Author: Spencer Ackerman

The Senate Armed Services Committee’s hearing on Blackwater/Paravant’s subcontract with Raytheon and the Army to train Afghan security forces has just ended, but not before Blackwater pushed all the blame onto Raytheon.

Fred Roitz, Blackwater’s top contract compliance officer, told the panel that Raytheon instructed Blackwater to hide its shell company Paravant’s affiliation with Blackwater. “Raytheon specifically knew who in fact they were contracting with,” Roitz told Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.). “They did not want to name Blackwater” to the Army. But Roitz said he didn’t know who at Raytheon issued that instruction.

So I called John Kasle, Raytheon’s senior corporate spokesman. As it turned out, he’d been monitoring the hearing. “We point back to Fred Roitz. He has promised to get back to the committee” with that information, Kasle said. “He’s made this claim; it’s up to him to substantiate it.

When pressed about whether Raytheon actually did instruct “Paravant” to hide its affiliation with Blackwater, Kasle didn’t deny it, simply saying instead, “We’re not going to make a comment.” I suggested to him that the committee would most likely follow up for a direct response to the allegation — Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) stated flatly, “Clearly, Raytheon failed overseeing this contract” — but Kasle held his ground. “We’ll wait for the committee” to contact Raytheon before replying, he said. “Mr. Roitz said he didn’t know who asked him [to hide Paravant’s ties to Blackwater]; I would suggest that’s the thread to follow. He’s promised to come back to the committee with more information.”

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) got Fred Roitz of Blackwater — sorry, “Xe Services,” the new name for the company — to say that Blackwater shell company “Paravant” came into existence shortly before “Paravant” got a subcontract from defense giant Raytheon to train Afghan security forces. But then Levin read from the contract submission: “Paravant has many years of experience identifying and selecting top candidates for training.” How could that possibly be true? Levin asked.

Roitz first tried to parry that the language referred to “recruiting and vetting functions service [within] all the companies” controlled by Blackwater. Levin wasn’t having it: “Your proposal says something that is not true.” Roitz backed down, saying the proposal “could have been better worded.” Levin rejoindered that Roitz’s answer could have been better worded. Finally, when Levin kept pressing him that Paravant’s claim of “years of experience” could not in any straightforward way be true, he conceded, “That is true.”

But not before he pointed his finger at Raytheon. “Raytheon specifically knew who in fact they were contracting with,” Roitz said. “They did not want to name Blackwater.” Levin pressed: Who at Raytheon told him that? “I don’t know.”

I have a call out to Raytheon officials on this; let’s see what they say.

The head of contract compliance for Blackwater, Fred Roitz, told Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) that he has never known that hundreds of weapons Blackwater employees took from a U.S. military depot in Afghanistan called 22 Bunkers (or Bunker 22) have been explicitly designated by Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command, as not being for contractor usage. A Blackwater official has also told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the company still has 53 weapons in Afghanistan from the military that it has never been authorized to possess.

Roitz said he doesn’t know how many of those guns come from 22 Bunkers. What’s more, he told Levin that he didn’t even know that any guns Blackwater uses in Afghanistan came from that Bunker until the “April, May time frame” in 2009, during an inventory check.

For the hat trick, Roitz told Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) that Raytheon requested Blackwater hide its affiliation with Paravant, Blackwater’s shell company to get a Raytheon subcontract training Afghan forces. If Raytheon denies that, Roitz may find himself subject to a perjury investigation.

Leave aside the fact that Blackwater/Paravant employees subcontracted to train Afghan security forces never received authorization from the U.S. military to carry guns in Afghanistan. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) wanted to clarify that Blackwater/Paravant at least informed the military when its armed guards moved around their battlespace.

“It was Blackwater/Paravant policy to notify the military when they made a move off the base,” Brian McCracken, the ex-Paravant vice president who signed off on the unapproved arming of Blackwater trainers in Afghanistan, said. “I don’t know how often it was adhered to or if it was ever adhered to.”

After a bit of a joust about the differences in notifying the U.S. military for armed contractor movements off of an Afghan base and an American one, John Walker, an ex-Paravant program manager in Afghanistan, told Levin, “No, we did not” inform the U.S. military in every case of armed contractor movement around the Afghan war zone.

In an interview with Senate staff, former “Paravant” vice president Brian McCracken said that the only reason a company called Paravant ever existed was because Blackwater wanted a piece of Raytheon’s contract with the Army to train Afghan security officials — without the “baggage” of the Blackwater name. (You know, like killing Iraqi civilians.) So Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) asked Steven Ograyensek, the contracting officer at an Army office responsible for overseeing the contract, whether he had any idea Paravant was part of Blackwater. There was “no indication” of that relationship in Paravant’s bid for the Raytheon subcontract, Ograyensek replied. Yet it took Senate staff a fairly short time to determine Paravant was a shell company for Blackwater.

Did Ograyensek even check Paravant’s references? “We didn’t call those references,” he said. “That was the responsibility of Raytheon.” Your contracting oversight at work.

“Paravant had never done anything,” Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) interjected. “But they represent in their [request for the contract] that they had 2000 personnel deployed overseas. They had no one. … It’s just a shell.”

Sen. George Lemieux (R-Fla.) wants to know which official at U.S. Central Command or anywhere else in the chain of command is “ultimately responsible for [ensuring] these contracts are being performed the way they’re supposed to.” Sensibly, he asked retired Col. Bradley Wakefield, a top former officer at Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, the command responsible for overseeing the training of Afghan security forces.

Wakefield’s reply? “Sir, I do not know that.”

Who’d he report to? “The commanding general of CSTC-A.” And if he wanted to follow up on a specific contractor’s performance? Not his responsibility.

Why did Blackwater/Paravant’s personnel carry weapons in Afghanistan for “personal use,” anyway? Brian McCracken, the former Paravant vice president, conceded to Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) that it never received authorization from either the Army or U.S. Central Command, as it needed before carrying guns in a war zone. He nevertheless said he discussed it with the Army and a “decision was made.”

But by whom? The Army civilian official overseeing the contract said that by the time he left his job in January 2009, no decision had been made. And when Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) — who represents Blackwater’s home state — asked the former commander of the Afghan training mission, retired Army Col. Bradley Wakefield, whether he approved the arming, Wakefield bluntly replied, “No.”

There’s no dispute that Blackwater wanted to be armed. There’s also no dispute that its employees were ultimately armed. But the emerging picture is that Blackwater made that decision unilaterally, without the necessary approval from U.S. Central Command and the Army.

The Senate Armed Services Committee right now is in a brief recess, but the likelihood of getting information out of two invited witnesses formerly employed by Blackwater is already looking pretty slim. One of them, Brian McCracken, a Raytheon employee who used to be an executive with the Blackwater arm known as Paravant, parried with Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) for nearly five minutes about whether, strictly speaking, he was right to describe a 2008 incident in which a Blackwater employee rode a moving car “like a stagecoach” and accidentally shot a comrade as an “authorized” training exercise. And a former Paravant program manager, John Walker, eschewed an opening statement by saying he had questions for the committee and then had difficulty speaking into the microphone.

We’ll see if this gets any more illuminating when the panel reconvenes. Like for instance: What became of those hundreds of weapons Blackwater took from U.S. military weapons depots — depriving the Afghan Army of them? Levin told reporters yesterday Blackwater “misrepresented the facts” when the committee asked if all the guns had been returned. So where are they?

The Senate Armed Services Committee’s Blackwater-in-Afghanistan hearing is just getting underway, but here’s an early highlight, courtesy of the committee’s chairman, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.). When Raytheon, the contractor that hired a Blackwater arm called Paravant as a subcontractor to train Afghan troops, objected to Blackwater guards’ drunken firing on Afghan motorists in May 2009, this was the response, received via email:

“If [Raytheon] believes that Paravant has an obligation to supervise all subcontractor personnel at all times… Paravant will need to submit a request for equitable adjustment for the additional personnel, security, and other costs of providing such ‘24-7′ supervision throughout Afghanistan.”

This is quite literally saying that it will cost Raytheon money to ensure Blackwater doesn’t shoot civilians. There’s a line from ‘Goodfellas’ that captures that attitude perfectly.

In advance of this morning’s big Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Blackwater in Afghanistan, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) wrote a diary for the Seminal on Firedoglake pushing a bill to restrict private security companies from performing inherently-governmental security functions:

As of mid-2009, the United States employed over 22,000 hired guns in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that number keeps going up. Our reliance on private, for-profit companies for the business of waging war is extremely dangerous. It’s time we move to eliminate the use of these unaccountable and controversial mercenaries, and I ask you to join me as a citizen co-sponsor of legislation that I have just re-introduced, the Stop Outsourcing Our Security Act.

The Stop Outsourcing Security Act, which will be introduced in the Senate by Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, recognizes that the U.S. needs to end its reliance on private security contractors, and it would prohibit the use of private contractors for military, security, law enforcement, intelligence, and armed rescue functions. It would also increase transparency over any remaining contracts by increasing reporting requirements and Congressional oversight.

In the interest of providing the other side of the issue, John Nagl and Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New American Security recently wrote that the first-order priority for any reorganization of the U.S. reliance on security contractors has to be for a determination of which security, intelligence and law-enforcement functions are inherently governmental ones. Also, full disclosure: FDL hosts my personal blog.

Eric Cartman of South Park (Photo courtesy: Comedy Central)

Employees of the CIA-connected private security corporation Blackwater diverted hundreds of weapons, including more than 500 AK-47 assault rifles, from a U.S. weapons bunker in Afghanistan intended to equip Afghan policemen, according to an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee. On at least one occasion, an individual claiming to work for the company evidently signed for a weapons shipment using the name of a “South Park” cartoon character. And Blackwater has yet to return hundreds of the guns to the military.

A Blackwater subsidiary known as Paravant that until recently operated in Afghanistan acquired the weapons for its employees’ “personal use,” according to committee staffers, as did other non-Paravant employees of Blackwater. Yet contractors in Afghanistan are not permitted to operate weapons without explicit permission from U.S. Central Command, something Blackwater never obtained. A November 2008 email from a Paravant vice president named Brian McCracken, obtained by the committee, nevertheless reads: “We have not received formal permission from the Army to carry weapons yet but I will take my chances.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

As a result of Blackwater’s disregard for U.S. military restrictions on contractor firearms, four employees of Paravant — which held a subcontract from defense giant Raytheon to train Afghan soldiers — under the influence of alcohol opened fire on a car carrying four Afghan civilians on May 5, 2009, wounding two. That incident, occurring less than two years after Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, prompted the committee’s investigation.

“In the fight against the Taliban, the perception that the Afghans have of us is critical,” Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the committee, told reporters Tuesday afternoon. “It’s clear to me that if we’re going to win that struggle, we need to know that contractor personnel are adequately screened, they’re adequately supervised and they’re adequately held accountable.” Levin will hold a hearing on Blackwater’s Afghanistan contracts Wednesday morning.

The committee’s investigation points to the contrary. Blackwater personnel appear to have gone to exceptional lengths to obtain weapons from U.S. military weapons storehouses intended for use by the Afghan police. According to the committee, at the behest of the company’s Afghanistan country manager, Ricky Chambers, Blackwater on at least two occasions acquired hundreds of rifles and pistols from a U.S. military facility near Kabul called 22 Bunkers by the military and Pol-e Charki by the Afghans. Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of all U.S. military forces in the Middle East and South Asia, wrote to the committee to explain that “there is no current or past written policy, order, directive, or instruction that allows U.S. Military contractors or subcontractors in Afghanistan to use weapons stored at 22 Bunkers.”

On one of those occasions, in September 2008, Chief Warrant Officer Greg Sailer, who worked at 22 Bunkers and is a friend of a Blackwater officer working in Afghanistan, signed over more than 200 AK-47s to an individual identified as “Eric Cartman” or possibly “Carjman” from Blackwater’s Counter Narcotics Training Unit. A Blackwater lawyer told committee staff that no one by those names has ever been employed by the company. Eric Cartman is the name of an obnoxious character from Comedy Central’s popular “South Park” cartoon.

Blackwater personnel invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination when approached by the committee to explain the weapons acquisitions from 22 Bunkers, according to committee staff. Sailer, who is still deployed to Afghanistan, told the committee that he thought Blackwater was signing for the weapons to train Afghan police, a task it has never conducted.

Not all of the guns received from Blackwater have been returned to the Afghan government — and, according to committee staff, many only began to be returned after staff approached the company for an explanation. “It was represented to us that all the weapons had been returned” to 22 Bunkers, Levin said. “That is not true. Hundreds of them were not returned.” Asked if that meant Blackwater lied to Congress, Levin replied, “They misrepresented the facts, and I’d like to leave it at that.”

Raytheon did not renew Paravant’s contract for training the Afghan army, which expired in September. Blackwater still holds a contract with the State Department worth millions of dollars to protect diplomats in Afghanistan. While that contract expires this year, Politico reported on Tuesday that Blackwater, now renamed Xe Services, might acquire a new multimillion-dollar contract from the Defense Department to train Afghan police — the same police force that Blackwater’s weapons diversions from 22 Bunkers deprived of hundreds of pistols and rifles.

This is not the first time Blackwater has faced allegations of diverted weapons. In 2007, company employees came under federal investigation for improperly shipping hundreds of weapons to Iraq, some of which are believed to have been sold on the black market and acquired by a Kurdish terrorist group. A Blackwater statement at the time said allegations that the company was “in any way associated or complicit in unlawful arms activities are baseless.” The New York Times reported in November that the company is negotiating with regulators over “hundreds of millions of dollars in fines” associated with the illicit weapons shipments.

In January, Blackwater’s founder, Erik Prince, confirmed to Vanity Fair that his 12-year-old company — which has earned more than a billion dollars through government contracts in the past decade — was involved in a nascent terrorist assassination program run by the CIA, among other CIA activities. “I’m paying for all sorts of intelligence activities to support American national security, out of my own pocket,” Prince told the magazine. Additionally, The Nation recently reported that Blackwater assists the Joint Special Operations Command with the terrorist manhunt in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including with the operations of JSOC’s armed unmanned drones.

Levin said his inquiry had uncovered “inadequate oversight by the Army over this contract.” The Florida-based Army office supposedly overseeing the contract did not even have a contracting officer representative in Afghanistan when the Paravant employees shot at Afghan civilians on May 5, 2009. Yet as early as December 2008, concerned Raytheon personnel informed that Army office that Paravant personnel were carrying unapproved weapons. An officer in Afghanistan responsible for training Afghan soldiers told the committee, “We should have had better control.”

Additionally, Blackwater personnel in Afghanistan, including those involved in both the May shooting and an earlier improper weapons discharge from December 2008, have been cited for, among other infractions, drug and alcohol abuse and, in one case, an “extensive criminal history.”

Wednesday’s hearing is expected to receive testimony from current and former Blackwater/Paravant officers, including Brian C. McCracken, the former Paravant vice president who now serves as Raytheon’s chief Afghanistan program officer; Fred Roitz, a Blackwater vice president; and John Walker, a former Paravant program officer.

The following quote was emailed to me by Matthew Alexander, the pseudonym of a military interrogator and vocal torture opponent who helped track down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq killed in 2006. A veteran of three wars and the Special Forces community, Alexander claims to have conducted more than 300 interrogations and monitored 1,000. Here’s how he observes the debate over the efficacy of law enforcement techniques used against terrorists:

The interrogation methods in the Army Field Manual 2-22.3 are valid approaches and sometimes applicable for interrogating members of al-Qaida, but even more effective are the techniques that I learned as a criminal investigator. I used these techniques, permitted by the Army Manual under the terms “…psychological ploys, verbal trickery, or other nonviolent or non-coercive subterfuge…” to great success and I taught these techniques to other members of my interrogation team. Just one example of a commonly used criminal investigative technique that has been adopted into the Army Field Manual is the Good Cop/Bad Cop approach, but there are numerous others that are absent from both the manual and the Army’s interrogator training. The U.S. law enforcement community has much to add to the improvement of our interrogation methods and the United States Army would do well to consult with experienced criminal investigators from our police departments and federal law enforcement agencies.

But I’m sure Marc Thiessen, a former White House speechwriter, knows more than a man who took down Zarqawi.

As a postscript to yesterday’s fact-check of Marc Thiessen, a former Bush White House speechwriter and torture proponent, notice how Thiessen, appearing on “Morning Joe,” wrapped himself in the mantle of CIA professionalism when challenged on the efficacy of torture. But according to a former colleague in the White House speechwriting office, Thiessen is hardly as doting on the CIA when it reaches conclusions he dislikes.

This is from page 201 of “Speech-Less: Tales of a White House Survivor,” a recent tell-all memoir by Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer, who recalled the following incident with his then-boss:

When Marc was writing remarks on the war in Iraq, he tried to browbeat a CIA analyst who was unwilling to state unequivocally that America was winning in the war on terror. “The president wants to say we’re winning!” Marc thundered. Just what we needed — another accusation that the Bush White House wanted to politicize intelligence.

In the index to Latimer’s book, a portion of the references to Thiessen is catalogued: “Gaffes by, 201-203.” This man is now a Washington Post columnist.

That’s what Laura Rozen is hearing:

Controversial defense contractor Blackwater, now known as Xe, is being told that it is likely to win a major contract to do police training mentoring and logistics in Afghanistan, a source tells POLITICO.

According to the well-informed source, U.S. authorities in Iraq including Gen. Stan McChrystal and US Ambasador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry had urged the Defense Department to issue the police training contract through DoD as opposed to through State/International Narcotics and Law Enforcement. DoD decided to use existing contract vehicles, where there are only five primes to use: Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrup, Arinc (owned by the Carlyle Group), and Blackwater.

I suspect this may be why the Senate Armed Services Committee scheduled a huge hearing for tomorrow on Blackwater, contracting and counterinsurgency.

Jefferson schmefferson–we have a #%$&@ deal! (official White House photo by Pete Souza)

Lindsey Graham is telling reporters about an emerging deal with Rahm Emanuel to close Guantanamo in exchange for stopping civilian trials for suspected terrorists:

The South Carolina senator said that in a series of meetings and phone calls over the last “several weeks,” he has pressed to establish a new national security court that would keep most Guantanamo detainees out of the federal courthouse. He expressed confidence that he could strike a deal to extend some measure of habeas corpus rights to prisoners detained on terrorism charges and to draft a “law of war” statute that ensures no one can be detained on the whim of the executive branch without oversight or judicial recourse.

A breakthrough on those issues could lead to agreement on trials for Guantanamo prisoners outside the federal court system, he said.

I dealt with this at length (too much length, maybe) on the merits in this Windy post just now, so why repeat myself. And as a political proposition, I still don’t get what Emanuel thinks he’s buying. Lindsey Graham will bring not a single GOP vote. For anything. How’s that climate bill coming? And the GOP is going to oppose absolutely everything the administration does, especially on national security, and just ignore the things the administration does that it likes, as with Afghanistan. Has the Afghanistan surge bought the White House any GOP goodwill? Within weeks of the announcement, the GOP freaked out over Abdulmutallab.

The amazing thing about this is that the administration is holding a very good national-security hand right now, and it’s barely playing it. You’ve got Eric Holder out there yesterday securing the life sentence of an aspirant terrorist, having busted up his plot before it occurred and getting information on al-Qaeda in the process, all within the civilian court system:

In this case, as it has in so many other cases, the criminal justice system has proved to be an invaluable weapon for disrupting plots and incapacitating terrorists, one that works in concert with the intelligence community and our military. We will continue to use it to protect the American people from terrorism.

As I have stated on other occasions, the criminal justice system also contains powerful incentives to induce pleas that yield long sentences and gain intelligence that can be used in the fight against Al Qaeda. We will use all available tools whenever possible against suspected terrorists.

And you trade that away for what, exactly?

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who’s probably dealt with the Pakistanis longer than any senior administration official, reacts to the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar at a press conference yesterday:

I don’t want to get into specific captures. But I would say that what we are seeing is the importance of operations, on both sides of the border, and a manifestation of real progress, on the Pakistani side, of dealing with the threats that I’ve talked about; whether they’re the Pakistan Taliban, the Afghan Taliban or al Qaeda, that they all work together, and the success of one is success of the rest.

So I think that the recent events have been another positive indication of the Pakistanis’ commitment to stabilizing this border area.

Typically understated.

This is one strange way for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to describe a “bipartisan” approach to closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay:

The South Carolina senator said that in a series of meetings and phone calls over the last “several weeks,” he has pressed to establish a new national security court that would keep most Guantanamo detainees out of the federal courthouse. He expressed confidence that he could strike a deal to extend some measure of habeas corpus rights to prisoners detained on terrorism charges and to draft a “law of war” statute that ensures no one can be detained on the whim of the executive branch without oversight or judicial recourse.

A breakthrough on those issues could lead to agreement on trials for Guantanamo prisoners outside the federal court system, he said.

So the price of closing Guantanamo is to create a “new national security court” from out of nowhere, according to the senior senator from South Carolina. The U.S. tried that once before when it created the military commissions. The courts have consistently found the commissions to be procedurally problematic, and even when the Obama administration embraced the commissions, senior officials testified that in essence they were going to make them more like civilian trials in order to withstand future scrutiny from the bench. Besides, the administration has declined to embrace the creation of new national security courts, even though some senior officials, like deputy solicitor general Neal Katyal, have long championed them. What’s to stop the courts from challenging another newly-created structure?

And for that matter, what’s wrong with the federal courts, which have a far better record of successfully convicting terrorists than any other model? Just yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder, announcing the plea deal of Najibullah Zazi, affirmed, “the criminal justice system has proved to be an invaluable weapon for disrupting plots and incapacitating terrorists, one that works in concert with the intelligence community and our military. We will continue to use it to protect the American people from terrorism.”

Of course, it may be that the administration goes back on that principled stance because White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel really believes, as he recently told The New York Times, “You can’t close Guantánamo without Senator Graham, and [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] was a link in that deal.” That’s a political calculation, though, since Graham has no chairmanship or appropriations status or anything else. And if Emanuel thinks that Graham can really bring along his GOP colleagues to sing kumbaya with the Obama administration over national security courts, it’s worth asking why Graham’s support of a climate change bill hasn’t weakened GOP opposition to it. The Republicans are committed as a political strategy to opposing everything the Obama administration does, and on national security — despite the record — they think they can win. Does Emanuel, whose political skills were honed in the Clinton White House and the partisan Congress, really think the howling on the right will stop just because Lindsey Graham gets the administration to compromise its principles for a dubious detentions fix?

Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan-American believed to be an al-Qaeda asset in the U.S., pleaded guilty today to conspiring to attack the New York City subway system with a chemical explosive. “The combined efforts of the law enforcement and intelligence communities disrupted a major plot, and there is no doubt that they saved American lives,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a press conference this afternoon, adding that information from Zazi will lead the FBI and related law-enforcement agencies “both to bring others involved to justice and to obtain intelligence that we can use to disrupt further plots.” Hint, hint: Law enforcement can contribute to intelligence collection, not inhibit it.

Adds Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, in a prepared statement: “Today’s guilty plea by Najibullah Zazi clearly demonstrates that America’s criminal justice system is a powerful and effective tool for bringing terrorists to justice. I want to congratulate the intelligence community and law enforcement for identifying, apprehending and prosecuting Mr. Zazi, and preventing what could have been a tragic terrorist attack on our homeland.”

So now the Obama administration can say that it disrupted a terrorist attempt on the homeland before it manifested itself; secured a life imprisonment conviction for the guilty party; and extracted additional information from the linchpin in the process to pursue his accomplices. The only question remaining is when the Republicans will call the whole thing a travesty.

Recall that this is what Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate minority leader, said about Zacharias Moussaoui’s trial:

With regard to foreign terrorists though, we have a choice, you know, about the only thing I ever hear this administration complement the previous administration on were some of the mistakes they made, for example, we have tried some of these terrorists in U.S. courts, remember the Moussaoui trial in Alexandria was a disaster. Judge Mukasey who was the last attorney general in the Bush administration, I believe, was the district judge in the blind sheikh case. It was a disaster.

Such a “disaster” that Moussaoui will serve life in prison. (By the way, I’m guessing McConnell ad-libbed that line, because it’s not in his official speech text. I got that blockquote from the transcript of his remarks preserved by Nexis.) What could be more successful than a disrupted plot; additional intel collection; and life imprisonment? At some point a theological commitment to torture and military imprisonment has to at least concede that the other way of doing business is racking up successes.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the secretary-general of the NATO alliance, told an audience at Georgetown University today that “this year” the alliance’s military command in Afghanistan “will be able to start transferring security responsibilities to the Afghans themselves” — well ahead of President Obama’s “strategic inflection point” of handovers beginning in July 2011.

Asked about that rosy assessment by TWI, Rasmussen reiterated his confidence in his earlier timeline, but said he would not be able to tell which Afghan provinces and districts would be realistic candidates for security transfer until the “second half of 2010.” But “within a very few weeks,” Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Amb. Mark Sedwill — NATO’s new civilian representative in Afghanistan — and the Afghan government will complete a set of criteria to determine when an area is ready for transference. Those criteria include “military and security aspects as well as civilian aspects,” Rasmussen said, adding that he anticipated “a transparent process” leading to public disclosure of the handover criteria. “I would expect this process of transition to start already this year,” Rasmussen emphasized, “so I would expect the first provinces to be handed over this year.”

The secretary general sounded other optimistic notes in his remarks, though, calling the Marja operation in Helmand province so far a “great success,” pledging that “we also see the implementation now in practice of the new civilian strategy” wherein “as soon as a district is liberated and cleared we provide governance, provide development assistance, make sure people in the local communities will be provided a better livelihood.” The NATO command in Afghanistan just this morning conceded that getting development aid into Marja was “progressing slowly due to ongoing resistance by the insurgents.”

For good measure, he denied that the collapse of the Dutch government had as much to do with NATO’s request to extend the Dutch troop presence in Afghanistan as was widely reported. “I don’t think what has happened in the Netherlands will have any impact on the situation in other countries,” Rasmussen said, although the Netherlands is hardly the only country where prolonged military deployments to Afghanistan are politically controversial. “It is the result of a unique political situation in the Netherlands and if there is a lesson learned I think other governments will not want to come to the same situation.”

Watch the former Bush speechwriter and torture enthusiast on “Morning Joe” today. His first point is that President Obama is endangering the country because the Pakistanis aren’t getting intelligence from captured Taliban deputy commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. What he doesn’t mention is that intelligence from Baradar, reportedly, directly led to the capture of Mulvi Kabir, one of the ten most wanted Taliban leaders. This was reported yesterday and Thiessen just ignores it.

Then he avers that Obama’s rejection of torture has cost U.S. interrogators “any tools at our disposal” to “compel” information out of terrorist captures. Except that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be bomber of Northwest Flight 253, is cooperating with his interrogators after they used pressure from his family to compel that cooperation. Also, the elite interrogators of the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group will surely be surprised to hear they have no available tools for interrogating a resistant detainee. Then he says that torture stopped an attempted attack on the Los Angeles library tower, a misstatement that has been so thoroughly debunked it raises questions about Thiessen’s honesty.

Then Daniel Freedman — a former Rudy Giuliani aide, aide to ex-FBI counterterrorist agent Ali Soufan and torture opponent, more than ably points out that despite the torture of senior al-Qaeda captives like Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, several attacks in Europe and throughout the Middle East nevertheless occurred. To say nothing of al-Qaeda’s demonstrable reconstitution in the tribal areas of Pakistan. And Thiessen — a former speechwriter — wants to credibly contend that torture is the difference between security and insecurity. “The problem Marc has is that he takes things out of context and doesn’t read the full documents,” Freedman observes. Yet he’s your newest Washington Post columnist.

Watch the whole thing — especially when Marc Thiessen implies that he knows more about interrogation than Gen. David Petraeus. And shame on Joe Scarborough for portraying Soufan, a man who has actually broken up al-Qaeda cells, as a “guy who writes a lot” and not one of the most experienced counterterrorists in American history:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I’m sorry, just one more thing. Thiessen objects to the use of the non-torture techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual on Interrogation against the highest-value detainees because the manual is “on the Internet” and terrorists can train against it. That’s just a flat-out misunderstanding of the field manual in particular and the interrogations process itself. The field manual does not and never has required only the use of those techniques it lists, but it proscribes physical and psychological abuse. That’s why people like Abdulmutallab can, say, have their parents’ opprobrium be used against them, a technique not explicitly listed in the field manual but still legally and morally kosher — and proven to be effective.