Debra Burlingame, at the Wall Street Journal, explains how Kuwaiti oil money successfully transformed Guantanamo Bay detainees from bloodthirsty killers into a human rights worthy cause.

He was the first American to die in what some have called “the real war.” Johnny “Mike” Spann, the 32-year-old CIA paramilitary commando, was interrogating prisoners in an open courtyard at the Qala-I-Jangi fortress in Afghanistan when the uprising of 538 hard-core Taliban and al Qaeda fighters began. Spann emptied his rifle, then his sidearm, then fought hand-to-hand as he was swarmed by raging prisoners screaming “Allahu akbar!”

The bloody siege by Northern Alliance and U.S. forces went on for several days, only ending when 86 of the remaining jihadi fighters were smoked out of a basement where they had retreated and where they murdered a Red Cross worker who had gone in to check on their condition. Spann, a former Marine, is credited with saving the lives of countless Alliance fighters and Afghan civilians by standing and firing as they ran for cover. His beaten and booby-trapped body was recovered with two bullet wounds in his head, the angle of trajectory suggesting he had been shot execution style.

One of the committed jihadis who came out of that basement, wounded and unrepentant, was “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, now serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison. Another who was shot during the uprising and pulled out of the basement along with Lindh was Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi. Today, the 29-year-old is living somewhere in Kuwait, a free man.

The true story of Mr. Mutairi’s journey, from the uprising in Qala-I-Jangi to Guantanamo Bay’s military detention camp to the privileged life of an affluent Kuwaiti citizen, is one that his team of high-priced lawyers and the government of Kuwait doesn’t want you to know. His case reveals a disturbing counterpoint to the false narrative advanced by Gitmo lawyers and human-rights groups–which holds that the Guantanamo Bay detainees are innocent victims of circumstance, swept up in the angry, anti-Muslim fervor that followed the attacks of September 11, then abused and brutally tortured at the hands of the U.S. military.

Mr. Mutairi was among 12 Kuwaitis picked up in Afghanistan and detained at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. Their families retained Tom Wilner and the prestigious law firm of Shearman & Sterling early that same year. Arguably, it is Mr. Wilner’s aggressive representation, along with the determined efforts of the Kuwait government, that has had the greatest influence in the outcome of all the enemy combatant cases, in the court of law and in the court of public opinion. The lawsuit filed on their behalf, renamed Rasul v. Bush when three cases were joined, is credited with opening the door for the blizzard of litigation that followed…

Mr. Wilner, a media-savvy lawyer who immediately realized that the detainee cases posed a tremendous PR challenge in the wake of September 11, hired high-stakes media guru Richard Levick to change public perception about the Kuwaiti 12. Mr. Levick, a former attorney whose Washington, D.C.-based “crisis PR” firm has carved out a niche in litigation-related issues, has represented clients as varied as Rosie O’Donnell, Napster, and the Roman Catholic Church. Mr. Levick’s firm is also registered under FARA as an agent of a foreign principal for the “Kuwaiti Detainees Committee,” reporting $774,000 in fees in a one year period. After the U.S. Supreme Court heard the first consolidated case, the PR campaign went into high gear, Mr. Levick wrote, to “turn the Guantanamo tide.”

In numerous published articles and interviews, Mr. Levick has laid out the essence of the entire Kuwaiti PR campaign. The strategy sought to accomplish two things: put a sympathetic “human face” on the detainees and convince the public that it had a stake in their plight. In other words, the militant Islamists who traveled to Afghanistan to become a part of al Qaeda’s jihad on America had to be reinvented as innocent charity workers swept up in the war after 9/11. The committed Islamist who admitted firing an AK-47 in a Taliban training camp became a “teacher on vacation” who went to Afghanistan in 2001 “to help refugees.” The member of an Islamist street gang who opened three al-Wafa offices with Suliman Abu Ghaith (Osama Bin Laden’s chief spokesman) to raise al Qaeda funds became a charity worker whose eight children were left destitute in his absence. All 12 Kuwaitis became the innocent victims of “bounty hunters.”..

Mr. Levick maintains that a year and a half after they began the campaign, their PR outreach produced literally thousands of news placements and that, eventually, a majority of the top 100 newspapers were editorializing on the detainees’ behalf. Convinced that judges can be influenced by aggressive PR campaigns, Mr. Levick points to rulings in the detainee cases which openly cite news stories that resulted from his team’s media outreach.

The Kuwaiti 12 case is a primer on the anatomy of a guerilla PR offensive, packaged and sold to the public as a fight for the “rule of law” and “America’s core principles.” Begin with flimsy information, generate stories that are spun from uncorroborated double or triple hearsay uttered by interested parties that are hard to confirm from halfway around the world. Feed the phonied-up stories to friendly media who write credulous reports and emotional human interest features, post them on a Web site where they will then be read and used as sources by other lazy (or busy) media from all over the world. In short, create one giant echo chamber.

Bizzyblog notes:

US Tax Revenues Up 9.7% through four months, Deficit Down 57%; US Media Outlets Mostly Ignore the News.

Treasury Report

Please compare publication dates and completeness of text:

Never Yet Melted, 10 Nov 2005:

1) The M-16 rifle : Thumbs down. Chronic jamming problems with the talcum powder like sand over there. The sand is everywhere. Jordan says you feel filthy 2 minutes after coming out of the shower. The M-4 carbine version is more popular because it’s lighter and shorter, but it has jamming problems also. They like the ability to mount the various optical gunsights and weapons lights on the Picatinny rails, but the weapon itself is not great in a desert environment. They all hate the 5.56mm (.223) round. Poor penetration on the cinderblock structure common over there and even torso hits cant be reliably counted on to put the enemy down. Fun fact: Random autopsies on dead insurgents shows a high level of opiate use.

2) The M243 SAW (squad assault weapon): .223 cal. Drum fed light machine gun. Big thumbs down. Universally considered a piece of shit. Chronic jamming problems, most of which require partial disassembly. (that’s fun in the middle of a firefight)….

Read the whole thing.

————————————————————-

Washington Post, (Opinion Section: Tom Ricks’s Inbox by Tom Ricks, “Military Correspondent”) 4 Feb 2007:

1) The M-16 rifle: Thumbs down. Chronic jamming problems with the talcum powder-like sand over there. The M-4 carbine version is more popular because it’s lighter and shorter, but it has jamming problems also. Marines like the ability to mount the various optical gunsights and weapons lights on the picattiny rails, but the weapon itself is not great in a desert environment. They all hate the 5.56mm (.223) round because of its poor penetration on the cinderblock structures common over there. Even torso hits can’t be reliably counted on to put the enemy down.

2) The M243 SAW (squad assault weapon), .223 cal. Drum-fed light machine gun: Big thumbs down. Universally considered a piece of junk. Chronic jamming problems, most of which require partial disassembly (not fun in the middle of a firefight).

Read the whole thing.

————————————————————-

Hey! It only took the Washington Post’s anti-Iraq war “Military Correspondent” a week short of 14 months to catch up in coverage with this blog.

Too bad Mr. Military Correspondent lacked the space to reproduce the entire Net-circulated report-from-the-front, and it’s really a pity that his ideological bias caused him deliberately to delete information derogatory to the adversaries of US forces.

Of course, that’s the Paleomedia in action for you, pompous and slow, biased and deceptive.

Ben Stein had a moment of satori during the State of Union speech.

So there I was, lying in my bed in Malibu with my dogs, watching Mr. Bush’s State of the Union speech. I thought it was darned good. Realistic, gracious, modest, sensible. I happen to think we should get out of Iraq yesterday, but I thought Mr Bush put forward his case well. And Congress responded graciously and generously on both sides of the aisle.

Then, whaam, as soon as the speech was over, ABC was bashing him, telling us how pathetic he was, how irrelevant he was, how weak he was, how unrealistic he was.

Right after that, Jim Webb gave a very short speech biting Bush’s head off — but not making any concrete proposals about anything. No network person mentioned how simple minded and unrealistic he was.

Then, tonight, the next night, I walked into the kitchen where my wife had left the radio going with NPR to amuse the cats. NPR was having a call-in show talking about the State of the Union. The first speaker I heard was a country music legend, Merle Haggard, who said he had never seen things so bad in this country. Then a legion of anonymous callers chimed in with similar thoughts.

And suddenly it hit me. The media is staging a coup against Mr. Bush. They cannot impeach him because he hasn’t done anything illegal. But they can endlessly tell us what a loser he is and how out of touch he is (and I mean ENDLESSLY) and how he’s just a vestigial organ on the body politic right now.

The media is doing what it can to basically oust Mr. Bush while still leaving him alive and well in the White House. It’s a sort of neutron bomb of media that seeks to kill him while leaving the White House standing (for their favorite unknown, Barack Obama, to occupy).

One of my classmates today quoted veteran New Yorker political commentator Elizabeth Drew writing in the New York Review of Books:

Almost everyone in Washington understands, even if they don’t say it, that there is no real solution to what now seems to be the most disastrous foreign policy decision in American history. It’s now a matter of how to bring America’s involvement to an end with the fewest bad consequences. Despite all the studies and reports and amendments, events in Iraq itself will likely define the outcome.

US deaths in Iraq have amounted to 3064 over nearly four years.

Grant’s attack at Cold Harbor, June 3, 1864, which cost the lives of 10,000 Union soldiers (from a population of 26 million) in twenty minutes was a disaster. The loss of three thousand citizens of a nation of 300 million, a country which loses 26,000 lives annually in traffic accidents, over the course of nearly four years is something very different from Cold Harbor.

Iraq has not been a military disaster. US forces have suffered no battlefield defeat. Our troops are not demoralized. And there is no possibility whatsoever of our enemies achieving victory by military means.

Their only hope for victory, for bringing about the disaster of US withdrawal which has not yet occurred, is via the cowardice, defeatism, and disloyalty of our own chattering class elite.

The left side of the Blogosphere has been cackling with glee over apparent disproof of the recent John Kerry spurned by troops, eating alone in Iraq story.

Greg Sargent provided the refutation.

it turns out that Kerry was at that table to conduct an off-the-record breakfast discussion with two reporters, so there would have been no reason whatsover for troops to be sitting with them. In fact, Kerry and the reporters even sought out empty seats, I’m told.

The two reporters who met with Kerry that morning are Marc Santora of The New York Times and Mark Danner of The New York Review, The New Yorker and other publications. Both Santora and Danner confimed to me that they met with Kerry — on the morning of Dec. 17, according to Kerry’s office and to Danner. (The person who posted the photo also confirmed that it was taken that morning.)

Danner confirmed to me that he’s the guy with his back to the camera, saying his jacket and the back of his head looked the same as in the photo. He added that his position in relation to Kerry was the same as the photo showed. And here’s what Danner had to say to me about the empty seats: “If there were empty seats it’s because we sought them out. We wanted an empty table so we could talk. It’s that simple.”

The left’s joy is prompted by an opportunity to get the better of Glenn Reynolds, Charles Johnson, Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson of Power-line, and an assortment of lesser right bloggers, including yours truly who took Scott Hennen‘s correspondent’s word for its veracity.

This is a true story…..Check out this photo from our mess hall at the US Embassy yesterday morning. Sen. Kerry found himself all alone while he was over here. He cancelled his press conference because no one came, he worked out alone in the gym w/o any soldiers even going up to say hi or ask for an autograph (I was one of those who was in the gym at the same time), and he found himself eating breakfast with only a couple of folks who are obviously not troops.

Well, I certainly have no capability of investigating how well John Kerry was received by interviewing witnesses in Iraq, but common sense does suggest he would not be the most popular political figure in the heart of the typical serviceman.

Mr. Sargent’s refutation consists of a context supplied to that photograph by a couple of liberal journalists who work for liberal publications. These would be exactly the same sort of journalists who assisted Mr. Kerry in repackaging his “‘If you study hard, you get ahead in this life, and if you don’t, you’re going to wind up in Iraq” comment as a failed anti-Bush joke. Why should anyone be willing to take their word about something like this?

Alan Nathan compares the MSM’s coverage of Sandy Berger’s theft and destruction of documents from the National Archives to the media’s treatment of Watergate (which brought down a sitting president) and asks (not unreasonably):

Why is robbing national security documents less important than robbing campaign documents?

AP is demonstrating all over again the characteristic incapacity of the Antique Media to resist the temptation to abuse its power, to resist its own biases, or even to recognize when the game is up.

Armed Liberal describes AP’s continued stonewalling on the Jamail Hussein scandal as

a display of clueless arrogance unmatched since the Black Knight refused to yield to King Arthur.

Magna est veritas et prævalet.

Curt identifies the synthetic and unsavory origins of the ersatz Black holiday, and the Marxist ideals it is based upon.

African Americans mostly don’t care about Kwanzaa either, as the Wilmington Star notes.

It has been four decades since Kwanzaa was created as an African-American celebration of family and community, but in that time it has not resonated widely in South Carolina, a state where one-third of the population is black.

“I personally don’t know a single person who celebrates the holiday,” said Marcus Cox, founding director of the African-American Studies Program at The Citadel.

The holiday was created in 1966 by California State University at Long Beach professor Maulana Karenga, and a survey for the National Retail Federation in October found 2.3 percent of Americans celebrate it.

Cox said he and many other blacks respect the holiday, but there are barriers to its broader acceptance.

One of them is the timing of Kwanzaa, which is celebrated from Dec. 26 through Jan. 1.

“Christmas is a religious holiday. And most African-Americans are Christians,” Cox said.

But liberal journalists love Kwanzaa, and never cease promoting it. Just look at all the Google News links to propaganda in favor of it.

Clarice Feldman points out that the Department of Justice went out of its way to let Sandy Berger off easily for the document theft, and she think she knows why.

A particularly telling detail was the bit in the news reports of Berger’s treatment to the effect that DOJ sources insisted that “no original information” had been lost. That, of course, is simply the negative way of saying: All annotations to the original documents have been lost; we will never know for sure what the reactions of responsible members of the Clinton administration were to the contents of these highly important national security documents. Of course DOJ has always known this, as well as the significance of Berger’s conduct So, what interest did the prosecutors have in minimizing the seriousness of Berger’s crime–for crime it was, whatever the plea deal ultimately was? Or am I forgetting that the DOJ officials–the same ones who oversaw the start of Plamegate–have close ties to certain Democratic senators?

She is probably right, but an even more interesting question is what did the Clinton Administration papers in the National Archives reveal about that administration’s knowledge of terrorist threats and response that was so damaging that Sandy Berger was willing to undertake the risky task of trying to remove and destroy the evidence. The DOJ isn’t the only one giving Sandy Berger a pass. The MSM is curiously uninterested.

PJM has a link to the Inspector General’s Office report.

Mr. Joseph Rago, the assistant editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal, yesterday attacked bloggers, putting the lot of us in our place with a quotation from Joseph Conrad written by fools to be read by imbeciles, originally intended by Conrad to apply to newspapers.

If the United States withdraws from Iraq in confusion and defeat, it will not be because our armed forces were outnumbered, out of supply, or faced by a better-armed or equipped enemy. It will not be because the enemy was braver, better organized, more disciplined or determined than our soldiers. It will not be because the enemy had better generals, or better tactics, or a better strategy. And it will not be because American forces were ever defeated on the battlefield. There will no great enemy victory like Blenheim or Yorktown or Waterloo, which decided the struggle.

American forces will retire again, undefeated by the enemy in the field, stabbed in the back by domestic traitors. The privileged American intelligentsia occupying the decisive high ground of communications, dominating the American media and academic communities, will for the second time in the lifetimes of many Americans misuse its power and prestige to destroy America’s confidence in the justice of her cause, and in the success of her arms.

American military power is more than adequate to deal with this country’s foreign enemies in open battle, but our military forces have no defense against the tactics and forces of domestic defeatism, against the New York Times and the Washington Post, against CBS and CNN, against The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, against Yale and against Harvard.