That was horribly depressing testimony yesterday. Crocker and Petraeus might have tried to put a sunny spin on the matter, but at the the end of the day the only thing you conclude was that the US is fighting in the wrong place and doesn’t have the first clue how to get itself out of this mess.
When Ambassador Crocker was asked which Al Qaeda group he would consider most important to eliminate, the real Al Qaeda or the splinter group Al Qaeda in Iraq, he choose the real Al Qaeda in Pakistan:
SEN. BIDEN: Mr. Ambassador, is Al Qaeda a greater threat to US interests in Iraq, or in the Afghan-Pakistan border region?
AMB. CROCKER: Mr. Chairman, Al Qaeda is a strategic threat to the United States wherever it is, in my view–
SEN. BIDEN: Where is most of it? If you could take it out? You had a choice: Lord almighty came down and sat in the middle of the table there and said ‘Mr. Ambassador you can eliminate every Al Qaeda source in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or every Al Qaeda personnel in Iraq,’ which would you pick?
AMB. CROCKER: Well given the progress that has been made again Al Qaeda in Iraq, the significant decrease in its capabilities, the fact that it is solidly on the defensive, and not in a position of–
SEN. BIDEN: Which would you pick, Mr. Ambassador?
AMB. CROCKER: I would therefore pick Al Qaeda in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area.
SEN BIDEN: That would be a smart choice.
Crocker tried to make it seem as if we have struck a massive blow against Al Qaeda in Iraq and so we could now turn our attention to Pakistan/Afghanistan. Some war defenders may rush to use that hedging as support for the notion that even if Crocker admits that iraq is not the central front in the war against Al Qaeda that it once was. That, of course, is nonsense. Al Qaeda in Iraq did not exist until we invaded so it could not have been an important front in the fight against Al Qaeda until our own stupidity allowed Al Qaeda the opportunity to make it so. And if Crocker is right, if we have had significant enough success against Al Qaeda in Iraq that we are free to turn our attention to Pakistan, why, precisely, is there still so much violence in Iraq? It must be because of other factions, factions that have nothing to do with Al Qaeda in Iraq. But both Crocker and Patreaus said we cannot leave Iraq, so, by Crocker’s own words, Iraq is a colossal distraction from the real fight: Al Qaeda.
Crocker admitting that Iraq is preventing us form dealign with and defeating Al Qaeda is bad enough, but Petraeus and Crocker had even worse news In essence, they have no idea what victory would look like. When Asked by Senator Clinton what victory would look like, General Petraeus gave this rambling answer:
With respect to the conditions, Senator, what we have is a number of factors that we will consider by area as we look at where we can make recommendations for further reductions beyond the reduction of the surge forces that will be complete in July. These factors are fairly clear. There’s obviously an enemy situation factor, there’s a friendly situation factor with respect to Iraqi forces, local governance, even economic and political dynamics, all of which are considered as the factors in making recommendations on further reductions.
Having said that, I have to say that again it’s not a mathematical exercise. There’s not an equation in which you have co- efficients in front of each of these factors. It’s not as mechanical as that. At the end of the day, it really involves commanders sitting down, also with their Iraqi counterparts and leaders in a particular area, and assessing where it is that you can reduce your forces so you can, again, make a recommendation to make further reductions.
And that’s the process, again.
He cannot say what conditions would trigger a draw down of troops — apparently his field commanders would just one day magically know that everything was friendship and light and flowering ponies and they could all go home. Saying now what that magical land of happy-happy would look like is, apparently, impossible. Just trust in the Mighty Power of the Patraeus and He will come down from the mountain and present us with the Ten Dates For Withdrawal.
Crocker was just as bad. When asked by Senator Obama what constituted success, Crocker replied:
CROCKER: And that’s because, Senator, is a — I mean, I don’t like to sound like a broken record, but this is hard and this is complicated.
I think that when Iraq gets to the point that it can carry forward its further development without a major commitment of U.S. forces, with still a lot of problems out there but where they and we would have a fair certitude that, again, they can drive it forward themselves without significant danger of having the whole thing slip away from them again, then, clearly, our profile, our presence diminishes markedly.
But that’s not where we are now.
Again the double talk: we will leave when things are good but we cannot tell you right now how things will look when things look good. Success in Iraq is just like pornography: it is whatever Republicans are pointing to when they say “victory”.
But it gets even worse. When Senator Levin specifically asked Petraeus what the number of troops would be at the end of the year if everything goes according to his plan, Petraeus could not answer:
LEVIN: Now, next question, if all goes well — if all goes well, what would be the approximate number of our troops there at the end of the year?
Let’s assume conditions permitted things to move quickly. What, in your estimate, would be the approximate number of American troops there at the end of the year?
Can you give us a — just say if you can’t give us an estimate.
PETRAEUS: Sir, I can’t — I can’t give you an estimate on that.
LEVIN: All right. You’re not going to give us an estimate on that.
They don’t have a plan beyond hope. If they had areal plan, they would be trumpeting it and would take every opportunity to tell a disgusted and worried American public “here, here is what the end looks like and here is how we intend to get there.” Crocker and Petraeus bobbed and weaved like Ali in his prime every time someone tried to get them define success and victory. People who know where they are going aren’t afraid of questions about the destination. Clearly, all they have is the vague hope that if they hang around long enough, things will somehow sort themselves out.
By the end of the day Crocker and Petraeus had made it clear that the war in Iraq was not keeping the country safer, they don’t really have any idea what they are trying to accomplish in Iraq but we cannot leave no matter the cost until they have accomplished the accomplishment that they cnanot define.
April 9th, 2008
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General, Politics, Iraq, Terrorism, Iran |
10 comments
I am sorry I missed this (been a busy day, personally), but the ACLU is kicking off a close Gito campaign. It has been six years since we opened that black hole. We haven’t given a single person in that camp the rights of a prisoner of war or charged them criminally. The BUsh Administration fought for years to keep them locked away forever, subject only to the whims of Bush or his surrogates. And when the Supreme Court, an institution as far right as any in the country, finally pointed out that such treatment was inhumane, illegal, and un-American, the Bush Administration created a process that kept the accused from seeing the evidence against them and allowed evidence based on torture to be used against them. The prison camp at Gitmo is a symbol to the world of our leader’s cowardice and viciousness and it is the single most effective propaganda tool the terrorists have. When they want to “prove” that all our high minded rhetoric about freedom and democracy is a lie, when they want to “prove” that our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are nothing more than a holy war against Muslim, all they have to do is say one word: Gitmo. It is long past time it be closed.
You can find out more here.
January 11th, 2008
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General, Legal Issues, Iraq, Terrorism, Torture |
one comment
So torture wasn’t enough, we can now kidnap people off the street:
AMERICA has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.
A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.
Do I really need to explain why this is wrong? We have extradition treaties with these countries. There is a procedure where the US gets to make its case in front of a judge. It is the very definition of due process these treaties protect US citizens as well as foreign citizens. Kidnapping people off the street when the process goes against you is despicable, the kind of nonsense vigilantism that you would expect out of a bad Chuck Norris movie (but I repeat myself).
And it is now official US government policy. Does anyone not think this will make other governments less likely to help the US as their citizens’ contempt for the US grows? Does anyone not think that this will hurt our economy as people decide that, combined with the hassle of getting into the country in the first place, since they could be stolen out of their homes in their own countries without trial or recourse its just not worth the hassle? Does anyone not notice that kidnapping people is wrong?
The stain and the stench of the Bush Administration will take a generation at least to wash away.
December 3rd, 2007
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Politics, Terrorism |
5 comments
This is inexcusable:
Thousands of Iraqis whose support for the U.S. war effort in Iraq has put them and their families in grave danger at home are being excluded from a new fast-track system aimed at speeding up refugee resettlement in the United States for American allies, officials said Thursday.
The Bush administration within the next month will begin accepting refugee applications directly from the about 100 Iraqi employees of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and their relatives, letting them bypass an often-lengthy U.N. referral process in third countries where they must travel at great expense, they said.
But possibly tens of thousands more at-risk Iraqis — those who worked for private contractors, aid agencies or media outlets and their relatives — won’t be eligible due to objections from the Homeland Security Department, which fears that terrorists might use it to slip into the country, the officials said.
Homeland Security is effectively blocking contract employees, like drivers, translators, technicians, from benefiting from the initiative by insisting they provide official U.S. references and sponsors before applying for resettlement, a more stringent standard than for direct hires and even those in the U.N. system, according to the officials.
We invaded their country, destroyed its infrastructure, failed to provide either security or the political rebirth we [promised, and now we are going to turn our backs on thousands of people who helped us try to reach our goals. Why? becasue the Bush Administration and its backers are too God damn afraid of the Scary Brown Terrorists to do the right thing by these people. We owe these people, but the Bush Administration is perfectly willing to let them and their families be raped tortured and killed becasue, apparently, no one in the damn place is smart enough to figure out a way to minimize the already slight risk that a terrorist might slip into the country. The notion that terrorists could slip into the country under the cover of this program is silly. Could it happen? maybe - -but there are screening processes that could be done and, frankly, its easier for a terrorists to come into the country in a way that does not invite such stringent scrutiny. You’d have to be a pretty stupid terrorist to try this. Denying help to these people base don that is inhumane and disgusting.
It is a loathsome decision made by loathsome people . And may God have no mercy on their souls if they are just doing this to keep the number of official refugees down in order to allow Bush to keep pretending that things are just going swimmingly. And full credit, here, to the people at the State Department (and I have to assume this includes Rice and her deputies) who are backing legislation to let these people in and who are fighting the DHS to get them to do the right thing. This is, in a literal sense, the very least we can do for those Iraqis who tried to help us. We cannot turn our back on these people becasue of mis-placed and overblown fears over terrorism.
November 30th, 2007
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Iraq, Terrorism |
7 comments
For the most unhinged pants-wetting alarmism in the face of imaginary terrorism, this year’s award goes to Bruce Kesler of the “Democracy Project“:
Stop arguing with your liberal friends about what a dangerous place the world is, and just send them this website. A friend just sent it to me. It’s called Global Incident Map: A Global Display of Terrorism and Other Suspicious Events.
You have to see it to believe it, and I really mean to believe it: The world is a very dangerous place.
It actually is a pretty interesting resource, though also somewhat alarmist. It features a world map with brightly-colored hazard symbols (Biohazard! Explosion! Fire! Electric Tram!) blinking and flashing at “hot spots” around the globe. Better is a dated list of “incidents” broken down by category, with links to further details, ranging back one week. If you’re interested in political violence, this looks like a good monitoring tool. It’s rather overwrought (what exactly I am supposed to feel in response to a blinking tram car symbol I just don’t know, and the Google satellite images of every location are cool but not particularly informative), but you can get good information out of it.
But, typically of the right-wing incitement-to-riot brigade, the message Kesler takes from it is just the opposite of what any rational analysis could possibly come up with.
Looking at the current page (it updates every 7 minutes), there are 77 incidents listed from around the entire world in the past week. That works out to about one incident per every 2 1/2 countries, per week. But in fact, only 26 unique countries are mentioned, most of them more than once. So according to this resource, there was no terrorism at all in over 80% of the nations of the world in the past week. And of the countries that are listed, the US and Israel acount for almost a third of all the incidents. So you’re down to about one incident per month per country, if you’re not a citizen of “greater USRael”.
But what of those incidents? Frankly, they’re pretty lame. Among the 77 “Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity” that Bruce Kesler is panicking over are such heart-stoppers as: “Contents of suspicous envelope handed over to [Irish police]”, “White powder at NAACP was harmless”, “Protester chained to railway line” and “Transpo[rtation] station back to normal after bomb scare”. Oh, my god! A transportation station was back to normal!? Somebody found a white powder that was harmless!? What a dangerous world we live in, with all this “Terrorism and Suspicious Activity” going on!
To be sure, many of the incidents listed are actual terrorism, some of them fatal. And the list is clearly woefully incomplete: it includes 10 incidents in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, but every one has Palestinians as the suspected terrorists; there is not a single incident of Israeli violence against Palestinians listed. There are only 2 terrorist incidents listed in all of Iraq for the past week, but 14 throughout the continental US. So we can’t take this list as exhaustive, and, of course, no such violent incidents should be minimized no matter how distant or infrequent. But for all its flaws, this is the list that has Bruce Kesler in a tizzy - the one he says proves that “the world is a dangerous place”, the one you should monitor constantly to keep yourself in a keen pitch for the Wah on Terra:
There’s nothing I’ve ever experienced – short of actually experiencing war or terrorist incidents –that so brings the message home, literally, right to your computer, and so comprehensively, about the need to be vigilant. . . .
Simply amazing. Belongs on everyone’s computer screen.
So Bruce is going to spend his life being vigilant about what he sees on this map. OK . . . . Assuming every one of these often-laughable “Events” is actually a terrorist incident, and they each kill 10 people (most of them actually killed no one), and assuming for the sake of simplicity that they occur randomly throughout the world, and accepting the US Census Bureau’s estimated world population of 6.63 billion, that would give each person in the world a weekly chance of death by terrorism of . . . 0.0000011%, or about 0.0006% (1:166,667) annually. Assuming you live in the US (14 incidents), Israel (10 incidents, and a 100% victimization rate - not a single incident of violence that involves Israelis is their fault), India (7 incidents), or Afghanistan or Pakistan (5 incidents each), and taking the populations of those countries together (1.602 billion), that gives a likelihood of involvement in a “Terrorism Event” of 0.0000026% per week, or 0.00013% (1:769,230)annually, for citizens of these horribly dangerous countries. Those numbers constitute a “very dangerous” world for Bruce.
I hope nobody tells him, because he might die from simple fear, but here are some other things for Bruce to be vigilant about:
| Hideous Danger |
Yearly Death Rate |
| Terrorism |
1/769,230 |
| Liposuction |
1/5,000 |
| Pedestrian Accidents |
1/58,000 |
| Firearms |
1/366,000 |
| Recreational Boating |
1/399,000 |
| Bicycling |
1/410,000 |
Yes . . . the fear that gnaws at Bruce Kesler’s heart . . . at any moment he could be attacked by a terrorist, or 154 liposuction doctors. Tell your liberal friends.
UPDATE: Fixed minor errors and typos.
November 21st, 2007
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General, Politics, Culture, Iraq, Terrorism, Media, News & Current Events, Math, Fiasco |
one comment
It appears that the Democratic leadership twisted some arms and telecom immunity is now out of the FISA replacement bill:
Reflecting the deep divisions within Congress over granting legal immunity to telephone companies for cooperating with the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a new domestic surveillance law on Thursday that sidestepped the issue.
By a 10 to 9 vote, the committee approved an overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that dropped a key provision for immunity for telecommunications companies that another committee had already approved. The Senate leadership will have to decide how to deal with the immunity question on the Senate floor.
On Thursday night, the House voted 227 to 189, generally along party lines, to approve its own version of the FISA bill, which also does not include immunity.
The story is a bit more complicated than the Times is letting on. Before the 10-9 vote, Feinstein and Whitehorse, both Dems, voted with the GOP to kill Feingold’s amendment to ban immunity for the telecom companies. Bit a couple of minutes later, Leahy got them to agree to pass this bill which does not grant immunity to the telecom companies. And, best of all, Reid’s staff is telling people that Leahy’s billis the one that will be advanced to the full Senate. So the leadership has taken sides here, and they have come down pretty squarely against telecom immunity.
This is a first good step. Allowing the government to “outsource” its violations of the Constitution to private concerns and then immunizing those concerns from punishment for their roles in such violations is a recipe for tyranny. I’ve said this before, but an emploiyee of ATT can take away your freedom just as throughly as an employee of the government. The only way to prevent that is either criminal penalties — which are extremely unlikely when the government itself solicited the crime — or civil penalties.
It is also encouraging that the leadership drove this change in the bills. it gives me some hope that when the inevitable veto showdown occurs, the Dems wont just wilt on these issues. It would be nice to have a political party in this country that actrually stands up for the Constitution. I realize that the Dems, as a rule, don’t engage in these unitary executive games when they have power, but thats not enough. They need to stand up in defense of the Constitution and that means trying to roll back the damage the Bush Administration has done. This si a good and encouraging first step, but the fight has barely been joined.
November 16th, 2007
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Politics, Legal Issues, Terrorism, NSA |
2 comments
Patterico asks a hypothetical question:
Let’s assume the following hypothetical facts are true. U.S. officials have KSM in custody. They know he planned 9/11 and therefore have a solid basis to believe he has other deadly plots in the works. They try various noncoercive techniques to learn the details of those plots. Nothing works.
They then waterboard him for two and one half minutes.
During this session KSM feels panicky and unable to breathe. Even though he can breathe, he has the sensation that he is drowning. So he gives up information — reliable information — that stops a plot involving people flying planes into buildings.
My simple question is this: based on these hypothetical facts, was the waterboarding session worth it?
This has already been addressed quite handily by Sebastian (also here) and Katherine over at Obsidian Wings, but I want to throw my hat into the ring on this as well.
November 15th, 2007
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Terrorism, Torture |
11 comments
Via Glenn Greenwald, we see that Powerline has surrendered to Bin Laden:
Who is Keith Ellison? (22)
I believe we ran 21 posts in our “Who is Keith Ellison?” series last year before Ellison was elected Minnesota’s Fifth District representative last November. I summarized the Ellison research in the Weekly Standard article “Louis Farrakhan’s first congressman” and the companion post “Keith Ellison for dummies.”
This week’s Star Tribune report on Ellison’s new cause [due process for al-Haj] prompts me to resurrect the series for part 22 . . . Reader Norm Carpenter asks us to connect the dots, from Guantanamo, to Al Jazeera, to Ellison. Who is Keith Ellison, and whom does he represent?
And what terrible crime did Ellison commit? he demanded that people — particularly an accredited journalist — be given hearings and trials at which they would either be convicted or released. And that brings out the smear machine.
Well, let me give the boys at Powerline another example of an American hating traitor:
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
… For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
That is from the Declaration of Independence, perhaps, to steal a line, the most masterful expression of the American mind. Or, it least it used to be the most masterful expression of the American mind. But now, apparently, those words mean nothing to the people at places like Powerline and the White House. They have abandoned a principle so important hat it helped lead to the founding of the country, despite their strident demands that we all respect their patriotism. it is a strange patriotism that turns its back upon the founding ideals of a nation at the first sign of danger. The country could use quite a bit less of the White House’s patriotism if that is how they wish to define it.
No, some combination of fear, bigotry, and a deep seated authoritarianism (which, in the end, is just another kind of fear. Authoritarians want some Big Strong Leader to protect them, to make everything all right, to keep the bad thoughts out of their precious little heads. To be an authoritarian follower is to be afraid of the world all of the time) have lead them to throw away everything good and decent about the country because Bin Laden conducted one successful attack on the country. Bin Laden has already beaten these people. He has, with one blow, caused them to abandon the ideals that Bin Laden was fighting against and, by so doing so, take the kids of actions that cannot but help Bin Laden “prove” that his propaganda about the country is correct.
Bin Laden has beaten them.
November 5th, 2007
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Politics, Iraq, Terrorism |
3 comments
Roger Cohen thinks that Europe is too pacifist, too unwilling to fight and die in Afghanistan:
The former group, battling the Taliban in Helmand Province and elsewhere, includes the United States, Britain, Canada and the Netherlands. The latter is dominated by Germany, Spain and Italy. The split gives a rough guide to parts of the world that still see military force as inextricable from international security and others that are now functionally pacifist.
“In Afghanistan, NATO solidarity collapses at the point of danger,” said Julian Lindley-French, a military expert at the Netherlands Defense Academy. “There’s no point planning robust operations worldwide if the burden is not shared. A lot of the German troops are little more than heavily armed traffic cops.”
Canada, with about 2,500 soldiers in Afghanistan, has seen 71 killed. That is about three times the German losses and seven times the Italian. Britain has more than 80 dead, and the United States almost 450. These are eloquent numbers.
There are several problems here, only one of which he addresses at all: Pakistan
One German retort I’ve heard is that it’s no good having the United States demand that its allies fight and die in southern Afghanistan when Washington refuses debate over the role of its pampered friend, Pakistan, in the violence.
That’s a fair point. Still, it’s time to bring on the Bundesmacht and past time for continental Europe to overcome its pacifist mirage and accept that these are dangerous times demanding serious defense budgets and sacrifice.
Cohen says its a fair point, but then, without even attempting to address it, says that Europe should just do as he wants anyway. But why should the EU send more troops to fight and die in a war that the actions of its primary ally make un-winnable? If southern Afghanistan cannot be pacified without dealing with the border region of Pakistan — not an unreasonable conclusion - -and the United States refuses to take any steps to force Pakistan to allow that region to be pacified - -which is a fair description of US policy at this point — then why should EU soldiers die in a fight they cannot win? How is it pacifisim to avoid wasting the lives of your soldiers?
But Cohen’s biggest oversight is the failure to address the affect that Bush Iraq disaster has had on the international playing field. Cohen writes that the mission in Iraq has changed and that the Taliban is resurgent. He ails to mention that those sad events have come about because the United States went off on a hair-brained scheme in Iraq instead of finishing the job in Afghanistan. What purpose does it serve for the Eu to become even more tightly ensnared in Afghanistan not knowing whether or not the US is serious about its commitment in Afghanistan. The EU already knows that Bush has no intention of ever leaving Iraq, much less shifting the focus of American military to Afghanistan.
More importantly, Bush’s Iraq war has been a monumental disaster. It has destabilized the region, lent credence to the propaganda of the terrorist, provided them with a marvelous recruiting tool, and made it easier for them to learn how to attack Western forces. Perhpas the Eu is worried about following the US lead, even in Afghanistan, becasue it is convinced that the US doesn;t have the first clue as to how to fight an insurgency or deal with the Muslim world. We have already seen reports of British commanders begging their US counterparts to not use so many air-strikes, as they kill indiscriminately and drive people into the arms of the Taliban as a result. Perhaps the EU is making the rational decision that they need to try tactics other than that of the US but that effort would be torpedoed by closer military co-operation with bumbling US commanders in the south of Afghanistan.
Perhaps I am wrong; perhaps the concerns I lay out here are overblown or of such little cost compared ot the potential gain that they should be put aside. But Cohen doesn’t even consider those issues. No, to him, Germans are pacifists and weak because they refuse to rush headlong into supporting, without question or control, what the Bush Administration does in the south of Afghanistan. IN Cohen’s world, there could never be a rational, well though out, compelling reason not to blow sh*t up. No, refusal to fall in line is the result of a moral failing or the result of wishful thinking, of believing in a “mirage”.
Cohen, a columnist for the New York Times, has just written an opinion piece whose “argument” is little more than name calling and chest thumping, barely fir for the playground much less a serious columnist. And yet he is a serious columnist, writing from one of the loftiest perches in the free world. That he and his editors thinks this an op-ed suitable for publication is both stunning and terrifying. Welcome to the our nation’s very serious foreign policy discussion; fell free to check your brain at the door. It appears that most of our commentariat has.
October 25th, 2007
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Culture, Iraq, Terrorism, Media |
2 comments
Where did this happen?
As the second series of questioning was ending, Higazy requested that Templeton stop. He testified that he began “feeling intense pain in my arm. I remember hearing my heartbeat in my head and I just couldn’t breathe. I said, ‘Sir, sir, please, stop. It hurts. Please stop. Please take it off.’” Templeton unhooked the polygraph, and according to Higazy, called Higazy a baby and told him that a nine-year-old could tolerate this pain. Templeton left the room to get Higazy water, and upon his return, Higazy asked whether anybody else had ever suffered physical pain during the polygraph, to which Templeton replied: “[i]t never happened to anyone who told the truth.”
Higazy alleges that during the polygraph, Templeton told him that he should cooperate, and explained that if Higazy did not cooperate, the FBI would make his brother “live in scrutiny” and would “make sure that Egyptian security gives [his] family hell.” Templeton later admitted that he knew how the Egyptian security forces operated: “that they had a security service, that their laws are different than ours, that they are probably allowed to do things in that country where they don’t advise people of their rights, they don’t – yeah, probably about torture, sure.”
That’s right, it happen in the United States of America. A federal agent tortured a man (polygraphs do not cause pain. The device he used was obviously either a torture device made to look like a polygraph or a polygraph modified to cause pain) and then threatened to have that man’s entire family tortured in order to get a false confession. Monster seems an appropriate term here. So does criminal and immoral and war crimes and other such terms that are supposed to be quaint in this age of unreasoning panic.
When the President and his apologists talk about extraordinary interrogation methods, this is what they mean: physically and mentally abusing a man until he tells them exactly what they want to hear. It is wrong and more than wrong. It is monstrous. It destroys the entire rational for fighting a war on terrorism. What makes us better than the terrorists, what makes the United States worth emulation and defense by people other than Americans, is that represents an expansive notion of freedom and human dignity that applies ot everyone in the world. Or, it used to before Bush and Cheney drowned that ideal in blood and torture. This country has never lived entirely up to its ideals, but it has never so publicly and, God help us all, proudly proclaimed that its founding ideals were a lie, meant only for the special few who did not displease the United States government.
Right now, in the Muslim world, we have no defense against the propaganda of Al Qaeda. When they say follow us, we know the mind of God and thus know how to take care of you and yours” we used to be able to say “we know a better a way, a way that values you and yours as people and allows you the space and the freedom to make your way through the world as you see fit.” We cannot say that anymore. We invaded a country that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda and then we publicly proclaimed our desire to torture people, including those innocents who would inevitably be caught up in such practices. Our promises are worth nothing and our actions are those of a bully and thug. Thanks to the cowards in the White House, we have betrayed our morality and thrown away our most powerful weapon. All so that Bush and Cheney can feel proud of how well they are protecting the country as they read the false confessions of dangerous men like the completely and totally innocent Higazy.
October 23rd, 2007
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General, Culture, Terrorism, Torture |
3 comments
David Horowitz, the right-wing provocateur, along with Michelle Malkin and similar bottom-feeders, is promoting “Islamofascism Awareness Week” this month on college campuses, in conjunction with college conservative groups. It’s another exercise in putting a smugly self-righteous face on their own bigotry.
October 17th, 2007
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General, Politics, Church & State, Religion, Culture, Iraq, Terrorism, News & Current Events, Iran |
25 comments
So it seems that the Bush Administration apparently started spying on Americans without warrants before 9/11:
Mr. Nacchio said last year that he had refused an N.S.A. request for customers’ call records in late 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks, as the agency initiated domestic surveillance and data mining programs to monitor Al Qaeda communications.
But the documents unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Denver, first reported in The Rocky Mountain News on Thursday, claim for the first time that pressure on the company to participate in activities it saw as improper came as early as February, nearly seven months before the terrorist attacks.
The significance of the claim is hard to assess, because the court documents are heavily redacted and N.S.A. officials will not comment on the agency’s secret surveillance programs. Other government officials have said that the agency’s eavesdropping without warrants began only after Sept. 11, 2001, under an order from President Bush.
But the court filings in Mr. Nacchio’s case illustrate what is well known inside the telecommunications industry but little appreciated by the public: that the N.S.A. has for some time worked closely with phone companies, whose networks carry the telephone and Internet traffic the agency seeks out for intercept.
If this is true, and it does fit their history, there are a couple of points here aside form the Bush Administration’s strange and overwhelming desire to be remember as less competent imitators of Pinochet. All but one company went along with this power grab and 9/11 happened anyway. Obviously, the spying program did little good to protect the country. Which is expected. If you have read the 9/11 Commission report, the problem was almost never a lack of intelligence. The problem was that intelligence was not shared, out of professional jealousy and incompetence primarily, and we did not have enough trained analysts to review the intelligence we did have in time to prevent the attacks. So the next time someone on the right whines about how having to obey the Constitution means hat we are all going to die! die! die!, remind them that the Bush Administration has been ignoring the Constitution since before 9/11 and it did us no damn good.
The second important point in this story is that the telecom companies all bowed before the government, at least in part, because they were afraid of losing large contracts. Their economic well being demanded that they comply with spying on their customers and so they did. There may have well been other reasons for their capitulation, but it needs to be noted that when the government failed to provide strong oversight of their behavior, they ran for the quick buck, regardless of the effect of their actions on their customers, their fellow citizens, and their country. From the standpoint of business, it makes perfect sense. Which, absent strong government oversight, is why it will happen again and again.
Without a strong reason not to, telecom companies will almost always put their economic interests ahead of any other considerations; it is what corporations are designed to do. Markets cannot keep you free, because markets care only about profit and loss. The pressure to produce profit and avoid loss eventually means that, in an unfettered marketplace, the scrupulous will almost certainly be driven out of the market by the unscrupulous. When government oversight breaks down, as it did spectacularly in this case, the free market will chain you as fast as any government. They might, if they are very clever, even get you to pay for the chains yourself.
October 16th, 2007
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Economics, Terrorism, NSA, How Capitalism Will Ruin You |
25 comments
Congratualtions, Mr. Bush, Mr Cheney: you have now establsihed a moral and legal code that would make Pinochet proud:
When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.
But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.
Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.
Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.
Torture is wrong. That used to go without saying, it used to be understood. But not now. No, now we have moral degenerates like Dick Cheney running the show, men who think that macho posturing makes up for their deep moral and intellectual failings, men who are too stupid to understand that torture is the leas effective method of interrogation, that it destroys the country’s moral credibility, and that it leads to bad information and wasted time chasing down false leads. Now we have men whose morality is so deficient that they think Pinochet is a model, not a monster.
There three kinds of people in the world, with respect to the United States. The first will hate us almost no matter what we do, because we represent something about the world and how to make your way in it that they despise. The second will love us no almost no matter what we do, for essentially the same in reason in reverse. The vast majority of the world falls into category three: people whose opinions of the US are shaped by what the US does. These people care about the US only to the extant that we touch their lives, impress their sense of the good, or offend their sense of morality. To these people we are what we do.
And what we do now, thanks to Bush and Cheney, is kidnap people, send suspects to be tortured by friendly tyrants, lock people away without much hope of a truly fair trial, and torture prisoners as a matter of policy.
The next time you wonder why they hate us, sit very still and listen for the screams, faint and distant, of the men entrusted to the morality of Dick Cheney and perhaps you will understand at least part of the answer.
October 4th, 2007
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Terrorism, Torture |
8 comments
From the ACLU:
Fix it. Defend the Constitution! That’s the message we have to send to Speaker Pelosi, Senator Reid and every member of Congress over the next 20 days.
By all indications, the House and Senate will cast critical votes within three weeks — deciding whether or not to make the vast new spying powers that they granted the Bush Administration in August permanent.
We can’t let that happen. That’s why we’re starting the FISA Flood of 2007 with today’s leadership switchboard shutdown. All our members of Congress but especially leadership — who control the agenda and whose actions impact us all — need to know just how many Americans demand they act to restore the Constitution. Here’s three things you can do, right now:
1. Call House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at (202) 225-4965.
2. Call Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at (202) 224-3542.
3. Call your own representative. You can look up your representative’s phone number here.
It’s clear what freedom demands. And this is what we need every Member of Congress to hear:
* Congress should not act on FISA until the Bush administration hands over the documents about the NSA wiretapping program.
* Any legislation to permanently amend FISA must restore judicial review and protect the privacy rights of innocent Americans.
* The government should receive only the information it is authorized to intercept by law, it should not be given direct and unfettered access to telecommunications infrastructure.
* And the legislation must not grant amnesty to telecom companies that broke the law by illegally releasing Americans’ phone calls and records to the government.
Call right now as we launch the FISA Flood of 2007 — a monumental outpouring of grassroots energy. Demand that Congress stand strong by standing up for the Constitution, not caving in to the Bush Administration.
We shouldn’t have to throw away our freedom in the name of an illusionary security from an over-hyped enemy. Al Qaeda cannot destroy this country. They cannot conquer our nation, they cannot cripple our infrastructure, they cannot ruin our economy. Yes, they are mass murderers, but they are not a threat to the survival of our nation. The only way they can do any permanent damage is if we allow ourselves to be terrified into destroying our freedoms ourselves.
It is time to stop panicing.
October 1st, 2007
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Politics, Legal Issues, Terrorism |
15 comments
You take seriously things like this:
A Pentagon group has encouraged some U.S. military snipers in Iraq to target suspected insurgents by scattering pieces of “bait,” such as detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, and then killing Iraqis who pick up the items, according to military court documents.
The classified program was described in investigative documents related to recently filed murder charges against three snipers who are accused of planting evidence on Iraqis they killed.
“Baiting is putting an object out there that we know they will use, with the intention of destroying the enemy,” Capt. Matthew P. Didier, the leader of an elite sniper scout platoon attached to the 1st Battalion of the 501st Infantry Regiment, said in a sworn statement. “Basically, we would put an item out there and watch it. If someone found the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against U.S. Forces.”
So they are going to put down material and shoot anyone who walks away with it. Never mind that the material could be used for something other than military operations; never mind that many, if not most, of the people who come across this stuff will not know what it is; never mind that people are pack racks and just pick things up because; never mind that the Iraqi economy is a mess and people will be on the lookout for things to use or sell; never mind that people in a war zone tend to try and remove armaments from locations where people could get hurt. Never mind, in other words, that this program is absolutely guaranteed to kill innocents.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but apparently I do: you do not win against an insurgency by random, indiscriminate violence. All that does is make it easier for the insurgents to get help and to recruit. The fact that such an idiotic and obviously counterproductive program has been put in place means that the US Army is losing in Iraq. This is the kind of stupidity that only happens when an occupying power has become frustrated past the point of reason. It is mindless lashing out, driven by the desire to do something to hurt the bastards that are hurting you. But counter-insurgency cannot succeed without the support of the population. When you stop making plans with that in mind, you start losing the war.
September 24th, 2007
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Iraq, Terrorism |
5 comments
You know, this country survived a foreign invasion, civil war, two world wars, and a cold war with an enemy that possessed enough nuclear weapons to turn every inch of the planet inot glass a hundred times over. It survived these threats without throwing away the Constitution. But when a couple of failed goat herders got lucky once, our Congress pissed their collective pants and willingly voted away the Fourth Amendment. Senators tend to be concerned, sooner or later, with their legacy. It might help if you pointed out to them that, right now, their section of the history book is entitled “Notable Cowards of the Early 21st Century”
The cloture vote –the vote to break the GOP lead filibuster, just to be clear — is apparently sometime this morning. There are phone numbers at the link above. Please, call your Senators and remind them that we aren’t supposed to be a nation of cowards.
September 19th, 2007
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Politics, Legal Issues, Terrorism, Torture |
33 comments
Do your good deed for the day:
This week, we have a critical opportunity to restore habeas corpus.
The Habeas Corpus Restoration Act gives us a chance to reverse one of the Bush Administration’s many assaults on our civil liberties.
We all want to make America safe from terrorism, but becoming a nation that sanctions the unlawful detention of its own residents — detaining and jailing them without the chance to appear before a judge — does not make us safe. Instead, it violates a value that we have held dear for centuries — safeguarding our individual freedom before arbitrary state action.
Please sign-on below as a citizen co-sponsor to the bipartisan Leahy-Specter-Dodd Habeas Corpus Restoration Act.
The right to challenge the government’s ability to detain you is fundamental to freedom. In a very real sense, no freedom can exist without it. Without it, the government can lock you away for ever and ever, with no hope of ever getting out, with no requirement that they justify that detention. The destruction of habeas corpus is the goal of men like Pinochet and Hussein. And our government willingly voted it away for a class of people. That’s not something to be proud of whatever the GOP frontrunners may tell you. The name for people who would vote away their foundational freedom is serf, not citizen.
Be a citizen, today, and help Dodd restore habeas corpus.
Link via Digby.
September 18th, 2007
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Legal Issues, Terrorism, Torture |
one comment
Please tell me this is some kind of sick joke…
August 9th, 2007
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Culture, Terrorism |
no comments
Sometimes, science just confirms commonsense:
People who have been traumatized by exposure to war crimes have a tendency to choose violent means and reject nonviolent means to achieve peace, says a joint Tulane University/University of California-Berkeley study in the August 1 issue of Journal of the American Medical Association.
The neo-con foreign policy is essentially one of bullying. They believe that if we just abuse, humiliate, kill and otherwise push around enough people then everyone will be too afraid to mess with us. A moment’s thought should be enough to prove that notion silly, but now we have some actual science to fall back on.
August 8th, 2007
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General, Terrorism |
one comment
Yesterday, a suicide bomber killed 28 people in the Northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar. It puts a gruesome exclamation point on the demise of the lone bright spot in the Iraq war, and serves as a microcosm of what might have been in Iraq, versus what actually was.
A little history is in order here. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, the city of Tal Afar was a particularly nasty place. It was a hotbed of insurgent activity, and its position near the Syrian border made it possible for such insurgents to get outside support. The city was one of the worst places in Iraq, and its outlook was bleak.
Enter Col. H.R. McMaster. He was tasked with stabilizing Tal Afar and suppressing insurgent efforts there. Beginning in May-June of 2005, McMaster’s forces engaged in a three-phase plan to secure Tal Afar and the surrounding Ninawa province. It started with a methodical sweep of the city to kill or capture insurgents and their leaders. Then the entire city was actively patrolled by armed troops to keep the peace and discourage new insurgent attacks. Finally, they put their good intentions into practice by rebuilding the infrastructure of the city. The strategy became known as clear-hold-build. And it worked.
If you ever saw footage of American troops fraternizing with Iraqi civilians — smiling, chatting, taking pictures, etc. — there’s a good chance that this footage came from Tal Afar. Clear-hold-build was a blueprint for how to establish peace in Iraqi cities. If it could work in Tal Afar, one of the worst places in all of Iraq, why couldn’t it work elsewhere?
Many people in the government took notice, including Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. She and others actively went to bat for clear-hold-build as a strategy moving forward. There was one big problem, however: Clear-hold-build is very manpower-intensive, and it therefore ran directly counter to the administration’s preference to try to execute the war with a thin force. With the 2006 midterms looming, and the American public already weary of American efforts there, clear-hold-build was rejected, with the administration foolishly accepting Iraqi government promises that they would do the holding and building.
We all know how this turned out. To be honest, by the time all this happened (roughly September of 2006), it was almost certainly already too late for anything like success in Iraq. But the limited success of clear-hold-build in Tal Afar, while it lasted, shows that whatever you might think about the justification for going into Iraq, proper planning and adequate deployment from the beginning could have limited or prevented the disaster we currently have on our hands.
Tal Afar, once the lone beacon of hope, has once again fallen into the despair that plagues the entire country. What could have been a model for American success in Iraq is instead yet another example of the completeness of our failure there.
(Primary sources here and here. I highly recommend both.)
August 7th, 2007
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Politics, Iraq, Terrorism |
26 comments
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