Author: Spencer Ackerman

For more on the Cheneyite right’s intimations that there’s something shameful about providing legal counsel for Guantanamo detainees, see Adam Serwer’s new piece for the American Prospect, which pivots off Keep America Safe’s bottom-scraping ad:

The group put out a web video demanding that Holder name the other Justice Department lawyers who had previously represented terror detainees or worked on similar issues for groups that opposed the Bush administration’s near-limitless assumption of executive power. “Whose values do they share?,” a voice asks ominously. “Americans have a right to know the identity of the al-Qaeda Seven.” The ad echoed [National Review writer Andy] McCarthy’s references to the “al Qaeda bar” from months earlier.

“This is exactly what Joe McCarthy did,” said Gude. “Not kind of like McCarthyism, this is exactly McCarthyism.”

That’s Ken Gude of the Center for American Progress. Yesterday, retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, a former chief prosecutor of the military commissions, wondered whether these people would call John Adams a British symp for defending the perpetrators of the Boston Massacre.

Nevertheless, the Los Angeles Times runs a story reporting this exactly the way the right wants it reported, with credulous intimations that there’s something “hidden” about the Justice Department lawyers. “It’s time for these policies to meet the light of day — and for the public to get the answers they deserve,” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) told the paper’s Richard Serrano, who didn’t ask Sessions whether he had a list of the Justice Department’s al-Qaeda sympathizers in his jacket pocket. This is a constant theme on the right. In 2006, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) told me that there were unnamed CIA officials who harbored sympathy with al-Qaeda. He was chairman of the House intelligence committee at the time.

Mitt Romney (UPPA/ZUMApress.com)

Mitt Romney’s just-published book, “No Apology: The Case For American Greatness,” is a bid to bolster the former Massachusetts governor’s nonexistent national-security and foreign policy portfolio ahead of a possible 2012 presidential run. But a glance through the remarkable conflation of conservative shibboleths, paranoid global fantasies and deterministic myopia in “No Apology” makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the perennial GOP candidate might have been better off saying nothing at all.

Romney’s central contention is that there are four “strategies” for global power: the United States’ blend of benevolent, market-based hegemony; the Chinese model of political autocracy and unrestrained industry; Russia’s energy-based path to resurgence; and the “violent jihadists,” an agglutination of scary Muslims. Trouble in paradise, according to Romney, comes from President Obama’s “presupposition” that “America is in a state of inevitable decline.” As a result, Romney must warn the nation to continue to lead the world, lest one or more of these competitors overtake America. “[T]here can be no rational denial of the reality that America is a decidedly good nation,” writes Romney, or perhaps a third grader. “Therefore, it is good for America to be strong.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

So many things are wrong with Romney’s view of an imperiled America that it is difficult to know where to begin. First, the idea that the U.S. is locked in a struggle for global supremacy with “violent jihadists” overlooks the exponential differences in economic resources, military strength, and global appeal between America and an increasingly imperiled band of Waziristan-based acolytes of Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda can attack us; it cannot displace the U.S. as a global leader. It manufactures nothing, trades with no one, and has absolutely nothing to offer anyone except like-minded conspiratorial murderers. In order to disguise these glaring asymmetries, Romney has to use an empty term — “the jihadists” — which he cannot rigorously define and with which he means to absorb the vastly different aims and ambitions of rival terrorist groups and separate nations like Iran.

“Violent jihadist groups come in many stripes across a spectrum,” Romney writes, “from Hamas to Hezbollah, from the Muslim Brotherhood to al-Qaeda.” But al-Qaeda exists because it considered the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt too accommodating of the Egyptian government; Hamas has literally fought al-Qaeda attempts at penetrating the Gaza Strip; and Sunni al-Qaeda released a videotape just this weekend that derides “Rejectionist Shiite Hezbollah.” There is absolutely nothing that unites these organizations in any programmatic manner except Romney’s ignorance, and the expansion of ignorance is insufficient to topple an American superpower.

The comparison between American and Russian or Chinese global power is less obviously stupid than between that of the “violent jihadists.” But that is not saying much. The amalgamation of Wikipedia-level facts about Chinese economic and military growth and renewed Russian assertiveness “No Apology” provides does little more than demonstrate that the Chinese are modernizing and the Russians again desire a prominent global position. But the U.S.’s military advantage over the Russians and the Chinese is massive, and will remain massive for decades. In 2008 alone, the U.S. spent over $700 billion on its military. China spent $122 billion and Russia spent $70 billion. At one point in the text, Romney is forced to concede that the Council on Foreign Relations wrote that until at least 2030 there is “no evidence to support the notion that China will become a peer military competitor of the United States.” He waves away that inconvenient fact:

On the other hand, Afghanistan fighters were certainly not a peer military with the Soviet Union, yet they defeated the Soviets — not globally of course, but certainly in Afghanistan.

One could conclude from this analogy that the lesson for the U.S., then, is not to invade and occupy China.

There are two salient global facts Romney never considers in his book. The first is that it is actually possible to obtain positive-sum relations with rising powers. The rise of China does not have to equal the decline of the United States. If, as Romney argues — following Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer — decline is a choice, so is permanent international competition. The concept of diplomacy is completely foreign to Romney. He dismisses the State Department as “assistant secretaries and… bureaucrats” and proposes designating regional relations to “one individual” who would become a “presidential envoy or the ambassador from CENTCOM or any of the other regional military commands.” Such an individual would “encourage people and politicians to adopt and abide by the principles of liberal democracy,” something that “would be ideal if other allied nations created similar regional positions, and if we coordinated our efforts with theirs.” That’s it for diplomacy, and he doesn’t have an agenda for global development. Why the world will simply do what America says simply because America says it is something Romney never bothers to consider. High school students at model U.N. conferences have proposed less ludicrous ideas.

The second concept Romney ignores is international institutions. He has practically nothing to say about the network of international institutions and regional alliances the U.S. engages with, from the United Nations to the G-20 to NATO to ASEAN to the IMF and World Bank. These institutions, occasionally the object of scorn from the right (the U.N.) and the left (the IMF), are permanent fixtures in international relations — fora for both international competition and cooperation. Romney has nothing to say about them — except for the invocation that NATO nations ought to spend more on defense — which might help explain why he views global power as a zero-sum competition.

That absence could be explained by the typical conservative hostility to anything resembling diplomacy or multilateralism. But there is a more surprising absence in “No Apology”: the Afghanistan war. Romney has absolutely nothing to say about a conflict in which 100,000 U.S. troops are committed, and which he would most likely inherit should he win the presidency in 2012. He proposes expanding the counterinsurgency capabilities of the military, but manages to say absolutely nothing about what they ought to do in Afghanistan, except for the content-free platitude that “we must draw upon the resources of our entire military.”

Romney himself never served, and his unfamiliarity with military issues is evident in “No Apology.” He proposes adding “at least 100,000 soldiers to the army and the marines” (Marines are not soldiers) and spending “at least 4 percent” of GDP on the military without explaining why. Why not 5, 10, 15 percent? Not only does Romney not discuss what to do in the actual conflict America fights, he can’t articulate why his proposals adequately resource the strategies he advocates. Most likely, he has been given a set of position papers from conservative think tanks and allowed a ghostwriter to weave them into something approaching a narrative. (Romney credits the conservative foreign-policy analysts Dan Senor, Pete Wehner, Mitchell Reiss and the Kagan family for some of the ideas that he presents.)

What he also barely articulates is his contempt for President Obama. Somehow Obama’s hypothetical out-year defense budget cuts to 3 percent of GDP — hypothetical because they are projections — leave the nation vulnerable to attack, but ticking that spending up to 4 percent of GDP (it’s at 3.7 percent now) means everything will be copacetic. That might be the most reality-based that Romney’s description of Obama’s approach of foreign affairs actually is. He imagines Obama taking an “American Apology Tour,” a staple talking point on the right to describe Obama’s 2009 trips abroad in which the president showed a conciliatory face to foreign leaders and publics. It is telling that Romney produces not a single quote from Obama deriding America, protecting himself from the inevitable charge of caricaturing Obama by saying the president, “always the skillful politician, will throw in compliments about America here and there.” The dishonesty of that statement is demonstrated by the most cursory glance at Obama’s major foreign speeches, from Prague (”Just as we stood for freedom in the 20th century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century”) to Cairo (”America holds within her the truth that regardless of race, religion, or station in life, all of us share common aspirations — to live in peace and security; to get an education and to work with dignity; to love our families, our communities, and our God”) to Oslo (”Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms”). Romney is offended by Obama’s U.N. speech that “power is no longer a zero-sum game,” writing, “that by necessity means America does not have the ability to maintain a dominant position in the world.” Any first-year logic student can correct Romney on that.

Romney has little choice but to caricature Obama. The president’s foreign-policy record so far is one of increased relations with Pakistan that have finally yielded Pakistani arrests of Afghan Taliban leaders; a commitment to resourcing and waging the Afghanistan war capably; the effective international isolation of Iran over its nuclear program (thanks in part to improved relations with Romney’s Chinese and Russian bogeymen); and a so-far cautious drawdown of military forces in Iraq. If Romney has a problem with any of this, he does not say — but because he cannot credibly gain purchase with a suspicious Republican Party that repudiated him in the 2008 primaries without bashing Obama, he must attack the version of Obama that exists in his mind. It’s telling that Romney’s actual proposals to expand counterinsurgency efforts in the military, strengthen cybersecurity initiatives and build a more effective missile-defense system are all initiatives that the current administration has pursued. For all of Romney’s imagination, paranoia, ignorance and invective, he has managed to build a foreign-policy doctrine in “No Apology” that, at its most substantive, can be charitably called Obama Lite. If he ultimately runs for president, he may find himself before GOP audiences apologizing for it.

Earlier, happier times in the White House (photo: Pete Souza, White House via Flickr)

Building off Marcy’s post on the Washington Post’s veneration of Rahm Emanuel, it now appears that Eric Holder had David Axelrod as an ally for what the Post calls an argument “rooted in principle” for trying KSM in criminal court. Rahm Emanuel had… Lindsey Graham. Obama went with Holder, Axelrod and principle. For the moment.

Recall: Graham is telling whatever reporter he can find that Emanuel understands that the price of closing Guantanamo Bay is his vote, and the price of his vote is to try KSM through a military commission and maybe the creation of a totally new national-security court. Well, almost any reporter: I’ve been trying to get Graham’s office to explain to me precisely why it’s unacceptable to try KSM in civilian court. Is he afraid KSM will walk? Civilian courts have successfully prosecuted 300-odd people in terrorism cases. Is he afraid classified evidence will be released? Judges have a lot of leeway to prevent that. Does he think KSM shouldn’t have a lawyer? He’d have one in a military commission. I don’t know the answer, because Graham’s office isn’t accepting my interview request, and he’s not explaining — just asserting that KSM can’t be tried in civilian court, because.

I sympathize with the effort to bring Graham along. Really! It’s a worthy goal to try to enlist bipartisan support for a stable architecture for handling terrorism detainees, so that the next GOP administration doesn’t start from scratch and we do this every time power changes hands — a circumstance that will leave the rest of the world wondering about American justice. But notice what Graham doesn’t do. After Obama says in May that he’s going to leave the military-commissions option open — and even works to pass the Military Commissions Act of 2009, while civil libertarians ground their teeth in their sleep — and even embraces the un-American option of indefinite detention without charge, Graham doesn’t say, “Hey, look at how far the administration has gone to accommodate conservative criticisms. This is something we should get on board with, and so maybe let’s let them get on with closing Guantanamo.” Instead, he makes extra demands, all to get Obama to bless a conservative version of quasi-law. There’s bipartisanship and then there’s capitulation. For evidence of which is at work here, notice the explosion of hysterical GOP criticism of Obama post-Abdulmutallab, when civilian measures for interrogation work but still Obama is endangering America and Mitch McConnell ret-cons the Moussaoui trial into a “disaster.”

Now the attacks have gotten so out-of-hand that the administration has little choice but to fight back. So you see John Brennan saying that military commissions are an inferior tool compared to civilian courts. Joe Biden says the same thing on the chat shows. Eric Holder even launches a whole DOJ webpage about the legal system as a counterterrorism instrument. For that matter, on the substance, David Kris and Jeh Johnson can’t even propose a rigorous standard for when to use the courts and when to use the commissions — but say that if they don’t make the commissions more like civilian trials, the courts are going to upend the whole apple cart.

What they can’t say — because of the original decision to embrace the commissions — is that the commissions are totally inappropriate. There’s a non-zero chance that ultimately GOP obstructionism, combined with Democratic spinelessness ahead of an election, could compel Obama to back down on a civilian KSM trial, especially with Emanuel saying that the key to the whole thing is Lindsey Graham. How could they attack the legitimacy of what could ultimately be the venue for a huge terrorism trial? So the message is diluted and the GOP inexplicably gets an advantage here. Several unforced errors for the price of a single South Carolina senator! And does anyone really believe that if Lindsey Graham says to get on board with a huge Obama priority, the Senate GOP will line up, no matter how compromise-y Obama gets?

Tags: David Axelrod, Eric Holder, KSM, Lindsey Graham, military commissions, Rahm Emanuel, Torture

Via Ben Smith, Keep America Safe, the Cheneyite national-security revival tour, has a new video out insinuating that Justice Department attorneys who represented Guantanamo detainees are sympathetic to al-Qaeda, a brazen slander that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) put forward last week against such DOJ officials as Neal Katyal and Jennifer Daskal. Rushing to their defense is retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor of the Cheneys’ beloved military commissions, who told me the attacks are “outrageous.”

“Neal in particular was and is one of the sharpest and hardest-working attorneys I’ve known in the 27 years I’ve been practicing law,” said Davis, who supervised prosecutions at Guantanamo from 2005 to 2007. “It is absolutely outrageous for the Cheney-Grassley crowd to try to tar and feather Neal and Jennifer and insinuate they are al-Qaeda supporters. You don’t hear anyone refer to John Adams as a turncoat for representing the Brits in the Boston Massacre trial.” Davis, of course, opposed Katyal on the famous case of Guantanamo Bay detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan’s habeas corpus rights — a case that Katyal won in the Supreme Court, striking down the first iteration of the military commissions. “He was the epitome of professionalism, and I can’t say that about a lot of the folks involved” in the commissions, Davis continued.

“If you zealously represent a client, there’s nothing shameful about that,” said the retired Air Force colonel. “That’s the American way.”

The Washington Post runs a breathless piece of Kremlinology arguing that Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, “is a force of political reason within the White House and could have helped the administration avoid its current bind if the president had heeded his advice.” Among the key components of that case is Emanuel’s opposition to trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow 9/11 conspirators in civilian court, an opposition rooted in the political calculation that the Obama administration’s commitment to closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay depends on the support of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who’s making that support contingent on trying KSM through a military commission.

Emanuel lost the initial fight with the president on that score. And apparently for good reason. The Post reports that he was the only one making the case for the commissions:

According to a person familiar with the conversations, who discussed the confidential deliberation on the condition of anonymity, Emanuel made his case to Obama, articulating the political dangers of a civilian trial to congressional Democrats. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. presented a counterargument rooted in principle, for civilian trials.

David Axelrod, senior adviser to Obama, supported Holder, the source said. The president agreed that letting the Justice Department take the lead was the right thing to do.

So the attorney general and one of the political strategists key to electing Obama made a principled case and Emanuel offered… Lindsey Graham, who doesn’t control any congressional committees and who has a dubious record of bringing Republican Senate votes along with him. This is “political reason” how, exactly?

San Francisco United for Iran Global Day of Action July 25, 2009 (photo: Steve Rhodes via Flickr)

Emotionally speaking, I cheer the Green Movement and will pop a bottle the day the Islamic Republic of Iran gets dragged through the streets of Teheran and then hung from the lampposts. But this is not a good argument from Shadi Hamid:

Almost definitional, a democratic Iran, by virtue of its democratic nature, would likely have a less destabilizing foreign policy, even allowing for the likelihood it would still pursue the bomb and perhaps support Hamas and Hezbollah.

After all, our problem with Iran is not just that it’s pursuing a nuclear program but that it’s pursuing a nuclear program combined with the fact that it’s a theocracy and/or military dictatorship. We can say there is an interesting interaction effect between these two variables. The authoritarian nature is likely amplified by the active pursuit of nuclear weapons, while the potentially destructive effects of Iran having nuclear weapons is amplified by the authoritarian nature of its regime.

Sure. But what about institutional gridlock or early-democratic political failure? So much depends on the circumstances under which the Greens succeed (presuming of course it will). It’s fairly easy to imagine that the Greens will have their work cut out for them consolidating support from the military, particularly if the rise of the Greens threatens to displace the officer corps’ status in a future Iran. Conditions of foreign emergency are really good for that, as Khomeini demonstrated from the Iran-Iraq war. While I hope that the international community wouldn’t greet any ascendant-Green scenario with the stupidity of a Saddam Hussein, history is often a story of blunder and miscalculation, so who knows. And sometimes militaries in nuclear-armed countries with weak or untested democracies are assertive, adventurous in foreign affairs and unresponsive to civilian concerns. Like for instance.

I want the Greens to win. I want the Islamic Republic to lose. But I’m not going to fool myself into thinking that if and when that happy day arrives, a host of foreign-policy dilemmas automatically unlocks, or even gets set on a glide path to unlocking. Not everything good is good together, or all at once, so let’s stop treating democracy like a children’s fable or magical incantation.

Tags: Green Movement, Islamic Republic of Iran, Shadi Hamid

This is the English-language website of Ahrar, a secularist Iraqi political party contesting the March 7 parliamentary elections that used to be somewhat affiliated with ex-Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. Does it remind you of a certain American political campaign? One that promised “Hope For The Future”?

Elsewhere on the site, Ahrar assures voters that its leader, Ayad Jamal Al-Din, “has always stood for unity — and for One Iraq.”

I guess anyone could build a campaign website with the Obama template, but you know… hmm… Are David Plouffe or Blue State Digital doing any work for Iraqis? Just asking…

The New York Times has a thorough overview of the Obama administration’s forthcoming nuclear-weapons policy. Anonymous administration officials tell the paper to expect “thousands” of weapons to be eliminated from the U.S. nuclear stockpile, commensurate with President Obama’s Prague speech outlining a nuclear-free world, and modernization of the remaining stockpile, sort of as a gambit to preempt calls for developing a new generation of nuclear weapons. As called for in the Quadrennial Defense Review issued last month by the Pentagon, the U.S. will develop missiles that carry a massive but non-nuclear explosive payload that give the president options for a huge, devastating strike that doesn’t cross the nuclear threshold.

But there’s still a debate about what the policy, known as the Nuclear Posture Review, ought to say about military doctrine for the purpose and use of nuclear weapons. When the U.S. faced a nuclear-armed global adversary in the Soviet Union, there was general consensus that ambiguity about whether the U.S. would initiate a nuclear war benefited the greater cause of never fighting one, as the ambiguity created a more robust nuclear deterrent. Now, officials are wondering whether it makes sense to retain that ambiguity or changed global circumstances — and the need to hold the U.S. to the same non-nuclear standard it expects of the rest of the world — merit greater candor. Here’s how to tell what Obama will decide:

Some leading Democrats, led by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have asked Mr. Obama to declare that the “sole purpose” of the country’s nuclear arsenal is to deter nuclear attack. “We’re under considerable pressure on this one within our own party,” one of Mr. Obama’s national security advisers said recently.

But inside the Pentagon and among many officials in the White House, Mr. Obama has been urged to retain more ambiguous wording — declaring that deterring nuclear attack is the primary purpose of the American arsenal, not the only one. That would leave open the option of using nuclear weapons against foes that might threaten the United States with biological or chemical weapons or transfer nuclear material to terrorists.

Obama meets with Defense Secretary Robert Gates later today to discuss this and other issues.

I wondered in January if Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a/k/a Abu Dujaanah al-Khorasani, the al-Qaeda double agent who killed seven CIA & Blackwater operatives at FOB Chapman in Khost Province, was tortured by the Jordanians during his crucial moment in their custody in early 2009. According to a new as-Sahab “martyrdom” video of Khorasani — basically his last propaganda testament before the December attack — probably not.

Evan Kohlmann translated the video and emailed his findings to reporters. (Thanks, Evan.) Here’s how the doctor, extremist-web-forum enthusiast and soon-to-be-murderer describes his experience in a Jordanian prison:

In truth, it all began with the Jordanian security organs entering my house at 11:30. They came and knocked at the door of my house. My wife came to me terrified, and told me, “There are police outside.” I knew that the moment of arrest had arrived. They came in, searched the house, confiscated my computer, and arrested me. The arrest warrant had written on it “Possession of prohibited materials,” which is a lie. They always lie and use this or any other allegation to arrest a Muslim. So they arrested me and sent me to Wadi as Sir, to the intelligence bureau there. I swear by Allah, the only thing that I was worried about was that I was in contact with the brothers through the forums, and I was afraid that Muslim brothers – my beloved Mujahideen – would be attacked from my flank. This is what I was concerned about, but – all praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds – this didn’t happen, because Allah blinded their sights. They could have gotten their hands on some extremely valuable information about Jihadi work, but Allah decreed something else. After they arrested and interrogated me, especially during the second night, I sat and prayed to Allah. No human power can prevent a slave from calling on his Lord. So I sat and prayed to Allah to deliver me and protect the Mujahideen from any danger which might emanate from me, and I prayed that I not cause harm to any Muslim. I prayed to Allah thus: “O Lord, I would rather die in my cell than be a cause of harm to any Muslim.” So all praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds: the intelligence officer – whose name was Abu Zaid [Ali bin Zaid], and who works with Abu Faisal in the Counter-Terrorism Division – was an idiot, and Allah made His plotting manifest itself by way of this idiot, who asked me to work with the security organs in spying on the Mujahideen in Waziristan and Afghanistan. So this step began with this proposal. They proposed that I go to Waziristan and Afghanistan to spy on Muslims. But the amazing thing which I could hardly believe is that I had been trying to mobilize to Jihad in Allah’s path but had been unsuccessful, then this idiotic man comes along and proposes that I go to the fields of Jihad. All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds: it was a dream come true!

At a separate point in the interview, Balawi/Khorosani describes himself as “a broken prisoner in the prison of Jordanian intelligence,” but that’s it, along with the oblique reference to his “second night” of interrogation. Frankly, it’s a bit surprising that he didn’t even claim to be tortured. The point of the video is to deride and humiliate the capabilities of Jordanian intelligence, which Balawi/Khorosani successfully manipulated into believing he was going to penetrate al-Qaeda in Waziristan. He gives very detailed information — I have no idea whether it’s true — about the layout of the offices of the Jordanian intelligence apparatus, and calls it a “hired dog” of the CIA. This is how he describes his handler, Abu Zaid:

Abu Zaid used to say to me in his letters, all of which I still have with me, “You’ve lifted our heads! You’ve lifted our heads in front of the Americans.” Allah is the Greatest! I swear by Allah the Magnificent, everyone who works in Jordanian intelligence, even their cooks and drivers…everyone who works in Jordanian intelligence, even if he works in the garden or carwash, is an apostate from Allah’s religion [I’m not going to quote this next part, which is mere incitement]. These are the hired dogs.

And still he doesn’t call them torturers.

One last thing. Balawi traces the road that led him to become “Khorosani.” For instance: “My trip with Jihad began a few years ago, after the American invasion of Iraq. I made many attempts to join the Jihad in Iraq, but Allah decreed something else for me.” So he becomes basically a top commenter on the extremist forums. Then, during the Gaza invasion he sees an al-Jazeera report not just about the deaths of civilians in Gaza but featuring “the daughters of Zion… watching Gaza as it was being bombed by F-16 fighter jets. They were using binoculars and watching the Muslims get killed, and it was as if they were just observing some natural phenomenon.” Then he writes an impassioned blog post and the Jordanians pick him up fairly soon after.

The matrix of sick motivations that leads a professional man — not the wretched of the earth, but a doctor — to become a murderer is a complex one. But neither the Iraq war nor the Gaza war was a necessary war for either America or Israel. If neither had taken place, seven CIA and Blackwater operatives would still be alive, and al-Qaeda could not claim this propaganda success.

barefoot on broken glass (image courtesy US Army)

This is Tareq al-Fadhli, a Yemeni who’s lived a picaresque life, one that included a stint fighting the Soviets beside Usama bin Laden. He’s against the Yemeni government and wants to ingratiate himself to the Americans, but I don’t care about that right now. I care about broadcasting this far and wide.

“When I fought with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, there were no bombings of civilians, and I would never have supported them,” he said.

I have talked to counterterrorism and intelligence professionals, people who spend all their time trying to anticipate al-Qaeda’s next moves — in six months and over 20 years — and their takeaway is clear: what al-Qaeda-the-movement cannot survive is the justified perception among Muslims that they’re murderers. They’re not warriors. They’re criminals. They’re murderers. That’s why in videos like this one, Ayman Zawahiri feels the need to contextualize al-Qaeda seeking civilian targets (and pretend as if the overwhelming majority of al-Qaeda victims aren’t Muslims). If even extremist Muslims consider al-Qaeda to be murderers, the movement dies. Permanently.

There are different conceptions of public diplomacy out there. Many of them concern how the U.S. talks to skeptical publics. I tend to feel that public diplomacy divorced from substantive policy decisions is transparent, condescending, credibility-destroying bullshit. Instead, public diplomacy should be viewed as an offensive capability — to attack an adversary’s credibility, aimed at his weak point, to destroy him, and rapidly. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine praising the man who co-wrote Dow 36,000, but by God, Jim Glassman, Bush’s last undersecretary of State for public diplomacy got that. (I’m sure I’ll go back to my comfortable ideological views about Jim now that he’s in charge of promoting the Bush legacy, but credit where due and all.)

Get al-Fadhli in a video, saying this shit in Arabic, and find a way to get it to al-Jazeera. It goes viral and we watch the cognitive dissonance batter al-Qaeda while they’re weakened.

In the latest bit of brazen slander from the right, Republican Senators are trying to invent a scandal about Justice Department lawyers who — horror — represented Guantanamo detainees. You know, provided the representation that the Rehnquist and Roberts Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled those detainees are entitled? And which even the military commissions provide for? Instead, there’s this McCarthyite tactic of calling Justice Department lawyers the “Gitmo Nine,” a name that oh-so-cleverly suggests that those lawyers were themselves detained at Guantanamo. From the Washington Times:

Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa is rightly unhappy that the Justice Department won’t divulge the names of the nine Justice Department lawyers who directly represented suspected-terrorist detainees, or their cases. Grassley identified two himself, Neal Katyal (an aside: Katyal is a very impressive guy and very charming and level-headed) and Jennifer Daskal.

There’s absolutely nothing “hidden” about this; it’s a pure smear job. Daskal, a former Human Rights Watch attorney, is so committed to hiding her representation of Guantanamo detainees that it’s on her Wikipedia page. And Katyal, the deputy solicitor general whom even this Washington Times bottom-feeder has to concede is a talented attorney, very publicly represented Salim Ahmed Hamdan and took his case to the Supreme Court, which promptly struck down the first phase of the military commissions. There is not a shred of a legitimate issue here, just pure innuendo.

Grassley knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s taking one of the strengths of the American justice system — the fact that everyone is entitled to legal representation — and implying that it’s unseemly. It’s a testament to the weakness of his character that he will never forthrightly accuse these attorneys of what he’s implying — sympathy with accused terrorists — in a way that they could refute. What a pathetic excuse for a man. Those of us in the media have an obligation to call this smear campaign what it is.

Mark Hosenball:

[F]ive U.S. officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, tell Declassified that the HIG—which the Obama administration has billed as a less-controversial alternative to the Bush administration’s use of secret CIA prisons and “enhanced” interrogation techniques that human rights advocates had described as torture—is not being deployed to participate in the questioning of Mullah Baradar. Some of the officials say they find this puzzling, since Baradar, who before his capture served as the Afghan Taliban’s top military commander, is widely believed to possess information that might be very useful to U.S. and allied forces fighting his Taliban comrades in Afghanistan.

So the U.S. now has access to the deputy Taliban commander, captured in Pakistan, but it’s not sending its elite team of interrogators, the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group? Who’s more high-value a detainee?

There’s a benign explanation that Hosenball doesn’t consider — probably for good reason! — and that’s that Baradar isn’t so much of an intelligence resource as he is a diplomatic bargaining chip to compel the Afghan Taliban to talk terms with the Karzai government (in a manner favorable to Pakistani interests). Is that likely? No idea. (Other Afghan Taliban arrests have already been credited to information from Baradar, but that’s still theoretically commensurate with the Baradar-as-diplomatic-tool explanation.) Either way: I no longer have any clarity on what the HIG is for.

Marine Gen. James T. Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps, became the first military service chief — or any flag officer, for that matter, so far — to oppose repeal of ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing yesterday.

“My personal opinion is that unless we can strip away the emotion, agenda and politics and ask [whether] we somehow enhance the war-fighting of the United States Marine Corps by allowing homosexuals to openly serve, then we haven’t addressed it from the correct perspective,” Conway said.

Conway is implicitly assuming that the interests of the Corps and the interests of gays and lesbians are two different things. But there are, in fact, gay Marines. In early 2007, Gen. Conway famously sent a memo, known as the ‘Every Marine Into The Fight’ memo, to the Corps, instructing them that it was his expectation for every Marine seek a combat deployment. His testimony sends the message that some Marines are more valued than others — not for their combat prowess but for their identity. I’m having trouble finding a full transcript of the hearing, but none of the reports about it indicate that Conway made an argument for why repealing ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ would reduce combat readiness, something that has not happened in any military where open gay service is permitted, as Adm. Giampaolo Di Paola, chairman of the NATO Military Committee, indicated to CNN earlier this week.

It took, oh, a couple hours for conservative outrage — that CIA officials would face criminal charges for the criminal act of torture — to successfully derail Rep. Silvestre Reyes’ (D-Texas) Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Interrogations Prohibition Act. The measure is now stripped out of the 2010 intelligence authorization bill, Politico reports, on order of the Rules Committee, which, of course, is controlled by Democrats. For good measure, the White House opposed Reyes’ proposal, according to Marc Ambinder.

Remember, this is the House, not the Senate, where the minority party has practically no institutional power to derail legislation. Democrats have absolutely no one to blame but themselves for once again folding after the ante.

Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), the chairman of the House intelligence committee, introduced an amendment to the 2010 intelligence authorization bill imposing a 15-year criminal sentence on any “officer or employee of the intelligence community” who tortures a detainee. (Twenty years if the torture involves an “act of medical malfeasance”; life if the detainee dies.)

Specifically, the proposed Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Interrogations Prohibition Act proscribes “forcing the individual to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner” — a la Abu Ghraib — “beatings, electrical shock, burns, or inflicting physical pain; waterboarding; using military working dogs; inducing hypothermia” — it happened at Guantanamo to Mohammed al-Qatani — sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation, denial of medical care, “using force or the threat of force”; “mock executions;” religious desecration in an intelligence context; “sensory deprivation”; “prolonged isolation”; “placing hoods or sacks over the heads of the individual;” “exploiting the phobias of the individual” and more. Basically, it clarifies that the entire parade of outside-the-Army-Field-Manual-on-Interrogation horrors during the Bush administration are criminal acts. We’ll see if this ever actually makes it to President Obama’s desk.

The CIA declined to comment on pending legislation.

I didn’t see this at yesterday’s big Blackwater hearing in the Senate Armed Services Committee, but another reporter friend watched this happen. Code Pink, the womens’ anti-war activist group that’s a fixture in congressional hearings, put out this press release about an incident yesterday between one of its members and Johnnie Walker, a former Blackwater employee who was involved in the May 5 2009 shootings in Kabul:

CODEPINK activist Tighe Barry was attending the hearing and was shocked about the criminal behavior of Blackwater contractors that included stealing weapons, reckless use of weapons, drinking on the job, violating rules of their contracts, defrauding the US government and disregarding local Afghan laws. “During the recess in the hearing, I spoke out about the shameful actions of Blackwater personnel that led to the death of Afghan civilians and their own fellow employees. Johnnie Walker, as he was leaving the hearing room, turned to me—within earshot of the U.S. Capitol Policeman Angel Morales–and said, “I’m gonna kill YOU.”

Barry shouted out to the police and Blackwater management, “Do you see the kind of people you hire–such loose cannons that they’d threaten me in a Senate hearing room?” Barry filed a complaint with the Capitol Police.

As I say, I didn’t witness this, but a trusted colleague claims to have seen it.

Update: I’ve corrected the headline, as I’ve been told Tighe Berry is a man. My sincere apologies for my assumption.

Marcy Wheeler conducts an invaluable close reading of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility report, released on Friday, and finds that the SERE psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen whom CIA contracted in 2001 to advise them on how to interrogate al-Qaeda detainees recommended a horrific technique:

The twelfth [interrogation] technique–which Mitchell and Jessen wanted approved but which Yoo excluded because of the rush to approve waterboarding–is mock burial.

There must have been significant discussion about the decision to exclude mock burial from the Bybee Two memo, because the reference to its exclusion in the report itself (PDF page 60 in the Final Report) includes a page and a half of redactions following the discussion of leaving it out.

We learned last year that the mysterious eleventh technique was prolonged diapering, thanks to the disclosure of the 2004 CIA inspector-general’s report into interrogation and detention. Wheeler’s discovery completes the list of what these two torture enthusiasts advocated.

Still no confirmation of The Christian Science Monitor’s major story about the Pakistanis arresting half of the Taliban’s senior leadership. But The New York Times has a great piece this morning about the restored closeness of the CIA and its Pakistani counterpart, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency. That close-but-uneasy relationship has resulted in a wave of deaths and captures of al-Qaeda, Taliban and aligned extremists in the past year-plus. But it hasn’t resulted in greater U.S. understanding of what’s motivating Pakistan’s newly torrid pace of assaults against the Afghan Taliban leadership it has nurtured for 15 years.

The working theory is a cautious one that takes into account the persistent divergence between Pakistani and U.S. interests. But it’s still beneficial for U.S. interests:

A top American military officer in Afghanistan on Wednesday suggested that with the arrests, the ISI could be trying to accelerate the timetable for a negotiated settlement between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

“I don’t know if they’re pushing anyone to the table, but they are certainly preparing the meal,” the officer said.

The idea is to compel the Afghan Taliban into peace talks that will leave it alive, reduced but intact, and able to represent Pakistani interests in a Karzai government. That carries with it the implication that the Taliban will survive the next 18 months’ worth of NATO/Afghan military efforts. Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Amb. Karl Eikenberry and Gen. David Petraeus repeatedly stated they were launching the current and planned offensives in southern Afghanistan in order to break the Taliban’s momentum and compel a peace settlement favorable to the new Afghan government. So, the strategic differences here may be ones of degree. On the other hand, if the military offensive in Afghanistan, if allowed to continue, can degrade the Taliban to a spent force, that — alongside renewed diplomatic ties between Washington, Kabul and Islamabad — might raise questions among the Pakistanis about whether the Taliban is even a viable mechanism for Pakistani interests in Afghanistan.

If the explanation held by this officer is correct, though, then we might be looking at the beginning of an endgame in the Afghanistan war.

As reported on Monday, the Pentagon didn’t embrace Stuart Bowen’s proposal to create a new agency — the U.S. Office of Contingency Operations — to help plan and coordinate civilian-military operations in conflict and post-conflict zones and failed states. But that’s not to say that Robert Gates, the secretary of defense, thinks that defense, diplomacy and development are currently well balanced or that U.S. foreign policy doesn’t lean too heavily on the military. He made that clear enough in a speech tonight to the Nixon Center.

Gates started out by outlining a new — or, viewed historically, restored — long-term core mission for the U.S. security apparatus: improving the capabilities of foreign partner militaries and security services. The general idea is that the more and the earlier the U.S. strengthens the ability of its partners to keep the peace, the lower the need for the U.S. military to be deployed to failing states in the future.

That’s something of a consensus position among Washington foreign policy circles — especially after the training missions in Afghanistan and Iraq — but Gates criticized the Pentagon and the military services for not organizing themselves sufficiently for the scope of the task. “We are unlikely to repeat a mission on the scale of Iraq or Afghanistan anytime soon – that is, forced regime change followed by nation-building under fire,” Gates said. “But, as the department’s Quadrennial Defense Review recently concluded, we are still likely to face scenarios calling on a similar tool-kit of capabilities, albeit on a smaller scale.”

Beyond that mission, Gates outlined a long-term vision for how the Pentagon and the State Department can collaboratively rebalance U.S. capabilities for foreign missions. It revolves around sharing money between the two agencies, which is a very big deal: the Defense Department budget, over half a trillion dollars annually, is literally an order of magnitude greater than the State Department’s. This deserves to be quoted at length:

Last year, I sent Secretary Clinton one proposal I see as a starting point of discussion for the way ahead. It would involve pooled funds set up for security capacity building, stabilization, and conflict prevention. Both the State and Defense Departments would contribute to these funds, and no project could move forward without the approval of both agencies. What I found compelling about this approach is that it would actually incentivize collaboration between different agencies of our government, unlike the existing structure and processes left over from the Cold War, which often conspire to hinder true whole-of-government approaches.

Regardless of what approach we take to reform and modernize America’s partner capacity apparatus – whether it is something like the proposal I just mentioned or some other arrangement – it should be informed by the following principles.

First, it must provide agility and flexibility. Under normal budgeting and programming cycles, a budget is put together in one year, considered and passed by the congress in the second, and then executed in the third. For predictable, ongoing requirements this is appropriate and manageable. But, as recent history suggests, it is not well suited to the emerging and unforeseen threats – or opportunities – coming most often from failed and fragile states.

Second, there must be effective oversight mechanisms that allow for the Congress to conduct its constitutional responsibilities to ensure that, with more discretion and flexibility given to the executive branch, these funds are spent properly. Tools that foster cooperation across the executive branch could also enhance cooperation across jurisdictional boundaries among Congressional committees – thereby actually strengthening Congressional oversight in the national security arena.

Third, our security assistance efforts writ large must be steady and long-term, in part to provide some measure of predictability and planning for our government, but more significantly, for our relationships abroad. Convincing other countries and leaders to be a partner of the United States, often at political and physical risk, ultimately depends on proving that our own government is capable of being a reliable partner over time. To be blunt, that means we cannot cut off assistance and relationships every time a country does something we dislike or disagree with.

Fourth, whatever we do should reinforce the State Department’s lead role in crafting and conducting U.S. foreign policy, to include foreign assistance, of which building security capacity is a key part. Proper coordination and concurrence procedures will ensure that urgent military capacity building requirements do not undermine America’s overarching foreign policy priorities.

Finally, everything we do must be suffused with strong doses of modesty and realism. When all is said and done, there are limits to what even the United States can do to influence the direction of countries and cultures radically different than our own. And even the most enlightened and modernized interagency apparatus is still a bureaucracy, prone to the same parochial and self-serving tendencies as the system it replaced.

There’s a lot of detail that needs to be established here. But it’s the first offering from an Obama administration official to outline an institutional approach to a unified foreign policy looking beyond the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I don’t have a clue whether this is true or not, but Anand Gopal of the Christian Science Monitor is saying that Pakistani security forces have arrested fully half of the Afghan Taliban’s leadership — the Quetta Shura — in Pakistan. If true, that should decisively settle the debate over Pakistan throwing its lot in with the United States. Gopal suggests that Pakistan is gambling that some form of reconciliation deal with the Afghan government is likely and it wants to influence the terms.