A Terrorist Defeat. WSJ Editorial
After negotiation failed, Sri Lanka pursued a military solution.
WSJ, May 20, 2009
The war on terror scored a big victory this weekend with the Sri Lankan army's battlefield defeat of the terrorist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The event vindicates one of the major lessons of September 11: Most of the time, terrorists have to be defeated militarily before political accommodation is possible.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa announced that the army had routed the Tigers from their last redoubt in the island's Northern Province, killing Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and several hundred top militant leaders. Prabhakaran's apparent demise is the Sri Lankan equivalent to killing Osama bin Laden. It's much less likely the cadres will continue a low-level terrorist insurgency.
How Sri Lanka got here is worth recounting. The island's conflict started in 1983. After Sri Lanka's independence from Britain, the ethnic Sinhalese majority pursued many discriminatory policies against the Tamil minority: a Sinhala-only language policy, preferences for Sinhalese in university admissions and government hiring, and the exclusion of Tamils from the police.
The war quickly became more about Prabhakaran's determination to form an independent Tamil state under the exclusive control of his Marxist Tigers than about those Tamil grievances. The Tigers killed many moderate Tamil politicians who would have been willing to cooperate politically with Colombo.
Prabhakaran made extensive use of suicide bombers -- including a teenage girl who blew herself up to assassinate former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 -- and relied heavily on child soldiers. Sri Lanka's conflict has claimed 70,000 lives by most counts. It should have been clear early on that government negotiation would go nowhere with such a committed killer.
Mr. Rajapaksa, elected in 2005, put an end to the "peace process" with Prabhakaran and focused on winning the military fight. In 2007, with the help of a Tiger splinter group, the government subdued the Eastern Province; the first elections were held there last year. The fighting then moved to the North. It has not been cheap or easy. Military spending in the 2009 budget is $1.7 billion, 5% of GDP and 20% of the government's budget.
Colombo also learned lessons from its earlier failures. The military improved its training in counterinsurgency tactics, and Colombo invested the resources to enable the army to hold territory it won. Moves by the United States, Britain, Canada and other countries to freeze Tiger fundraising among the Tamil diaspora helped weaken the Tigers. Mr. Rajapaksa wisely ignored international calls for a ceasefire as he got closer to victory, including threats from the Obama Administration to block $1.9 billion in International Monetary Fund aid money.
The government now faces a potential humanitarian crisis in housing, feeding and clothing the more than 200,000 Tamil civilians who have fled the fighting. Sri Lanka has to more fully address the political grievances of moderate Tamils and ensure that there are economic opportunities for all Sri Lankans. After decades of socialism, several rounds of liberalization have since paved the way for 6% to 8% annual growth even amid a civil war.
As Colombo starts to grapple with those post-conflict problems, everyone else can take note: Thanks to a strategy of defeating the insurgency, Sri Lanka is now in a position to talk seriously about peace and economic growth. When negotiating with terrorists doesn't work, Plan B is defeating them.
Showing posts with label war on terror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war on terror. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
The irresponsible Office of Professional Responsibility
Obama's Injustice Department, by Michael Stokes Paulsen
The irresponsible Office of Professional Responsibility.
The Weekly Standard, May 25, 2009, Volume 014, Issue 34
Government lawyers in the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) appear to have leaked to the press parts of a confidential--and classified--draft report concerning the actions of Bush administration lawyers. The report calls for state bar associations to investigate, and perhaps discipline, attorneys who provided sensitive legal advice to President Bush's administration concerning the legal limits of coercive interrogation methods against high-level al Qaeda terrorists. That advice was, of course, controversial. It is now, in the current political climate, highly unpopular in certain circles. OPR has determined, apparently, that it was "unethical" to give it and that the lawyers involved should be punished.
How many things are wrong with this picture? From the perspective of legal ethics, constitutional law, and good government, I count at least five big problems.
1. The leak itself: Trial by innuendo and media exploitation is a McCarthyite tactic and is forbidden by the canons of legal ethics. So too is a breach of a lawyer's duty of confidentiality. Here, the original leak dates back to December, and it is not hard to discern a reason behind it: OPR's draft report was emphatically rejected by then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey. What's a bureaucrat to do, when his views are repudiated by his boss? In Washington, the answer is to leak the views to the press. But for a lawyer, such conduct is among the most fundamental of ethical violations: The ABA's Rules of Professional Conduct state: "A lawyer shall not reveal information relating to the representation of a client unless the client gives informed consent."
Violating client confidentiality is a grave ethical breach. It is the type of conduct for which shoddy lawyers are routinely disbarred or suspended from the practice of law. In this case, to the extent the disclosure involves classified information, such conduct may well be a federal crime.
If the leak came from, or involved the knowing assistance of, lawyers in the OPR or elsewhere, they should be investigated and disciplined. It is outrageous to think that government "ethics" lawyers would engage in such blatantly unethical conduct. Who watches these watchdogs? OPR's reported actions suggest that the real need is for an ethics investigation of the Justice Department's ethics office.
2. Unconstitutionally outsourcing federal ethics responsibility: Then there is OPR's cowardly attempt to farm out ethics investigations to state bar authorities. This is a transparently political maneuver. It is also contrary to longstanding federal policy--and arguably to the Constitution. The Department of Justice has maintained that regulation of the ethics and conduct of federal government attorneys is a matter for the federal government, acting through the attorney general--not for state bar panels. Were it -otherwise, state officials could interfere with the conduct of federal officials. (Constitutional lawyers will recognize this as a problem under the Supreme Court's famous 1819 decision in McCulloch v. Maryland, which held that state laws may not interfere with federal officers' actions.)
Why would OPR recommend this? To impose political punishment (of a sort) on Bush attorneys, but without bearing accountability. The Obama Justice Department is, rightly, reluctant to take "disciplinary" action itself with respect to the attorneys who advised the prior administration. In the first place, it is not clear what it meaningfully could do since those involved no longer work for the executive branch. Second, it would smack of partisan payback (which it is). What better solution than to outsource the task to "neutral" bar authorities? But this is a transparent façade that should fool no one. And it is a ruse that would come back to harm Democratic as well as Republican administrations: Whenever you disagree strongly with lawyers' advice from a previous administration, don't just change the legal advice, ask state bar associations to investigate. This is an excellent formula only if your goal is to chill candid legal advice and government service by licensing retaliation against lawyers in prior administrations with whose views you disagree.
3. Incompetently assessing lawyers' professional roles: OPR seemingly has no comprehension of the basic principle of legal ethics that a lawyer does not endorse everything his client may wish to do, within the bounds of the law. A lawyer acts properly when he seeks to help his client figure out exactly where the lines are. ABA Rule 1.2(d) provides that lawyers may not counsel clients to engage in conduct they know is illegal, but that a lawyer "may discuss the legal consequences of any proposed course of conduct with a client and may counsel or assist a client to make a good faith effort to determine the validity, scope, meaning or application of the law." It is plain from reading the memos involved that this is exactly what the Bush Justice Department lawyers were doing--discussing with their clients the legal consequences of what they proposed to do and endeavoring to assist them to ascertain the meaning and scope of the laws and constitutional provisions involved.
The leaks suggest that OPR has reviewed internal emails and found what it thinks are indications that the client agencies (the CIA or the White House) wanted the Department of Justice attorneys to come out a certain way or consider specific issues or arguments--that they had a desired or preferred outcome, which would permit harsh interrogations to go forward. Surprise! Clients always have a desired result in mind and would prefer that their lawyers say yes rather than no. Government agencies are, in my experience, no different from any other client in this regard.
But so what? In the absence of smoking-gun evidence that the lawyers had concluded that a proposed course of conduct was illegal, but that they then agreed to provide a "cover" memo whose advice was contrary to that conclusion, there is no ethical problem here at all. There is nothing wrong with a lawyer exhaustively studying all plausible legal avenues that might sustain a client's desired course of conduct. There is nothing wrong with exploring additional arguments that may support a client's proposed course of action, even if those might not have been part of a lawyer's initial thinking. There is nothing wrong even with a lawyer reconsidering or modifying his initial views in the course of such a process.
For OPR to suggest anything else--to suggest that this is a violation of legal ethics principles--would be, in my opinion, an incompetent analysis of the law of legal ethics.
4. Incompetence about competence: Which brings me to a fourth huge flaw in what OPR is said to be reporting: the suggestion that the Bush administration lawyers' legal work failed to satisfy professional standards of "competence." The notion is that failure to cite some specific case, or to discuss some historical precedent, renders the Bush team's legal analysis incompetent.
As a matter of legal ethics law, as applied to the memos in question, this is simply ludicrous. One may well disagree with the conclusions reached in one or more of the memos, or with some of the arguments contained therein. One may well think that the memos should have been written differently--discussed certain points not included, omitted certain arguments that were included; said less, said more. But there is a world of difference between Monday-morning quarterbacking and incompetent lawyering. Anyone who does not recognize that is not thinking straight--is either not himself a good lawyer or is blinded by a partisan agenda. One can make many fair criticisms of the legal memos, but incompetence is not a charge that can fairly be made.
5. Incompetence about the underlying law: Constitutional law, in addition to legal ethics, is one of my areas of teaching and scholarship. In my opinion, the most basic problem with any suggestion of incompetence is that the memos' essential legal conclusions are correct. There is a fundamental distinction in the law between what constitutes actual, legal "torture" under applicable standards and what may be harsh, aggressive, unpleasant interrogation tactics but not, legally, "torture." Reasonable people will come to different conclusions as to where that line is, but the Bush administration's lawyers' conclusions are certainly defensible and, I think, ultimately correct. As a matter of constitutional law, moreover, the Bush administration memos' most sweeping and categorical conclusion--that at all events no statute or treaty may limit the president's sole constitutional powers as military commander in chief to direct and conduct the use of U.S. force--is in my opinion unquestionably correct.
This view is informed by my experience both as a law professor and, nearly two decades ago, as an attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) of the Department of Justice--the same office that provided the advice in question during President George W. Bush's administration. The types of constitutional and statutory arguments made in the disputed memos are consistent with longstanding OLC positions with respect to presidential power under Article II of the Constitution. They involve subtle niceties of constitutional law and history. OPR attorneys are, as a rule, not as conversant in such matters. To put the point in terms of legal ethics: Were the Office of Professional Responsibility to purport to pass judgment on the competence of the constitutional and statutory analysis of the OLC memos, it would be straying far beyond its areas of purported competence.
When I teach legal ethics, I tell my students that one aspect of competence is to know what you know and to know what you don't know, and to stay away from the latter. It is fair to wonder whether staff attorneys in OPR--whose actions with respect even to the law of legal -ethics appear so dubious--possess the requisite professional skill, expertise, and knowledge to competently evaluate (let alone second-guess) OLC lawyers' analysis of constitutional law, treaties, international law, and complicated criminal statutes. We will see: If OPR's leaked report becomes public and indeed takes the Bush team to task on grounds of professional legal competence, it will be fair to ask whether OPR attorneys really understand the substantive law they are talking about--or whether the charge of incompetence falls more heavily on their own heads.
Unethical leaks and confidentiality violations; outsourcing federal responsibilities; basic misunderstandings of legal ethics principles; incompetent analysis of constitutional, international, treaty, and statutory law. What more could be wrong with an ethics office's actions? It is hard to know for sure--without seeing OPR's report--the full extent to which it contains all of these problems. But leaked accounts of the OPR's draft report so far call that office's ethics and professionalism into question more than they do those of anyone else.
Michael Stokes Paulsen is university chair and professor of law at the University of St. Thomas, in Minneapolis. He was an attorney-adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel from 1989-91.
The irresponsible Office of Professional Responsibility.
The Weekly Standard, May 25, 2009, Volume 014, Issue 34
Government lawyers in the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) appear to have leaked to the press parts of a confidential--and classified--draft report concerning the actions of Bush administration lawyers. The report calls for state bar associations to investigate, and perhaps discipline, attorneys who provided sensitive legal advice to President Bush's administration concerning the legal limits of coercive interrogation methods against high-level al Qaeda terrorists. That advice was, of course, controversial. It is now, in the current political climate, highly unpopular in certain circles. OPR has determined, apparently, that it was "unethical" to give it and that the lawyers involved should be punished.
How many things are wrong with this picture? From the perspective of legal ethics, constitutional law, and good government, I count at least five big problems.
1. The leak itself: Trial by innuendo and media exploitation is a McCarthyite tactic and is forbidden by the canons of legal ethics. So too is a breach of a lawyer's duty of confidentiality. Here, the original leak dates back to December, and it is not hard to discern a reason behind it: OPR's draft report was emphatically rejected by then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey. What's a bureaucrat to do, when his views are repudiated by his boss? In Washington, the answer is to leak the views to the press. But for a lawyer, such conduct is among the most fundamental of ethical violations: The ABA's Rules of Professional Conduct state: "A lawyer shall not reveal information relating to the representation of a client unless the client gives informed consent."
Violating client confidentiality is a grave ethical breach. It is the type of conduct for which shoddy lawyers are routinely disbarred or suspended from the practice of law. In this case, to the extent the disclosure involves classified information, such conduct may well be a federal crime.
If the leak came from, or involved the knowing assistance of, lawyers in the OPR or elsewhere, they should be investigated and disciplined. It is outrageous to think that government "ethics" lawyers would engage in such blatantly unethical conduct. Who watches these watchdogs? OPR's reported actions suggest that the real need is for an ethics investigation of the Justice Department's ethics office.
2. Unconstitutionally outsourcing federal ethics responsibility: Then there is OPR's cowardly attempt to farm out ethics investigations to state bar authorities. This is a transparently political maneuver. It is also contrary to longstanding federal policy--and arguably to the Constitution. The Department of Justice has maintained that regulation of the ethics and conduct of federal government attorneys is a matter for the federal government, acting through the attorney general--not for state bar panels. Were it -otherwise, state officials could interfere with the conduct of federal officials. (Constitutional lawyers will recognize this as a problem under the Supreme Court's famous 1819 decision in McCulloch v. Maryland, which held that state laws may not interfere with federal officers' actions.)
Why would OPR recommend this? To impose political punishment (of a sort) on Bush attorneys, but without bearing accountability. The Obama Justice Department is, rightly, reluctant to take "disciplinary" action itself with respect to the attorneys who advised the prior administration. In the first place, it is not clear what it meaningfully could do since those involved no longer work for the executive branch. Second, it would smack of partisan payback (which it is). What better solution than to outsource the task to "neutral" bar authorities? But this is a transparent façade that should fool no one. And it is a ruse that would come back to harm Democratic as well as Republican administrations: Whenever you disagree strongly with lawyers' advice from a previous administration, don't just change the legal advice, ask state bar associations to investigate. This is an excellent formula only if your goal is to chill candid legal advice and government service by licensing retaliation against lawyers in prior administrations with whose views you disagree.
3. Incompetently assessing lawyers' professional roles: OPR seemingly has no comprehension of the basic principle of legal ethics that a lawyer does not endorse everything his client may wish to do, within the bounds of the law. A lawyer acts properly when he seeks to help his client figure out exactly where the lines are. ABA Rule 1.2(d) provides that lawyers may not counsel clients to engage in conduct they know is illegal, but that a lawyer "may discuss the legal consequences of any proposed course of conduct with a client and may counsel or assist a client to make a good faith effort to determine the validity, scope, meaning or application of the law." It is plain from reading the memos involved that this is exactly what the Bush Justice Department lawyers were doing--discussing with their clients the legal consequences of what they proposed to do and endeavoring to assist them to ascertain the meaning and scope of the laws and constitutional provisions involved.
The leaks suggest that OPR has reviewed internal emails and found what it thinks are indications that the client agencies (the CIA or the White House) wanted the Department of Justice attorneys to come out a certain way or consider specific issues or arguments--that they had a desired or preferred outcome, which would permit harsh interrogations to go forward. Surprise! Clients always have a desired result in mind and would prefer that their lawyers say yes rather than no. Government agencies are, in my experience, no different from any other client in this regard.
But so what? In the absence of smoking-gun evidence that the lawyers had concluded that a proposed course of conduct was illegal, but that they then agreed to provide a "cover" memo whose advice was contrary to that conclusion, there is no ethical problem here at all. There is nothing wrong with a lawyer exhaustively studying all plausible legal avenues that might sustain a client's desired course of conduct. There is nothing wrong with exploring additional arguments that may support a client's proposed course of action, even if those might not have been part of a lawyer's initial thinking. There is nothing wrong even with a lawyer reconsidering or modifying his initial views in the course of such a process.
For OPR to suggest anything else--to suggest that this is a violation of legal ethics principles--would be, in my opinion, an incompetent analysis of the law of legal ethics.
4. Incompetence about competence: Which brings me to a fourth huge flaw in what OPR is said to be reporting: the suggestion that the Bush administration lawyers' legal work failed to satisfy professional standards of "competence." The notion is that failure to cite some specific case, or to discuss some historical precedent, renders the Bush team's legal analysis incompetent.
As a matter of legal ethics law, as applied to the memos in question, this is simply ludicrous. One may well disagree with the conclusions reached in one or more of the memos, or with some of the arguments contained therein. One may well think that the memos should have been written differently--discussed certain points not included, omitted certain arguments that were included; said less, said more. But there is a world of difference between Monday-morning quarterbacking and incompetent lawyering. Anyone who does not recognize that is not thinking straight--is either not himself a good lawyer or is blinded by a partisan agenda. One can make many fair criticisms of the legal memos, but incompetence is not a charge that can fairly be made.
5. Incompetence about the underlying law: Constitutional law, in addition to legal ethics, is one of my areas of teaching and scholarship. In my opinion, the most basic problem with any suggestion of incompetence is that the memos' essential legal conclusions are correct. There is a fundamental distinction in the law between what constitutes actual, legal "torture" under applicable standards and what may be harsh, aggressive, unpleasant interrogation tactics but not, legally, "torture." Reasonable people will come to different conclusions as to where that line is, but the Bush administration's lawyers' conclusions are certainly defensible and, I think, ultimately correct. As a matter of constitutional law, moreover, the Bush administration memos' most sweeping and categorical conclusion--that at all events no statute or treaty may limit the president's sole constitutional powers as military commander in chief to direct and conduct the use of U.S. force--is in my opinion unquestionably correct.
This view is informed by my experience both as a law professor and, nearly two decades ago, as an attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) of the Department of Justice--the same office that provided the advice in question during President George W. Bush's administration. The types of constitutional and statutory arguments made in the disputed memos are consistent with longstanding OLC positions with respect to presidential power under Article II of the Constitution. They involve subtle niceties of constitutional law and history. OPR attorneys are, as a rule, not as conversant in such matters. To put the point in terms of legal ethics: Were the Office of Professional Responsibility to purport to pass judgment on the competence of the constitutional and statutory analysis of the OLC memos, it would be straying far beyond its areas of purported competence.
When I teach legal ethics, I tell my students that one aspect of competence is to know what you know and to know what you don't know, and to stay away from the latter. It is fair to wonder whether staff attorneys in OPR--whose actions with respect even to the law of legal -ethics appear so dubious--possess the requisite professional skill, expertise, and knowledge to competently evaluate (let alone second-guess) OLC lawyers' analysis of constitutional law, treaties, international law, and complicated criminal statutes. We will see: If OPR's leaked report becomes public and indeed takes the Bush team to task on grounds of professional legal competence, it will be fair to ask whether OPR attorneys really understand the substantive law they are talking about--or whether the charge of incompetence falls more heavily on their own heads.
Unethical leaks and confidentiality violations; outsourcing federal responsibilities; basic misunderstandings of legal ethics principles; incompetent analysis of constitutional, international, treaty, and statutory law. What more could be wrong with an ethics office's actions? It is hard to know for sure--without seeing OPR's report--the full extent to which it contains all of these problems. But leaked accounts of the OPR's draft report so far call that office's ethics and professionalism into question more than they do those of anyone else.
Michael Stokes Paulsen is university chair and professor of law at the University of St. Thomas, in Minneapolis. He was an attorney-adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel from 1989-91.
Iran's Nuclear Shopping List
Iran's Nuclear Shopping List. WSJ Editorial
Morgenthau: 'It's late in the game.'
WSJ, May 19, 2009
Back when the Bush Administration was warning about Iran's nuclear progress, or its deadly meddling in Iraq, the typical Democratic and media response was to treat the Islamic Republic as innocent until proven guilty. This month, Democrat Robert Morgenthau supplied the proof.
In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that was largely ignored by the media, the legendary Manhattan District Attorney opened a window on how Iran is secretly obtaining the ingredients for an arsenal of mass destruction. Mr. Morgenthau, whose recent cases have exposed illicit Iranian finance and procurement networks, has discovered what he calls "Iran's shopping list for materials related to weapons of mass destruction." They add up to "literally thousands of records."
Missile accuracy appears to be a key Iranian goal. In one of Mr. Morgenthau's cases -- the prosecution of Chinese citizen Li Fang Wei and his LIMMT company for allegedly scamming Manhattan banks to slip past sanctions on Iran -- the DA uncovered a list that included 400 sophisticated gyroscopes and 600 accelerometers. These are critical for developing accurate long-range missiles. He also found that Iran was acquiring a rare metal called tantalum, "used in those roadside bombs that are being used against our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan." So much for the media notion that Iran has played no part in killing American GIs.
Mr. Morgenthau also noted that the material shipped by LIMMT "included 15,000 kilograms of a specialized aluminum alloy used almost exclusively in long-range missile production; 1,700 kilograms of graphite cylinders used for banned electrical discharge machines which are used in converting uranium; more than 30,000 kilograms of tungsten-copper plates; 200 pieces of tungsten-copper alloy hollow cylinders, all used for missiles; 19,000 kilograms of tungsten metal powder, and 24,500 kilograms of maraging steel rods . . . especially hardened steel suitable for long-range missiles."
Lest anyone think that these materials may have innocent uses, Mr. Morgenthau added that "we have consulted with top experts in the field from MIT and from private industry and from the CIA. . . . Frankly, some of the people we've consulted are shocked by the sophistication of the equipment they're buying."
Mr. Morgenthau's information is corroborated by a staff report for the Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Democrat John Kerry, which notes that Iran is making nuclear progress on all fronts, and that it "could produce enough weapons-grade material for a bomb within six months." The committee also notes that "Iran is operating a broad network of front organizations," and that authorities suspect "some purchases for Iran's nuclear and missile programs may have come through an elaborate ruse to avoid U.S. financial sanctions on dealing with Iranian banks."
As we've reported, Lloyds bank entered into a deferred prosecution agreement in January with Mr. Morgenthau's office in which it admitted to a $300 million "stripping" scheme designed to hide the Iranian origin of banking transfers from 2001 to 2004. Several other banks are also in the crosshairs of Mr. Morgenthau and the Justice Department.
All this should put to rest any doubts about the Iranian regime's purposes and determination. As for what the U.S. should do about it, the committee report insists that "direct engagement" must be a part of American strategy, and so it seems fated to be under the Obama Administration. The least it can do is heed Mr. Morgenthau's central point about everything he's learned about Iran's nuclear progress: "It's late in the game, and we don't have a lot of time."
Morgenthau: 'It's late in the game.'
WSJ, May 19, 2009
Back when the Bush Administration was warning about Iran's nuclear progress, or its deadly meddling in Iraq, the typical Democratic and media response was to treat the Islamic Republic as innocent until proven guilty. This month, Democrat Robert Morgenthau supplied the proof.
In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that was largely ignored by the media, the legendary Manhattan District Attorney opened a window on how Iran is secretly obtaining the ingredients for an arsenal of mass destruction. Mr. Morgenthau, whose recent cases have exposed illicit Iranian finance and procurement networks, has discovered what he calls "Iran's shopping list for materials related to weapons of mass destruction." They add up to "literally thousands of records."
Missile accuracy appears to be a key Iranian goal. In one of Mr. Morgenthau's cases -- the prosecution of Chinese citizen Li Fang Wei and his LIMMT company for allegedly scamming Manhattan banks to slip past sanctions on Iran -- the DA uncovered a list that included 400 sophisticated gyroscopes and 600 accelerometers. These are critical for developing accurate long-range missiles. He also found that Iran was acquiring a rare metal called tantalum, "used in those roadside bombs that are being used against our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan." So much for the media notion that Iran has played no part in killing American GIs.
Mr. Morgenthau also noted that the material shipped by LIMMT "included 15,000 kilograms of a specialized aluminum alloy used almost exclusively in long-range missile production; 1,700 kilograms of graphite cylinders used for banned electrical discharge machines which are used in converting uranium; more than 30,000 kilograms of tungsten-copper plates; 200 pieces of tungsten-copper alloy hollow cylinders, all used for missiles; 19,000 kilograms of tungsten metal powder, and 24,500 kilograms of maraging steel rods . . . especially hardened steel suitable for long-range missiles."
Lest anyone think that these materials may have innocent uses, Mr. Morgenthau added that "we have consulted with top experts in the field from MIT and from private industry and from the CIA. . . . Frankly, some of the people we've consulted are shocked by the sophistication of the equipment they're buying."
Mr. Morgenthau's information is corroborated by a staff report for the Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Democrat John Kerry, which notes that Iran is making nuclear progress on all fronts, and that it "could produce enough weapons-grade material for a bomb within six months." The committee also notes that "Iran is operating a broad network of front organizations," and that authorities suspect "some purchases for Iran's nuclear and missile programs may have come through an elaborate ruse to avoid U.S. financial sanctions on dealing with Iranian banks."
As we've reported, Lloyds bank entered into a deferred prosecution agreement in January with Mr. Morgenthau's office in which it admitted to a $300 million "stripping" scheme designed to hide the Iranian origin of banking transfers from 2001 to 2004. Several other banks are also in the crosshairs of Mr. Morgenthau and the Justice Department.
All this should put to rest any doubts about the Iranian regime's purposes and determination. As for what the U.S. should do about it, the committee report insists that "direct engagement" must be a part of American strategy, and so it seems fated to be under the Obama Administration. The least it can do is heed Mr. Morgenthau's central point about everything he's learned about Iran's nuclear progress: "It's late in the game, and we don't have a lot of time."
Sunday, May 17, 2009
WaPo: Mr. Obama's War? No, it's America's war
Mr. Obama's War? WaPo Editorial
No. Like it or not, it's America's war.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
PRESIDENT OBAMA'S clashes with the liberal base of his party are the kind of sporting event that Washington loves. But what Mr. Obama is confronting is less his party and more a stubborn reality that many in his party are unwilling to accept: There are forces in the world that continue to wage war against the United States and its allies, whether or not the United States wants to acknowledge that war.
Mr. Obama's recent decisions on paying for Afghanistan, reviving military tribunals and withholding photos of detainee abuse, among others, all reflect this reality. Although we disagreed with his conclusion on the photos, we sympathize with his concern that it might harm Americans fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. His announcement Friday that he had reversed his opposition to trying some enemy detainees in military commissions reflects, again, the fact of a nation at war; the federal courts will not be the proper venue for every al-Qaeda member captured by U.S. forces. (In a separate editorial we offer some views on how to improve the commissions further.) His commitment to fighting al-Qaeda and its allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan recognizes that pretending a threat does not exist will only increase the danger to America.
That's what is worrying about the modest but gathering opposition to Mr. Obama's policies within his party. Rep. Donna F. Edwards (D-Md.), who represents parts of Montgomery and Prince George's counties, was one of 51 Democrats to vote against funding for the Afghan war on Thursday. In a statement, Ms. Edwards hailed "the passion and commitment of our servicemen and women" that she witnessed on a recent trip to the embattled nation as well as "the commitment and courage of Afghan women to build a future for their country." But Ms. Edwards said that she could not support funding, because Mr. Obama lacks "a strategy for leaving Afghanistan." In a similar vein, Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the Appropriations Committee, told the New York Times that he would give Mr. Obama's strategy one year to work before moving into opposition.
Mr. Obama understands that the only safe strategy for leaving Afghanistan is to beat back radical Islamist forces and build Afghan capacity to continue that fight. It's an effort that will require soldiers and civilians, military battles and economic development. Of course it will take more than a year; Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the military effort, has been entirely candid about that.
What's discouraging is how quickly many Americans seem to forget the peril of half-finishing wars. Once before this country abandoned the battlefield in central Asia; Osama bin Laden moved into the vacuum. Today, he and like-minded terrorists continue to conspire in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere. Confronted by this unpleasant truth and the difficult challenge it poses, too many politicians lapse into the wishful-thinking school of making policy. We worry that there remains a touch of that in Mr. Obama's Iraq timetables and lean defense budget. But for the most part, having accepted the responsibility of keeping America safe, he has recognized that America can't always choose its enemies or its battlefields. His realism deserves support.
No. Like it or not, it's America's war.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
PRESIDENT OBAMA'S clashes with the liberal base of his party are the kind of sporting event that Washington loves. But what Mr. Obama is confronting is less his party and more a stubborn reality that many in his party are unwilling to accept: There are forces in the world that continue to wage war against the United States and its allies, whether or not the United States wants to acknowledge that war.
Mr. Obama's recent decisions on paying for Afghanistan, reviving military tribunals and withholding photos of detainee abuse, among others, all reflect this reality. Although we disagreed with his conclusion on the photos, we sympathize with his concern that it might harm Americans fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. His announcement Friday that he had reversed his opposition to trying some enemy detainees in military commissions reflects, again, the fact of a nation at war; the federal courts will not be the proper venue for every al-Qaeda member captured by U.S. forces. (In a separate editorial we offer some views on how to improve the commissions further.) His commitment to fighting al-Qaeda and its allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan recognizes that pretending a threat does not exist will only increase the danger to America.
That's what is worrying about the modest but gathering opposition to Mr. Obama's policies within his party. Rep. Donna F. Edwards (D-Md.), who represents parts of Montgomery and Prince George's counties, was one of 51 Democrats to vote against funding for the Afghan war on Thursday. In a statement, Ms. Edwards hailed "the passion and commitment of our servicemen and women" that she witnessed on a recent trip to the embattled nation as well as "the commitment and courage of Afghan women to build a future for their country." But Ms. Edwards said that she could not support funding, because Mr. Obama lacks "a strategy for leaving Afghanistan." In a similar vein, Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the Appropriations Committee, told the New York Times that he would give Mr. Obama's strategy one year to work before moving into opposition.
Mr. Obama understands that the only safe strategy for leaving Afghanistan is to beat back radical Islamist forces and build Afghan capacity to continue that fight. It's an effort that will require soldiers and civilians, military battles and economic development. Of course it will take more than a year; Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the military effort, has been entirely candid about that.
What's discouraging is how quickly many Americans seem to forget the peril of half-finishing wars. Once before this country abandoned the battlefield in central Asia; Osama bin Laden moved into the vacuum. Today, he and like-minded terrorists continue to conspire in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere. Confronted by this unpleasant truth and the difficult challenge it poses, too many politicians lapse into the wishful-thinking school of making policy. We worry that there remains a touch of that in Mr. Obama's Iraq timetables and lean defense budget. But for the most part, having accepted the responsibility of keeping America safe, he has recognized that America can't always choose its enemies or its battlefields. His realism deserves support.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
WSJ Editorial Page: Obama's Photo Epiphany
Obama's Photo Epiphany. WSJ Editorial
Why make it harder for the U.S. to defend itself?
WSJ, May 14, 2009
President Obama yesterday put American soldiers and national security ahead of political braying from his campaign allies on the left. What a pleasant reversal.
The White House said it will now seek to block the release of photographs collected as part of military probes into accusations of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Pentagon had agreed last month to release the images by May 28, acceding to an American Civil Liberties Union request under the Freedom of Information Act.
"The President strongly believes that the release of these photos, particularly at this time, would only serve the purpose of inflaming the theaters of war, jeopardizing U.S. forces, and making our job more difficult in places like Iraq and Afghanistan," a White House official said, echoing arguments made on these pages. So the Administration will renew its legal appeals, including all the way to the Supreme Court if need be.
Mr. Obama thus took the advice of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his leading generals that the photos would complicate their efforts to win over Muslim allies for America's antiterror mission. Release of the photos would also serve no public interest since they were collected as evidence in cases that have been investigated, and adjudicated when appropriate. Our guess is that Mr. Obama's political advisers also wanted to distance him from the decision to release the photos -- the better to shield him from any nasty fallout. Now the fault will lie with the ACLU.
Mr. Obama's change of heart was quickly denounced as akin to the "stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration" (the ACLU) and for "reneging on its legal obligation to release the torture photos" (Amnesty International). The President is learning, albeit slowly, that secrecy has its uses in wartime, and that the real goal of his allies on the left is to make it harder for the U.S. to defend itself.
Why make it harder for the U.S. to defend itself?
WSJ, May 14, 2009
President Obama yesterday put American soldiers and national security ahead of political braying from his campaign allies on the left. What a pleasant reversal.
The White House said it will now seek to block the release of photographs collected as part of military probes into accusations of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Pentagon had agreed last month to release the images by May 28, acceding to an American Civil Liberties Union request under the Freedom of Information Act.
"The President strongly believes that the release of these photos, particularly at this time, would only serve the purpose of inflaming the theaters of war, jeopardizing U.S. forces, and making our job more difficult in places like Iraq and Afghanistan," a White House official said, echoing arguments made on these pages. So the Administration will renew its legal appeals, including all the way to the Supreme Court if need be.
Mr. Obama thus took the advice of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his leading generals that the photos would complicate their efforts to win over Muslim allies for America's antiterror mission. Release of the photos would also serve no public interest since they were collected as evidence in cases that have been investigated, and adjudicated when appropriate. Our guess is that Mr. Obama's political advisers also wanted to distance him from the decision to release the photos -- the better to shield him from any nasty fallout. Now the fault will lie with the ACLU.
Mr. Obama's change of heart was quickly denounced as akin to the "stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration" (the ACLU) and for "reneging on its legal obligation to release the torture photos" (Amnesty International). The President is learning, albeit slowly, that secrecy has its uses in wartime, and that the real goal of his allies on the left is to make it harder for the U.S. to defend itself.
Congress and Waterboarding: Nancy Pelosi was an accomplice to enhaced interrogation
Congress and Waterboarding. WSJ Editorial
Nancy Pelosi was an accomplice to 'torture.'
WSJ, May 14, 2009
Someone important appears not to be telling the truth about her knowledge of the CIA's use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs). That someone is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The political persecution of Bush administration officials she has been pushing may now ensnare her.
Here's what we know. On Sept. 4, 2002, less than a year after 9/11, the CIA briefed Rep. Porter Goss, then House Intelligence Committee chairman, and Mrs. Pelosi, then the committee's ranking Democrat, on EITs including waterboarding. They were the first members of Congress to be informed.
In December 2007, Mrs. Pelosi admitted that she attended the briefing, but she wouldn't comment for the record about precisely what she was told. At the time the Washington Post spoke with a "congressional source familiar with Pelosi's position on the matter" and summarized that person's comments this way: "The source said Pelosi recalls that techniques described by the CIA were still in the planning stage -- they had been designed and cleared with agency lawyers but not yet put in practice -- and acknowledged that Pelosi did not raise objections at the time."
When questions were raised last month about these statements, Mrs. Pelosi insisted at a news conference that "We were not -- I repeat -- were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used." Mrs. Pelosi also claimed that the CIA "did not tell us they were using that, flat out. And any, any contention to the contrary is simply not true." She had earlier said on TV, "I can say flat-out, they never told us that these enhanced interrogations were being used."
The Obama administration's CIA director, Leon Panetta, and Mr. Goss have both disputed Mrs. Pelosi's account.
In a report to Congress on May 5, Mr. Panetta described the CIA's 2002 meeting with Mrs. Pelosi as "Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on [legal] authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed." Note the past tense -- "had been employed."
Mr. Goss says he and Mrs. Pelosi were told at the 2002 briefing about the use of the EITs and "on a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission." He is backed by CIA sources who say Mr. Goss and Mrs. Pelosi "questioned whether we were doing enough" to extract information.
We also know that Michael Sheehy, then Mrs. Pelosi's top aide on the Intelligence Committee and later her national security adviser, not only attended the September 2002 meeting but was also briefed by the CIA on EITs on Feb. 5, 2003, and told about a videotape of Zubaydah being waterboarded. Mr. Sheehy was almost certain to have told Mrs. Pelosi. He has not commented publicly about the 2002 or the 2003 meetings.
So is the speaker of the House lying about what she knew and when? And, if so, what will Democrats do about it?
If Mrs. Pelosi considers the enhanced interrogation techniques to be torture, didn't she have a responsibility to complain at the time, introduce legislation to end the practices, or attempt to deny funding for the CIA's use of them? If she knew what was going on and did nothing, does that make her an accessory to a crime of torture, as many Democrats are calling enhanced interrogation?
Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy wants an independent investigation of Bush administration officials. House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers feels the Justice Department should investigate and prosecute anyone who violated laws against committing torture. Are these and other similarly minded Democrats willing to have Mrs. Pelosi thrown into their stew of torture conspirators as an accomplice?
It is clear that after the 9/11 attacks Mrs. Pelosi was briefed on enhanced interrogation techniques and the valuable information they produced. She not only agreed with what was being done, she apparently pressed the CIA to do more.
But when political winds shifted, Mrs. Pelosi seems to have decided to use enhanced interrogation as an issue to attack Republicans. It is disgraceful that Democrats who discovered their outrage years after the fact are now braying for disbarment of the government lawyers who justified EITs and the prosecution of Bush administration officials who authorized them. Mrs. Pelosi is hip-deep in dangerous waters, and they are rapidly rising.
Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
Nancy Pelosi was an accomplice to 'torture.'
WSJ, May 14, 2009
Someone important appears not to be telling the truth about her knowledge of the CIA's use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs). That someone is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The political persecution of Bush administration officials she has been pushing may now ensnare her.
Here's what we know. On Sept. 4, 2002, less than a year after 9/11, the CIA briefed Rep. Porter Goss, then House Intelligence Committee chairman, and Mrs. Pelosi, then the committee's ranking Democrat, on EITs including waterboarding. They were the first members of Congress to be informed.
In December 2007, Mrs. Pelosi admitted that she attended the briefing, but she wouldn't comment for the record about precisely what she was told. At the time the Washington Post spoke with a "congressional source familiar with Pelosi's position on the matter" and summarized that person's comments this way: "The source said Pelosi recalls that techniques described by the CIA were still in the planning stage -- they had been designed and cleared with agency lawyers but not yet put in practice -- and acknowledged that Pelosi did not raise objections at the time."
When questions were raised last month about these statements, Mrs. Pelosi insisted at a news conference that "We were not -- I repeat -- were not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used." Mrs. Pelosi also claimed that the CIA "did not tell us they were using that, flat out. And any, any contention to the contrary is simply not true." She had earlier said on TV, "I can say flat-out, they never told us that these enhanced interrogations were being used."
The Obama administration's CIA director, Leon Panetta, and Mr. Goss have both disputed Mrs. Pelosi's account.
In a report to Congress on May 5, Mr. Panetta described the CIA's 2002 meeting with Mrs. Pelosi as "Briefing on EITs including use of EITs on Abu Zubaydah, background on [legal] authorities, and a description of the particular EITs that had been employed." Note the past tense -- "had been employed."
Mr. Goss says he and Mrs. Pelosi were told at the 2002 briefing about the use of the EITs and "on a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission." He is backed by CIA sources who say Mr. Goss and Mrs. Pelosi "questioned whether we were doing enough" to extract information.
We also know that Michael Sheehy, then Mrs. Pelosi's top aide on the Intelligence Committee and later her national security adviser, not only attended the September 2002 meeting but was also briefed by the CIA on EITs on Feb. 5, 2003, and told about a videotape of Zubaydah being waterboarded. Mr. Sheehy was almost certain to have told Mrs. Pelosi. He has not commented publicly about the 2002 or the 2003 meetings.
So is the speaker of the House lying about what she knew and when? And, if so, what will Democrats do about it?
If Mrs. Pelosi considers the enhanced interrogation techniques to be torture, didn't she have a responsibility to complain at the time, introduce legislation to end the practices, or attempt to deny funding for the CIA's use of them? If she knew what was going on and did nothing, does that make her an accessory to a crime of torture, as many Democrats are calling enhanced interrogation?
Senate Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy wants an independent investigation of Bush administration officials. House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers feels the Justice Department should investigate and prosecute anyone who violated laws against committing torture. Are these and other similarly minded Democrats willing to have Mrs. Pelosi thrown into their stew of torture conspirators as an accomplice?
It is clear that after the 9/11 attacks Mrs. Pelosi was briefed on enhanced interrogation techniques and the valuable information they produced. She not only agreed with what was being done, she apparently pressed the CIA to do more.
But when political winds shifted, Mrs. Pelosi seems to have decided to use enhanced interrogation as an issue to attack Republicans. It is disgraceful that Democrats who discovered their outrage years after the fact are now braying for disbarment of the government lawyers who justified EITs and the prosecution of Bush administration officials who authorized them. Mrs. Pelosi is hip-deep in dangerous waters, and they are rapidly rising.
Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
Monday, May 11, 2009
WaPo: The White House should join lawmakers in reforming the state secrets doctrine
Securing Lawsuits. WaPo Editorial
The White House should join lawmakers in reforming the state secrets doctrine.
WaPo, Monday, May 11, 2009
ON CONSECUTIVE days last month, a federal appeals court and the president of the United States revealed that they had come to the same conclusion: The state secrets doctrine, which has been used to shut down litigation that the government claims to be risky for national security, needs to be revamped.
During an April 29 news conference, President Obama called the doctrine "overbroad." "I think it is appropriate to say that there are going to be cases in which national security interests are genuinely at stake and that you can't litigate without revealing covert activities or classified information that would genuinely compromise our safety," Mr. Obama said, but he added, "There should be some additional tools, so that it's not such a blunt instrument."
Yet the Obama administration seized on the most blunt interpretation of the state secrets doctrine this year in a lawsuit brought by five men who sued Jeppesen DataPlan, claiming that the Boeing subsidiary helped the Bush administration carry out extraordinary renditions that led to their torture. The Obama Justice Department -- like the Bush administration -- argued that no part of the case could be litigated without the threat of compromising national security.
The day before the president's news conference, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit roundly rejected the administration's assertions. In an April 28 opinion, the court ruled that a trial judge should proceed with the case and evaluate individual claims of government secrecy. If a piece of evidence is deemed too sensitive, it may be stricken, but the plaintiff may still try to prove his case using unclassified evidence.
The 9th Circuit's decision squarely conflicts with a 2007 decision of the Richmond-based 4th Circuit to throw out the case of Khaled al-Masri, a German national who was seized in 2004 by U.S. operatives and allegedly tortured. The Justice Department could appeal the 9th Circuit decision, so as to allow the Supreme Court to resolve the conflict. But a better course would be to begin working with lawmakers to fine-tune the proposed State Secrets Protection Act.
The bill, originally championed by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and recently reintroduced by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), would allow judges to privately review information that the government claims is too sensitive for public dissemination. If a specific piece of evidence was deemed too sensitive, the bill would allow the government to provide unclassified summaries of evidence to plaintiffs' lawyers with appropriate security clearances. If even that proved unworkable, the judge could exclude the evidence, but the entire case would not have to be dismissed.
The executive's prerogatives to protect national security must be respected, as must the rights of private litigants to have a fighting chance in court. Passage of the State Secrets Protection Act would ensure that these factors are weighed fairly no matter who sits in the Oval Office.
The White House should join lawmakers in reforming the state secrets doctrine.
WaPo, Monday, May 11, 2009
ON CONSECUTIVE days last month, a federal appeals court and the president of the United States revealed that they had come to the same conclusion: The state secrets doctrine, which has been used to shut down litigation that the government claims to be risky for national security, needs to be revamped.
During an April 29 news conference, President Obama called the doctrine "overbroad." "I think it is appropriate to say that there are going to be cases in which national security interests are genuinely at stake and that you can't litigate without revealing covert activities or classified information that would genuinely compromise our safety," Mr. Obama said, but he added, "There should be some additional tools, so that it's not such a blunt instrument."
Yet the Obama administration seized on the most blunt interpretation of the state secrets doctrine this year in a lawsuit brought by five men who sued Jeppesen DataPlan, claiming that the Boeing subsidiary helped the Bush administration carry out extraordinary renditions that led to their torture. The Obama Justice Department -- like the Bush administration -- argued that no part of the case could be litigated without the threat of compromising national security.
The day before the president's news conference, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit roundly rejected the administration's assertions. In an April 28 opinion, the court ruled that a trial judge should proceed with the case and evaluate individual claims of government secrecy. If a piece of evidence is deemed too sensitive, it may be stricken, but the plaintiff may still try to prove his case using unclassified evidence.
The 9th Circuit's decision squarely conflicts with a 2007 decision of the Richmond-based 4th Circuit to throw out the case of Khaled al-Masri, a German national who was seized in 2004 by U.S. operatives and allegedly tortured. The Justice Department could appeal the 9th Circuit decision, so as to allow the Supreme Court to resolve the conflict. But a better course would be to begin working with lawmakers to fine-tune the proposed State Secrets Protection Act.
The bill, originally championed by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and recently reintroduced by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), would allow judges to privately review information that the government claims is too sensitive for public dissemination. If a specific piece of evidence was deemed too sensitive, the bill would allow the government to provide unclassified summaries of evidence to plaintiffs' lawyers with appropriate security clearances. If even that proved unworkable, the judge could exclude the evidence, but the entire case would not have to be dismissed.
The executive's prerogatives to protect national security must be respected, as must the rights of private litigants to have a fighting chance in court. Passage of the State Secrets Protection Act would ensure that these factors are weighed fairly no matter who sits in the Oval Office.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Review of Mansoor's Baghdad at Sunrise: Rediscovering counterinsurgency in Iraq
The Learning Curve, by Mackubin Thomas Owens
Rediscovering counterinsurgency in Iraq.
The Weekly Standard, May 11, 2009, Volume 014, Issue 32
Review of Baghdad at Sunrise
A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq
by Peter R. Mansoor
Yale, 416 pp., $28
Some years ago, the late Carl Builder of RAND wrote a book entitled The Masks of War, in which he demonstrated the importance of the organizational cultures of the various military services. His point was that each service possesses a preferred way of fighting that is not easily changed.
Since the 1930s the culture of the U.S. Army has emphasized "big wars." This is the legacy of Emory Upton, an innovative 19th-century officer who became a protégé of William Tecumseh Sherman when Sherman became general-in-chief of the Army after the Civil War. Upton believed that the traditional constabulary focus of the Army was outdated. Dispatched on a world tour by Sherman, Upton was especially impressed by Prussian military policy, Prussia's ability to conduct war against the armies of other military powers, and its emphasis on professionalism. Certainly Prussia's overwhelming successes against Denmark, Austria, and France in the Wars of German Unification (1864-71) made the Prussian Army the new exemplar of military excellence in Europe.
Upon his return home, Upton proposed a number of radical reforms, including replacing the citizen-soldier model with one based on a professional soldiery, reducing civilian "interference" in military affairs, and abandoning the emphasis on the constabulary operations that had characterized Army roles during most of the 19th century (with the exception of the Mexican and Civil wars) in favor of preparing for a conflict with a potential foreign enemy.
Given the tenor of the time, all of his proposals were rejected. In ill health, Upton resigned from the Army and, in 1881, committed suicide. But the triumph of progressivism, a political program that placed a great deal of reliance on scientific expertise and professionalism, the end of the Army's constabulary duties on the Western frontier, and the problems associated with mobilizing for and fighting the Spanish American War, made Upton's proposed reforms more attractive, especially within the officer corps. In 1904 Secretary of War Elihu Root published Upton's Military Policy of the United States, and while many of Upton's more radical proposals remained unacceptable to republican America, the idea of reorienting the Army away from constabulary duties to a mission focused on defeating the conventional forces of other states caught on.
While the Army returned to constabulary duties after World War I, Upton's spirit now permeated the professional culture. World War II vindicated Upton's vision, and his view continued to govern Army thinking throughout the Cold War. The American Army that entered Iraq in 2003 was still Emory Upton's Army. Focused as it has been on state-versus-state warfare, Upton's army has not cared much for counterinsurgency, and this was apparent during the first years of the Iraq War. It is also the theme of several recent books on the conflict.
Baghdad at Sunrise is one of the best, written by a colonel who commanded the 1st Brigade of the 1st Armored Division during a particularly difficult year (May 2003-July 2004), a period that saw the rapid coalition victory over Saddam Hussein give way to a vicious insurgency that came close to defeating the United States in Iraq. A genuine soldier-scholar, Colonel Mansoor provides the unique perspective of a midlevel ground commander adapting to the requirements of fighting an insurgency under the most difficult conditions.
His perspective is enhanced by the fact that, two-and-a-half years after redeploying his brigade to Germany, he returned as executive officer to Gen. David Petraeus as Petraeus implemented the "surge" and the counter- insurgency strategy that helped turn the situation around in Iraq. Mansoor not only observed but helped to implement the Army's painful transition from an organization beholden to Emory Upton to one that recognized the necessity to adapt to an enemy who refused to fight the Upton way.
The conventional wisdom holds that it was civilian interference, especially on the part of Donald Rumsfeld, that was to blame for the difficulties U.S. forces faced in Iraq during the first years of the campaign. According to the dominant narrative, Rumsfeld willfully ignored military advice and initiated the war with a force that was too small. He ignored the need to prepare for post-conflict stability operations, and he failed to adapt to the new circumstances once things began to go wrong, not foreseeing the insurgency that engulfed the country.
It is undeniable that Rumsfeld made many critical mistakes. But the uniformed military was no more prescient than he. Did Rumsfeld insist on an early attack with a smaller force than that recommended by many uniformed officers? Yes. But the plan he pushed was a version of a scheme developed by an Army officer, Col. Douglas MacGregor. The military objective of this plan was not to occupy the country but to liberate Iraq from Saddam and turn governance over to liberal Iraqis. The approach was popular with both Rumsfeld and the military because both took their bearings from the Weinberger Doctrine, a set of rules for the use of force drafted in the 1980s which emphasized the quick, overwhelming application of military force to defeat an enemy, leaving postwar affairs to others.
Did Rumsfeld ignore postwar planning? Again, yes. But in doing so he was merely ratifying the preferences of a uniformed military that had internalized the Weinberger emphasis on an "exit strategy." The fact is that if generals are thinking about an exit strategy they are not thinking about "war termination"--how to convert military success into political success. This cultural aversion to stability operations is reflected in the fact that operational planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom took 18 months while planning for postwar stabilization began half-heartedly only a couple of months before the invasion.
Did Rumsfeld foresee the insurgency and the shift from conventional to guerrilla war? No. But neither did his critics in the uniformed services. Mansoor makes this point clear by observing that, for at least the three decades before the Iraq war, the professional military education system all but ignored counterinsurgency operations. This cultural aversion to counter- insurgency lay at the heart of the difficult years in Iraq (2003-07), and in the absence of a counterinsurgency doctrine the Army fell back on what it knew: conventional offensive operations designed to kill the enemy without protecting the population.
The Army's predisposition toward offensive operations was reinforced in the 1990s by a sort of operational "happy talk" that convinced many (who should have known better) that the American edge in emerging technologies, especially informational technologies, would permit the United States to conduct short, decisive, and relatively bloodless campaigns. This was the lesson many learned from the first Gulf war, and the result was an approach that goes under the name of Rapid Decisive Operations. Mansoor observes that Rapid Decisive Operations misunderstood the timeless nature of war: "What we learned [in Iraq]," he writes, "was that the real objective of the war was not merely the collapse of the old regime but the creation of a stable government." As the old saying goes, in war the enemy has a vote, and in the case of Iraq, our adversaries voted not to fight the kind of war Americans preferred.
As the conflict morphed into an insurgency, U.S. ground troops responded by going after the insurgents, adapting conventional tactics to a guerrilla war. In The Gamble Thomas Ricks quotes a speech by an Army officer that captures the essence of the U.S. approach in Iraq until 2007: "Anytime you fight, you always kill the other sonofabitch. Do not let him live today so he will fight you tomorrow. Kill him today."
This approach made sense when the insurgents stood and fought, as they did in Falluja in April and November 2004. It also made sense during the subsequent "rivers campaign" of 2005, designed to destroy the insurgency in al Anbar Province by depriving it of its base and infrastructure in the Sunni Triangle and the "ratlines" west and northwest of Falluja. It unquestionably killed thousands of insurgents, including Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, as well as many of his top lieutenants, and led to the capture of many more. Intelligence from captured insurgents, as well as from Zarqawi's computer, had a cascading effect, permitting the coalition to maintain pressure on the insurgency.
But while successful in disrupting insurgent operations, there were too few troops to maintain control of the towns of al Anbar. The insurgents, abandoning their Falluja approach of standing and fighting the Americans, simply melted away, only to return after coalition troops had departed. Thus, while soldiers and Marines were chasing insurgents from sanctuary to sanctuary, they were not providing security for the Iraqi population, leaving them at the mercy of the insurgents who terrorized and intimidated them.
As the insurgency metastasized in 2005 the United States had three military alternatives: continue offensive operations along the lines of those in Anbar after Falluja; adopt a counterinsurgency approach; or emphasize the training of Iraqi troops in order to effect a transition to Iraqi control of military operations. Gen. John Abizaid of Central Command, and Gen. George Casey, the overall commander in Iraq, chose the third option, supported by Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Richard Myers.
But while moving toward Iraqi control was a logical option for the long run, it did little to solve the proximate problem of the insurgency, which had generated sectarian violence. Based on the belief of many senior commanders, especially General Abizaid, that U.S. troops were an "antibody" to Iraqi culture, U.S. forces were consolidated on large "forward operating bases," maintaining a presence only by means of motorized patrols that were particularly vulnerable to attacks by IEDs. In so doing, we ceded territory and population alike to the insurgents. Mansoor describes this approach as a mistake: "Security of the population is the fundamental basis of any successful counterinsurgency strategy."
The withdrawal of American forces to forward operating bases also contributed to a "kick-in-the-door" mentality among troops when they did interact with Iraqis. This was completely at odds with effective counterinsurgency practice, seriously undermining attempts to pacify the country. And yet, despite many difficulties (including resistance from above), some Army and Marine commanders had been implementing a counterinsurgency approach on their own initiative; that is to say, forming partnerships with the Sunni sheikhs in al Anbar province who had tired of al Qaeda's reign of terror in the Sunni Triangle. By providing security to the people in cooperation with the sheikhs, the Americans were able to isolate Al Qaeda in Iraq. And as U.S commanders were struggling with the insurgency, the Army and Marine Corps were developing a counterinsurgency doctrine based on this insight, and an operational strategy that would successfully be applied as part of the surge in 2007.
As a close associate of General Petraeus, Colonel Mansoor helped serve as midwife to the remarkable shift in Iraq arising from a more general application of the lessons that he had learned during his 2003-04 command. This new approach rejected the position articulated by Petraeus's predecessor, General Casey, who had told President George W. Bush in 2006 that "to win, we have to draw down." And General Abizaid of Central Command, sticking to his belief that American soldiers were an "antibody" to Iraqi culture, seconded Casey.
But Petraeus agreed with Mansoor's observation that "counterinsurgency is a thinking soldier's war," requiring "the counterinsurgent to adapt faster than the insurgent." The time for applying a new approach was at hand, and to his credit, President Bush saw the necessity for change and took action.
One of the debates triggered by our experience in Iraq concerns U.S. force structure. As Mansoor puts it, "If we accept the premise that [counterinsurgency and] stability operations [are] of primary concern, then the Army's organization for combat should [be] different." This debate pits the "long war" school against "traditionalists." The former argues that Iraq and Afghanistan are most characteristic of the protracted and ambiguous wars America will fight in the future, and that the military should be developing a force designed to fight the "long war" on terrorism, which envisions the necessity of preparing for small wars, or insurgencies.
The traditionalists concede that irregular warfare will occur more frequently in the future and that fighting small wars is difficult. But traditionalists also conclude that such conflicts do not threaten U.S. strategic interests, while large-scale conflicts, which they believe remain a real possibility, will threaten strategic interests. They fear that the Long War School's focus on small wars and insurgencies will transform the Army back into a constabulary force, whose new capability for conducting stability operations and "nation-building" would be purchased at a high cost: the inability to conduct large-scale conventional war.
This is by no means a parochial debate, of interest only to the uniformed military, and its outcome has implications for broader national security policy: A force structure aligned with the requirement to fight conventional wars would make it more difficult for the United States to fight small wars. This may be a legitimate choice for the United States, but it is one that should be made by policymakers, and not delegated to the uniformed military. To do so would permit military decisions to constrain policy and strategy questions that lie well within the purview of civilian authority, and our experiences in Vietnam and Iraq demonstrate the dangers of leaving military doctrine and force structure strictly to the military.
Mackubin Thomas Owens is editor of Orbis, the journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College.
Rediscovering counterinsurgency in Iraq.
The Weekly Standard, May 11, 2009, Volume 014, Issue 32
Review of Baghdad at Sunrise
A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq
by Peter R. Mansoor
Yale, 416 pp., $28
Some years ago, the late Carl Builder of RAND wrote a book entitled The Masks of War, in which he demonstrated the importance of the organizational cultures of the various military services. His point was that each service possesses a preferred way of fighting that is not easily changed.
Since the 1930s the culture of the U.S. Army has emphasized "big wars." This is the legacy of Emory Upton, an innovative 19th-century officer who became a protégé of William Tecumseh Sherman when Sherman became general-in-chief of the Army after the Civil War. Upton believed that the traditional constabulary focus of the Army was outdated. Dispatched on a world tour by Sherman, Upton was especially impressed by Prussian military policy, Prussia's ability to conduct war against the armies of other military powers, and its emphasis on professionalism. Certainly Prussia's overwhelming successes against Denmark, Austria, and France in the Wars of German Unification (1864-71) made the Prussian Army the new exemplar of military excellence in Europe.
Upon his return home, Upton proposed a number of radical reforms, including replacing the citizen-soldier model with one based on a professional soldiery, reducing civilian "interference" in military affairs, and abandoning the emphasis on the constabulary operations that had characterized Army roles during most of the 19th century (with the exception of the Mexican and Civil wars) in favor of preparing for a conflict with a potential foreign enemy.
Given the tenor of the time, all of his proposals were rejected. In ill health, Upton resigned from the Army and, in 1881, committed suicide. But the triumph of progressivism, a political program that placed a great deal of reliance on scientific expertise and professionalism, the end of the Army's constabulary duties on the Western frontier, and the problems associated with mobilizing for and fighting the Spanish American War, made Upton's proposed reforms more attractive, especially within the officer corps. In 1904 Secretary of War Elihu Root published Upton's Military Policy of the United States, and while many of Upton's more radical proposals remained unacceptable to republican America, the idea of reorienting the Army away from constabulary duties to a mission focused on defeating the conventional forces of other states caught on.
While the Army returned to constabulary duties after World War I, Upton's spirit now permeated the professional culture. World War II vindicated Upton's vision, and his view continued to govern Army thinking throughout the Cold War. The American Army that entered Iraq in 2003 was still Emory Upton's Army. Focused as it has been on state-versus-state warfare, Upton's army has not cared much for counterinsurgency, and this was apparent during the first years of the Iraq War. It is also the theme of several recent books on the conflict.
Baghdad at Sunrise is one of the best, written by a colonel who commanded the 1st Brigade of the 1st Armored Division during a particularly difficult year (May 2003-July 2004), a period that saw the rapid coalition victory over Saddam Hussein give way to a vicious insurgency that came close to defeating the United States in Iraq. A genuine soldier-scholar, Colonel Mansoor provides the unique perspective of a midlevel ground commander adapting to the requirements of fighting an insurgency under the most difficult conditions.
His perspective is enhanced by the fact that, two-and-a-half years after redeploying his brigade to Germany, he returned as executive officer to Gen. David Petraeus as Petraeus implemented the "surge" and the counter- insurgency strategy that helped turn the situation around in Iraq. Mansoor not only observed but helped to implement the Army's painful transition from an organization beholden to Emory Upton to one that recognized the necessity to adapt to an enemy who refused to fight the Upton way.
The conventional wisdom holds that it was civilian interference, especially on the part of Donald Rumsfeld, that was to blame for the difficulties U.S. forces faced in Iraq during the first years of the campaign. According to the dominant narrative, Rumsfeld willfully ignored military advice and initiated the war with a force that was too small. He ignored the need to prepare for post-conflict stability operations, and he failed to adapt to the new circumstances once things began to go wrong, not foreseeing the insurgency that engulfed the country.
It is undeniable that Rumsfeld made many critical mistakes. But the uniformed military was no more prescient than he. Did Rumsfeld insist on an early attack with a smaller force than that recommended by many uniformed officers? Yes. But the plan he pushed was a version of a scheme developed by an Army officer, Col. Douglas MacGregor. The military objective of this plan was not to occupy the country but to liberate Iraq from Saddam and turn governance over to liberal Iraqis. The approach was popular with both Rumsfeld and the military because both took their bearings from the Weinberger Doctrine, a set of rules for the use of force drafted in the 1980s which emphasized the quick, overwhelming application of military force to defeat an enemy, leaving postwar affairs to others.
Did Rumsfeld ignore postwar planning? Again, yes. But in doing so he was merely ratifying the preferences of a uniformed military that had internalized the Weinberger emphasis on an "exit strategy." The fact is that if generals are thinking about an exit strategy they are not thinking about "war termination"--how to convert military success into political success. This cultural aversion to stability operations is reflected in the fact that operational planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom took 18 months while planning for postwar stabilization began half-heartedly only a couple of months before the invasion.
Did Rumsfeld foresee the insurgency and the shift from conventional to guerrilla war? No. But neither did his critics in the uniformed services. Mansoor makes this point clear by observing that, for at least the three decades before the Iraq war, the professional military education system all but ignored counterinsurgency operations. This cultural aversion to counter- insurgency lay at the heart of the difficult years in Iraq (2003-07), and in the absence of a counterinsurgency doctrine the Army fell back on what it knew: conventional offensive operations designed to kill the enemy without protecting the population.
The Army's predisposition toward offensive operations was reinforced in the 1990s by a sort of operational "happy talk" that convinced many (who should have known better) that the American edge in emerging technologies, especially informational technologies, would permit the United States to conduct short, decisive, and relatively bloodless campaigns. This was the lesson many learned from the first Gulf war, and the result was an approach that goes under the name of Rapid Decisive Operations. Mansoor observes that Rapid Decisive Operations misunderstood the timeless nature of war: "What we learned [in Iraq]," he writes, "was that the real objective of the war was not merely the collapse of the old regime but the creation of a stable government." As the old saying goes, in war the enemy has a vote, and in the case of Iraq, our adversaries voted not to fight the kind of war Americans preferred.
As the conflict morphed into an insurgency, U.S. ground troops responded by going after the insurgents, adapting conventional tactics to a guerrilla war. In The Gamble Thomas Ricks quotes a speech by an Army officer that captures the essence of the U.S. approach in Iraq until 2007: "Anytime you fight, you always kill the other sonofabitch. Do not let him live today so he will fight you tomorrow. Kill him today."
This approach made sense when the insurgents stood and fought, as they did in Falluja in April and November 2004. It also made sense during the subsequent "rivers campaign" of 2005, designed to destroy the insurgency in al Anbar Province by depriving it of its base and infrastructure in the Sunni Triangle and the "ratlines" west and northwest of Falluja. It unquestionably killed thousands of insurgents, including Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, as well as many of his top lieutenants, and led to the capture of many more. Intelligence from captured insurgents, as well as from Zarqawi's computer, had a cascading effect, permitting the coalition to maintain pressure on the insurgency.
But while successful in disrupting insurgent operations, there were too few troops to maintain control of the towns of al Anbar. The insurgents, abandoning their Falluja approach of standing and fighting the Americans, simply melted away, only to return after coalition troops had departed. Thus, while soldiers and Marines were chasing insurgents from sanctuary to sanctuary, they were not providing security for the Iraqi population, leaving them at the mercy of the insurgents who terrorized and intimidated them.
As the insurgency metastasized in 2005 the United States had three military alternatives: continue offensive operations along the lines of those in Anbar after Falluja; adopt a counterinsurgency approach; or emphasize the training of Iraqi troops in order to effect a transition to Iraqi control of military operations. Gen. John Abizaid of Central Command, and Gen. George Casey, the overall commander in Iraq, chose the third option, supported by Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Richard Myers.
But while moving toward Iraqi control was a logical option for the long run, it did little to solve the proximate problem of the insurgency, which had generated sectarian violence. Based on the belief of many senior commanders, especially General Abizaid, that U.S. troops were an "antibody" to Iraqi culture, U.S. forces were consolidated on large "forward operating bases," maintaining a presence only by means of motorized patrols that were particularly vulnerable to attacks by IEDs. In so doing, we ceded territory and population alike to the insurgents. Mansoor describes this approach as a mistake: "Security of the population is the fundamental basis of any successful counterinsurgency strategy."
The withdrawal of American forces to forward operating bases also contributed to a "kick-in-the-door" mentality among troops when they did interact with Iraqis. This was completely at odds with effective counterinsurgency practice, seriously undermining attempts to pacify the country. And yet, despite many difficulties (including resistance from above), some Army and Marine commanders had been implementing a counterinsurgency approach on their own initiative; that is to say, forming partnerships with the Sunni sheikhs in al Anbar province who had tired of al Qaeda's reign of terror in the Sunni Triangle. By providing security to the people in cooperation with the sheikhs, the Americans were able to isolate Al Qaeda in Iraq. And as U.S commanders were struggling with the insurgency, the Army and Marine Corps were developing a counterinsurgency doctrine based on this insight, and an operational strategy that would successfully be applied as part of the surge in 2007.
As a close associate of General Petraeus, Colonel Mansoor helped serve as midwife to the remarkable shift in Iraq arising from a more general application of the lessons that he had learned during his 2003-04 command. This new approach rejected the position articulated by Petraeus's predecessor, General Casey, who had told President George W. Bush in 2006 that "to win, we have to draw down." And General Abizaid of Central Command, sticking to his belief that American soldiers were an "antibody" to Iraqi culture, seconded Casey.
But Petraeus agreed with Mansoor's observation that "counterinsurgency is a thinking soldier's war," requiring "the counterinsurgent to adapt faster than the insurgent." The time for applying a new approach was at hand, and to his credit, President Bush saw the necessity for change and took action.
One of the debates triggered by our experience in Iraq concerns U.S. force structure. As Mansoor puts it, "If we accept the premise that [counterinsurgency and] stability operations [are] of primary concern, then the Army's organization for combat should [be] different." This debate pits the "long war" school against "traditionalists." The former argues that Iraq and Afghanistan are most characteristic of the protracted and ambiguous wars America will fight in the future, and that the military should be developing a force designed to fight the "long war" on terrorism, which envisions the necessity of preparing for small wars, or insurgencies.
The traditionalists concede that irregular warfare will occur more frequently in the future and that fighting small wars is difficult. But traditionalists also conclude that such conflicts do not threaten U.S. strategic interests, while large-scale conflicts, which they believe remain a real possibility, will threaten strategic interests. They fear that the Long War School's focus on small wars and insurgencies will transform the Army back into a constabulary force, whose new capability for conducting stability operations and "nation-building" would be purchased at a high cost: the inability to conduct large-scale conventional war.
This is by no means a parochial debate, of interest only to the uniformed military, and its outcome has implications for broader national security policy: A force structure aligned with the requirement to fight conventional wars would make it more difficult for the United States to fight small wars. This may be a legitimate choice for the United States, but it is one that should be made by policymakers, and not delegated to the uniformed military. To do so would permit military decisions to constrain policy and strategy questions that lie well within the purview of civilian authority, and our experiences in Vietnam and Iraq demonstrate the dangers of leaving military doctrine and force structure strictly to the military.
Mackubin Thomas Owens is editor of Orbis, the journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College.
The Justice Department, torture and the Demjanjuk deportation case
The Justice Department’s Torture Hypocrisy. By Andrew C. McCarthy
Investigate Bush lawyers’ torture analysis one day, cite it favorably the next.
NRO, May 6, 2009 1:30 PM
Investigate Bush lawyers’ torture analysis one day, cite it favorably the next.
NRO, May 6, 2009 1:30 PM
WSJ Editorial Page on difficulties with Guantanamo and detainees
Obama's Gitmo Mess. WSJ Editorial
So where is the Pentagon going to send the Yemenis?
WSJ, May 07, 2009
On his second day in office, President Obama ordered the Pentagon to mothball Guantanamo within one year, purportedly to reclaim the "moral high ground." That earned applause from the anti-antiterror squadrons, yet it is now causing all kinds of practical and political problems in what used to be known as the war on terror.
This mess grew even more chaotic this week, when Democrats refused the Administration's $50 million budget request to transfer some of the remaining 241 Gitmo detainees to a prison likely to be somewhere in the U.S. and perhaps to a new one built with taxpayer dollars. "What do we do with the 50 to 100 -- probably in that ballpark -- who we cannot release and cannot try?" Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently asked Congress.
The best answer is Gitmo. But the antiwar left wants terrorists treated like garden-variety criminals in the civilian courts or maybe military courts martial. The not-so-minor problem is that even states that send leftists to Congress don't want to host Gitmo-II. Think California, where Alcatraz could be an option. The abandoned San Francisco Bay prison has Gitmo's virtue of relative isolation -- but Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, claims it is a national treasure. The terrorist-next-door problem is also rising to a high boil in Kansas politics, given that Fort Leavenworth is being eyed too.
More urgently, the Administration risks losing all control once enemy combatants set foot on formal U.S. soil, which the courts could determine entitles the terrorists to the same Constitutional protections as U.S. citizens. One federal judge has already ordered that 17 detainees -- the Uighurs, a Chinese ethnic minority -- be released domestically. Another judge has ruled that the Supreme Court's 5-4 Boumediene decision, which granted detainees the right to file habeas petitions in U.S. courts, extends to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where the military is holding three times as many prisoners as Guantanamo.
In his Boumediene dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts indicted the majority's "set of shapeless procedures to be defined by federal courts at some future date," and was he ever right. How will judges prevent the public disclosure of classified material? What about Miranda rights, or evidence obtained under battlefield conditions?
Such questions nearly scuttled the Justice Department's case against Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, which flamed out last week with a sentence of only 15 years. According to the plea agreement, al-Marri entered the U.S. on September 10, 2001 on orders from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to begin research on chemical weapons and potential targets. Prosecutors were hampered by the possibility of disclosing intelligence sources and methods, as well as (yet another) political flare-up about interrogation and detention.
For these reasons and more, the Obama Administration has done a 180-degree turn on George W. Bush's military commissions. Mr. Obama called this meticulous legal process "an enormous failure" during his campaign and suspended it when he cashiered Gitmo, but now Mr. Gates says it is "still very much on the table." The Administration may soon announce that it will be reactivated, with a few torques to the rules of secrecy and evidence to attempt to appease the human-rights lobby.
The hardest Gitmo cases are those prisoners who are known to be dangerous or were actively involved in terror networks but haven't committed crimes per se. Others involve evidence that is insufficient for successful prosecutions but sufficient enough to determine that release or transfer would pose a grave security risk. Many of these detainees are Yemeni, and the Yemeni government is demanding that Washington repatriate them.
That would be an unmitigated disaster, whatever Yemen's promises of rehabilitation. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair recently reported that Yemen "is re-emerging as a jihadist battleground and potential regional base of operations for al Qaeda to plan internal and external attacks, train terrorists and facilitate the movement of operatives."
Terror groups have conducted some 20 attacks on U.S. or Western targets in Yemen, the most recent in September against the U.S. embassy, which killed six guards and four civilians. The recidivism rate of those detainees who the military has judged to be good candidates for release from Gitmo is already high, and the danger for the 90 or so Yemenis and others ought to be unacceptable.
Which brings us back to Gitmo's new location, if it ever gets one. Since 1987, the political system has been deadlocked over burying a negligible amount of nuclear waste deep within a remote mountain in Nevada, so it's hard to imagine how it will deal with a terrorist problem that is far more -- how to put it? -- radioactive. Safe to say that any new setting will not be in a 2012 swing state, and you don't have to be a cynic to wonder if it will have two Republican Senators. Mr. Obama could have avoided this mess had he kept his Gitmo options open, but to adapt a famous phrase, the President broke Guantanamo so now he owns the inmates.
So where is the Pentagon going to send the Yemenis?
WSJ, May 07, 2009
On his second day in office, President Obama ordered the Pentagon to mothball Guantanamo within one year, purportedly to reclaim the "moral high ground." That earned applause from the anti-antiterror squadrons, yet it is now causing all kinds of practical and political problems in what used to be known as the war on terror.
This mess grew even more chaotic this week, when Democrats refused the Administration's $50 million budget request to transfer some of the remaining 241 Gitmo detainees to a prison likely to be somewhere in the U.S. and perhaps to a new one built with taxpayer dollars. "What do we do with the 50 to 100 -- probably in that ballpark -- who we cannot release and cannot try?" Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently asked Congress.
The best answer is Gitmo. But the antiwar left wants terrorists treated like garden-variety criminals in the civilian courts or maybe military courts martial. The not-so-minor problem is that even states that send leftists to Congress don't want to host Gitmo-II. Think California, where Alcatraz could be an option. The abandoned San Francisco Bay prison has Gitmo's virtue of relative isolation -- but Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, claims it is a national treasure. The terrorist-next-door problem is also rising to a high boil in Kansas politics, given that Fort Leavenworth is being eyed too.
More urgently, the Administration risks losing all control once enemy combatants set foot on formal U.S. soil, which the courts could determine entitles the terrorists to the same Constitutional protections as U.S. citizens. One federal judge has already ordered that 17 detainees -- the Uighurs, a Chinese ethnic minority -- be released domestically. Another judge has ruled that the Supreme Court's 5-4 Boumediene decision, which granted detainees the right to file habeas petitions in U.S. courts, extends to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where the military is holding three times as many prisoners as Guantanamo.
In his Boumediene dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts indicted the majority's "set of shapeless procedures to be defined by federal courts at some future date," and was he ever right. How will judges prevent the public disclosure of classified material? What about Miranda rights, or evidence obtained under battlefield conditions?
Such questions nearly scuttled the Justice Department's case against Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, which flamed out last week with a sentence of only 15 years. According to the plea agreement, al-Marri entered the U.S. on September 10, 2001 on orders from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to begin research on chemical weapons and potential targets. Prosecutors were hampered by the possibility of disclosing intelligence sources and methods, as well as (yet another) political flare-up about interrogation and detention.
For these reasons and more, the Obama Administration has done a 180-degree turn on George W. Bush's military commissions. Mr. Obama called this meticulous legal process "an enormous failure" during his campaign and suspended it when he cashiered Gitmo, but now Mr. Gates says it is "still very much on the table." The Administration may soon announce that it will be reactivated, with a few torques to the rules of secrecy and evidence to attempt to appease the human-rights lobby.
The hardest Gitmo cases are those prisoners who are known to be dangerous or were actively involved in terror networks but haven't committed crimes per se. Others involve evidence that is insufficient for successful prosecutions but sufficient enough to determine that release or transfer would pose a grave security risk. Many of these detainees are Yemeni, and the Yemeni government is demanding that Washington repatriate them.
That would be an unmitigated disaster, whatever Yemen's promises of rehabilitation. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair recently reported that Yemen "is re-emerging as a jihadist battleground and potential regional base of operations for al Qaeda to plan internal and external attacks, train terrorists and facilitate the movement of operatives."
Terror groups have conducted some 20 attacks on U.S. or Western targets in Yemen, the most recent in September against the U.S. embassy, which killed six guards and four civilians. The recidivism rate of those detainees who the military has judged to be good candidates for release from Gitmo is already high, and the danger for the 90 or so Yemenis and others ought to be unacceptable.
Which brings us back to Gitmo's new location, if it ever gets one. Since 1987, the political system has been deadlocked over burying a negligible amount of nuclear waste deep within a remote mountain in Nevada, so it's hard to imagine how it will deal with a terrorist problem that is far more -- how to put it? -- radioactive. Safe to say that any new setting will not be in a 2012 swing state, and you don't have to be a cynic to wonder if it will have two Republican Senators. Mr. Obama could have avoided this mess had he kept his Gitmo options open, but to adapt a famous phrase, the President broke Guantanamo so now he owns the inmates.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Terrorists and Pirates: An Alliance of Convenience
Terrorists and Pirates: An Alliance of Convenience. By Ryan Mauro
Friday, May 01, 2009
In his Salon.com article titled “Our Misguided Fight Against Somali Pirates,” John Feffer from the Institute for Policy Studies asks “Those teenage high-seas renegades are not about to team up with terrorists, so why is the U.S. military devoting so much attention to them?” While Freer is correct in pointing out that the pirates and terrorists are not ideological allies, it is a mistake to assume that the pirates are not willing to become valued business partners of radical Islamic terrorist groups including those linked to Al-Qaeda.
Al-Shabaab, the Al-Qaeda affiliate labeled by the State Department as a terrorist organization, currently controls southern Somalia. The recent media attention given to the taking of an American cargo ship captain hostage and subsequent rescue will no doubt motivate this group to partner with pirates, if for no other reason than to try to steal some of the spotlight. Indeed, shortly following the incident, al-Shabaab claimed credit for firing mortars near a visiting U.S. congressman.
Already, senior Al-Qaeda member Sa’id Ali Jabir Al-Khathim al-Shihri, has instructed his Somali allies to “increase your strikes against the crusaders at sea and in Djibouti.” Earlier in April, an al-Shabaab spokesperson praised the pirates, saying they were “protecting the coast against the enemies of Allah.” The leader of the Ras Kamboni Brigades, another radical Islamic group said to be linked to Al-Qaeda, said the pirates were “part of the Mujahideen” despite being “money-seekers.” Those that dismiss the possibility of a link between pirates and terrorists underestimate the forces of radical Islam’s ability to establish relationships of convenience, and underestimate the greed of pirates with a clear will to bypass principles for the sake of profit.
At the Somali Piracy Conference on April 7, Ambassador David H. Shinn conceded there was “no evidence that piracy is directly linked to international terrorism, although many Somali groups get a cut of the ransom money.” Citing Jane’s Intelligence Review, Shinn explained that the two forces cooperate on arms smuggling, and the pirates are reportedly helping al-Shabaab develop maritime capabilities.
While the relationship is based on business and not ideology, it doesn’t make it any less beneficial to al-Shabaab. He says that they sometimes receive a “protection fee of 5 to 10 percent of the ransom money. If al-Shabab helps to train the pirates, it might receive 20 percent and up to 50 percent if it finances the piracy operation.”
Andrew Mwangura, the head of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, has also said such a link exists. He told Reuters in August that “According to our information, the money they make from piracy and ransoms goes to support al-Shabaab activities onshore.”
Nor is al-Shabaab the only radical Islamic group utilizing piracy. According to The Long War Journal, “Al Qaeda’s regional affiliate, Jeemah Islamiyah, is often engaged in piracy, as are the Philippine affiliates Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Abu Sayyaf Group. The pirates and terrorists are often one in the same, or if not, are in close cooperation.”
This isn’t to say that they don’t sometimes fight one another, as all criminal and terrorist groups sometimes do. Ambassador Shinn accurately described the relationship as “fragile.” As a marriage of convenience, this relationship will fracture and subsequently heal depending on the interests of each party.
Three incidents in 2008 demonstrate this dynamic.
In April 2008, Somali pirates were paid a $1.2 million ransom to release a Spanish fishing boat and its 26 crewmembers. Al-Shabaab reportedly received five percent of the ransom, which local residents said was smaller than what the terrorist group demanded. In this case, they were business partners.
In September 2008, pirates hijacked a Ukrainian vessel which contained arms, including grenade launchers and 33 Russian T-72 tanks destined for Kenya. Al-Shabaab’s requests to receive some of the weapons from the ship were rebuffed by the pirates, who opted to take a $3.2 million ransom and released the ship and crew. Although no reports indicate that a portion of the ransom was given to terrorists, the possibility can not be ruled out. Here, al-Shabaab was rejected, but they did not declare armed conflict on the pirates, ending future deals.
These examples contrast with when pirates seized a Saudi supertanker. Sheikh Abdirahim Isse Adow, a spokesperson for the Islamic Courts Union which was allied with al-Shabaab, condemned the act saying “Saudi Arabia is a Muslim country and hijacking its ship is a bigger crime than other ships…we shall do something about that ship.” Radical Islamic militants then raided a port in an attempt to locate the pirates and the ship. In this case, pirates became the enemies of the terrorists. Despite this clash, the wounds were ultimately healed as Al-Qaeda has praised the recent pirate attacks on non-Muslim ships.
Some experts, such as John Feffer, mistake this on-again off-again relationship as meaning radical Islamic forces in Somalia won’t team up with pirates that do not attack Muslim ships. In fact, even this standard may not be consistently held, as Al-Qaeda has repeatedly attacked Muslims. Feffer describes the Islamic Courts Union, the former al-Shabaab ally from which Somalia’s current “moderate” president comes from, as a force against pirates, and even gives credit to Al-Shabaab’s condemnation of piracy as un-Islamic.
While leaders of the current Somali government may be against piracy, al-Shabaab’s condemnation is meaningless as the above information shows, and that group controls southern Somalia. When terrorist attacks can be carried out for thousands of dollars, the effect of a business relationship between some pirates and terrorists should not be downplayed.
Ryan Mauro is the founder of WorldThreats.com and the Assistant-Director of Intelligence at C2I. He’s also the National Security Researcher for the Christian Action Network and a published author. He can be contacted at TDCAnalyst@aol.com.
Friday, May 01, 2009
In his Salon.com article titled “Our Misguided Fight Against Somali Pirates,” John Feffer from the Institute for Policy Studies asks “Those teenage high-seas renegades are not about to team up with terrorists, so why is the U.S. military devoting so much attention to them?” While Freer is correct in pointing out that the pirates and terrorists are not ideological allies, it is a mistake to assume that the pirates are not willing to become valued business partners of radical Islamic terrorist groups including those linked to Al-Qaeda.
Al-Shabaab, the Al-Qaeda affiliate labeled by the State Department as a terrorist organization, currently controls southern Somalia. The recent media attention given to the taking of an American cargo ship captain hostage and subsequent rescue will no doubt motivate this group to partner with pirates, if for no other reason than to try to steal some of the spotlight. Indeed, shortly following the incident, al-Shabaab claimed credit for firing mortars near a visiting U.S. congressman.
Already, senior Al-Qaeda member Sa’id Ali Jabir Al-Khathim al-Shihri, has instructed his Somali allies to “increase your strikes against the crusaders at sea and in Djibouti.” Earlier in April, an al-Shabaab spokesperson praised the pirates, saying they were “protecting the coast against the enemies of Allah.” The leader of the Ras Kamboni Brigades, another radical Islamic group said to be linked to Al-Qaeda, said the pirates were “part of the Mujahideen” despite being “money-seekers.” Those that dismiss the possibility of a link between pirates and terrorists underestimate the forces of radical Islam’s ability to establish relationships of convenience, and underestimate the greed of pirates with a clear will to bypass principles for the sake of profit.
At the Somali Piracy Conference on April 7, Ambassador David H. Shinn conceded there was “no evidence that piracy is directly linked to international terrorism, although many Somali groups get a cut of the ransom money.” Citing Jane’s Intelligence Review, Shinn explained that the two forces cooperate on arms smuggling, and the pirates are reportedly helping al-Shabaab develop maritime capabilities.
While the relationship is based on business and not ideology, it doesn’t make it any less beneficial to al-Shabaab. He says that they sometimes receive a “protection fee of 5 to 10 percent of the ransom money. If al-Shabab helps to train the pirates, it might receive 20 percent and up to 50 percent if it finances the piracy operation.”
Andrew Mwangura, the head of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, has also said such a link exists. He told Reuters in August that “According to our information, the money they make from piracy and ransoms goes to support al-Shabaab activities onshore.”
Nor is al-Shabaab the only radical Islamic group utilizing piracy. According to The Long War Journal, “Al Qaeda’s regional affiliate, Jeemah Islamiyah, is often engaged in piracy, as are the Philippine affiliates Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Abu Sayyaf Group. The pirates and terrorists are often one in the same, or if not, are in close cooperation.”
This isn’t to say that they don’t sometimes fight one another, as all criminal and terrorist groups sometimes do. Ambassador Shinn accurately described the relationship as “fragile.” As a marriage of convenience, this relationship will fracture and subsequently heal depending on the interests of each party.
Three incidents in 2008 demonstrate this dynamic.
In April 2008, Somali pirates were paid a $1.2 million ransom to release a Spanish fishing boat and its 26 crewmembers. Al-Shabaab reportedly received five percent of the ransom, which local residents said was smaller than what the terrorist group demanded. In this case, they were business partners.
In September 2008, pirates hijacked a Ukrainian vessel which contained arms, including grenade launchers and 33 Russian T-72 tanks destined for Kenya. Al-Shabaab’s requests to receive some of the weapons from the ship were rebuffed by the pirates, who opted to take a $3.2 million ransom and released the ship and crew. Although no reports indicate that a portion of the ransom was given to terrorists, the possibility can not be ruled out. Here, al-Shabaab was rejected, but they did not declare armed conflict on the pirates, ending future deals.
These examples contrast with when pirates seized a Saudi supertanker. Sheikh Abdirahim Isse Adow, a spokesperson for the Islamic Courts Union which was allied with al-Shabaab, condemned the act saying “Saudi Arabia is a Muslim country and hijacking its ship is a bigger crime than other ships…we shall do something about that ship.” Radical Islamic militants then raided a port in an attempt to locate the pirates and the ship. In this case, pirates became the enemies of the terrorists. Despite this clash, the wounds were ultimately healed as Al-Qaeda has praised the recent pirate attacks on non-Muslim ships.
Some experts, such as John Feffer, mistake this on-again off-again relationship as meaning radical Islamic forces in Somalia won’t team up with pirates that do not attack Muslim ships. In fact, even this standard may not be consistently held, as Al-Qaeda has repeatedly attacked Muslims. Feffer describes the Islamic Courts Union, the former al-Shabaab ally from which Somalia’s current “moderate” president comes from, as a force against pirates, and even gives credit to Al-Shabaab’s condemnation of piracy as un-Islamic.
While leaders of the current Somali government may be against piracy, al-Shabaab’s condemnation is meaningless as the above information shows, and that group controls southern Somalia. When terrorist attacks can be carried out for thousands of dollars, the effect of a business relationship between some pirates and terrorists should not be downplayed.
Ryan Mauro is the founder of WorldThreats.com and the Assistant-Director of Intelligence at C2I. He’s also the National Security Researcher for the Christian Action Network and a published author. He can be contacted at TDCAnalyst@aol.com.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Pak's Ambassador: The pacification model that worked in Iraq can work in the Swat Valley
How Pakistan Is Countering the Taliban. By HUSAIN HAQQANI
The pacification model that worked in Iraq can work in the Swat Valley.
WSJ, Apr 29, 2009
The specter of extremist Taliban taking over a nuclear-armed Pakistan is not only a gross exaggeration, it could also lead to misguided policy prescriptions from Pakistan's allies, including our friends in Washington.
Pakistan and the international community do face serious challenges in confronting terrorists and the ideologies that sustain them. But panicked reactions of the type witnessed in the U.S. media over the last few weeks -- after the Taliban drove into Buner, a town 60 miles north of the capital Islamabad -- are not conducive to strengthening Pakistani democracy or to developing an effective counterterrorism policy for Pakistan.
Now that the Taliban have been driven out of Buner, and Pakistani forces have militarily engaged them just outside their Swat Valley stronghold, it should be clear to all that Pakistan can and will defeat the Taliban.
In the free elections that returned Pakistan to democracy in February 2008, Pakistanis overwhelmingly rejected Taliban sympathizers and advocates of extremist Islamist ideologies. But the legacy of dictatorship, including a tolerance for some militant groups, has proven tough to erase. Anti-American rhetoric and Pakistan's traditional security concerns about its neighbors have also dampened popular enthusiasm for strong military action against violent extremists, even though President Asif Zardari has repeatedly declared the war against them a war for Pakistan's soul.
Meanwhile, the change of administration in the U.S. has slowed the flow of assistance to Pakistan. Unfortunately, ordinary Pakistanis have begun to wonder if our alliance with the West is bringing any benefits at all.
Under the Musharraf dictatorship, Pakistan probably was not as quick as it needed to be to comprehend the enormity of the Taliban threat. And after last year's election of democratic leaders, our new government had an array of domestic issues to address. Mobilizing all elements of national power, particularly public opinion, against the Taliban threat took time because many Pakistanis thought the Taliban were amenable to negotiations and would keep their word.
Recent developments offer us an opportunity amid crisis. More Pakistanis are now convinced of the need to confront the extremists.
The recent spike of international concern about the threat in Pakistan seems to stem from the recent dialogue between the government of the Pashtunkhwa Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan and a local movement that supported Islamic law but did not join the Taliban's violent campaign. The goal for this dialogue was twofold -- first, to restore order and stability to the Swat Valley; and second, to wedge rational elements of the religiously conservative population away from terrorists and fanatics.
The model here was the successful pacification of Fallujah in Iraq, where agreements with more moderate elements broke them away from al Qaeda nihilists. The model worked so well in Fallujah that it is now being resurrected by the American and NATO troops in Afghanistan. The goal in Pakistan's Swat Valley was the same.
The dialogue in Swat resulted in an agreement that would allow for elements of Shariah to be applied to the judicial system of the Valley, as it has at other times in our nation's history. This agreement demanded that the native Taliban put down their weapons, pledge nonviolence, and accept the writ of the state. It was a local solution for what some in Pakistan viewed as a local problem.
Let me be perfectly clear here: Pakistan's civil and military leadership understands that al Qaeda and its allies are not potential negotiating partners. But, as the U.S. did in Iraq, Pakistan sought to distinguish between reconcilable and irreconcilable elements within an expanding insurgency.
The premise of the dialogue was peace. Without peace there is no agreement, and without an agreement the Pakistani government will use all power at its disposal to restore order in the Valley. We'd rather negotiate than fight. But if we have to fight we will -- and we will fight to win.
What does Pakistan need to contain this threat? In the short term we need the U.S. to share modern technology in antiterrorist engagement. Pakistan needs night-vision equipment, jammers that can knock out FM radio transmissions by the terrorists, and a larger, modernized fleet of helicopter gunships for ground support in the massive sweeps that are necessary to contain, repel and destroy the enemy.
Yet Washington has been reluctant to share this modern equipment, and to train our military in antiterrorism techniques, because of concerns that these systems could be used against India. Such concerns are misplaced. Pakistanis understand that the primary threat to our homeland today is not from our neighbor to the east but from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on our border with Afghanistan. To meet this threat, we must be provided the means to fight the terrorists while we work on resuming our composite dialogue with India.
In the long term, Pakistan's security will be predicated on Pakistan's economic viability. That is the central thrust of the Kerry-Lugar legislation currently before Congress, which would establish a 10-year, multibillion dollar commitment to Pakistan's economic and social system. It is also manifest in the Regional Opportunity Zone legislation currently before Congress that would open U.S. markets to products manufactured in Afghanistan and Pakistan's FATA region. An economically prosperous Pakistan will be less susceptible to the ideology of international terrorism -- and it will become a model to a billion Muslims across the world that Islam and modernity under democracy are not only compatible, but can thrive together.
Mr. Haqqani is Pakistan's ambassador to the United States.
The pacification model that worked in Iraq can work in the Swat Valley.
WSJ, Apr 29, 2009
The specter of extremist Taliban taking over a nuclear-armed Pakistan is not only a gross exaggeration, it could also lead to misguided policy prescriptions from Pakistan's allies, including our friends in Washington.
Pakistan and the international community do face serious challenges in confronting terrorists and the ideologies that sustain them. But panicked reactions of the type witnessed in the U.S. media over the last few weeks -- after the Taliban drove into Buner, a town 60 miles north of the capital Islamabad -- are not conducive to strengthening Pakistani democracy or to developing an effective counterterrorism policy for Pakistan.
Now that the Taliban have been driven out of Buner, and Pakistani forces have militarily engaged them just outside their Swat Valley stronghold, it should be clear to all that Pakistan can and will defeat the Taliban.
In the free elections that returned Pakistan to democracy in February 2008, Pakistanis overwhelmingly rejected Taliban sympathizers and advocates of extremist Islamist ideologies. But the legacy of dictatorship, including a tolerance for some militant groups, has proven tough to erase. Anti-American rhetoric and Pakistan's traditional security concerns about its neighbors have also dampened popular enthusiasm for strong military action against violent extremists, even though President Asif Zardari has repeatedly declared the war against them a war for Pakistan's soul.
Meanwhile, the change of administration in the U.S. has slowed the flow of assistance to Pakistan. Unfortunately, ordinary Pakistanis have begun to wonder if our alliance with the West is bringing any benefits at all.
Under the Musharraf dictatorship, Pakistan probably was not as quick as it needed to be to comprehend the enormity of the Taliban threat. And after last year's election of democratic leaders, our new government had an array of domestic issues to address. Mobilizing all elements of national power, particularly public opinion, against the Taliban threat took time because many Pakistanis thought the Taliban were amenable to negotiations and would keep their word.
Recent developments offer us an opportunity amid crisis. More Pakistanis are now convinced of the need to confront the extremists.
The recent spike of international concern about the threat in Pakistan seems to stem from the recent dialogue between the government of the Pashtunkhwa Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan and a local movement that supported Islamic law but did not join the Taliban's violent campaign. The goal for this dialogue was twofold -- first, to restore order and stability to the Swat Valley; and second, to wedge rational elements of the religiously conservative population away from terrorists and fanatics.
The model here was the successful pacification of Fallujah in Iraq, where agreements with more moderate elements broke them away from al Qaeda nihilists. The model worked so well in Fallujah that it is now being resurrected by the American and NATO troops in Afghanistan. The goal in Pakistan's Swat Valley was the same.
The dialogue in Swat resulted in an agreement that would allow for elements of Shariah to be applied to the judicial system of the Valley, as it has at other times in our nation's history. This agreement demanded that the native Taliban put down their weapons, pledge nonviolence, and accept the writ of the state. It was a local solution for what some in Pakistan viewed as a local problem.
Let me be perfectly clear here: Pakistan's civil and military leadership understands that al Qaeda and its allies are not potential negotiating partners. But, as the U.S. did in Iraq, Pakistan sought to distinguish between reconcilable and irreconcilable elements within an expanding insurgency.
The premise of the dialogue was peace. Without peace there is no agreement, and without an agreement the Pakistani government will use all power at its disposal to restore order in the Valley. We'd rather negotiate than fight. But if we have to fight we will -- and we will fight to win.
What does Pakistan need to contain this threat? In the short term we need the U.S. to share modern technology in antiterrorist engagement. Pakistan needs night-vision equipment, jammers that can knock out FM radio transmissions by the terrorists, and a larger, modernized fleet of helicopter gunships for ground support in the massive sweeps that are necessary to contain, repel and destroy the enemy.
Yet Washington has been reluctant to share this modern equipment, and to train our military in antiterrorism techniques, because of concerns that these systems could be used against India. Such concerns are misplaced. Pakistanis understand that the primary threat to our homeland today is not from our neighbor to the east but from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on our border with Afghanistan. To meet this threat, we must be provided the means to fight the terrorists while we work on resuming our composite dialogue with India.
In the long term, Pakistan's security will be predicated on Pakistan's economic viability. That is the central thrust of the Kerry-Lugar legislation currently before Congress, which would establish a 10-year, multibillion dollar commitment to Pakistan's economic and social system. It is also manifest in the Regional Opportunity Zone legislation currently before Congress that would open U.S. markets to products manufactured in Afghanistan and Pakistan's FATA region. An economically prosperous Pakistan will be less susceptible to the ideology of international terrorism -- and it will become a model to a billion Muslims across the world that Islam and modernity under democracy are not only compatible, but can thrive together.
Mr. Haqqani is Pakistan's ambassador to the United States.
Monday, April 27, 2009
The "Idea of India" after Mumbai
The "Idea of India" after Mumbai. By Apoorva Shah
AEI, Friday, April 24, 2009
India's founding ideal of multicultural democracy is critical to both domestic cohesion and geopolitical interest, and it has defined how the country confronts terrorism at home. Modern India has much experience with terrorism, but most attacks have been rooted in separatist and ethnic insurgencies in rural frontier provinces. In the last decade, however, India has seen a steep rise in the number of attacks in urban areas, aimed at civilians, and committed not by rural insurgents but by young, middle-class jihadists. These domestic threats, which expose fault lines in the "idea of India," have been welcomed and at times supported by Pakistan, whose existence is founded in opposition to India. In fact, the apparent paradox between Pakistan's tolerance of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist group leading up to the November 26, 2008, attacks in Mumbai and Pakistan's internal struggle against extremists can be understood in the framework of these conflicting ideologies. For India, countering the threat of domestic jihadism is not only a security imperative; it is also a strategic necessity. This merits a new counterterrorism response by the Indian government and a renewed understanding of Indian Muslims and their place in India's pluralistic society.
Full outlook here.
AEI, Friday, April 24, 2009
India's founding ideal of multicultural democracy is critical to both domestic cohesion and geopolitical interest, and it has defined how the country confronts terrorism at home. Modern India has much experience with terrorism, but most attacks have been rooted in separatist and ethnic insurgencies in rural frontier provinces. In the last decade, however, India has seen a steep rise in the number of attacks in urban areas, aimed at civilians, and committed not by rural insurgents but by young, middle-class jihadists. These domestic threats, which expose fault lines in the "idea of India," have been welcomed and at times supported by Pakistan, whose existence is founded in opposition to India. In fact, the apparent paradox between Pakistan's tolerance of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist group leading up to the November 26, 2008, attacks in Mumbai and Pakistan's internal struggle against extremists can be understood in the framework of these conflicting ideologies. For India, countering the threat of domestic jihadism is not only a security imperative; it is also a strategic necessity. This merits a new counterterrorism response by the Indian government and a renewed understanding of Indian Muslims and their place in India's pluralistic society.
Full outlook here.
Misconceptions About the Interrogation Memos
Misconceptions About the Interrogation Memos. By William M McSwain
Their goal was to allow the CIA and military to stay within the parameters of a murky area of the law.
WSJ, Apr 26, 2009
President Barack Obama has reinvigorated the critics of George W. Bush's antiterror policies by opening the door to prosecuting or sanctioning those who crafted interrogation policy in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. These critics -- including the president -- are laboring under numerous misconceptions. Many of them have no experience with or understanding of military or CIA interrogation, the purpose of which is to gain actionable intelligence to safeguard our country. The recently released memos by lawyers in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel were written to assist interrogators in that critical mission. The memos cannot be fairly evaluated without that mission in mind.
Military and CIA interrogators are trained to use creative means of deception, and to play on detainee emotions and fears. This can be a nasty business. People unfamiliar with it, therefore, might even view a perfectly legitimate interrogation of a prisoner of war that is in full compliance with the Geneva Conventions as abhorrent by its very nature.
But military interrogation is not akin to a friendly chat across a conference table -- nor is it designed to gather evidence in a criminal trial, as an FBI interview might be. There is a fundamental distinction between law enforcement and military interrogations that we ignore at our peril.
Second-guessers can also fail to appreciate the increased importance of interrogation (and human intelligence in general) in the post 9/11 world. We face an enemy that wears no uniform, blends in with civilian populations, and operates in the shadows. This has made eliciting information from captured terrorists vital to the effort of finding other terrorists. As interrogation has become more important, drawing out useful information has become more difficult -- because hardened terrorists are often trained to resist traditional U.S. interrogation methods.
Fortunately, aggressive interrogation techniques like those outlined in the memos to the CIA are effective. As the memos explain, high-value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of 9/11, and Abu Zubaydah, one of Osama bin Laden's key lieutenants, provided no actionable intelligence when facing traditional U.S. methods. It is doubtful that any high-level al Qaeda operative would ever provide useful intelligence in response to traditional methods.
Yet KSM and Zubaydah provided critical information after being waterboarded -- information that, among other things, helped to prevent a "Second Wave" attack in Los Angeles, according to the memos. Similarly, the 2005 report by Vice Adm. Albert Church on Defense Department interrogation policies, the "Church Report" -- of which I served as the executive editor -- documented the success of aggressive techniques against high-value detainees like Mohamed al Kahtani, 9/11's "20th hijacker."
The aggressive techniques in the CIA memos are also undeniably safe, having been adopted from Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) training used with our own troops.
I have personally been waterboarded, put into stress positions, sleep deprived, slapped in the face. While none of this was enjoyable, I am none the worse for wear.
While such techniques are used in U.S. military training, some apparently consider them too brutal, too abusive, too inhumane -- in short, too much like "torture" -- to be used on fanatics like KSM who are bent on the mass murder of innocent American civilians. And if legal advisers such as Steven G. Bradbury, Jay S. Bybee and John Yoo are to be prosecuted for having sanctioned their use under careful controls, who's next? Every commander who ever implemented a SERE course?
Many critics also play the Abu Ghraib "trump card": The abuses of prisoners at that facility in Iraq allegedly "prove" the Bush administration's supposed policy of abuse, first codified in its legal memos. This ignores all relevant evidence.
As the Church Report concluded, after a thorough review of all Defense Department interrogation policies, the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib bore no resemblance to approved policies at any level, in any theater. The 2004 Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations -- whose four members included two former secretaries of defense under President Jimmy Carter -- also stated that "no approved procedures called for or allowed the kinds of abuse that in fact occurred. There is no evidence of a policy of abuse promulgated by senior officials or military authorities."
Similarly, the critics like to default to Guantanamo as a symbol of the kind of abuse that Mr. Bush's antiterror policies allowed. Yet, at the time of the Church Report, there had been more than 24,000 interrogation sessions at Guantanamo and only three cases of substantiated interrogation-related abuse. All of them consisted of minor assaults in which military interrogators had exceeded the bounds of approved interrogation policy. Notably, the Church Report found that detainees at Guantanamo were more likely to have been injured playing recreational sports than in confrontations with interrogators or guards.
Mr. Bush's advisers were public servants with the memory of 9/11 still fresh in their minds, doing their best to give legitimate legal advice in a murky, largely undefined area of the law. Is this the stuff of which federal prosecutions, or even sanctions, are made?
As a former federal prosecutor, I know a good case from a bad one. I know a case based on solid evidence and even-handed application of the law versus one based on scoring political points. Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, have professed their desire to take politics out of the Justice Department, to restore integrity to a department that they believe had gone astray under Mr. Bush. Their recent actions, however, speak otherwise.
The bottom line is that any attempt to prosecute or sanction lawyers such as Messrs. Bradbury, Bybee or Yoo would be a fool's errand. And whatever our new president and his attorney general are, they aren't fools. Or at least I don't think they are. For the good of the country, I hope they don't prove me wrong.
Mr. McSwain, a former scout/sniper platoon commander in the Marines and assistant U.S. attorney, was executive editor of the 2005 Review of Department of Defense Detention Operations and Detainee Interrogation Techniques (The Church Report). He is an attorney in private practice in Philadelphia.
Their goal was to allow the CIA and military to stay within the parameters of a murky area of the law.
WSJ, Apr 26, 2009
President Barack Obama has reinvigorated the critics of George W. Bush's antiterror policies by opening the door to prosecuting or sanctioning those who crafted interrogation policy in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. These critics -- including the president -- are laboring under numerous misconceptions. Many of them have no experience with or understanding of military or CIA interrogation, the purpose of which is to gain actionable intelligence to safeguard our country. The recently released memos by lawyers in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel were written to assist interrogators in that critical mission. The memos cannot be fairly evaluated without that mission in mind.
Military and CIA interrogators are trained to use creative means of deception, and to play on detainee emotions and fears. This can be a nasty business. People unfamiliar with it, therefore, might even view a perfectly legitimate interrogation of a prisoner of war that is in full compliance with the Geneva Conventions as abhorrent by its very nature.
But military interrogation is not akin to a friendly chat across a conference table -- nor is it designed to gather evidence in a criminal trial, as an FBI interview might be. There is a fundamental distinction between law enforcement and military interrogations that we ignore at our peril.
Second-guessers can also fail to appreciate the increased importance of interrogation (and human intelligence in general) in the post 9/11 world. We face an enemy that wears no uniform, blends in with civilian populations, and operates in the shadows. This has made eliciting information from captured terrorists vital to the effort of finding other terrorists. As interrogation has become more important, drawing out useful information has become more difficult -- because hardened terrorists are often trained to resist traditional U.S. interrogation methods.
Fortunately, aggressive interrogation techniques like those outlined in the memos to the CIA are effective. As the memos explain, high-value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of 9/11, and Abu Zubaydah, one of Osama bin Laden's key lieutenants, provided no actionable intelligence when facing traditional U.S. methods. It is doubtful that any high-level al Qaeda operative would ever provide useful intelligence in response to traditional methods.
Yet KSM and Zubaydah provided critical information after being waterboarded -- information that, among other things, helped to prevent a "Second Wave" attack in Los Angeles, according to the memos. Similarly, the 2005 report by Vice Adm. Albert Church on Defense Department interrogation policies, the "Church Report" -- of which I served as the executive editor -- documented the success of aggressive techniques against high-value detainees like Mohamed al Kahtani, 9/11's "20th hijacker."
The aggressive techniques in the CIA memos are also undeniably safe, having been adopted from Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) training used with our own troops.
I have personally been waterboarded, put into stress positions, sleep deprived, slapped in the face. While none of this was enjoyable, I am none the worse for wear.
While such techniques are used in U.S. military training, some apparently consider them too brutal, too abusive, too inhumane -- in short, too much like "torture" -- to be used on fanatics like KSM who are bent on the mass murder of innocent American civilians. And if legal advisers such as Steven G. Bradbury, Jay S. Bybee and John Yoo are to be prosecuted for having sanctioned their use under careful controls, who's next? Every commander who ever implemented a SERE course?
Many critics also play the Abu Ghraib "trump card": The abuses of prisoners at that facility in Iraq allegedly "prove" the Bush administration's supposed policy of abuse, first codified in its legal memos. This ignores all relevant evidence.
As the Church Report concluded, after a thorough review of all Defense Department interrogation policies, the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib bore no resemblance to approved policies at any level, in any theater. The 2004 Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations -- whose four members included two former secretaries of defense under President Jimmy Carter -- also stated that "no approved procedures called for or allowed the kinds of abuse that in fact occurred. There is no evidence of a policy of abuse promulgated by senior officials or military authorities."
Similarly, the critics like to default to Guantanamo as a symbol of the kind of abuse that Mr. Bush's antiterror policies allowed. Yet, at the time of the Church Report, there had been more than 24,000 interrogation sessions at Guantanamo and only three cases of substantiated interrogation-related abuse. All of them consisted of minor assaults in which military interrogators had exceeded the bounds of approved interrogation policy. Notably, the Church Report found that detainees at Guantanamo were more likely to have been injured playing recreational sports than in confrontations with interrogators or guards.
Mr. Bush's advisers were public servants with the memory of 9/11 still fresh in their minds, doing their best to give legitimate legal advice in a murky, largely undefined area of the law. Is this the stuff of which federal prosecutions, or even sanctions, are made?
As a former federal prosecutor, I know a good case from a bad one. I know a case based on solid evidence and even-handed application of the law versus one based on scoring political points. Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, have professed their desire to take politics out of the Justice Department, to restore integrity to a department that they believe had gone astray under Mr. Bush. Their recent actions, however, speak otherwise.
The bottom line is that any attempt to prosecute or sanction lawyers such as Messrs. Bradbury, Bybee or Yoo would be a fool's errand. And whatever our new president and his attorney general are, they aren't fools. Or at least I don't think they are. For the good of the country, I hope they don't prove me wrong.
Mr. McSwain, a former scout/sniper platoon commander in the Marines and assistant U.S. attorney, was executive editor of the 2005 Review of Department of Defense Detention Operations and Detainee Interrogation Techniques (The Church Report). He is an attorney in private practice in Philadelphia.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Let the Senate Investigate the Interrogations
Let the Senate Investigate the Interrogations. By Dianne Feinstein
It's the only way we'll understand the program.
WSJ, Apr 26, 2009
President Barack Obama's release of memos detailing CIA interrogation policies under the Bush administration has ignited a political firestorm that continues to dominate the nation's front pages and news programs. The pressure is intense -- on Capitol Hill and elsewhere -- for Congress to "do something," and do it fast.
It's time to step back, take a breath, and set the record straight.
Here are the facts:
We already are doing something. Last year, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence began reviewing CIA materials on the first two high-value detainees to be captured, and is finalizing a classified report on their detention and interrogation.
Last month, we launched a comprehensive, bipartisan review of CIA interrogation and detention policies. Since then, we have identified and requested from the CIA, among other things, a voluminous amount of materials and records related to conditions of detentions and techniques of interrogations.
The Senate Intelligence Committee is the appropriate body to conduct this review, because it is responsible for the oversight of America's 16 intelligence agencies -- most specifically, the CIA. The committee has access, on a regular basis, to classified materials and is supplementing its existing professional staff to carry out the investigation with bipartisan oversight.
All of this will be done in a classified environment, and the results will be brought to the full committee for its careful consideration. The committee will make a determination with respect to findings and recommendations.
It's important to note the fundamental realities underpinning this effort. First, it's vital that our work be structured in such a way as to avoid a "witch hunt" or a "show trial." That's easy. We do the vast bulk of our work behind closed doors -- precisely because the subject matter is highly classified. This allows us to examine the entire, unvarnished record in our search for the truth.
Second, for our review to succeed, it simply must be bipartisan, as is our tradition. This committee's last major investigation, in 2004, into prewar Iraq intelligence, was both bipartisan and critical in providing public understanding of the failed intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Democrats and Republicans on the committee came together with shared purpose in this latest endeavor. And we announced the committee's action, in a joint statement issued March 5.
Here's part of what we said: "The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has agreed on a strong bipartisan basis to begin a review of the CIA's detention and interrogation program. The purpose is to review the program and to shape detention and interrogation policies in the future."
We went on to explain that the review would specifically examine:
- How the CIA created, operated and maintained conditions of detention and interrogation.
- Whether the CIA accurately described the detention and interrogation program to other parts of the U.S. government, including the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, and the Senate Intelligence Committee.
- Whether the CIA implemented the program in compliance with official guidance, including covert action findings, Office of Legal Counsel opinions and CIA policy.
- The intelligence gained through the use of enhanced and standard interrogation techniques.
Our objective is clear: to achieve a full understanding of this program as it evolved in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
So amid all the quarreling and confusion, I say this: Let's not prejudge or jump to conclusions. And let's resist the temptation to stage a Washington spectacle, high in entertainment value, but low in fact-finding potential.
Let the Senate Intelligence Committee do its job.
Mrs. Feinstein is chairman of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
It's the only way we'll understand the program.
WSJ, Apr 26, 2009
President Barack Obama's release of memos detailing CIA interrogation policies under the Bush administration has ignited a political firestorm that continues to dominate the nation's front pages and news programs. The pressure is intense -- on Capitol Hill and elsewhere -- for Congress to "do something," and do it fast.
It's time to step back, take a breath, and set the record straight.
Here are the facts:
We already are doing something. Last year, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence began reviewing CIA materials on the first two high-value detainees to be captured, and is finalizing a classified report on their detention and interrogation.
Last month, we launched a comprehensive, bipartisan review of CIA interrogation and detention policies. Since then, we have identified and requested from the CIA, among other things, a voluminous amount of materials and records related to conditions of detentions and techniques of interrogations.
The Senate Intelligence Committee is the appropriate body to conduct this review, because it is responsible for the oversight of America's 16 intelligence agencies -- most specifically, the CIA. The committee has access, on a regular basis, to classified materials and is supplementing its existing professional staff to carry out the investigation with bipartisan oversight.
All of this will be done in a classified environment, and the results will be brought to the full committee for its careful consideration. The committee will make a determination with respect to findings and recommendations.
It's important to note the fundamental realities underpinning this effort. First, it's vital that our work be structured in such a way as to avoid a "witch hunt" or a "show trial." That's easy. We do the vast bulk of our work behind closed doors -- precisely because the subject matter is highly classified. This allows us to examine the entire, unvarnished record in our search for the truth.
Second, for our review to succeed, it simply must be bipartisan, as is our tradition. This committee's last major investigation, in 2004, into prewar Iraq intelligence, was both bipartisan and critical in providing public understanding of the failed intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Democrats and Republicans on the committee came together with shared purpose in this latest endeavor. And we announced the committee's action, in a joint statement issued March 5.
Here's part of what we said: "The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has agreed on a strong bipartisan basis to begin a review of the CIA's detention and interrogation program. The purpose is to review the program and to shape detention and interrogation policies in the future."
We went on to explain that the review would specifically examine:
- How the CIA created, operated and maintained conditions of detention and interrogation.
- Whether the CIA accurately described the detention and interrogation program to other parts of the U.S. government, including the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, and the Senate Intelligence Committee.
- Whether the CIA implemented the program in compliance with official guidance, including covert action findings, Office of Legal Counsel opinions and CIA policy.
- The intelligence gained through the use of enhanced and standard interrogation techniques.
Our objective is clear: to achieve a full understanding of this program as it evolved in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
So amid all the quarreling and confusion, I say this: Let's not prejudge or jump to conclusions. And let's resist the temptation to stage a Washington spectacle, high in entertainment value, but low in fact-finding potential.
Let the Senate Intelligence Committee do its job.
Mrs. Feinstein is chairman of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
WaPo: What does the Obama administration hope to accomplish by publicly warning of a Pakistani collapse?
Sound the Alarm. WaPo Editorial
What does the Obama administration hope to accomplish by publicly warning of a Pakistani collapse?
WaPo: Sunday, April 26, 2009
THE TALIBAN raised fears in Pakistan last week by briefly seizing new territories near the capital, Islamabad. But in its own way, the Obama administration offered as much reason for panic about the deteriorating situation in that nuclear-armed Muslim country. In the course of just three days, the U.S. secretaries of State and Defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the commanding general of American forces in the Middle East all publicly warned, in blunt and dire language, that Pakistan was facing an existential threat -- and that its government and Army were not facing it. "I think that the Pakistani government is basically abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists," said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
That they felt compelled to openly air such conclusions about a nominally close U.S. ally -- for which the administration is proposing billions in new aid dollars -- was a measure of the desperation that seems to have infected the Obama administration's dealings with Pakistan's weak civilian government and obtuse military leadership. In the months since the administration took office, as in the last months of the Bush administration, private cajoling of President Asif Ali Zardari and Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani to fight the Taliban has done little good. It's not yet clear whether the public campaign will have more effect -- but it is sure to get many in Washington stirred about what Ms. Clinton described as the "mortal threat" a Taliban regime armed with nuclear weapons could pose to the United States.
That threat is certainly real. The government's decision to tolerate what amounts to Taliban control of the Swat Valley northwest of Islamabad has emboldened the extremists, who now are seeking to infiltrate neighboring districts even closer to the capital. The Pakistani army, untrained in counterinsurgency and rigidly focused on India, is reluctant to take on the militants; when it has tried to fight them in areas near the Afghan border, it has been mostly ineffective. Though the vast majority of Pakistanis oppose the Taliban's fundamentalism, most also dislike Mr. Zardari's government and suspect that operations against the insurgents serve U.S. interests more Pakistan's.
The loud U.S. warnings did provoke the Zardari government and Gen. Kiyani to say that they would fight the Taliban if it continued to advance; the black-turbaned fighters subsequently withdrew from one district on Friday. Pakistani officials say that the public support needed for the military offensive Washington wants won't be forthcoming unless Pakistanis believe that their government has tried all peaceful options. It is certainly the case that Pakistanis as well as their government must embrace the fight against the Taliban as their own, and not as a proxy war for the United States. It is also true that, apart from mounting missile strikes by remote-controlled aircraft, there is little the United States can do directly to defeat the Pakistani Taliban; the administration must try to work through the government and army.
But the United States has leverage: Without the billons flowing into Pakistan in direct U.S. aid as well as from other donors marshaled by Washington, Pakistan's economy would collapse. Perhaps the dire U.S. warnings will galvanize the country's political class into demanding action from the army and government -- or replacing the latter. But shouts of '"fire" have risks: They can also cause panic, or go unheeded.
What does the Obama administration hope to accomplish by publicly warning of a Pakistani collapse?
WaPo: Sunday, April 26, 2009
THE TALIBAN raised fears in Pakistan last week by briefly seizing new territories near the capital, Islamabad. But in its own way, the Obama administration offered as much reason for panic about the deteriorating situation in that nuclear-armed Muslim country. In the course of just three days, the U.S. secretaries of State and Defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the commanding general of American forces in the Middle East all publicly warned, in blunt and dire language, that Pakistan was facing an existential threat -- and that its government and Army were not facing it. "I think that the Pakistani government is basically abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists," said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
That they felt compelled to openly air such conclusions about a nominally close U.S. ally -- for which the administration is proposing billions in new aid dollars -- was a measure of the desperation that seems to have infected the Obama administration's dealings with Pakistan's weak civilian government and obtuse military leadership. In the months since the administration took office, as in the last months of the Bush administration, private cajoling of President Asif Ali Zardari and Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani to fight the Taliban has done little good. It's not yet clear whether the public campaign will have more effect -- but it is sure to get many in Washington stirred about what Ms. Clinton described as the "mortal threat" a Taliban regime armed with nuclear weapons could pose to the United States.
That threat is certainly real. The government's decision to tolerate what amounts to Taliban control of the Swat Valley northwest of Islamabad has emboldened the extremists, who now are seeking to infiltrate neighboring districts even closer to the capital. The Pakistani army, untrained in counterinsurgency and rigidly focused on India, is reluctant to take on the militants; when it has tried to fight them in areas near the Afghan border, it has been mostly ineffective. Though the vast majority of Pakistanis oppose the Taliban's fundamentalism, most also dislike Mr. Zardari's government and suspect that operations against the insurgents serve U.S. interests more Pakistan's.
The loud U.S. warnings did provoke the Zardari government and Gen. Kiyani to say that they would fight the Taliban if it continued to advance; the black-turbaned fighters subsequently withdrew from one district on Friday. Pakistani officials say that the public support needed for the military offensive Washington wants won't be forthcoming unless Pakistanis believe that their government has tried all peaceful options. It is certainly the case that Pakistanis as well as their government must embrace the fight against the Taliban as their own, and not as a proxy war for the United States. It is also true that, apart from mounting missile strikes by remote-controlled aircraft, there is little the United States can do directly to defeat the Pakistani Taliban; the administration must try to work through the government and army.
But the United States has leverage: Without the billons flowing into Pakistan in direct U.S. aid as well as from other donors marshaled by Washington, Pakistan's economy would collapse. Perhaps the dire U.S. warnings will galvanize the country's political class into demanding action from the army and government -- or replacing the latter. But shouts of '"fire" have risks: They can also cause panic, or go unheeded.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Porter J. Goss: Security Before Politics
Security Before Politics. By Porter J. Goss
WaPo, Saturday, April 25, 2009
Since leaving my post as CIA director almost three years ago, I have remained largely silent on the public stage. I am speaking out now because I feel our government has crossed the red line between properly protecting our national security and trying to gain partisan political advantage. We can't have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets. Americans have to decide now.
A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation's intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA's "High Value Terrorist Program," including the development of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.
Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as "waterboarding" were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.
Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:
-- The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.
-- We understood what the CIA was doing.
-- We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.
-- We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.
-- On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.
I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed "memorandums for the record" suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately -- to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president's national security adviser -- and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have.
Circuses are not new in Washington, and I can see preparations being made for tents from the Capitol straight down Pennsylvania Avenue. The CIA has been pulled into the center ring before. The result this time will be the same: a hollowed-out service of diminished capabilities. After Sept. 11, the general outcry was, "Why don't we have better overseas capabilities?" I fear that in the years to come this refrain will be heard again: once a threat -- or God forbid, another successful attack -- captures our attention and sends the pendulum swinging back. There is only one person who can shut down this dangerous show: President Obama.
Unfortunately, much of the damage to our capabilities has already been done. It is certainly not trust that is fostered when intelligence officers are told one day "I have your back" only to learn a day later that a knife is being held to it. After the events of this week, morale at the CIA has been shaken to its foundation.
We must not forget: Our intelligence allies overseas view our inability to maintain secrecy as a reason to question our worthiness as a partner. These allies have been vital in almost every capture of a terrorist.
The suggestion that we are safer now because information about interrogation techniques is in the public domain conjures up images of unicorns and fairy dust. We have given our enemy invaluable information about the rules by which we operate. The terrorists captured by the CIA perfected the act of beheading innocents using dull knives. Khalid Sheik Mohammed boasted of the tactic of placing explosives high enough in a building to ensure that innocents trapped above would die if they tried to escape through windows. There is simply no comparison between our professionalism and their brutality.
Our enemies do not subscribe to the rules of the Marquis of Queensbury. "Name, rank and serial number" does not apply to non-state actors but is, regrettably, the only question this administration wants us to ask. Instead of taking risks, our intelligence officers will soon resort to wordsmithing cables to headquarters while opportunities to neutralize brutal radicals are lost.
The days of fortress America are gone. We are the world's superpower. We can sit on our hands or we can become engaged to improve global human conditions. The bottom line is that we cannot succeed unless we have good intelligence. Trading security for partisan political popularity will ensure that our secrets are not secret and that our intelligence is destined to fail us.
The writer, a Republican, was director of the CIA from September 2004 to May 2006 and was chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 1997 to 2004.
WaPo, Saturday, April 25, 2009
Since leaving my post as CIA director almost three years ago, I have remained largely silent on the public stage. I am speaking out now because I feel our government has crossed the red line between properly protecting our national security and trying to gain partisan political advantage. We can't have a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets. Americans have to decide now.
A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation's intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA's "High Value Terrorist Program," including the development of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.
Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as "waterboarding" were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.
Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:
-- The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.
-- We understood what the CIA was doing.
-- We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.
-- We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.
-- On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.
I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed "memorandums for the record" suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately -- to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president's national security adviser -- and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have.
Circuses are not new in Washington, and I can see preparations being made for tents from the Capitol straight down Pennsylvania Avenue. The CIA has been pulled into the center ring before. The result this time will be the same: a hollowed-out service of diminished capabilities. After Sept. 11, the general outcry was, "Why don't we have better overseas capabilities?" I fear that in the years to come this refrain will be heard again: once a threat -- or God forbid, another successful attack -- captures our attention and sends the pendulum swinging back. There is only one person who can shut down this dangerous show: President Obama.
Unfortunately, much of the damage to our capabilities has already been done. It is certainly not trust that is fostered when intelligence officers are told one day "I have your back" only to learn a day later that a knife is being held to it. After the events of this week, morale at the CIA has been shaken to its foundation.
We must not forget: Our intelligence allies overseas view our inability to maintain secrecy as a reason to question our worthiness as a partner. These allies have been vital in almost every capture of a terrorist.
The suggestion that we are safer now because information about interrogation techniques is in the public domain conjures up images of unicorns and fairy dust. We have given our enemy invaluable information about the rules by which we operate. The terrorists captured by the CIA perfected the act of beheading innocents using dull knives. Khalid Sheik Mohammed boasted of the tactic of placing explosives high enough in a building to ensure that innocents trapped above would die if they tried to escape through windows. There is simply no comparison between our professionalism and their brutality.
Our enemies do not subscribe to the rules of the Marquis of Queensbury. "Name, rank and serial number" does not apply to non-state actors but is, regrettably, the only question this administration wants us to ask. Instead of taking risks, our intelligence officers will soon resort to wordsmithing cables to headquarters while opportunities to neutralize brutal radicals are lost.
The days of fortress America are gone. We are the world's superpower. We can sit on our hands or we can become engaged to improve global human conditions. The bottom line is that we cannot succeed unless we have good intelligence. Trading security for partisan political popularity will ensure that our secrets are not secret and that our intelligence is destined to fail us.
The writer, a Republican, was director of the CIA from September 2004 to May 2006 and was chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 1997 to 2004.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
WSJ Editorial Page: Federal President's invitation to indict Bush officials will haunt his presidency
Presidential Poison. WSJ Editorial
His invitation to indict Bush officials will haunt Obama's Presidency.
WSJ, Apr 23, 2009
Mark down the date. Tuesday, April 21, 2009, is the moment that any chance of a new era of bipartisan respect in Washington ended. By inviting the prosecution of Bush officials for their antiterror legal advice, President Obama has injected a poison into our politics that he and the country will live to regret.
Policy disputes, often bitter, are the stuff of democratic politics. Elections settle those battles, at least for a time, and Mr. Obama's victory in November has given him the right to change policies on interrogations, Guantanamo, or anything on which he can muster enough support. But at least until now, the U.S. political system has avoided the spectacle of a new Administration prosecuting its predecessor for policy disagreements. This is what happens in Argentina, Malaysia or Peru, countries where the law is treated merely as an extension of political power.
If this analogy seems excessive, consider how Mr. Obama has framed the issue. He has absolved CIA operatives of any legal jeopardy, no doubt because his intelligence advisers told him how damaging that would be to CIA morale when Mr. Obama needs the agency to protect the country. But he has pointedly invited investigations against Republican legal advisers who offered their best advice at the request of CIA officials.
"Your intelligence indicates that there is currently a level of 'chatter' equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks," wrote Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, in his August 1, 2002 memo. "In light of the information you believe [detainee Abu] Zubaydah has and the high level of threat you believe now exists, you wish to move the interrogations into what you have described as an 'increased pressure phase.'"
So the CIA requests a legal review at a moment of heightened danger, the Justice Department obliges with an exceedingly detailed analysis of the law and interrogation practices -- and, seven years later, Mr. Obama says only the legal advisers who are no longer in government should be investigated. The political convenience of this distinction for Mr. Obama betrays its basic injustice. And by the way, everyone agrees that senior officials, including President Bush, approved these interrogations. Is this President going to put his predecessor in the dock too?
Mr. Obama seemed to understand the peril of such an exercise when he said, before his inauguration, that he wanted to "look forward" and beyond the antiterror debates of the Bush years. As recently as Sunday, Rahm Emanuel said no prosecutions were contemplated and now is not a time for "anger and retribution." Two days later the President disavowed his own chief of staff. Yet nothing had changed except that Mr. Obama's decision last week to release the interrogation memos unleashed a revenge lust on the political left that he refuses to resist.
Just as with the AIG bonuses, he is trying to co-opt his left-wing base by playing to it -- only to encourage it more. Within hours of Mr. Obama's Tuesday comments, Senator Carl Levin piled on with his own accusatory Intelligence Committee report. The demands for a "special counsel" at Justice and a Congressional show trial are louder than ever, and both Europe's left and the U.N. are signaling their desire to file their own charges against former U.S. officials.
Those officials won't be the only ones who suffer if all of this goes forward. Congress will face questions about what the Members knew and when, especially Nancy Pelosi when she was on the House Intelligence Committee in 2002. The Speaker now says she remembers hearing about waterboarding, though not that it would actually be used. Does anyone believe that? Porter Goss, her GOP counterpart at the time, says he knew exactly what he was hearing and that, if anything, Ms. Pelosi worried the CIA wasn't doing enough to stop another attack. By all means, put her under oath.
Mr. Obama may think he can soar above all of this, but he'll soon learn otherwise. The Beltway's political energy will focus more on the spectacle of revenge, and less on his agenda. The CIA will have its reputation smeared, and its agents second-guessing themselves. And if there is another terror attack against Americans, Mr. Obama will have set himself up for the argument that his campaign against the Bush policies is partly to blame.
Above all, the exercise will only embitter Republicans, including the moderates and national-security hawks Mr. Obama may need in the next four years. As patriotic officials who acted in good faith are indicted, smeared, impeached from judgeships or stripped of their academic tenure, the partisan anger and backlash will grow. And speaking of which, when will the GOP Members of Congress begin to denounce this partisan scapegoating? Senior Republicans like Mitch McConnell, Richard Lugar, John McCain, Orrin Hatch, Pat Roberts and Arlen Specter have hardly been profiles in courage.
Mr. Obama is more popular than his policies, due in part to his personal charm and his seeming goodwill. By indulging his party's desire to criminalize policy advice, he has unleashed furies that will haunt his Presidency.
His invitation to indict Bush officials will haunt Obama's Presidency.
WSJ, Apr 23, 2009
Mark down the date. Tuesday, April 21, 2009, is the moment that any chance of a new era of bipartisan respect in Washington ended. By inviting the prosecution of Bush officials for their antiterror legal advice, President Obama has injected a poison into our politics that he and the country will live to regret.
Policy disputes, often bitter, are the stuff of democratic politics. Elections settle those battles, at least for a time, and Mr. Obama's victory in November has given him the right to change policies on interrogations, Guantanamo, or anything on which he can muster enough support. But at least until now, the U.S. political system has avoided the spectacle of a new Administration prosecuting its predecessor for policy disagreements. This is what happens in Argentina, Malaysia or Peru, countries where the law is treated merely as an extension of political power.
If this analogy seems excessive, consider how Mr. Obama has framed the issue. He has absolved CIA operatives of any legal jeopardy, no doubt because his intelligence advisers told him how damaging that would be to CIA morale when Mr. Obama needs the agency to protect the country. But he has pointedly invited investigations against Republican legal advisers who offered their best advice at the request of CIA officials.
"Your intelligence indicates that there is currently a level of 'chatter' equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks," wrote Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, in his August 1, 2002 memo. "In light of the information you believe [detainee Abu] Zubaydah has and the high level of threat you believe now exists, you wish to move the interrogations into what you have described as an 'increased pressure phase.'"
So the CIA requests a legal review at a moment of heightened danger, the Justice Department obliges with an exceedingly detailed analysis of the law and interrogation practices -- and, seven years later, Mr. Obama says only the legal advisers who are no longer in government should be investigated. The political convenience of this distinction for Mr. Obama betrays its basic injustice. And by the way, everyone agrees that senior officials, including President Bush, approved these interrogations. Is this President going to put his predecessor in the dock too?
Mr. Obama seemed to understand the peril of such an exercise when he said, before his inauguration, that he wanted to "look forward" and beyond the antiterror debates of the Bush years. As recently as Sunday, Rahm Emanuel said no prosecutions were contemplated and now is not a time for "anger and retribution." Two days later the President disavowed his own chief of staff. Yet nothing had changed except that Mr. Obama's decision last week to release the interrogation memos unleashed a revenge lust on the political left that he refuses to resist.
Just as with the AIG bonuses, he is trying to co-opt his left-wing base by playing to it -- only to encourage it more. Within hours of Mr. Obama's Tuesday comments, Senator Carl Levin piled on with his own accusatory Intelligence Committee report. The demands for a "special counsel" at Justice and a Congressional show trial are louder than ever, and both Europe's left and the U.N. are signaling their desire to file their own charges against former U.S. officials.
Those officials won't be the only ones who suffer if all of this goes forward. Congress will face questions about what the Members knew and when, especially Nancy Pelosi when she was on the House Intelligence Committee in 2002. The Speaker now says she remembers hearing about waterboarding, though not that it would actually be used. Does anyone believe that? Porter Goss, her GOP counterpart at the time, says he knew exactly what he was hearing and that, if anything, Ms. Pelosi worried the CIA wasn't doing enough to stop another attack. By all means, put her under oath.
Mr. Obama may think he can soar above all of this, but he'll soon learn otherwise. The Beltway's political energy will focus more on the spectacle of revenge, and less on his agenda. The CIA will have its reputation smeared, and its agents second-guessing themselves. And if there is another terror attack against Americans, Mr. Obama will have set himself up for the argument that his campaign against the Bush policies is partly to blame.
Above all, the exercise will only embitter Republicans, including the moderates and national-security hawks Mr. Obama may need in the next four years. As patriotic officials who acted in good faith are indicted, smeared, impeached from judgeships or stripped of their academic tenure, the partisan anger and backlash will grow. And speaking of which, when will the GOP Members of Congress begin to denounce this partisan scapegoating? Senior Republicans like Mitch McConnell, Richard Lugar, John McCain, Orrin Hatch, Pat Roberts and Arlen Specter have hardly been profiles in courage.
Mr. Obama is more popular than his policies, due in part to his personal charm and his seeming goodwill. By indulging his party's desire to criminalize policy advice, he has unleashed furies that will haunt his Presidency.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Conservative about Dennis Blair memo on high-value information of coercive interrogation
Who's Politicizing Intelligence Now?, by Stephen F. Hayes
Obama's intelligence chief admits the value of tough interrogations.
The Weekly Standard, Apr 22, 2009
Admiral Dennis Blair, the top intelligence official in the United States, thanks to his nomination by Barack Obama, believes that the coercive interrogation methods outlawed by his boss produced "high-value information" and gave the U.S. government a "deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country." He included those assessments in a letter distributed inside the intelligence community last Thursday, the same day Obama declassified and released portions of Justice Department memos setting out guidelines for those interrogations.
That letter from Blair served as the basis for a public statement that his office put out that same day. But the DNI's conclusions about the results of coercive interrogations--in effect, that they worked--were taken out of Blair's public statement. A spokesman for the DNI told the New York Times that the missing material was cut for reasons of space, though the statement would be posted on DNI's website, where space doesn't seem to be an issue.
Curious.
There's more. Blair's public statement differed from his letter to colleagues in another way. The letter included this language: "From 2002 through 2006 when the use of these techniques ended, the leadership of the CIA repeatedly reported their activities both to Executive Branch policymakers and to members of Congress, and received permission to continue to use the techniques." Blair's public statement made no mention of the permission granted by "members of Congress"--permission that came from members of Obama's own party.
Odd.
And then there are the memos themselves. Sections of the memos that describe the
techniques have been declassified and released. But other sections of those same memos--the parts that describe, in some detail, the value of the program--have been redacted and remain hidden from public view.
Marc Thiessen, a speechwriter for George W. Bush, had access to the full memos and read them to prepare a speech for Bush in 2006. When Thiessen looked at the redacted version released by the White House last week, he noticed something strange.
He writes: "But just as the memo begins to describe previously undisclosed details of what enhanced interrogations achieved, the page is almost entirely blacked out. The Obama administration released pages of unredacted classified information on the techniques used to question captured terrorist leaders but pulled out its black marker when it came to the details of what those interrogations achieved."
It's not just those memos. Former Vice President Dick Cheney says he has read other memos that describe the intelligence obtained by using coercive interrogation and that demonstrate its value. He has asked for them to be declassified and made public.
It is possible, I suppose, that a series of fortunate coincidences has resulted in the public disclosure of only that information that will be politically helpful to the Obama administration. It is also possible that Dick Cheney has taken up synchronized swimming in his retirement.
It wouldn't be the first time the Obama administration has politicized intelligence. Back in the early days of the administration, the New Yorker's Jane Mayer wrote an article about Obama's decision to ban some of these interrogation techniques. She spoke with White House counsel Greg Craig, who described the deliberations.
Across the Potomac River, at the C.I.A.'s headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, however, there was considerably less jubilation. Top C.I.A. officials have argued for years that so-called "enhanced" interrogation techniques have yielded lifesaving intelligence breakthroughs. "They disagree in some respect," Craig admitted. Among the hard questions that Obama left open, in fact, is whether the C.I.A. will have to follow the same interrogation rules as the military. While the President has clearly put an end to cruel tactics, Craig said that Obama "is somewhat sympathetic to the spies' argument that their mission and circumstances are different."
Despite such sentiments, Obama's executive orders will undoubtedly rein in the C.I.A. Waterboarding, for instance, has gone the way of the rack, now that the C.I.A. is strictly bound by customary interpretations of the Geneva Conventions. This decision, too, was the result of intense deliberation. During the transition period, unknown to the public, Obama's legal, intelligence, and national-security advisers visited Langley for two long sessions with current and former intelligence-community members. They debated whether a ban on brutal interrogation practices would hurt their ability to gather intelligence, and the advisers asked the intelligence veterans to prepare a cost-benefit analysis. The conclusions may surprise defenders of harsh interrogation tactics. "There was unanimity among Obama's expert advisers," Craig said, "that to change the practices would not in any material way affect the collection of intelligence."
That's interesting: "top CIA officials have argued for years that so-called 'enhanced' interrogation techniques have yielded lifesaving intelligence breakthroughs," but the team of "expert advisers" from Obama's presidential campaign apparently knows better.
All of this leads to one obvious question: Who needs intelligence professionals when you have campaign advisers?
Stephen F. Hayes, a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author of Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President (HarperCollins).
Obama's intelligence chief admits the value of tough interrogations.
The Weekly Standard, Apr 22, 2009
Admiral Dennis Blair, the top intelligence official in the United States, thanks to his nomination by Barack Obama, believes that the coercive interrogation methods outlawed by his boss produced "high-value information" and gave the U.S. government a "deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country." He included those assessments in a letter distributed inside the intelligence community last Thursday, the same day Obama declassified and released portions of Justice Department memos setting out guidelines for those interrogations.
That letter from Blair served as the basis for a public statement that his office put out that same day. But the DNI's conclusions about the results of coercive interrogations--in effect, that they worked--were taken out of Blair's public statement. A spokesman for the DNI told the New York Times that the missing material was cut for reasons of space, though the statement would be posted on DNI's website, where space doesn't seem to be an issue.
Curious.
There's more. Blair's public statement differed from his letter to colleagues in another way. The letter included this language: "From 2002 through 2006 when the use of these techniques ended, the leadership of the CIA repeatedly reported their activities both to Executive Branch policymakers and to members of Congress, and received permission to continue to use the techniques." Blair's public statement made no mention of the permission granted by "members of Congress"--permission that came from members of Obama's own party.
Odd.
And then there are the memos themselves. Sections of the memos that describe the
techniques have been declassified and released. But other sections of those same memos--the parts that describe, in some detail, the value of the program--have been redacted and remain hidden from public view.
Marc Thiessen, a speechwriter for George W. Bush, had access to the full memos and read them to prepare a speech for Bush in 2006. When Thiessen looked at the redacted version released by the White House last week, he noticed something strange.
He writes: "But just as the memo begins to describe previously undisclosed details of what enhanced interrogations achieved, the page is almost entirely blacked out. The Obama administration released pages of unredacted classified information on the techniques used to question captured terrorist leaders but pulled out its black marker when it came to the details of what those interrogations achieved."
It's not just those memos. Former Vice President Dick Cheney says he has read other memos that describe the intelligence obtained by using coercive interrogation and that demonstrate its value. He has asked for them to be declassified and made public.
It is possible, I suppose, that a series of fortunate coincidences has resulted in the public disclosure of only that information that will be politically helpful to the Obama administration. It is also possible that Dick Cheney has taken up synchronized swimming in his retirement.
It wouldn't be the first time the Obama administration has politicized intelligence. Back in the early days of the administration, the New Yorker's Jane Mayer wrote an article about Obama's decision to ban some of these interrogation techniques. She spoke with White House counsel Greg Craig, who described the deliberations.
Across the Potomac River, at the C.I.A.'s headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, however, there was considerably less jubilation. Top C.I.A. officials have argued for years that so-called "enhanced" interrogation techniques have yielded lifesaving intelligence breakthroughs. "They disagree in some respect," Craig admitted. Among the hard questions that Obama left open, in fact, is whether the C.I.A. will have to follow the same interrogation rules as the military. While the President has clearly put an end to cruel tactics, Craig said that Obama "is somewhat sympathetic to the spies' argument that their mission and circumstances are different."
Despite such sentiments, Obama's executive orders will undoubtedly rein in the C.I.A. Waterboarding, for instance, has gone the way of the rack, now that the C.I.A. is strictly bound by customary interpretations of the Geneva Conventions. This decision, too, was the result of intense deliberation. During the transition period, unknown to the public, Obama's legal, intelligence, and national-security advisers visited Langley for two long sessions with current and former intelligence-community members. They debated whether a ban on brutal interrogation practices would hurt their ability to gather intelligence, and the advisers asked the intelligence veterans to prepare a cost-benefit analysis. The conclusions may surprise defenders of harsh interrogation tactics. "There was unanimity among Obama's expert advisers," Craig said, "that to change the practices would not in any material way affect the collection of intelligence."
That's interesting: "top CIA officials have argued for years that so-called 'enhanced' interrogation techniques have yielded lifesaving intelligence breakthroughs," but the team of "expert advisers" from Obama's presidential campaign apparently knows better.
All of this leads to one obvious question: Who needs intelligence professionals when you have campaign advisers?
Stephen F. Hayes, a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author of Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President (HarperCollins).
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