0:59 video

In the domestic American debate, such minor forms of coercion as keeping in an interrogation subject awake or making him stand for extended periods have been commonly referred to as “torture.”

Controversial methods of coercive interrogation employed by US Counterterrorism agencies have included at the most extreme a technique called “waterboarding.”

The customary description of which reads: “The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.”

Waterboarding sounds unpleasant, but the discomfort it inflicts is clearly primarily psychological. There is no genuine physical injury. There is no real threat to life.

US forces in a recent raid on an Al Qaeda safe house found instruments of real torture and and Al Qaeda manual illustrating a variety of techniques. See the story and pictures at the Smoking Gun.

Compare sleep deprivation, standing in the corner, a few face slaps, and even waterboarding to this.

Unidentified “US officials” leak to Britain’s Guardian.

Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal, US officials say.

“Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq and it’s a very dangerous course for them to be following. They are already committing daily acts of war against US and British forces,” a senior US official in Baghdad warned. “They [Iran] are behind a lot of high-profile attacks meant to undermine US will and British will, such as the rocket attacks on Basra palace and the Green Zone [in Baghdad]. The attacks are directed by the Revolutionary Guard who are connected right to the top [of the Iranian government]. …

US officials now say they have firm evidence that Tehran has switched tack as it senses a chance of victory in Iraq. In a parallel development, they say they also have proof that Iran has reversed its previous policy in Afghanistan and is now supporting and supplying the Taliban’s campaign against US, British and other Nato forces.

Tehran’s strategy to discredit the US surge and foment a decisive congressional revolt against Mr Bush is national in scope and not confined to the Shia south, its traditional sphere of influence, the senior official in Baghdad said. It included stepped-up coordination with Shia militias such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi as well as Syrian-backed Sunni Arab groups and al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, he added. Iran was also expanding contacts across the board with paramilitary forces and political groups, including Kurdish parties such as the PUK, a US ally.

There is a famous military history by Kenneth P. Williams, titled Lincoln Finds a General, describing the lengthy series of unsuccessful Union commanders and the dismal record of Union defeats in the Eastern theater of the war, before, after three years of fighting, Abraham Lincoln finally made Ulysses Grant general-in-chief.

In Grant, Lincoln found a general who had an unbroken record of victory in the West, and it was Lincoln’s decision to give supreme command to a fighting general with a habit of success which brought his war to a successful conclusion.

Burdened with a similarly protracted war, one happily unmarred by any American defeat, but nonetheless a war increasing dramatically in unpopularity with the electorate, George W. Bush has found not a fighting general with a record of victory, but a staff officer. He has appointed not a general-in-chief with unlimited authority to wage war, but rather “a war coordinator” whose role will be “to eliminate conflicts among the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies.”

Following Lincoln’s example would have been more to the point.

Associated Press story

USAToday recently reported an in-progress study by military historians commissioned by the Department of Defense demonstrates that insurgencies can be defeated, but doing so takes time and requires ingenuity and patience.

Insurgencies, such as the one the United States is fighting in Iraq, last an average of more than 10 years, according to a study commissioned by the Defense Department.

For the United States, the good news is that rebels lose more often than they win. Chances for stopping an insurgency improve after 10 years, the study shows. …

“The violence in Iraq is going to go on a minimum for at least three or four more years and in reality another five plus years,” said Christopher Lawrence, director of The Dupuy Institute, which is conducting the study.

The Iraq war is in its fifth year.

The Annandale, Va.-based Dupuy Institute is under a Defense Department contract to study insurgencies to help give commanders more information about what works and what doesn’t. The study is due to be completed in September.

The military recently produced a new counterinsurgency manual that establishes doctrine for waging a counterinsurgency.

According to the manual, defeating an insurgency requires:

•An understanding of local society;

•Good intelligence about the enemy;

•Establishing security and a rule of law;

•Establishing a long-term commitment.

The new doctrine points out the limits to using overwhelming firepower, which could anger civilians, and the need to find political solutions to win over the population.

The manual says counterinsurgency is much more complex than other forms of warfare, requiring the coordination of political, military and economic efforts.

As part of the study, the institute built a database of 63 post-World War II insurgencies, including Vietnam, the French in Algeria and the Soviets in Afghanistan.

The United States experience in Vietnam soured the U.S. military on insurgencies, Lawrence said. The prevailing military doctrine after Vietnam emphasized building conventional capabilities to counter the Soviet threat. “The subject (of counterinsurgencies) has not been seriously analyzed by the Army since the 1960s,” Lawrence said.

Not all insurgencies are quagmires, the report shows. Insurgents only win in 41% of the conflicts in the database, Lawrence said. The remainder were victories for the counterinsurgents, were inconclusive or are still going on.

One of the most successful counterinsurgencies was the British victory over communist insurgents in Malaysia during the 1950s.

Col. Timothy Reese, director of the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., cautions against reading too much into it.

Each conflict is unique, and the differences are as important as the similarities, Reese said.

“War cannot be reduced to a formula,” Reese said. “War is an art as much as it is a science.”

The Telegraph reports the death of the head of the Taliban’s military forces.

The Taliban’s most prominent military commander has been killed by a combined Nato-Afghan force.

Mullah Dadullah, a senior lieutenant of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, was killed yesterday in the southern province of Helmand, an area which has seen intense fighting between British, American and Afghan troops and the Taliban.

Dadullah’s body was shown to journalists in the governor’s office in the city of Kandahar. Three bullet wounds could be seen on his body – one to the back of the head and two to the stomach.

Dadullah, who lost a leg fighting against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, is of the highest-ranking Taliban leaders to be killed since the fall of the hard-line regime following the US-led invasion in 2001.

His death represents a major victory for the Afghan government and the international coalition that has struggled to contain the Taliban insurgency destabilising the south and east of the country.

The London Times reports that not only democrats are looking forward to an American withdrawal from Iraq.

A radical plan by Al-Qaeda to take over the Sunni heartland of Iraq and turn it into a militant Islamic state once American troops have withdrawn is causing alarm among US intelligence officials.

A power struggle has emerged between the self-styled Islamic State of Iraq, an organisation with ambitions to become a state which has been set up by Al-Qaeda, and more moderate Sunni groups. They are battling for the long-term control of central and western areas which they believe could break away from Kurdish and Shi’ite-dominated provinces once the coalition forces depart.

According to an analysis compiled by US intelligence agencies, the Islamic State has ambitions to create a terrorist enclave in the Iraqi provinces of Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala, Salah al-Din, Nineveh and parts of Babil.

“Al-Qaeda are on the way to establish their first stronghold in the Middle East,” warned an American official. “If they succeed, it will be a catastrophe and an imminent danger to Saudi Arabia and Jordan.”

The US conviction that the Islamic State could seize power is based on its use of classic Al-Qaeda tactics and its adoption last October of a draft constitution. This was entitled Notifying Mankind of the Birth of the Islamic State and was posted on a website based in Britain. The group named 10 ministers under its emir, Abu Amer Al-Baghdadi. They included a war minister, Abu Hamza Al-Muhajer who is also known as Abu Ayub al-Masri and is Al-Qaeda’s commander in Iraq.

Greg Sheridan, in The Australian, describes how Al Qaeda is winning, not by battlefield success, but via propaganda.

the awesome power of what the boffins call al-Qa’ida’s “single narrative” for Muslims everywhere. The single narrative is the most powerful propaganda tool yet devised. It presents all of Muslim experience worldwide as a story of Western and Zionist persecution of Muslims. This embraces obvious cases such as Palestinians, Kashmiris and Bosnians, but also the experience of Muslims in the Middle East under corrupt governments, the experience of Muslims in India, the marginalised status of Muslims in western Europe, the conflict in Iraq and everything else. The beauty of the single narrative is that any grievance at all, real or imagined, whether based in fact or fantasy or conspiracy, can be fitted into it.

(Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer observes) “In terms of their PR, I give full marks to al-Qa’ida. They’ve been very successful.”

“Every time there’s a terrorist attack in Iraq there’s a Western reaction not of how horrible these people are but that we must pull out, we should give up. I give full credit to al-Qa’ida for their excellent public relations.”

Downer is right in this withering analysis. Al-Qa’ida in a sense wins whether it wins or loses. If it kills a large number of innocents, the chief reaction among most commentators is that this is somehow the fault of the US or its coalition allies.

The Western commentariat, not least in Australia, has embraced the pro-terrorist proposition that almost the only people not morally responsible for terrorism are the terrorists.

whole article

Richard Miniter and a US Army explosives expert discuss weapons of Iranian origin captured in Iraq on a PJM-exclusive 12:15 video.

David Broder, in today’s Washington Post, claims the left has a mandate for defeat, surrender, and withdrawal.

The gap between public opinion and Washington reality has rarely been wider than on the issue of the Iraq war. A clear national mandate is being blocked — for now — by constraints that make sense only in the short-term calculus of politics in this capital city.

The public verdict on the war is plain. Large majorities have come to believe that it was a mistake to go in, and equally large majorities want to begin the process of getting out. That is what the polls say; it is what the mail to Capitol Hill says; and it is what voters signaled when they put the Democrats back into control of Congress in November. …

The question that naturally arises is why the strongly expressed judgment of the people — responding to news of increasing American casualties in a seemingly intractable sectarian conflict — cannot be translated into action in Washington. …

One way or another, public opinion ultimately will be heeded on the war in Iraq. It is hard to imagine the Republicans going into the presidential election of 2008 with 150,000 American troops still taking heavy casualties in Iraq.

It’s true that the democrats won control of Congress last November, but many other issues and factors besides the war, and a number of Republican scandals, undoubtedly also played a role in that election’s results. The democrats gained a very narrow Congressional majority, and can hardly be described as possessing a mandate to do anything other than avoid taking bribes and molesting pages.

Which mandate alone should represent a more than adequate challenge, requiring all the moral resolve and political will the democrat party can possibly muster, if not more.

One hears the claim a lot these days that public opinion thinks this, and public opinion demands that, as if opinion polls conducted by news organizations represented some sort of meaningful, objective, binding, and official process. This sort of claim represents the grossest sort of attempt by journalists to usurp political authority.

The poll Mr. Broder cites in his own editorial was conducted by two notoriously biased news organizations, the Washington Post and ABC News. And its results are based on the responses of a mere 1082 adults, including an intentional “oversample of African-Americans.”

Opinion polls of 1000 or so of the people willing to talk to pollsters on the phone prove basically nothing. Opinion polls are typically artfully crafted. The questions they contain steer answers in the direction their creators desire.

That WaPo/ABC poll, which Broder cited, asked:

Do you think (the United States should keep its military forces in Iraq until civil order is restored there, even if that means continued U.S. military casualties); OR, do you think (the United States should withdraw its military forces from Iraq in order to avoid further U.S. military casualties, even if that means civil order is not restored there)?

But if I asked instead:

Do you think (the United States should abandon the civilian population of Iraq to Islamic Fundamentalism and sectarian violence, if that means destroying our future credibility in the eyes of both our friends and our adversaries abroad): OR, do you think (the United States should keep its word and implant stable and democratic government in Iraq, even at the cost of US military casualties)?

the poll results would be quite different.

Mr. Broder’s polls never can produce anything resembling a mandate. They only represent propaganda, typically created by dishonest and dishonorable advocates.

The only opinion polls which count occur officially and in November. The last election was inconclusive, as are the war’s current results.

Members of the left and its allies in the punditocracy looking for a mandate for surrender, withdrawal, and defeat need to look for it in the results of the 2008 election, and stop claiming that they already possess it.

George Tenet’s new book, At the Center of the Storm, which justifies himself and attacks the Bush Administration, and particularly its Neocon members, has provoked some highly devastating replies from (no particular friend of the Neocons) Michael Scheuer, Tyler Drumheller, and most delightfully of all, last Friday in the Wall Street Journal from every liberal’s favorite Neocon whipping boy Douglas Feith himself.

Mr. Feith provides an alternative link on his own web-site to the demolition.

Mr. Tenet resents that the CIA was criticized for its work on Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, in particular, Iraq’s relationship with al Qaeda. On this score he is especially angry at Vice President Dick Cheney, at Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, at Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and at me — I was the head of the Defense Department’s policy organization. Mr. Tenet devotes a chapter to the matter of Iraq and al Qaeda, giving it the title: “No Authority, Direction or Control.” The phrase implies that we argued that Saddam exercised such powers — authority, direction and control — over al Qaeda. We made no such argument.

Rather we said that the CIA’s analysts were not giving serious, professional attention to information about ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. The CIA’s assessments were incomplete, nonrigorous and shaped around the dubious assumption that secular Iraqi Baathists would be unwilling to cooperate with al Qaeda religious fanatics, even when they shared strategic interests. This assumption was disproved when Baathists and jihadists became allies against us in the post-Saddam insurgency, but before the war it was the foundation of much CIA analysis.

Mr. Tenet’s account of all this gives the reader no idea of the substance of our critique, which was that the CIA’s analysts were suppressing information. They were not showing policy makers reports that justified concern about ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. Mr. Tenet does tell us that the CIA briefed Mr. Cheney on Iraq and al Qaeda in September 2002 and that the “briefing was a disaster” because “Libby and the vice president arrived with such detailed knowledge on people, sources, and timelines that the senior CIA analytic manager doing the briefing that day simply could not compete.” He implies that there was improper bullying but then adds: “We weren’t ready for this discussion.”

This is an abject admission. He is talking about September 2002 — a year after 9/11! This was the month that the president brought the Iraq threat before the United Nations General Assembly. This was several weeks after I took my staff to meet with Mr. Tenet and two-dozen or so CIA analysts to challenge the quality of the agency’s work on Iraq and al Qaeda. …

Mr. Tenet hosted our briefing because my boss, Donald Rumsfeld, personally suggested he do so. Mr. Tenet knew that the Agency’s dismissive view of Iraq’s relationship with al Qaeda was controversial — and of importance to the nation. So there was no excuse, weeks later, for senior CIA officials to be so thoroughly un-ready to brief Mr. Cheney on the subject. The September 2002 meeting was not a surprise bed-check, after all; it was a scheduled visit by the vice president. …

Fairness, evidently, was not Mr. Tenet’s motivating impulse as an author. His book is defensive. It aims low — to settle scores. The prose is humdrum. Mr. Tenet includes no citations that would let the reader check the accuracy of his account. He offers no explanation of why we went to war in Iraq. So, is the book useless? No.

What it does offer is insight into Mr. Tenet. It allows you to hear the way he talked — fast, loose, blustery, emotional, imprecise, from the “gut.” Mr. Tenet proudly refers to the guidance of his “gut” several times in the book — a strange boast from someone whose stock-in-trade should be accuracy and precision. “At the Center of the Storm” also allows you to see the way he reasoned — unimaginatively and inconsistently. And it gives a glimpse of how he operated: He picked sides; he played favorites. The people he liked got his attention and understanding, their judgments his approval; the people he disliked he treated harshly and smeared. His loyalty is to tribe rather than truth.

Mr. Tenet makes a peculiar claim of detachment, as if he had not been a top official in the Bush administration. He wants readers not to blame him for the president’s decision to invade Iraq. He implies that he never supported it and never even heard it debated. Mr. Tenet writes: “In many cases, we were not aware of what our own government was trying to do. The one thing we were certain of was that our warnings were falling on deaf ears.”

Mr. Tenet’s point here builds on the book’s much-publicized statements that the author never heard the president and his national-security team debate “the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” whether or not it was “wise to go to war” or when the war should start. He paints a distorted picture here.

But even if it were true that he never heard any such debate and was seriously dissatisfied with the dialogue in the White House Situation Room, he had hundreds of opportunities to improve the discussion by asking questions or making comments. I sat with him in many of the meetings, and no one prevented him from talking. It is noteworthy that Mr. Tenet met with the president for an intelligence briefing six days every week for years. Why didn’t he speak up if he thought that the president was dangerously wrong or inadequately informed?

One of Mr. Tenet’s main arguments is that he was somehow disconnected from the decision to go to war. Under the circumstances, it seems odd that he would call his book “At the Center of the Storm.” He should have called it “At the Periphery of the Storm” or maybe: “Was That a Storm That Just Went By?”

Read the whole thing.

Reuters is reporting:

U.S. and Iraqi forces have killed the head of the self-styled Islamic State in Iraq, an al Qaeda-led militant group that has claimed many major attacks in the country, Iraq’s deputy interior minister said on Thursday.

Hussein Kamal said Abu Omar al-Baghdadi had been killed in a battle north of Baghdad. He declined to say when but said authorities had recovered Baghdadi’s body.

“Abu Omar al-Baghdadi was killed north of Baghdad by Iraqi and American forces. He died as a result of wounds sustained in clashes. The Interior Ministry has his body to carry out further checks,” Kamal told Reuters by telephone.

Baghdadi was erroneously reported to have been captured in early March.