Yes, kids, it's time for another installment of are we the butt of technology's cruel joke?

What's worse: that there's a chain e-mail making the rounds, falsely claiming that Al Gore gave Oliver North a hard time when he tried to warn the world about (wrong again) Osama bin Laden?

'Threatened? By whom?' the senator questioned.

 

'By a terrorist, sir' Ollie answered.

 

'Terrorist? What terrorist could possibly scare you that much?'

 

'His name is Osama bin Laden, sir' Ollie replied.

Or that none of the people sending this along this nonsense spent the few seconds needed to find a bevy of sites debunking it?

What's better: that a viral video of an assault by young girls is the rage of the Internet, or that, thanks to the wonder of hypertext, we can see the changes made by the founders as they were working on the Constitution?

You be the judge, dear readers.

We remember how Keven McKenna unsuccessfully challenged the role of Frank J. Williams, chief justice of the RI Supreme Court, in serving on a federal appeals panel concerning US terror detainees. Now, as Eric Tucker of the Providence AP recently reported, Williams is still waiting for his first case in that arena:

The U.S. Court of Military Commission Review was created last year to hear appeals from detainees convicted of war crimes and to review other decisions made by military tribunals.

It has heard only one case so far, but Williams wasn't on the three-judge panel that decided it. The first of the full-fledged trials is at least a few months away, and the only person yet convicted in military court proceedings, Australian David Hicks, gave up his right to an appeal after pleading guilty last year.

Williams, a former Army captain who earned a Bronze Star in the Vietnam War and still peppers his speech with military analogies, said he became motivated to serve the country again after Sept. 11. He sent a resume and cover letter to the Defense Department general counsel, offering help as the government was setting up military courts to prosecute fighters captured overseas.

"I can't get into a uniform again and go to Iraq or Afghanistan," he said. "I do what I think I can do best, which is judge."

Williams and three other judges were appointed to a forerunner appeals court that was disbanded when the U.S. Supreme Court in 2006 ruled that the military commission structure was unconstitutional. Congress passed a new law, the Military Commissions Act, and a new court of civilian and military judges was constituted last year to handle appeals.

Williams became chief judge in November.

In a law review article last year, Williams described the Sept. 11 hijackers as "nihilistic barbarians." He argued the military commission system affords detainees ample legal protections and is a justifiable and historically established way to deal with suspected terrorists.

That view troubled detainee lawyers who view the tribunal process as inherently unfair and designed to produce and affirm convictions.

David Glazier, a military commission expert at Loyola Law School, said Williams appears to have adopted the Bush administration's "unconstrained definition of a global 'war on terror.'" He said detainee lawyers would be wise to ask him to recuse himself if they appear before his court, and that Williams seems to have already prejudged the fairness of the system.

"These are issues that call for an unbiased assessment by the trial and appellate judges on a case-by-case basis, and any individual who has already formed blanket conclusions is clearly unsuited for these roles," Glazier wrote in an e-mail message.

Williams rejects the criticism, and lawyers who have appeared before him describe him as unbiased. He said he was merely trying to frame the debate over military tribunals from a historical perspective, drawing on his expertise in Lincoln and the Civil War.

Maureen Dowd went to yesterday's US Senate hearing:

It’s hard to follow the narrative of our misadventure in Iraq. We went in to help the Shiites that we betrayed in the first Gulf War shake off their Sunni tormentors. But then, predictably for everyone except the chuckleheaded W. and Cheney, the Shiites began tormenting the Sunnis. So we put 90,000 Sunni Sons of Iraq — some of the same ones who were exploding American soldiers — on our payroll so they’d stop shooting at Americans and helping Al Qaeda. Our troops have gone from policing a Sunni-Shiite civil war to policing a Shiite-Shiite power struggle, while Osama bin Laden plots in peace as Al Qaeda in Iraq distracts us and drains our military resources.

Even some senators got confused.

John McCain seemed to repeat his recent confusion over tribes, mistakenly referring to Al Qaeda again as a “sect of Shiites” before correcting himself and saying: “or Sunnis or anybody else.”

And Joe Biden theorized that “The Awakening,” made up of Sunnis, might decide to get into a civil war with Sunnis, presumably meaning Shiites.

But Senator Biden asked a trenchant, if attenuated, question of Mr. Crocker about Al Qaeda: “If you could take it out, you had a choice, the Lord Almighty came down and sat in the middle of the table there and said, ‘Mr. Ambassador, you can eliminate every Al Qaeda source in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or every Al Qaeda personnel in Iraq,’ which would you pick?”

Given the progress beating back Al Qaeda in Iraq, the ambassador replied, he would pick the hiding place of bin Laden.

“That would be a smart choice,” Mr. Biden noted.

Senator John Warner asked the essential question — the one that makes it clear that W. and Cheney hurt the national interest: Is the war making us safer here at home?

A lot of Americans forget that most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. So the appearance this afternoon by media bigfoot Karen Elliott House, at Brown's Watson Institute, promises to be interesting:

Monday, April 7, 2008 at 4:00 PM

Directors Lectures Series on Contemporary International Affairs

Live Video Stream Available

An archived video will also be made available at this site within 24 hours of the event.

 

"Reform in Saudi Arabia: Movement or Mirage?," with Karen Elliott House,  former senior vice president of Dow Jones & Company and former publisher of all print editions of The Wall Street Journal, and Watson Institute Overseer.

 

King Abdullah, who just turned up #4 on a global list of "worst dictators" doesn't deserve that billing. But how real is the reform image he seeks to cultivate since assuming the throne in 2005? True the kingdom has held municipal elections and King Abdullah favors more freedom for women. But with US pressure for more liberalization now gone, reform is becoming more rhetoric than reality. Politics is limited to the ruling family and the religious establishment is given sway over social change. So women remain the battleground between religious conservatives and modernizers: One woman is thrown in prison for coffee with a male colleague at Starbucks. Is reform success in America's interest?

 

Karen Elliott House had been president of Dow Jones' international group since January 1995 before being appointed publisher in July 2002. In 1974, she joined the Journal's Washington, D.C. bureau as a journalist, where she covered energy, environment, and agriculture. She was named diplomatic correspondent in 1978, moved to New York in 1983 as assistant foreign editor, and became foreign editor in 1984. House won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1984 for her coverage of the Middle East. In March 1989, she was named vice president of Dow Jones' international group.

 

She is currently working on a book on Saudi Arabia and is a Senior Fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. 

 

Location: Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.

Early on during the war in Iraq, there was talk of how Americans officers were checking out The Battle of Algiers, a movie about the Algerian insurgency against the French in the 1950s, for clues about the politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency. Not that it seems to have helped much. Anyway, the Watson Institute at Brown is screening the movie tomorrow.

April 1, TUESDAY  6:30pm

 

FILM: The Battle of Algiers. This film reenacts the story of the urban insurgency against French rule in Algeria in the 1950s. Released in 1967, it attracted student audiences who, in a time of leftist activism, shared the director’s sympathies with the Algerian guerrillas. In 2003, the film was screened at the Pentagon, and advertised with the following: “How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.” What was all the fuss about? See the film and hear from Brown faculty. Presented by the Occupation/Liberation/Collaboration Film Series and the Global Media Project. Location: Joukowsky Forum.

 As has been reported, Colin Powell took aside President Bush before the US invaded Iraq and told him about the Pottery Barn Rule. In other words, you break it, you own it.

We recently looked at some of the impacts of the war:

[There's] a tab in the trillions, tens of thousands dead, US troops being sent into battle without proper equipment, veterans getting shabby treatment, America's global standing seriously diminished, terrorists strengthened, and no end in sight . . .

And yet those who thought Bush is getting ready to pass this mess off on his successor seem absolutely right.

From yesterday's New York Times:

Mr. Bush announced no final decision on future troop levels after the video briefing by the commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, and the diplomat, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker. The briefing took place on the day when the 4,000th American military death of the war was reported and just after the invasion’s fifth anniversary.

But it now appears likely that any decision on major reductions in American troops from Iraq will be left to the next president. That ensures that the question over what comes next will remain in the center of the presidential campaign through Election Day.

Isn't there something a bit striking in how Obama's minister problem has come to a head at the same time as the fifth anniversary of the Iraq?

I mean, yes, some of Jeremiah Wright's statements are not the kind of thing to which you want to hitch your cart when you are running for president of the United States. And for those inclined to view this stuff in the dimmest possible light, it won't make a whit of difference that making fiery pronouncements fits squarely in the tradition of a particular style of preaching in the black church.

But say you want to have an elective war, with a tab in the trillions, tens of thousands dead, US troops being sent into battle without proper equipment, veterans getting shabby treatment, America's global standing seriously diminished, terrorists strengthened, and no end in sight?

No problem!

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, the author of The Three Trillion Dollar War: the True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, is the subject of a Q+A in this week's Phoenix:

Let’s start at the beginning: why did the Bush Administration go to war in Iraq? And why did Congress and the American people go along with it?
Those are hard questions to answer. The alleged reasons don’t make any sense. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There were not, until the United States invaded, any connections with Al Qaeda. Anyone familiar with the highly secular nature of Hussein’s Baathist regime would have known that a connection with Al Qaeda would have been inconsistent with Saddam’s political views. The irony, of course, is that while we were worrying about weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist in Iraq, North Korea became a nuclear power. While we were focusing on a country where there was no connection with 9/11, things went terribly wrong in Afghanistan, a nation strongly connected to the New York and Washington attacks. . . . .

By some measures, Bush’s so-called surge appears to be working. Combat deaths are down. The once-hot insurgency appears to have cooled. Senator John McCain, the republican presidential nominee, says this is the road to victory. Cynics, such as myself, see the surge as a way to ensure that the next president will be forced to continue the fight. What’s your view?
I am a bit inclined to your view. The question, I guess, is what lessons can we infer? First, you say the level of violence is down. One has to put this into context. The level of violence is still extraordinary high. And it’s just down from the peaks that it attained at the beginning of 2007. It’s still at the level of 2006. It is not exactly peace and stability.

Secondly, the objective of the surge was to create room to create a viable, stable, political solution to the civil conflict. It hasn’t worked. The political solution has not emerged. So, going forward, you have to ask this: “Are we supposed to maintain our forces there forever? For the 80 to 100 years McCain has talked about?” . . . .

Several days ago, a White House spokesman dismissed your findings with the following words: “people like Joseph Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure. One can’t even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9/11. It is an investment in the future safety and security of americans and our vital national interests. $3 trillion? What price does Joe Stiglitz put on attacks on the American homeland that have already been prevented? Or doesn’t his slide rule work that way?” How do you respond?
There are so many problems packed into those five-or-so sentences. It is interesting that he was commenting on my book before he had a chance to read it. He was just responding to the bottom line without knowing or understanding the analysis that prompted the conclusions. I would suggest that the administration lacks the courage of its convictions. Democracy is more than periodic elections. It’s about having an informed citizenry participate in the decisions that affect their lives. The critical word here is “informed.” The administration refuses to talk about what the costs of the war are. It’s an important dimension. Americans should be able to make the decisions about what the benefits and costs are. They may differ about the benefit side, but at least they should know what the costs are.

We document the way the administration has been trying to hide and mislead the American people about the cost of the war. Senator Charles Schumer of New York has asked the Bush administration to testify about those costs. The administration so far has refused. It refuses to engage with critics. The administration is still trying to hide behind the 9/11 smoke screen. The fact is that, because of the war, America is less — not more — secure. According to a recent survey of senior military officers, our military forces are depleted. We are less prepared for a new attack than we were five years ago.

Writing in this week's New Yorker, Paul Kramer reveals how, long before the waterboarding controversy, American forces in the Phillippines used a similar form of water torture, more than 100 years ago, to pry information from insurgents:

Many Americans were puzzled by the news, in 1902, that United States soldiers were torturing Filipinos with water. The United States, throughout its emergence as a world power, had spoken the language of liberation, rescue, and freedom. This was the language that, when coupled with expanding military and commercial ambitions, had helped launch two very different wars. The first had been in 1898, against Spain, whose remaining empire was crumbling in the face of popular revolts in two of its colonies, Cuba and the Philippines. The brief campaign was pitched to the American public in terms of freedom and national honor (the U.S.S. Maine had blown up mysteriously in Havana Harbor), rather than of sugar and naval bases, and resulted in a formally independent Cuba.

The Americans were not done liberating. Rising trade in East Asia suggested to imperialists that the Philippines, Spain’s largest colony, might serve as an effective “stepping stone” to China’s markets. U.S. naval plans included provisions for an attack on the Spanish Navy in the event of war, and led to a decisive victory against the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in May, 1898. Shortly afterward, Commodore George Dewey returned the exiled Filipino revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo to the islands. Aguinaldo defeated Spanish forces on land, declared the Philippines independent in June, and organized a government led by the Philippine élite.

During the next half year, it became clear that American and Filipino visions for the islands’ future were at odds. U.S. forces seized Manila from Spain—keeping the army of their ostensible ally Aguinaldo from entering the city—and President William McKinley refused to recognize Filipino claims to independence, pushing his negotiators to demand that Spain cede sovereignty over the islands to the United States, while talking about Filipinos’ need for “benevolent assimilation.” Aguinaldo and some of his advisers, who had been inspired by the United States as a model republic and had greeted its soldiers as liberators, became increasingly suspicious of American motivations. When, after a period of mounting tensions, a U.S. sentry fired on Filipino soldiers outside Manila in February, 1899, the second war erupted, just days before the Senate ratified a treaty with Spain securing American sovereignty over the islands in exchange for twenty million dollars. In the next three years, U.S. troops waged a war to “free” the islands’ population from the regime that Aguinaldo had established. The conflict cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos and about four thousand U.S. soldiers.

Within the first year of the war, news of atrocities by U.S. forces—the torching of villages, the killing of prisoners—began to appear in American newspapers. Although the U.S. military censored outgoing cables, stories crossed the Pacific through the mail, which wasn’t censored. Soldiers, in their letters home, wrote about extreme violence against Filipinos, alongside complaints about the weather, the food, and their officers; and some of these letters were published in home-town newspapers. A letter by A. F. Miller, of the 32nd Volunteer Infantry Regiment, published in the Omaha World-Herald in May, 1900, told of how Miller’s unit uncovered hidden weapons by subjecting a prisoner to what he and others called the “water cure.” “Now, this is the way we give them the water cure,” he explained. “Lay them on their backs, a man standing on each hand and each foot, then put a round stick in the mouth and pour a pail of water in the mouth and nose, and if they don’t give up pour in another pail. They swell up like toads. I’ll tell you it is a terrible torture.”

Amid the news that the US will seek the death penalty for six Guantanamo detainees facing 9/11 charges, a related protest is planned to coincide with the arrival at US District Court in Providence this morning of John Roberts, chief justice of the US Supreme Court.

According to a news release from Mark Stahl of the RI Community Coalition for Peace,

A coalition of RI community, religious, and political groups will hold a rally and procession at the Federal Courthouse on Kennedy Plaza. The purpose of this action is to bring attention to the following critical demands: close the Guantanamo gulag, end all U.S. involvement in torture, end illegal spying, and restore the Bill of Rights.

 

Although all three branches of the Federal Government have acted to debase the very concept of justice, ordinary citizens will peacefully and solemnly gather to assert their civil liberties and invoke principles to counter the empty, congratulatory posturing behind the Roberts visit. “Since the Chief Justice is a stalwart neocon,” notes Sam Smith of East Bay MoveOn, “we fear that the Supreme Court will legitimize the roll-back of civil liberties wrought by the Bush administration”.

 

“As a citizen of the U.S. and member of the world community,” adds Kathy Lessuck of the RI Community Coalition for Peace, “I am saddened, sickened, and embarrassed by our practice and promotion of torture, as well as the continued existence of Guantanamo and other secret U.S. prisons throughout the world. ....         

 

Gathering will begin at 10:30 am on Tuesday Feb. 12 at Burnside Park, adjacent to Kennedy Plaza. After a brief rally, citizens will move in procession toward the Federal Building.

A few days ago, I touched on how the Republicans are pulling a naked emperor bit in attacking the Democrats on the national security-terrorism front.

Two related things today:

-- On the front of the ProJo, a McClatchy story tells us how US-enabled Pakistan is losing ground to militants.

-- And in bidding farewell to Mitt Romney [whose headline-making former dog, Seamus, got ink earlier in the campaign], New York Times columnist Gail Collins is on-point:

Mitt invested more than $40 million of his own money and $50 million of other people’s on his race, which comes down to about $8 million per state won (North Dakota says thank you!) or around $324,000 per delegate. It was an incredible bargain compared to the $60 million Rudy Giuliani spent on zero delegates, but still not exactly the kind of return on investment he was used to getting in the private sector.

“We’re going to keep on battling. We’re going to go all the way to the convention,” he told his cheering supporters Tuesday night as his loyal wife, Ann, stood by looking somewhat unenthusiastic. ....

POP QUIZ: What reason did Mitt Romney give for dropping out of the presidential race?

A) I’m down to my last $40 million.

B) I just discovered Tagg let another illegal immigrant mow the lawn.

C) I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.

Yes! Continuing his near-perfect record of referring to political opponents as sinister forces bent on undermining the nation, Romney said he was dropping out so the Republicans wouldn’t lose the race to the Democratic terror-surrenderers.

Can you see the next nine months stretching out before you, people? Envision the pages on the calendar flipping. Hear the incessant drone of terrorsurrenderterrorsurrenderterrorsurrender? Welcome to McCain vs. Yet-to-Be-Named-White-Flag-Waver.

Other than repeatedly offering to give up any civil liberty the Bush administration felt it might need, Romney never talked all that much about the war on terror as a candidate. He was more interested in denouncing illegal immigration. Until he got to Michigan, where he became Friend of the Workers Mitt. If that primary had gone on any longer, he’d have been picketing with the writers’ union.

UPDATE: Shocker: RNC calls Dems weak on defense.

On one hand, we have the AP reporting on the strains faced by our military abroad.

“The well is deep, but it is not infinite,” Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We must get Army deployments down to 12 months as soon as possible. People are tired.”

Yet despite that, and despite the details below, the RNC has rolled out a video on YouTube to call Clinton and Obama liberal wusses. Might that be a bit myopic?

---

Although it played on the bottom of the front of Wednesday's New York Times, this story doesn't seem to have gotten much wider attention, what with Super Tuesday and the pursuit of possible suspects in the death of Natalie Holloway.

It nonetheless points to how the war in Iraq has taken the focus away from what seems like the main threat to America. And it's our own government that is saying this.

WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda is gaining in strength from its refuge in Pakistan and is steadily improving its ability to recruit, train and position operatives capable of carrying out attacks inside the United States, the director of national intelligence told a Senate panel on Tuesday.

The director, Mike McConnell, told lawmakers that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, remained in control of the terrorist group and had promoted a new generation of lieutenants. He said Al Qaeda was also improving what he called “the last key aspect of its ability to attack the U.S.” — producing militants, including new Western recruits, capable of blending into American society and attacking domestic targets.

A senior intelligence official said Tuesday evening that the testimony was based in part on new evidence that Qaeda operatives in Pakistan were training Westerners, most likely including American citizens, to carry out attacks. The official said there was no indication as yet that Al Qaeda had succeeded in getting operatives into the United States.

The testimony, in an annual assessment of the threats facing the United States, was the latest indication that Al Qaeda appears to have significantly rebuilt a network battered by the American invasion of Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks.

It follows a National Intelligence Estimate last summer that described a resurgent Al Qaeda, and could add fuel to criticisms from Democratic lawmakers and presidential candidates that the White House focus on Iraq since 2002 has diverted attention and resources from the battle against the Qaeda organization’s core.

In recent weeks, fresh concerns about the threat posed by Al Qaeda have prompted senior Bush administration officials to travel to Pakistan to seek approval for more aggressive American military action against militants based in the tribal areas near the border with Afghanistan.

Charlie Wilson's War is Hollywood's version of the US role in arming the rebels, known as the Mujahedeen, who chased the Soviets from Afghanistan. I haven't seen the movie, but I'm told that it completely overlooks the cause-and-effect between that moment in history and how it came back to bite us in a big way.

This isn't very surprising. In 1990, I wrote a profile of a public health nurse from Massachusetts who had trained the Afghan rebels in medical skills, and who was concerned that Washington would forget them with the end of the Cold War -- which is exactly what happened. (When I focused the top of my story on her concern, a top editor changed it, explaining that 27 words made for a long sentence and that talking about Afghanistan and the Cold War in the same sentence might be a bit much for most readers.)

Chalmers Johnson, the author of Blowback: the Costs and Consequences of American Empire, recently took up Charlie Wilson's War in a piece titled, appropriately, "Bad History and Bad Comedy":

On May 25, 2003 (the same month George W. Bush stood on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln under a White-House-prepared "Mission Accomplished" banner and proclaimed "major combat operations" at an end in Iraq), I published a review in the Los Angeles Times of the book that provides the data for the film Charlie Wilson's War. The original edition of the book carried the subtitle, "The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History – the Arming of the Mujahedeen." The 2007 paperbound edition was subtitled, "The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times." Neither the claim that the Afghan operations were covert nor that they changed history is precisely true.

 

In my review of the book, I wrote, 

"The Central Intelligence Agency has an almost unblemished record of screwing up every 'secret' armed intervention it ever undertook. From the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953 through the rape of Guatemala in 1954, the Bay of Pigs, the failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, the 'secret war' in Laos, aid to the Greek Colonels who seized power in 1967, the 1973 killing of President Allende in Chile, and Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra war against Nicaragua, there is not a single instance in which the Agency's activities did not prove acutely embarrassing to the United States and devastating to the people being 'liberated.' The CIA continues to get away with this bungling primarily because its budget and operations have always been secret and Congress is normally too indifferent to its Constitutional functions to rein in a rogue bureaucracy. Therefore the tale of a purported CIA success story should be of some interest.

 

"According to the author of Charlie Wilson's War, the exception to CIA incompetence was the arming between 1979 and 1988 of thousands of Afghan mujahedeen ('freedom fighters'). The Agency flooded Afghanistan with an incredible array of extremely dangerous weapons and 'unapologetically mov[ed] to equip and train cadres of high tech holy warriors in the art of waging a war of urban terror against a modern superpower [in this case, the USSR].'

 

"The author of this glowing account, [the late] George Crile, was a veteran producer for the CBS television news show 60 Minutes and an exuberant Tom Clancy-type enthusiast for the Afghan caper. He argues that the U.S.'s clandestine involvement in Afghanistan was 'the largest and most successful CIA operation in history,' 'the one morally unambiguous crusade of our time,' and that 'there was nothing so romantic and exciting as this war against the Evil Empire.' Crile's sole measure of success is killed Soviet soldiers (about 15,000), which undermined Soviet morale and contributed to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the period 1989 to 1991. That's the successful part.

 

"However, he never once mentions that the 'tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists' the CIA armed are the same people who in 1996 killed nineteen American airmen at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, blew a hole in the side of the USS Cole in Aden Harbor in 2000, and on September 11, 2001, flew hijacked airliners into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon."

Driving his argument home, Johnson goes on to note:

Neither a reader of Crile nor a viewer of the film based on his book would know that, in talking about the Afghan freedom fighters of the 1980s, we are also talking about the militants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban of the 1990s and 2000s. Amid all the hoopla about Wilson's going out of channels to engineer secret appropriations of millions of dollars to the guerrillas, the reader or viewer would never suspect that, when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, President George H.W. Bush promptly lost interest in the place and simply walked away, leaving it to descend into one of the most horrific civil wars of modern times.

 

Among those supporting the Afghans (in addition to the U.S.) was the rich, pious Saudi Arabian economist and civil engineer Osama bin Laden, whom we helped by building up his al-Qaeda base at Khost. When bin Laden and his colleagues decided to get even with us for having been used, he had the support of much of the Islamic world. This disaster was brought about by Wilson's and the CIA's incompetence as well as their subversion of all the normal channels of political oversight and democratic accountability within the U.S. government. Charlie Wilson's war thus turned out to have been just another bloody skirmish in the expansion and consolidation of the American empire – and an imperial presidency. The victors were the military-industrial complex and our massive standing armies. The billion dollars' worth of weapons Wilson secretly supplied to the guerrillas ended up being turned on ourselves.

This killing by a suicide bomber of Benazir Bhutto is bad news and only further complicates the US relationship with one of the linchpins in a very volatile part of the world.

There's already abundant evidence of the Bush administration's seriously flawed approach to fighting terrorism, and the New York Times has some more:

Catching Americans who travel illegally to Cuba or who purchase cigars, rum or other products from the island may be distracting some American government agencies from higher-priority missions like fighting terrorism and combating narcotics trafficking, a government audit to be released Wednesday says.

The report, from the Government Accountability Office, says that Customs and Border Protection, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, conducts secondary inspections on 20 percent of charter passengers arriving from Cuba at Miami International Airport, more than six times the inspection rate for other international arrivals, even from countries considered shipment points for narcotics.

That high rate of inspections and the numerous seizures of relatively benign contraband “have strained C.B.P.’s capacity to carry out its primary mission of keeping terrorists, criminals and inadmissible aliens from entering the country at Miami International Airport,” says the audit, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.

The audit also called on the Treasury Department to scrutinize the priorities of its Office of Foreign Assets Control, which enforces more than 20 economic and trade sanctions programs, including those aimed at freezing terrorists’ assets and restricting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, but has long focused on Cuba.

Between 2000 and 2006, 61 percent of the agency’s investigation and penalty caseload involved Cuba embargo cases. Over that period, the office opened 10,823 investigations into possible violations involving Cuba and just 6,791 investigations on all other cases, the audit found.

Critics of the American embargo on Cuba seized on the report as evidence that Washington’s policy, which began in the Kennedy administration and has grown more stringent ever since, was outdated.

The New York Times had a strong editorial yesterday on the Mukasey confirmation:

Once upon a time, the confirmation of major presidential appointments played out on several levels — starting, of course, with politics. It was assumed that a president would choose like-minded people as cabinet members and for other jobs requiring Senate approval. There was a presumption that he should be allowed his choices, all other things being equal.

Before George W. Bush’s presidency, those other things actually counted. Was the nominee truly qualified, with a professional background worthy of the job? Would he discharge his duties fairly and honorably, upholding his oath to protect the Constitution? Even though she answers to the president, would the nominee represent all Americans? Would he or she respect the power of Congress to supervise the executive branch, and the power of the courts to enforce the rule of law?

In less than seven years, Mr. Bush has managed to boil that list down to its least common denominator: the president should get his choices. At first, Mr. Bush was abetted by a slavish Republican majority that balked at only one major appointment — Harriet Miers for Supreme Court justice, and then only because of doubts that she was far enough to the right.

The Democrats, however, also deserve a large measure of blame. They did almost nothing while they were in the minority to demand better nominees than Mr. Bush was sending up. And now that they have attained the majority, they are not doing any better.

On Thursday, the Senate voted by 53 to 40 to confirm Mr. Mukasey even though he would not answer a simple question: does he think waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning used to extract information from a prisoner, is torture and therefore illegal?

Democrats offer excuses for their sorry record, starting with their razor-thin majority. But it is often said that any vote in the Senate requires more than 60 votes — enough to overcome a filibuster. So why did Mr. Mukasey get by with only 53 votes? Given the success the Republicans have had in blocking action when the Democrats cannot muster 60 votes, the main culprit appears to be the Democratic leadership, which seems uninterested in or incapable of standing up to Mr. Bush.

Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat who turned the tide for this nomination, said that if the Senate did not approve Mr. Mukasey, the president would get by with an interim appointment who would be under the sway of “the extreme ideology of Vice President Dick Cheney.” He argued that Mr. Mukasey could be counted on to reverse the politicization of the Justice Department that occurred under Alberto Gonzales, and that Mr. Mukasey’s reticence about calling waterboarding illegal might well become moot, because the Senate was considering a law making clear that it is illegal.

That is precisely the sort of cozy rationalization that Mr. Schumer and his colleagues have used so many times to back down from a confrontation with Mr. Bush. The truth is, Mr. Mukasey is already in the grip of that “extreme ideology.” If he were not, he could have answered the question about waterboarding.

It's embarrasing that the US Senate confirmed an attorney general -- Michael Mukasey -- who danced around the question of whether waterboarding constitutes torture.

Here's what Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who held Mukasey's feet to the fire on this issue, had to say:

“I voted against the nomination of Michael Mukasey because I believe this nation had the chance to present the world a moment of clarity on what we stand for.  America’s strength comes from its ideals.  We do not – we cannot – stand for torture. And we cannot stand for an administration that cannot condemn torture.  

 

“I was deeply disappointed by Judge Mukasey’s evasions on whether the practice of waterboarding is torture and unconstitutional.  But this moment is now past. What is left is the hope that he will repair the damage his predecessor did to the Department of Justice, and the hope that if called upon to choose between obeying the President and upholding the rule of law, he will make the right choice. I hope we can trust this man for that.”

While the White House warns Iran about the peril of gaining even knowledge about nukes, the United States remains the world's largest arms dealer.

The United States maintained its role as the leading supplier of weapons to the developing world in 2006, followed by Russia and Britain, according to a Congressional study. Pakistan, India and Saudi Arabia were the top buyers.

The global weapons market is highly competitive, with manufacturing countries seeking both to increase profits and to expand political influence through weapons sales to developing nations that reached nearly $28.8 billion in 2006.

Is this kind of arms-dealing, which includes Providence-based Textron, good foreign policy?

Here's one view, from Asia Times Online:

It [The US government] sees arms sales as a way of making and keeping strategic friends and tying countries more directly to US military planning and operations.

At its simplest, as Lt Gen Jeffrey B Kohler, director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, told the New York Times in 2006, the United States likes arms deals because “it gives us access and influence and builds friendships”. South Asia has been an important arena for this effort, and it teaches some lessons the United States should not ignore.

A recent Congressional Research Service report on international arms sales records that last year the United States delivered nearly $8 billion worth of weapons to Third World countries. This was about 40% of all such arms transfers. The US also signed agreements to sell over $10 billion worth of weapons, one-third of all arms deals with Third World countries.

It is easy to put this in perspective: $10 billon a year is the estimated cost of meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal for water and sanitation, which would reduce by half the proportion of people in the world without proper access to drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015. Today, about 1.1 billion people do not have access to a minimal amount of clean water and about 2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation.

Recall those flights that shuttled Saudi nationals out of the US after 9/11? It's turns out that one of them emanated from Warwick:

It’s been six years since 9/11, and far from becoming old news, there’s always more to learn about that day and its aftermath.
 
Remember the charter flights that expedited Saudi nationals out of the US soon after the attacks? Some of these whisked away Saudi royalty, while others, more ominously, carried extended members of the bin Laden family.
 
A 2003 Vanity Fair article claimed that the FBI facilitated the flights, and Judicial Watch eventually forced the release of the FBI.’s own heavily redacted documents about the matter. The documents, with various information blacked out, nonetheless confirm that six charter flights carrying Saudis left the US between September 14 (the first day flights were allowed) and September 24, 2001.
 
The first of these infamous flights, it appears, took off from our own T.F. Green Airport. Yet a March 27, 2005, New York Times article, reprinted on page A-13 of the Providence Journal, provided little detail.
 
According to the documents unearthed by Judicial Watch, a public interest group, “On 9/14/2001, four individuals, including [redacted], a member of the Saudi Royal Family, flew from Providence, R.I., to Paris, France, aboard a chartered aircraft.” The flight — paid for with an American Express card, the name of whose owner was redacted — cost $75,000 and the passengers carried 1500 pounds of luggage.
 
“Pacific Jet Company” booked the charter through Northstar Aviation in Warwick. The FBI interviewed individuals at Northstar, while, according to the documents, the Rhode Island State Police and US Customs Service searched the luggage. The names of those on the flight remain redacted.
 
“Extensive investigation revealed no information to suggest travel by [redacted] and [redacted] and [redacted] within New England was connected to any terrorist or criminal activity,” the documents continue.
 
Northstar Aviation is owned by Frank Zammiello, a Cranston and Florida-based real estate mogul who wants to build a high rise on Federal Hill. As the Providence Journal noted in July, Zammiello and his family in 1986 pledged more than $6 million to secure a pre-trial release for then-New England mob boss Raymond J. “Junior” Patriarca.
 
The FBI conducted follow-up interviews regarding the Providence flight into 2002. Reading between redactions, it appears that the royal passenger's plans to attend a New England school fell through and his father called him home immediately after the attacks on 9/11.
 
An agent in the Providence FBI office first denied the flight in question happened, and then said he had a vague memory of it. (A lot of turnover since that day, he said.)  He found another agent with more information, but to talk they had to have permission from the FBI’s Boston office, which declined to provide it.

Writing in this week's Phoenix, James Parker offers a lively piece on how limericks and surrealism offer considerable insight into the torture policies backed by the Bush administration:

History will have trouble digesting the irony of it — that George W. Bush, a man who claims Jesus as his favorite political philosopher and the Lord as his warrant, has presided over the transformation of US foreign policy into a God-destroying juggernaut of absurdity. “If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations,” wrote Thomas Merton in 1961, “study hell.” Merton was a Trappist monk, but he knew the world. In its relentless, chaotic sponsorship of torture, the Bush Administration has created many little chambers of hell, many places where reason is overthrown and sanctity denied. In such places — in Abu Ghraib, or Guantánamo, or Camp Cropper, or Bagram Air Base — human rights evaporate: there are no rights, no principles or precedents. There is only the despotism of the present tense, whose sole limit is the fact that you might die before it has exhausted its capacity for torment. It doesn’t get more absurd than that.

Edward Lear didn’t invent the limerick, but he might as well have. The form had existed for centuries before this shy Victorian landscape painter — tormented privately by epilepsy, which he called “my terrible demon” — made his name by turning it into a vehicle for violent irrationality:

There was a Young Person of Smyrna
Whose grandmother threatened to burn her;
But she seized on the cat, and said, “Granny, burn that!
You incongruous old woman of Smyrna!”

Lear was a post-Romantic who disliked getting carried away: he described his own mind as “concrete and abstemious,” and he knew that the key to successful nonsense (as he called his verse) lay in a crooked balancing of order and chaos. Without the punctilious containment of the limerick — its mirrored first and last lines creating a sense of psychotic circularity (literally, of loopiness) — his strange animalistic jokes would have had no punch line.

There was an old man who screamed out
Whenever they knocked him about;
So they took off his boots, and fed him with fruits,
And continued to knock him about.

Insisting that his nonsense was simple entertainment, written for the nursery, Lear was in fact one of the fathers of absurdity, of Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco, unwilling herald of a universe “freed” — in the words of Martin Esslin, scholar of absurd theater — “from the shackles of logic,” where “wish-fulfillment will not be inhibited by considerations of human kindness.” The old man is fed with fruits to stop him screaming: once he’s quiet, the abuse can resume.

The Bush-era analogue to this situation would be the one in which the doctor stands by during the torture session, ensuring that the prisoner doesn’t die. During the course of one interrogation at the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, for example, as reported by Time magazine, prisoner 063 — Mohamed al-Qahtani, the so-called 20th hijacker of 9/11 — grew dangerously dehydrated. Medical corpsmen intervened, and al-Qahtani was pumped with three bags of saline. For the duration of the procedure, however, he remained strapped to his chair, and loud music (possibly Christina Aguilera, which had been used before) was played to keep him awake.

Nonsense is its own insurance. In the unhappy event that a prisoner expires before realizing his full potential as a source of intelligence, his corpse can be kept safely in the realm of meaninglessness — pickled, as it were, in absurdity. Steven H. Miles, in his 2005 book Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror (Random House) describes the case of the detainee at Camp Cropper, near Baghdad International Airport, who was killed by a blow to the head. Two weeks later his body, complete with pre-prepared death certificate, was dropped at a local hospital. Cause of death: “sudden brainstem compression.” That unfortunate young man of Camp Cropper . . .

Reginald Centracchio, the former adjutant general of the Rhode Island National Guard, appears this week on WPRI/WNAC-TV's Newsmakers, discussing the war in Iraq, Obama's statement about Pakistan, the bridge collapse in Minnesota, and other topics. We also hear from WPRI meteorologist Steve Cascione about the threat posed by hurricanes. The show is broadcast Sunday, at 5:30 am on Channel 12, and at 10 on Fox 64. 

Samantha Power had a lengthy essay in yesterday's New York Times Book Review. One of the highlights is how she calls the US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual a leading reference for a revised 21st Century approach to fighting terrorism.

When the terrorists struck on 9/11, the United States military was singularly unprepared to deal with them. One reflection of the Pentagon’s mind-set at the time was the fact that the Army counterinsurgency manual had not been updated since 1986 and the Marine Corps guide had not been revised since 1980.

This lack of preparedness showed. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the armed forces did not have the appropriate intelligence, linguistic capabilities, weapons, equipment, force structures, civil affairs know-how or capacity to train security forces in other countries. “It is not unfair to say that in 2003 most Army officers knew more about the U.S. Civil War than they did about counterinsurgency,” Lt. Col. John A. Nagl writes in the foreword to the University of Chicago edition. But while the Bush administration dug in, refusing to admit how ill-suited its premises were to the new century, American military officers revised their old doctrines on the fly.

. . . .

The fundamental premise of the manual is that the key to successful counterinsurgency is protecting civilians. The manual notes: “An operation that kills five insurgents is counterproductive if collateral damage leads to the recruitment of 50 more insurgents.” It suggests that force size be calculated in relation not to the enemy, but to inhabitants (a minimum of 20 counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents). It emphasizes the necessity of coordination with beefed-up civilian agencies, which are needed to take on reconstruction and development tasks.

The most counterintuitive, as well as the most politically difficult, premise of the manual is that the American military must assume greater risk in order to gather much-needed intelligence and, in the end, achieve greater safety. The emphasis of the 1990s on force protection is overturned by the assertion of several breathtaking paradoxes: “Sometimes, the more you protect your force, the less secure you may be.” “Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective it is.” “Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction.” Sarah Sewall, a former Pentagon official who teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (and a close colleague of mine), has contributed an introduction that should be required reading for anybody who wants to understand the huge demands effective counterinsurgency will place on the military and the voting public. “Those who fail to see the manual as radical probably don’t understand it,” she writes, “or at least what it’s up against.”

Regardless of one's view on the war in Iraq, the Bush administration's lack of preparation for the post-invasion phase of the conflict is nothing short of shameful. How many lives might have been spared if more thought and consideration had gone into this, let alone the wisdom of the entire idea?

Defense Secretary Robert Gates was recently brought to tears while discussing the death in May of Douglas Zembiec, who was known as "the Lion of Falluja," and who was killed during his fourth tour in Iraq.  He had given up his Pentagon job to return to the conflict.

In the assessment of Maureen Dowd, "Mr. Gates captured the sadness we feel about American kids trapped in a desert waiting to be blown up, sent there by men who once refused to go to a warped war themselves."

After 9-11, the nation rallied around President Bush and placed a lot of credulity in his statements and leadership. We've seen where that has gotten us.

While Jack Reed might not want to become defense secretary, he's the kind of Democrat, because of his expertise and military background, who brings a lot of credibility to national security issues. With now considerable evidence of the White House's failure to make progress in the fight with Al Qaeda, the question is whether Democrats can better define and lead in this area, particularly with a presidential election on the line.

I wrote about this issue during the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004:

The belief that [John] Kerry can do a better job leading the US in the post-9/11 age of anxiety . . . permeates the DNC. During the convention’s opening night, one of the images that steadily appeared on a giant screen circling the FleetCenter was the legend, "A Stronger America," accompanied by a cheery red background with simulated fireworks exploding in the background.

Jack Reed has the kind of national security credentials — he’s a West Point graduate and former Army Ranger who serves on the Armed Services Committee — that lend strength to the Democratic case. In terms of the task facing Kerry and John Edwards on this front, Reed told me, "I think they have to demonstrate their experience and their expertise." He offered a reminder that Kerry is a combat veteran of Vietnam, and said Edwards has "a discerning intellect that will be obvious in the campaign."

For the converted, the war in Iraq — from its preemptive start to the many bungles along the way — points to the need for some big changes. As Reed notes, in a theme repeated at the convention, the US "is now considered to be a nation without friends in the world. We can’t do anything without a collaborative effort." And even with homeland security rhetoric emanating from the White House, he says, relatively little of it has been adequately backed up — a finding articulated in alarming detail by the national September 11 commission last week.

Given all this, you don’t have to be a fan of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, with its share of unflattering footage of the president’s syntax-challenged remarks, to think the administration lacks in judgment and other national security skills. So why do the Democrats still face a seemingly uphill battle on this issue?

Reed says the perception among some that Democrats are weak on defense is a legacy of the last 25 or 30 years. And the simplistic outlook of the Bush White House — in which the president suggests a black-and-white view of complex global geopolitics — has "a certain appeal to people."

We saw what happened to John Kerry (his campaign bears responsibility, IMHO, for not anticipating these kind of tactics and effectively responding). Given the opportunity presented by Bush's blunders, will the Dems do any better in 2008?