war on terror » Undiplomatic

8 March 2010 Charles J. Brown
04:56 pm

Marc Thiessen: Our Bizzaro World Torture Apologist

Ladies and gentleman, I present you the latest WaPo column by Marc Thiessen, who apparently has decided that his goal in life is to make Liz Cheney look like Mother Theresa:

Would most Americans want to know if the Justice Department had hired a bunch of mob lawyers and put them in charge of mob cases? Or a group of drug cartel lawyers and put them in charge of drug cases? Would they want their elected representatives to find out who these lawyers were, which mob bosses and drug lords they had worked for, and what roles they were now playing at the Justice Department? Of course they would — and rightly so.

Yet Attorney General Eric Holder hired former al-Qaeda lawyers to serve in the Justice Department and resisted providing Congress this basic information.

Get the insinuation? Mob lawyers, as everyone knows, are lawyers hired by the mob to defend their interests. Drug cartel lawyers, as everyone knows, are lawyers hired by drug cartels to defend their interests. So “al Qaeda lawyers” must be. . . .

I know! Paid by al Qaeda! Those bastards! Send them to Guantanamo!

Only one small problem here, Marc. The attorneys in question worked pro bono, frequently at the request of [Bush] Administration officials. And some of the people in question, as I’ve noted elsewhere, were brought in by the Bush Administration in the exact same way that you now object to under the Obama Administration.

One other thing: those lawyers you despise for allegedly selling out their country? They took their cases to the Supreme Court. And in a couple of instances, they won. If we were to use your twisted logic, we should now start calling members of the Supreme Court “al Qaeda justices.” And what about the JAG attorneys who defended terror suspects in front of the military tribunals? Are they now al Qaeda judge advocates?

Here’s another Thiessen counter-factual:

Where was the moral outrage when fine lawyers like John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Jim Haynes, Steve Bradbury and others came under vicious personal attack? Their critics did not demand simple transparency; they demanded heads. . . .The standard today seems to be that you can say or do anything when it comes to the Bush lawyers who defended America against the terrorists. But if you publish an Internet ad or ask legitimate questions about Obama administration lawyers who defended America’s terrorist enemies, you are engaged in a McCarthyite witch hunt.

Sigh.

First of all, the critics of Yoo et. al. demanded both transparency and heads. Second, this isn’t a tit for tat situation. You are alleging that the lawyers in question did something you didn’t like — but was perfectly legal — when they were in private practice. Those criticizing (and yes, demanding the resignation/censure of) Yoo and friends were saying that they engaged in illegal behavior. Those are not the same thing — and you know better. This is the worst kind of straw man argument — one that uses a straw man to mount an ad hominem attack.

Would someone please again tell me why the Washington Post hired this guy?

Wow

I don’t really know what to say about this other than wow. Michael Scheuer, who is best known for Imperial Hubris (which originally was written listed as written by “anonymous,” since Scheuer had not yet left the CIA, where he was a member of the bin Laden Unit), talks to Glenn Beck (h/t):

Uighurs to Palau

So it looks like the Uigurs held in Guantanamo are finally going to be released — not to the DC area as originally planned, but to the Pacific Island nation of Palau. NYT:

The United States has won an agreement to transfer up to 17 Chinese Muslims from the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to Palau, a sparsely populated archipelago in the North Pacific, according to a statement released by Palau to The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The president of Palau, Johnson Toribiong, said his government had “agreed to accommodate the United States of America’s request” to “temporarily resettle” the detainees, members of the Uighur ethnic group, “subject to periodic review.” Palau, the president said, would be “honored and proud” to take them in a “humanitarian gesture.” . . .

Three Obama administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity Tuesday because the negotiations were not yet complete, said it was not certain how many of the Uighurs would be settled in Palau. With barely 20,000 people, Palau, about 500 miles east of the Philippines, is one of the world’s least-populated nations, made up of 8 main islands and 250 smaller ones. . . .

The United States has pledged $200 million in long-term development aid to Palau. But a senior State Department official flatly denied it was a quid pro quo for the detainee deal.

Palau is known more for its tropical scenery and scuba diving than for its involvement in international politics. But despite its tiny size, it is diverse, with Philippine and Chinese populations. The Uighurs, some say, could do a lot worse for themselves. “What they will encounter in Palau is paradise,” said Stuart Beck, an American lawyer who is Palau’s permanent United Nations representative. “From the time the first British vessel hit a reef in Palau in 1783, it has welcomed refugees.”

When I saw this, my first reaction was not unlike Beck’s: they’re going to paradise. My second reaction was that they’re coming from a nightmare. And I’m not sure that seven years of enforced (and largely unnecessary) hell was worth it — especially given the fact that they’re being dropped into what is going to feel like the middle of nowhere. In addition, keep in mind that they’ve been on a semi-tropical island for the past seven years and it hasn’t exactly been beach blanket bingo.

Interestingly, Palau is one of the few countries left that continues to recognize Taiwan instead of the PRC, so this must be doubly galling to the Chinese. But given the fact that there is a Chinese minority there, it’s not going to be that difficult for the ChiComs to dispatching someone to watch them.

One other thing I haven’t seen anywhere else: it’s largely forgotten now, but Palau was a member of the “coalition of the willing.” If I’m not mistaken (I couldn’t find confirmation in a brief review of the intertubes), they got additional development assistance back then as well.

Jack Bauer, White Courtesy Phone Please

You gotta love House Republicans. Why appeal to reason when you can go straight to scare tactics?

Sheesh, all that’s missing is Jack Bauer.

What the GOP seems to be suggesting is FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR.

But that’s just a guess.

Set aside, if you can, the action movie soundtrack and the slick production values.

Set aside — as hard as it may be — that the night vision video of U.S. troops kicking down doors is in all likelihood from Iraq, which as even (most) Republicans now admit, had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.

Set aside the questions you may want to ask in return, like “How does torturing people make us safer?” Or “How did Abu Ghraib make us safer?” Or, even better, “How did invading Iraq make us safer?”

Instead, ask the GOP just one question.

Where’s Osama?

Why is it that you can’t show him in the video?

Oh wait, that’s right. You got busy in Iraq and forgot to catch him.

Heckuva job there, GOP.

One other thing: the Democrats have an answer to this stupid, stupid fear-mongering: as many Republicans, including John McCain and Robert Gates, have acknowledged, closing Guantanamo makes us safer because it eliminates one of al Qaeda’s most effective recruiting tools.

But don’t take my word for it. Just listen to that notorious terrorist sympathizer Richard Clarke:

This video and the recent Republican attacks on Guantanamo are more desperate attempts from a demoralized party to politicize national security and the safety of the American people. But what is more disturbing is their brazen use of imagery and the memory of 9/11 to score political points. Thousands of Americans tragically died that day, and for the GOP to think it can win elections by denigrating their memory is disgraceful.

The difference between these Republican videos and the very terrorist propaganda that seeks to damage our society is negligible. Each attempt to stoke the embers of fear in order to disrupt American life. Just as al Qaeda videos should be viewed as misguided rants from a small group of marginalized radicals, so too should these Republican videos be equally dismissed. As opposed to what the GOP thinks, the American people are not that naïve.

(h/t)

Repost: The Manchurian President

The following is a reposting of something I wrote back in July, when word first leaked that the Bush Administration had used techniques first developed by the Chinese. Given today’s news, I think it’s worth repeating today.

We’ve all heard the whispers. Every four years, the extreme right starts suggesting that the current Democratic candidate for President is a traitor. He’s not a patriot, they say — he’s actually a Communist/athiest/internationalist/Muslim.

Every four years, they find a new variation on this theme: Bill Clinton was recruited by the Soviets when he visited the USSR. Al Gore will cede American sovereignty to the United Nations. John Kerry was recruited by the Viet Cong during the war. Barack Obama was recruited by a Muslim terror cell while attending an Indonesian madrasa. It’s just like that movie — you know – The Manchurian Candidate.

Today, we found out who the real Manchurian Candidate really was: George W. Bush.

No, I’m not suggesting that our President was kidnapped or brainwashed by anyone. It’s actually much worse than that. He’s not Laurence Harvey — he’s Angela Freaking Lansbury.

Here’s the story from today’s Times:

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

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

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

You read that correctly: our government authorized the use of techniques developed by the Chinese to torture American servicemen in Korea. And as Andrew Sullivan points out today, the North Vietnamese adopted a similar approach in Vietnam — meaning that they were used on John McCain.

That’s awful enough. But here’s the kicker. As Matt Yglesias notes,

[T]he main purpose of these Chinese torture techniques was to elicit false confessions. That’s not very surprising as the main use of torture in interrogations has always been to elicit false confessions.

But still, to literally rip your techniques off from a study called “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War” requires some level of obliviousness I wasn’t aware of. Or else maybe they were looking for false confessions?

There really are only two conclusions here. Either the Bush Administration is mind-bendingly stupid, or they are unconscionably evil. Then again, there is one more possibility: they’re both. But regardless of which of these equally distressing options is correct, one thing is crystal clear: they are a cancer on our values and our freedoms.

How can any conservative support a regime whose policies represent the absolute antithesis of the values of those who fought and often died to defeat communism?

How could anyone with a conscience support a government that steals the methods of our former enemies — who used them against our own soldiers to force false conventions — and then applies them to “extract” the truth?

For a long time, I resisted those who called Bush, Cheney, and their cronies evil. I criticized those who demanded their impeachment, arguing that it would only garner them sympathy.

Not anymore. Impeach them. Better yet, indict them. Prosecute them for war crimes and crimes against humanity. And then toss them into jail and throw away the key.

SERE-ing the Conscience

In case you haven’t seen it, from the NYT today:

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.

A lot of this isn’t new — again, Jane Mayer reported it in The Dark Side. But it’s appalling to think that American officials made the decision to torture without making any effort to learn what they were doing. As Mayer noted in her Google talk, this was as much about retribution as it was about information.

We all knew it was bad. We even had the gut feeling it was this bad. But no one expected it would be this stupid.

I’ll have more on this in just a minute.

Torture: Something Old, Something New

Trying to catch up on all the new info coming out on torture, including the Senate Armed Services Committee Report and the right’s response. It is, frankly, a bit overwhelming, especially given the fact I’m not a full-time blogger.

That said, I think we’re beginning to see a level of outrage worthy of the crimes. The Obama Administration is going to have a very difficult time preventing prosecutions and/or a Congressionally sanctioned truth commission.

In addition, I am struck by how much of what is coming out confirms Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side. It’s still worth reading. As Mayer herself notes, there is new info, but she reported not only the framework, but also many of the details.

If you have the time, watch Mayer’s talk at Google last year (warning — the interviewer is inane, but it’s still worth it):

The Torture Memos: The Two John McCains

This is a post I did not want to write.

For most of his career, John McCain has been an outspoken advocate against torture. So you would think that Senator McCain would have cheered the White House’s decision to release the torture memos.

Unfortunately, you would be wrong (h/t):

McCain says he wishes that the Bush Administration had abided by the Detainee Treatment Act, of which he was the principal sponsor. He describes waterboarding as “unacceptable” and “torture, period.” He notes that those tortured will tell an interrogator “whatever they want to hear.” He says that it’s a great “recruiting tool” for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. He says that it doesn’t matter whether the Administration got useful intelligence from torture because of the resulting damage to America’s reputation around the world.

But he also says that the release of the memos “Helps no one.” He says that it “doesn’t help America’s image.” He says that their release “does not help address the issue. He believes that “it was a serious mistake to release these memos.”

So on one hand, Senator McCain believes that torture has hurt America’s reputation in the world and that it has encouraged our enemies. On the other, he believes that offically acknowleging torture will hurt America’s reputation in the world and that it will encourage our enemies.

I wanted to give Senator McCain the opportunity to clarify his remarks. I contacted his office, which promptly returned my call. But despite my repeated efforts to get additional information, his office provided only the following statement, and only on background (meaning that no one was willing to be quoted):

Senator McCain’s position has been clear, he led the fight on the detainee treatment act, and this sort of conduct shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

That really doesn’t answer the question: Why has Senator McCain has chosen to criticize the Obama Administration’s decision to release the memos as potentially damaging to U.S. interests when he also argues that torture already has damaged American interests.

To put it another way, how can acknowledging the facts somehow be as bad as the facts themselves?

McCain’s decision to continue to defend the actions of the Bush Administration is especially mystifying given that Administration’s past disregard for his opinion. In October 2007, The New York Times obtained two Justice Department memos authorizing waterboarding and other techniques (both of which were among those released by the Obama Administration). In response, McCain told MSNBC that he was

personally assured by administration officials that at least one of the techniques allegedly used in the past, waterboarding, was prohibited under the new law.

In a January 2008 statement, McCain said something similar. It is worth quoting at length:

Throughout these debates, I have said that it was not my intent to eliminate the CIA interrogation program, but rather to ensure that the techniques it employs are humane and do not include such extreme techniques as waterboarding. I said on the Senate floor during the debate over the Military Commissions Act, “Let me state this flatly: it was never our purpose to prevent the CIA from detaining and interrogating terrorists. On the contrary, it is important to the war on terror that the CIA have the ability to do so. At the same time, the CIA’s interrogation program has to abide by the rules, including the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act.” This remains my view today.

When, in 2005, the Congress voted to apply the Field Manual to the Department of Defense, it deliberately excluded the CIA. The Field Manual, a public document written for military use, is not always directly translatable to use by intelligence officers. In view of this, the legislation allowed the CIA to retain the capacity to employ alternative interrogation techniques. I’d emphasize that the DTA permits the CIA to use different techniques than the military employs, but that it is not intended to permit the CIA to use unduly coercive techniques – indeed, the same act prohibits the use of any cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment. . . .

This necessarily brings us to the question of waterboarding. Administration officials have stated in recent days that this technique is no longer in use, but they have declined to say that it is illegal under current law. I believe that it is clearly illegal and that we should publicly recognize this fact. In assessing the legality of waterboarding, the Administration has chosen to apply a “shocks the conscience” analysis to its interpretation of the DTA. I stated during the passage of that law that a fair reading of the prohibition on cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment outlaws waterboarding and other extreme techniques. It is, or should be, beyond dispute that waterboarding “shocks the conscience.”

It is also incontestable that waterboarding is outlawed by the Military Commissions Act, and it was the clear intent of Congress to prohibit the practice. The MCA enumerates grave breaches of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions that constitute offenses under the War Crimes Act. Among these is an explicit prohibition on acts that inflict “serious and non-transitory mental harm,” which the MCA states “need not be prolonged.” Staging a mock execution by inducing the misperception of drowning is a clear violation of this standard. Indeed, during the negotiations, we were personally assured by Administration officials that this language, which applies to all agencies of the U.S. Government, prohibited waterboarding.

It is unfortunate that the reluctance of officials to stand by this straightforward conclusion has produced in the Congress such frustration that we are today debating whether to apply a military field manual to non-military intelligence activities. It would be far better, I believe, for the Administration to state forthrightly what is clear in current law – that anyone who engages in waterboarding, on behalf of any U.S. government agency, puts himself at risk of criminal prosecution and civil liability.

If we are to believe Senator McCain, Bush Administration officials looked him in the eye. The first time, in October 2007, they told him that such practices had stopped. The second time, in early 2008, they told him specifically that they no longer waterboarded — but continued to regard such practices as legal.

Let’s not beat around the bush here. On at least two occasions, the Bush Administration flat-out lied to Senator McCain. They told him they weren’t doing what they were doing. And he not only believed them, he publicly defended them.

Making this even odder is that in April 2008, McCain acknowledged to Time magazine’s Michael Scherer that that he did not know the details of the Bush Administration’s policies “any more than is available to non-members of the Intelligence Committee.” That means that when he was accepting the Bush Administration’s assurances, he had no idea what they were doing.

I don’t know whether Senator McCain is angry about this. I would hope so. But given his only public statement (and his office’s subsequent unwillingness to answer my questions), we have no way of knowing.

In the past, critics of the Senator have suggested that his willingness to accept the Bush Administration’s promises was a product of his ambitions — that he was willing to set aside his principled opposition to torture in order to become President.

But that theory doesn’t explain why Senator McCain continues to defend the Administration now that he no longer is a candidate.

Let me repeat my question. Why does Senator McCain now believe that acknowledging the facts is somehow more damaging than the facts themselves?

One possible answer is that this is not about the torture memos.

Senator McCain does not want to acknowledge that he was duped. He does not want to credit the Obama Administration for achieving what he could not — an end to the Bush Administration’s torture regime. He does not want to admit that he was could not prevent our (and his) worst fears from becoming a harsh reality.

I sincerely hope that there is another answer, one that will end the contradiction between John McCain the anti-torture champion and John McCain the Bush Administration apologist. But until we hear more than platitudes and apologies from the Senator himself, we will have to assume the worst.

Back in Your Court(s), Mr. President

Spanish prosecutors have decided not to investigate six Bush Administration officials for violating Spanish law and the Convention against Torture:

Attorney General Candido Conde-Pumpido said Thursday the claim against officials in former President George W. Bush’s administration is fraudulent, CNN reported. The matter was presented by a human rights group and provisionally accepted by a Spanish court pending the prosecutor’s opinion.

If a claim were to be investigated, it should be pursued by the United States so the former officials would have the opportunity to defend themselves in the U.S. court system, Conde-Pumpido said through his press secretary.

That’s good news for the Obama Administration. But here’s hoping it will pay attention to the reason why the Spanish are not pursuing the case — because it’s our responsibility.

The Torture Memos: He is Us.

I’ve spent a good part of the past twenty-four hours mulling over the torture memos.

I want to start by giving props to the always brilliant (and observant) Hilzoy, who like many others noted a particularly horrific section of the 2002 Bybee-Yoo memo:

Hilzoy then notes the following passage in George Orwell’s 1984:

“You asked me once,” said O’Brien, “What was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”

“In your case,” said O’Brien, “the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.”

The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the further table. Because of the position in which O’Brien was standing. Winston could not see what the thing was.

“The worst thing in the world,” said O’Brien, “varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.”

He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.

There are no words for how appalling it is that our government — our government — approved the use of techniques that not only replicate those used by the world’s worst dictatorships, but also freinvented the worst nightmare that George Orwell, our poet-laureate of totalitarianism, could possibly imagine. As one commenter on Hilzoy’s post noted, “Some people read 1984 and think of it as a warning. For others, it is a training manual.”

I am reminded of what Hannah Arendt said about the bureaucracy of torture in her classic Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (emphasis original):

[W]hen I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at at [Eichmann's] trial. . . Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely. . .never realized what he was doing. . . . He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness. . . .

We had heard the protestations of the defense the Eichmann was after all only a “tiny cog” in the machinery of the FInal Solution, and of the prosecution, which believed it had discoverd in Eichmann the actual motor. . . . In its judgment, the court naturally conceded that such a crime could be committed only by a giant bureaucracy using the resources of a government. But insofar as it remains a crime — and that, of course, is the premise for a trial — all the cogs in the machinery, no matter how insignificant, are in court forthwith transformed back into perpetrators, that is to say, into human beings.

If the defendant excuses himself on the ground that he acted not as a man but as a mere functionary whose functions could just as easily have been carried out by anyone else, it is as if a criminal pointed to the statistics on crime — which set forth that so-and-so many crimes per day are committed in such-and-such a place. . . and declared that he not only did what was statistically expected, that it was mere accident that he did it and not somebody else, since after all somebody had to do it.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that those responsible for implementing the policies outlined in these memos are Nazis or Soviets or their contemporary equivalents. Despite the fevered imaginations of the far right (re Obama) and far left (re Bush), we remain a democracy in which citizens still enjoy considerable rights.

But to suggest that those who designed and implemented this policy should not be held responsible involves pretending that individuals — – human beings — played no role in the machinery of torture. That includes not only those who came up with the idea, but also those who developed the legal justification for it, those responsible for doing it, and — no matter how reprehensible these individuals’ crimes may be — those whose who were victims of it.

Taking — and demanding — responsibility is, after all, one of the fundamental tenets of every religious belief system. Those responsible for allowing this to happen must be held accountable. Yes, history will judge. But so should our legal system.

The question here is not what kind of society we are but rather what kind of society we aspire to be. Although we have often failed to live up to the vision of the founders, we always have believed that the better angels of our nature, to use Lincoln’s phrase, would overcome our darkest impulses.

In the end, however, our better angels cannot triumph if we do not acknowledge our mistakes. For that to happen, we must accept our own responsibility. Each and every one of us (by which I mean each and every American citizen) must recognize that we did not prevent the Bush Administration from implementing these practices. And even when we found out, we did nothing — or did not do enough — to stop it.

So in the end, who is responsible? Who is accountable?

I am.

You are.

All of us are.

We have met the torturer, and he is us.

Here Come the Torture Memos: Ten Thoughts (UPDATED)

From a statement issued by the White House today:

The Department of Justice will today release certain memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel between 2002 and 2005 as part of an ongoing court case. These memos speak to techniques that were used in the interrogation of terrorism suspects during that period, and their release is required by the rule of law. . . .

But that is not what compelled the release of these legal documents today. While I believe strongly in transparency and accountability, I also believe that in a dangerous world, the United States must sometimes carry out intelligence operations and protect information that is classified for purposes of national security. I have already fought for that principle in court and will do so again in the future. However, after consulting with the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence, and others, I believe that exceptional circumstances surround these memos and require their release.

First, the interrogation techniques described in these memos have already been widely reported. Second, the previous Administration publicly acknowledged portions of the program – and some of the practices – associated with these memos. Third, I have already ended the techniques described in the memos through an Executive Order. Therefore, withholding these memos would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time. This could contribute to an inaccurate accounting of the past, and fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States.

In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution. The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world. Their accomplishments are unsung and their names unknown, but because of their sacrifices, every single American is safer. We must protect their identities as vigilantly as they protect our security, and we must provide them with the confidence that they can do their jobs. . . .

This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.

The United States is a nation of laws. My Administration will always act in accordance with those laws, and with an unshakeable commitment to our ideals. That is why we have released these memos, and that is why we have taken steps to ensure that the actions described within them never take place again.

So what can we conclude from this?

1. The Administration has decided to release those documents that show how the torture regime came about. The docs are not yet out, and I’m guessing that parts will be redacted, but chances are that they will include further evidence of just how far down the road the Bush Administration went.

2. That said, it’s not clear clear the Administration would have released these memos without the ACLU lawsuit.

3. The Administration not only does not want to prosecute anyone, it does not want anyone else spending “time and energy laying blame for the past.” That means it will oppose any efforts to establish a Congressionally sanctioned investigative body modeled after the 9/11 Commission.

4. CIA Director Leon Panetta won the battle to grant immunity to line officers who implemented the Bush Administration’s torture regime. He did not, however succeed in preventing the memos from being released. It’s not yet clear the degree to which he was successful in getting them redacted.

5. It is an irony, but this probably will help Panetta’s efforts to reform the Agency and clean up some of the messes left by the previous Administration.

6. It remains unclear whether this decision will hinder what I assume are behind-the-scenes efforts to get the Spanish to walk back from their decision investigate six Bush Administration officials for torture. I suspect that my former colleagues in the human rights community will conclude that the chances of a domestic prosecution are now slim, and will push the Spanish courts to pursue this further.

7. If the Spanish court indicts any former Bush Administration officials, it will create more problems for Obama than any domestic investigation would have.

8. Given the the Spanish investigation, and given the fact that the memos may produce more outrage, there remains a chance that Congress will move to establish a Commission without the support of the Administration. You may remember that Congress created both the 9/11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group despite opposition from the Bush Administration. That said, I see no interest in Congress (beyond Patrick Leahy and a few others) to push for such a Commission.

9. The Administration’s actions today — particularly its announced intention not to pursue prosecutions — should have the effect of smoothing the path to the confirmation for Dawn Johnsen to head the OLC and Harold Koh to serve as Legal Adviser in the State Department.

10. This isn’t a game ender, but it is a game changer. No matter what those who want prosecutions may think, most Americans are tired of anything that requires them to reflect on the Bush Administration. There has never been the level of sustained public outrage about the Bush torture policies that we’ve seen in the case of those responsible for the economic crisis.

What do you think? If you haven’t yet, vote in our poll on what should happen next.

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UPDATE: Several sources have reported that only the CIA agents’ names will be redacted.

One other thing: some in the media are saying that Obama has granted immunity to those who implemented the Bush Administration’s policies. Unless I’m mistaken (and please tell me if I am), the only power the President has is to pardon them. His administration can choose not to prosecute, and to oppose any attempt by others to do so, but the President does not have the power to grant immunity per se.

Systems Theory and U.S. Foreign Policy: Obama’s Trip to Europe

Back in the 1960s, MIT’s Sloan School of Management developed something called the “beer game,” which — much to the dismay of MIT students — did not involve shot glasses, ping pongs, or even beer. The purpose of the exercise was to demonstrate the challenges of managing a supply chain, and how inputs into one part of the chain could radically affect (usually negatively) decision-making elsewhere. It is a classic demonstration of systems theory, the idea that everything is interrelated and that you can’t make a decision in isolation without it having an impact on a variety of other matters beyond your horizon.

Management guru Peter Senge, explained the importance of systems theory in The Fifth Discipline (which, despite the fact it was written for business leaders, should be read by everyone interested in American politics and U.S. foreign policy):

From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes complex tasks more manageable, but we pay an hidden, enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic connection to a larger whole. When we try to “see the big picture,” we try to reassemble the fragments in our minds, to list and organize all the pieces. But as physicist David Bohm says, the task is futile — similar to trying to assemble the fragments of a broken mirron to see a true reflection. Thus, after a while, we give up trying to see the whole altogether. . . .

Business and other human endeavors. . .are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often takes years to fully play out their effects on one another. Since we are part of that latticework ourselves, it’s doubly hard to see that whole pattern of change. Instead, we focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved.

With the obvious exception of the global economy, there are few systems bigger or more complex than the way governments interact with one another (and the way our government responds to those interactions). If a President wants to achieve his/her foreign policy goals, s/he must understand how his/her decisions have an impact on events over the horizon.

The Bush Administration never quite understood this. Its foreign policy tended to have a very limited horizon, and it failed utterly to think through the impact of its actions. To cite the most obvious example, it invaded Iraq thinking it would send a message to state sponsors of terror and nuclear club wannabes that the United States would not tolerate their misbehavior. The Bush team never really thought through the unintended consequences of the invasion: the radicalization of Muslims around the world; the anger of allies heretofore willing to let the U.S. take the lead in the fight against terrorism; the implosion of America’s image; the costs (in terms of both human and financial resources) of fighting an insurgency after the success of the intitial invasion; the erosion of military capacity; and the impact of diverted resources and attention on the war in Afghanistan.

In contrast, it looks like the Obama Administration recognizes that its decisions can have consequences far beyond the immediate challenge at hand. Obama’s trip to Europe (and Iraq) demonstrated the degree to which he is trying to weave different challenges into what Senge calls a “fabric of interrelated actions.” His bilaterals with Russia and China were crucial to success at the G-20. He had to balance humility and leadership if the G-20 and NATO summits were to demonstrate progress. He couldn’t have a bilateral with Medvedev without also visiting Prague to reassure America’s East European allies that they wouldn’t be forgotten. He couldn’t visit to Turkey to talk about better relations with the Islamic world without also recognizing Turkey’s desire to be part of the EU. He couldn’t ensure a shift in emphasis to Afghanistan without visiting Iraq and reassuring our troops there that a change in focus does not mean their efforts are not as important.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Obama achieved everything he set out to do, or that the Administration’s application of systems theory is without flaws or mistakes. We won’t know for some time whether Obama’s trip will be as successful substantively and it was stylistically.

But over-focusing on details (such as the continued unwillingness of the Euro zone to support additional economic stimulus) obsfucates a larger picture: Obama took on a number of issues — the economy, Afghanistan, Iraq, U.S.-Russian relations, U.S.-China relations, NATO, arms control, IFI governance, American relationship with the Islam world, terrorism, Turkey’s membership in the EU, and U.S. support for its new allies in Eastern Europe — and highlighted repeatedly their interconnection.

A good example of this is a story in Der Spiegel on the G-20 meeting (h/t The Agonist) that received almost no attention in the U.S.:

Berlusconi now spoke to [Obama] directly: “I would like to extend my congratulations to Barack Obama,” he said, adding that the economic crisis had begun in the US. “Now he has to address it,” he said and looked towards Obama. “We wish him all the best for the citizens of the US and the entire world.” . . .

“It is gratifying to see that good work has been done here,” Obama began. “Ten, twenty, thirty years ago, it was not a matter of course that countries which were traditionally enemies solved problems together. After the Great Depression, a similar group did not convene until 1944. . . . It is important that we do not sell short the results of this summit. The press would like us to have conflicts. Instead we have attained great achievements. And it is important that we exude confidence.”

He then lowered his voice: “It is true, as my Italian friend has said, that the crisis began in the US. I take responsibility, even if I wasn’t even president at the time.” And he underscored how important it is for him “that we now genuinely make progress. Thank you.” Applause.

The others couldn’t believe their ears. Was that really a confession of guilt from the US? Was it a translation error, or at least an inaccuracy? Afterwards, this sentence fueled long discussions among the members of the German delegation. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was so impressed by Obama’s statement that she rushed to tell her finance minister, Peer Steinbrück. Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso reacted immediately: The proposal to hold the next summit not in Japan, but rather in the US, is something that he no longer rejects, he says, “now that the US has shouldered responsibility.” . . .

The fact that Obama has now admitted [responsibility] sends a strong signal of hope to the world, perhaps the strongest to emerge from the G-20 summit in London last Wednesday and Thursday. Such an admission could begin to pave the way towards rectifying the situation.

This is a particularly good example of the kind of systems thinking necessary to deal with the complexities of the world today: Obama recognizes that he cannot achieve a range of goals — more NATO troops in Afghanistan, a common agenda on Iran’s efforts to build a nuclear weapon, etc. – without first acknowledging American responsibility for the current financial crisis. They’re not separate challenge — they’re part of one big problem that cannot be broken down into small parts if we want to solve it. Taking it apart may look easier, but in reality, doing so only makes solving the larger problem more difficult.

One of the most important parts of the Der Speigel story is Obama’s warning that “The press would like us to have conflicts. Instead we have attained great achievements.” Now look at what Senge says:

Conversations in organizations are dominated by short-term events. . .The media reinforces an emphasis on short-term events — after all, if it’s more than two days old, it’s no longer “news.” Focusing on events leads to “event” explanations: “The Dow Jones average dropped sixteen points today,” announces the newspaper, “because low fourth-quarter profits were announced yesterday.” Such explanations may be true, but they distract us from seeing the longer-term patterns of change that lie behind the events and from understanding the causes of those patterns.

[T]oday, the primary threats to our survival. . .come not from not from sudden events, but from slow, gradual processes: the arms race, environmental decay, the erosion of a society’s public education system. . .are all slow, gradual processes. . . .Learning in organizations cannot be sustained if people’s thinking is dominated by short-term events. . . . Maladaptation to gradually building threats to survival is. . .pervasive.

Senge wrote that twenty years ago, before the 24-hour news cycle, before the internet, before text messaging, iPhones, Twitter and all the other technologies we now use to keep up to date. If anything, what was already true then is blatantly obvious now: as a society — not just as a nation, but as an increasingly interconnected world — it is almost impossible for us to stop reacting to immediate events and start responding to systemic challenges.

From what we’ve seen so far, Obama understands system theory. He and his team have not succeeded in applying it across the board — his foreign policy advisors seem to understand it better than his economic advisors, for example — and he will still have to respond to (and have his long-term planning affected by) short-term events. But the signs so far certainly can offer hope to those who have watched administration after administration react as if each isolated event exists in a vacuum.

Pakistan: Mad Libs

In case you missed the big South Asia story of the weekend, here it is, via WaPo:

Unable to crush street protests Sunday that spilled out of this city and threatened to reach the capital, the Pakistani government announced early Monday morning that it would restore the former chief justice of the Supreme Court and a group of other deposed judges in a major capitulation to opponents.

The move reflected the weakening position of President Asif Ali Zardari, a key U.S. ally, but it also signaled a peaceful end to a mounting political crisis in the nuclear-armed Muslim nation of 172 million. Zardari had resisted bringing back former chief justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry for months, but he faced mounting pressure from a broad coalition of opponents who demanded the reinstatement of Pakistan’s independent judiciary and threatened to march on the capital, Islamabad, until Chaudhry was brought back.

The decision marked an extraordinary victory for Pakistan’s legal community, which has been agitating peacefully for the judges’ reinstatement for the past two years, and for Zardari’s major political rival, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who joined the lawyers’ crusade last month and quickly became its most forceful advocate.

It’s always the same in Pakistan, to a point of dreary familiarity: protests = instability = weakened regime. I get the feeling that WaPo merely trots out the same basic story every eightteen to thirty-six months. With some minor changes, this lede could have been about the protests that led to Musharraf’s downfall, or even about the events that led Musharraf to depose Sharif.

So in the spirit of helping WaPo save time the next time this happens, I thought I would create a Pakistan version of Mad Libs:

Unable to verb type of demonstration day of week that spilled out of city in Pakistan and threatened to reach the capital, the Pakistani government announced early following day that it would verb political opponent in a major capitulation to opposition group .

The move reflected the weakening position of current leader , a key U.S. ally, but it also signaled a peaceful/violent end to a mounting political crisis in the nuclear-armed Muslim nation of 172 million. Current leader had resisted verb political opponent for unit of time , but he faced adjective noun from a broad coalition of opposition figures , who demanded reinstatement of/release of/an end to opposition figure/branch of government and threatened to type of protest in/on the capital, Islamabad, until political opponent was brought back.

The decision marked an extraordinary victory for Pakistan’s pro-democracy group/fundamentalists/NGO community/opposition party , which has been agitating violently/peacefully for political opponent ’s reinstatement/release for the past unit of time , and for current leader ’s major political rival, rival’s name , who joined the synonym for protest last unit of time and quickly became its most forceful advocate.

It has become a cliché to describe Pakistan as a failed state. I don’t think that’s entirely accurate — Pakistan hasn’t failed so much as found itself stuck in a cycle of pseudo-democracy, corruption/incompetence, coup, dictatorship, protest, end of dictatorship, and then back to pseudo-democracy again. That’s not so much failure as it is a long, slow death spiral. And with each turn, the fundamentalists get a little stronger.

Regardless of how you describe it, Pakistan clearly wins the award for the country most-likely-to-screw-up-everybody’s-plans-by-creating-a-big-honking-mess-at-home-or-in-neighboring-state. Afghanistan may be a chaotic mess, but it doesn’t have nuclear arms. North Korea may have nuclear arms, but it doesn’t have to contend with Islamic fundamentalists. Iran may have Islamic fundamentalists trying to build a bomb, but a) they’re Shiites rather than Sunnis, and thus do not enjoy the widespread support of other radical Islamists; and b) they haven’t (as far as we know) built the bomb yet.

Pakistan, in contrast, has it all: it is an enormous mess; has a system of government that has remained consistently unstable; is a nuclear power; and has a large contingent of religious fanatics within its borders.

We are still paying for Bush’s inexplicable failure to demand that Musharraf take action against those in the ISI and military who were responsible for sponsoring both the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Lashkar-e-Taiba in Kashmir. In the end, the Bush Administration’s Pakistan policies — rather than Iraq or Afghanistan — may be remembered as its most disastrous foreign policy mistake — as well as the greatest risk to Obama’s ability to purse a smarter course in foreign policy.

Power Corrupts. Unenumerated Powers. . .

Today, the Obama Administration released one of the infamous John Yoo memos from 2001, entitled “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities within the United States.” You can find the entire appalling document here. A few highlights for your reading displeasure:

The Fourth Amendment. . .would not apply [to the use of the military domestically against foreign terrorists.] Thus, for example, we do not think that a military commander carrying out a raid on a terrorist cell would be required to demonstrate probable cause or to obtain a warrant. . . .

[T]he courts would not generally require a warrant, at least when the action was authorizd by the President or other high executive branch official. The Government’s compelling interest in protecting the nation from attack and in prosecuting the war effort would outweigh the relevant privacy interests, making the search or seizure reasonable. . . .

We believe that Article II of the Constitution, which vests the President with the power to resond to emergency threats to the national security, directly authorizes use of the Armed Forces in domestic operations against terrorists. . . .

Okay, so far we’re only on page 2 of a 35 page opinion. It gets worse from there.

There’s the part where Yoo suggests that the rights of British kings — supposedly the thing we were trying to get away from in that whole Revolution thingy — were also a precedent:

[A]n executive power, such as the power to use force in response to attacks upon the nation, not specifically detailed in Article II, Section 2, must remain with the President. This has been the general approach in regard to other powers not mentioned in the Constitution. . . .

These “exceptions” and “qualifications” are limited to those powers, in which the Framers unbundled certain plenary powers that had traditionally been regarded as “executive.” Some elements of those powers were assigned to Congress in Article I, while other elemens were expressly retained as executive powers in the enumerations in Article II.

So for example, the King’s traditional powers with respect to war and peace were disaggregated: the royal power to declare war was given to Congress under Article I, while the Commander in Chief authority was expressly reserved to the President in Article II. Further, the Framers altered other plenary powers of the King, such as treaties and appointments, by including the Senate in their exercise. Any other, unenumerated executive powers, however, were conveyed to the President by the Vesting Clause.

Such unenumerated power includes the authority to use military force, whether at home or abroad, in response to a direct attack upon the United States.

I’m not a lawyer, but if I read this correctly, the reasoning is that the President retains all authority vested in the British Crown in the 18th Century that the Constitution did not assign to other branches of government.

One of the more stunning passages talks about previous conflicts as precedents that justify the proposed action:

Although the exercise of such authority usually has concerned the use of force abroad, there have been cases, from the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion on, in which the President has deployed military force within the United States against armed forces operating domestically. During the Civil war and the War of 1812, federal troops fought enemy armies operating within the continental United States. On other occasions, the President has used military force within the United States against Indian tribes and bands. In yet other circumstances, the Armed Forces have been used to counter resistance to federal court orders. . . . We believe that the text, structure, and history of the Constitution, in light of its executive, legislative, and judicial interpretation, clearly supports deployment of the military domestically.

A couple of things about this argument stand out. First, I think Lincoln would be surprised to hear that the Confederate “enemy army” was the same as the British invaders of 1812-14. As far as I know, he was careful never to portray the Confederacy as a sovereign nation — I mean, that was the whole point, wasn’t it?

Second, Yoo uses the Indian wars to justify proposed action — wars now widely acknowledged as one of the greatest embarrassments in American history.

Third, when the Armed Forces have been used to “counter resistance to federal court orders,” it was to enforce and uphold the Constitution, not ignore it. To put it another way, the federalized National Guard units were deployed to enforce court orders, not trample on the prerogative of the courts to issue them. Little Rock, Oxford, and Selma were a far different kind of action than what the Bush Administration was proposing.

Here’s another little gem:

Using the military to defend the nation requires action and energy in execution, rather than the deliberate formulation of rules to govern private conduct.

In other words, there are no laws when it comes to pursuing military action. Don’t let those pesky little rules mess up your vision, el Presidente.

And yet another:

If a standing army and navy are required to repel or deter sudden attacks, then by creating such forces and placing them under the President’s command, Congress is necessarily authorizing him to deploy those forces.

. . . thus making a formal Declaration of War unnecessary? That’s an enumerated power, but don’t let that get in the way of your logic, guys.

What I find particularly striking about all this is how it completely contradicts the strict constructionist theory of Constitutional law. As I understand it, constructionists argue that if it’s not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution, it isn’t there — it’s the basis of the entire constructionist argument against Roe v. Wade, to cite one example.

But Yoo is arguing the exact opposite: if it’s not enumerated in the Constitution, then it’s part of the President’s “unenumerated powers.” To appreciate the absurdity of this, think about that term for a minute. It basically means that anything not assigned to Congress or the judiciary is vested in the President.

That’s not a separation of powers. It isn’t even a theory of a unitary executive. It’s the prelude to dictatorship — a dictatorship that was to be justified thanks to memoranda diligently generated by Justice Department flacks.

I’m still reading this — I can only take so much in a single sitting. I may have more later.

The Gitmo-Cole Kerfuffle

Okay, tell me what I’m missing here:

The Pentagon’s senior judge overseeing terror trials at Guantanamo Bay dropped charges Thursday against an al-Qaida suspect in the 2000 USS Cole bombing, upholding President Barack Obama’s order to freeze military tribunals there. The charges against suspected al-Qaida bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri marked the last active Guantanamo war crimes case.

The legal move by Susan J. Crawford, the top legal authority for military trials at Guantanamo, brings all cases into compliance with Obama’s Jan. 22 executive order to halt terrorist court proceedings at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba. Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Crawford dismissed the charges against al-Nashiri without prejudice. That means new charges can be brought again later. He will remain in prison for the time being.

Judging by the response of some conservatives, you’d think that the Obama Administration is going to pardon al-Nashiri and get him a job flipping burgers at a Wendy’s in Poughkeepsie. Here’s Joe Scarborough:

“The parents of 17 dead sailors understand we had the process, Mika,” Scarborough said to his co-host, Mika Brzezinski, who was questioning the legal process. “I wonder what President Obama says to the 17 families of these dead soldiers. It seems, Mika, like there is very little to be said.”

To be fair, it’s not just conservatives who are unhappy. Families of the victims of the Cole aren’t pleased either. Perhaps most vocal is Cmdr. (ret.) Kirk S. Lippold, who commanded the USS Cole at the time of the bombing in 2000. Here’s what he said to Scarborough:

“Personally, I am very disappointed he has gone forward with this,” said retired Cmdr. Kirk S. Lippold on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show. “But more important is the impact that has on the families who have waited for eight years for justice to have to wait another 120 days.”

Lippold’s comments were a glimpse of what Obama will hear at a Friday meeting with families of victims of the Cole bombing and 9/11 attacks. Lippold said he will be in attendance.

The judge overseeing military trials at Guantanamo ordered charges Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, reversing an earlier decision that the case must go forward despite a request by the president to delay the proceeding. “We had a legal process in place,” Lippold said. “Now justice delayed, is justice denied.”

I sympathize with Lippold, and strongly agree that those responsible for the death of his crew members should be held responsible. But what part of the words “procedural matter” does he not understand? And how does this delay of justice, as Lippold put it, somehow wrong when the Bush Administration has been screwing around for years? Don’t we want to get it right?

To its credit, the Obama Administration is trying to ensure that a future prosecution of al-Nashiri can move forward without the risk of double jeopardy that an immediate trial could pose. In other words, if you want this guy convicted, and you want it done right, the best thing to do is to delay the trial until you’ve done a thorough review.

I haven’t seen any pool reports about the White House meeting, but here’s hoping that President Obama explained this to Lippold and others sharing similar concerns.

As always, I encourage those in my readership who actually know the law to correct my misunderstanding.

Obama’s Pre-Super Bowl Interview

I haven’t seen much discussion of this on the intertubes, but Matt Lauer raised two foreign policy issues in his pre-Super Bowl interview with President. Unfortunately, they may represent some of the stooooooopidest questions ever asked a sitting President. Here’s part one of the interview, including both questions:

The first starts at about 3:14. Lauer actually asks the President whether, if we were to get access to the same intel briefings Obama gets, “how much less sleep would we be getting?” To his credit, Obama adroitly swats the question away, providing an appropriate non-answer answer.

What exactly did Lauer think Obama would say? “Well, Matt, we’ve actually crunched the numbers on this and we think it would be 12.2 minutes if Americans read the summary and 41.7 minutes if they saw the raw data.” And even if Lauer had framed the question a little better, did he actually think that Obama would be dumb enough to scare the living crap out of every American watching by providing an honest answer? “Well, Matt, most Americans would be scared to death. But they should just set that aside and enjoy the game, which I should add, faces at least six credible and fourteen potential terrorist attacks.”

Obama may have only been President for twelve days (as Lauer repeatedly likes to remind him), but he wasn’t born yesterday.

The second, slightly less stooopid question begins at about 4:13. Lauer asks whether Obama can promise whether a substantial number of those serving in Iraq “will be home in time for next Super Bowl Sunday?” Because, you know, that really should define our withdrawal timetable. Because by next year, General Petraeus won’t just be doing the coin toss, he’ll be coach of the next Super Bowl champions, my Tampa Bay Buccaneers (hey, he’s based in Tampa — he wouldn’t even have to move).

Unfortunately, Obama bites on this one. He says yes. I think that was a mistake, not because I disagree with his plan, but because as he himself has said, a timetable is predicated not just on getting troops out, but getting them out the right way. Furthermore — and not to pick nits here — some of those troops will be in Afghanistan and others will be in Germany, Korea, and other overseas bases. Of course, just as was the case with the first question, a completely honest answer would not have necessarily endeared Obama to the people for whom the question was asked.

I know that Matt Lauer is no Katie Couric, but can he at least try not to be Mary Hart? I mean sheesh, the opening question (what’s it like to be living with your mother-in-law?) was bad enough, but can you please at least read a magazine or book before you ask such stooooooooooopid questions?

Apparently the election of a smart President has done nothing to raise the intelligence of the MSM.

“As Rich and Fulfilling as My Hatred for Your Country”

Jon Stewart opens up a can of whoop-ass on those Republicans fear-mongering over the closure of Guantanamo:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Guantanamo Baywatch - The Final Season

Daily Show Full Episodes
Daily Show Tickets

Will China Force Pakistan’s Hand?

Long-time readers of this blog know that I’m not a big fan of the government of the People’s Republic of China. They have a consistent talent for doing the wrong thing.

But I have to give them major props today:

Security agencies in China are quizzing their Pakistani counterparts about possible links between the attack in Mumbai and terrorist organisations based in Pakistan, informed sources said. Chinese agencies have already taken measures to seal off possible loopholes in the country’s borders with India, Pakistan and Afghanistan to ensure that no fugitives sneak in. Beijing is particularly worried that Pakistan based terrorists might seek refuge Xinjiang, the terrorism hit province bordering Pakistan.

“We are ready to cooperate with India and Pakistan to fight terrorists groups that are active in the region,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told TOI. “We face the danger of terrorists’ attacks from supporters of the East Turkmenistan movement. So, we are very concerned,” he said.

China, which is a close allay of Pakistan, is capable of persuading leaders in Islamabad to part with critical intelligence and even hand over terrorists to India. But Beijing might prefer to deal with Pakistani leaders on this score to safeguard itself from terrorism spilling across the border to its own territory.

Liu, the foreign ministry spokesman, said China was ready to join hands with India to track down terrorists groups that may have been involved in the attack in Mumbai on November 26.

Clearly the PRC is acting in its own interest here — it doesn’t want the chaos in Afghanistan and Pakistan (and lately, India) to bleed across its borders into Xinjiang, its predominantly Muslim province. Nonetheless, it’s refreshing to see them do the right thing.

Last week, I speculated as to whether a potential war between India and Pakistan could eventually draw in China on Pakistan’s side, which could have only disastrous consequences. Although that certainly remains a remote possibility, I am reassured to see the Chinese government pushing the Pakistanis to do the right thing.

Transition Open Thread

It’s going to be a light blogging day today, as I’m in consulting land. In the meantime, what do you guys think of the WaPo report that Richard Holbrooke will serve as the President’s envoy to South Asia? And does this news in any way undermine The Condi’s efforts in the region?

Talk amongst yourselves.

India-Pakistan: China, Obama,and the Specter of 1914

Given the increasingly heated rhetoric between India and Pakistan, two questions come to mind, one obvious, the other not so much. Will this spiral out of control and lead to war, including perhaps a nuclear exchange? And what will China do? Specifically, what happens if China comes in on Pakistan’s side?

Remember that the First World War began when a small group of Serbian nationalists committed an act of terrorism on Austrian soil (or at least Austrian-controlled soil). But things didn’t get out of hand until Russia came in on Serbia’s side and Germany did the same in the case of Austria-Hungary.

If I were President-elect Obama, I’d get Hillary on a plane now, preferably on a joint mission with The Condi. We can’t wait until January 20th to allow this thing to get completely out of control. Because the current crisis is no more about terrorism than it was in 1914.

The Foreign Policy Team: No Surprises

President-elect Obama named his National Security team. No surprises.

That extends to the reaction: the MSM is focusing on the “team of rivals” meme, and the netroots are debating whether they should be concered that “centrists” will hold the three key positions. I think both are missing the key story here, which I and others outlined last night in reaction to the NYT story on the Obama Administration’s plan to mount the most ambitious restructuring of U.S. national security institutions since the Truman Administration.

I’ll have more later on ten key posts, beyond the Deputy Secretaries and Deputy National Security Advisor, to watch for as the transition moves forward.

One other note: Obama’s press conference reflects the reality that the terrorist attacks in India haven’t really percolated to the top of people’s thinking about U.S. national security. Yes, Obama did mention it, but in the context of terrorism and not its potential impact on Indian-Pakistani relations. Equally importantly, nobody in the press bothered to ask a follow-up question.

Un-Bauer-able: The Return of “24″

So Jack Bauer, America’s favorite torturer and all around sociopath, is back!

Jack will spend the next 24 hours in the fictional African country of Sangala “saving the children” from what looks like a vicious child soldier-recruiting rebel. That, of course, will make up for all the horrible stuff he’s done in the past.

So the new and improved Jack. . .

is now killing caricatures of Africans rather than caricatures of Arabs;
doesn’t have to worry about beating the hell out of people because he’s in Africa, which of course doesn’t have laws or something;
can shoot people while standing in the middle of a crowded African street and not worry about hitting innocents;
loves the kids, even if it means having to shoot people in front of them;
cannot, even with all his powers, get a nasty American official to open the damn gate.

Wait a second. Wasn’t last year supposed to be Bauer’s redemption? Didn’t they even name it “24: Redemption”? How many times can this guy be redeemed? Will next year be “24: Jack Gets an Indulgence from Pope Innocent IX”?

Instead of “24: Exile,” They should just call it what it is: “24: We Know the Whole Torturing Arabs Thing Doesn’t Seem to Be Working Anymore.”

Of course, rehabilitation of Wacko Jacko doesn’t mean that the producers have completely abandoned their neoconservative conspiracy theorist ways: Bauer refuses to return to Washington to testify before a Senate committee investigating his past crimes, and it looks like one of the villains, as Diplopundit notes, is the most officious, insensitive foreign service officer in history. He not only hates Jack, he hates the children. The bastard.

My only hope is that this storyline will so bore the hell out of the American people that they will flee from “24: Exile” like. . .well, like everyone flees from Jack Bauer whenever he pulls out a gun.

Then, at last, our long national prime time nightmare finally will be over.

UPDATE: This is actually from Charlie, not Chris. Not quite sure how that happened, but I can’t change it.

Mumbai

Over the years, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in India, but not much in Mumbai. That said, like any visitor to India’s financial and creative capital, I made sure to the Taj Hotel, which is a national treasure.

Now it’s on fire. At least 80 people are dead, and countless more are wounded. My thoughts and prayers are with everyone in that fair city. I can only hope my friends there are okay.

Right now a domestic group known as the Indian Mujahideen has claimed responsibility, but some analysts think it may be al Qaeda.

Three things to watch as events unfold:

1. India-Pakistan. If it turns out that Pakistan-based militants are behind these attacks (or even worse, that the Indians discover evidence linking Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency to those responsible), it could spark a major regional crisis and perhaps even war. And since both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers, that means a major international crisis as well.

2. Reprisal attacks. Although Hindus outnumber Muslims by a factor of more than six to one in India, that still means there are 150 million Muslims. In the past, Muslim violence has led quickly to reprisal attacks against Muslim communities. In 2002, for example, after a Muslim mob attacked a train in the state of Gujarat, riots by Hindus led to the death of over 2,000 Muslims. In 1993-1994, Muslim-Hindu riots in Mumbai caused death of over 900 people. Regardless of whether the instigators of today’s attacks turn out to be from outside India or not, chances are that we will see reprisal attacks in very short order.

3. Domestic politics. Currently, a coalition led by the Congress Party of India is in power, and its main rival, the Hindu-nationalist BJP, has been in disarray. The attacks may change that, however, as BJP politicians have not hesitated in the past to use communal violence to whip up Hindu nationalist fervor.

I Can See Al-Qaeda from My House

I’ve been holding off commenting on this story until I could hear about the results of the conference call the McCain campaign held this morning in response to this Washington Post article:

[S]ome of [Al-Qaeda's] supporters think Sen. John McCain is the presidential candidate best suited to [their goals]. “Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” said a commentary posted Monday on the extremist Web site al-Hesbah, which is closely linked to the terrorist group. It said the Arizona Republican would continue the “failing march of his predecessor,” President Bush. . . .

In language that was by turns mocking and ominous, the newest posting. . .suggested that a terrorist strike might swing the election to McCain and guarantee an expansion of U.S. military commitments in the Islamic world. “It will push the Americans deliberately to vote for McCain so that he takes revenge for them against al-Qaeda,” said the posting, attributed to Muhammad Haafid, a longtime contributor to the password-protected site. “Al-Qaeda then will succeed in exhausting America.”

In response, the McCain campaign got foreign policy spokesman Randy Scheunemann and raving right-wingnut ex-CIA director James Woolsey on a call with reporters and bloggers. Of course, the very fact they were holding a call probably indicates that there’s a problem. Dave Weigel reports on the results:

Schneuemann and Woolsey attacked the paper for selectiveness and unfairness, listing supportive things said by American enemies like Ghadaffi about Obama that the Post never covered. Plus, according to Woolsey, there’s no way a serious Al-Qaeda blogger could support McCain.

This individual knows that an endorsement by him is a kiss of death, figuratively. He is not trying to help John McCain.

The first question: If this was a bad faith comment meant to hurt McCain, how do we know comments from Ahmedinijad about Obama aren’t meant to hurt the Democrat? Woolsey:

Any major organization, itself, will not take the risk to depart from the party line.

Okay, let’s dissect this a bit. If you are to believe the Wingnut Twins, the the Post’s alleged failure to cover past favorable comments by Ghadaffi and Chavez somehow makes their coverage of Al-Qaeda’s commentary on McCain somehow illegitimate. This defies logic for several reasons.

To begin with, other outlets, including the Associate Press, reported the story as well.

Second, the Post, like every other media outlet, has reported on stories where the McCain campaign (and others) suggested that foreign leaders’ preference for Obama made him unfit for office. Post columnists like Charles Krauthammer have hammered this home again and again. And that doesn’t even touch on the mini-controversy caused by the fact that a Hamas spokesman at one point said he would favor Obama.

Third, the standard isn’t whether the Post covered it, but whether the McCain campaign itself thought similar stories were newsworthy. McCain and his surrogates have hammered Obama on both his “no preconditions” speech and the Hamas story, among others. The campaign and its stalking horses in the blogosphere have even brought up favorable comments by Obama’s supporters, trying to use his followers’ statement to link him to Chavez, the Castros, Ahmadinejad, and even Che Guevara. Only now, when the tables are turned, is this somehow off limits.

Fourth, what do you think whould have happened if the press reported that al Qaeda actually preferred Obama? Woolsey and Scheunemann would be frothing at the mouth, and Schmidt and company would have a new ad up saying Osama hearts Obama.

Fifth, John McCain has repeatedly criticized Obama for expressing a willingness to violate Pakistan’s sovereignty to “take out” Osama bin Laden. It is Obama, not McCain, who has promised to redirect resources currently used in Iraq to win the war in Afghanistan. It is Obama, not McCain who poses the greater threat to al Qaeda. So to suggest that this was designed to hurt McCain because he is the bigger threat is to ignore the facts.

Last but not least, the CIA, among others, has noted that Osama bin Laden’s 2004 video, released four days before the Presidential election, played a significant role in pushing a number of undecideds toward Bush — which was exactly the result bin Laden wanted. If, as Scheunemann and Woolsey would have you believe, al Qaeda fears McCain more than Obama, wouldn’t it make sense that they would avoid taking an action that would tilt the election toward McCain?

The McCain campaign can’t have it both ways. They can’t argue that other foreign nutjobs’ apparent support for Obama proves he is unworthy to be President and then claim that these nutjobs’ support for McCain proves that he is the bigger threat to terrorism. You also can’t suggest that al Qaeda’s support for you is fake and that Ahmedinejad, Chavez and others’ support for Obama is sincere.

Oh. Wait. It’s the McCain campaign.

Inconsistency and double standards are their preferred tools.

Never mind.

Beyond November: Elisa Massimino

The Connect U.S. Fund has launched a new two-year initiative to help shape debate during the upcoming Presidential transition. As part of this effort, they’ve asked leading thinkers and advocates to talk about what should be the top two or three foreign policy priorities for the next President. They’ve also kindly allowed us to cross-post the responses here.

Today, we’ll hear from Elisa Massimino. You can find the previous posts here. Thanks again to Heather Hamilton and Eric Schwartz for making the cross-postings happen.

Tonight, many Americans will tune in to watch Senator McCain and Senator Obama face off in the final presidential debate before the 2008 election. With just twenty days left in the campaign, the candidates are relentlessly focused on highlighting their differences. But the fury of this final round of sparring should not drown out the sound of a particular silence: there is no debate going on between the candidates about whether the United States should continue to allow the torture of prisoners in U.S. custody. Last month, in the first debate between the two parties’ nominees, Senator Obama and Senator McCain agreed that the United States must end the use of torture, which has stained our national honor and undermined the ability of the United States to lead.

Restoring our nation’s commitment to the rule of law must be a top priority for the next president of the United States. What the next president says will be important in this effort. In the early primary debates, both nominees condemned torture rather than extol the supposed heroism of 24’s fictional Jack Bauer or call for a doubling of the size of Guantánamo, as some of their opponents did. Hearing more from the two candidates tonight about the particulars of how they plan to restore the rule of law would be instructive. But, because of the way the current administration has sought to distort, obscure and evade the clear language of the law, words alone — from the candidates now or from the new president in January — will not be enough. After all, President Bush has repeatedly asserted that “we do not torture,” meanwhile privately authorizing conduct like waterboarding that our own military has long considered to be war crimes. It will be the actions of the next administration that will either confirm Vice President Cheney’s assertion of a “new normal,” or will prove him wrong.

The next president should prioritize a return to the rule of law in two key areas: enforcing the prohibitions on torture and other cruelty; and abandoning the failed experiment at Guantánamo in favor of the proven effectiveness of our federal criminal justice system. Taking these steps will go a long way toward restoring the essential moral authority of the United States as a leader for human rights and will strengthen national security by contributing to a more effective counterterrorism strategy.

The next president will have a window of opportunity to signal to the American people and the rest of the world that the policies of the last seven years were an aberration and that the United States is serious about restoring the rule of law, upholding our Constitution and respecting the international rules our country played such a central role in formulating.

Here’s the 12-step program to get us back on the straight and narrow:

Renounce torture and official cruelty, ideally in the inaugural address.
Enforce existing bans on torture and cruel treatment.
Repudiate and rescind all orders, memoranda and legal opinions authorizing cruel treatment or secret detention.
Release publicly all documents authorizing cruel treatment, secret detention, or rendition.
End secret prisons and the practice of holding “ghost prisoners.”
Put a moratorium on extraordinary renditions and direct the National Security Advisor to undertake a 90-day review to assess the use of diplomatic assurances and issue new regulations to ensure we are not sending people to places where they are likely to be tortured.
Announce the intention to empty the Guantánamo detention facility within one year.
Suspend pending military commission proceedings and terminate Combatant Status Review Tribunals and Administrative Review Boards.
Direct the Attorney General to review Guantánamo cases for federal court prosecution.
Direct the Secretary of State to perform individualized risk assessments and review remaining cases for transfer to prosecution, repatriation, or resettlement.
Direct the Attorney General to identify secure U.S. detention facilities capable of housing detainees identified for federal court prosecution.
Establish a bipartisan commission to investigate U.S. government detention and interrogation operations, assess the strategic impact of these operations, identify lessons learned, and make recommendations to avoid future abuses.

The misguided embrace of indefinite detention, torture and deeply flawed military commissions has greatly damaged the reputation of the United States, fueled terrorist recruitment and undermined international cooperation in counterterrorism operations. Repairing our reputation as a nation committed to the rule of law will require bold action. That must start with finally closing the detention facility in Guantánamo and demonstrating — in deed, not just in word—an unequivocal commitment to treating all prisoners humanely.

Elisa Massimino is the Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights). Elisa is the organization’s chief advocacy strategist, an expert on a range of international human rights issues and a national authority on US compliance with human rights law. She testifies frequently before Congress, writes extensively for legal and popular publications, and serves as one of the organization’s primary spokespeople with the media. She is Human Rights First’s point of contact with U.S. government leaders, international diplomats, and human rights opinion leaders and decision makers.

Is Osama Bin Laden A Level 70 Warlock?

Those of you who have read my blog since its origins know that I’m a gamer (if you don’t know what that means, you might as well stop reading now). Lately, I’ve been trying out Spore (meh), but I’m sure that I’ll soon return to my first love, World of Warcrack Warcraft, especially now that Blizzard is putting out the new expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, right after the election.

Little did I know, however, that playing WoW actually makes me a potential terrorist:

The American military and intelligence communities are increasingly worried that would-be bin Ladens might gather in a virtual world, to plan a real-life attack. But the spies haven’t given many details, about how it might be done. Now, a Pentagon researcher has laid out how such a terror plot might unfold. The planning ground is World of Warcraft. The main target of this possibly nuclear strike: the White House.

There’s been no public proof to date of terrorists hatching plots in virtual worlds. But online spaces like World of Warcraft are making some spooks, generals and Congressmen extremely nervous. They imagine terrorists rehearsing attacks in these worlds, just like the U.S. military trains with commercial shoot-em-up games. They worry that the massively multiplayer games make it incredibly easy to gather plotters from around the world. But, mostly, virtual worlds are nerve-wracking to spies because they’re so hard to monitor. The accounts are pseudonymous. The access is global. The jargon is thick. And most of the spy agencies’ employees aren’t exactly level-70 shamans.

In a presentation late last week at the Director of National Intelligence Open Source Conference in Washington, Dr. Dwight Toavs, a professor at the Pentagon-funded National Defense University, gave a bit of a primer on virtual worlds to an audience largely ignorant about what happens in these online spaces. Then he launched into a scenario, to demonstrate how a meatspace plot might be hidden by in-game chatter.

If you play WoW, you’re gonna love the scenario, complete with graphics, that the Pentagon researcher put together.

Two World of Warcraft players discuss a raid on the “White Keep” inside the “Stonetalon Mountains.” The major objective is to set off a “Dragon Fire spell” inside, and make off with “110 Gold and 234 Silver” in treasure. “No one will dance there for a hundred years after this spell is cast,” one player, “war_monger,” crows.

Except, in this case, the White Keep is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “Dragon Fire” is an unconventional weapon. And “110 Gold and 234 Silver” tells the plotters how to align the game’s map with one of Washington, D.C.

Here’s a set a maps he put together. For those who don’t know the game, the terrain is a part of WoW’s virtual world and the discussion to the right is supposed to be two players chatting in-game:

Okay, looks perfectly normal. But wait — it’s actually Washington, DC:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh man, Pentagon, you’re killing me. I want to work at a think tank that lets me play WoW all day.

Three observations.

1. I think the Pentagon just might have better things to do. For example, they might want to think about trying to raid that real-world StoneTalon Keep known as Osama Bin Laden’s freaking cave.

2. Warning: Geeky WoW insider stuff follows.

If you’re going to create a scenario where terrorists are using WoW, you might want to know something about WoW. I just checked Thottbot (the WoW geek version of Google), and there is no such thing as a White Keep. Same with the Dragon Fire spell. Nobody in the game talks about gold and silver numbers because the game is randomized in such a way that you don’t know how much gold and silver the mobs drop.

Furthermore, since Stonetalon is a fairly low-level zone, there is no freaking way there’d be that much cash there. If they wanted to use numbers like that, they’d just use map coordinates. Oh, and there’s no freaking way that Blizzard wouldn’t notice a guild trying this kind of stuff.

While Stonetalon is fairly low-level, it’s not level 1. The terrorists would have to play for about three weeks before they could go into Stonetalon without getting pwned (and you can’t even see the map in Stonetalon without having explored it).

Oh, and nobody talks in real time — they talk in server time. Don’t ask.

What a n00b.

End Geeky WoW insider stuff.

3. WoW players can be divided into three categories: fourteen-year-olds, twenty-something punk/thrash/hardcore/metal fans, and ex-Dungeon and Dragon geeks (like me), most over thirty years old (with apologies to Ta-Nehisi Coates). These people hate n00bs and would just waste these guys, metaphorically speaking.

I may have to eat these words someday, but I seriously doubt that terrorists would have either the patience or the knowledge of pop culture to survive long enough to pull this off. The Chuck Norris jokes in Barrens chat alone would be enough to drive them away.

And as I noted earlier, the Pentagon should a hell of a lot less time wandering around Outland and a whole hell of a lot more time trying to take down that real-life level 70 warlock living in a cave somewhere in Waziristan.

Twenty Questions for the Debate Tonight

Twenty questions I would like to see asked at the debate tonight:

1. Are we at war with Pakistan? Senator Obama, given your pledge to go into Pakistan, if necessary, to take out Osama bin Laden, do you support President Bush’s current counter-insurgency efforts along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border? And Senator McCain, when Senator Obama made those comments, you accused him of being reckless. Do you now think President Bush is being reckless?

2. Numerous reports have indicated that the State Department is woefully underfunded and understaffed. Secretary Gates, among others, has urged Congress and the President to take steps to address these concerns. Congress has largely been unsympathetic. What would you do, as President to make the State Department more effective, and to give it the resources it needs to succeed?

3. Do you support making USAID a cabinet-level agency? Given the current financial crisis, can the United States afford to continue its foreign assistance programs? Do you support reestablishing the US Information Agency or a similar construct to coordinate and strengthen our public diplomacy?

4. Is the United States more or less safe and secure than it was on September 12, 2001? Why or why not?

5. Senator McCain, can you please tell me what the difference is between Russian incursions into Georgia and American incursions into Pakistan? Don’t both involve a large power moving into territory controlled by a democratic ally of the United States?

6. Some have argued that the American century is over and that China will soon be the world’s dominant economic and political power. Do you think that is accurate? Why or why not? Would it matter if the United States wasn’t the biggest dog in the yard anymore?

7. Senator McCain, five former Secretaries of State, including two who have endorsed you, have called for dialogue with Iran without preconditions. You have stated your opposition, and your candidate for Vice President has suggested that such views are naive. Yet when it came time for you to choose someone to brief Sarah Palin on foreign policy, you asked Henry Kissinger, one of those five, to do it. Do you still believe that it is not possible for the United States not to talk to Iran?

8. Senator Obama, are there any situations where you think it would be necessary to set conditions before meeting with a foreign leader? In other words, is there anything that any leader can do that would make it impossible for you to meet with him or her?

9. Senator McCain, your running mate has suggested that the United States should not second-guess Israel should it decide to attack Iran. Is that your view as well? Senator Obama, do you agree or disagree?

10. Both of you have called on the Bush Administration to close Guantanamo and to end the practice of torture. There is growing evidence that Bush Administration officials may have violated U.S. law as well as treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory. Would you favor the investigation of such allegations and the prosecution of those, up to an including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, found to have broken American laws including statutes against war crimes?

11. What can the United States do to strenghten the United Nations?

12. Should the United States ratify the International Criminal Court treaty?

13. What can the United States do to prevent genocide? Would you favor military intervention by U.S. forces if it could help prevent a genocide? Would you have intervened in Rwanda? What are you going to do in Sudan?

14. What is the one foreign policy issue that you think is currently under the radar but will have an impact on your administration?

15. Most of the world has come to regard the United States as part of the problem rather than part of the solution. What steps would you take to reverse that?

16. Have we “lost” Latin America? What steps would you take to reverse growing anti-Americanism in the region?

17. When this campaign started, no issue was bigger than Iraq. Now it appears to be an almost forgotten issue. Senator McCain, given Prime Minister Maliki’s outspoken desire to see American troops leave, why do you continue to oppose a phased withdrawal from Iraq? Senator Obama, is there any situation where you can see American troops remaining in Iraq beyond the timetable you outlined?

18. Is the war in Afghanistan lost? Would you favor a surge there along the lines of what happened in Iraq?

19. Senator McCain, how can we afford to stay in Iraq and deal with the financial crisis at home? Senator Obama, you have suggested moving troops in Iraq to deal with the growing crisis in Afghanistan. Can we afford to do that as well?

20. Given the fact that Russo-American relations have cooled considerably since Russia’s invasion of Georgia, what steps would you take to ensure continued Russian-American cooperation on anti-proliferation measures, including not only implementation of Nunn-Lugar, but also the situations in Iran and North Korea?

Add your own questions in the comments below.

Ambassador for All War Crimes except Our Own

Here’s my post that appeared on HuffPo yesterday. If you haven’t yet, please go give it a read over there, and buzz/digg/stumble upon it. You can find it here.

Imagine, just for a moment, that President Bush decided to appoint Carly Fiorina as U.S. Ambassador for Global Financial Issues, and then sent her overseas to meet with allies to discuss how they should adopt the American financial services model. After the events of the past few days, she’d be laughed out of every ministry she visited.

Now pretend that we’re not talking about financial services, but rather war crimes. What if the United States had an Ambassador for War Crimes Issues? Given the Bush Administration’s atrocious record on torture, you’d probably conclude that not even Bush would have the testicular fortitude to try to pull off such an audacious act.

You’d be wrong.

Meet Clint Williamson, who might just have the worst job in Washington: U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues. For the past two years, he has “advise[d] the Secretary of State directly and formulate[d] U.S. policy responses to atrocities committed in areas of conflict and elsewhere throughout the world.” His scope of work includes former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Iraq (crimes committed by the former regime, not the current occupation), Sri Lanka, and, as of last week, Georgia.

There’s one important country missing from that list, one responsible for some of the worst war crimes of the past eight years: our own.

According to the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, “war crimes” are defined to include fifty separate acts that violate the Geneva Conventions, international law, or the laws and customs of war. They include murder, torture, “causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health,” “depriving a prisoner of war or other protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial,” illegal deportation, unlawful confinement, the taking of hostages, and “committing outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”

If we accept that definition, then, as Jane Mayer documents in The Dark Side, military and CIA personnel have committed acts that constitute war crimes under international law. These were not, as Donald Rumsfeld contended at the time of Abu Ghraib, isolated acts, committed by rogue personnel. The men and women on the ground committing these abuses did so with the full authorization and support of the Bush Administration.

Senior officials, including the President, Vice President, a Secretary of Defense, two Secretaries of State, three CIA Directors, and two Attorneys General supported or tolerated these acts. A team of lawyers, including David Addington and John Yoo, have crafted legal arguments to validate them (often after the fact), including findings that the President’s power as Commander in Chief overrides the Geneva Conventions, the Convention against Torture, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and domestic law. These same lawyers also sought to redefine torture downwards to such a degree that even the humiliations suffered by Senator John McCain in Vietnam no longer would qualify.

Of course, when Ambassador Williamson travels overseas, he can’t really discuss any of that. Instead, he must talk about what other countries have done. It must be a miserable job, having to pretend that the country you represent hasn’t tarnished its own reputation to such a degree that you look like an apologist for the very thing you were appointed to oppose.

But that’s not the worst of it. The Office of War Crimes Issues doesn’t just tell other countries to do as we say and not as we do. The Administration has actually made OWCI complicit of its own war crimes apparatus. Since September 11, OWCI has been responsible “for negotiating the repatriation, to their home countries, of individuals detained by the United States for their involvement in terrorist activities.” In other words, whenever the Administration discovers that someone it has tortured or mistreated is, in fact, innocent, it turns to OWCI to make the arrangements to send them home.

I wonder if that tiny little detail ever comes up when Ambassador Williamson travels overseas?

It wasn’t always this way. OWCI was created by then-Secretary Albright to support the International Criminal Tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Its first Ambassador, David Scheffer, played an important role in helping to make those courts effective. He also headed the U.S. delegation to the Rome Conference that created the International Criminal Court. It was, in fact, his leadership that led to the Rome Treaty’s definition of war crimes — the one that the current Administration so blithely ignores.

I was a member of the U.S. delegation to the Rome Conference. Despite the best efforts of the Pentagon to derail the negotiations, U.S. diplomats and lawyers helped make the ICC Statute an effective mechanism for prosecuting the worst of the worst — individuals who commit genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Although Scheffer ultimately was instructed to vote against the treaty, President Clinton subsequently signed it, demonstrating American willingness to work with the Court and support its goals.

Little did we know then that ten years later, some of the bad guys that the Court was created to prosecute would work for the U.S. government. When Bush decided to “unsign” the ICC treaty in May 2002 — an event that John Bolton called the “happiest day” of his professional career — U.S. officials already were torturing suspected terrorists. The very principles that the U.S. delegation in Rome pushed so hard to have included in the treaty were now being violated by a U.S. government.

Those responsible for this terrible reversal include President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice, Michael Chertoff, and the group of lawyers known inside the Administration as the “War Council” — David Addington, John Yoo, William J. Haynes, and Timothy Flanigan. All twelve should be tried as war criminals, either under the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996, or, if no American court is willing to pursue the matter, courts in other countries. (Unfortunately, the International Criminal Court cannot prosecute them because the United States is not a party to the Rome Treaty.)

Clint Williamson worked honorably for seven years as a trial attorney at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. He clearly knows what constitutes war crimes. He must realize that those he works for — including the woman he advises on war crimes issues — are responsible for acts not dissimilar to the ones committed by those he used to prosecute at the Hague. And he must realize that, by having his office repatriate the system’s victims, he is helping to conceal the truth.

Mr. Williamson should resign, and the position he now holds should remain vacant until the United States can practice what it so hypocritically preaches. If he instead chooses to remain in a compromised and largely ceremonial job, the very least he could do is agree to accept a new title: Ambassador-at-Large for All War Crimes except Our Own.

Huge Bombing at Islamabad Marriot

At least 40 dead — with the number likely to increase significantly.

You can find additional photos here. It looks like the entire hotel went up in flames.

The New York Times quotes one of the leaders of the democratic opposition that helped push out Musharraf:

A prominent Pakistani lawyer, Athar Minallah, said: “It’s the 9/11 for Pakistan. It’s an attack on Pakistan, an attack on the people of Pakistan.” Mr. Minallah, a leader of the lawyers’ movement that protested against the rule of President Pervez Musharraf, said the extremists “have crossed the limits. . . . There cannot be any justification for this,” he said. “It is for the people of Pakistan to join hands and sort out this menace. They are enemies of Pakistan.”

Back when I regularly traveled to Pakistan (almost 15 years ago), that’s where I stayed in Islamabad. If memory serves me, security at the hotel was pretty extensive, so I have to wonder whether this was an inside job. I also can’t help thinking about the fact that most of the people on the lower floors would have been local staff, not foreigners.

This is the second major terrorist attack in three days (the other was the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Yemen). There’s a good chance that this was undertaken by an al Qaeda affiliate. I think it’s important to ask whether the two attacks’ proximity in time was planned or merely a coincidence.

Our thoughts go out to the victims and their families.

The Decline of American Power, Iraq Edition, Part 356

This morning, The Washington Postdated confirms that yesterday’s attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad was the work of a group known as the Soldiers’ Brigade of Yemen, an affiliate of al Qaeda, using techniques that they may have learned while fighting in Iraq:

[T]he first vehicle exploded near a guard post. Cameras then recorded attackers taking positions nearby, until a second vehicle packed with explosives detonated near a sidewalk. . . . The use of two vehicle bombs — one to breach the perimeter of a compound, a second to drive inside and explode — is a tactic used by the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Matt Duss over at Think Progress demonstrates how this blows away yet another justification for the Iraq war — the “we’re fighting them over there so that we don’t have to fight them over here” idea, also known as the flypaper theory:

Those who have been following the Iraq debate might remember “flypaper theory,” which was one of the earliest exponents of the “incoherent post hoc justifications for the Iraq war” genre. The idea was that there was some limited number of terrorists in the Middle East, and the presence of an occupying U.S. army would lure them to Iraq, whereupon they could all be conveniently killed, presumably as soon as they stepped off the bus.

This plan was prevented from working only by the fact that it was staggeringly dumb. The U.S. occupation radicalized scores of young Muslims, many of whom traveled to Iraq, where they learned terror warfare and were galvanized in the global jihad. And now they’ve begun returning home, to share the tactics and technology developed in a laboratory we provided for them by invading Iraq.

Of course, that doesn’t even take into account the role of torture, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other such obscenities in helping to radicalize Muslims as well.

To put it another way, the Bush Administration have spent billions upon billions of dollars on the Iraq War, largely based on the bankrupt theory that we are building an island of democracy that will de-radicalize the Middle East. In reality, we have made things far worse than they would have been had we never invaded, so much so that we have unthinkingly created another generation of terrorists, in the process weakening ourselves to such a degree that we may not be able to fight back the next time the come “over here.”

Imagine how bad things would be if Bush had taken a similar approach to the economy.

Oh. Wait.

Never mind.

Hat tip: Obsidian Wings

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