Lindsey Graham must have decided that he wants to keep his job. Yesterday he left Eric Holder baffled during Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings, simply by asking him: Can you give me a case in United States history where a enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?

This dialogue then followed:

GRAHAM: If bin Laden were caught tomorrow, would it be the position of this administration that he would be brought to justice?

HOLDER: He would certainly be brought to justice, absolutely.

GRAHAM: Where would you try him?

HOLDER: Well, we’d go through our protocol. And we’d make the determination about where he should appropriately be tried. [...]

GRAHAM: If we captured bin Laden tomorrow, would he be entitled to Miranda warnings at the moment of capture?

HOLDER: Again I’m not—that all depends. I mean, the notion that we—
GRAHAM: Well, it does not depend. If you’re going to prosecute anybody in civilian court, our law is clear that the moment custodial interrogation occurs the defendant, the criminal defendant, is entitled to a lawyer and to be informed of their right to remain silent.

The big problem I have is that you’re criminalizing the war, that if we caught bin Laden tomorrow, we’d have mixed theories and we couldn’t turn him over—to the CIA, the FBI or military intelligence—for an interrogation on the battlefield, because now we’re saying that he is subject to criminal court in the United States. And you’re confusing the people fighting this war.

NYM made the same point as Mr. Graham last week.

4:40 video

Courtesy of our elite law schools, Shearman & Sterling, and a liberal Supreme Court majority, some news agency reports that federal judges are busy right now turning captured jihadis loose.

Complying with a Supreme Court ruling last year, 15 federal judges in the U.S. courthouse (In Washington, D.C.) are giving detainees their day in court after years behind bars half a world away from their homelands.

The judges have found the government’s evidence against 30 detainees wanting and ordered their release. That number could rise significantly because the judges are on track to hear challenges from dozens more prisoners. ...

Bush administration Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once promised Guantanamo held “the worst of the worst.” The judges here have rejected pleas for release from eight detainees, but they have concluded the government doesn’t even have enough evidence to keep 30 other detainees behind bars.

“There is absolutely no reason for this court to presume that the facts contained in the government’s exhibits are accurate,” District Judge Gladys Kessler wrote in ordering the release of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed. He was repatriated to Yemen after a seven-year stay at Guantanamo, where he was brought as a teenager.

“Much of the factual material contained in those exhibits is hotly contested for a host of different reasons ranging from the fact that it contains second- and third-hand hearsay to allegations that it was obtained by torture to the fact that no statement purports to be a verbatim account of what was said,” Kessler said. She ruled the government failed to prove the detainee was part of or substantially supported Taliban or al-Qaida forces.

Andrew McCarthy doesn’t think so. He thinks they know exactly what they’re doing.

We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda’s case against America. Since that will be their “defense,” the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and — depending on what judge catches the case — they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets. And the circus will be played out for all to see — in the middle of the war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America’s defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.

Read the whole thing.

Back in 1969, when Richard Nixon was trying to conscript me, part of the process accompanying physical examinations and aptitude testing was a lengthy background form.

The US Military was extremely conservative, since in 1969 it was still seeking assurances that prospective draftees were not members or associates of such examples of pre-WWII history as the German American Bund and the Black Dragon Society.

I was in a cranky mood that day, and being tickled at encountering such historical references in a contemporary document, I affirmed my own membership in the Kokuryūkai (Black Dragon Society).

I was a trifle disappointed that no one noticed or ever mentioned my alleged sinister Oriental associations.

Presumably today, the contemporary version of the same form asks if you belong to, or subscribe to publications by, or sympathize with the goals of unsavory Islamic groups like al Qaeda and the Order of Assassins.

And clearly, today, just like back in 1969, the US Army does not look terribly closely into the sinister associations of potential inductees.

Take Nidal Malik Hasan, for example.

It turns out that he attended the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, Virginia, presided over by none other than Anwar al-Awlaki, author of 44 Ways to Support Jihad and spiritual advisor to 9/11 hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.

Anwar al-Awlaki, currently a resident of Yemen, has since endorsed his former congregant’s actions in a posting titled Nidal Hasan Did the Right Thing.
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The army was even warned about Hasan’s views by fellow doctors.

ABC:

A fellow Army doctor who studied with Hasan, Val Finell, told ABC News, “We would frequently say he was a Muslim first and an American second. And that came out in just about everything he did at the University.

Finell said he and other Army doctors complained to superiors about Hasan’s statements.

“And we questioned how somebody could take an oath of office…be an officer in the military and swear allegiance to the constitution and to defend America against all enemies, foreign and domestic and have that type of conflict,” Finell told ABC News.

ABC:

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan tried to make contact with people linked to al Qaeda.

It is not known whether the intelligence agencies informed the Army that one of its officers was seeking to connect with suspected al Qaeda figures, the officials said.

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During WWII, the issue of potential conflicting loyalties on the part of Japanese-Americans was taken very seriously. Japanese served in segregated units and were deliberately deployed only in the European theater. Today, the principal focus of concern is completely different.

Army Chief of Staff General George Casey has ordered his officers to be on the lookout to prevent “a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers.” “It would be a shame,” the general said, “As great a tragedy as this was — it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.”

Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano is working to prevent “a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment.”

The Mirror:

A British nuclear expert taking part in disarmament talks with Iran has died in mysterious circumstances at a UN building in Austria.

Timothy Hampton, 47, plunged to his death from the 17th floor and was found in a stairwell just hours before high-level discussions were due to resume in Vienna.

Investigators said they have not ruled out murder or suicide, but local sources said no suicide note was found.

Police are also investigating the death of another Brit who fell from the same building four months ago.

The third such incident will be very hard to take for just another accident.

On Oct. 13, a former Guantanamo detainee named Yousef Mohammed al Shihri was killed in a shootout at a checkpoint along the Saudi-Yemeni border. Al Shihri and his accomplices were stopped by Saudi security forces after their suspicious behavior drew attention.

Two of the travelers, including al Shihri, were reportedly dressed as women. Saudi security personnel decided to search the al Qaeda car and its passengers, but al Shihri and the others opened fire. Al Shihri and one other al Qaeda member were killed in the shootout, while a third was arrested. One Saudi security officer was also killed. ...

Yousef Mohammed al Shihri was repatriated to Saudi Arabia in November 2007 along with thirteen other Saudi citizens. At least several of them have returned to al Qaeda’s ranks. One of those who rejoined al Qaeda is Said Ali al Shihri, who has become the deputy chief of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and was reportedly involved in the September 2008 attack on the US embassy in Sanaa, Yemen. According to memos prepared at Gitmo, Said Ali al Shihri is Yousef Mohammed al Shihri’s brother. However, according to a report by Caryle Murphy in the Christian Science Monitor, Saudi authorities have said the two al Qaeda terrorists were brothers-in-law.

Regardless, Yousef and Said were relatives. And their stories demonstrate the pitfalls of the US government’s transfer and release decisions. Prior to their transfers, US intelligence officials at Guantanamo had determined that Said was “a known al Qaeda operative.” Moreover, when they inquired about Yousef, they found that he was considered one of the more dangerous Saudis held at Guantanamo.

In a memo prepared at Guantanamo, US intelligence officials reported that:

A foreign government service provided information on detainees held at Guantanamo Bay that they designated as being high priority targets, in order of precedence. [Yousef Mohammed al Shihri] is number four on the list.

The “foreign government service” is likely Saudi intelligence, as that organization would have the most information on Yousef and his fellow Saudi al Qaeda compatriots. Well more than 100 Saudis were detained at Guantanamo, so Yousef must have been considered especially dangerous to be listed as number four on the list.

In addition, US intelligence officials alleged that Yousef Mohammed al Shihri made his allegiances and animosity for America well-known long before being transferred to Saudi Arabia. Regarding Yousef Mohammed al Shihri, memos prepared at Guantanamo alleged:

The detainee stated he considers all Americans his enemy. The detainee decided that he hates all Americans because they attack his religion, Islam. Since Americans are the detainee’s enemy, he will continue to fight them until he dies.

The detainee pointed to the sky and told the interviewing agents that he will have a meeting with them in the next life. …

The detainee stated that the FBI, the United States and the interrogators are the enemy.

Despite all of this, Yousef and Said were transferred to Saudi custody. They both graduated from the Saudi jihadist rehabilitation program and then joined nine others in a planned escape from Saudi soil. They fled to Yemen, where they joined al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is currently one of the strongest al Qaeda branches. Said lives on to fight another day, while Yousef now gets to test his theory of the afterlife.

The Pathans (as they used to call them in English), or Pashtuns (as is preferred currently), the largest ethnic group (c. 42,000,000 people) without a state, are the hosts of al Qaeda and Taliban’s prime recruiting base. Their inhospitable mountainous tribal homelands are the base of the insurgency in Afghanistan and the safe refuge of Islamic terrorism.

In their very significant paper No Sign until the Burst of Fire: Understanding the Pakistan-Afghanistan Frontier, Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason address the issue at length, providing a quick background in history and ethnology, and explaining how Pakistan and the United States created the problem in the first place by facilitating the preaching of jihad to oppose the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan. The authors contend that efforts to impose external authority on the Pashtuns only provoke greater fanaticism and more enthusiastic resistance, and argue that the key to defeating Islamic extremism among the Pashtun tribes consists of strengthening indigenous self-rule and conducting diplomatic relations with the tribes in a fashion consistent with a Pashtun perspective and sense of honor very different from our own.

According to tradition, members of the Pashtun Hill Tribes who inhabit the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Area) are descendents of Karlan, a foundling adopted as the fourth son of Qais Abdur Rashid, a contemporary of the Prophet Mohammed and the ur-ancestor of the Pashtun ethnic group. The Hill Tribes, or Karlanri, include many of the most warlike tribes, such as the Afridis, Daurs, Jadrans, Ketrans, Mahsuds, Mohmands, and Waziris. Of all the Pashtun tribes, the Waziris of greater Waziristan (a region that includes North Waziristan Agency, South Waziristan Agency, and the Bermol District of Afghanistan’s Paktika Province) are reputed to be the most conservative and irascible. The Waziris pride themselves on never having paid taxes to any sovereign and never having their lands, which they consider veiled, or in purdah, conquered. (Considered good but unreliable fighters by the British during the colonial era, the Waziris and several other tribes were prohibited de facto from enlisting in native regiments of the Indian Army.)

Historically, the rural Pashtuns have dominated their neighbors and have avoided subjugation or integration by a larger nation. As one elderly Pashtuntribesman told Mountstuart Elphinstone, a British official visiting Afghanistan in 1809, “We are content with discord, we are content with alarms, we are content with blood . . . we will never be content with a master.” This characteristic makes Pashtuns the perfect insurgents.

With more than 25 million members, the Pashtun represent one of the largest tribal groups in the world. ...

Pashtuns identify themselves in terms of their familial ties and commitments, and have a fundamentally different way of looking at the world. As the preeminent Afghan scholar M. Jamil Hanifi wrote in 1978: “The Afghan individual is surrounded . . . by concentric rings consisting of family, extended family, clan, tribe, confederacy, and major cultural-linguistic group. The hierarchy of loyalties corresponds to these circles and becomes more intense as the circle gets smaller . . . seldom does an Afghan, regardless of cultural background, need the services and/or the facilities of the national government. Thus, in case of crisis, his recourse is to the kinship and, if necessary, the larger cultural group. National feelings and loyalties are filtered through the successive layers.”

Pashtuns engage in social, political, and economic activities within these concentric rings; this engagement prevents government-oriented institutions from gaining a foothold in tribal areas.24 This segmentation is one reason why, historically, no foreign entity—whether Alexander, the British, the Soviets, the Afghans, or the Pakistanis—has been able to reconcile the Pashtun to external rule. During the nineteenth century, at the height of its imperial power, Great Britain struggled and failed to subject the Pashtuns to state authority. Even the most brutal of these foreign incursions, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, failed to subjugate the Pashtuns—despite genocidal military tactics and a massive commitment of military personnel and firepower that killed more than a million Pashtuns and drove at least 3 million more into exile in Pakistan and Iran. ...

The obstinacy of the Pashtun tribes and the inability of the British Empire to control them led to a border policy of “masterly inactivity” that essentially used the tribesmen as a buffer between India’s northern frontier and the approaching Russian Empire in Central Asia. Successive Pakistani and Afghan governments were no more successful than the British or the Russians, and the designation of this region as a kind of tribal no man’s land over generations created the loose political system of tribal autonomy in the FATA seen today. Indeed the name for this area is actually a misnomer. It is not federally administered in any sense of the word. Constitutionally, Islamabad has never maintained legal jurisdiction over more than 100 meters to the left and right of the few paved roads in the tribal areas. ...

Why have the Pashtuns provided a safe haven for the Taliban and al-Qaida, while their neighbors along the same border have proven so resistant to such religious radicalization?...

The explanation for the Pashtuns’ provision of safe haven to the Taliban and al-Qaida lies in their unique social code, known as Pashtunwali: a set of values and unwritten, but universally understood, precepts that define Pashtun culture. Pashtunwali, literally translated, means “the way of the Pashtun.” For U.S. policymakers seeking to address the challenges of the Pashtun tribal areas, an understanding of the core principles of this cultural value system is crucial. Pashtunwali is the keystone of the Pashtuns’ identity and social structure, and it shapes all forms of behavior from the cradle to the grave. Its rules are largely responsible for the survival of the Pashtun tribes for more than 1,000 years, but they remain little understood in the West. As Charles Allen writes, “[Pashtunwali is] an uncompromising social code so profoundly at odds with Western mores that its application constantly brings one up with a jolt.” A Pashtun must adhere to this code to maintain his honor and retain his identity. The worst obscenity one Pashtun can call another is dauz, or “person with no honor.” In a closed, interdependent rural society, a Pashtun family without honor becomes a pariah, unable to compete for advantageous marriages or economic opportunities, and shunned by the other families as a disgrace to the clan. ...

Intrinsically flexible and dynamic, Pashtunwali has core tenets that include self-respect, independence, justice, hospitality, forgiveness, and tolerance. Not all Pashtuns embody the ideal type defined by Pashtunwali, but all respect its core values and admire—if sometimes grudgingly—those who do. When hillmen come down out of the mountains to buy staples in the bazaar of a valley town, with their long fighting knives visible in their waistbands, the towns-people are likely to sneak admiring glances and mutter something to their friends about “real Pashtuns.” ...

For centuries, these interlocking elements of the unwritten code of the Pashtun—freedom, honor, revenge, and chivalry—have defeated every effort to subdue the Pashtuns and supersede Pashtunwali with a more codified and centralized rule of law. Nevertheless,Western policymakers continue to ignore or to downplay the primacy of these fundamental cultural values in their efforts to shape strategies for southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, while the Taliban and al-Qaida use them for recruitment, shelter, and social mobilization.

(Najibullah) Zazi, a onetime coffee-cart operator on Wall Street and shuttle-van driver at the Denver airport, was planning what could have been the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since September 11. Prior to his arrest last month, the FBI discovered pages of handwritten notes on his laptop detailing how to turn common, store-bought chemicals into bombs. If proven guilty, Zazi would be the first genuine Al Qaeda recruit discovered in the United States in the past few years.

The novel details of the case were sobering. Few Americans, after all, were expecting to be terrorized by an Al Qaeda agent wielding hair dye. But it was perhaps the least surprising fact about Zazi that was arguably the most consequential: where he is said to have trained.

In August 2008, prosecutors allege, Zazi traveled to Pakistan’s tribal regions and studied explosives with Al Qaeda members. If that story sounds familiar, it should: Nearly every major jihadist plot against Western targets in the last two decades somehow leads back to Afghanistan or Pakistan. The first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 was masterminded by Ramzi Yousef, who had trained in an Al Qaeda camp on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Ahmed Ressam, who plotted to blow up LAX airport in 1999, was trained in Al Qaeda’s Khaldan camp in Afghanistan. Key operatives in the suicide attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000 trained in Afghanistan; so did all 19 September 11 hijackers. The leader of the 2002 Bali attack that killed more than 200 people, mostly Western tourists, was a veteran of the Afghan camps. The ringleader of the 2005 London subway bombing was trained by Al Qaeda in Pakistan. The British plotters who planned to blow up passenger planes leaving Heathrow in the summer of 2006 were taking direction from Pakistan; a July 25, 2006, e-mail from their Al Qaeda handler in that country, Rashid Rauf, urged them to “get a move on.” If that attack had succeeded, as many as 1,500 would have died. The three men who, in 2007, were planning to attack Ramstein Air Base, a U.S. facility in Germany, had trained in Pakistan’s tribal regions.

And yet, as President Obama weighs whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, the connection between the region and Al Qaeda has suddenly become a matter of hot dispute in Washington. We are told that September 11 was as much a product of plotting in Hamburg as in Afghanistan; that Al Qaeda and the Taliban are quite distinct groups, and that we can therefore defeat the former while tolerating the latter; that flushing jihadists out of one failing state will merely cause them to pop up in another anarchic corner of the globe; that, in the age of the Internet, denying terrorists a physical safe haven isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

These arguments point toward one conclusion: The effort to secure Afghanistan is not a matter of vital U.S. interest. But those who make this case could not be more mistaken. Afghanistan and the areas of Pakistan that border it have always been the epicenter of the war on jihadist terrorism-and, at least for the foreseeable future, they will continue to be. Though it may be tempting to think otherwise, we cannot defeat Al Qaeda without securing Afghanistan.

A young Osama Bin Laden first arrived in the region around 1980 to wage jihad against the Soviets; he would spend most of his adult life in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Al Qaeda leaders have, since the ‘80s, developed deep relationships with key Taliban commanders based along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and members of the Haqqani family. Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, has even married into a local tribe. ...

Al Qaeda’s leaders are themselves keenly aware of the importance of maintaining a safe haven. The very words Al Qaeda mean “the base” in Arabic; and, as bin Laden explained in an interview with Al Jazeera in 2001, the name is not a reference to some kind of abstract foundation but, rather, to a physical spot for training: “Abu Ubaidah Al Banjshiri [an early military commander of Al Qaeda] created a military base to train the young men to fight. ... So this place was called ‘The Base,’ as in a training base, and the name grew from this.”

But it isn’t just a safe haven that Al Qaeda wants; it is a state. As Zawahiri explained shortly after September 11 in his autobiographical Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, “Confronting the enemies of Islam, and launching jihad against them require a Muslim authority, established on a Muslim land that raises the banner of jihad and rallies the Muslims around it. Without achieving this goal our actions will mean nothing.” No wonder Al Qaeda remains so committed to Afghanistan-and so deeply invested in helping the Taliban succeed.

DEBKAfile has rumors of the Taliban targeting the bases containing Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report: Five days Taliban gunmen and bombers hit Pakistan’s army headquarters in Islamabad and at the same time advanced on the northwestern Kohat road to Peshawar and a cluster of air bases holding its nuclear arsenal around Kamra in the North West Frontier Province.

Thursday, Taliban struck further northeast toward the Kamra nuclear center, aiming to cut it off from Islamabad, 150 kilometers east of Kohat. They have begun encircling the Sargodha air base, the location of nuclear warheads stores. En route, suicide attackers flattened a police station in the Saddar suburb of Kohat town, killing 10 people and wounding 20.

Taliban has stepped up the tempo of its large-scale assaults in an effort to unbalance central government and the military command as they prepare a major offensive against terrorist bastions in South Waziristan.

This news agency story discusses varying opinions of the security of Pakistan’s estimated 70 to 90 nuclear warheads.
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Bill Roggio has analysis of what is going on.

The spate of attacks at military bases has largely targeted officers, new recruits, and the families of those serving. The Taliban and al Qaeda’s objective may be two-fold: intimidate officers either on the fence or who do not support the Islamists, and erode the military’s capacity to defend nuclear installations if the Taliban and al Qaeda can mount a raid to seize nuclear weapons. While the Pakistani nuclear weapons are under tight security according to the government, US intelligence officials have repeatedly expressed concerned over the safety of Pakistan’s arsenal.

The Taliban’s campaign to take control of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province and its strong presence in Quetta and wider Baluchistan Province also plays into the West’s fears over Pakistan’s nuclear program. The Northwest Frontier Province not only serves as a base for the Taliban and al Qaeda Central Command, the territory directly abuts sensitive nuclear sites in the province of Punjab.

LA Times:

In a brazen attack on Pakistan’s military nerve center, gunmen disguised in army uniforms broke into the grounds of the country’s army headquarters today, sparking a furious firefight that left four attackers and six military personnel dead.

By late Saturday, the tense scene at the compound had evolved into a hostage crisis. As many as five gunmen remained holed up in a security building and were holding 10 to 15 security officers and civilian workers as hostages, said army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas.

The initial attack, which lasted about 90 minutes, illustrated the breadth of the militants’ ability to launch attacks virtually anywhere in the violence-wracked Muslim nation—even the epicenter of its vaunted security establishment.

At about 11:30 a.m., Abbas said, the gunmen drove up in a white Suzuki van to a perimeter checkpoint outside the army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi, a garrison city adjacent to Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. Armed with automatic rifles, the gunmen opened fire at guards at the checkpoint, jumped out of the van and then took positions outside a second checkpoint about 330 yards down the road. Four of the military personnel killed in the siege died in that initial exchange of gunfire, Abbas said.

Officials said they believed the use of camouflage military uniforms, along with military plates on the van, probably helped the gunmen approach the first checkpoint without an initial reaction from guards. The strategy mirrored the tactics used in a suicide bomb blast at the U.N.’s World Food Program office Monday. In that attack, in which five World Food Program employees were slain, the suicide bomber wore a Pakistani paramilitary police uniform and got by the heavily guarded main entrance by asking for permission to use the restroom.

Once at the second checkpoint Saturday, the militants opened fire again and lobbed grenades at guards. Witnesses said bursts of gunfire continued to ring out for several minutes, punctuated by the sound of grenade blasts. Overhead, Pakistani military helicopters and Cobra gunships hovered.

While the gun battle raged on, some of the Army’s top generals and commanders were trapped inside the compound’s buildings. There were unconfirmed reports that explosives were found in the attackers’ van.

Police and soldiers established a cordon around the gunmen to keep them from fleeing. By early afternoon, security officials reported that four gunmen had been killed. Among the military personnel killed were a brigadier general and a lieutenant colonel responsible for security at the compound, Abbas said.

Early Saturday evening, military officials said they had traced the location of the gunmen at large to a security building within the compound, where they were holding hostage several security officers and civilian employees assigned to the army headquarters. Pakistani commandos surrounded the building, military officials said.

1:16 ITN News video

These kind of contemptible suicide attacks are really the tactic of an impotent and irrational enemy lashing out in a useless and unproductive manner. Except that in the contemporary era, the dominant voice is that of the militarily unsophisticated Western public, in whose eyes a news headline is equivalent to winning a major battle.

Terrorism’s real battlefield is in the reports of the media.

Rory Stewart, the Afghanistan-war skeptic who heads the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, has one advantage over his fellow witnesses at this Senate panel: he’s better with quips. Stewart compares the Obama administration’s twinning of Afghanistan and Pakistan policy to a policy of dealing with “an angry cat and a tiger,” after Brookings’ Steve Biddle reiterated his argument that the U.S.’s interests in Afghanistan are primarily about Pakistan.

“We’re beating the cat,” Stewart said, “and when you say, ‘Why are you beating the cat?’ you say, ‘It’s a cat-tiger strategy.’ But you’re beating the cat because you don’t know what to do about the tiger.”

first published in 2006

Born in Hayle, Cornwall, May 27, 1939, to a working-class family, Rescorla joined the British Army in 1957, serving three years in Cypress. Still eager for adventure, after army service, Rescorla enlisted in the Northern Rhodesia Police.

Ultimately finding few prospects for advancement in Britain or her few remaining colonies, Rescorla moved to the United States, and joined the US Army in 1963. After graduating from Officers’ Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1964, he was assigned as a platoon leader to Bravo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, Third Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). Rescorla’s serious approach to training and his commitment to excellence led to his men to apply to him the nickname “Hard Corps.”

The 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry was sent to Vietnam in 1965, where it soon engaged in the first major battle between American forces and the North Vietnamese Army at Ia Drang.

The photograph above was used on the cover of Colonel Harold Moore’s 1992 memoir We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, made into a film starring Mel Gibson in 2002. Rescorla was omitted from the cast of characters in the film, which nonetheless made prominent use of his actual exploits, including the capture of the French bugle and the elimination of a North Vietnamese machine gun using a grenade.

For his actions in Vietnam, Rescorla was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star (twice), the Purple Heart, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. After Vietnam, he continued to serve in the Army Reserve, rising to the rank of Colonel by the time of his retirement in 1990.

Rick Rescorla became a US citizen in 1967. He subsequently earned bachelor’s, master’s, and law degrees from the University of Oklahoma, and proceeded to teach criminal law at the University of South Carolina from 1972-1976, before he moved to Chicago to become Director of Security for Continental Illinois Bank and Trust.

In 1985, Rescorla moved to New York to become Director of Security for Dean Witter, supervising a staff of 200 protecting 40 floors in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. (Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter merged in 1997.) Rescorla produced a report addressed to New York’s Port Authority identifying the vulnerability of the Tower’s central load-bearing columns to attacks from the complex’s insecure underground levels, used for parking and deliveries. It was ignored.

On February 26, 1993, Islamic terrorists detonated a car bomb in the underground garage located below the North Tower. Six people were killed, and over a thousand injured. Rescorla took personal charge of the evacuation, and got everyone out of the building. After a final sweep to make certain that no one was left behind, Rick Rescorla was the last to step outside.
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Directing the evacuation on September 11th.
Security Guards Jorge Velasquez and Godwin Forde are on the right.
photograph: Eileen Mayer Hillock.

Rescorla was 62 years old, and suffering from prostate cancer on September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, he successfully evacuated all but 6 of Morgan Stanley’s 2800 employees. (Four of the six lost included Rescorla himself and three members of his own security staff, including both the two security guards who appear in the above photo and Vice President of Corporate Security Wesley Mercer, Rescorla’s deputy.) Rescorla travelled personally, bullhorn in hand, as low as the 10th floor and as high as the 78th floor, encouraging people to stay calm and make their way down the stairs in an orderly fashion. He is reported by many witnesses to have sung “God Bless America,” “Men of Harlech, ” and favorites from Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. “Today is a day to be proud to be an American,” he told evacuees.

A substantial portion of the South Tower’s workforce had already gotten out, thanks to Rescorla’s efforts, by the time the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, struck the South Tower at 9:02:59 AM. Just under an hour later, as the stream of evacuees came to an end, Rescorla called his best friend Daniel Hill on his cell phone, and told him that he was going to make a final sweep. Then the South Tower collapsed.

Rescorla had observed a few months earlier to Hill, “Men like us shouldn’t go out like this.” (Referring to his cancer.) “We’re supposed to die in some desperate battle performing great deeds.” And he did.
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Tehran has (taken) the longest strides towards its objective than at any time since its program was surreptitiously launched.

The progress confirmed by our sources consists of four major steps:

1. Iran has succeeded in secretly combining uranium processing, airborne high-explosive tests and work on designing a missile cone to fit a nuclear warhead, according to Western intelligence updates.

2. The conflicting reports on the amount of uranium enriched and number of fast centrifuge machines in operation obscure the following hard facts: The Iranians have doubled the number of ever faster centrifuges that are working at their enrichment plants.

They are moreover completing tests on a more advanced homemade centrifuge, the IR4, which will halve the time taken for converting low-grade enrichment uranium into weapons-grade material.

3. By February 2010 – and some say sooner – Tehran will have stocked enough high-grade enriched uranium for two nuclear bombs.

4. Iran has also gone into home production of nuclear fuel rods for plutonium.

Pamela Hess and Matt Appuzzo, writing for some news agency, are trying to shocking a nation’s conscience.

With just two weeks of training, or about half the time it takes to become a truck driver, the CIA certified its spies as interrogation experts after 9/11 and handed them the keys to the most coercive tactics in the agency’s arsenal.

Can you imagine? Just because some Muslim terrorists killed a lousy 3000 Americans and produced some mere billions of dollars worth of physical destruction and economic disruption, the Bush Administration actually allowed people with only two weeks of federal training to slap terrorists, pour water on them, and (worst of all) to expose them to caterpillar attack.

Hat tip to Stephen Frankel.

Unlike the US, Al Qaeda provided appropriately thorough training. They even produced a manual.

Good thing we elected Barack Obama president, isn’t it?

We wouldn’t want American intelligence officers running around shooting terrorists, would we? Without a formal hearing, without providing them with counsel from top law firms or access to major media reporters? That would be hasty, violent, risky, and (at least from some Buddhist perspectives, and that of much of the contemporary community of fashion) simply wrong.

CIA officials were proposing to activate a plan to train anti-terrorist assassination teams overseas when agency managers brought the secret program to the attention of CIA Director Leon Panetta last month, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The plan to kill top al-Qaeda leaders, which had been on the agency’s back burner for much of the past eight years, was suddenly thrust into the spotlight because of proposals to initiate what one intelligence official called a “somewhat more operational phase.” Shortly after learning of the plan, Panetta terminated the program and then went to Capitol Hill to brief lawmakers, who had been kept in the dark since 2001.

The Obama administration’s top intelligence official, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair, yesterday defended Panetta’s decision to cancel the program, which he said had raised serious questions among intelligence officials about its “effectiveness, maturity and the level of control.”

I think it’s time to deal properly with al Qaeda terrorists. First of all, they clearly have grievances, so Congress should add a provision entitling then to TARP payments. We all know that the fundamental basis of all terrorism is always economic inequality, so if Goldman Sachs can get TARP money, why not al Qaeda prime?

Their violent behavior clearly is a way of externalizing emotional discomfort with being fanatical adherents of a medieval, intolerant sect associated with a backward culture widely looked down upon and despised. Counseling is clearly in order.

Instead of trained teams of CIA assassins, perhaps the Obama administration will instead organize a new, more progressive answer, sending out teams of legal aid attorneys to assist indignant ghazis in securing financial reparations for Western slights, along with crack platoons of therapists and anger management counselors to help the bitter and offended mujahedin to just get over it.

Instead of hellfire rockets fired from helicopters or drone aircraft, the Obama administration might start delivering Pilates equipment and yoga mats to Taliban training camps.

New York Times:

The American military unexpectedly released five Iranians on Thursday after holding them for two and a half years on charges they had orchestrated deadly attacks in Iraq. Iraqi officials promptly promised to turn them over to the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad.

The Iranians, whom the Americans accused of being senior operatives of Iran’s Quds force, an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, have been a point of contention between the United States, Iran and Iraq ever since they were seized in a predawn raid in the northern Kurdish city of Erbil in January 2007. An adviser to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, Yassein Majid, confirmed the men’s release but provided no additional details. American military and diplomatic officials did not immediately comment.

The reasoning behind the timing of the release was unclear.

Western anti-terror agencies have warned that a large group of 15-20 al Qaeda terrorists, trained in Pakistan and Algeria to hijack and blow up airliners, deployed secretly in at least six European and Middle East countries in early July. They are standing ready to carry out multiple terrorist attacks.

The terrorists are believed to have landed in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey and Egypt.

The dates to watch, local authorities were warned, were July 4, July 7, the fourth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks on the British transport system in which 52 people died, and July 8-9, when the G8 summit meets in the Italian town of L’Aqila. US president Barack Obama will fly in from talks with Russian leaders in Moscow. ...

The alert is still in force.

Another of the innocent inhabitants of the Middle East, erroneously and unjustly detained by the Bush Administration at Guantanamo Bay then freed in 2007, has resumed his former life and become a prominent and effective leader in his home community.

Fox News.

A former Guantanamo Bay inmate is leading the fight against U.S. Marines in the Helmand province of Afghanistan, a senior U.S. defense official confirmed to FOX News on Tuesday.

Mullah Zakir, also known as Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, surrendered in Mazar-e-Sharif in Northern Afghanistan in 2001, and was transferred to Gitmo in 2006. He was released in late 2007 to Afghan custody.

Now as the United States is pushing ahead with the massive Operation Khanjar in the southern province of Afghanistan, Zakir is coordinating the Taliban fighters. Some 4,000 U.S. Marines and hundreds of Afghan forces have faced some resistance as they sweep across the province, reclaiming control of districts where Zakir and his comrades were running a shadow government.

Zakir was released from Afghan custody around 2008, according to the New York Post. He re-established connections with high-level Taliban leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan after his second release.

Taliban chief Mullah Omar appointed Zakir in mid-2008 as senior military commander, according to the newspaper.

Zakir quickly became a charismatic leader, helping establish an “accountability commission” to track spending and monitor activities of Taliban leaders in the districts where they held power and were running a shadow government, according to the Post.

Explaining why Zakir was released from Gitmo, the defense official said, “We were under incredible pressure from the world to release detainees at Gitmo. You just don’t know what people are going to do.

“He was no worse than anyone else being held at Gunatanamo Bay,” the official added. “He was not going to be tried for war crimes so we decided to release him. Either he was not thought to have committed a crime or we didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute him.”

The defense official shifted some blame for Zakir’s activities to Afghanistan. “The country which agreed to take him promised to take steps to mitigate the threat he posed.

(PowerPoint needed for this one. Be patient. It’s a big download.)

A classmate passed along to me this PowerPoint slideshow (originally titled: CarreterasAfganistan1) of 58 photos of military operations in Afghanistan. Good 4th of July viewing featuring remarkable photos of US forces operating in spectacular terrain.

I wish I could properly credit these, but the slideshow was evidently one of those virally-distributed emails which arrives anonymously. The file and and some credits offer the clue that it came originally from a Spanish-language source.

Back in 1959, well before Vietnam, there was a very funny Peter Sellers comedy called The Mouse That Roared.

Impoverished by the collapse of its only industry, the tiny European Duchy of Grand Fenwick proposes to declare war on the United States, lose, and then achieve prosperity via US reconstruction assistance and aid to a defeated foe.

American charity to wartime enemies was sufficiently notorious in the post-WWII era to provide themes for comedy, but it never occurred to George Marshall or Harry Truman to dispatch captured members of Axis forces to tropical resorts in the manner described by yesterday’s New York Times.

Almost exactly seven years after arriving at Guantánamo in chains as accused enemy combatants, and four days after their surprise predawn flight to Bermuda, four Uighur Muslim men basked in their new-found freedom here, grateful for the handshakes many residents had offered and marveling at the serene beauty of this tidy, postcard island.

In newly purchased polo shirts and chinos, the four husky men, members of a restive ethnic minority from western China, might blend in except for their scruffy beards. Smelling hibiscus flowers, luxuriating in the freedom to drift through scenic streets and harbors, they expressed wonder at their good fortune in landing here after a captivity that included more than a year in solitary confinement. ...

“Before we were asking, ‘Why are the Americans doing this to us?’ ” said Mr. Abdulahat. Now, he said, with others nodding in agreement, “We have ended up in such a beautiful place….

While some less affluent residents said they felt it was unfair to offer jobs and citizenship to men the United States itself would not take, many others shrugged and expressed pride at Bermudan hospitality. As the men venture from the seaside cottage where they temporarily live until they get jobs and figure out next steps, people often come up to shake their hands and wish them well, and the men said they were deeply touched.

Their homeland of Xinjiang, a largely Muslim region in western China where many residents chafe under Chinese rule, is landlocked, and many of the Uighur detainees saw an ocean — still a distant, mysterious presence — for the first time ever through fences at Guantánamo.

Now they can play in the waters. Khaleel Mamut, 31, said he went fishing on a boat on Saturday and caught his first fish ever. “I was so excited,” he said. “You just drop the hook in the water and you get a fish.” Hearing that fishing did not always bring such quick results, one of the other men quipped that perhaps the fish were joining in Bermuda’s welcome.

They have been promised work visas and, in perhaps a year or so, possible citizenship, their American lawyers said. That would give them passports and a right to travel.

slideshow

Tired of living in hopeless poverty driving sheep across the Gobi’s trackless sands? Get yourself an AK-47 and start taking potshots at US troops. Maybe you, too, will be captured and awarded a new life in a tropical resort at US taxpayers’ expense. Allahu Akhbar!

Surviving German and Italian prisoners of war of the WWII era, who were, after all, lawful combatants fighting in uniform as members of military forces typically observing the laws and customs of war, were by comparison lodged in Spartan conditions behind barbed wire and commonly required to perform agricultural or construction labor. Those Axis POWs must be feeling a trifle slighted. No one ever offered to release them into new lives in vacation playgrounds.

Palau is not the only resort island willing to take the Uighurs detained at Guantanamo. The Obama administration has transferred four Uighurs to Bermuda, which is, of course, much closer to the continental U.S. than Palau. Understandably, the Obama administration has placed travel restrictions on the Uighurs. ABC News reports that they are not allowed to travel to the U.S. without prior consent.

This alone is somewhat of a reversal by the administration, since it was reportedly considering freeing some of the Uighur detainees in the U.S. at one point. One wonders what our European allies will think, too. Leading European nations were only willing to consider taking detainees, including the Uighurs, if the administration showed a willingness to release them on U.S. soil. While the administration has found a home for the Uighurs, it fails to satisfy the quid pro quo conditions that our allies have demanded. Keep an eye out for Europe’s reaction to this news, and whether attitudes across the pond evolve. The reaction of European politicians could very well be: If the Obama administration won’t even allow former detainees to travel to the U.S., then why should we free them in our own nations?

So, who are Bermuda’s new residents? And why would the Obama administration place travel restrictions on them?

All four of them are members or associates of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (otherwise known as the Turkistan Islamic Party). The ETIM/TIP is a U.S. and UN designated terrorist organization affiliated with al Qaeda and has attacked civilians in China, as well as reportedly plotted against other targets elsewhere, including the U.S. embassy in Kyrgyzstan. According to the State Department, ETIM/TIP members have also fought alongside the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And last year the organization threatened to attack the Olympic Games in China.

The four Uighurs attempted to deny any relationship with the ETIM/TIP, the Taliban, and al Qaeda during their CSRTs. But their denials are not credible. In the context of their denials they made important admissions.

For example, all four of the Uighurs admitted during their combatant status review tribunals (CSRTs) at Gitmo that they received training in the Taliban’s Afghanistan. And all four of them received this training at an ETIM/TIP terrorist training facility in Tora Bora, a key area once controlled by the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Three of the four Uighurs transferred to Bermuda also admitted that they had firsthand ties to senior terrorists such as Hassan Mahsum and Abdul Haq – the leaders of the ETIM/TIP. Haq was recently designated an al Qaeda terrorist by the Obama administration’s Treasury Department, which noted that he is also a member of al Qaeda’s elite Shura council. Mahsum was killed in a Taliban and al Qaeda stronghold in northern Pakistan in 2003.

When 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was captured on March 1, 2003, he was not cooperative. “I’ll talk to you guys after I get to New York and see my lawyer,” he said, according to former CIA Director George Tenet.

Of course, KSM did not get a lawyer until months later, after his interrogation was completed, and Tenet says that the information the CIA obtained from him disrupted plots and saved lives. “I believe none of these successes would have happened if we had had to treat KSM like a white-collar criminal—read him his Miranda rights and get him a lawyer who surely would have insisted that his client simply shut up,” Tenet wrote in his memoirs.

If Tenet is right, it’s a good thing KSM was captured before Barack Obama became president. For, the Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee.

Then, you arrange $11.1 million a head retirement packages to the South Seas for your prisoners. Yes, 17 Uighurs into $200 million comes to $11.1 million semolians.

Fox News:

Palau says its decision to temporarily take the 17 Uighurs, or Chinese Muslims, being held at the Guantanamo Bay prison was a “humanitarian gesture.”

But the South Pacific island may have been motivated more by 200 million other reasons.

Two U.S. officials told the Associated Press that the U.S. was prepared to give Palau up to $200 million in return for accepting the Uighurs and as part of a mutual defense and cooperation treaty that is due to be renegotiated this year.

Figures on Palau’s federal budget weren’t immediately available, but if it is close to its size in 1999, when it was $71 million, the deal with the U.S. would in effect more than double the nation’s spending and make it the fastest growing economy in the world.

Frankly, I bet you could get very close to every terrorist simply to put down his AK-47 and retire for a considerably smaller one-time payment.

Of course, it’s hard to imagine a more effective recruiting promotional deal. I can see Achmed the al Qaeda recruiter delivering his spiel even now, “And if the soldiers of the great Shaitan capture you, they will only provide you with attorneys from Sherman & Sterling before funding your retirement to a life of leisure in a tropical paradise surrounded by beautiful maidens serving you Mai Tais. Inshallah!”

Despite the inclination of establishment media to dismiss issues of Obama’s citizenship status, questions continue to surface in wider circles of American society.

We’ve all seen the e-mails about Barack Obama’s citizenship. This is a new twist we hadn’t known. Interesting. More questions. And this time some good questions.

It can be resolved by Obama answering one simple question: What passport did you use when you were shuttling between New York, Jakarta, and Karachi?

So how did a young man who arrived in New York in early June 1981, without the price of a hotel room in his pocket, suddenly come up with the price of a round-the-world trip just a month later? And once he was on a plane, shuttling between New York, Jakarta and Karachi ,what passport was he offering when he passed through Customs and Immigration?

The American people not only deserve to have answers to these questions, they must have answers.

It makes the debate over Obama’s citizenship a rather short and simple one.

Q: Did he travel to Pakistan in 1981, at age 20?

A: Yes, by his own admission.

Q: What passport did he travel under

A: There are only three possibilities. 1. He traveled with a U.S. passport, 2) He traveled with a British passport, or 3) He traveled with an Indonesia passport.

Q: Is it possible that Obama traveled with a U.S. passport in 1981?

A: No. It is not possible. Pakistan was on the U.S. State Department’s “no-travel” list in 1981.

Conclusion: When Obama went to Pakistan in 1981, he was traveling either with a British passport or an Indonesian passport. If he was traveling with a British passport, that would provide proof that he was born in Kenya on Aug. 4, 1961, not in Hawaii as he claims. And if he was traveling with an Indonesian passport, that would tend to prove that he relinquished whatever previous citizenship he held, British or American, prior to being adopted by his Indonesian stepfather in 1967.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the American people need to know how he managed to become a “natural born” U.S. citizen between 1981 and 2008.

The Hill reports on democrat efforts to stonewall and obfuscate.

In the bowels of the Capitol Visitor Center, members of the (House Intelligence Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations) gathered behind locked doors on Thursday morning to begin a series of hearings on the interrogation of terrorism suspects.

What began as a remarkably quiet and secretive hearing had, within a matter of hours, exploded into a political brawl over intelligence matters and national security.

Despite the weeks-long furor over how the Central Intelligence Agency came to use enhanced interrogation techniques, and what members of Congress were told about their development and implementation, the committee’s first hearing on the issue during the 111th Congress almost came and went without notice. The hearing was announced publicly but was not open to the public.

According to Republicans, that was by design.

“Democrats weren’t sure what they were going to get,” said Rep. Pete Hoekstra (Mich.), ranking Republican on the Intelligence panel, referring to information on the merits of enhanced interrogation techniques. “Now that they know what they’ve got, they don’t want to talk about it.”

The hearing was publicly described only as a subcommittee hearing on “Interrogations.” A committee spokeswoman would not comment on whether the development and use of controversial interrogation tactics were discussed.

But Republicans on the panel said that not only did the use of interrogation techniques come up Thursday, but that the data shared about those techniques proved they had led to valuable information that in some instances prevented terrorist attacks.

Hoekstra did not attend the hearing, but said he later spoke with Republicans on the subcommittee who did. He said he came away with even more proof that the enhanced interrogation techniques employed by the CIA proved effective.

“I think the people who were at the hearing, in my opinion, clearly indicated that the enhanced interrogation techniques worked,” Hoekstra said.

Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), a member of the subcommittee who attended the hearing, concurred with Hoekstra.

“The hearing did address the enhanced interrogation techniques that have been much in the news lately,” Kline said, noting that he was intentionally choosing his words carefully in observance of the committee rules and the nature of the information presented.

“Based on what I heard and the documents I have seen, I came away with a very clear impression that we did gather information that did disrupt terrorist plots,” Kline said.

Neither Hoekstra nor Kline revealed details about the specifics of what they were told Thursday or the identity of the briefers.

Democrats lambasted their Republican counterparts for discussing the information that was provided behind locked doors.

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

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) said, “Members on both sides need to watch what they say.”

Both Schakowsky and Reyes accused GOP members of playing politics with national security.

“I think they are playing a very dangerous game when it comes to the discussion of matters that were sensitive enough to be part of a closed hearing,” Schakowsky said.

Asked about the validity of Republican contentions that information shared in Thursday’s hearing showed the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques, Schakowsky said she could not comment on what was discussed at a closed hearing.

Reyes responded by saying he did not attend the entire hearing.

“I wasn’t at the whole hearing,” Reyes said. “As the chairman my view is we need to get the facts about how the enhanced interrogation techniques came about, not just the results.”

The CIA is equipping Pakistani tribesmen with secret electronic transmitters to help target and kill al-Qaida leaders in the north-western tribal belt, in a tactic that could aid Pakistan’s army as it takes the battle against extremism to the Taliban heartland.

As the army mops up Taliban resistance in the Swat valley, where a defence official predicted fighting would be over within days, the focus is shifting to Waziristan and the Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud.

But a deadly war of wits is already under way in the region, where tribesmen say the US is using advanced technology and old-fashioned cash to target the enemy.

Over the last 18 months the US has launched more than 50 drone attacks, mostly in south and north Waziristan. US officials claim nine of the top 20 al-Qaida figures have been killed.

That success is reportedly in part thanks to the mysterious electronic devices, dubbed “chips” or “pathrai” (the Pashto word for a metal device), which have become a source of fear, intrigue and fascination.

“Everyone is talking about it,” said Taj Muhammad Wazir, a student from south Waziristan. “People are scared that if a pathrai comes into your house, a drone will attack it.”

According to residents and Taliban propaganda, the CIA pays tribesmen to plant the electronic devices near farmhouses sheltering al-Qaida and Taliban commanders.

Hours or days later, a drone, guided by the signal from the chip, destroys the building with a salvo of missiles. “There are body parts everywhere,” said Wazir, who witnessed the aftermath of a strike.

Declan Walsh reports on 5:27 audio

Silly narcissistic people, like Ambinder, who make moral statements along with their fashion statements and for the same reasons, will never recognize the inevitable fruits of their eager intrusion into the issue. Bang! goes the gun in the hand of the US soldier or intelligence officer who now knows better than to take any prisoners who are going to serve as the focus of such a costly, idiotic, and self-lacerating domestic debate.

There can be little doubt that what Ralph Peters advocates will de facto be the never-expressed policy.

We made one great mistake regarding Guantanamo: No terrorist should have made it that far. All but a handful of those grotesquely romanticized prisoners should have been killed on the battlefield.

The few kept alive for their intelligence value should have been interrogated secretly, then executed.

Terrorists don’t have legal rights or human rights. By committing or abetting acts of terror against the innocent, they place themselves outside of humanity’s borders. They must be hunted as man-killing animals.

And, as a side benefit, dead terrorists don’t pose legal quandaries.

“In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.”
—Dick Cheney

Rich Lowry hits Obama’s nail right on the head.

Put Barack Obama in front of a Tele PrompTer and one thing is certain—he’ll make himself appear the most reasonable person in the room.

Rhetorically, he is in the middle of any debate, perpetually surrounded by finger-pointing extremists who can’t get over their reflexive combativeness and ideological fixations to acknowledge his surpassing thoughtfulness and grace. ...

It’s natural, then, that his speech at the National Archives on national security should superficially sound soothing, reasonable and even a little put upon (oh, what President Obama has to endure from all those finger-pointing extremists).

But beneath its surface, the speech—given heavy play in the press as an implicit debate with former Vice President Dick Cheney, who spoke on the same topic at a different venue immediately afterward—revealed something else: a president who has great difficulty admitting error; who can’t discuss the position of his opponents without resorting to rank caricature, and who adopts an off-putting pose of above-it-all righteousness.

Read the whole thing.

[W]e still can’t sell scripts about “Muslim terrorists,” but a celebrity death match between the Central Intelligence Agency and the person who stands second to the vice president in the line of succession to the White House should any, you know, unfortunate accident befall the leader of the free world, is right up our alley. Which is why I was first off the mark last week when Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi, the flower of Baltimore and the pride of San Francisco, accidentally pulled the pin on a live hand grenade in front of the fiercely independent Washington press corps and blew herself up.

She wasn’t trying to, of course. She was trying to explain to a bunch of less-than-enchanted media stenographers who would rather be covering Michelle Obama’s workout, or even Bo the dog’s breakfast, that the nasty, un-American CIA has deliberately “misled” her when discussing just precisely how they were going to insert bamboo shoots under the fingernails of a caterpillar that they would then waterboard and introduce into the cell of some totally innocent mujahedin caught up in the lawless Bush-Cheney dragnet during the hysteria that followed the inside job that was 9/11 and . . .

Zzzzzzzzzzzz.

In the other corner we have the Central Intelligence Agency, which we in Tinseltown have been depicting for years as just about the most malevolent organization in the world, outside of the Catholic Church, the Club for Growth, and the Cheney family. In movie after movie, the shadowy CIA guy always wound up as the villain in the last reel. So imagine our surprise when, during the Bushitler interregnum, we discovered that the CIA is on our side, and has been for decades! Screwed up the whole Shah of Iran thing and opened the way for the mullahs? Check! Consistently overrated and then failed to forecast the sudden disintegration of the Soviet Union? Check!! Never did quite figure out what Osama bin Laden was up to? Check

To top it all off, along came super-top-secret agent/Vanity Fair babe Valerie Plame and her dashing, Graydon-Carter-tressed hubby, Joe Wilson, running a sting operation against the hapless Bush White House, whipsawing the president and the veep with Joe’s unprovoked New York Times tale of sipping mint tea with Colonel Kurtz up the Congo and all of sudden there’s shouting about the “sixteen words” in Chimpy’s State of the Union address and Valerie is outed by Cheney flunky Scooter Libby — okay, by Colin Powell flunky Dick Armitage, same thing — and then Judy Miller goes to jail and . . .

Zzzzzzzzzzzz.

[H]ere’s the script that just made me a cool $1.5 mil plus five monkey points plus two first-class tickets to the premiere: Three Days of the Dodo Bird.

We open in Abu Ghraib prison, post-“Mission Accomplished,” where a SHADOWY CIA AGENT gets the bright idea to strike fear into the hearts of America’s “enemies” by photographing completely innocent prisoners in outrageous situations (piled naked on top of each other, led around on a dog leash by a woman, forced to wear panties on their heads) calculated to offend and inflame the sensibilities of the Religion of Peace. Now, you and I both know that these kinds of things happen every week at the right Hollywood parties, and they’re tons of fun, but for some weird cultural reason the photos are deemed offensive, the super-top-secret psy-war campaign winds up on the front page of the Times every day for a year, and the Shi’ites hit the fan.

Read the whole thing.

It was always quite clear that liberals’ efforts to wreak vengeance on President George W. Bush for his (successful) terror-war strategy would hurt Democrats more than it hurt him, but who ever dreamed it would become quite so funny this fast?

Minutes after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave her news conference on the subject of “torture,” she, and not Bush, was the issue and story; she was at war with the CIA and Director Leon Panetta; she was at war with House Whip Steney Hoyer, who wants to succeed her; and she had become a huge problem for President Barack Obama — or as he might say, a “distraction” — who had trouble enough trying to reconcile his rhetoric with the demands of his office, and his responsibilities to protect the country with the addled demands of his frenetic admirers. Not bad for a 25-minute presser. And this was just the first day.

This knowledge that the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate had known of and approved at last tacitly the “harsh” techniques sanctioned by the Bush administration in the grim days after 9/11 was the more explosive on the heels of the news that many Bush-era tactics — detainment, rendition, Club Gitmo — were being endorsed by their president.

The problem is that like the CIA, the entire government is now in the hands of the Democrats, who now have the job of protecting the country, not under past conditions, not under conditions they like to imagine, but conditions that really exist. The conditions that exist are those in which small groups of people, undeterred by threats or the prospect of dying, are able to inflict immense harm.

Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack, but it took place thousands of miles from the mainland and was an assault on the Armed Forces. The 9/11 attacks were an assault on the mainland, on unarmed civilians who were going to work. In conditions like this, nice people from Chicago and Texas, who find themselves charged with protecting the lives of 300 million, may find themselves employing “enhanced information techniques” seldom used in the days of orthodox warfare.

This may cost them the good will of the chattering classes of the East and West coasts and most cities in Europe, but, as Scrappleface puts it, “crashing hijacked planes into buildings full of noncombatant civilians is one of several ‘enhanced immolation techniques’ forbidden under U.S. and international law.”

Trying to square their need to trash Bush for his successful deterrence agenda with their need to escape blame if harm comes if his acts are reversed by their people, liberals react with the perfect lucidity that has long been their main trait. Eugene Robinson insists that because it can’t be proved beyond doubt that any technique used by the Bush administration stopped any specific attack from occurring, it proves beyond doubt that none did.

Read the whole thing.

Our special award for responsible journalism goes to that ever popular red-rag The Nation for today’s unsigned story, which quotes an alleged interview by arch-traitor Seymour Hersh with “Arab TV.”

The story contends, in broken and infelicitous English, that Pakistan president-elect Benazir Bhutto was murdered by a US assassination squad operating under the orders of Dick Cheney (!). Supposedly, she was killed because she had revealed in an interview in 2007 with Al Jazeera that Osama bin Ladin was dead, killed by Omar Saeed Sheikh.

————————————————
In this November 2, 2007 (14:38 video) interview with David Frost (at around 6:10), Bhutto refers to a “very key figure” in Pakistani security, a retired military officer, who she alleges “has had dealings” with (among others) “Omar Sheikh, the man who murdered Osama bin Ladin.”

But, as Omaron notes in this blog posting, Bhutto’s reference to bin Ladin was probably just a slip of the tongue.

While she did say what I (and now lots of others) thought she said, ... both from reading the transcript and re-watching the clip, was that she simply misspoke, meaning to say “the man who killed [WSJ reporter] Daniel Pearl” – which Omar Sheikh is accused of – in such a matter of fact tone, because it is well known.

It appears she didn’t realize what she said. Even Frost, that ever-cunning interviewer, seems to have missed it.

Speaking not for the Al Jazeera network, but for myself – as a journalist – I can say that the question should have been cleared up in the interview. But why I chose not to pursue the story: Not because of a conspiracy or a cover-up, but because it was an apparent slip of the tongue.

One can only observe that the Nation’s news reporting fully equals its political and economic analysis in responsibility, accuracy, and quality.

————————————————
Ooops! What do you know? Why, Seymour Hersch himself denies having said any such thing, and calls the Nation’s report “complete madness.”

Are they embarassed, do you suppose?

Members of Congress have been told in confidential briefings that Pakistan is rapidly adding to its nuclear arsenal even while racked by insurgency, raising questions on Capitol Hill about whether billions of dollars in proposed military aid might be diverted to Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed the assessment of the expanded arsenal in a one-word answer to a question on Thursday in the midst of lengthy Senate testimony. Sitting beside Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, he was asked whether he had seen evidence of an increase in the size of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.

“Yes,” he said quickly, adding nothing, clearly cognizant of Pakistan’s sensitivity to any discussion about the country’s nuclear strategy or security.

Inside the Obama administration, some officials say, Pakistan’s drive to spend heavily on new nuclear arms has been a source of growing concern, because the country is producing more nuclear material at a time when Washington is increasingly focused on trying to assure the security of an arsenal of 80 to 100 weapons so that they will never fall into the hands of Islamic insurgents.

Meanwhile the Times of India thinks US aid dollars may be paying for all this.

Are American lawmakers and the Obama administration unintentionally funding a runaway Pakistani nuclear weapons program that may not only mean a mortal danger to the United States in the long run, but pose a more immediate existential threat to India?

Influential American commentators and media outlets are now starting to question what they see as Washington’s indirect bankrolling of Pakistan’s nuclear program through massive infusion of aid, even as US President Obama is insisting that he is confident Islamabad won’t allow its nuclear assets to fall into extremist hands.

News of Islamabad’s accelerated nuclear weapons program, exposed by US satellite imagery and reported in this paper last Saturday, is being scrutinized in the light of the administration-backed Congress move to pump billions of dollars of US aid into Pakistan. Confirmation last week by US’ highest military official, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, that Pakistan is indeed ramping up its weapons program, had added a sense of urgency to the review, particularly since the aid package is being finalized this week.

Stung by CIA rebuttals, Nancy Pelosi did her best to forstall more damage to herself by trying to assure CIA officers that they were not her targets. She was only continuing the left’s vendetta against George W. Bush and officials of his administration.

So ease up, fellows. The Speaker is signaling that you’re safe and she is not sincere. It’s just politics.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has backed down slightly in her fight with the CIA, saying that she really meant only to criticize the Bush administration rather than career officials.

“My criticism of the manner in which the Bush Administration did not appropriately inform Congress is separate from my respect for those in the intelligence community who work to keep our country safe,” Pelosi said in a statement.

The Hill:

CIA Director Leon Panetta challenged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s accusations that the agency lied to her, writing a memo to his agents saying she received nothing but the truth.

Panetta said that “ultimately, it is up to Congress to evaluate all the evidence and reach its own conclusions about what happened.”

Pelosi (D-Calif.) infuriated Republicans this week when she said in a news conference that she was “misled” by CIA officials during a briefing in 2002 about whether the U.S. was waterboarding alleged terrorist detainees.

Panetta, President Obama’s pick to run the clandestine agency and President Clinton’s former chief of staff, wrote in a memo to CIA employees Friday that “CIA officers briefed truthfully on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, describing ‘the enhanced techniques that had been employed,’” according to CIA records.

“We are an agency of high integrity, professionalism and dedication,” Panetta said in the memo. “Our task is to tell it like it is — even if that’s not what people always want to hear. Keep it up. Our national security depends on it.”

In the pep talk-style memo titled “Turning Down the Volume,” Panetta encourages CIA employees to return to their normal business and not to be distracted by the shout-fest Pelosi’s remarks created.

“My advice — indeed, my direction — to you is straightforward: Ignore the noise and stay focused on your mission,” Panetta wrote. “We have too much work to do to be distracted from our job of protecting this country.”

In what may be the most critical moment of her speakership, Pelosi is under fire about what she knew of the enhanced interrogation techniques used by the Bush administration and when she knew it.

At the same news conference where she accused the CIA of misleading her on the topic, Pelosi acknowledged for the first time that she knew in 2003 that terrorism suspects were waterboarded. She said she learned that from an aide who sat in on a briefing in February 2003.

For weeks, Pelosi had dodged questions about what she knew about waterboarding and when she knew it. Republicans have called her a hypocrite for criticizing techniques as “torture” when she tacitly agreed to the practices after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. At least one lawmaker — Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) — called on Pelosi Friday to step down as Speaker.

Question: What does Dick Cheney think of waterboarding?

He’s in favor of it. He was in favor of it then, he’s in favor of it now. He doesn’t think it’s torture, and he supports having it on the books as a vital option. On his recent TV appearances, he sometimes gives the impression he would not be entirely averse to performing a demonstration on his interviewers, but generally he believes its use should be a tad more circumscribed. He is entirely consistent.

Question: What does Nancy Pelosi think of waterboarding?

No, I mean really. Away from the cameras, away from the Capitol, in the deepest recesses of her (if she’ll forgive my naivete) soul. Sitting on a mountaintop, contemplating the distant horizon, chewing thoughtfully on a cranberry-almond granola bar, what does she truly believe about waterboarding?

Does she support it? Well, according to the CIA, she did way back when, over six years ago.

Does she oppose it? According to Speaker Pelosi, yes. In her varying accounts, she’s (a) accused the CIA of consciously “misleading the Congress of the United States” as to what they were doing; (b) admitted to having been briefed that waterboarding was in the playbook but that “we were not — I repeat — were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used”; (c) belatedly conceded that she’d known back in February 2003 that waterboarding was being used but had been apprised of the fact by “a member of my staff.” As she said on Thursday, instead of doing anything about it, she decided to focus on getting more Democrats elected to the House.

It’s worth noting that, by most if not all of her multiple accounts, Nancy Pelosi is as guilty of torture as anybody else. That’s not an airy rhetorical flourish but a statement of law. As National Review’s Andy McCarthy points out, under Section 2340A© of the relevant statute, a person who conspires to torture is subject to the same penalties as the actual torturer. Once Speaker Pelosi was informed that waterboarding was part of the plan and that it was actually being used, she was in on the conspiracy, and as up to her neck in it as whoever it was who was actually sticking it to poor old Abu Zubaydah and the other blameless lads.

That is, if you believe waterboarding is “torture.”

I don’t believe it’s torture. Nor does Dick Cheney. But Nancy Pelosi does. Or so she has said, latterly.

Alarmed by her erratic public performance, the speaker’s fellow San Francisco Democrat Dianne Feinstein attempted to put an end to Nancy’s self-torture session. “I don’t want to make an apology for anybody,” said Senator Feinstein, “but in 2002, it wasn’t 2006, ’07, ’08, or ’09. It was right after 9/11, and there were in fact discussions about a second wave of attacks.”

Indeed. In effect, the senator is saying waterboarding was acceptable in 2002, but not by 2009. The waterboarding didn’t change, but the country did. It was no longer America’s war but Bush’s war. And it was no longer a bipartisan interrogation technique that enjoyed the explicit approval of both parties’ leaderships, but a grubby Bush-Cheney-Rummy war crime.

Dianne Feinstein has provided the least worst explanation for her colleague’s behavior. The alternative — that Speaker Pelosi is a contemptible opportunist hack playing the cheapest but most destructive kind of politics with key elements of national security — is, of course, unthinkable. Senator Feinstein says airily that no reasonable person would hold dear Nancy to account for what she supported all those years ago. But it’s okay to hold Cheney or some no-name Justice Department backroom boy to account?

Well, sure. It’s the Miss USA standard of political integrity: Carrie Prejean and Barack Obama have the same publicly stated views on gay marriage. But the politically correct enforcers know that Barack doesn’t mean it, so that’s okay, whereas Carrie does, so that’s a hate crime. In the torture debate, Pelosi is Obama and Dick Cheney is Carrie Prejean. Dick means it, because to him this is an issue of national security. Nancy doesn’t, because to her it’s about the shifting breezes of political viability.

But it does make you wonder whether a superpower with this kind of leadership class should really be going to war at all.

The contemporary intelligentsia, existing in a historical void and devoted to extravagant and conspicuous moral posturing, obviously will not countenance any (publicly-debated) form of coercive interrogation. The real answer is not to involve countless numbers of spoiled, pampered haute bourgeois Americans in these kinds of life and death decisions.

It is not America’s old lady cat lovers, her pansy leftwing bloggers, her Ethical Culture Society members, or her nice idealistic young coeds who have the knowledge, perspective, experience, and fortitude required to decide what is necessary to protect the lives of American civilians from terrorist plots and American soldiers in the field from primitive bloodthirsty fanatics. These kinds of decisions should be made in secret by the necessary rough men willing and able to do what needs to be done to allow the ethically concerned at home to sleep safe in their beds.

The great torture debate is just an anti-Bush Administration propaganda campaign which has successfully set off a grand series of echoes in the empty heads of our chattering classes. There has always been coercive interrogation. There will always be coercive interrogation when lives and the outcome of wars is at stake.

Sympathy for the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who sawed off Daniel Pearl’s head with a dull knife and who played a principal planning role in the 9/11 attacks which very cruelly killed more than 3000 innocent American civilians, is absurd. He is a foreign enemy, an unlawful combatant, a systematic violator of every form of law and all the rules and customs of war, and a mass murderer. There is something seriously wrong with the moral outlook of people who have a problem with slapping him in the face, pouring water on his head, or frightening him into divulging information on his schemes and accomplices necessary to prevent further mass attacks.

Happily, now that the Obama Administration has eliminated any form of “enhanced” interrogation, we can console ourselves that the result will be no terrorist prisoners being taken, since they will have no value as information sources. And the philosopher can reflect that, if the result of our new, more edifying intelligence policies proves to be renewed successful attacks on US urban centers, well, those are the locations filled with sanctimonious democrat voters, aren’t they?

The Washington Post provides sideline commentary on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s surprising decision to reiterate her claims that the CIA did not brief her on enhanced interrogation techniques, climbing further out on her own personal limb and handing irritated spooks in Langley a saw.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s extraordinary accusation that the Bush administration lied to Congress about the use of harsh interrogation techniques dramatically raised the stakes in the growing debate over the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies even as it raised some questions about the speaker’s credibility.

Pelosi’s performance in the Capitol was either a calculated escalation of a long-running feud with the Bush administration or a reckless act by a politician whose word had been called into question. Perhaps it was both.

For the first time, Pelosi (D-Calif.) acknowledged that in 2003 she was informed by an aide that the CIA had told others in Congress that officials had used waterboarding during interrogations. But she insisted, contrary to CIA accounts, that she was not told about waterboarding during a September 2002 briefing by agency officials. Asked whether she was accusing the CIA of lying, she replied, “Yes, misleading the Congress of the United States.”

Washington now is engaged in a battle royal of finger-pointing, second-guessing and self-defense, all over techniques President Obama banned in the first days of his administration. Both sides in this debate believe they have something to prove—and gain—by keeping the fight alive.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi drew a line in the sand at her news conference yesterday. In her bluntest language yet, she said she was never briefed about detainee waterboarding and accused the CIA of misleading Congress. Time will tell who is misleading whom.

Mrs. Pelosi’s carefully worded prepared statement admitted that in September 2002 the CIA briefed her on “some enhanced interrogation techniques,” known in some quarters as torture. She did not specify whether the briefers said the techniques were being used but noted that only waterboarding was singled out as not being used.

This new take is interesting. On the Feb. 25 “Rachel Maddow Show,” Mrs. Pelosi stated, “I can say, flat out, they never told us that these enhancement interrogations were being used … . They did not brief us with these enhanced interrogations that were taking place. They did not brief us.” Although this seems to contradict her current version of events, there is enough ambiguity in yesterday’s statement to leave the question open. Perhaps that was the speaker’s intention.

The confusion, she says, is the CIA’s fault. “The CIA was misleading the Congress,” she declared. However, one member of the intelligence community told The Washington Times that Mrs. Pelosi was “playing with fire.” The CIA will have saved documents that prove the case either way. “They know better after Iraq,” our source said. “They’re smarter than that now. All that stuff is saved. Nobody’s stupid.”

Mrs. Pelosi’s shifting story line is disturbing. She has accused the CIA of misleading Congress, but her full public record of statements on this issue seems misleading at best. She states that she “takes very seriously” her oath not to release classified information, but as we editorialized April 28, the cloak of government secrecy exists to protect agents who defend the United States, not to shield members of Congress from public inquiries about their records.

The CIA had a lot better reason to do some leaking this time: to correct the historical record after Barack Obama and congressional democrats chose to use counter-terrorism interrogations as an alleged atrocity useful for indicting their Republican predecessors.

But the spooks are not playing with gentlemanly George W. Bush this time. Demonstrate that Nancy Pelosi was lying her head off, and out come the democrat senatorial thugs to cry foul.

The Politico has the story.

Democrats charged Tuesday that the CIA has released documents about congressional briefings on harsh interrogation techniques in order to deflect attention and blame away from itself.

“I think there is so much embarrassment in some quarters [of the CIA] that people are going to try to shift some of the responsibility to others — that’s what I think,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and was briefed on interrogation techniques five times between 2006 and 2007.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said he finds it “interesting” that a document detailing congressional briefings was released just as “some of the groups that have been responsible for these interrogation techniques were taking the most criticism.”

Asked whether the CIA was seeking political cover by releasing the documents, Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said: “Sure it is.”

The London Times reports on a dangerous new weapon currently in the hands of the Taliban.

Taleban fighters have been using deadly white phosphorus munitions, some of them manufactured in Britain, to attack Western forces in Afghanistan, according to previously classified United States documents released yesterday.

White phosphorus, which can burn its victims down to the bone, has been found in improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in regions across Afghanistan including in the south, where British troops are based. It has also been used in mortar and rocket attacks on American forces. ...

Major Jennifer Willis, a spokeswoman for the US Army at Bagram, near Kabul, said that markings on some of the white phosphorus munitions that had been recovered showed that they had been manufactured in a number of different countries, including Britain, China, Russia and Iran.

Although a full investigation is under way, it is not yet clear how the Taleban and other insurgent forces using them had acquired the white phosphorus munitions from Britain. However, Major Willis said that Afghanistan was littered with ordnance of every kind and it was not a surprise that the insurgents had got their hands on white phosphorus.

The US military said that the Taleban had found white phosphorus rounds left over from the war with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. But there were newer models which, it is suspected, had been smuggled across the border from Pakistan.

Major Willis said that the use of white phosphorus in IEDs was a relatively new development. The earliest report of the insurgents using white phosphorus was in February 2003, but the eight known IED cases, including one in the south, have all occurred since March 2007.

Wasn’t it kind of the CIA to help her out by leaking to ABC News?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on terrorist suspect Abu Zubaydah in September 2002, according to a report prepared by the Director of National Intelligence’s office and obtained by ABC News.

The report, submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee and other Capitol Hill officials Wednesday, appears to contradict Pelosi’s statement last month that she was never told about the use of waterboarding or other special interrogation tactics. Instead, she has said, she was told only that the Bush administration had legal opinions that would have supported the use of such techniques.

The report details a Sept. 4, 2002 meeting between intelligence officials and Pelosi, then-House intelligence committee chairman Porter Goss, and two aides. At the time, Pelosi was the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee.

The meeting is described as a “Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on authorities, and a description of particular EITs that had been employed.”

EITs stand for “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a classification of special interrogation tactics that includes waterboarding.

Pelosi, D-Calif., sharply disputed suggestions last month that she had been told about waterboarding having taken place.

“In that or any other briefing . . . we were not, and I repeat, were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation techniques were used,” Pelosi said at a news conference in April. “What they did tell us is that they had some legislative counsel. . . opinions that they could be used, but not that they would.”

Congressional Republicans (1, 2) and democrats are raising serious questions about Barack Obama’s plans to release terrorist detainees from the US holding facility in Guantanamo Bay into the United States, pointing to already existing statutes barring entry to recipients of terrorist training and introducing further legislation to block the president’s plans.

Jennifer Rubin, at Commentary, thinks Obama has painted himself into a corner on this one, and is going to incur serious political costs whichever way he decides in the end to proceed.

So what does the president do now? To go back on his promise to close Guantanamo would mean incurring the wrath of not only the Left in the U.S., but of the fawning European leaders and public who praised his decision to shut the place down. And it would, of course, be a humiliating admission that his initial pronouncement — made even before Eric Holder visited Guantanamo — was ill-conceived. He can try to fudge the issue or delay, but ultimately he has to do one or the other: proceed to close Guantanamo and begin releasing the detainees, or admit error and adhere to the Bush policy of housing dangerous terrorists there. It is not “a false choice,” but a very real one. We’ll see which audience, American or European, he is willing to offend.

Has Barack Obama made an enemy who can sabotage his presidency?

The presidency of George W. Bush began to unravel when some in high positions at the Central Intelligence Agency began waging a covert campaign against him.

It began in the summer of 2003 when officials at the CIA asked the Justice department to open a criminal investigation into who had disclosed to columnist Robert Novak that Valerie Plame, wife of controversial former diplomat Joseph Wilson, worked at the CIA.

The officials knew at the time the Intelligence Identities Protection Act did not apply to Ms. Plame, who’d been out of the field for more than five years.

Another blow was struck with the publication in 2004 of the book “Imperial Hubris” by Michael Scheuer, who’d headed the bin Laden desk during the Clinton administration. It was harshly critical of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror in general, and the invasion of Iraq in particular.

Never before had a serving officer been allowed to publish such a book.

The CIA typically slow-rolled and censored books even by retired CIA directors.

“Why did the CIA allow such a controversial book to be published in the first place?” asked attorney Mark Zaid, who specializes in national security law. “There is simply no question that the CIA could have prevented the publication of Scheuer’s book if it had wanted to do so. And no court would have sided with him.”

Why would some at the CIA want to sabotage President Bush? One motive might have been to deflect blame for intelligence failures. The CIA confidently had predicted Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. But none were found. The tactical intelligence the CIA provided to the U.S. military forces invading Iraq proved nearly worthless. And the CIA was caught flat-footed by the insurgency that developed several months after Saddam’s fall.

There may have been a simpler motive. The novelist Charles McCarry was a deep cover CIA operative for ten years. “I never met a stupid person in the agency,” he said in a 2004 interview. “Or an assassin. Or a Republican.”

The CIA’s war against President Bush was motivated by ass covering, or by political partisanship. But with President Obama, it’s personal.

If the CIA torture memos tell us anything, it’s that Americans still have a long way to go towards civility. When disenfranchised youths flew planes into buildings, it should have been a time of quiet introspection. Instead, Americans gave into baser emotions and demanded vengeance against our “attackers.” Since we had the barbaric Bush administration in charge, they gave into those demands and soon loosed the sadistic Cheney, who took a break from blasting his friends in the face with a shotgun to turn his violence on foreign minorities. Pretty soon our intelligence agencies had grabbed some random Arab terrorist masterminds off the street and started inconveniencing them, making them uncomfortable, and — dare I say it — torturing them.

And now we are no better than they are. Less better even.

A civilized nation should never torture. Period. Ever, for any reason. No matter how many lives are at stake. It always just reduces us to animals that thirst for the pain of others. We say we want it to stop “terrorists” from killing us, but if in the process we murder our own humanity, what’s the point? And anyway, torture doesn’t work. I don’t care what basic logic or common sense or history tells you. It never works. Ever. That’s what studies say. Scientific ones where, to test the efficacy, they tortured monkeys to see if they could get the monkeys to talk, and none of them ever did. So with that issue settled, for what other reason could we be seeking torture but inhuman sadistic pleasure?

Yes, some are claiming that the torturing of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed saved thousands of people from a plot to blow up the Library Tower in Los Angeles, but that’s ridiculous. First of all, if they really got useful information, then they obviously didn’t use torture because it’s a well-known fact that torture doesn’t work (remember the studies I mentioned). But they claimed they used waterboarding, which they say is not torture but we all know is totally torture. I mean, they hold someone down and pour water — real water — on his face; try that on a cat and see if it acts like that isn’t torture. Thus, since waterboarding is torture, it obviously didn’t cause KSM to give up information because torture doesn’t work. Thus, he must have given up the information for reasons completely unrelated to the waterboarding.

Now look at what we (and by we, I mean you, because I’m not a part of this) have become. Torturers. And what did we gain? Information on a terror plot that was probably never going to happen in the first place. And even if it was going to happen, it’s not like thousands of people don’t die in LA every year anyway. Plus, “Library Tower” isn’t actually a library. So we gained nothing, and we debased ourselves by becoming nothing more than common Cheneys. Just because someone masterminded a plot that killed thousands doesn’t make it right to pour water on him.

So I hope your bloodthirst has been quenched, you mindless barbarians. You may say Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is “evil,” but then I ask, “Who is holding whom hostage and pouring water on his face?” No wonder the rest of the world looks at us and sees who the real terrorists are. This is what our torture has done to us. And I weep.

Read the whole thing.

In a CNN debate with Ari Fleischer, I said the United States executed Japanese war criminals for waterboarding. My point was that it is disingenuous for Bush Republicans to argue that waterboarding is not torture and thus illegal. It’s kind of awkward to argue that waterboarding is not a crime when you hanged someone for doing it to our troops. My precise words were: “Our country executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American POWs. We executed them for the same crime we are now committing ourselves.” ...

I was referencing the statement of a different member of the Senate: John McCain. On November 29, 2007, Sen. McCain, while campaigning in St. Petersburg, Florida, said, “Following World War II war crime trials were convened. The Japanese were tried and convicted and hung for war crimes committed against American POWs. Among those charges for which they were convicted was waterboarding.”

Sen. McCain was right and the National Review Online is wrong. Politifact, the St. Petersburg Times’ truth-testing project (which this week was awarded a Pulitzer Prize), scrutinized Sen. McCain’s statement and found it to be true. Here’s the money quote from Politifact:

“McCain is referencing the Tokyo Trials, officially known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. After World War II, an international coalition convened to prosecute Japanese soldiers charged with torture. At the top of the list of techniques was water-based interrogation, known variously then as ‘water cure,’ ‘water torture’ and ‘waterboarding,’ according to the charging documents. It simulates drowning.” Politifact went on to report, “A number of the Japanese soldiers convicted by American judges were hanged, while others received lengthy prison sentences or time in labor camps.”

Actually, murders, massacres, and death marches head the International Military Tribunal for the Far East’s list of war crimes, and the use of water simply happens to the first item addressed in a subsequent heading titled “Torture and Other Inhumane Treatment.” Since burning, flogging, strappado, and pulling out finger and toe nails are mentioned after the “water cure,” it is far from obvious that the authors of the Tribunal’s list of war crimes were intending to rank it as more inhumane than the others.

Politifact’s anonymous authorities (drawn from presumably the staffs of the St. Petersburg Times and the Congressional Quarterly which created Politifact as a joint venture) are betraying their own liberal journalist prejudices and manipulating the available data to suit their own preferences.

They, and Paul Begala, and John McCain are most particularly and obviously in error in equating the Japanese “water cure” torture with US water-boarding.

In the “water cure,” according to the Tribunal’s war crimes description, [t]he victim was bound or otherwise secured in a prone position; and water was forced through his mouth and nostrils into his lungs and stomach until he lost consciousness. Pressure was then applied, sometimes by jumping upon his abdomen to force the water out. The usual practice was to revive the victim and successively repeat the process.

The Tribunal does not mention it, but historically the “water cure” torture technique was often performed with sufficient brutality that internal organs would be ruptured with fatal results, or merely performed excessively to the point where the victim’s body’s electrolyte balance was fatally compromised, producing death by “water intoxication.”

In the “water-cure,” the victim’s mouth is forced open, and enormous quantities of water are poured down his throat. If he fails to swallow any of the rapidly-poured water, it goes into his lungs and he really does experience drowning.

In the US-government-authorized water-boarding of three mass murderers, a cloth or cellophane barrier was placed over the criminal’s face and water poured on it for intervals of 10 to 40 seconds. Water was specifically prevented from entering the subject’s respiratory system.

Elaborate and carefully calculated protocols had been laid down, in precisely the opposite manner of the Japanese case, 1) confining the use of such comparatively harsh interrogation techniques to a tiny number of extremely guilty terrorists likely to possess extremely vital information on major threats to the lives of many thousands of innocent American civilians, and 2) assuring that no real lasting physical or mental harm was ever actually inflicted on the three major terrorist prisoners.

Those are extremely significant differences, Mr. Begala.

Beyond that, Begala, Politifact, and even Senator McCain overlook another very important consideration: the laws and customs of war.

We punished the defeated Japanese after WWII, and US troops commonly punished Japanese encountered in the field by offering no quarter, for Japanese disregard of the civilized European world’s military customs of avoiding the practice of perfidy (i.e. not falsely surrendering and then opening fire, not wearing the wrong uniform, and so on) and according prisoners of war honorable status and treating them humanely.

We do not owe Al Qaeda terrorists prisoner of war status. We do not, in fact, owe them, by the conventional laws and customs of war, anything beyond summary execution following drumhead courts martial at the pleasure of the officer in immediate authority. United States military forces, in fact, would by traditional standards not only possess every right to extract forcibly by any measures necessary any and all information necessary to preserve innocent life, they would have a grave obligation to do so.

It is the Al Qaeda terrorists who, like the Japanese in WWII, reject the civilized world’s customs of limiting behavior in war. And, as we punished the Japanese during and after WWII for failing to adopt our customs, we ought to be punishing Al Qaeda terrorists the same way for the same reasons. That is how the laws and customs of war are enforced.

Terrorist prisoners, in their capacity as hostis humani generis, by the conventional laws and customs of war for thousands of years, are entitled to nothing whatsoever in the form of rights, judicial proceeding, or sympathy. They deserve absolutely nothing other than execution by some harsh method particularly expressive of contumely like hanging.

historical examples of usage omitted

2. Severe or excruciating pain or suffering of mind or body; anguish, agony, torment; the infliction of such. ...

figurative meanings omitted

—Oxford English Dictionary, 1971, p. 3357.
————————————————————————-

The left has loudly and persistently accused the Bush Administration of violating International Law, the US Constitution, the Geneva Convention, and conventional standards of human decency by torturing detainees.

These accusations have been advanced by a large variety of allied voices at every level of print and electronic publication employing the same inflammatory characterizations, the same reliance on preassumed conclusions, and the same intimidating tone of exaggerated emotionalism.

The left’s punditocracy naturally avoids ever questioning whether modest forms of coercion, such as waterboarding, slaps to the face or abdomen, sleep deprivation, and deliberately-caused temperature discomfort, etc., carefully and deliberately calculated to stop short of inflicting any enduring harm to the subject, actually do rise to the level of meeting the normal (non-figurative) definition of torture.

A slap to the face may be painful, humiliating, and unpleasant, but it is really “excruciating” or “severe?” Most of us (of the older generation, at least) actually have been slapped in the face in childhood by other children and even by adults. My elementary school principal did not like an angry letter to the editor about her school policies I had composed in the 8th grade and slapped me across the face. I can’t say that I ever thought of myself as a torture victim or an appropriate case for an investigation by some International Committee on Human Rights.

When I read over the list of coercive measures sanctioned by the Bush Administration for use in extracting information from only three of the most important participants in a conspiracy which brought about the violent deaths of more than 3000 innocent American civilians and which was actively in the process attempting further such attacks on an even greater scale, most of them remind me of the ordinary cruelties inflicted on small children commonly by schoolyard bullies.

Waterboarding amounts to the victim being briefly deprived of breath by facial immersion in an attempt to use fear of drowning to compel cooperation. Is there really anyone in America who didn’t have his or her head held underwater at least once by a larger bully or childhood playmate?

Abu Zubaydah was placed by CIA interrogators into close propinquity with a caterpillar. I’m afraid that when I search my own conscience I can recall dropping a caterpillar down the back of at least one female classmate back in the third grade myself.

The controversial coercive interrogation methods were employed by the Bush Administration against, we must remember, only three spectacularly guilty murderers whose hands were dripping with innocent blood, and were clearly not excruciating. They were capable of, and intended to, induce discomfort, probably even anguish, but not agony.

Severe is a relative term, I suppose. But, in the context of forcible interrogation, surely a severe form of coercion would be a practice capable of producing permanent injury or death.

What traditionally defined real torture, more specifically than the OED’s definition, was the permanence of the result. Someone would not be refered to as “tortured,” who had been beaten up or simply slapped around. A person referred to as having been tortured would have to have suffered, at the very least, lasting serious injury.

Torture has always conceptually involved pieces of one’s anatomy being cut or burned, fingernails pulled out, bones broken, and joints dislocated. Having your head dunked or your face slapped or being confronted by a caterpillar may be unpleasant, but only in the context of figurative speech is it torture.

A common perspective on the subject is that real torture has to include an ultimate threat of ending with death. The audience finds credible this viewpoint as illustrated in the 1941 John Huston film version of The Maltese Falcon.

Sam Spade finding himself unarmed in the presence of Caspar Guttman and his criminal allies successfully defies threats of torture because his adversaries can’t afford to kill him.

Joel Cairo: You seem to forget that you are not in a position to insist upon anything.

Caspar Cuttman: Now, come, gentlemen. Let’s keep our discussion on a friendly basis.

There certainly is something in what Mr. Cairo said…

Sam Spade: If you kill me, how are you gonna get the bird? If I know you can’t afford to kill me, how’ll you scare me into giving it to you?

Caspar Guttman: Sir, there are other means of persuasion besides killing and threatening to kill.

Sam Spade: Yes, that’s…That’s true. But none of them are any good unless the threat of death is behind them.

You see what I mean?

If you start something, I’ll make it a matter of your having to kill me or call it off.

Caspar Guttman: That’s an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgement on both sides. Because, as you know, in the heat of action, men are likely to forget where their best interests lie, and let their emotions carry them away.

Look at the first definition again. The coercive tactics employed by the Bush Administration did not produce “excruciating pain.” The US Administration was not a cruel tyranny (whatever the infantile left may chose to think). Our intelligence officers were not savages or brigands, though the three interrogation subjects certainly were. The discomforts inflicted on the three interrogation subjects were not done out of hatred or revenge, but to protect innocent lives. The only small portion of the Oxford Dictionary’s definition which fits is the purpose of causing unwilling witnesses to provide information. But that is only a descriptive portion of the definition, and the vital and key “excruciating pain” element of the definition is completely missing.

QED: The coercive tactics employed by the Bush Administration against three Al Qaeda detainees were not torture, not by the best dictionary definition of the word, and not by our conventional “ordinary language” understanding of the meaning of the word.

Marcy Wheeler, who posts as “emptywheel” over at leftwing FireDogLake, last Saturday topped the Internet headlines blogging about a detail she read in the May 30, 2005 Brabury Memo: Poor little Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003.

All over Europe and America the hearts of the bien pensant community stirred with outrage at the thought of just how pruney and wrinkled poor KSM must have been after so much immersion back during that dreadful March.

Well, it turns out that Marcy Wheeler’s agita was derived from a basic misunderstanding.

Inside anonymous sources leaked (as it were) an explanation of the basis of that 180-plus figure to NR’s Cliff May:

According to two sources, both of them very well-informed and reliable (but preferring to remain anonymous), the 180-plus times refers not to sessions of waterboarding, but to “pours” — that is, to instances of water being poured on the subject.

Under a strict set of rules, every pour of water had to be counted — and the number of pours was limited.

Also: Waterboarding interrogation sessions were permitted on no more than five days within any 30-day period.

No more than two sessions were permitted in any 24-hour period.

A session could last no longer than two hours.

There could be at most six pours of water lasting ten seconds or longer — and never longer than 40 seconds — during any individual session.

Water could be poured on a subject for a combined total of no more than 12 minutes during any 24 hour period.

You do the math.

It’s as if censorious Marcy Wheeler had accused my old drinking buddy Pat of having downed 183 beers the previous evening, and Pat assured her that he’d been dieting and confined himself to only 183 sips.

At the Central Intelligence Agency, it’s known as “slow rolling.” That’s what agency officers sometimes do on politically sensitive assignments. They go through the motions; they pass cables back and forth; they take other jobs out of the danger zone; they cover their backsides.

Sad to say, it’s slow roll time at Langley after the release of interrogation memos that, in the words of one veteran officer, “hit the agency like a car bomb in the driveway.” President Obama promised CIA officers that they won’t be prosecuted for carrying out lawful orders, but the people on the firing line don’t believe him. They think the memos have opened a new season of investigation and retribution.

The lesson for younger officers is obvious: Keep your head down. Duck the assignments that carry political risk. Stay away from a counterterrorism program that has become a career hazard.

CNS:

After KSM was captured by the United States, he was not initially cooperative with CIA interrogators. ...

After he was subjected to the “waterboard” technique, KSM became cooperative, providing intelligence that led to the capture of key al Qaeda allies and, eventually, the closing down of an East Asian terrorist cell that had been tasked with carrying out the 9/11-style attack on Los Angeles.

New York Times:

Don’t be discouraged by what’s happened in the last few weeks,” he told employees. “Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes. That’s how we learn. But the fact that we are willing to acknowledge them and then move forward, that is precisely why I am proud to be president of the United States and that’s why you should be proud to be members of the C.I.A.”

Of course, any CIA employees involved would be well advised to stay at home. If they go abroad, they may be arrested and hauled before a leftwing war crimes tribunal in some place like Spain, where Baltasar Garzon has already initiated prosecution of six former senior Bush Administration officials.

Barack Obama is not content with having gained an underhanded election victory in significant part based upon demagoguery on that issue, he is still trying to score political points by attacking the previous administration for mildly coercive interrogation tactics applied only in three cases of major terrorist figures believed to possess particularly vital information.

Dick Cheney is rightly calling Obama’s bluff. If the democrats want to keep debating coercive interrogation of terrorists, let’s have a full debate. Put the rest of the story on the table. We’ve heard all about how unjustified and ineffective coercion is for several years now. Let’s look at exactly what was learned and what Al Qaeda attacks were prevented.

The Politico:

Researching his memoirs, former Vice President Dick Cheney is pushing the CIA to declassify files that he claims would vindicate the CIA’s use of coercive interrogation techniques that President Barack Obama has banned.

The request, which the CIA has not yet answered, sets up a showdown between the past and current administrations. Cheney can be expected to argue that the Obama administration’s publication of other files last week is a precedent for release of the reports he wants. Cheney contends that the information he seeks does not pose a threat to anyone, nor to intelligence sources and methods.

Cheney originally requested the reports in late March as he worked on his book, but now thinks the documents should be made public immediately as evidence that waterboarding and other controversial practices deterred terrorist attacks and therefore saved American lives.

If nothing else, President Obama’s decision to overrule his own intelligence officials and release Bush-era legal memos justifying what The New York Times sanctimoniously described as the CIA’s “brutal” interrogation techniques proves what a bunch of pushovers we Americans are.

Al Qaeda kidnaps Americans, tortures them, then decapitates them on TV.

We deprive captives of sleep, push them into walls and put harmless caterpillars that we say are poisonous in their cells.

Then we’re the ones who are condemned as the worst human-rights violators on the planet.