My Gut Hatred Of People Who Use The Term "Gut Hatred" To Marginalize People

I'm glad that the Tom Ridge revelation about FEAR Unit is getting the pickup it deserves - we shouldn't forget the kind of place this country was after 9/11 and during the bulk of the Bush regime (By the way, Ridge has been hinting at this for years). Maybe if Democratic leaders understood that more they wouldn't be stubbing their toes right now. The facts are that the Republicans at that time were willing to politicize national security, and lie to terrorize the public, all to win elections. The fact that Ridge refused to raise the terror alert level one time (in response to the bin Laden message right before the 2004 vote) doesn't excuse him for doing Bush's bidding numerous times beforehand, like holding press conferences right after the Democratic National Convention raising fears of terrorism. And the spin from Frances Townsend, that they only discussed if raising threat levels would HURT Bush, makes no sense at all.

It was clear just by recognizing the pattern - that even election year came with a whole slew of terror alerts - that this was a coordinated effort to scare people into trusting Daddy Bush and the GOP with their lives. When Marc Ambinder tried to call those who recognize this pattern motivated by "gut hatred" of Bush and admitted that "journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt," he really summed up the state of the modern media. Ambinder's apologized for the term "gut hatred," but not the underlying fallacy supporting his beliefs. Glennzilla:

Just as is still commonly said about opponents of the Iraq War (even though they were right, they were still wrong and unSerious because their motives were bad), Ambinder acknowledges that Bush critics were right that the terror alerts were being manipulated for political ends (he has no choice but to acknowledge that now that Ridge admits it), but still says journalists like himself were right to scorn such critics "because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence." As always: even when the dirty leftist hippies are proven right, they're still Shrill, unSerious Losers who every decent person and "journalist" scorns [...]

The reason journalists such as Ambinder saw no such evidence wasn't because it didn't exist. It existed in abundance; you had to suffer from some form of moral, intellectual or emotional blindness not to see it. It's because they didn't want to see it, because -- as Ambinder said -- they trusted the Bush administration as good and decent people who might err but would never do anything truly dishonest. It's because only loser Leftist ideologues distrusted Bush officials and the overriding goal of establishment journalists is to prove that they are not like them, that they're much more Serious and responsible and thus would never attribute bad motives to government leaders such as those who ran the Bush administration.

As Krugman says, "it’s really sad that those who missed the obvious, who failed to see what was right in front of their noses, still consider themselves superior to those who got it right." But then, they wouldn't be modern journalists if they didn't act that way.

Oh, The Things They Did

So let's take a quick break from calling Obama Hitler to have a look at his predecessor. Anything new coming out?

Doop-de-do... hey, look, turns out they hired mercenaries to carry out extra-judicial assassinations!

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.

Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, helped the spy agency with planning, training and surveillance. The C.I.A. spent several million dollars on the program, which did not successfully capture or kill any terrorist suspects.

The fact that the C.I.A. used an outside company for the program was a major reason that Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A.’s director, became alarmed and called an emergency meeting in June to tell Congress that the agency had withheld details of the program for seven years, the officials said.

It's the perfect Bush-era blend of privatization and murder.

Also, I think we know how Blackwater mercenaries react in situations where they are given guns and a measure of freedom - that would be Nissour Square. I guess we should be happy the "Blackwater in Your Corner" campaign only reached the formative stages.

So, anything else? Hmm... here's confirmation from Tom Ridge of something we knew all along!

Among the headlines promoted by publisher Thomas Dunne Books: Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

Obviously, this is Ridge's book, and he gets to set the history. But I don't think you could escape the sneaking suspicion that, every even-numbered year in the age of Bush, suddenly we were told about "chatter" from terrorists and definitive plans and the raising of the alert level. I used to call it the Federal Even-yeared Anti-Terror Response, or FEAR, Unit.

Can Ridge apologize now for saying in 2004 "We don't do politics at the Department of Homeland Security"?

My, what a trip down memory lane this morning...

...Marc Ambinder calls pattern recognition "gut hatred of Bush", admits his skepticism about politicized terror alerts was wrong, but at least he wasn't a hippie about it. This guy should be fired for admitting that.

But he's a card-carrying Villager, so he'll be promoted.

...Wow.

Osama bin Laden had released a videotape with one more ominous sounding but unspecific threat against the United States. Neither Mr. Ridge nor any of the department’s security experts thought the message warranted any change in the nation’s alert status.

“…at this point there was nothing to indicate a specific threat and no reason to cause undue public alarm,” he writes.

But that view met resistance in a tense conference call with members of the intelligence community and several other Cabinet officers including Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

“A vigorous, some might say dramatic, discussion ensured. Ashcroft strongly urged an increase in the threat level and was supported by Rumsfeld.”

Noting the correlation found between increases in the threat level and the president’s approval rating, Mr. Ridge writes, “I wondered, ‘Is this about security or politics?’”

No wonder Ridge didn't run for Senate.

The Silent Riot At Bagram

From the did you know file, did you know that the United States continues to operate, and assert the legality of operating, a detention facility that indefinitely locks up suspects without charging them? No, not Guantanamo, which the President has vowed to close. I'm talking about Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, which is not merely a POW facility but which ships in terror suspects from all over the world and confines them in a legal black hole. There is little knowledge of this or outcry about it in the United States, but the prisoners themselves have begun acts of civil disobedience.

The prisoners at the largest U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan have refused to leave their cells for at least the past two weeks to protest their indefinite imprisonment, according to lawyers and the families of detainees.

The prison-wide protest, which has been going on since at least July 1, offers a rare glimpse inside a facility that is even more closed off to the public than the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Information about the protest came to light when the International Committee of the Red Cross informed the families of several detainees that scheduled video teleconferences and family visits were being canceled.

Representatives of the ICRC, which monitors the treatment of detainees and arranges the calls, last visited the Bagram prison on July 5, but inmates were unwilling to meet with them.

"We have suspended our video telephone conference and family visit programs because the detainees have informed us they do not wish to participate in the programs for the time being," said Bernard Barrett, a spokesman for the organization.

The 620 prisoners at Bagram, more than twice that of Guantanamo, have no access to attorneys. The facility is being rebuilt to hold even more prisoners, up to 1,000. And at least over three dozen of them have been captured around the world and transferred to Bagram, with no connection whatsoever to the war in Afghanistan.

This is a blight on our country, we must deal with the human rights and legal abuses at all of our detention facilities, including Bagram. What's disgusting is that the prisoners are more actively engaged in this than almost anyone in this country.

...and then you have people like Lindsey Graham, who thinks we should hold detainees without charges "until they die."

More Collateral Damage In The War On Terror

This guy's had some time of things this decade, but he may finally get to go home.

Abdul Rahim Abdul Razak al-Janko was tortured by al-Qaeda and imprisoned by the Taliban for 18 months because the groups' leaders thought he was an American spy.

Abandoned by his captors in late 2001, he was picked up by U.S. authorities, who shipped him to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on suspicion that he was a member of the two groups.

Yesterday, a federal judge ordered Janko's release, saying the government's legal rationale for continuing to detain him "defies common sense."

In a 13-page opinion that he read from the bench, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ordered the government to engage in diplomatic efforts to find a country that would host the 30-year-old detainee. It is unlikely that he will be sent to his native Syria. His attorney, Stephen R. Sady, would like Janko sent "to a safe haven."

"This is a tragedy," Sady said. "The guy was horribly tortured and then tries to report his human rights violation to the U.S. forces. He is a brave person and wants to tell his story. Instead, he gets mistaken for being a terrorist. . . . This is a nightmare for an innocent man being accused of all of these things."

Amazingly, the al-Janko story doesn't even come to mind when thinking of all the injustices meted out during this so-called war on terror. That's how deep the level of injustice has become. I never heard of this guy before reading this story.

When he is released, I hope somebody asks him who treated him better, al Qaeda or the Americans.

By the way, this was a habeas hearing, so remember that the Bush Administration didn't want this man to ever have this opportunity - and neither would the Obama Administration, were al-Janko kept at Bagram Air Force Base.

Third Time's A Charm

The Miami group who couldn't even afford guns but who apparently were all set to blow up the Sears Tower got convicted after two mistrials yesterday, and I have to agree with Jonathan Turley on this:

Some legal scholars said the case would continue to be viewed as an example of the Bush administration’s overzealous approach to terrorism prosecutions.

“The past cases ending in hung juries showed that the Justice Department had trouble matching the evidence with their rhetoric,” said Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington Law School. Professor Turley added, “It goes to show that if you try it enough times, you’ll eventually find a jury that will convict on very little evidence.”

This is a bad day for the justice system. The Liberty City group had no weapons and no plans. An overzealous informant practically walked them through the entire plan and insisted that they take a pledge for Al Qaeda. They are a poor gang being treated like dangerous terrorists.

The President ought to consider commuting the sentences.

Rejoining The World Community

With the glaring exception of Af-Pak policy, which is admittedly fraught with tough choices, I have appreciated the Obama Administration's work in foreign policy to this point. They have moved in a number of additional directions today.

First, they decided to join the UN Human Rights Council, after George Bush pulled the US off of it.

"Human rights are an essential element of American global foreign policy," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a statement. "With others, we will engage in the work of improving the U.N. human rights system. . . . We believe every nation must live by and help shape global rules that ensure people enjoy the right to live freely and participate fully in their societies."

The United States announced it would participate in elections in May for one of three seats on the 47-member council, joining a slate that includes Belgium and Norway.

Bush's removal from the Council was entirely based on right-wing demonization of the UN. And this made John Bolton sputter with rage, which is always fun.

Next, US and Iranian officials took part in a cordial meeting today at a conference on Afghanistan.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - In a cautious first step toward unlocking 30 years of tense relations, senior U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke had a brief but cordial meeting with Iran's deputy foreign minister Tuesday at an international conference on Afghanistan.

The rare diplomatic approach was the first official face-to-face interplay between the Obama administration and the Iranian regime. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton cautioned that the brief talks between Holbrooke and Iranian diplomat Mehdi Akhundzadeh were cordial but not "substantive."

"They agreed to stay in touch," Clinton said at the close of a one-day conference on Afghan security and development that was designed partly to allow the diplomatic turn with Iran. She told NBC News, "We think there is room for more engagement with Iran going forward." [...]

The face-to-face pleasantries, along with a diplomatic letter hand-delivered to the Iranian delegation by a U.S. official, were carefully calibrated overtures from the Obama administration aimed at testing the clerical regime's willingness to take larger steps.

This is especially encouraging in light of new Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's messianic rantings about how Obama must stop Iran "or I will." Here on Planet Earth, in the post-Bush era we engage with enemies and exhaust diplomatic avenues instead of the failed neocon policy of belligerence and unilateralism. Israel doesn't have the resources to carry out an attack on Iran, and are only left with bluster. Obama's words of engagement toward Iran mean much more.

Finally, Secretary of State Clinton acknowledged at the same conference in The Hague that the United States no longer uses the phrase "war on terror."

"The administration has stopped using the phrase, and I think that speaks for itself," Mrs. Clinton told reporters as she traveled here for a United Nations-led conference on Afghanistan.

The phrase has been criticized as having inflammatory connotations in the Muslim world. Some Democratic officials believe it is better to describe more specifically whom the U.S. is fighting, such as al Qaeda or the Taliban.

Mrs. Clinton made her remarks in response to reporters' questions. Asked whether there was a specific policy decision on the terminology, she said: "I haven't gotten any directive about using it or not using it. It's just not being used."

President Obama used the phrase a bit during the campaign, but I'm glad to see his Administration dropping it. The entire "war" terminology is unhelpful, whether we're talking about drugs or cancer or poverty. Against terror, the phrase was particularly misapplied. In addition to it being impossible to wage war on a tactic (David Cross famously said "It would be like fighting a war on jealousy"), it has been used to justify all manner of unconstitutional unitary executive rulings that took away civil liberties. There is no reason to be imprecise when talking about war. People may get the idea that you're waging it on them.

All in all, a pretty good day for change in the Obama Administration.

Security Theater

With my gig at the Monthly I hadn't been able to get to this story, which was already covered by one of my fellow guest-bloggers. But it's incredibly important. We already knew a lot of this, but now we have independent corroboration that Abu Zubaydah, who according to the recently leaked Red Cross report was something of a guinea pig for the Bush Administration's torture techniques, had no viable intelligence value, and his eventual breakdown and confession yielded no good intelligence information.

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President George W. Bush had publicly described him as "al-Qaeda's chief of operations," and other top officials called him a "trusted associate" of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed.

Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a "fixer" for radical Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 -- and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.

In the article, Noor al-Deen, a Syrian who was captured along with Zubaydah, admitted that the so-called Al Qaeda leader has little information about operations. This made us demonstrably less safe. While investigators and intelligence operatives were off on wild goose chases, they were not seeking real leads on terrorist plots or the whereabouts of top Al Qaeda leaders. Bush and his gang were more consumed with metrics - the notion that we "appear" to be fighting terror - than actions. Digby had a great piece on this.

This isn't the first time I've heard that the Bush administration was obsessed with getting a volume of information, caring little about the quality or reliability of it. neither is it the first time that we've heard that this pressure came from the highest reaches of the administration itself [...]

They were desperate to keep up the fiction that Al Qaeda was the outsized foe they'd built them up to be. If they were merely a dangerous little gang of criminals rather than a deadly global army of supervillians, it would be hard to justify the spending of trillions on unnecessary wars and suspending inconvenient portions of the constitution. These Vietnam chickenhawks didn't want to hear anything that would imply that they weren't fighting the war of all wars.

They knew these were false confessions and fictional plots and cynically used them to keep up the sense of panic --- even among themselves --- that fueled their global ambitions and fed their damaged egos. Ultimately they failed in that, not because they actually did anything that kept the babies safe, but because the American people just don't have the attention span to stay panicked about anything for very long. Once the spell broke, there was nothing left but the metrics.

In other words, this was a show for the media, to write a script about the good guys getting information from the bad guys and as a result making the world safe. It had no basis in fact whatsoever. And in order to keep up this fiction, the "good guys" had to use torture, maybe to deliberately obtain false confessions to prove they were "getting things done."

When those Spanish courts send out those indictments for Bush officials for violations of human rights and international torture conventions, remember this story. Especially when you hear that the CIA did what it had to do to "keep America safe." That's not the whole story.

Don't Make Bagram Guantanamo II

Today the Justice Department announced that Ali al-Marri, the last enemy combatant held inside the United States, would be charged and tried in a federal court in Illinois. This is a major victory for the rule of law. Instead of being held indefinitely without due process or habeas corpus, al-Marri will be given charges and prosecuted in an American courtroom, not a military commission. All Guantanamo prisoners deserve the same courtesy - either be tried, or released. In addition, we will probably get a ruling on al-Marri's detention anyway, which would be positive to set the precedent:

The Supreme Court already agreed to consider a challenge to the constitutionality of al-Marri’s detention, and the ACLU is asking the Court still to consider that case. According to Al-Marri’s attorney, the ACLU’s Jonathan Hafetz, “it is vital that the Supreme Court case go forward because it must be made clear once and for all that indefinite military detention of persons arrested in the U.S. is illegal and that this will never happen again.”

There is another group of detainees that should be extended the rights of being tried or released - those at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan who were transferred there from around the world. The expansion of Bagram has raised fears that Obama may use it the way George Bush used Guantanamo.

Now, human rights groups say they are becoming increasingly concerned that the use of extra-judicial methods in Afghanistan could be extended rather than curtailed under the new U.S. administration. The air base is about to undergo a $60 million expansion that will double its size, meaning it can house five times as many prisoners as remain at Guantanamo.

Apart from staff at the International Red Cross, human rights groups and journalists have been barred from Bagram, where former prisoners say they were tortured by being shackled to the ceiling of isolation cells and deprived of sleep.

The base became notorious when two Afghan inmates died after the use of such techniques in 2002, and although treatment and conditions have been improved since then, the Red Cross issued a formal complaint to the U.S. government in 2007 about harsh treatment of some prisoners held in isolation for months.

While the majority of the estimated 600 prisoners are believed to be Afghan, an unknown number -- perhaps several dozen -- have been picked up from other countries.

Hilzoy had a great piece about this, showing the genuinely conflicting issues at play here. But one thing seems fairly obvious - if we are going to restore our moral authority around the world, we need to have the same standard for those detainees at Bagram not detained in the course of military conflict as we ought to have for those at Guantanamo. That's not just true of the Muslim world, where support for Al Qaeda itself is mixed, but strongly in favor of their efforts to drive the United States off their land, through force if necessary. It's also true of our allies in Europe, who will not work with us on key issues if we just rebuild Guantanamo at Bagram.

In one of his first acts in office, President Barack Obama ordered the closure within one year of Guantanamo Bay, where about 245 people are still detained and which has been widely viewed as a stain on the U.S. human rights record.

But Obama has yet to decide what to do about the jail at Bagram, where more than 600 prisoners are held, or whether to continue work on a $60 million prison complex there.

Washington wants the EU to help it close Guantanamo by agreeing to accept discharged prisoners who cannot be returned to their own countries for fear of torture.

But a confidential EU policy paper, obtained by Reuters, said such help would depend on Washington's overall anti-terrorism policies, including assurances that Bagram or other camps would not become new Guantanamos.

"I would find it very surprising, if the (U.S.) policy remained the same while Guantanamo was closed, to see the EU mobilize itself," EU anti-terrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerchove told Reuters.

The EU policy paper said: "It would not be in conformity with EU fundamental rights policies to simply transfer Guantanamo elsewhere (i.e. in Bagram) without solving the underlying question of the detention of terror suspects for indefinite time and without trial."

This is going to undermine our efforts at global cooperation if it is allowed to fester. Obama's honeymoon around the world will quickly come to an end. We will have lost a great opportunity to push the reset button.

Congress The Civil Libertarians Of Last Resort?

OK, what the f%&! is going on here? The Obama Administration has an empirically good team on civil liberties at the Justice Department. And yet in the last few days, DoJ lawyers have backed up President Bush's extreme use of state secrets privileges, Leon Panetta - in a generally solid hearing at the Senate Intelligence Committee - told the panel that some detainees were "too dangerous to prosecute" and may have to be held for a long time, and now Elena Kagan, nominated as Solicitor General, has agreed that "enemy combatants" can be detained without trial:

Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan, President Obama's choice to represent his administration before the Supreme Court, told a key Republican senator Tuesday that she believed the government could hold suspected terrorists without trial as war prisoners.

She echoed comments by Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. during his confirmation hearing last month. Both agreed that the United States was at war with Al Qaeda and suggested the law of war allows the government to capture and hold alleged terrorists without charges.

Now reading further, Kagan was apparently led by the nose by Huckleberry Graham on this one. And this isn't totally bad, but there's a significant amount of mission creep that can result. For example, with whom are we at war? When is that war considered over? What is the battlefield? For an Administration that is trying not to use the phrase "war on terror," their stated policies are not necessarily reflecting that. Not to mention the fact that the Supreme Court has ALREADY RULED in this matter and decided that "enemy combatants" as defined by the Bush Administration have habeas corpus rights. Simply put, we are not a nation of laws if we have a separate set of them for some people. The rules of criminal justice can easily apply to all, at the minimum by charging suspects with a crime and giving them a trial.

Perhaps the good that's coming of this is the pressure it is putting on Congress to act, and how they are actually meeting the challenge. Russ Feingold blasted the Administration for their decision to invoke the state secrets privilege, and he is asking for a classified briefing on the matter as well as pushing his own legislation that would limit how state secrets can be used. Similarly, Patrick Leahy is being very adamant about the need for investigating the crimes of the Bush Administration, even talking to the White House counsel about it:

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy and White House Chief Counsel Greg Craig discussed on Tuesday the Senator's proposal to set up a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate potential crimes of the Bush administration.

"I went over some of the parameters of it and they were well aware at the White House of what I'm talking about," Leahy told the Huffington Post. "And we just agreed to talk further."

The dialogue between the Vermont Democrat and the president's office is a new phase in a delicate process concerning how best to handle potential crimes in the previous White House. Leahy proposed an investigatory commission on Monday, after which the president -- speaking at his first news conference -- said he did not currently have an opinion on the plan. Obama went on to say that he would rather look forward than backward, but he promised to prosecute any crime -- whether committed was a former White House official or everyday citizen [...]

Leahy did add an important ripple to the story in the interview with the Huffington Post: Congress will likely proceed with investigations regardless of whether Obama is on board.

"Oh yeah," Leahy said when asked if he would go forward without Obama's endorsement. "I think the Senate and the Congress as whole has an oversight responsibility that has to be carried out here anyway. Now it is much easier with the cooperation of the administration. A lot of things with the subpoenas I issued the past few years, we got a lot of information but a lot of it was held back."

I am unhappy with some of the moves by the Administration on these issues thus far, but am heartened by Congress stepping up to perform its oversight functions.

....the House is introducing a companion bill on the state secrets privilege today, with Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), John Conyers (D-MI), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), and Tom Petri (R-WI) signing on.

Right Wing And Pentagon Remnants Work Overtime To Fearmonger

This completely unsourced New York Times article is yet another in the drumbeat of warnings to Obama that he can't very well use the rule of law as a guidepost when terrists wanna kill us in our beds and that.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

His status was announced in an Internet statement by the militant group and was confirmed by an American counterterrorism official.

“They’re one and the same guy,” said the official, who insisted on anonymity because he was discussing an intelligence analysis. “He returned to Saudi Arabia in 2007, but his movements to Yemen remain unclear.”

Wondering if that counterterrorism official just happens to not be part of the new Obama team. Signs point to yes.

It really doesn't matter if they're in power or out of power, conservatives can plant their stories in the media whenever they choose. Glenn Greenwald links to a bunch of them today. There are hosts of howls from the right that we'll all be killed if we try terror suspects in US courts, shut down gulags and release the innocent.

National Review's Jim Geraghaty spent all day yesterday fantasizing about all the scary things that could happen if we have Al-Qaeda Terrorists in our communities (near nuclear facilities and airports!). Former Bush aide and chief speechwriter Marc Thiessen warned yesterday in The Washington Post that if there is a Terrorist attack on U.S. soil, Americans will blame Obama because he stopped torturing and closed Guantanamo, and Democrats will be "unelectable for a generation." Today, at National Review, Thiessen, citing yesterday's Executive Orders, declared Obama "to be the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office." And yesterday, of course, The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt echoed the standard claim that our regular federal courts were inadequate to try dangerous Terrorists.

All of this is pure fear-mongering -- the 2009 version of Condoleezza Rice's mushroom cloud and Jay Rockefeller's "we'll-lose-our-eavesdropping-capabilities" cries. Both before and after 9/11, the U.S. has repeatedly and successfully tried alleged high-level Al Qaeda operatives and other accused Islamic Terrorists in our normal federal courts -- in fact, the record is far more successful than the series of debacles that has taken place in the military commissions system at Guantanamo. Moreover, those convicted Terrorists have been housed in U.S. prisons, inside the U.S., for years without a hint of a problem.

Not to mention this zombie lie that I mentioned yesterday, the new "big stat" thrown around by major news organizations, that 61 terrists have "returned to the battlefield" from Guantanamo. Putting aside the difficulty in believing this nonsense - past examinations of Pentagon claims have shown that they're counting people who've never been to Gitmo and people who have written letters to the editor to newspapers - Atrios points out the absurdity:

Without even getting into the actual accuracy of the latest bit of wingnut porn about how 61 released Gitmo detainees supposedly returned to take up arms against the US, can anyone explain how this is supposed to represent a failure of Obama's policies? He didn't let them go. Liberal bloggers didn't let them go. The ACLU didn't let them go.

And if George Bush has "kept us safe," what exactly is it that these terrorists have done?

All this folds in on itself at some point. But the point is to make sure everyone is aware that we can be killed at any moment, to restrict Obama's break from the past and ensure that their little fantasies are not repudiated. I believe we do have to be skeptical of those loopholes, and work on our own side to ensure their removal.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the committee, said that despite the executive orders she still planned to press for legislation mandating a single standard for military and C.I.A. interrogators. Such a law would be harder to reverse than Mr. Obama’s executive order, which he could alter or cancel at any time by issuing a new order.

“I think that ultimately the government is well served by codifying it, by having it in law,” Mrs. Feinstein said.

Some liberal groups, while praising the Obama orders, said they supported legislation like Mrs. Feinstein’s because they were concerned about what his task forces might propose. They also said they would continue to press for a full investigation of detention and interrogation programs under President George W. Bush.

Of course, this isn't totally about legislation for the wingnuts. It's about scaring an electorate for political advantage, hoping to pin whatever terrorism might arise in the next several years on Obama and using that in the next election.

...by the way, this is how you deal with terrorists, through law enforcement and detective work. But there isn't enough crushing of testicles involved, so it's deeply disappointing to the man-childs on the right.

Casualties Of War

Alberto Gonzales, a guy who wrote memos calling the Geneva Conventions quaint, who barged into John Ashcroft's hospital bed to sign off on illegal wiretapping of Americans, who aided in the authorization and direction of torture, who watched as the Justice Department under his tenure became a politicized mess, just can't seem to figure out what made him the bad guy.

WASHINGTON -- Alberto Gonzales, who has kept a low profile since resigning as attorney general nearly 16 months ago, said he is writing a book to set the record straight about his controversial tenure as a senior official in the Bush administration [...]

"What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?" he said during an interview Tuesday, offering his most extensive comments since leaving government.

During a lunch meeting two blocks from the White House, where he served under his longtime friend, President George W. Bush, Mr. Gonzales said that "for some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror."

If Gonzales was just a dupe, an unwilling functionary in the Bush regime, that statement ALONE would be enough to justify all the scorn heaped on him. I think there are several thousand American families, and several hundred thousand worldwide, that know a little something about being casualties in the war on terror. Being forced out of your cushy job as Attorney General and getting ready to write a book doesn't qualify.

Republicans sure do love their own personal martyrdom, don't they?

Tell Me How This Ends

Yesterday Robert Gates, on the ground in Afghanistan, discussed a rapid troop increase (around 20,000) in the country within a matter of months, and a “sustained commitment” over the next three to four YEARS (which would push our presence in Afghanistan to over a decade). Both Gates and Gen. David McKiernan, the top general in Afghanistan, sounded extremely pessimistic, but in ways that to me evoked nothing so much as Robert McNamara:

What was striking about the trip was the tone of weariness that cropped up in the remarks of both Mr. Gates and General McKiernan about the Afghan war. “Let’s put it in historical perspective — this country has been at war for the last 30 years,” General McKiernan told reporters, using the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 as the starting point. “Thirty years. That’s not going to stop overnight. So if your question is, might it get worse before it gets better, the answer is yes, it might.”

When Mr. Gates was asked here if the conflict would last 10 or 15 years, he made a comparison to the cold war. “I think that we are in many respects in an ideological conflict with violent extremists,” he said. “The last ideological conflict we were in lasted about 45 years.”

This idea that anyone, much less the Secretary of Defense, would make such an analogy between the Cold War and a regional conflict in a broken country, with all the attendant "central front in the war on terra" folderol, has to be very worrying to the safety and security of troops in that part of the world, fighting and dying for an extremely uncertain cause. Searching for meaning in Afghanistan is futile. You just have a bunch of old warhorses justifying the whole thing to themselves. Are we bringing democracy and freedom to a remote part of the world?

And then there were the daily frustrations of (British Lieut. Colonel Graeme) Armour's job: training Afghan police officers. Almost all the recruits were illiterate. "They've had no experience at learning," Armour said. "You sit them in a room and try to teach them about police procedures — they start gabbing and knocking about. You talk to them about the rights of women, and they just laugh." A week earlier, five Afghan police officers trained by Armour were murdered in their beds while defending a nearby checkpoint — possibly by other police officers. Their weapons and ammunition were stolen. "We're not sure of the motivation," Armour said. "They may have gone to join the Taliban or sold the guns in the market."

Are we solidifying a strong central government?

...once bin Laden slipped away (nice passive voice there -ed. ), the mission morphed into a vast, messy nation — building effort to support the allegedly democratic Karzai government. There was a certain logic to that. The Taliban and al-Qaeda can't base themselves in Afghanistan if something resembling a stable, secure nation-state exists there. But the mission was also historically implausible: Afghanistan has never had a strong central government. It has been governed for thousands of years by local and regional tribal coalitions. The tribes have often been at one another's throats — a good part of the current "Taliban" uprising is nothing more than standard tribal rivalries juiced by Western arms and opium profits — except when foreigners have invaded the area, in which case the Afghans have united and slowly humiliated conquerors from Alexander the Great to the Soviets.

Are we fighting a defined enemy where we are on the side of the "Afghan people"?

It's also not clear who the United States should be talking to. A recent report by the Center for American Progress names six major Islamic insurgent groups fighting in Afghanistan--including not just the Taliban and Al Qaeda but a colorful cast of characters, such as the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan; the so-called "Haqqani Network," which recently tried to kill Karzai; and Hezb-i- Islami Gulbuddin, followers of the rapacious Afghan warlord and former bin Laden ally Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who once declared that, because a million Afghans had already died in civil wars there, he saw no great problem with another million perishing. The Taliban itself consists of numerous tribally oriented splinter groups with various leaders and motivations--some little more than criminal gangs who may be willing to cooperate with the United States for the right price. But the group's core leadership is not the deal-making kind. "When I was at the State Department, we had some dealings with [the Omar-led Taliban], and it always came down to 'We've got time and Allah on our side,'" says Weinbaum.

The mission is fuzzy, and thus the mistakes magnified, like the incident this week where US forces killed 6 Afghan police officers by accident during an assault on a suspected Taliban commander. When the local population has little understanding why these foreign fighters are in the country or even whose side they are on, incidents like this become more and more demoralizing and set public opinion against the foreigners with guns increasingly seen as an occupier.

Meanwhile, the commanders whose job it is to know these things understand what the commitment would have to be to even attempt what many consider to be a thankless and hopeless counterinsurgency mission.

Around the time of the November election, John Nagl, a retired Army Colonel, took a helicopter ride across Afghanistan. What he saw below worried him [...] Winning in Afghanistan, he realized, would take more than "a little tweak," as he put it to me from back in Washington a few weeks later, when he was still shaking off the gritty "Kabul crud" that afflicts traveler's lungs. It would take time, money, and blood. "It's a doubling of the U.S. commitment," Nagl said. "It's a doubling of the Afghan army, maybe a tripling. It's going to require a tax increase and a bigger army." [...]

Nagl's rule of thumb, the one found in the counterinsurgency manual, calls for at least a 1-to-50 ratio of security forces to civilians in contested areas. Applied to Afghanistan, which has both a bigger population (32 million) and a larger land mass (647,500 square miles) than Iraq, that gets you to some large numbers fast. Right now, the United States and its allies have some 65,000 troops in Afghanistan, as compared to about 140,000 in Iraq. By Nagl's ratio, Afghanistan's population calls for more than 600,000 security forces. Even adjusting for the relative stability of large swaths of the country, the ideal number could still total around 300,000--more than a quadrupling of current troop levels. Eventually, Afghanistan's national army could shoulder most of that burden. But, right now, those forces number a ragtag 60,000, a figure Nagl believes will need to at least double and maybe triple. Standing up a force of that size, as the example of Iraq has shown us, will take several years and consume billions of U.S. dollars.

Which of course is an impossible burden right now. But the questions everyone should be asking are not how we mask over that needed commitment, but: Why are we in Afghanistan, what is the desired end-state, where is the national security interest, and how can we possibly succeed? Otherwise, it becomes nothing but a resource suck. Having terrorists project power from a country where they have safe harbor is undesirable, but of course they already have that across the border in Pakistan, where the forces we're supposed to be fighting in Afghanistan are increasingly installed. Pakistan, of course, is an entirely different set of nightmares. These are complex and interconnected regional struggles, a "murky Chinese puzzle," as Juan Cole calls it, to which adding fresh sets of troops without thinking through the consequences for our military, for our hobbled finances, for our national security, seems to me unwise. The first step would be trying to actually explain why we're in Afghanistan and what our troops are expected to do there. If you can't, you ought to leave.

The Last Straw

Outside of the murder of thousands of innocent American citizens, I was all set to ease up on Al Qaeda in this new climate of bipartisanship and unity. But then Ayman al-Zawahiri goes and calls Barack Obama a House Negro. I guess literally translated he said "house slaves," but the English subtitles that Al Qaeda helpfully provided said "House Negro."

For a legitimate analysis of this speech, go to Juan Cole (basically Zawahiri was calling Obama a pro-white slave, which is crucially wrong). But I'm going to just shake my head and wonder, "If we can't trust the terrorists to be tolerant of all races, what hope do any of us have?" By the way, Ayman, you're not exactly Aryan yourself. And neither are 99.9% of all Muslims who have experienced the sting of discrimination.

I think Cole's final thoughts are on point:

It is absolutely clear toward the end of the video that al-Zawahiri is petrified of Obama's popularity and is very afraid that he will be a game-changer in relations between the Muslim world and the United States. Hence his flailing around talking about house slaves, as though Obama were not (as of Jan. 20) himself the most powerful man in the world, catapulted into his position by nearly half of American whites (who voted for him in higher proportions than they did for Clinton and Kerry).

Al-Zawahiri has seen a lot of Muslim politics, and if he is this afraid of Obama, it is a sign that the new president has enormous potential to deploy soft power against al-Qaeda, and al-Zawahiri is running scared, trying to pretend it is still the 1960s, when it just isn't.

(Strangely, Zawahiri and McCain, through the focus on Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground, share this error!)

There is certainly a desperation in the Al Qaeda leader's speech, a recognition that moderate Muslims can be pushed back to the side of the West in this struggle. The fact of Obama's skin color and his policy on diplomatic engagement disarms a major element of Al Qaeda's propaganda, that the US punishes minorities and ignores the world. More than anything, Al Qaeda detests open societies, which is among the promises of an Obama victory. They fear the change he represents.

However, beyond the symbolism, which is significant, this also has to be about policy. To truly capitalize on this moment to marginalize terrorist extremists, we need to end practices like this:

UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 19--The United States, the world's largest international aid donor, is among the worst at promoting the independence, impartiality and neutrality of humanitarian aid deliveries to needy populations, according to a survey by a Madrid-based nonprofit group that monitors donors' performance.

The Development Assistance Research Associates (DARA) Humanitarian Response Index 2008 measures how effectively the world's 23 largest donors deliver aid. The United States ranked 15th in overall effectiveness and only 13th in the level of generosity measured by the size of its economy.

But it ranked near the bottom, 22nd, when it came to adherence to principles and guidelines established by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to ensure that political considerations don't exclude worthy recipients of aid.

DARA's findings reflect what it called the United States' use of humanitarian assistance to achieve military or political goals in eight crisis zones the group studied, including Afghanistan, Colombia and the Palestinian territories.

A more progressive counter-terrorism strategy not only takes into account the role of local law enforcement and intelligence in disrupting plots, but it treats the world less like pieces on a chess board and more like equals. And in this context, the security benefit to seeking real humanitarian goals and reducing poverty is incalculable. In other words, less missile strikes and more bowls of rice, schools and bridges. We must lead with our values because that's the best way to show countries the world over that this Administration is really different.

Spencer Ackerman had a great piece on what a progressive counter-terrorism policy would look like that is well worth your time.

The Sickness Of Guantanamo

I'm finding it somewhat hard to write about the Guantanamo issue because it truly disgusts me. That my taxpayer dollars are in part going to fund indefinite detention at a hellscape of a gulag is really gut-wrenching. And there's no way out for those prisoners.

It's been weeks since a judge ruled that the 17 Uighurs, who have been determined to represent no national security threat to this country, must be set free. Since then, the government has appealed and appealed and prevented them from leaving Gitmo. The initial judge's order is clear and to the point. And really, the case for forcing them to remain detained has mostly to do with covering the collective asses of the Administration officials who put them there. These are innocents. They are consigned to a detention camp. We're paying for it.

After a prosecutor resigned in the case against five other Guantanamo detainees because he alleged that the military was withholding exculpatory evidence, the court dropped the charges - only so they could re-file new charges, and keep these prisoners locked up. The system for detaining and trying these people is an immense failure and yet there's no way they're ever going to be allowed to leave. Even if they were guilty, they cannot be tried because the evidence is tainted through torture. And if they aren't guilty, they cannot be let out into the world to describe the torturous acts. It's a black hole.

And as for closing Guantanamo altogether? Forget it.

WASHINGTON — Despite his stated desire to close the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, President Bush has decided not to do so, and never considered proposals drafted in the State Department and the Pentagon that outlined options for transferring the detainees elsewhere, according to senior administration officials.

Mr. Bush’s top advisers held a series of meetings at the White House this summer after a Supreme Court ruling in June cast doubt on the future of the American detention center. But Mr. Bush adopted the view of his most hawkish advisers that closing Guantánamo would involve too many legal and political risks to be acceptable, now or any time soon, the officials said.

The administration is proceeding on the assumption that Guantánamo will remain open not only for the rest of Mr. Bush’s presidency but also well beyond, the officials said, as the site for military tribunals of those facing terrorism-related charges and for the long prison sentences that could follow convictions.

Guantanamo's closure would represent a final failure for the Bush Administration. As long as the secrets are kept on a remote island in Cuba, they cannot be revealed to the larger world. And so they remain hidden.

It's disgusting.

McCain and 9/11

Another year has passed, another memorial to the victims of the September 11 attacks has been set, more wreaths have been laid, and Osama bin Laden is still at large.

Let's take a look at John McCain's relationship to this, shall we? On the morning of 9/11, he listed a host of countries that would have to pay for the attacks, including Iraq:

To be honest with you, Dan, I never thought that an operation of this sophistication and size would take place. I just never did. But I don’t think there’s any doubt that there are countries — Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea and others — who we know engage in proliferation of — of capabilities and, from time to time, involve themselves in state-sponsored terrorism. But never did we imagine on a scale such as this.

He said Iraq was "obviously" next to Paula Zahn on October 9, 2001.

He was simply in a rush to get to Iraq, just like this President and this Administration. Now that Iraq has been proven beyond all doubt to have nothing to do with 9/11, and the occupation itself has been a disaster (more on that later), only NOW has McCain turned back to bin Laden, making the most selfish statement that a national politician has maybe ever made.

Keith Olbermann raised a brilliant point tonight. John McCain bragged in June that he, and only he, knows how to capture Osama bin Laden, the man responsible for killing 3,000 people on September 11. Pray tell, how Senator?

As Keith notes, it's been several months now and John McCain is still keeping his little secret. Is McCain planning on blackmailing the country, Olbermann asks - he won't tell us unless he wins? I can imagine some in the media will say "pshaw, we know what McCain meant." No we don't. McCain was happy to invoke September 11 for his own political purposes in June, and just last week at his own convention John McCain was happy to force the nation to witness again the horrific spectacle of planes flying into the World Trade Center and the towers falling. For some reason, John McCain thought showing that video, up until then taboo at a political event, was now fair game. John McCain told the country three months ago that he and only he - not Barack Obama, but John McCain - had the secret to how to capture Osama bin Laden. But apparently he's keeping the secret a secret.

Somehow the war on terror is supposed to be a "plus" for Republicans. The facts, of course, are that we invaded Afghanistan and then neglected the country to such a degree that even the Pentagon agrees that the current strategy is not working, and we're running out of time for our efforts to be anything but counterproductive. Not only is our coalition dissolving in Iraq, but the Canadians are bugging out of Afghanistan, leaving us practically alone in these money pits and sinkholes which are failing to make the country any safer. The President is only know authorizing raids inside Pakistan, but it's a clear end-of-the-term, election-year ploy to make a big headline splash, at the expense of angering a brand new Pakistani government.

(of course, Obama is talking about falling into these same traps. I don't argue for isolationism, but an understanding that, as Admiral Mullen said yesterday, "we cannot kill our way out of the problem." Ending terrorist threats require local law enforcement and lifting societies out of poverty as much as bombs and guns.)

The truth is that John McCain, a dishonorable man, has shown that he does not have the judgment and temperament to deal with the threats we face in a measured and realistic way. In fact, it's clear that he would fly off the handle and run the globe red with blood at the slightest provocation.

UPDATE: Michael Smerconish, who I couldn't stand when I lived in Philly but has also come around as a more sensible conservative, addresses this subject today as well.

Tales Of The War On Terror

So Congress isn't buying the neat little bow that the FBI tried to put on the anthrax case.

WASHINGTON — A month after the F.B.I. declared that an Army scientist was the anthrax killer, leading members of Congress are demanding more information about the seven-year investigation, saying they do not think the bureau has proved its case.

In a letter sent Friday to Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Democratic leaders of the House Judiciary Committee said that “important and lingering questions remain that are crucial for you to address, especially since there will never be a trial to examine the facts of the case.”

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, committed suicide in July, and Mr. Mueller is likely to face demands for additional answers about the anthrax case when he appears before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on Sept. 16 and 17.

“My conclusion at this point is that it’s very much an open matter,” Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the top Republican on the Senate committee, said of the strength of the case against Dr. Ivins, a microbiologist at the Army’s biodefense laboratory who worked on anthrax vaccines. “There are some very serious questions that have yet to be answered and need to be made public.”

I'm looking forward to that hearing.

In addition to letting potential domestic terror suspects go free, you'll be pleased to know that the Bush Administration, an equal opportunity bungler, has done the same with foreign terror suspects:

A lengthy trial centering on what Scotland Yard called a plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners ended Monday when the jury convicted three of eight defendants of conspiracy to commit murder.

But the jury failed to reach verdicts on the more serious charge of a conspiracy to have suicide bombers detonate soft-drink bottles filled with liquid explosives aboard seven airliners headed for the United States and Canada.

The failure to obtain convictions on the plane-bombing charge was a blow to counterterrorism officials in London and Washington, who had described the scheme as potentially the most devastating act of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks seven years ago this week. British and American experts had said that the plot had all the signs of an operation by Al Qaeda, and that it was conceived and organized in Pakistan.

In a case of a buried lede, the Times story later gets around to mentioning that the Bush Administration's jumping of the gun, authorizing arrests in Pakistan of people connected to the plot for nakedly political reasons prior to the 2006 midterm elections, cut short the investigation and put Scotland Yard in a situation where they didn't have enough evidence to convict. London had to roll up the plotters before they were ready to present full evidence.

George Bush - politicizing terror, making sure nobody is held responsible since 2001!

Time for a change.

Who Are We Fighting?

When I appear on Meet The Bloggers in a couple hours you can be sure I'm going to ask Rachel Maddow about this:

American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials.

The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region.

The American officials also said there was new information showing that members of the Pakistani intelligence service were increasingly providing militants with details about the American campaign against them, in some cases allowing militants to avoid American missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

This is just an extension of an earlier story about the CIA noting links between militants and the ISI, but this fills in the details. And it's absolutely frightening. I've called Pakistan the Most Dangerous Trouble Spot On Earth for the past couple years for good reason, and now to see their intelligence services act as an adjunct for the insurgency just puts a lot of this into perspective. (Of course, the Embassy bombing could also merely be an extension of the India-Pakistan cold war, using the Afghan rebels as a proxy. There have been clashes in Kashmir this week.)

Committing to a wider war in Afghanistan, where the public resists colonial efforts historically, entangles us in all sorts of regional political battles, and if you think you didn't know who your friends were in Iraq, wait until you get over there. This just has all the earmarks of a disaster. The Pakistani leadership doesn't even know how to deal with the ISI.

Some American officials have begun to suggest that Pakistan is no longer a fully reliable American partner and to advocate some unilateral American action against militants based in the tribal areas.

The ISI has long maintained ties to militant groups in the tribal areas, in part to court allies it can use to contain Afghanistan’s power. In recent years, Pakistan’s government has also been concerned about India’s growing influence inside Afghanistan, including New Delhi’s close ties to the government of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president.

American officials say they believe that the embassy attack was probably carried out by members of a network led by Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose alliance with Al Qaeda and its affiliates has allowed the terrorist network to rebuild in the tribal areas.

American and Pakistani officials have now acknowledged that President Bush on Monday confronted Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, about the divided loyalties of the ISI.

Pakistan’s defense minister, Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar, told a Pakistani television network on Wednesday that Mr. Bush asked senior Pakistani officials this week, “ ‘Who is in control of ISI?’ ” and asked about leaked information that tipped militants to surveillance efforts by Western intelligence services.

Pakistan’s new civilian government is wrestling with these very issues, and there is concern in Washington that the civilian leaders will be unable to end a longstanding relationship between members of the ISI and militants associated with Al Qaeda.

Let's remember that the ISI was strengthened when the country was under the control of Pervez Musharraf (then chief of staff of the army with jurisdiction over the military intelligence service), who we handed over billions of dollars in "aid" money with no paper trail and no accountability for where it was sent. Thus, like Juan Cole says, that money could easily be going to kill US, NATO and Afghan troops.

Oh, and the group of militants that the ISI used to carry out this attack are Pushtun guerrillas, not actually "Taliban" in the traditional sense. The shibboleths of "Taliban" and "Al Qaeda" don't quite fit here. This is a Pakistani push for regional dominance incorporating tribes and assorted fighters.

By the way, John McCain supported Musharraf. He saw him as a strong leader, typical of most American beliefs about the need for strongmen in the developing world. As Cole notes:

Musharraf's 'successful state' involved dismissing the Supreme Court, provoking massive and repeated demonstrations, violating the constitution, interfering with free and fair elections, and presiding over a virtual national meltdown on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto late last December. McCain appears to value nothing beyond sheer military might-- even if it has shady contacts to al-Qaeda!

When the newly elected civilian government of Pakistan tried to put the ISI under the civilian Ministry of the Interior last weekend, it was quickly reversed by the generals. The US government (and the candidates) should be supporting the elected civilian government in its efforts to get control of the ISI.

This news is not about Pakistan, since most Pakistanis dislike al-Qaeda and the Taliban. It is not about the elected Pakistani government. It is not even about the Pakistani military, which has fought hard battles against the Pakistani Taliban and suffered hundreds of casualties in so doing. It is about corruption in the Pakistani officer corps and the penetration of pro- al-Qaeda elements in the ISI.

And we're being sucked into this slowly, bled dry and ultimately made the fool.

Hey, Studying Terrorism, There's A Thought!

This RAND Corporation study is really kind of incredible. Actually the most incredible thing is that it's not ten years old. We have been aware of extremist groups like Al-Qaeda for at least a decade, it's been a major focal point for the government since 2001, and we're just getting around to studying how terrorist groups fail? Seriously?

Anyway, you might be interested to know that they fail due to the exact opposite policies that we've been undertaking.

All terrorist groups eventually end. But how do they end? Answers to this question have enormous implications for counterterrorism efforts. The evidence since 1968 indicates that most groups have ended because (1) they joined the political process or (2) local police and intelligence agencies arrested or killed key members. Military force has rarely been
the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups, and few groups within this time frame achieved victory. This has significant implications for dealing with al Qa’ida and suggests fundamentally rethinking post–September 11 U.S. counterterrorism strategy [...]

What does this mean for counterterrorism efforts against al Qa’ida? After September 11, 2001, the U.S. strategy against al Qa’ida centered on the use of military force. Indeed, U.S. policymakers and key national-security documents referred to operations against al Qa’ida as the war on terrorism. Other instruments were also used, such as cutting off terrorist financing, providing foreign assistance, engaging in diplomacy, and sharing information with foreign governments. But military force was the primary instrument.

The evidence by 2008 suggested that the U.S. strategy was not successful in undermining al Qa’ida’s capabilities. Our assessment concludes that al Qa’ida remained a strong and competent organization. Its goals were the same: uniting Muslims to fight the United States and its allies (the far enemy) and overthrowing western-friendly regimes in the Middle East (the near enemy) to establish a pan-Islamic caliphate. Al Qa’ida has been involved in more terrorist attacks since September 11, 2001, than it was during its prior history. These attacks spanned Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Al Qa’ida’s modus operandi also evolved and included a repertoire of more-sophisticated improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and a growing use of suicide attacks. Its organizational structure evolved, making it a more dangerous enemy.

Al Qa’ida’s resurgence should trigger a fundamental rethinking of U.S. counterterrorism strategy. Based on our analysis of how terrorist groups end, a political solution is not possible. Since al Qa’ida’s goal remains the establishment of a pan-Islamic caliphate, there is little reason to expect that a negotiated settlement with governments in the Middle East is possible. A more effective approach would be adopting a two-front strategy.

First, policing and intelligence should be the backbone of U.S. efforts. In Europe, North America, North Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, al Qa’ida consists of a network of individuals who need to be tracked and arrested. This would require careful work abroad from such organizations as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as well as their cooperation with foreign police and intelligence agencies. Second, military force, though not necessarily U.S. soldiers, may be a necessary instrument when al Qa’ida is involved in an insurgency. Local military forces frequently have more legitimacy to operate than the United States has, and they have a better understanding of the operating environment, even if they need to develop the capacity to deal with insurgent groups over the long run. This means a light U.S. military footprint or none at all. The U.S. military can play a critical role in building indigenous capacity but should generally resist being drawn into combat operations in Muslim societies, since its presence is likely to increase terrorist recruitment.

A key part of this strategy should include ending the notion of a war on terrorism and replacing it with such concepts as counterterrorism, which most governments with significant terrorist threats use. The British government, among others, has already taken this step and abjured the phrase war on terror. The phrase raises public expectations—both in the United States and elsewhere—that there is a battlefield solution to the problem of terrorism. It also encourages others abroad to respond by conducting a jihad (or holy war) against the United States and elevates them to the status of holy warriors. Terrorists should be
perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors.

Our analysis suggests that there is no battlefield solution to terrorism. Military force usually has the opposite effect from what is intended: It is often overused, alienates the local population by its heavy-handed nature, and provides a window of opportunity for terrorist-group recruitment. This strategy should also include rebalancing U.S. resources and attention on police and intelligence work. It also means increasing budgets at the CIA, U.S. Department of Justice, and U.S. Department of State and scaling back the U.S. Department of Defense’s focus and resources on counterterrorism. U.S. special operations forces will remain critical, as will U.S. military operations to counter terrorist groups involved in insurgencies.

Pretty goddamn simple, huh? It's not like these concepts of blowback, of inflaming local populations, and of treating heinous crimes as crimes are, you know, foreign. They have formed the backbone of counterterrorism strategy since the Visigoths. They're what John Kerry actually ran on in 2004 (which earned him ridicule - I'm sure everyone is very, very sorry now). The current strategy of planting more flags in the Middle East, bombing local populations from 30,000 feet, torturing, using belligerent rhetoric like "war or terror" and "clash of civilizations" has not worked. Period. And we're in an election where we know that one candidate would not only maintain these policies, but go further.

Militarism, colonialism and unilaterism are making us less safe. This study offers hope that a President Obama might draw back from the "if not x then y" military approach that suggests we dump forces in Afghanistan, and maybe rethink the overall strategy for using all of our instruments of power to reach the actual mission goal - to end this terrorist groups the way other terrorist groups ended. The fact that DNI McConnell is actually allowing intel analysts use expert opinion in making their assessments, that's a start. The fact that Obama is talking about transparent, deliberate processes to deal with capturing terrorists and bringing them to justice - and McCain is joining him on opposite days, another start. But we need to rethink and revamp the policy entirely.

What About Lieberman's Remark?

The unquestionably worst thing about the Wes Clark incident is how it has obscured the rather remarkable statement uttered by a different guest on the very same episode of Face The Nation yesterday, Joe Lieberman.

Joe Lieberman, appearing on Face the Nation today, made the case for McCain with a blunt reminder.

"Our enemies will test the new president early," said Lieberman. "Remember that the truck bombing of the World Trade Center happened in the first year of the Clinton administration. 9/11 happened in the first year of the Bush administration."

The White House, by the way, endorsed this today. Being the kinder, gentler party of the two, I don't think a single important Democrat went after Joe Lieberman for these comments. But they are procedurally similar to Charlie Black's statement that a terror attack would unquestionably help Republicans. This is the comment that the Beltway press navel-gazed last week, only to come to the conclusion that it was probably true. Therefore, when Lieberman says something like "Presidents get tested early by Al Qaeda" (as if Al Qaeda ties all of their potential attacks to the American political calendar) there's no doubt how the media receives that, how it colors their reporting, and how it's fed to the public - there will be more terrorist attacks, and we can't have on-the-job training, and so we must stick with the same failed policies, etc.

Sen. Barack Obama and his surrogates continued to criticize Charles R. Black Jr., a top adviser to Sen. John McCain, on Tuesday for saying a terrorist attack before the November election would help the presumptive Republican nominee. But behind their protests lay a question that has dogged Democrats since Sept. 11, 2001: Was Black speaking the truth? [...]

McCain has distanced himself from Black's comments, saying, "If he said that -- and I don't know the context -- I strenuously disagree."

But radio host Rush Limbaugh said aloud what other Republicans have been saying privately for months. Black's comments were "obvious," Limbaugh said yesterday on his program as he criticized McCain for distancing himself from them.

Limbaugh said in no uncertain terms that Obama would be weak in the face of terrorism. "We know damn well it's Obama who would seek to appease our enemies. We know damn well it's McCain who won't put up with another attack," Limbaugh said.

A propagandist like Rush Limbaugh is allowed to present the dominant opinion in one of the nation's paper of record on this question of whether terrorism helps Democrats. If you wonder why media stars flub Obama and Osama over and over, this is the reason. They're subliminally meant to conflate them.

Importantly, the substance of the argument here is never discussed - it's always about who among the political parties terrorism or a more dangerous world benefits, not which political party can bring about less terrorism or a less dangerous world. Because given the primary evidence, there is no possible way that answer can be Republicans.

Late last year, top Bush administration officials decided to take a step they had long resisted. They drafted a secret plan to make it easier for the Pentagon’s Special Operations forces to launch missions into the snow-capped mountains of Pakistan to capture or kill top leaders of Al Qaeda [...]

But more than six months later, the Special Operations forces are still waiting for the green light. The plan has been held up in Washington by the very disagreements it was meant to eliminate. A senior Defense Department official said there was “mounting frustration” in the Pentagon at the continued delay.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush committed the nation to a “war on terrorism” and made the destruction of Mr. bin Laden’s network the top priority of his presidency. But it is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.

The Keystone Kops would actually be an IMPROVEMENT from these clowns. The most basic initiative in this so-called war on terror, to any reasonable individual, would be to seek out those who actually committed the act. Seven years later - seven years - they have been allowed to escape, rebuild, launch attacks, nearly take over large towns in Pakistan and most of the Afghan countryside, and generally return their operation to roughly the same level of force as it was before the 9-11 attacks. There has been no comprehensive strategy in seven years to counteract this.

And I'm supposed to believe that's the party who ought to benefit from a future terror attack?

But we're too focused on whether or not a distinguished retired general hurt John McCain's feelings to grapple with this. And Democratic fecklessness in the face of the hissy fit just ensures that such a conversation never takes place. Joe Lieberman, who will speak at the 2008 RNC, probably in a starring, prime-time role, will never face pressure for the comment he made. Wes Clark, who worked to elect his opponent and is as credible a national security voice as there is in the Party, gets the legs cut out from him by its leaders.

I'm going to need a new laptop. This one's acting all screwy from the 18,000 I've banged my head against it today.

These People Are Idiots

The standard Republican reaction to the Supreme Court's decision to disallow the US Government to indefinitely detain prisoners without charges is typified by John McCain's response.

The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country. Sen. Graham and Sen. Lieberman and I had worked very hard to make sure that we didn't torture any prisoners, that we didn't mistreat them, that we abided by the Geneva Conventions, which applies to all prisoners. But we also made it perfectly clear, and I won't go through all the legislation we passed, and the prohibition against torture, but we made it very clear that these are enemy combatants, these are people who are not citizens, they do not and never have been given the rights that citizens of this country have. And my friends there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people. So now what are we going to do. We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate, because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases. By the way, 30 of the people who have already been released from Guantanamo Bay have already tried to attack America again, one of them just a couple weeks ago, a suicide bomber in Iraq. Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation, and the men and women who defend it. This decision will harm our ability to do that.

He either doesn't know what a habeas corpus suit is, which is simply a manner to challenge indefinite detention without charges, or he's intentionally lying to his audience. I'd love to see a study of the reading level of Presidential town hall meetings, because McCain appears to be talking to third-graders who know nothing about the US Constitution.

Newt GIngrich was worse.

This court decision is a disaster, which could cost us a city. And the debate ought to be about whether you’re prepared to lose an American city on behalf of five lawyers — it was a five to four decision. … That ought to be a principled argument between McCain and Obama, about whether or not you’re prepared to allow any random, nutcake district judge who has no knowledge of national security to set the rules for terrorists.

There is of course nothing in that decision that would in its own right release any terrorist whatsoever. It merely states that suspects in detention must be charged. If the prisoners at Gitmo are so dangerous, the "worst of the worst," surely there's evidence to that effect which can be brought out to justify the arrest and detention.

Gingrich doesn't want to mention that. In fact, none of them want to break it down in those terms, because they would be forced to admit that a very large number of these prisoners are innocent of any crime.

Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as "the worst of the worst."

But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's Camp Four who hissed "infidel" and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

"He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government," a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.

An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.

McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.

This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.

The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.

It's not the consequence of delays in implementing military commissions that has transformed Guantanamo into a legal black hole. It is in fact DESIGNED to be that way. The Bush Administration doesn't wish to admit its mistakes - that hundreds of people they rounded up in the war on terror were innocent, were sent there as a result of tribal leaders in Afghanistan picking up bounties by ratting out enemies, and were abused for no good reason. And so allowing Gitmo inmates to ask what they are being charged with would prove the entire anti-terrorism strategy after 9/11 to be a failure. The Constitution was ignored, liberties were taken, and security was not aided. In fact, it was harmed, as Guantanamo became as much a terrorist training camp as it was a detention facility.

Of course, this is a bipartisan problem, as Democratic leaders ran away - at times literally - from making substantive opposition arguments to the Bush Administration's horrific practices. They passed the Military Commissions Act, part of which was struck down by the Supreme Court this week. They are about to allow warrantless spying on Americans because they don't want to be seen as soft on national security. As Glenn Greenwald notes:

But the broader and more important point is the one illustrated by the bold and principled acts being undertaken by British politicians in several parties there, the same principle illustrated by numerous acts of Russ Feingold over the past seven years: defending basic liberties, the core principles of our political system, and the rule of law is of such overriding importance that any worthwhile politician, by definition, will do so even if it entails some political cost. As British members of Parliament resign their seats and defend members of other parties in defense of their liberties, our own Democratic Party this week will -- yet again -- endorse and legalize the most extremist and illegal aspects of the Bush agenda in pursuit of the craven, illusory and increasingly irrelevant goal of protecting its own political interests.

There is a weird upset in this country, a belief that we're seriously off track, and I really think this is the reason. We have a rogue President seemingly dedicated to transgressing American values and nobody does a thing to stop him. People shake their heads. It undermines any faith in the entire political class.