U.S. military officers inside Iraq and then sent into Iran. The Iranians, whose intelligence network inside Iraq is pervasive, surveilled the meeting, then followed the agents across the border and seized them.

I'd gather that Iran has far better human intelligence inside Iraq in addition to electronic surveillance. So when we sink money into covert operations using front groups and dissidents, we should realize that the operations aren't that covert, are led by incompetents, and only serve to harden Iranian opinions about their need for a weapons program.

Whatever happened to the age when we had the good spies? Not even good at espionage anymore. Getting harder to believe in this country's leading-edge innovations.

Hersh's Gambit

I've spent the last two days puzzling over Sy Hersh's latest New Yorker piece about the prospect of war with Iran. There's no question in my mind that the Cheneyites want to be the "real men" who go to Tehran. Fourthbranch Cheney may have lost the skirmish inside the Administration on North Korea, but it's clear the country with the oil in it is the bigger prize, and in a way, has always been the focus.

I know there's a lot of talk about Israel going ahead with an airstrike, but Hersh doesn't buy it, and neither do I. Fourthbranch doesn't believe they have the firepower needed to penetrate the deeply embedded facilities he thinks the Iranians have, and he figures the US would be blamed for any attack anyway, so why not go ahead with it. Furthermore, the Israelis are doing too much talking about this, telegraphing the fact that they don't want to actually do it. If they were serious about attacking, nobody at the New York Times would get briefed about preparatory maneuvers.

About 13 years ago, while working on a British TV magazine program, I found myself spending a couple of days with Christopher Wallace, aka Biggie Smalls/the Notorious B.I.G. (I swear, I still have the tape, but it’s analog.) This extended interview took place at the time when Tupac Shakur was yelling from the rooftops that he was going to kill Brooklyn’s greatest rapper, and getting plenty of publicity and selling records by doing so. Biggie wasn’t particularly alarmed. He’d been a hustler in Bed-Stuy for too long to take seriously threats that are broadcast. In far more colorful language, he said words to the effect of “On the streets, when someone is telling anyone who’ll listen that they’re going to kill you, you don’t have to lose any sleep over it. You’re not going to hear about it beforehand when the real killer comes.”

Exactly. (Yes, I know, Biggie was eventually, tragically, murdered — but his point is proven by the fact that his killers had nothing to do with Tupac.)

So Fourthbranch wants to take the shot himself (Israel's even asking them to do it for them, which is the point of all the talk). And if you're someone like Sy Hersh who thinks that is abhorrent, that it would be deeply destabilizing and catastrophic to this country's national security, you do whatever you can to stop it. So he's been reporting about the imminent possibility of an attack, in the hopes that the presence of the articles will become a deterrent. He's revealed that the weapons have been moved into position, the exercises prepped, the bombing routes checked. He knows he can't rely on the Democratic Congress, obviously; as this latest article shows, the only people who have been standing in the way of war with Iran are at the Pentagon.

A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s characterization.) [...]

Admiral Fallon acknowledged, when I spoke to him in June, that he had heard that there were people in the White House who were upset by his public statements. “Too many people believe you have to be either for or against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re only one way or another is nonsense.”

When it came to the Iraq war, Fallon said, “Did I bitch about some of the things that were being proposed? You bet. Some of them were very stupid.”

Hersh is basically writing what he hopes are self-negating columns. He wants the very act of publishing, of making transparent all these efforts to bomb Iran and the pushback, to deter the Administration. This is pretty much Spencer Ackerman's take, and so far, so good.

However, what Hersh is putting up front in this piece is that the war has actually already begun:

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

The reason for the Finding, which is yet another hideous example of playing with fire (we're arming and training Sunni fundamentalist Baluchis from the same region as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?), is that the normal blueprint for ginning up a war in the Middle East hasn't worked. Cheney initially took the Iraqi pre-war marketing plan, with neocons in high places going to battle on the op-ed pages and TV, articles about Iranian perfidy strategically placed, and the like. Didn't cause more than a ripple, and after the NIE showing Iran discontinued their nuclear program years ago, dead on arrival. It should be known that the NIE itself, finally released after years of delay and attempted suppression, is now a fading memory in the national consciousness. It's a wonder we got it out at all:

The onetime undercover agent, who has been barred by the CIA from using his real name, filed a motion in federal court late Friday asking the government to declassify legal documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency views at the time.

The former operative alleged in a 2004 lawsuit that the CIA fired him after he repeatedly clashed with senior managers over his attempts to file reports that challenged the conventional wisdom about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Key details of his claim have not been made public because they describe events the CIA deems secret [...]

"On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify his reporting on WMD in the Near East, or not to file his reports at all," (his attorney Roy) Krieger said in an interview.

So Plan B was launched - to start a dirty war inside Iran, using enemies of the Iranian government, in the hopes that they can spark an event that the Administration can credibly call an act of aggression. They had to get the go-ahead from the Gang of Eight in Congress, which buckled (again). But they authorized a very different program than Fourthbranch ended up implementing:

Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference [...]

“This is a big deal,” the person familiar with the Finding said. “The C.I.A. needed the Finding to do its traditional stuff, but the Finding does not apply to JSOC. The President signed an Executive Order after September 11th giving the Pentagon license to do things that it had never been able to do before without notifying Congress. The claim was that the military was ‘preparing the battle space,’ and by using that term they were able to circumvent congressional oversight.

Emptywheel has more on this aspect of the White House evading oversight so they can set the fuse for a casus belli. Clearly they want to "prep the battle space" and garner just enough support to go over the heads of the wavering generals and launch the attack of their dreams. And the fact that just talking about this stuff enough raises the price of oil makes it a win even if they lose.

Here's how Fourthbranch tried to get to Hersh the last time he foiled one of his dastardly plans:

...it's May, 1975, and Seymour Hersh of the New York Times has just broke the story of a secret submarine mission inside Soviet territorial waters.

Here's Dick Cheney's handwritten notes on how the Ford administration might proceed next: "go after Hersh papers in his apt."

I don't know what it'll be this time. But it's clear to me, as we approach July 4th, that there's no better patriot in this country than Seymour Hersh, taking on the job of 236 Democrats in the House and 50 in the Senate, trying to hold off this insanity for a few more months before transitioning into a new Adminstration which will hopefully recognize the broad consensus for negotiation and diplomacy with the Islamic Republic as opposed to the folly of war.