Author: Spencer Ackerman

The Justice Department has brought charges against a Pennsylvania woman whose internet handle is “Jihad Jane.” Her actual name is Colleen LaRose, and she’s accused of “conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, conspiracy to kill in a foreign country, making false statements to a government official and attempted identity theft.” Why did she think she’d get away with it? Charlie Savage and Anahad O’Connor explain:

Ms. LaRose is white, with blond hair and green eyes, according to the law enforcement official, who was not authorized to share details of the case and spoke only on the condition of anonymity. …

The indictment refers to e-mail messages in which a conspirator, citing how Ms. LaRose’s appearance and American passport would make it easier for her to operate undetected, allegedly directed her in March 2009 to go to Sweden to help carry out a murder.

But the Department of Homeland Security insists on singling out citizens of mostly-Muslim “terror-prone” countries for additional airport screening, a move that would not have caught shoebomber Richard Reid (British citizen, Jamaican heritage); would-be-underpants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab at the time (Nigerian citizen, lots of time spent in the U.K.; and now Jihad Jane (American citizen, white as the driven snow, and we know white people can’t be terrorists). But ethnic profiling is great at humiliating and infuriating dignitaries of countries like Pakistan, whose assistance is absolutely crucial to an ultimate defeat of al-Qaeda.

In January, after the Department of Homeland Security announced that citizens of 14 (mostly Muslim) “terror-prone” countries would face extra security screening at U.S. airports, I wrote a piece predicting a backlash. The U.S. was trying to convince Pakistan, for instance, that it was looking out for Pakistani interests — right as Pakistanis themselves were facing full-body screening. Kalsoom Lakhani, a Pakistani citizen who directs a Pakistan-based philanthropic organization, told me the new rules make her “nervous to travel.”

Sure enough, last week, the State Department brought a group of Pakistani legislators to the U.S. on a goodwill tour. It ended in what The New York Times calls a “public relations fiasco” after — of course — the dignitaries were told they’d be pulled out of a security line at a New Orleans airport and frisked. Instead, they refused to board their plane. Now, back home, they’re heroes. And we’re villains. One of them told a radio host: “Going through a body scan makes you naked, and in making you naked, they make the whole country naked.”

Imagine you’re a Pakistani official. You make a risky decision to start arresting your former proxies in the Afghan Taliban after years of American pressure. And this is how your legislators are treated by the Americans? How would you respond?

Just released from the Vice President:

I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem. The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel. We must build an atmosphere to support negotiations, not complicate them. This announcement underscores the need to get negotiations under way that can resolve all the outstanding issues of the conflict. The United States recognizes that Jerusalem is a deeply important issue for Israelis and Palestinians and for Jews, Muslims and Christians. We believe that through good faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome that realizes the aspirations of both parties for Jerusalem and safeguards its status for people around the world. Unilateral action taken by either party cannot prejudge the outcome of negotiations on permanent status issues. As George Mitchell said in announcing the proximity talks, “we encourage the parties and all concerned to refrain from any statements or actions which may inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of these talks.”

And to think, Janine Zacharia of The Washington Post filed a pool report quoting Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu saying of Biden, “We’ve been personal friends for almost three decades. Can you believe it’s been that long?” Well, friends tell each other uncomfortable truths…

On Feb. 23, I broke a story about how the Senate Armed Services Committee determined that Blackwater employees in Afghanistan signed for hundreds of AK-47s and pistols using the name “Eric Cartman,” evidently a reference to the popular “South Park” character.

On March 17 — which Dave Weigel tells me is the season premiere — “South Park” will show Eric Cartman signing for the guns.

A few years ago, a pal of mine named Malcolm Nance testified to a congressional panel about how he was waterboarded. Nance used to instruct Naval Special Forces in how to resist torture, and part of their instruction was, inevitably, to undergo it themselves. Since the CIA’s contract psychologists essentially reverse-engineered that training in order to build a brutal interrogation regimen after 9/11, Nance thought members of Congress ought to know what techniques like waterboarding actually involve. “It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water,” Nance wrote in the New York Daily News. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning.

Mark Benjamin at Salon backs Nance up. Benjamin dug through some recently-disclosed CIA documents and found what waterboarding actually involved, as practiced by CIA:

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

This is all detailed in Abu Zubaydah’s account to the International Committee of the Red Cross of how he was tortured. But it’s one thing for a terrorist to testify to ill treatment. It’s another for CIA documentation to corroborate his account. Clearly Abu Zubaydah was drowned. As Benjamin observes, this is not the “dunking” that Dick Cheney describes. Whatever apologists like Marc Thiessen might say, the people who performed this torture knew full well that they were torturing people like Abu Zubaydah.

Julian Sanchez makes a wonderful observation about the Guantanamo lawyers:

Charles Katz really was involved in illegal gambling, but it’s his case that established a Fourth Amendment right to be free from warrantless wiretaps. Klansman Clarence Brandenburg really was advocating “revengeance” against Jews and African Americans (though in the latter case I’m paraphrasing)—but I owe him my right to express radical political views as long as I’m not directly inciting violence. Crucial Fourth Amendment cases protecting the sanctity of the home involved cocaine smuggling rings, marijuana growers, and thieves.

Many of them were, to put it mildly, unsympathetic characters whose “values” I would not want to be “shared” by high-ranking attorneys in the Justice Department. Fortunately, competent attorneys argued both sides of those cases, not because of their personal feelings about the defendants, but because the legal questions at the hearts of those cases had larger implications for the kind of country we’re going to live in.

I’m sure the FDL Lawfare Crew can add much to this, but I saw Ken Starr, of all people, making the case on ‘Countdown’ that we want to “encourage young lawyers” to follow in the tradition of defending controversial clients like the Guantanamo detainees. Marc Thiessen, upholding his deeply-felt commitment to embarrassing himself and the Washington Post, responds that there was no such backlash among lawyers to the cruel slights visited upon John Yoo and David Addington and Jay Bybee for creating legal pretexts for torture. Well, yes: Lawyers tend to like it when their colleagues uphold the law rather than figure out how to evade it.

A digression on Thiessen, because his piece is indicative of a juvenile conservative persecution complex. Yoo et. al., at the behest of Bush/Cheney/Tenet et. al., create a circumstance whereby U.S. personnel violate the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture, ratified by the U.S. Senate; place U.S. servicemembers under greater likelihood of being tortured themselves if captured by an enemy force; and place CIA operatives, officials and contractors in legal jeopardy, as they are now; and, of course, set the conditions for fellow human beings to be brutalized. And the problem, as Thiessen sees it, is that people are too mean to John Yoo.

Tags: al-qaeda seven, Countdown, Guantanamo, Guantanamo Lawyers, John Yoo, Julian Sanchez, Ken Starr, Marc Thiessen, Washington Post

Two weeks ago, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), in the midst of negotiations with the White House over trading a military tribunal for 9/11 conspirator Khalid Shaikh Mohammed for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, floated a new proposal: “a new national security court” for terrorism detainees. Graham didn’t appear to press the point in interviews since. But his spokesman, Kevin Bishop, said Graham is busy drawing up a proposal for how such a system would work, and gave some detail about its scope. As it happens, this is less a national-security court than it is an indefinite detention system. “There has to be some type of statute– and he’s been clear on that — for indefinite detention,” Bishop said.

Primarily, the system Graham is designing is set up for handling the Obama administration’s so-called “Fifth Category” of detainees that a Justice Department task force recommended against charging and releasing. “What do you do with them? What type of system do you have to hold them indefinitely?” Bishop said. “What type of system do you establish where we can ensure that we’re looking back at their cases; that we are holding them; we still determine that they are enemy combatants; they’re too dangerous to release; but we also aren’t going to try them in either a military or a civilian court. So there has to be a system for that, and that’s why Senator Graham is looking for a legal framework.”

Bishop said that Graham was not considering holding any American citizen indefinitely without charge — something that Graham’s close allies, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), included in their recent detention proposal. “You can’t hold an American citizen indefinitely in that kind of status,” Bishop said.

Graham is “talking with the White House” about the idea, Bishop said. But last year, the administration opted not to seek a new statute from Congress authorizing indefinite detention, as the Justice Department would “would rely on authority already provided” by the legislature for holding some terror suspects without charge.

There’s much that remains undefined about Graham’s proposal, including how much oversight judges would exercise over detainees held without charge. But Bishop said the system Graham is trying to set up wouldn’t just apply to the estimated 48 Guantanamo detainees the task force considers too dangerous to release but too difficult to prosecute in any forum. “There may be some people whom we capture in the future whom we can’t release,” Bishop said, “and that’s what Senator Graham is trying to establish.” Any proposal remains “weeks away” from introduction, he added, as “the White House has said they’re weeks away from any determination, even on the KSM situation.”

Update: I should clarify that the DOJ left itself wiggle room last year. According to The New York Times, while the administration opposed new legislation for the indefinite detention without charge of those 48-odd Guantanamo detainees, it hasn’t ruled out seeking such legislation for future detainees whom it may seek to hold indefinitely without charge. I’m trying to get some clarity here from the Justice Department.

Dave may be correct that the conservative rebuke to Keep America Safe has possibly peaked — conservatives, after all, don’t have an interest in keeping their internal disputes public — but no less a Democratic persecutor than Ken Starr went on ‘Countdown’ last night to admonish the Cheneys for slandering Justice Department lawyers who defended Guantanamo detainees. “It’s very important for lawyers to be willing to take on unpopular causes,” Starr said. “This is in the finest traditions of our country. I hope schoolchildren still learn about the example of John Adams, because we certainly teach it in law school — John Adams taking on [as clients] the British Redcoats who were charged with the Boston Massacre.”

Video after the jump:

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A new Democracy Corps/Third Way poll bills itself as a “wake-up call” for Democrats on national security. Last May, Democracy Corps found that Obama’s election had erased the Republicans’ traditional public opinion advantage on national security. What they’ve now found is that Obama maintains significant public support for his policies on foreign policy and national security, but the Democrats don’t.

Obama’s numbers on national security are strong almost all around. Fifty-eight percent of the public approves of his overall handling of national security. He has 58 percent support on Afghanistan. He has 55 percent support on handling terrorism. He has 54 percent support for his foreign policy. All of this comes with wide margins separating his approval on these issues from disapproval: Only 39 percent disapprove of Obama on national security, 37 percent disapprove on Afghanistan and 41 percent disapprove on terrorism. The only exception: Obama gets net negative marks for his handling of interrogations of detention: 46 percent approve and 49 percent disapprove. Democracy Corps’ poll is the first to show that more people feel less confident in Obama after the attempted Christmas bombing: 46 percent feel less confident while 42 percent feel more confident.

Generic Democrats do a lot worse. The public gives Democrats a net negative rating on national security — 43 percent approve and 49 percent disapprove. The Republicans once again have better numbers in this traditionally strong area for them, but not much better: 45 percent approve of the GOP on national security and 44 percent disapprove. Fifty-five percent of likely voters say they have a good idea what the Democrats stand for on national security, while 63 percent say they understand the Republican message.

“There’s a good deal of good news about the ratings for Democrats, the president and progressive ideas on national security,” pollster Jeremy Rosner said on a conference call with reporters, but “there’s clear danger of the historic Democratic deficit reopening.” Still, there’s “a real big opportunity by stressing tough actions and tangible results,” Rosner said, citing a 69 percent approval rating after voters hear about U.S. actions against terrorism in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen. Meanwhile, the strongest GOP message tested — about Obama giving “full legal protections, like Miranda rights,” to terrorists — garners only 57 percent support.

“You must take these issues head-on,” Matt Bennett, the head of Third Way, warned Democrats. “They can turn national security to an asset in their campaigns.”

Not that many of them appear to be trying.

Here’s another measure of how unlikely it is that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) can actually bring along GOP votes for closing Guantanamo Bay if only, only, the Obama administration caves on trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court. Last week, Graham’s two best Senate friends, John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), introduced a bill presenting, essentially, the GOP response to Obama’s legal approach to terrorism. (PDF.) Here’s a sampling of what it says:

SEC. 5. DETENTION WITHOUT TRIAL OF UNPRIVILEGED ENEMY BELLIGERENTS.

An individual, including a citizen of the United States, determined to be an unprivileged enemy belligerent under section 3(c)(2) in a manner which satisfies Article 15 5 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners in which the individual has engaged, or which the individual has purposely and materially supported, consistent with the law of war and any authorization for the use of military force provided by Congress pertaining to such hostilities.

My emphasis. Lieberman is constantly described as a moderate. McCain — at least once upon a time — used to buck his party and is now taking a for-it-before-he-was-against-it position on closing Guantanamo. And they favor keeping U.S. citizens detained indefinitely, a position that wouldn’t withstand a second of judicial scrutiny.

These are Graham’s closest allies in the Senate. They would be the very first people he would call to round up their votes for closing Guantanamo if the White House agrees to a deal. And they favor keeping American citizens detained forever!

More on Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) offer to trade the White House a Guantanamo Bay closure for a military commission for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. On ‘Face The Nation,’ Bob Schieffer asked what it’ll really take for Graham to deliver the Guantanamo votes from the GOP caucus. What did Graham say?

BOB SCHIEFFER: Do you think you can get the Republican votes to close Guantanamo and–and open another facility in this country because that’s going to require considerable amount of-

SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM (overlapping): I can’t– I can’t do it by myself. But I think if we could get Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the co-conspirators of 9/11 back in the military commission, it’d go down well with the public. But I’m going to need General Petraeus, Admiral Mullen, people known in public office. I’m going to need people from the Bush administration to try to close Gitmo, to put aside partisanship, rally around this President, stand by his side and say, let’s close Gitmo safely. With that kind of help, that will reassure Americans we’re making a good, logical decision, we can do the things we need to do to getting in back–

But this is support that the White House already has or isn’t going to get. You want Petraeus backing the Guantanamo closure? Here he is. You want Mullen backing the Guantanamo closure? Here he is. It’s not like their positions have changed. The only thing that’s changed is the hardening of Republican opposition to Obama’s plans. Everyone from the Bush administration who really would “put aside partisanship, rally around this President, stand by his side” on Guantanamo already has. Even George W. Bush has said he believes, in theory, that the U.S. ought to close the detention facility. There’s absolutely nothing Graham can unlock if the White House caves on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Graham is essentially asking the Obama administration to pay a higher price for a commodity it already possesses.

What’s more: The money to close Guantanamo is in the Afghanistan war funding request, the most politically untouchable package of money the government will ask Congress to approve. That signaled a willingness to play hardball on the closure, and force the GOP to defend blocking money for the troops. It’s no surprise Graham wants the White House to go further. He’s holding a losing hand, and a loss won’t let him position himself as a conservative hero in the guise of a bipartisan dealmaker.

(photo by Paul Keller)

This is the deal Lindsey Graham thinks he can use to get the White House to abandon a civilian trial for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed: Republican support for the closure of Guantanamo Bay. According to the more sophisticated explanation/rationalization I’ve heard for accepting the deal, it’s not so much that Graham can really bring along Republicans as much as he can provide political cover for reticent Democrats to vote for what in 2008 was a bipartisan consensus position, endorsed by even George W. Bush and John McCain. This is the world we live in.

The thing is this: in order for any of that to even get off the ground, the GOP has to at least accept the basic premise of the deal. And it doesn’t. Greg Sargent calls around to Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and Keep America Safe. Surprise: they’re GTMO hardliners. They do not care what Graham promises the White House. Graham can’t deliver GOP votes. Nor can he deliver any political cover for Democrats. Republicans will oppose whatever Democrats do, especially on national security. Such is politics. This is the world we live in.

So, now that Graham’s battleship is sunk, the question becomes whether the White House will cave on a principle and a political position it’s staked out — in exchange for absolutely nothing. Put differently: What world does Rahm Emanuel live in?

Tags: civil trial, George W. Bush, Greg Sargent, GTMO, Guantanamo, John Boehner, John McCain, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, KSM, Lindsey Graham, military commissions, Mitch McConnell, Rahm Emanuel

For more on the systemic failures in contracting that contribute to firms like Blackwater getting more and more security contracts after, like, killing civilians and stealing guns, check out Scott Amey’s recent testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Amey, the general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, zeroes in on a problem I highlighted in my piece: the inexplicable reluctance of government contracting officials to declare a company “debarred” — an inelegant word meaning formally ineligible for bidding on future contracts. It’s pretty bad:

According to the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, there were only 4,296 suspensions or debarments of contractors and individuals in fiscal year 2007, which was down from the 7,300 in FY 2006 and the 9,900 in FY 2005. All federal agencies under-utilize suspension and debarment against large contractors that supply the majority of the $530 billion worth of goods and services to the federal government each year. In fact, there have only been a handful of large contractors suspended since the 1990s – GE (for a period of five days), Worldcom, Enron, Arthur Anderson, Boeing (which received multiple waivers to receive new contracts during its suspension), and most recently IBM (for a period of eight days in 2008).

Basically, there are a number of Bad Contractor lists that apparently get ignored by contracting overseers, so even if Blackwater gets placed on one of them, that still won’t guarantee that it won’t get future government work. The system is basically set up to make it difficult to kick bad contractors out of the running. Which is pretty close to the dictionary definition of corruption.

Update: Very sorry for misspelling Amey’s name initially. Clearly Dick Armey rules my world.

David Rivkin and Lee Casey are an op-ed-writing team of former GOP legal officials who defend practically every terrorism-related policy pushed by the Bush administration. Here they are saying that warrantless surveillance “has always been on firm legal ground.” Here they are saying that the Justice Department and CIA torture memos somehow prove “the actual techniques used… did not cause severe pain or degradation.” Here they are saying that Congress can do practically nothing to stop a war aside from ceasing to appropriate money for it. Clearly they know something about implausible spin. And even they think the Cheneyites crossed a line by calling Justice Department lawyers who defended Guantanamo detainees the “al-Qaeda Seven.“

Ben Smith has a letter signed by a coalition of Republican legal mainstays, including Rivkin and Casey, denouncing Keep America Safe’s most recent ad, terming it “a shameful series of attacks” on people who upheld the “American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients [which] is at least as old as John Adams’s representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston massacre.” Other signatories include, of all people, Cully Stimson, the Pentagon official in charge of detainee policy who resigned for exactly the same offense that the Cheneyites committed and the letter condemns. Yes, they’ve lost that guy.

And they know it. Smith cites Bill Kristol, a board member of Keep America Safe, implausibly spinning the ad as an attempt to merely raise questions about disclosure — which itself suggests that the Justice Department lawyers did something untoward, something a Founding Father disputes — and not impugning the loyalty of the people the ad called the “al-Qaeda Seven.” That sounds like an attempt at a face-saving retreat, with Kristol’s attacks on the critics of the ads acting as little more than suppressing fire. The question now becomes whether Keep America Safe’s toxic reputation remains with it the next time it attempts to attack the patriotism of the Obama administration.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is trying to convince the White House that the only way to win congressional Republican support for closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay — or at least provide political cover to nervous Democrats — is to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a military commission. “I can’t do it by myself,” he told ‘Face The Nation’ yesterday. “But I think if we could get Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators of 9/11 back in the military commission, it would go down well with the public.”

The White House can surely cave on its plan to try KSM in civilian court, but it’s doubtful Graham can actually deliver on his end of the deal. Greg Sargent asked around GOP circles and found that Graham has practically no levers of GOP authority supporting the deal, whether inside government or outside:

Don Stewart, a spokesperson for Mitch McConnell, tells me the GOP leadership position will remain the same: Guantanamo, not a U.S.-based facility, is the right place to hold the detainees.

Michael Steel, a spokesperson for John Boehner, suggests the same: “Our focus is keeping dangerous terrorists from being brought to this country, where they will have the same rights as American citizens.”

And Liz Cheney’s group, Keep America Safe, says: No Deal. “We are concerned by reports that this will be part of a deal to close Guantanamo Bay and bring terrorists onto US soil,” a statement sent over by the group says. “We continue to call on the President to reverse his decision to close the facility.”

This might be the most unsurprising aspect of the whole prospective deal. Graham hasn’t been able to bring over any significant GOP support for a climate bill. Rather than bring Republicans along or even provide the administration cover, Graham himself has earned rebuke from his party. That might be admirable from a progressive perspective on principle. But Graham is asking the administration to compromise its principles in exchange for delivering votes that he shows no sign of being able to deliver. Why would any administration take this deal?

Blackwater guards in Iraq in 2003 (ALI HAIDER/EPA/KEYSTONE Press)

By March 24, the private security corporation formerly known as Blackwater — last seen in Afghanistan shooting civilians and stealing weapons intended for the Afghan police — may win a new Defense Department contract to train the Afghan police. And nearly no one in the government wants to own up to how it could happen.

Interviews over the past week with numerous Pentagon officials and military officers in Washington and Kabul have presented a portrait of a contracting process in which it is remarkably difficult to deny a contract to a security company involved in numerous civilian deaths and possible fraud. While it is not certain that Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, will receive a contract that could be worth as much as a billion dollars, the fact that the company is still eligible for the bid — while no one involved in the process wishes to claim responsibility for the potential award — highlights a confusing, unaccountable and systemic problem in how the government delivers security contracts.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Last year, at the request of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commanding general of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the Defense Department took control of a contract for training Afghan policemen from the State Department’s Bureau of Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs — an office that the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction signaled out as exercising weak oversight. According to four senior military officers with the NATO military command responsible for training Afghan security forces, known as CSTC-A, the command “identified a requirement” for a contractor to perform “tasks we specified” for training the police, said Brig. Gen. Gary Patton, the director of programs for CSTC-A. But all four officers said they had no further involvement with how the contract will be awarded.

That decision belongs to an obscure Army office called CNTPO. Short for the Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office, CNTPO is a subdivision of the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command. No one interviewed for this article could explain why CNTPO is responsible for overseeing a contract that has a tenuous connection to counter-narcoterrorism. Patton explained that CSTC-A’s advice to CNTPO on the contract is limited to designing the shape of the contract’s requirements, including what he described as a focus on “training the trainer” of Afghan forces and “more counterinsurgency in the program instruction, more counterinsurgency lessons, operating conditions and the like brought into the program instruction.” CNTPO had prior relationships with five security companies that it allowed to bid on the Afghan police training contract: Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, NG, ARINC — and Blackwater.

It doesn’t appear like CNTPO is a particularly well-known organization inside the Pentagon. Several of Patton’s colleagues at CSTC-A described it as being based in Huntsville, Ala., but several attempts to contact the office over the past week were unsuccessful.

In mid-December, DynCorp, another private security contractor that held the police-training contract back when the State Department controlled it, filed an objection with the Government Accountability Office over the decision to move the acquisition authority for the contract to CNTPO from State. The GAO has until March 24 to adjudicate the dispute. Several sources throughout the Pentagon and Congress expect CNTPO to award the contract almost immediately afterward if GAO rules that the office is indeed allowed to award it. CSTC-A officers said they did not know which company CNTPO believes ought to hold the contract.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) has expressed frustration that Blackwater is eligible for another government contract. In late February, an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which Levin chairs, uncovered that Blackwater created a shell company called Paravant in 2008 to help it win a sub-contract with the Army for training Afghan soldiers. While holding that contract, employees of Paravant who were never authorized to carry weapons simply took hundreds of rifles and pistols intended for Afghan police use from a U.S. military weapons depot near Kabul, even signing for those guns using the name of a “South Park” cartoon character.

Levin wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Feb. 25 to request that Pentagon officials “consider the deficiencies in Blackwater’s performance under the weapons training contract before a decision is made to award the police training work to Blackwater.” In a separate letter, Levin requested Attorney General Eric Holder investigate Blackwater for contract fraud. Justice Department officials would not comment for the record, but told TWI that Holder is considering Levin’s request.

Any action from Holder would represent perhaps the only chance to stop Blackwater from receiving any additional government contracts. Several CSTC-A officers and Pentagon officials said that good-government contract rules prevent them from banning Blackwater. Specifically, an obscure contracting rule known as Federal Acquisition Regulation 9.406-2 prevents an acquisition official for banning a company from being awarded a contract unless the company has been formally “debarred” from eligibility — something that has never happened in Blackwater’s case. However, several criteria for debarment appear to apply to Blackwater, including “commission of fraud,” “theft,” “falsification or destruction of records, making false statements,” “a history of failure to perform, or of unsatisfactory performance of, one or more contracts,” and “violations of the Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988.”

Asked what message it would send to the Afghans if a company whose employees have shot Afghan civilians and stolen weapons meant for the Afghan police wins a contract to train Afghan policeman, Patton said we was “not going to address hypotheticals.” He added, “I’ve got faith in the system, and we’re going to let the system play out and go from there.”

Adam Gadahn, the California metalhead (really!) who became al-Qaeda’s first American citizen recruit, has been apprehended in Pakistan. In 2006, the Bush Justice Department indicted Gadahn on charges of treason. But since then, a Democrat has been elected to the White House, and a principal knock on him from the right is that he cares more about the law than he does national security. So: How long will it be for a Republican critic of President Obama to suddenly discover that the Bush administration made a mistake by charging Gadahn in a civilian court?

Update: Alas, The New York Times reports that initial accounts of Gadahn’s arrest are incorrect, and the al-Qaeda figure the Pakistanis apprehended was ” Abu Yahya Mujahdeen al-Adam, who was described as having been born in Pennsylvania.” So. Will he be handed to the U.S. at all; and if so, what will be his legal fate?

Guantanamo detainees (photo: El Enigma via Flickr)

I don’t want to step on the toes of a forthcoming piece, so I hope you’ll forgive me being a bit cryptic. But one of the basic principles animating the Obama administration, as I understand it, is a very civic-minded impulse to resolve the complex interplay of terrorism and justice. In other words, when he ultimately goes home to Chicago, Obama wants to leave behind a system for trying terrorist suspects that can be embraced by the courts and by Congress. To create a new, stable consensus that everyone can embrace. That involves compromise.

I want to say that I fully understand and sympathize with that impulse. It’s not a good thing for the sake of American justice if the law gets rewritten on terrorism and the courts every four or eight years. But there are two problems with the impulse at play here.

First, it misunderstands the scope of the GOP opposition. The Republicans also want to leave behind a stable system for the complex interplay of terrorism and justice. And when they win an election, they’ll contend that the public wants them to rewrite those rules. And, really, they should claim that, because that’s what it means to win an election. While Obama moves further to the right, to demonstrate his reasonableness, no one on the right gives him any thumbs up. They continue to shift the goalposts, because they’re good at politics. See Adam Serwer and especially David Kurtz for more on this.

Second, and relatedly, Obama won’t be revising the rules here. He’ll be ratifying what the previous administration established. Remember the big picture: the argument for flipping on the KSM criminal trial is, says Rahm Emanuel, to get Lindsey Graham to vote for the closure of Guantanamo Bay. Why Graham’s support is so crucial never quite gets explained. But put that aside for a moment. What’s the problem with Guantanamo? Three things: torture; indefinite detention; and military commissions. Obama’s solution — creating a new detention facility at Thomson, Illinois — gets rid of the torture and keeps the indefinite detention and the military commissions. (Though indefinite detention is a form of torture.) The McCain/Lieberman bill introduced yesterday really restricts any Justice Department from bringing criminal charges against terrorists. So the state of play with Graham and KSM is that Obama is now fighting to retain any role for the criminal justice system when it comes to terrorism — something not even Bush had to do — in exchange for a very compromised GTMO closure. See how the Overton Window has shifted?

Add to that one more factor. When the Next GOP President inevitably endeavors to rewrite the rules, not only will s/he be operating on very favorable political terrain, but his/her opponents will have difficulty claiming a principled objection. How to oppose widespread indefinite detention if you already accept it in some cases? How to argue against widespread military commissions if you concede that civilian courts aren’t even good enough (despite the record) to handle open-n-shut cases like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who wanted to plead guilty before the commissions in 2008?

It’s a very worthy impulse to want to build a lasting legal architecture to confront terrorism. The greater likelihood, though, is that the country is not done with arguing the questions politically. If Obama backs down now, before even playing a winning hand, he’ll be setting up the left to keep losing the next rounds.

Marvel Comics owns Iron Man, Siege, Dark Reign, Norman Osborn, etc., and I don’t. Please don’t sue me. I just like this conceit.

Tags: al-Qaeda, Lindsey Graham, McCain-Lieberman Bill, military commissions

Reports Major Garrett:

A senior administration official deeply involved in White House deliberations about the future location and judicial venue of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other alleged 9/11 conspirators told Fox a decision on the case is “weeks away” and will not be made or announced before President Obama leaves for Guam, Indonesia and Australia on March 18.

In some quarters, Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s order to his troops in Afghanistan to protect civilians first represents a dangerous exposure to battlefield risk, particularly as he’s restricted offensive airstrikes and instructed his troops to stop fighting insurgents who retreat into population centers. To counterinsurgents, McChrystal is putting the mission first, since the mission is to protect the population, which requires treating any violence or humiliation experienced by civilians as a strategic threat. McChrystal’s latest move will probably entrench the judgment of both camps.

Today McChrystal’s command released a new guidance for “night raids,” in which troops hunting insurgents enter the houses of Afghan civilians. While stressing that the raids are “essential” and will continue, the commanding general in Afghanistan writes that “nearly every Afghan I talk to mentions them as the single greatest irritant,” far out of proportion with the number of Afghans the raids affect. Accordingly, McChrystal instructs his troops to avoid the raids whenever possible, and when they are unavoidable, to include Afghan soldiers or police in every raid — as well as in planning them. “If possible, local elders should be incorporated into the process,” McChrystal writes, “to ensure that the actual facts are related to the local populace.” Local leaders are to be informed of the raids. Only women soldiers are to search Afghan women. Any property damaged or confiscated must be reported to local leaders through the provision of “detailed receipts.”

“When properly executed, night raids remain a viable and advantageous option,” McChrystal writes in a public version of the new night raid guidance. “But if we do not conduct ourselves appropriately during night raids, we cede credibility to insurgents who can exploit our insensitivities in a persuasion campaign. It would be a tragic irony if operations we conduct to protect the population by ridding villages of insurgents are distorted to convince Afghans that we are unfeeling intruders.

“Ultimately, the Afghan people will decide the outcome of this conflict, and only with their support can we win.”