Author: Spencer Ackerman

Man, Dan Benjamin, the State Department’s counterterrorism chief, sure picked an unlucky day to deliver a speech defending the Obama administration’s counterterrorism record to the International Peace Institute in New York:

Finally, our approach recognizes that our counterterrorism efforts can best succeed when they make central respect for human rights and the rule of law. Because as President Obama has said from the outset, there should be no tradeoff between our security and our values. Indeed, in light of what we know about radicalization, it is clear that navigating by our values is an essential part of a successful counterterrorism effort. We have moved to rectify past excesses of the past few years by working to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay…

To be serious, this is what retired Lt. Gen. Harry Soyster meant when he said that American adversaries can “feel they are making progress if in fact our initial stand is reversed” on the KSM trial. Because abrogating the rule of law to accomodate political fear-mongering creates an asterisk after speeches like this that stick up for a mutually reinforcing commitment to the rule of law and national security. Hypocrisy has real security consequences.

Human Rights First, which staunchly opposes any decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow 9/11 conspirators in a military commission, convened a conference call with three prominent retired military leaders similarly opposed.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, who served in Vietnam, the Gulf War and Bosnia, said he got “worked up” reading the Post’s story this morning:

“Any time you do something hard, there’s a time where maybe you have second thoughts. That’s the time any good leader has got to remind himself about the story about ‘steady boy steady.’… The machinations of those who are afraid of these terrorists, who are afraid of American laws, who are afraid of this process that lived by under the rule of law for many many years — centuries — this is not the time to allow them to have their fear drive us away from doing the right thing… This is not the time to be scared. This is not the time to accomodate those who have led the country through an aura of fear for eight years. it’s time to do the right thing and persevere through.”

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Harry Soyster, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had harsher words:

“My concern is what it looks like to our enemy. And they certainly should be delighted in what appears to be great confusion, great ambiguity and inability to address the issue, so they should feel they are making progress if in fact our initial stand is reversed. from my perspective, the president [initially] chose chose the harder right over the easier wrong when he made the stand, supported his attorney general…and he should hold firm to that.”

Soyster rejected any trade, pushed by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, that would involve closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in exchange for a military tribunal for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “Both should be done,” Soyster said. “Guantanamo should be closed and the [KSM] trial should be done in an Article 3 federal court… We need to do the right thing.”

Retired Navy Real Adm. John Hutson, the Navy’s Judge Advocate General from 1997 to 2000:

“If you were from Mars and you came to earth and were told there were two options for prosecuting these guys. And one of them was federal courts, where we’ve done 200 of these [terrorism] cases over the last nine years, 90-percent-plus conviction rate, people successfully imprisoned, experienced judges, experienced prosecutors and all of that. Or you could go to a military commission which the Supreme Court has already struck down once, they’ve got three cases [with] two guilty pleas — both of those guys are out of jail — no experienced judges, no experienced prosecutors and a tenuous judicial system at best which is untried up to now in any real sense — which one you choose is pretty clear. Then you put on top of that the Constitution very clearly provides the president in his capacity as commander-in-chief is responsible for the prosecution of the war — and I would argue all of this is part of that responsibility, in how we go forward with the war — and the Department of Justice is responsible for the prosecution of federal prisoners, it’s clearly in the authority and the responsibility of the executive branch to do this.”

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who helped command the training of the Iraqi Army during the early phase of the Iraq war, is distressed to hear that at least some of President Obama’s advisers are urging him to abandon a civilian trial for 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “I do not see KSM as a combatant,” said Eaton, who is now a senior adviser to the progressive National Security Network. “This guy is a criminal, he is not a combatant. He is a murderer. He is not a combatant.” Combatants could reasonably be charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice in a courts-martial-like system — which the military commissions are not. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was arrested in Rawalpindi, Pakistan in 2003, far from any battlefield.

“Putting a military face on the American judicial system is counterproductive for our image abroad,” Eaton continued, recalling his work to convince Iraqi soldiers to obey the rule of law and civilian control of the military. “If you put the judicial system into the military’s hands, that is really a challenge to the premise that civilians and not the military are responsible for guiding and directing military activities. It is really a logic break to try these cases in a military setting.”

China and Russia pressured Tehran to agree to an offer to swap its enriched uranium for a foreign supply of nuclear fuel for its medical research reactor. Their appeals — delivered during a U.N. Security Council meeting on nuclear nonproliferation — presented Tehran with a final chance to skirt U.N. sanctions.

Russia’s U.N. ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, said that while diplomatic efforts by the U.N. and the big powers “have not yielded the desired results,” there “is still a horizon for negotiations. There is still an opportunity to agree to a persuasive mutually acceptable fuel exchange model for Tehran’s research reactor.”

Iran agreed to a version of this deal only after President Obama’s deadline for negotiations had passed, and agreed to a modality for swapping out uranium that didn’t satisfy the U.S.’s concerns that Iran could continue enrichment outside the watchful eye of the International Atomic Energy Agency. But if the Russians and the Chinese are really in last-chance mode, than this doesn’t appear to be such a bad deal from a U.S. perspective, as both of those countries — the only actual obstacles to the sanctions package — have both moved very close to the U.S. position over the last year, and this proposal from Moscow and Beijing moves them even further.

Sen. Lindsey Graham at Davos, Switzerland (photo: World Economic Forum via Flickr)

So, here’s where Lindsey Graham shows Rahm Emanuel that he represents some value-added on detainee issues to the Obama administration.

John McCain and Joe Lieberman introduced a bill today — the Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act of 2010 — that authorizes indefinite detention without charge for terrorism detainees. (Or, as McCain put it, “authorize detention of enemy belligerents without criminal charges for the duration of the hostilities consistent with standards under the law of war which have been recognized by the Supreme Court.”) While McCain and Lieberman are usually Graham’s main Senate allies on security stuff, look what Graham told Fox:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), an Air Force Reserves Judge Advocate General, told Fox he usually “understands what John and Joe are trying to do,” but he added, “I just don’t feel comfortable with it. There is a role for the civilian courts to play.”

And that’s what we call water-carrying. Graham’s opposition should be enough to cut the bill off at the pass.

It’s that kind of evening and I’m in that kind of mood, so I’m going to ask just how much water Graham actually carried. This bill was never going to pass, although, in fairness, it could have been (or might still be!) politically troublesome as long as the Democrats choose to remain supine on security issues. So now Graham visibly goes to bat for the administration’s right to try detainees in the federal courts — yes, this is how far we’ve sunk — and so Rahm gets to use that in internal discussions with, like, Eric Holder and David Axelrod for why all roads to closing Guantanamo Bay go through the stand-up G Lindsey Graham. You can almost feel that military commission for KSM coming closer… closer… closer…

You don’t think McCain and Lieberman teed up Graham for this, do you? Naahhhhh…. (Like I said, it’s that kind of night.)

[Update: It’s the morning after that kind of night, and this story is moving–and not in a good direction. Cynthia has more at The Seminal.  –Ed.]

Tags: Detention and Prosecution Ac, Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Eric Holder, Guantanamo, indefinite detention, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Rahm Emanuel, rule of law, Terrorism, Trials

The Washington Post is pretty sure that Obama’s advisers are congealing around abandoning Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court. Apparently President Obama has yet to make a decision. If he goes back to the military commissions for KSM and the other 9/11 conspirators — military charges against them were dropped in late January — Obama won’t just be abandoning the civilian courts. He’ll be abandoning a winnable political battle on a matter of principle.

The opposing argument, made by Rahm Emanuel, is a political one. (And apparently not shared by David Axelrod.) It’s that the trial is a political headache and the cost of closing Guantanamo Bay, another administration priority, is the vote of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — and the cost of Graham’s vote is to try KSM in a military commission. Graham showed his utility to the administration yesterday, going to bat for Obama’s right to try at least some terrorism detainees in civilian court after his close political allies, Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), released a bill providing for indefinite detention without trial for terrorism suspects.

You can’t raid the Pentagon that way — those who built the building thought of this — but you can kill a lot of commuters, especially shortly before 7 on a weeknight. Luckily that hasn’t happened, but two Pentagon guards have been injured. The suspect is in custody and the Department of Defense put out the following statement just now:

A shooting incident has occurred at the Pentagon Metro Entrance this evening at approximately 6:40 p.m. EST. Two Pentagon Force Protection Agency (PFPA) officers were injured when an unknown suspect fired at them. The suspect was injured in return fire from the PFPA officers. Injuries to the two PFPA officers do not appear to be life threatening. A suspect is in custody and his condition is unknown. All three injured have been taken to a local hospital. All Pentagon entrances were secured for a brief time but have since been reopened with the exception of the Pentagon Metro entrance. The incident is under investigation. More details will be released when available.

The sweet smell of success? (photo: spike55151)

Chuck Grassley and Jeff Sessions have led the McCarthyite charge to slander those Justice Department attorneys who defended Guantanamo detainees. And yet, predictably, these shining specimens voted for the Military Commissions Act of 2006. You know what one of the provisions of the Military Commissions Act was? The right to defense counsel. Shocked, I know you are. (Special guest appearance in this post by retired Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Swift, who defended Salim Hamdan.) Also, who said this: “Good lawyers representing the detainees is the best way to ensure that justice is done in these cases.” Yes, the terrorist sympathizer Alberto Gonzales.

Special jackass award goes to the Daily Caller’s Meghan Clyne, for writing this, in the midst of smearing Neal Katyal’s former intern on the Hamdan case, who now works for the White House counsel’s office:

Others note that everyone — even an alleged terrorist — is entitled to a defense. One question often raised, however, is about the motives of private-sector attorneys who can choose their pro bono activities (or, in Kravis’s case, a law student trying to allocate out-of-class time) and decide to expend their efforts on behalf of enemy combatants.

Of course they’re working pro bono. What, they’re going to charge Guantanamo detainees or the government for standing up for the principle of universal access to legal defense? Cully Stimson, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, once intimated something nefarious about who was actually paying for this legal work:

It’s not clear, is it? Some will maintain that they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that they’re doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are; others are receiving moneys from who knows where, and I’d be curious to have them explain that.

The quote Gonzales issued was in response to Stimson. Who resigned soon afterward.

Update: Adam Serwer with a serious get:

“I think it’s unfortunate that these individuals are being criticized for their past representation, it reflects the politicization and the polarization of terrorism issues,” Bellinger said. ““neither republicans nor democrats should be attacking officials in each other’s administration’s based solely on the clients they have represented in the past.”

“We’ve had a longstanding tradition in our country for lawyers to represent unpopular causes, and they shouldn’t be attacked for doing so,” Bellinger added.

That would be Condoleezza Rice’s legal counsel at State and NSC.

Tags: Alberto Gonzales, Charlie Swift, DOJ, Guantanamo, Hamdan, Meghan Clyne, Military Commissions Act, Neal Katyal, Salim Hamdan

So one of the so-called “Gitmo Nine” Justice Department lawyers attacked by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) is Tony West. West, the associate attorney general for the civil division of Justice, defended John Walker Lindh, the California rich kid sentenced to 20 years for aiding the Taliban. You can learn about West’s nefarious and shadowy connections to Lindh by, say, Googling him.

Grassley was just quoted by CNN pledging that he isn’t attacking anyone’s patriotism, he just wants disclosure. But when West went before the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 10, 2009 for his confirmation hearing — a committee on which both Sessions and Grassley sit — neither of them so much as asked West a single question, let alone a question about representing Lindh. (The transcript of the hearing is on Nexis, which is where I found it.) Again: It’s barely even due diligence to find West’s representation of Lindh. Here’s a livechat West did with The Washington Post about the case in 2002. The very first sentence of his National Journal profile mentions Lindh. And yet, given the chance to ask West about precisely the issue that so concerns Grassley and Sessions now, both refused to ask. What are they hiding? Did al-Qaeda pay them to stay silent????

Oh yeah, and as Adam Serwer noted this morning: Both Grassley and Sessions voted to confirm West, a man they now intimate is disloyal to the country he serves.

It’s not just Alberto Gonzales. Adam Serwer talks to John Bellinger, who served as Condoleezza Rice’s legal adviser at the State Department and the National Security Council, about the Grassley/Sessions/Cheneyite smears on the Justice Department lawyers who represented Guantanamo detainees:

“I think it’s unfortunate that these individuals are being criticized for their past representation, it reflects the politicization and the polarization of terrorism issues,” Bellinger said. “neither republicans nor democrats should be attacking officials in each other’s administration’s based solely on the clients they have represented in the past.”

“We’ve had a longstanding tradition in our country for lawyers to represent unpopular causes, and they shouldn’t be attacked for doing so,” Bellinger added.

Who knew George W. Bush hired so many traitors! Can’t wait to see the Keep America Safe ad attacking Bellinger.

There are two senators who’ve accused Justice Department attorneys who represented Guantanamo detainees of sympathizing with terrorists: Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and, perhaps more disturbingly, Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee who very nearly became a federal judge in the 1980s. Their logic is no different than presuming a lawyer who defends an accused rapist approves of rape.

“Do the senators suggest that the person be unrepresented?” wondered retired Navy Lt. Commander Charlie Swift, who helped defend Salim Hamdan alongside Neal Katyal, the deputy solicitor general whom Grassley and Sessions slimed. “Can they concede that a court in which they are unrepresented [fails to] meet that Common Article 3 standard?” Funny thing about that.

In 2006, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act. Among the provisions of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 — specifically, Section 948k — is that detainees under the commissions are entitled to defense counsel. You’ll never guess which two senators voted for the Military Commissions Act, with its nefarious promises of detainee counsel: Chuck Grassley and Jeff Sessions.

“If they didn’t think attorneys should do this, or that such people are traitors for doing it, why did they establish the requirement?” said Swift, now a lawyer in private practice in Seattle. “I don’t understand. To me, it’s political cheap shots. It’s not the law.”

Another funny thing: This particularly sleazy argument has all played out before. In 2007, Cully Stimson, then the top Pentagon official for detainees (now with the conservative Heritage Foundation), said in an interview that he was eager to see law firms pay a price for choosing to represent Guantanamo detainees. “When corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks,” Stimson said. “And we want to watch that play out.” The Washington Post’s editorial page replied that it was “offensive” for Stimson to argue “that law firms are doing anything other than upholding the highest ethical traditions of the bar by taking on the most unpopular of defendants.”

And you know who agreed with the Post? No less a law-breaking, impunity-loving executive-power-drunk official than soon-to-be-disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. “Good lawyers representing the detainees is the best way to ensure that justice is done in these cases,” Gonzales told The New York Times. Even Alberto Gonzales thinks that Guantanamo detainees deserve good legal counsel!

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that this episode has fallen down the right-wing memory hole now that a Democrat is in office. “This entire attack is representative of the extraordinary double standard to which members of the Obama administration are held, as opposed to members of the Bush administration,” Swift observed, adding for good measure about his friend Katyal: “Neal is the modern-day John Adams, in fact. … Neal came in out of the highest of principles. He took the case even though he knew he might be attacked later for doing it. He argued it from the highest of principles, he conducted himself at every moment as the most principled attorney I’ve ever seen. And he won the case.”

Amb. Susan Rice, the U.S. envoy to the United Nations, just released this transcript of her submission for U.N. Security Council consideration of a package of economic sanctions for Iran:

The United States remains firmly committed to a peaceful resolution to international concerns about Iran’s nuclear program. Over the past year and more, the United States has reached out to Iran in unprecedented ways, repeatedly demonstrating our commitment to work towards a diplomatic solution based on mutual respect. And yet, Iran has yet to take steps to build confidence and honor the commitments it has made.

As Security Council members, we must all continue to stand firm in our conviction that Iran must comply with its international obligations. Four years, four years have passed since the IAEA referred this serious situation to the Security Council. In that time, the P5+1 has dedicated itself to a dual-track approach to place a clear choice before Iran so that it can choose a better way forward. And the United States remains committed to this strategy.

Mr. President, in light of Iran’s continued noncompliance with its obligations, this Council must consider further measures to hold the Government of Iran accountable.

Laura Rozen at Politico beat me to this, but today Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, released letters he sent to Attorney General Eric Holder and Defense Secretary Robert Gates asking them to review Feb. 24 testimony from ex-Blackwater executives and Army officials that indicate the security contractor committed contract fraud. In particular, Levin’s Senate Armed Services Committee received testimony that day from ex-Blackwater officials that the company obscured its relationship with a shell company called Paravant in order to win a subcontract with the Army to train Afghan soldiers — possibly at the behest of the defense giant Raytheon, which held the overall training contract. (Raytheon non-denies denies such involvement.)

From Levin’s letter to Holder:

The $25 million subcontract was awarded to Blackwater just months after the State Department had said they lost “confidence in [Blackwater’s] credibility and management ability.” The Army contracting officer who approved the Paravant contract testified to the Committee that he was unaware that the proposal was really a Blackwater proposal in the name of Paravant. If the Army contracting officer had known he was approving a subcontract with Blackwater, perhaps he would have taken the Department of State’s finding about the company’s lack of credibility and management ability into account when deciding whether to approve that subcontract. That makes the deceptive representation a serious matter.

A Justice Department official told me the department is reviewing Levin’s request at the moment.

Meanwhile, Blackwater might possibly get another contract with the Defense Department to train Afghan policemen — yes, even after Blackwater employees stole hundreds of guns from U.S. military weapons depots that were intended for Afghan police use. The General Accountability Office is currently reviewing an objection raised by rival private security firm DynCorp to Blackwater’s potential acquisition of the contract. Levin writes to Gates that responsible contracting officials should check out the contract fraud uncovered at the committee hearing last week and “consider the deficiencies in Blackwater’s performance under the weapons training contract” before giving the company a new contract worth, potentially, a billion dollars.

Gates will have to act fast. I am reliably informed GAO has until March 24 to reach a decision about who gets the contract.

It’s gotten much less attention than his unilateral revision of Afghanistan’s electoral law, but Afghan President Hamid Karzai is scaling back a milestone for human rights in post-Taliban Afghanistan: setting aside parliamentary seats for women politicians. Things are still in flux, and for weeks, a spokesman for the Afghan government has not returned my emails seeking clarity. But Suraya Pakzad, one of the leading women’s rights activists in Afghanistan, told me this morning that she’s appealing to the international community “not to support a process where women’s rights are denied — not just women’s rights, but human rights,” particularly at a time when crucial decisions for the future of women’s rights in a potential postwar Afghanistan may be up for discussion.

Pakzad is in Washington for the next several days to press that case to a number of U.S. officials, including aides to Amb. Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and on a variety of fronts. Beyond attempting to preserve women’s parliamentary representation, Pazkad, the recipient of a State Department ‘Women of Courage’ award in 2008, wants the U.S. and its allies to press Karzai on allowing women to help draft the terms of any reconciliation offer to Taliban insurgents.

“We’re not just looking at women in parliament, but women at the local and national level,” Pazkad said after a breakfast event on the Hill sponsored by the United Nations’ Development Fund for Women and the Women Thrive Worldwide non-governmental organization. “We need the international community to push the Afghan government that they should not support any reconciliation with the Taliban without women’s presence.”

As he announced in the London international conference on Afghanistan in January, Karzai is going to draft a reconciliation proposal to present to the heretofore-disinterested Taliban leadership. “We don’t want to stand against the draft when it is made,” Pakzad said. “We would like to be there while they make the draft. We don’t want our rights to be bargained [away]. We don’t want compromising. We need real, equal positions in the making of important decisions for our country.” If Karzai ignores Pazkad’s concerns, he could turn a glimmer of hope for the end of the war into a looming human rights catastrophe, considering Taliban rule during the 1990s made Afghanistan one of the worst places on earth to be a woman.

Pazkad said representatives from her Herat-based organization, Voice of Women in Afghanistan, met with Mohammed Masoom Stanekzai, the Karzai aide responsible for drafting the reconciliation offer, a few days ago, while she herself was traveling to Washington. Even so, she added, “Advocacy doesn’t mean being invited. We raise our voices.”

photo: yewenyi via Flickr

Since — what? — 2004, I’ve read thousands of pages of declassified documents, internal investigations, ICRC accounts, survivor testimony and journalistic inquiry about the myriad and sprawling torture apparatus created after 9/11. I’ve written about it a bit. I’ve spent four days in Guantanamo Bay. I’ve seen a quasi-legal Administrative Review Board consider the case of a detainee at Guantanamo. I’ve walked around Disney Drive at Bagram Air Field and wondered if I would be able to even catch a glimpse of one of the detention facilities there. I’ve heard the halt in the voice of a terrified mother of a man detained without charge for 20 months in Saudi Arabia before being transfered to a federal courthouse to face charges of conspiracy to assassinate George W. Bush.

And nothing quite has the power of hearing the words contained in these documents read out loud.

So last night the ACLU (full disclosure: my girlfriend works for the ACLU, although you know from years of my work that I’ve been sympathetic to their efforts long before we met) staged a reading of critical documents from the torture era at Georgetown’s law school. I thought it would be mawkish torture-theater or a cheap holiday in other people’s misery. It turned out to be nauseatingly powerful. Rep. Bobby Scott read from the Bybee/Yoo “techniques” memo of August 2002 while Rep. Keith Ellison interjected with the account Abu Zubaydah provided to the ICRC in 2007 of what happened to him as the result of that memo. I’ve read both of those memos again and again. I wrote a piece in April piecing together those two accounts to pierce the euphemistic membrane that the memo calls “sleep deprivation.” But to hear these words read out loud before you — it has a different narrative power. As does Rep. John Conyers reading Bush’s 2004 speech commemorating United Nations Day in Support of Victims of Torture.

I won’t belabor the point, but I want to add something that rarely gets stated. We tend to speak of torture and indefinite detention as two different things. And it’s true that they’re notionally distinct. But imagine yourself placed into a cell for months or for years and abused, without anyone listening to your pleas to be brought before a judge and read the evidence against you, without any ability to contest or challenge what the interrogators tell you that you’ve done. And it drags on for years and years — just you and the guards and maybe the others imprisoned near you, the days counting down without anything changing. To have to find within you the remainder of your faith in something that will at least allow you to make sense of what has happened to you, if not actually set you free. That is, itself, torture.

It made me wonder, hearing these accounts: what if Jay Bybee or John Yoo or David Addington or John Rizzo or Jim Haynes or Alberto Gonzales or George Tenet or Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney or George Bush had to taste what this was like? The weight of the apparatus they created, bearing down upon them? It should, of course, never happen, because the most important thing in this world is justice, and justice is no less necessary for the iniquitous than it is for the good. But would any American experience this for himself or herself and not immediately see how plainly evil — evil — it is to subject someone to this treatment, no matter who they are or what they’ve done?

Tags: Abu Zubaydah, ACLU, Alberto Gonzales, Bobby Scott, David Addington, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, George Tene, Jay Bybee, Jim Haynes, John Conyers, John Rizzo, John Yoo, Keith Ellison

Last December, after President Obama’s self-imposed deadline for direct, preconditionless negotiations with Iran expired without Iranian receptivity, administration officials told me they were gearing up to place economic sanctions on Iran as soon as they could arrange for international support. The New York Times reports that an actual sanctions package is now making its way through the United Nations Security Council:

The diplomats said the proposed sanctions called for an outright ban on certain transactions with Iran, whereas the existing sanctions called on United Nations members to exercise “vigilance” or “restraint” in interacting with Iran in some areas of weapons trade, shipping and banking. The focus is on the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which runs a vast array of Iranian businesses, while the oil industry is not included, diplomats said.

It’s up to Amb. Susan Rice to secure the support of the Russians and the Chinese, without which the sanctions package can’t pass through the Security Council. Diplomats from allied nations have told me they’re prepared to cobble together an ad-hoc sanctions coalition of Iranian trading partners, but their strong preference is for U.N. action.

I’m trying to kick the “No Apology” habit, I really am. But one of the central themes of Mitt Romney’s analysis of global affairs is that China’s acceleration of economic and military power threatens to dislodge American international standing. There are only four models for global power, Romney writes: the American, the Chinese, the Russian and the “Violent Jihadist.”

So today we see this:

China’s official military budget will rise by just 7.5 percent in 2010, a government spokesman said on Thursday, a rate that is about half the increase in recent years and the first single-digit rise in military spending since 1989.

The announcement by Li Zhaoxing, a spokesman for the National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, gave no explanation for the slowdown. Some analysts speculated, however, that China’s huge economic stimulus program and other efforts to address unemployment and welfare had eaten into monies that in a normal year would go toward the nation’s rapid military buildup

I choose to interpret the move as the Chinese being so impressed with the force of Romney’s argumentation that they decided to back down. You just have to show strength on the world stage.

From Jake Tapper at ABC:

Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller said today that Justice Department officials “will not participate in an attempt to drag people’s names through the mud for political purposes.”

Miller said that one of the hallmarks of “our nation’s legal system is that attorneys provide faithful representation to all sorts of clients. As John Roberts said at his confirmation hearings, it is wrong to identify lawyers with the client or the views the lawyer advances for the client, and our history is replete with such examples, from John Adams representing British soldiers to Department of Defense JAG lawyers representing Guantanamo detainees.”

Notice Miller daring Cheney and Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) to slander the JAG lawyers who defend Guantanamo detainees. Glenn Greenwald has perspective on all this.

And Justin Elliott notices a lawyer working for Rudy “Noun-Verb-9/11″ Giuliani’s firm. Good for Giuliani for hiring someone who’d offer legal counsel to the most vilified of defendants, which is the American way.

One of the major critiques of holding a civilian trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow alleged 9/11 conspirators is that any city hosting the trial becomes a terrorist target. Rand Beers, the undersecretary of Homeland Security who used to be part of Richard Clarke’s crew of 1990s-vintage counterterrorism officials, told me at a forum hosted by the conservative Heritage Foundation this afternoon that he’d “be remiss to tell you no, there’s no threat,” particularly after manifested — if unsuccessful — terrorist plots against the U.S. at home from Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Najibullah Zazi emerged. “But can I tell you there’s a specific threat? No.”

That’s not to say the Department of Homeland Security isn’t preparing to lend support to municipal law enforcement. “If the trial is held in a U.S. district courthouse, as currently constructed, we would have an inner ring of the U.S. Marshall Service,” Beers said. “We would have an exterior ring, which would probably involve the Federal Protective Service, and we would have an interagency, intergovernmental task force, which would involve the state or local entity that would be responsible for law enforcement in those areas. And there was certainly discussions with respect to that if the trial were going to be in New York. I can assure you those same discussions are going to take place any other place that that determination is made to locate the trial.”

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) introduces his bill to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” today. As I write, he’s giving a presser that (alas) I was unable to attend. But via Jen DiMascio at Politico, Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued instructions for his information-gathering team — Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson and U.S. Army-Europe chief Lt. Gen. Carter Ham — about what criteria they should study to recommend a repeal of the ban on open gay military service:

Determine any impacts to military readiness, military effectiveness and unit cohesion, recruiting/retention, and family readiness that may result from repeal ofthe law and recommend any actions that should be taken in light of such impacts.

Determine leadership, guidance, and training on standards of conduct and new policies.

Determine appropriate changes to existing policies and regulations, including but not limited to issues regarding personnel management, leadership and training, facilities, investigations, and benefits.

Recommend appropriate changes (if any) to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Monitor and evaluate existing legislative proposals to repeal 10 U.S.C § 654 and proposals that may be introduced in the Congress during the period of the review.

Assure appropriate ways to monitor the workforce climate and military effectiveness that support successful follow-through on implementation.

Evaluate the issues raised in ongoing litigation involving 10 U.S.C § 654.

So far, Gen. James Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps, has been the only military service chief to oppose the repeal. Gates’ first criterion speaks to Conway’s concerns.