Newshoggers.com

What good allies we have...

By Fester:

Good allies trust each other.  Good allies tell each other about major operations that are about to go off in shared battlespace.  Good allies don't devote significant national level surveillance assets that are in high demand and limited supply to watching their allies.  The LA Times has more on the relationship between Iraqi and US forces:

the United States is using spy satellites that ordinarily are trained on adversaries to monitor the movements of the American-backed Iraqi army, current and former U.S. officials say.

The stepped-up surveillance reflects breakdowns in trust and coordination between the two forces....
The use of the satellites puts the United States in the unusual position of employing some of its most sophisticated espionage technology to track an allied army that American forces helped create, continue to advise, and often fight alongside.

The satellites are "imaging military installations that the Iraqi army occupies," said a former U.S. military official, who said slides from the images had been used in recent closed briefings at U.S. facilities in the Middle East. "They're imaging training areas that the Iraqi army utilizes. They're imaging roads that Iraqi armored vehicles and large convoys transit."

The US military is saying through its actions that the Iraqis are standing up and capable of conducting their own operations or at least wants to mask those operations from the US until they are started and the Iraqi Army needs to get bailed out with airpower and artillery. And in order to not be suckered into fights the US does not want to fight but are forced to on the basis of freshly tied Gordian knots, the US is using assets that are very expensive in both cash outlays and much more importantly opportunity costs.  A satellite image analyst who is looking at the take of a KH-11 viewing areas south of Najaf can not be looking at images near the Khyber Pass.  Depending on orbital mechanics, some of the satellites may or may not have been pulled off of other missions to observe our allies.

What great allies we have and what great allies we are....

Torture And Moral Causistry

By Cernig

Via our colleague Eric Martin, writing at Obsidian Wings, comes an LA Times story which really puts the seal on the whole sorry tale of Gitmo, renditions and evidence obtained by torture.

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

There's no doubt in my mind, certainly, that the Bush administration knew that these techniques were best for eliciting false confessions - after all, that's the main use torture has always been put to by authoritarian regimes since the Witch Trails of Europe and before. The same techniques were used to elicit a false conviction from John McCain when he was incarcerated during the Vietnam War - yet he's just fine nowadays with accepting the Bush administration's parsing of such methods as somehow not being, precisely, torture.

Christopher Hitchens used to join in that parsing - he has now tried waterboarding for himself and has now unequivocally changed his mind.

Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

...The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it. Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

America under Bush tortures people - bad people and people it believes are bad who later turn out to be innocent. It gets confessions - many false - from those people. It parses - lies by ommission and misdirection - about whether it actually does torture or not. It commits war crimes thereby. And John McCain, despite having had these things done to him, would continue that program by continuing to parse reality. He may have spoken up against waterboarding, but he's just fine with following the Bush lead in defining other torture techniques as 'enhanced interrogation". It is, as Hitchens says "moral causistry" of the most horrid sort. Do you really need another reason why he shouldn't be president?

Blowing the Fight Against Al Qaeda

By BJ

The New York Times has a long article out today examining the less than stellar progress made by the Bush administration in fighting al Qaeda on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. Among other highlights are infighting between and within agencies, timidity by White House officials, accommodation to Musharraf, and my personal favourite, diversion of resources and attention to Iraq and the subsequent loss of US standing that resulted.

Some choice quotes on that last.

The story of how Al Qaeda, whose name is Arabic for “the base,” has gained a new haven is in part a story of American accommodation to President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, whose advisers played down the terrorist threat. It is also a story of how the White House shifted its sights, beginning in 2002, from counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to preparations for the war in Iraq.

. . .

Current and former military and intelligence officials said that the war in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas. When American military and intelligence officials requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq.

. . .

The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 added another complicating factor, by cementing a view among Pakistanis that American forces in the tribal areas would be a prelude to an eventual American occupation.

. . .

“We had to put people out in the field who had less than ideal levels of experience,” one former senior C.I.A. official said. “But there wasn’t much to choose from.”

One reason for this, according to two former intelligence officials directly involved in the Qaeda hunt, was that by 2006 the Iraq war had drained away most of the C.I.A. officers with field experience in the Islamic world. “You had a very finite number” of experienced officers, said one former senior intelligence official. “Those people all went to Iraq. We were all hurting because of Iraq.”

. . .

Intelligence reports were painting an increasingly dark picture of the terrorism threat in the tribal areas. But with senior Bush administration officials consumed for much of that year with the spiraling violence in Iraq, the Qaeda threat in Pakistan was not at the top of the White House agenda.

Add to that the story yesterday pointing out that the only way for US to increase troop strength in Afghanistan is to pull them out of Iraq since the US military has no reserve capacity in its ground forces.

The whole NYT story is well worth the read, but as the situation in the region grows ever bleaker, it is the above facts that will haunt Bush’s legacy. Even if by some magical and superhuman effort, his successors can turn Iraq into a successful state once again, the opportunity cost of the invasion and subsequent occupation will easily dwarf any of the, (so far imaginary), benefits.

Another Bloody Month in Afghanistan

By BJ

For the second month in a row, coalition forces in Afghanistan will have suffered more fatalities than those in Iraq. Given the far smaller number of troops present in Afghanistan, it has been the more dangerous place to serve for some time, but this summer looks to be a brutal one.

Insurgent activity is increasing sharply in Afghanistan and has spread into once stable areas, with attacks up almost 40% in the eastern provinces alone, according to new American military data that have prompted alarm among senior Pentagon officials.

. . .

The troubling numbers, including two new NATO troop deaths Tuesday, come after a period of increasing distress on the part of military officials about the deterioration of security in Afghanistan, where the Taliban regime, which had harbored Al Qaeda, was ousted by U.S.-led forces in late 2001. Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has spent time attempting to refocus the Pentagon's and Capitol Hill's attention on the Afghanistan war.

Mullen has repeatedly expressed frustration that NATO allies have not provided the numbers of troops needed to wage a complex counterinsurgency campaign. He also has expressed concern that the U.S., with continuing heavy commitments in Iraq, does not have enough combat-ready troops to fill the gap. Commanders believe that three brigades, or about 10,000 troops, are necessary.

Those commanders apparently don't include outgoing ISAF commander General McNeill, who was quoted saying he needed 400,000 troops to fight a proper counterinsurgency. Of course, 400,000 is impossible under current conditions, but 10,000 may be doable, so long as you're not too worried about the condition of the troops themselves.

Last year's troop buildup in Iraq and the overall strain on U.S. ground forces have made it almost impossible to increase force levels in Afghanistan. Many military officials, including top Army leaders, have advocated taking advantage of future troop reductions in Iraq by giving U.S. units more time at home to rest and train.

But in a shift, military planners now have agreed that future troop reductions in Iraq instead will lead to an increase in U.S. units in Afghanistan. The shift followed a lengthy internal battle, a senior Defense official said, speaking of the debate on condition of anonymity.

So even if Iraq continues to go well, US ground forces can't look forward to any breaks from a schedule that's burning them out, and thanks to a less-than-timely or well-thought out raid, among other things, Iraq continuing to go well certainly isn't guaranteed. (We won't even get into the possibility of the Bush administration starting yet another war on top of the two he's already losing.)

And just to make things interesting, things aren't going too well across the border in Pakistan either. Want to guess how long the US and Nato can keep even the troops they have in Afghanistan already should their main supply line be cut?

It's going to be a long summer.

A VAT for Opium

By Fester:

The Value Added Tax (VAT) is a common tax structure where the tax is levied against each stage of production on the basis of the value added by that stage.  For example, let us assume that an oil refinery bought a barrel of heavy sour crude for $110 and after they finished refining the barrel into its gases, gasoline, diesel and heavy fuel oils, they were able to sell that barrel for $150.  In this hypothetical example, the refinery added $40 of value to the barrel of oil and a VAT would be charged against this $40.  The VAT is a very common tax throughout the world. 

It is so common, it looks like the Taliban in Afghanistan is charging what is effectively a VAT tax on opium production.  The BBC reports that the Taliban tax the raw materials and receive a decent sum of money from the farmers:

The Taleban made an estimated $100m (£50m) in 2007 from Afghan farmers growing poppy for the opium trade, the United Nations says.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), said the money was raised by a 10% tax on farmers in Taleban-controlled areas.

As Dr. Taylor at Poliblogger notes, the Taliban is taxing and collecting fees at other points in the value chain, especially at the higher end of the chain.  The Taliban provides security in exchange for signficant pay-offs.  He makes a worrying observation:

The “FARCization” of the Taliban continues…

FARC is a Columbian guerrilla group that has been fighting the Columbian government for almost two generations now.  It is being funded primarily by its connections to the cocaine trade and resource smuggling.  And it is a sustainable model as long as there exists a massive black market for a desirable product which means the suppliers of that product must turn to non-state groups for support and security.  FARC has a similiar quasi-VAT structure on coco and cocaine production. 

It provides a predictable, multi-level revenue stream.  Predictable revenue allows for longer term planning and the provision of credible promises of support.  The Taliban and the Pashtun groups already have strong loyalty claims on some members of its population but the ability to make credible long term promises should expand and strengthen loyalty claims.  That is not good.....

UN Under Attack For Pro-Western Agenda

By Cernig

The UN is coming under attack by terrorists because they see it as an enabler of a pro-Western, Anti-Muslim agenda. No, really. Despite the claims of the US Right's black helicopter crowd, that is the finding of a seven-person outside panel that investigated the Algiers bombing of the U.N. compound there last December by an Al Qaida affiliate.

A key section of the report discussed why the United Nations was now coming under attack from militants, an issue first highlighted when the U.N. compound in Iraq was blown up in 2003, killing 15 staff and seven others.

The U.N., it said, "is being targeted by terrorists for what it is and what it represents." This was due to perceptions that the body had become "an instrument of powerful member states to advance agendas that serve their own interests, rather than those of the global community of nations.

"This is often broadly referred to as a pro-western agenda; others have called it an anti-Muslim agenda," it said. "Whatever it is called ... the fact is that in many places the U.N. is no longer seen as impartial and neutral."

The panel also identified failings in the UN's security apparatus, leading to the resignation of the organisation's Under-Secretary-General for Safety and Security, David Veness.

"Most unfortunately, the system as a whole and individuals who, both in the duty station itself and at headquarters, held direct responsibility for the U.N. presence in Algiers and the security of its personnel and premises, have been found wanting," panel chief Lakhdar Brahimi said.

There was "ample evidence that several staff members up and down the hierarchy may have failed to respond adequately to the Algiers attack, both before and after the tragedy," Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister and U.N. official said in the report.

In particular, the panel found that security safeguards were looser for local employees of the UN, making them less safe than international employees.

U.N. employees had "limited confidence" in the security management system, it added, and the 75 percent of field staff worldwide who were locally employed felt that they were not protected as well as international staff. Fourteen of the 17 staff who died in Algiers were Algerians.

Which, just like lapses in care for local employees by the US military and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, encourages the idea that they don't really care about the locals.

It's a popular meme among the US Right that the UN is inherently anti-American and anti-Western. Yet the UN overlooked, without action of any kind, the invasion of Iraq without a UN mandate and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The UNSC is dominated by Western nations with vetos - and yes, Russia counts as Western nowadays. There's all kinds of sabre-rattling and pressure for action over Iran's hypothetical nuclear weapons program but none whatsoever over Israel's real one. You can see where some folks might get the idea that they're too pro-Western. Of course, neither is true - the UN is just the sum of its parts and the UNSC veto holders, the "great nations", have influence there far beyond that of other members when it comes to actual action, even if other members often manage to pass toothless resolutions condemning one veto-holder or another for their latest "great nation" exceptionalism.

Scalia's Urban Legend

By Cernig

Scalia’s dissenting opinion on the Boumidiene ruling stated that "[a]t least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantánamo Bay have returned to the battlefield." The trouble is, that statement was an urban myth based on DoD reports which have already been discredited and which the DoD has already walked back.

Seton Hall Law’s Center for Policy and Research has just released a report which examines claims that Gitmo detainees have returned to the battlefield. In the press release accompanying the report, they write:

The statistic was endorsed by a Senate Minority Report issued June 26, 2007, which cites a media outlet, CNN. CNN, in turn, named the DoD as its source. The “30” number, however, was corrected in a DoD press release issued in July 2007, and a DoD document submitted to the House Foreign Relations Committee on May 20, 2008 abandons the claim entirely.

Professor Mark Denbeaux, director of the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research commented, “As lawyers and judges we have an obligation to be careful with our facts. The notion that 30 detainees ‘returned to the battlefield’ was disproved a year ago. It is distressing that Justice Scalia in Boumediene was not more careful in such an important matter, especially since he was relying uncritically on information that originated with a party in the case before him.”

The report examines the DoD's own documents on the matter and comes up with a couple of startling conclusions. Not only is the true number at most 12 and perhaps as low as one, but the one detainee who can be absolutely proven to have returned to the battlefield was released by Bush administration political appointees over the objections of the military, who told them the detainee would return to violence.

The report itself (PDF) continues, in detail, but it's main findings are:

• At most 12, not 30, detainees “returned to the fight.”

• Of these 12, it is by no means clear that all are properly characterized as having been so engaged since their release.

• According to the Department of Defense’s published and unpublished data not a single detainee was ever released by a court. Moreover, every released detainee was released by political appointees of the Department of Defense, sometimes over the objection of the military.

• According to the Department of Defense’s published and unpublished data and reports, not a single released Guantánamo detainee has ever attacked any Americans.

• The Department of Defense’s statements regarding recidivism are inconsistent with each other and often contradictory.

• This may be because, despite the importance of detainee recidivism, the Department of Defense’s sources of information are media reports.

• Despite national security concerns, the Department of Defense does not have a system for tracking the conduct or even the whereabouts of released detainees.

• The only indisputable detainee who took up arms against the United States or its allies was ISN 220.

• ISN 220 was not released as a result of any legal process, whether a CSRT or a federal habeas proceeding; no detainee has been released as a result of either process.

• The decision to release ISN 220 was made by political officers in the Department of Defense and was contrary to the recommendations of the military officers.

• The Department of Defense has never explained why ISN 220 was released or who is responsible for the decision.

• It is at least plausible that a more transparent process would have resulted in ISN 220 still being detained.

So, not only is Scalia's figure an urban legend he almost certainly already knew had been walked back by the DoD, but the release of the one man who definitely returned to violence was on the orders of Bush administration officials, against military advice, rather than the action of a court - and they still won't explain why they did it.

Both Scalia and the administration have some serious explaining to do. And perhaps in the light of this report John McCain might explain, too, why he's backing Scalia's dissent-by-mythmaking rather than holding Bush's feet to the fire.

Update, June 21st: Matt Duss at the Wonk Room writes:

While there is little evidence that fighters interred at Guantanamo Bay — that is, those who were fighters before they got there — have attacked Americans, there is quite a bit of evidence that, for those falsely imprisoned there and for many young Muslims watching around the world, Guantanamo has a politically radicalizing effect. Maintaining Guantanamo and other illegal detention sites hurts America’s image abroad, and calls into question America’s support for human rights and the rule of law. There is no good argument against closing it down.

And today the Washington Post's Michael Abramowitz does a terribly mangled job of explaining that, even within the Bush administration and the Pentagon, a large body of legal opinion advised against the Addington/Yoo plan for indefinite extra-legal detentions. Senior lawyers and counsel told the administration, repeatedly, that any method of dealing with detainees other than the one deliniated in international law of starting from the assumption of POW status with full habeas rights and holding open tribunals under full military justice to determine illegal combatant status, was likely to be struck down by the Supreme Court. Level legal heads tried to get the adminsitration to use tactics - such as getting early legislation from Congress - to make that less likely.

Despite their advice, the Bush administration went ahead with Addington and Yoo's plan because they were more interested in pushing their view of the unitary all-powerful Executive than anything else.  "Why are you trying to give away the president's power?" Addington told one administration legal counsel.

General Says Bush Administration Committed War Crimes

By Cernig

McClatchey reports that Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who was in charge of the probe into abuse at Abu Graib prison, has finally come clean and said that administration officials have committed war crimes.

The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

Taguba, whose 2004 investigation documented chilling abuses at Abu Ghraib, is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes. "The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture," he wrote.

I mentioned that report, in which a panel of physicians and psychologists examined past detainees and found they had undergone pain and suffering only describable as torture, just yesterday.

At the time of Taguba's probe, he was complicit in helping the Bush administration and the Pentagon paint abuse as the work of a "few bad apples" and now that the retired general has finally spoken out they are again trying to play down the truth, with a pentagon spokesman saying ""It adds little to the public discourse to draw sweeping conclusions based upon dubious allegations regarding remote medical assessments of former detainees, now far removed from detention."

I disagree. It matters because America is being asked to pick a Republican candidate who, despite his past fine words and own experiences of torture, has backed continuing the Bush administration's war crimes into his own prospective tenure. It matters because hundreds of thousands of military servicemen are being expected to follow orders emanating from those who have committed war crimes. It just matters, because justice does.

Update: Far more from Scott Horton. There will be no war crimes trails for Bush and the rest in the U.S., we all know that - but abroad it might be a different story.

In the past two years, I have spoken with two investigating magistrates in two different European nations, both pro-Iraq war NATO allies. Both were assembling war crimes charges against a small group of Bush administration officials. "You can rest assured that no charges will be brought before January 20, 2009," one told me. And after that? "It depends. We don't expect extradition. But if one of the targets lands on our territory or on the territory of one of our cooperating jurisdictions, then we'll be prepared to act."

Viewed in this light, the Bush Administration figures involved in the formation of torture policy face no immediate threat of prosecution for war crimes. But Colin Powell's chief of staff, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, nails it: "Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzales and--at the apex--Addington, should never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In the future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court." Augusto Pinochet made a trip to London, and his life was never the same afterwards.

Doctors - Yes, It Was Torture

By Cernig

McClatchy have been doing an excellent reporting job of late with their series "Guantanamo: Beyond The Law" which among other horror stories has confirmed that detainees at Gitmo were often wrongly accused innocents and that the International Red Cross was kept in the dark about detainees locations and abusive treatment, in flagrantly criminal violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Well, now you can add this into the mix - a team of medical experts examined eleven former detainees and found that, in their expert opinions, they had experienced severe pain and long-term suffering - the very definition of torture by international and U.S. law.

Cambridge, MA. (PRWEB) June 17, 2008 - A team of doctors and psychologists convened by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) to conduct intensive clinical evaluations of 11 former detainees held in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay has found that these men suffered torture and ill-treatment by U.S. personnel, which resulted in severe pain and long-term disability. The men were ultimately released from U.S. custody without charge or explanation.

"The horrific consequences of U.S. detention and interrogation policy are indelibly written on the bodies and minds of the former detainees in scars, debilitating injuries, humiliating memories and haunting nightmares," states Dr. Allen Keller, Director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture and a contributor to PHR's report Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by U.S. Personnel and Its Impact. "Physical and psychological evidence clearly supports the detainees' first-hand accounts of cruelty, inhuman treatment, degradation, and torture."

"The poignant case studies focus on the profound and lasting consequences of cruelty at the hands of U.S. personnel," said Farnoosh Hashemian, MPH, PHR Research Associate and lead author of the report. "The detainees suffer permanent hearing loss, persistent and debilitating pain in limbs and joints, major depressive disorder, severe post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety disorders, such as panic attacks."

The report also calls for full accountability for these war crimes, as it bloody well should. Unfortunately, that isn't going to happen in the U.S. It will be left up to other nations, if they will, to uphold America's supposed standards.

Yeah, Osama Should Get Habeas Rights

By Cernig

What a bloody stupid thing to ask. [1.]

In a question posed ... by Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard, the McCain campaign might have found a new talking point with which to emphasize the possible effect of the Gitmo decision. Hayes' asked if -- in the campaign's interpretation -- the Court's decision would mean that if Osama bin Laden was captured and imprisoned at Guantanamo, he too would be entitled to Habeas Corpus rights.

The McCain campaign's answer was yes.

My answer is yes too.

Professor Steven Taylor:

So what? Are we saying that we don’t have enough evidence to warrant holding him that a court would release him? To read these kinds of responses (and the general uproar in general over the issue of habeas corpus rights) is make one think that that habeas corpus petitions are get out of jail free cards. They aren’t–they are simply challenges over the right to hold a prisoner, i.e., that the confinement of the prisoner is illegal. The notion that there is a court anywhere in the United States that would free Osama bin Laden because he filed a habeas petition is asinine. Beyond that, is the McCain camp arguing that the United States has no evidence against bin Laden?

Apparently.

It's the same old crap we got from Bush:

When you pare it down to its barest components, the argument remains largely unchanged since the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001; Democrats are too weak to defend you, and if you vote for them, you’re going to die.

The nation and the world are sick of it.

[1.] It should be noted that Bill Kristol and Michael Goldfarb are the leading intellects at the Weekly Standard, and thus those chosen to contribute to the magazine, who must be of comparable but slightly less shining brilliance, are a very select group indeed.

The Biggest Lie Yoo Told

By Cernig

Torture justifier to the Bush administration John Yoo has an op-ed in the WSJ today in which he flat lies to the Amercan public about due process for captured combatants. No, I don't mean the way in which he assumes all the detainees at Gitmo are guilty, although that too is a heinious assumption unbecoming a law professor, as Glenn Greenwald ably points out.

I mean this:

In World War II, no civilian court reviewed the thousands of German prisoners housed in the U.S. Federal judges never heard cases from the Confederate prisoners of war held during the Civil War...Congress gave Guantanamo Bay prisoners more rights than any prisoners of war, in any war, ever.

...Judicial micromanagement will now intrude into the conduct of war. Federal courts will jury-rig a process whose every rule second-guesses our soldiers and intelligence agents in the field. A judge's view on how much "proof" is needed to find that a "suspect" is a terrorist will become the standard applied on the battlefield. Soldiers will have to gather "evidence," which will have to be safeguarded until a court hearing, take statements from "witnesses," and probably provide some kind of Miranda-style warning upon capture. No doubt lawyers will swarm to provide representation for new prisoners.

So our fighting men and women now must add C.S.I. duties to that of capturing or killing the enemy.

I'd already seen this notion - that lawyers will be running alongside combat troops and marines will be reading their enemies their Miranda rights before opening fire - from rightwing commenters on Newshoggers. At the time, I told them that they showed a woeful appreciation of due process for POWs as set down in the Geneva Conventions and so it's doubly bemusing to see this rightwing talking point regurgitated by someone who doubtless does know better but chooses not to say so. If I, a non-lawyer, can figure it out quite easily from the extant texts and interpretation, then for a surety John Yoo already has.

The reason no civilian court ever reviewed POW status for those captured in WW2 is that POW status is an unproblemmatic preserve of military justice as far as the Conventions are concerned. If the detainees at Gitmo had been afforded POW status from word one, there would already have been military trials for those accused of war crimes - trials including the full panoply of jurisprudence including habeas corpus rights. Those found guilty would have been sentenced, perhaps to death, and those found innocent either held until the close of hostilities legally as POWs or released as no longer a threat at the military's convenience. Those who successfully challenged their POW stutus through their pursuit of a writ of habeas corpus would have become civilian detainees for trial, including further habeas rights, by the civilian system. Again, the guilty would have been sentenced and the innocent released. No combat lawyers, no battlefield Miranda readings.

The problem, then, is caused by the introduction of the entirely spurious designation of "enemy combatant" - a creature neither fish nor fowl and a designation designed entirely to slip through the cracks of previously established military and civilian judicial processes. The only reason ever to invent this designation was to keep detainees beyond the reach of due process, including habeas rights, as a hedge against prosecutions for torture during interrogations.

The Washington Post today reveals that such torture was premeditated and top-down. The groundwork to sidestep legal responsibility for torture was likewise arranged with malice aforethought - setting the Executive up with a glib excuse to be the "only judge of its own judgment" in clear violation of the seperation of powers - and John Yoo was one of its primary architects.

No wonder he wants to lie about it.

Tensions Rising on the Afghan-Pakistani Frontier?

By BJ

Yesterday, Fester noted the massive prison break in Khandahar, about which he had this to say:

This is a complex operation with multiple things that could go wrong against a high value and high prestige target.  It is also a Taliban attack that is aimed at delegitimatizing the government by highlighting its ineffectiveness while improving internal cohesion and morale as a demonstrated example of the Taliban taking care of its own.

An example of the highlighted portion can be found in this story, in which Canada's top general is trying to put a positive spin on the event.

. . . one Afghan was not so optimistic, saying it revealed the weakness of the government. One resident of Kandahar told CBC News he's keeping family members inside because they're terrified of the escapees, and tension in the city is high.

The more troubling part of the news today, is that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has apparently learned from his masters in Washington that the best way to answer a challenge to your legitimacy is to focus on an external threat and talk tough, and the external threat he's decided to focus on is Pakistan.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has threatened to send troops over the border into Pakistan to confront militants based there.

He said that when militants crossed over from Pakistan to kill Afghans and coalition troops, his nation had the right to retaliate in "self-defence".

. . .

He warned that he was prepared to seek out Taleban leaders wherever they were, specifically naming Baitullah Mehsud, who is based in South Waziristan, Pakistan.

"Baitullah Mehsud should know that we will go after him now and hit him in his house," Mr Karzai said, adding that Taleban leader Mullah Omar could expect the same.

There are actually two possibilities here, the first being that this is little more than tough rhetoric since Afghanistan doesn't exactly have the kind of offensive capabilities to be launching attacks against its far more powerful neighbour.

The second, and unfortunately more probable scenario, is that this may be Karzai's way to provide cover for American strikes across the frontier between the two countries. Washington has ever been highly critical of the Pakistani authorities inability or presumed reluctance to root out the Taliban on their side of the border, but the situation has grown tenser in recent days. Via Kat, the outgoing commander of the ISAF just held a press conference regarding Afghanistan, and leaves little doubt as to what he thinks the solution is.

In a sober assessment, Gen. Dan K. McNeill, who departed June 3 after 16 months commanding NATO's International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, said that although record levels of foreign and Afghan troops have constrained repeated Taliban offensives, stabilizing Afghanistan will be impossible without a more robust military campaign against insurgent havens in Pakistan.

. . .

McNeill criticized Pakistani efforts to crack down on that threat, and -- offering his unofficial view -- described the political situation in Islamabad as "dysfunctional."

He also criticized efforts by the Pakistan government to negotiate peace deals with insurgents on the frontier, saying past agreements have led to increased attacks across the border in Afghanistan. McNeill said the 50 percent increase in attacks in eastern Afghanistan in April compared with the same month last year is "directly attributable to the lack of pressure on the other side of the border."

He also goes on to note a couple of instances where US troops were killed in clashes with the Pakistani Frontier Guards, whose responsibility it is to patrol the border between the two states. No mention of the far more recent incident where around a dozen Pakistani paramilitary soldiers were killed by an American air strike. That incident has stoked anti-American rage in Pakistan and increased the rhetoric on both sides,

The rhetoric used by the Pakistani military Wednesday was the harshest it has leveled since the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan in 2001. The airstrike was a "completely unprovoked and cowardly act" which "hit at the very basis of cooperation and sacrifice with which Pakistani soldiers are supporting the Coalition in the war against terror," asserted the statement issued by the military's Inter-Services Public Affairs.

. . .

"I believe fundamentally if the United States is going to get hit, it is going to come out of the planning of the leadership in the FATA, Al-Qaeda specifically," Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday. "That is a threat to us that must be dealt with."

U.S. commanders also say that the peace deals negotiated by the Pakistani army have enabled militants to step up their attacks on Afghan and coalition forces inside Afghanistan.

Some U.S. officers in Afghanistan contend that current and former Pakistani army, intelligence and paramilitary officers have secretly continued to aid the insurgents despite Islamabad's avowed support for the Bush administration's "war on terror."

"Their policy for the last four years can be generously described as duplicitous," Army Col. Thomas Lynch, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy institute in Washington, told McClatchy this week.

Given the pro- and anti-Musharraf forces inside Pakistan seem to be heading towards yet another showdown, this would seem to be a really bad time for the US and its Afghan puppet to be turning up the heat in the pressure-cooker. As China Hand at American Footprints put it a few months back:

The Bush administration is pushing Pakistan into a corner.

It’s not a happy place.

It’s called Musharraf = Shah of Iran territory.

And it really doesn’t have to be that way.

Doesn't have to, but may yet be. If anything else, this shows the necessity of having adults back in the White House who know how to de-escalate tense situations before they blow up in your face, rather than the type who only seem to know how to throw fuel on the fire.

Your Subserviance is now required....

By Fester:

TSA has a new policy that is not a security policy.  It is a policy of ritualistic humiliation and subservience enforcement. 

Beginning Saturday, June 21, 2008 passengers that willfully refuse to provide identification at security checkpoint will be denied access to the secure area of airports. This change will apply exclusively to individuals that simply refuse to provide any identification or assist transportation security officers in ascertaining their identity.

This new procedure will not affect passengers that may have misplaced, lost or otherwise do not have ID but are cooperative with officers. Cooperative passengers without ID may be subjected to additional screening protocols, including enhanced physical screening, enhanced carry-on and/or checked baggage screening, interviews with behavior detection or law enforcement officers and other measures. [emphasis mine] (Via Outside the Beltway)

So if I am understanding this press release correctly the policy is that if an individual is nice and subservient to a TSA official, an arrangement can be made, but if the individual is perceived to be an asshole or insufficiently deferential to TSA, they are out of luck. 

This is not a security procedure unless there is an amazing model out that which proves all potential security threats are by definition visible and loud assholes.  We saw with the 9-11 hijackers that this is not the case; they attempted to blend in and not draw too much official attention to themselves.  We know how the KGB trained their NOCs to be normal and quiet but not too quiet individuals.

This is an absurd security policy. If it was a security policy, the workarounds available to cooperative passengers who forgot their ID would also be available to the non-cooperative individuals.   However it is a policy that asserts dominance.

BJ in a great post looking at Canadian stun gun usage also notes the same basic trend.  The use of force is increasing and the threshold of force utilization is decreasing:

But despite the new rules, the percentage of Taser incidents in which the weapon was fired multiple times crept up from 42 per cent in 2005 to 45 per cent in 2007.

The investigation also revealed that in 2,200 of the 3,000 RCMP Taser incidents between 2002 and 2007, the person the Mounties were dealing with was unarmed.[Emp Added]

It's clear that the Taser is being used more for pain compliance than for actual threats. 

Using a firearm is a very high cost action for a cop.  It is a life or death decision as cops are taught to aim for center of body mass which means the chest which means the aimpoint has a high probability of killing an individual.  However tasers, stun guns and pepper sprays have much lower costs of usage as they are probabilistically less likely to cause death or lasting injury.  This, unsurprisingly, means a much higher utilization of weapons in significantly less threatening situations.  It also lowers the cost of pain compliance and humiliation.

Ahh welcome to a world of fear and abuse of power enabled by fear.  Make sure your papers are in good order and the official is in a good mood....   

Character and the Courts

By Fester:

Character is what you do when no one is watching, or what you do when there are multiple potential paths.  It is the moments of urgency, of confusion, of chaos and crisis when rational decisions are not able to be formed or full decision processes and loops run that character becomes critical as that informs the option space and choice space of individuals and groups.  It is at that point where the default assumptions become nakedly clear.

After 9/11, we as a country despite the best efforts of some, revealed an ugly character as we panicked and forgot about the differentiating factors that we like to believe makes the US as a whole exceptional.  We tortured, we profiled, we hired out mercenaries, and we launched a war of choice of neo-colonial conquest.  We failed ourselves in order to give a slight salve of liberty.  Our political and press process failed miserably in tolerating and encouraging these behaviors.  The oh so serious pundits and politicians who one would usually suspect of knowing better caved in and said that we had to torture, we had to invade, we had to suspend the Constitution as this was an unimaginable and deadly threat, while forgetting about the Soviet's 20,000 nuclear weapons.  Some of this was from fear, and some of this was from cold political calculus that fear inspired lashing out was what the median voter wanted.  We failed. 

Now that times have cooled down, this hysteria is receding.  The politicians who should have known better has been defeated for the Democratic nomination while someone who did what they could is being nominated and favored to win the White House.  The courts have been fighting a valiant action to protect their prerogatives by defending the Constitution against hysteria. And today's decision to grant Habeas Corpus by overturning portions of the fear inspired MCA has several great lines that assert what we should be and what we need to be (stealing these excerpts from TalkLeft:)

Security subsists, too, in fidelity to freedom’s first principles. Chief among these are freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint.....

Their access to the writ is a necessity to determine the lawfulness of their status, even if, in the end, they do not obtain the relief they seek. ...

The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law. The Framers decided that habeas corpus, a right of first importance, must be a part of that framework, a part of that law....

These are assertions of first principals of American exceptionalism. We should be strong enough and tough enough to believe in our principals even when those principals look to be difficult and expensive to follow.  And by following those principals we advance our meta-narrative that we respect people, we respect the law, and that we play fairly.  And by advancing this narrative through real and expensive signaling actions, we would have undermined the central Bin-Laden narrative of a clash of civilizations where the Muslim world is defended by a band of strategically aggressive but scrappy fighters against a ruthless, imperialistic hypocritical United States.  It is this battle of narratives that we need to win in order to make us more secure.  Our principals are strong when we act upon them in times of crisis and danger, and we need to remember that. 

SCOTUS - Detainees Have Habeas Rights

By Cernig

It was close, but today the Supreme Court decided that America should observe the rule of law by applying Habeas Corpus to detainees at the Gitmo prison complex.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.

In its third rebuke of the Bush administration's treatment of prisoners, the court ruled 5-4 that the government is violating the rights of prisoners being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The court's liberal justices were in the majority.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, said, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."

Kennedy said federal judges could ultimately order some detainees to be released, but that such orders would depend on security concerns and other circumstances.

The White House had no immediate comment on the ruling. White House press secretary Dana Perino, traveling with President Bush in Rome, said the administration was reviewing the opinion.

It was not immediately clear whether this ruling, unlike the first two, would lead to prompt hearings for the detainees, some of whom have been held more than 6 years. Roughly 270 men remain at the island prison, classified as enemy combatants and held on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

The ruling could resurrect many detainee lawsuits that federal judges put on hold pending the outcome of the high court case.

The Court split on partisan lines. As usual when such judgements are forthcoming, I turn to Marty Lederman for expert commentary:

The Court held 5-4, in an opinion by Justice Kennedy, that the petitioners at GTMO have a constitutional right to petition for habeas corpus and that the DTA/MCA process of D.C. Circuit review from CSRT decisions is not an adequate alternative to habeas.

...But as far as I can tell just yet, the Court did not reach the two even more important questions:

1. Whether the Constitution applies to detainees held outside GTMO; and

2. What the substantive standard for detention is: "It bears repeating that our opinion does not address the content of the law that governs petitioners’ detention.
That is a matter yet to be determined."

At first glance, it would appear that although the decision is momentous, there are other important things that it does not do:

It does not speak to whether GTMO should be closed (although it basically undermines the Administration's principal reason for using GTMO in the first place, which was to keep the courts from reviewing the legality of the Executive's conduct).

Nor does it affect, in any dramatic sense, possible military commission trials

...therefore there will be no call for a new "special court" process to replace the commissions. ([Because the Court holds that the Constitution applies at GTMO, that might enhance some of the defendants' specific claims and defenses in those trials, such as under the Ex Post Facto Clause (the argument that the conduct they are alleged to have engaged in was not a crime at the time of its commission) -- but that would not in and of itself call into question the very existence of the commissions or precipitate an overhaul of the commission process.)

It seems to me, though, that this ruling will most affect detainee's defenses in the areas of torture to produce evidence and in the prosecution deliberately destroying or witholding evidence from the defense. Some very bad people are likely to walk free along with the innocent because the Bush administration tried to walk around domestic and international principles of law, creating an entirely spurious new designation of "unlawful combatant" so that they could either hide detainees from due process indefinitely or, failing that, conduct kangaroo courts.

If they'd just stuck with the existing definitions, all the Gitmo detainees against whom they could build a real case under the actual rules of law, without torture and without rigging the courts, would have been tried as POW's already. If found guilty, the death penalty would have been warranted in some cases. I would personally have had no problem with that. That it hasn't happened is a failure of the Bush administration, no-one else. They have proven themselves incompetent to shepherd America's national security.

Indeed, there is surely a case now, even within the U.S. system, that these detentions without habeas constitute war crimes in that the administration had prior knowledge that they were bending the law to give cover to illegal actions. Certainly, the Nuremberg trials ruled thusly for those who had helped the Nazis reinterpret the law to apparently legalise their tortures and other crimes.

Of course, the Right doesn't want to see it that way. John Hawkins is particularly shrill in his denial of the direction of the arrow of causality.

Prozac Army

By Cernig

Regular readers know we at Newshoggers are big fans of the blogging veterans over at VetVoice. We'd like to offer Captain Chris LeJeune our heartfelt support and thanks today for going public in TIME about one of the unspoken impacts of the War On Terror - depression and addiction to prescribed antidepressants among those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Seven months after sergeant Christopher LeJeune started scouting Baghdad's dangerous roads -- acting as bait to lure insurgents into the open so his Army unit could kill them -- he found himself growing increasingly despondent. "We'd been doing some heavy missions, and things were starting to bother me," LeJeune says. His unit had been protecting Iraqi police stations targeted by rocket-propelled grenades, hunting down mortars hidden in dark Baghdad basements and cleaning up its own messes. He recalls the order his unit got after a nighttime firefight to roll back out and collect the enemy dead. When LeJeune and his buddies arrived, they discovered that some of the bodies were still alive. "You don't always know who the bad guys are," he says. "When you search someone's house, you have it built up in your mind that these guys are terrorists, but when you go in, there's little bitty tiny shoes and toys on the floor -- things like that started affecting me a lot more than I thought they would."

So LeJeune visited a military doctor in Iraq, who, after a quick session, diagnosed depression. The doctor sent him back to war armed with the antidepressant Zoloft and the antianxiety drug clonazepam. "It's not easy for soldiers to admit the problems that they're having over there for a variety of reasons," LeJeune says. "If they do admit it, then the only solution given is pills."

While the headline-grabbing weapons in this war have been high-tech wonders, like unmanned drones that drop Hellfire missiles on the enemy below, troops like LeJeune are going into battle with a different kind of weapon, one so stealthy that few Americans even know of its deployment. For the first time in history, a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The medicines are intended not only to help troops keep their cool but also to enable the already strapped Army to preserve its most precious resource: soldiers on the front lines. Data contained in the Army's fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicate that, according to an anonymous survey of U.S. troops taken last fall, about 12% of combat troops in Iraq and 17% of those in Afghanistan are taking prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills to help them cope. Escalating violence in Afghanistan and the more isolated mission have driven troops to rely more on medication there than in Iraq, military officials say. [Bold emphasis mine - C]

Brandon Friedman at VetVoice writes:

This is tough because it's not something that many in the military want to face.  In fact, it's just become something of an open secret that repeated, extended combat tours have left the professional force so strained that troops are routinely sent into combat while drugged for PTSD and depression.  But Chris--always the consummate soldier--handled the topic deftly, by being frank and honest, so that millions of Americans can see what's really taking place in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

It took guts for Chris to tell his story publicly, but the more people we have who can convey the true experience of war, the better off we'll be as a nation.

And Chris notes in comments there:

One thing to add that this story did not cover very fully.  It is difficult to get your prescriptions in Iraq.  When I was there it involved getting together a four truck convoy and a dozen soldiers, with at least two crew-served weapons.  All so you could go get your damn crazy pills.

There are few things dumber in this life than faux-macho posturing. Chis is a brave soldier and a great man for having the courage to talk about this problem. Now let's see some real leadership and consensus to support the troops from the government, the military and the two candidates.

Running In Circles

By Cernig

I see that CIA director Hayden is claiming that Al Qaida has been essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and is on the defensive throughout most of the rest of the world. I think he might have a point in Iraq, where AQI shot itself in the foot by violence against Iraqis and certainly we keep hearing welcome reports that AQ has likewise been its own worst enemy in the rest of the Islamic world, where its atrocities have gradually worked to alienate most Muslems. But I think he's relying on his American audience's ignorance of the central front when he claims that things are going just as well along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, where AQ's leadership has its safe havens.

The ability to kill and capture key members of al-Qaeda continues, and keeps them off balance -- even in their best safe haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border," Hayden said.

But terrorism experts note the lack of success in the U.S. effort to capture bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Intelligence officials say they think both are living in the Pakistan-Afghanistan tribal area in locations known only to a few top aides. Hayden said capturing or killing the pair remains a top priority, though he noted the difficulties in finding them in a rugged, remote region where the U.S. military is officially forbidden to operate.

The UK's Guardian quotes a couple of sceptical experts:

Mike Scheur, the former chief of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit, said it may be that Hayden's comments may be aimed at trying to exploit recent outbursts by Muslim clerics against al-Qaida.

He added that Hayden had a reputation within the agency for being frank and honest but these comments might put a dent in it.

"The stuff on the ground that you can measure does not look like a strategic defeat for al-Qaida. When you look on the ground, they are expanding in the Levant and across North Africa. They have fought the US to a standstill in Iraq and Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden has not been caught. They have the initiative in Afghanistan."

Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of operations and analysis at the CIA's counter-terrorist centre, said Hayden was going public about a consensus reached within the agency about six weeks ago that al-Qaida had been weakened.

"The question is whether it is permanent or not. There is no real agreement on that," he said.

I'm not surprised there's no agreement on that. Violence in both Iraq and Afghanistan has proven to be cyclic, with new outbreaks following closely upon lulls that have previously enticed administration officials and their supporters to claim last corners being turned. Al Qaeda and the Taliban have both proven persistent hydras, able to regenerate after continued decapitations. If the Taliban were a spent force, they wouldn't have been able to overrun an Afghan town yesterday, even if security forces managed to take it back today. They wouldn't still outright control several remote areas, especially in Helmand province.

On the Pakistan/Afghan border, I'll take the word of General Dan McNeill over that of Hayden, as the former has proven himself even more of a straight talker than Hayden has been until now.

The departing American commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Dan McNeill, has raised concerns that Pakistan has not followed through on promises to tackle militancy on its side of the border, and in recent months has even stopped its cooperation with NATO and Afghan counterparts on border issues.

McNeill said Thursday that Pakistan's failure to act against militants in its tribal areas and its decision to hold talks with the militants without putting pressure on them had led to an increase in attacks against U.S. and NATO forces in eastern Afghanistan.

"We have not seen the actions that we had expected late last year; we have seen a different approach," he said before a news briefing in Kabul. "That is different from what most of us thought last year we were going to get."

Militancy rose last year in Pakistan, where officials indicated that tougher measures against the insurgents were planned. Instead, the government has sued for peace, a policy tried in 2005 and 2006 that led directly to a rise in attacks across the border, as is happening now.

"Over time, when there has been dialogue, or peace deals, the incidents have gone up," McNeill told journalists in Kabul and others in Brussels via videoconference. "What you see right now is the effects of no pressure on the extremists and insurgents on the other side of the border."

As if to underscore his point, a suicide car bomb exploded Thursday near a convoy of international forces on the eastern side of Kabul, killing four civilian bystanders and wounding 14 others, police officials said.

McNeill said that Pakistan had stopped the high-level meetings among Pakistani, Afghan and NATO counterparts that were the main conduit for resolving border issues and coordinating operations to combat cross-border infiltration.

The meetings are usually attended by the top generals on all sides, but Pakistan has postponed the last three, he said.

Perhaps McNeill, in his almost-forgotten posting, didn't get the White House memo that said everything must be painted rosy and punted down the road in the last five months of the Bush Years so that Republicans next year can point to how everything fouled up on Obama's watch.

DHS Security chief decries ‘war on terror’

By Cernig

The Department of Homeland Security's top intelligence official has urged the administration to stop using the phrase 'War on Terror", saying that it is counter-productive:

Charles Allen, the senior intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security, says the phrase is counter-productive because it creates “animus” in Islamic countries.

“[It] has nothing to do with political correctness,” Mr Allen said in an interview. “It is interpreted in the Muslim world as a war on Islam and we don’t need this.”

...While US officials have warned about an increasing potential for home-grown terrorism, Mr Allen welcomed the results of a 2007 study by the Pew Research Center, which found that the vast majority of US Muslims were concerned about the rise of Islamic extremism and had an unfavourable view of al-Qaeda.

Mr Allen says any comprehensive communications strategy demands a comprehensive outreach programme to Muslim communities both in the US and abroad, which he says is starting to happen.

He also recommends that the next president tell the American people that the country faces a “long, difficult struggle” and has “to engender the kind of strong counter-radicalisation and messaging abroad that will roll back this extremism”.

A recent memo from the homeland security department’s office for civil rights and civil liberties echoed some of these concerns. The memo said terminology employed by the US government should “avoid helping the terrorists by inflating the religious bases and glamorous appeal of their ideology” and “must be properly calibrated to diminish the recruitment efforts of extremists who argue that the west is at war with Islam”.

Mr Knocke, the Homeland Security spokesman, stressed that the memo was not formal policy, but a series of recommendation that have originated from “active and ongoing dialogue with the community to promote civic engagement and prevent radicalization”.

Frank Cilluffo, a terrorism expert at George Washington University and former special assistant to Mr Bush for homeland security, says the US government can take a series of steps to help counter al-Qaeda. He agrees that the US should abandon the concept of a “war on terror” – which “fuels the adversaries narrative” – and “decouple religion from ideology”.

It's a view that has gained wider acceptance from the likes of Peter Hoekstra, who has said the phrase is the “dumbest term…you could use”, and CJCS General Mullen.

While the military in general tends to echo the langauge of the president, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs who recently met with moderate Muslim leaders to hear their concerns, tries to ensure his language does not create the perception of a war against Islam, Captain John Kirby, his spokesman, said.

“The chairman is aware of the concerns voiced by many in the Muslim community about the phrase ‘war on terror’,” Captain Kirby said.

“He is committed – when speaking of it – to focusing his language and efforts on the violent extremists we are fighting. This is not a war on Islam. It’s a war against lethal enemies who are using a warped view of that faith to justify killing innocent civilians.”

Mullen will, hopefully, be outraged and dumbfounded by the latest "hearts and minds" failure in Iraq - US Marines handing out tokens urging the citizens of Fallujah to convert to Christianity. If there was ever a way to play into the extremists' narrative that US Christian soldiers are waging a crusade against Islam, this is it.

But really, the phrase "War on Terror" is just too useful domestically to Republicans to be dropped, as Zbigniew Brzezinski explained in a memorable March 2007 op-ed for the Washington Post:

Constant reference to a "war on terror" did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Support for President Bush in the 2004 elections was also mobilized in part by the notion that "a nation at war" does not change its commander in chief in midstream. The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being "at war."

...The culture of fear has bred intolerance, suspicion of foreigners and the adoption of legal procedures that undermine fundamental notions of justice. Innocent until proven guilty has been diluted if not undone, with some -- even U.S. citizens -- incarcerated for lengthy periods of time without effective and prompt access to due process. There is no known, hard evidence that such excess has prevented significant acts of terrorism, and convictions for would-be terrorists of any kind have been few and far between. Someday Americans will be as ashamed of this record as they now have become of the earlier instances in U.S. history of panic by the many prompting intolerance against the few.

...The events of 9/11 could have resulted in a truly global solidarity against extremism and terrorism. A global alliance of moderates, including Muslim ones, engaged in a deliberate campaign both to extirpate the specific terrorist networks and to terminate the political conflicts that spawn terrorism would have been more productive than a demagogically proclaimed and largely solitary U.S. "war on terror" against "Islamo-fascism." Only a confidently determined and reasonable America can promote genuine international security which then leaves no political space for terrorism.

Where is the U.S. leader ready to say, "Enough of this hysteria, stop this paranoia"?

Where indeed?

How Should Progressives Wage War?

By Cernig

SecDef Bob Gates among others have been vocal recently in calling for America to "fight the wars it has" rather than chase big-ticket procurement of massive shiny toys which keep arms manufacturers in a cozy government welfare program but will only be useful if America fights a war it isn't in yet. Meanwhile, we're already seeing interventionist hawks attack Obama for "appeasement" in wanting to use negotiation to solve problems and raising the old chestnut of progressives never waging even an undeniably just war for fear of breaking eggs (collateral damage and civilian deaths) while making an omelet.

Back in 2006, I got to thinking about these issues in the light of the counter-insurgency principles that "less is more" and that "hearts and minds" always end up more important than body counts of bad guys. What follows is mostly copied from a post back then - but I keep revisiting that post and I still think it's largely correct. However, Newshoggers has a rather larger readership than it did in 2006 - this idea is being put forward again for criticism. If you think you can shoot it full of holes, please do so.

Although as a democratic socialist I believe that whenever possible conflict should be settled by diplomacy and negotiation I am also a realist enough to understand that is not always possible. In particular, fundamentalist extremists willing to turn to terror and violence - often backed by states with a vested interest in keeping such groups on some kind of leash - have historically presented a major problem to peaceable conflict resolution. Given that force must occasionally be used as a last resort, where diplomacy will not suffice, it makes sense to me to say that we want to use that force in the best way - that is, the most successful for conflict resolution.

It is an article of faith among many that overwhelming military force is just as valid and valuable a response in fighting terror as it indubitably is in fighting another State's regular armed forces - is that actually the case?

The short answer to that is undoubtedly "No". To see this we only have to look at the situations in which America and some of its major allies around the world find themselves. Even where 3rd generation warfare was incredibly successful in the state-on-state phase of a conflict, the occupations or hunting down and eradicating of terrorist and insurgent groups has been an universal failure when using the same equipment and tactics.

In Lebanon and Palestine, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, bombing even with "precision" weapons seems to kill and radicalize more of the civilian population than it kills terrorists. Heavy troop presence becomes an incitement to radicalization when the populace sees it's land as "occupied" rather than seeing "liberators". Tanks and heavy artillery simply add to the disproportionate civilian carnage of the fighter-bombers while being easier for an insurgency to gain PR points by counter-attacking. Surely only the dumbest of the dumb would expect a different outcome from exactly the same set of failed tactics.

For those who seem to be exactly that dumb, here's a short refresher course in Guerrilla War 101, courtesy of the guy who literally wrote the book (and who thinks the neocons are morons) William S. Lind:

Air power works against you, not for you. It kills lots of people who weren’t your enemy, recruiting their relatives, friends and fellow tribesmen to become your enemies. In this kind of war, bombers are as useful as 42 cm. siege mortars.

Big, noisy, offensives, launched with lots of warning, achieve nothing. The enemy just goes to ground while you pass on through, and he’s still there when you leave. Big Pushes are the opposite of the “ink blot” strategy, which is the only thing that works, when anything can.

Putting the Big Push together with lots of bombing in Afghanistan’s Pashtun country means we end up fighting most if not all of the Pashtun. In Afghan wars, the Pashtun always win in the end. [Apply this to the ethnic/religious group with a generations-long warrior tradition of your choice for other regions. It still works. - C]

Quisling governments fail because they cannot achieve legitimacy.

You need closure, but your guerrilla enemy doesn’t. He not only can fight until Doomsday, he intends to do just that-if not you, then someone else.

The bigger the operations you have to undertake, the more surely your enemy is winning.

And more - as Lind quotes from expert Chet Richards in his forthcoming book "Neither Shall The Sword":

war is terrorism, so a “war on terrorism” is a war on war. We are not in a war on “terrorism” or engaged in a “struggle against violent extremism.” Instead, we are faced with an evolutionary development in armed conflict, a “fourth generation” of warfare that is different from and much more serious than “terrorism”…

to see the difference between 4GW and “terrorism,” run this simple thought experiment: suppose bin Laden and al-Qaida were able to enforce their program on the Middle East, but they succeeded without the deliberate killing of one more American civilian. The entire Middle East turns hostile, Israel is destroyed, and gas goes up to $15 per gallon when it is available. Bin Laden’s 4GW campaign succeeds, but without terrorism. Do you feel better?

This applies to situations like Iraq and Afghanistan:

It’s not a war followed by a blown peace. That is conventional war thinking, even if the war is waged and quickly won by 3GW. Instead, it will be an occupation against some degree of resistance, followed by the real, fourth generation war.

I've a notion that the correct strategy lies in going exactly the other way in applying asymmetric force. Less is more. Assassinate known and self-admitted terrorist leaders and those who noisily support them from positions of state or popular power. Those individuals who lead, support and advocate terror only and no others. Do not create civilian casualties to fuel the next round of hate. One of the very first effects will be to concentrate the minds of both sides' leadership - often the very people who are safest from the destruction they create, towards ceasefires, conflict resolution and peace.

Let the terrorists be the only ones to ever mass-kill innocents and even many who support them will change their minds about that support, gradually removing their power base of generational hatred. Back that up with a genuinely universal foreign policy of ethical intervention and aid (hearts and minds) and the effect will be multiplied. Between the two, it would even dampen down, through both positive and negative reinforcement, the process of replacing the terrorist leaders and the leaders who enable them.

The West has the tools - highly trained special forces and intelligence units. No person is safe from a trained and motivated assassin backed by the kind of support technology modern democracies can provide. But don't use bombs and artillery - they just aren't accurate enough, even when "precision" is prefixed to their names by the advertising blurb.

Should this mean threats of reciprocity - killing of the West's leaders and and its own versions of advocates of genocide - then let those threatened people declare "bring it on". Let them too have the courage to face the bullet from afar. (Isn't the dream of the common man to have the two leaders in a conflict fight it out as champions without a multitude of peasants' deaths? This would be as close to it as we are likely to get.)

Should any nation descend into chaos because too much of its leadership class has been removed then - as the neocons never cease to remind us - not all medicine tastes nice. Which is preferable, a chaotic nation where inimical strongmen are still around to help guide the chaos along to their own ends or one where a true "hearts and minds" policy can soften the blow, shorten the interregnum and help the blameless innocent - all of whom will blissfully still be alive - choose a decent path for their nation free of the machinations of terrorist leaders and their enablers?

Let me make myself clear - I'm not advocating secret wars of political assassination here. I'm talking about a new approach to waging declared wars - one that minimizes killing of innocents, maximizes killing the bad guys that count and can drive change in a destructive group or a rogue regime, either by allowing those who are amenable to rational negotiation to rise to power or by decapitating leadership in a way that allows massive reconstruction forces of the kind envisioned by Gates and others - "wingtips on the ground" in current COIN-speak - a far easier time in stepping into the consequent breach.

But it would mean the U.S. spearheading a move to have the prohibition against direct targeting of political leaders struck from international law - a prohibition nowadays which is effectively ignored by massively penetrating ordinance anyway and which was originally set up by political leaders who wanted to guard their own elite asses while sending peons into the meat-grinder. There would be a political price to pay for that if it wasn't handled delicately and with full explanation of the whys and wherefores. Even so, I think it would make sense from a progressive point of view and from the view of those COIN specialists contemplating the kinds of wars America and the world look to be engaging in for now and the considerable future.

So go on - shoot it down, build on it, whatever.

Nobody Is Safe

By Cernig

How's this for a scary sentence?

Government lawyers told federal judges that the president can send the military into any U.S. neighborhood, capture a citizen and hold him in prison without charge, indefinitely.

The government says the president needs this power to keep the nation safe and says that Congress gave the president this power when it passed the passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force. Lawyers for a US resident declared an illegal combatant and taken out of the civilian justice system to a military brig in South Carolina so that he can be interrogated without a lawyer present say that it's unconstititional and that as long as the president can detain anyone he wants, nobody is safe.

As usual Joe Lieberman is wrong

By Ron Beasley

Joe Lieberman like Bill Kristol and the entire Bush administration has been wrong about everything.  That didn't prevent him from taking the Democrats to task on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.  Today Senator Joe Biden does a good job of taking Mr Lieberman to task on those same pages.

On Wednesday, Joe Lieberman wrote on this page that the Democratic Party he and I grew up in has drifted far from the foreign policy espoused by Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy.

In fact, it is the policies that President George W. Bush has pursued, and that John McCain would continue, that are divorced from that great tradition – and from the legacy of Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Sen. Lieberman is right: 9/11 was a pivotal moment. History will judge Mr. Bush's reaction less for the mistakes he made than for the opportunities he squandered.

The president had a historic opportunity to unite Americans and the world in common cause. Instead – by exploiting the politics of fear, instigating an optional war in Iraq before finishing a necessary war in Afghanistan, and instituting policies on torture, detainees and domestic surveillance that fly in the face of our values and interests – Mr. Bush divided Americans from each other and from the world.

But it's Joe Conason who really explains what Joe Lieberman is all about in Joe Lieberman, ideological turncoat.

Despite his boundless pretensions, Sen. Joe Lieberman is not and has never been a font of foreign policy wisdom. His opinions derive as much from expedience and vanity as any consistent worldview. He will say whatever serves his ambitions at a given moment.

Running against antiwar Democrat Ned Lamont almost two years ago, for instance, he promised Connecticut voters that we were on the cusp of victory in Iraq. "I am confident that the situation is improving enough on the ground that by the end of this year, we will begin to draw down significant numbers of American troops," he said in October 2006, "and by the end of the next year more than half of the troops who are there now will be home." Within weeks after winning that election, of course, Lieberman was joining with Sen. John McCain, his friend and ideological ally, in support of sending 30,000 additional American troops to Iraq -- and bringing exactly none home.

Was he lying when he offered that false but comforting assurance in the heat of a Senate campaign? Was he simply unable to distinguish between reality and his own propaganda? A similar set of questions confronted readers of a Lieberman essay on foreign policy and the Democrats that appeared Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, where we can expect the "independent Democrat" to appear often during the coming months as a turncoat surrogate for McCain -- because today he evidently hopes for appointment as a token Democrat in a Republican Cabinet, or even a second nomination as vice president, on the Republican ticket.

Lieberman's theme in the Journal essay, excerpted from a speech he delivered at an event sponsored by Commentary magazine, the leading neoconservative journal, is easily summarized and utterly unoriginal: Democrats were once patriotic and strong on defense, when Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy led the party, but they have lapsed (again) into weakness and vacillation during the Bush era. And Lieberman pillories Barack Obama for suggesting that he would sit down and talk with the leaders of Iran and other adversarial regimes and for failing to stand up to the party's overbearing liberal wing.

For someone who once considered himself a history scholar, Lieberman shamelessly falsifies not only the diplomacy of past and current administrations but also, by omission, his own political pedigree. His Journal essay opens with a lament about the condition of the Democratic Party and an idealized glance back at the "principled, internationalist, strong and successful" foreign policy of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Truman.

[......]

The Democrats have struggled over foreign policy since Vietnam, although Lieberman's indictment of a party that abandoned the president after 9/11 is just as dishonest as his failure to discuss his own evolution. Democrats stood in lock step with Bush when he invaded Afghanistan, and only began to break with him over Iraq, a ruinous war that was based on lies.

As for his complaint against Obama's willingness to engage with v