++A-Rod managed to get only one year suspension from major league baseball.
++The Huffington Post kept reporting that Ariel Sharon's health was deteriorating. What could that mean since he was in a vegetative state for the last 8 years. Today, he did die at the age of 85 so I guess I found out what they meant.
++The Unemployment rate fell to 6.7% and like most news during the Obama years it was considered a negative. The economy only grew 74,000 jobs the last month but I expect the number to be revised since ADP, the payroll service, had the best month, some 230,000 in years. The jobs report was considered the worst in three years.
++The White House is furious with the Senate on pushing a new sanctions bill against Iran. The bill sponsored by Bob Menendez now has reached a number where it is veto-proof. The problem is that it would wreck the negotiations and doom the situation to war. The EU reported that the Iranian negotiations concerning the implementation of the interim agreement has made significant progress. Russia is already negotiating an oil for goods deal to alleviate the Iranian sanctions regime.
++Bob Gates' memoir sparked off a flurry of comments in Washington about Obama's commitment to Afghanistan and the Iraq war. House Democrats thought it sounds like Obama had the right idea about not being fooled by the demands of generals. Gates wrote that Obama was committed to the fighting men and women but not to the mission in Afghanistan. It seems Obama's mistrust of Karzai is well-deserved. Karzai has released prisoners against American advice and is stalling about reaching a security agreement.
++The Administration wants to ship arms to Iraq along with Apache helicopters. Congress is leery about Prime Minister Malicki because they suspect he will use the arms to go against his Sunni opponents.
++The Economist writes that for all the noise about Al Qaeda in Fallujah and Syria, it actually looks like they peaked. As always,the local tribes are rising up against them because they resist Al Qaeda's hamfisted style of governance.
Showing posts with label Al Qaeda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Al Qaeda. Show all posts
Saturday, January 11, 2014
Monday, July 4, 2011
The Missing Martyrs
Charles Kurzman "The Missing Martyrs--Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists",Oxford University, 248 pages.
John Brennen recently discussed that the Obama Administration is now seriously considering defeating Al Qaeda. Remember the whole Long War Doctrine? It seems bin Laden spent his last days contemplating Al Qaeda's image problem and thought of re-branding the group with a new name. His counter-intelligence chief had resigned in frustration and he was having problems fund-raising. He seemed to think that Al Qaeda hurt itself by killing so many other Muslims. During this time, Al Qaeda's American spokesperson cut a YouTube video to urge all American Muslims to go to gun shows and buy weapons and use them against the Crusaders. So far that has been a bust.
But for reasons best known to ideologues, almost ten years after 9/11, Americans are supposed to be more afraid of the Muslim threat and be on the lookout for creeping sharia law and the building of mosques. Despite the rhetoric from both the Bush and Obama administrations that we are not waging war against Islam, we have a whole very vocal subculture saying we are and we want to be.
Charles Kurzman's latest book is an ideologue's worst nightmare--a well reasoned argument about why ,in fact, there are so few Muslim terrorists and why the level of terrorist acts have remained fairly consistent for over two decades. In fact, Muslim terrorist themselves ask the same questions as Kurzman. Fewer than 100,000 Muslims have been involved in terrorist acts over the last quarter of a century. Al Qaeda's number 2, the Egyptian Ayman Zawahiri frequently laments the lack of militancy among Muslims. In 2008, he declared,"Each day,the sheep in the flock hope that the wolves will stop killing them, but their prayers go unanswered. Can any rational person fail to see how they are misguided in hoping for this? This is our own state of affairs?"
And you would think that we should have numerous domestic Muslim terrorists since we are in several wars in the Middle East. But, contrary to even the warnings of our own law enforcement officials, fewer than 40 Muslim-Americans planned or carried out acts of domestic terrorism
over the period since 9/11. Since then, only a dozen people in this country were convicted for having links with Al Qaeda. Islamist terrorists have found it especially hard to recruit in the United States. In fact I can almost recall every example from the northern Virginia boys who went to Yemen and the teenagers from the Somalia community in Minnesota.
When Kurzman started the study for this book,Muslims were offended by his question, even though he was supporting their contention that few were involved or even knew anyone involved in terrorism. What sparked the book was the assumption after 9/11 that we would see Islamist violence all over the country and terrorist attacks throughout the world. In fact, despite the sensational acts that occurred abroad in Spain and London, terrorist acts actually went down throughout the world and eventually the bulk of them were contained during the war in Iraq. So naturally, the question becomes why were there not more.
Kurzman has had his share of attacks from the Right as have serious Middle East scholars, who are believed as not getting the facts straight. These same people,however, are routinely consulted by Homeland Security and the Defense Department to get a gauge on the upcoming threats. Kurzman takes a shot at Bernard Lewis, a brilliant scholar of medieval Islam, who became one of those advising the Bush Administration to invent Iraq to send a message to the Mulsim world. Kursman points out that Lewis has never factored in the appeal of modernity to modern Muslims and by the end actually reversed everything he had written about the Middle East, saying that Bush's campaign for democracy would work, despite a lifetime arguing against the idea. Kurzman is particularly good in dissecting Sam Huntington's view that we were in a clash of civilizations.
Kurzman is particularly good in summarizing all the polling data we have from Islamic states. While the Muslim world is not enthusiastic about America's foreign policy, it widely endorses our core ideals of democracy and participatory government. The same applies to our domestic Muslim-Americans. What Kurzman found was that polling in Turkey and in Indonesia shows that our ratings as a country rise and fall according to what we do. This isn't true for other Muslim countries. Muslims tend to think that all our rhetoric of democracy and human rights is just white wash for an imperialist agenda. Like our own Left, Muslims believe we are just interested in their oil and gaining power over them. Yet,even still, this does not generate the type of violent reactions that people believed would happen after 9/11.
In fact, despite Tom Friedman's lament about the lack of Muslim condemnation of 9/11, almost all the religious leaders in Saudi Arabia, radical groups like Hamas,and other religious figures around the region openly condemned both 9/11 and terrorism. Kurzman is particularly good in delineating the arguments radical Islamists have with terrorism and notes the internal and vicious debates groups like the Muslim Brotherhood had with Al Qaeda on this issue. The issue where it was seen as permissable to engage in these acts was in Iraq because thye radicals felt the United States was an occupying force. But even there, the excesses of foreign fighters soon drew stronhg condemnation from the surrounding countries.
What Kurzman shows is that the terrorists we are familiar with tend to be educated, tend not to have a deep religious background and are often alienated from their families or from their country. The Gang of Boys theory tends to support some of the findings about terrorist rings in Canada and the United States like the Lackawana Six. These efforts were blatantly amateurish, although extremely deadly if successful. The Canadian young people even wore their camouflage to the local fast food franchise, which enabled them to be detected and caught. The Times Square bomber was having his home foreclosed and he had lost his job. The underwear bomber came from a rather well-to-do Nigerian family and felt alienated from England, where he was going to school.
What is most interesting in Kurzman's analysis is the importance of family as a key component in inhibiting Muslims from becoming terrorists. This is particularly a problem for groups trying to recruit new members. Asked about this on the Jihadist internet sites, groups are forced to say that the Quran says that your responsibility to your family supercedes your duty to jihad. This is such a delicate issue that Al Qaeda would give bonuses to people who left their family and tried to support those left behind. But it remains a thorn in their side.
This book was written before the Arab Spring but it anticipates what has become obvious. The Muslim world would love to be rid of authoritarian leaders--many of whom unfortunately were backed by the United States. The Islamist terrorists have all said that democracy was a sham. But their message has been soundly rejected by Muslims when given a choice. The first instance of this was in Indonesia where the Islamists opposed the democratic transition and found themselves isolated as the entire country rejected their position. The same is now true throughout northern Africa and the Middle East. Al Qaeda has slow to comment on the Egyptian Revolution and only late in the game begrudgingly supported it rhetorically.
What Kurzman is good at is to highlight the fact that there has been a century of Muslim liberal movements--some succeeded , other failed. In fact, he produced a large anthology of liberal Muslim thought, which his colleagues doubted there existed enough material. But these movements all embrace democratic forms of government and even the full participation of women. Even the radical Islamists condemned the Taliban for its feudalist view of the world. Where there is a key difference is the distinction between mosque and state and even here there are wide differences of opinions. The most modern of the movements emphasize the need for a secular order, even if it is informed by religious teachings. How sharia law is considered is all over the map. But very few Muslims consider sharia in the same way our Islamophones do here in the United States.
This small, well-reasoned book is a welcomed antidote to the rhetoric we hear constantly about the Islamic threat and fear of our own Muslim Americans. If anything,our fellow Muslim Americans seem to believe more in the American dream than we do right now.
I think Kurzman does us a favor by suggesting we consider the terrorist groups much like we did the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigade. Lethal grouplets that share some of the same psychological profiles. As Kurzman's informants kept telling him, Al Qaeda and the like might invoke Islam but they have nothing Islamic about them.
John Brennen recently discussed that the Obama Administration is now seriously considering defeating Al Qaeda. Remember the whole Long War Doctrine? It seems bin Laden spent his last days contemplating Al Qaeda's image problem and thought of re-branding the group with a new name. His counter-intelligence chief had resigned in frustration and he was having problems fund-raising. He seemed to think that Al Qaeda hurt itself by killing so many other Muslims. During this time, Al Qaeda's American spokesperson cut a YouTube video to urge all American Muslims to go to gun shows and buy weapons and use them against the Crusaders. So far that has been a bust.
But for reasons best known to ideologues, almost ten years after 9/11, Americans are supposed to be more afraid of the Muslim threat and be on the lookout for creeping sharia law and the building of mosques. Despite the rhetoric from both the Bush and Obama administrations that we are not waging war against Islam, we have a whole very vocal subculture saying we are and we want to be.
Charles Kurzman's latest book is an ideologue's worst nightmare--a well reasoned argument about why ,in fact, there are so few Muslim terrorists and why the level of terrorist acts have remained fairly consistent for over two decades. In fact, Muslim terrorist themselves ask the same questions as Kurzman. Fewer than 100,000 Muslims have been involved in terrorist acts over the last quarter of a century. Al Qaeda's number 2, the Egyptian Ayman Zawahiri frequently laments the lack of militancy among Muslims. In 2008, he declared,"Each day,the sheep in the flock hope that the wolves will stop killing them, but their prayers go unanswered. Can any rational person fail to see how they are misguided in hoping for this? This is our own state of affairs?"
And you would think that we should have numerous domestic Muslim terrorists since we are in several wars in the Middle East. But, contrary to even the warnings of our own law enforcement officials, fewer than 40 Muslim-Americans planned or carried out acts of domestic terrorism
over the period since 9/11. Since then, only a dozen people in this country were convicted for having links with Al Qaeda. Islamist terrorists have found it especially hard to recruit in the United States. In fact I can almost recall every example from the northern Virginia boys who went to Yemen and the teenagers from the Somalia community in Minnesota.
When Kurzman started the study for this book,Muslims were offended by his question, even though he was supporting their contention that few were involved or even knew anyone involved in terrorism. What sparked the book was the assumption after 9/11 that we would see Islamist violence all over the country and terrorist attacks throughout the world. In fact, despite the sensational acts that occurred abroad in Spain and London, terrorist acts actually went down throughout the world and eventually the bulk of them were contained during the war in Iraq. So naturally, the question becomes why were there not more.
Kurzman has had his share of attacks from the Right as have serious Middle East scholars, who are believed as not getting the facts straight. These same people,however, are routinely consulted by Homeland Security and the Defense Department to get a gauge on the upcoming threats. Kurzman takes a shot at Bernard Lewis, a brilliant scholar of medieval Islam, who became one of those advising the Bush Administration to invent Iraq to send a message to the Mulsim world. Kursman points out that Lewis has never factored in the appeal of modernity to modern Muslims and by the end actually reversed everything he had written about the Middle East, saying that Bush's campaign for democracy would work, despite a lifetime arguing against the idea. Kurzman is particularly good in dissecting Sam Huntington's view that we were in a clash of civilizations.
Kurzman is particularly good in summarizing all the polling data we have from Islamic states. While the Muslim world is not enthusiastic about America's foreign policy, it widely endorses our core ideals of democracy and participatory government. The same applies to our domestic Muslim-Americans. What Kurzman found was that polling in Turkey and in Indonesia shows that our ratings as a country rise and fall according to what we do. This isn't true for other Muslim countries. Muslims tend to think that all our rhetoric of democracy and human rights is just white wash for an imperialist agenda. Like our own Left, Muslims believe we are just interested in their oil and gaining power over them. Yet,even still, this does not generate the type of violent reactions that people believed would happen after 9/11.
In fact, despite Tom Friedman's lament about the lack of Muslim condemnation of 9/11, almost all the religious leaders in Saudi Arabia, radical groups like Hamas,and other religious figures around the region openly condemned both 9/11 and terrorism. Kurzman is particularly good in delineating the arguments radical Islamists have with terrorism and notes the internal and vicious debates groups like the Muslim Brotherhood had with Al Qaeda on this issue. The issue where it was seen as permissable to engage in these acts was in Iraq because thye radicals felt the United States was an occupying force. But even there, the excesses of foreign fighters soon drew stronhg condemnation from the surrounding countries.
What Kurzman shows is that the terrorists we are familiar with tend to be educated, tend not to have a deep religious background and are often alienated from their families or from their country. The Gang of Boys theory tends to support some of the findings about terrorist rings in Canada and the United States like the Lackawana Six. These efforts were blatantly amateurish, although extremely deadly if successful. The Canadian young people even wore their camouflage to the local fast food franchise, which enabled them to be detected and caught. The Times Square bomber was having his home foreclosed and he had lost his job. The underwear bomber came from a rather well-to-do Nigerian family and felt alienated from England, where he was going to school.
What is most interesting in Kurzman's analysis is the importance of family as a key component in inhibiting Muslims from becoming terrorists. This is particularly a problem for groups trying to recruit new members. Asked about this on the Jihadist internet sites, groups are forced to say that the Quran says that your responsibility to your family supercedes your duty to jihad. This is such a delicate issue that Al Qaeda would give bonuses to people who left their family and tried to support those left behind. But it remains a thorn in their side.
This book was written before the Arab Spring but it anticipates what has become obvious. The Muslim world would love to be rid of authoritarian leaders--many of whom unfortunately were backed by the United States. The Islamist terrorists have all said that democracy was a sham. But their message has been soundly rejected by Muslims when given a choice. The first instance of this was in Indonesia where the Islamists opposed the democratic transition and found themselves isolated as the entire country rejected their position. The same is now true throughout northern Africa and the Middle East. Al Qaeda has slow to comment on the Egyptian Revolution and only late in the game begrudgingly supported it rhetorically.
What Kurzman is good at is to highlight the fact that there has been a century of Muslim liberal movements--some succeeded , other failed. In fact, he produced a large anthology of liberal Muslim thought, which his colleagues doubted there existed enough material. But these movements all embrace democratic forms of government and even the full participation of women. Even the radical Islamists condemned the Taliban for its feudalist view of the world. Where there is a key difference is the distinction between mosque and state and even here there are wide differences of opinions. The most modern of the movements emphasize the need for a secular order, even if it is informed by religious teachings. How sharia law is considered is all over the map. But very few Muslims consider sharia in the same way our Islamophones do here in the United States.
This small, well-reasoned book is a welcomed antidote to the rhetoric we hear constantly about the Islamic threat and fear of our own Muslim Americans. If anything,our fellow Muslim Americans seem to believe more in the American dream than we do right now.
I think Kurzman does us a favor by suggesting we consider the terrorist groups much like we did the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigade. Lethal grouplets that share some of the same psychological profiles. As Kurzman's informants kept telling him, Al Qaeda and the like might invoke Islam but they have nothing Islamic about them.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Michael Scheuer's Osama Bin Laden
Michael Scheuer was the chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999 and remained a counter-terrorism analyst until 2004. The Bin Laden unit was nicknamed the Manson Family and proposed such ideas as creating an ergonomically correct chair to cart Bin Laden back to the States for trial. Scheuer's first books slammed the Clinton Administration for failing on several occasions to assassinate bin Laden when they had a clear shot. He also bemoaned the role of neoconseravtives in pushing the Iraq War which only validated everything bin Laden ever said about America's true aims in the Islamic World.
In recent years Scheuer has shown up on television and appears to be demented, angry and frustrated as if he's the only one in the country who takes bin Laden's seriously. Most people have now turned to Peter Bergen as the bin Laden expert of choice. Bergen's latest book is "The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda", which tracks the history of our conflict with bin Laden and suggests alternative strategies. Bergen is now a fellow at the New America Foundation and the security analyst for CNN.
However, having said that, Scheuer's "Osama Bin Laden"(Oxford 2011)is the best book on Bin Laden I've ever read. Its 183 page text is supplemented by 80 pages of notes and documents. It is simply the clearest and most succinct analysis of the person Bin Laden and the organization Al Qaeda I've ever read. Scheuer could use some media coaching to make himself more presentable for television and hence creditable to a wider audience.
Scheuer stands as one of the few bin Laden experts who reads and speaks Arabic fluently and as he reminds the reader he has read all 789 pages of bin Laden's known writings. He is appalled that other so-called experts seem not to have read bin Laden or thought about what he has said he wants to do with Al Qaeda. He feels without reading him the Western analysts have been manipulated by the Saudis, who have spun the story of bin Laden as the son gone wrong. Instead, as Scheuer writes, Osama bin Laden is the poster boy for the whole Saudi educational system.
Sometimes Scheuer reads like someone suffering from intellectual Stockholm Syndrome where the subject of analysis becomes the noble hero of the story. He reminds us that bin Laden is in the prime of his life and that his personal characteristics of bravery, courage, personal kindness and austerity have won the hearts of those closest to him and made him a genuine hero in the Islamic world. He asserts that bin Laden practices a form of "defense jihad" or Islamic Just War theory and that he believes he is fighting the occupation of the Arab World by Western powers and Israel. Scheuer goes into depth on how this "defensive jihad" works out in reality and explores the whole issue of Muslim victims in the fighting, an issue that turned the Iraqis against Al Qaeda during the war.
What Scheuer wants to convey is that the West must try and understand bin Laden and comprehend that he is a worthy opponent with a strategic mastery of the battlefield. He argues that unless we have a clear-headed view of his life and beliefs we will not understand how he has revolutionized warfare by creating a global organization that has synthesized terrorism and insurgent movements with a central command.
But that task of honestly evaluating him must begin with letting go of some myths created by both the Saudis and our own analysts. Scheuer claims that the bin Laden family for cultural reasons probably did not cut off his finances from the family company. Bin Laden has no serious health problems such as the legend about kidney disease and having a dialysis machine. Mullah Omar did have tactical differences with bin Laden but would never in his lifetime betray him. No bin Laden did not go bad because of the influence of the Egyptians on his thought. Yes, bin Laden was a loyal Saudi until the Gulf War, where he had warned the Saudis against Saddam Hussein and offered to build a frontier to prevent an invasion of the Arabian peninsula. Instead, the Saudis asked for American military troops to be stationed for the first time on the holy land. Also, Bin Laden is not isolated--some of the terrain he lives in has been his home for decades and he has extensive contacts throughout Pakistan, Saudi Arabia,Yemen, the Sudan and Afghanistan.
Scheuer is especially good in examining the various religious thinkers bin Laden had made contact with and been educated by, such as the exiled Muslim Brotherhood who taught in Saudi schools. Bin Laden also has been outspoken all his life on the corruption of Arab politics and even participated in the creation of a non-violent reform moment in Saudi Arabia.
Scheuer points out that Bin Laden does want to destroy Israel and the United States. One of the ways he thought he could destroy the United States was to bankrupt it by forcing it to react to Al Qaeda's actions, which he has come close to achieving. Scheuer is sharp in his criticism of our invasion of Iraq, which he said validated everything Bin Laden ever said about our intentions in the Middle East. But Iraq also became the place where Bin Laden made an atrocious blunder in appointing to the head of Al Qaeda Iraq a person who wanted to start the war against the Shia also, something Bin Laden is also committed to. Scheuer makes it plain that Bin Laden held the Shia in contempt and especially the Islamic regime in Tehran because they failed to implement any of their plans against Israel successfully. The whole neo-con theme of an bin Laden-Tehran alliance Scheuer terms ludicrous.
Scheuer, I believe, gets the whole Al Qaeda global strategy right. Bin Laden always uses indignous forces as the leaders of the local branches and supplements them with foreign backups, who must subordinate their own views to the local leaders but remain in contact with Al Qaeda central. Scheuer does a masterful job of outlining the internal organization of Al Qaeda Central and how it has studied and mastered modern media. Bin Laden's obsession with the media began with the role Saudi media played during the Afghanistan conflict. Also, Bin Laden is extremely flexible in terms of his tactics and does not always act out his maximalist dreams and plans.
What will be interesting is to hear from Bin Laden about the Egyptian Revoution.
No he does not envy our freedoms, he has made it clear he hates them.
This is one short book that is really worth the read. Hopefully Michael Scheuer will calm down now. He did a superb job.
In recent years Scheuer has shown up on television and appears to be demented, angry and frustrated as if he's the only one in the country who takes bin Laden's seriously. Most people have now turned to Peter Bergen as the bin Laden expert of choice. Bergen's latest book is "The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda", which tracks the history of our conflict with bin Laden and suggests alternative strategies. Bergen is now a fellow at the New America Foundation and the security analyst for CNN.
However, having said that, Scheuer's "Osama Bin Laden"(Oxford 2011)is the best book on Bin Laden I've ever read. Its 183 page text is supplemented by 80 pages of notes and documents. It is simply the clearest and most succinct analysis of the person Bin Laden and the organization Al Qaeda I've ever read. Scheuer could use some media coaching to make himself more presentable for television and hence creditable to a wider audience.
Scheuer stands as one of the few bin Laden experts who reads and speaks Arabic fluently and as he reminds the reader he has read all 789 pages of bin Laden's known writings. He is appalled that other so-called experts seem not to have read bin Laden or thought about what he has said he wants to do with Al Qaeda. He feels without reading him the Western analysts have been manipulated by the Saudis, who have spun the story of bin Laden as the son gone wrong. Instead, as Scheuer writes, Osama bin Laden is the poster boy for the whole Saudi educational system.
Sometimes Scheuer reads like someone suffering from intellectual Stockholm Syndrome where the subject of analysis becomes the noble hero of the story. He reminds us that bin Laden is in the prime of his life and that his personal characteristics of bravery, courage, personal kindness and austerity have won the hearts of those closest to him and made him a genuine hero in the Islamic world. He asserts that bin Laden practices a form of "defense jihad" or Islamic Just War theory and that he believes he is fighting the occupation of the Arab World by Western powers and Israel. Scheuer goes into depth on how this "defensive jihad" works out in reality and explores the whole issue of Muslim victims in the fighting, an issue that turned the Iraqis against Al Qaeda during the war.
What Scheuer wants to convey is that the West must try and understand bin Laden and comprehend that he is a worthy opponent with a strategic mastery of the battlefield. He argues that unless we have a clear-headed view of his life and beliefs we will not understand how he has revolutionized warfare by creating a global organization that has synthesized terrorism and insurgent movements with a central command.
But that task of honestly evaluating him must begin with letting go of some myths created by both the Saudis and our own analysts. Scheuer claims that the bin Laden family for cultural reasons probably did not cut off his finances from the family company. Bin Laden has no serious health problems such as the legend about kidney disease and having a dialysis machine. Mullah Omar did have tactical differences with bin Laden but would never in his lifetime betray him. No bin Laden did not go bad because of the influence of the Egyptians on his thought. Yes, bin Laden was a loyal Saudi until the Gulf War, where he had warned the Saudis against Saddam Hussein and offered to build a frontier to prevent an invasion of the Arabian peninsula. Instead, the Saudis asked for American military troops to be stationed for the first time on the holy land. Also, Bin Laden is not isolated--some of the terrain he lives in has been his home for decades and he has extensive contacts throughout Pakistan, Saudi Arabia,Yemen, the Sudan and Afghanistan.
Scheuer is especially good in examining the various religious thinkers bin Laden had made contact with and been educated by, such as the exiled Muslim Brotherhood who taught in Saudi schools. Bin Laden also has been outspoken all his life on the corruption of Arab politics and even participated in the creation of a non-violent reform moment in Saudi Arabia.
Scheuer points out that Bin Laden does want to destroy Israel and the United States. One of the ways he thought he could destroy the United States was to bankrupt it by forcing it to react to Al Qaeda's actions, which he has come close to achieving. Scheuer is sharp in his criticism of our invasion of Iraq, which he said validated everything Bin Laden ever said about our intentions in the Middle East. But Iraq also became the place where Bin Laden made an atrocious blunder in appointing to the head of Al Qaeda Iraq a person who wanted to start the war against the Shia also, something Bin Laden is also committed to. Scheuer makes it plain that Bin Laden held the Shia in contempt and especially the Islamic regime in Tehran because they failed to implement any of their plans against Israel successfully. The whole neo-con theme of an bin Laden-Tehran alliance Scheuer terms ludicrous.
Scheuer, I believe, gets the whole Al Qaeda global strategy right. Bin Laden always uses indignous forces as the leaders of the local branches and supplements them with foreign backups, who must subordinate their own views to the local leaders but remain in contact with Al Qaeda central. Scheuer does a masterful job of outlining the internal organization of Al Qaeda Central and how it has studied and mastered modern media. Bin Laden's obsession with the media began with the role Saudi media played during the Afghanistan conflict. Also, Bin Laden is extremely flexible in terms of his tactics and does not always act out his maximalist dreams and plans.
What will be interesting is to hear from Bin Laden about the Egyptian Revoution.
No he does not envy our freedoms, he has made it clear he hates them.
This is one short book that is really worth the read. Hopefully Michael Scheuer will calm down now. He did a superb job.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Happy Norooz!
Happy Iranian New Year to everyone. Hopefully, spring will bring good things for the Iranian people.
Meanwhile back in Stoogeland, I headed to the House today and on the way back got stuck in traffic as the President's motorcade went pass. Besides the Batmobile, he has several SUVs, a bomb disposal truck and an ambulance as well as a phalanx of police motorcycles. He had been up to the House to speak to members on the Health Reform Bill.
Since it's the Year of the Tiger, we should expect good news but things are still tight. Dennis the Menace did the manly thing and endorsed the bill. A few of the Stupak gang also have signed on. Yet, the remaining Democrats are facing a blitz of corporate ads in their home district. The Chamber of Commerce announced in addition to their $25 million this week, they will devote $55 million for the mid-year elections and target those wafflers who vote for the bill in the end.
Tea Baggers expressed disgust with Dick Armey's effort yesterday and thought he had more resources to bear on the final health care event. Oh, I'm sure he did but it's for himself.
Conservatives are now threatening to take the health care bill to the Supreme Court. That is very intriguing. We know the corporations own the majority of the court--let's not pretend anymore. But the constitutional issue would center around mandates to buy health insurance. Progressives have criticized President Obama for omitting a public option. If the present bill passes, it is a type of TARP bailout for an industry that is currently operating on a failed business model. So the industry would be faced with the new regulations, but then if the Court ruled mandates were unconstitutional they would essentially go bankrupt and enter into a financial meltdown mood. It would be interesting to see where the insurance industry actually came down on such a court case. Currently, they are playing high-price chicken over the bill but at the end of the day they stand to gain over 30 million new customers. Do they want to lose them?
The right-wing radios keep telling people the bill doesn't take effect until 2014. But here's a list of things that start immediately:
*35% immediate tax break for small businesses who provide insurance for employees;
*Prohibit dropping people from coverage when they get sick in all plans;
*Lowers senior prescription drug prices;
*Eliminates lifetime limits and restrictive annual limits on benefits on all plans;!!!!
*Requires plans to cover dependent children until the age 26;
*Requires new plans to cover preventive services and immunizations without cost-sharing;
*Provides immediate access to insurance for uninsured Americans because of pre-existing conditions;
*Ensures consumers have access to an internal and external appeals process to appeal insurance plan decisions;
Requires premium rebates to enrolees from insurers with high administrative expenditures and requires public disclosure of the percent of premiums applied to overhead costs.
The Democrats also created a website at the House where one can see the benefits of the bill for each congressional district. It actually works great.
The Republicans are miffed that if the bill passes they aren't being invited to participate in the signing ceremonies at the White House. They hope they can get the simulus effect--voting no but showing up with the stimulus check for the project in their districts.
As of late afternoon today, the Senate has already drafted their bill, which accepts the House changes. This was a confidence-building measure for House Democrats, who were afraid the Senate would renege on their promises. The draft copy of this reads well and improves everything rather dramatically.
After seeing about a dozen representatives today performing their functions on other issues, I have severe doubts any of them would understand anything about the health care bill. It was a sorry bipartisan bunch. If you deal alot with young democracies, you forget that the first generation produces the best, most finely-tuned talent available. Thereafter the gene pool starts getting diluted.
The Senate actually passed an anemic $18 billion jobs bill with some Republican support. The bill is almost entirely tax cuts. What the Senate is really excited about is increasing the threshold for estate taxes to $10 million, instead of the Bush $7 million. Here we have alot of energetic Senators.
If the Health Bill passes, it will only provide a temporary halt to the slide of health care in the United States. For instance, Arizona, facing critical budget shortfalls and run by a neanderthal, will cut 42,000 children from the SCHIP program and another 376,000 from the health insurance rolls. The devastation of the current economy is blowing holes through almost every state's budget resulting both in health care cuts but also the wholesale closings of schools.
Apparently, the President is continuing his healthcare fight in the hustings. He's appearing a few miles away on Friday to fire people up.
On another military front, Leon Panetta testified that the Obama campaign against Al Qaeda has forced the organization deeper underground and that the group no longer has any systemic command and control. Intercepted communications had lesser Al Qaeda officials pleading with Bin Laden to show some leadership as the group has been devastated. Panetta indicated a drone killed Hussein al-Yemeni, the Al Qaeda operative thought responsible for the attack on the CIA outpost. He also served as their explosives expert for all the affiliate organizations. Panetta claimed that Al Qaeda no longer could plan large sophisticated operations against the United States. Instead, they were looking for recruits who had no arrest records or ties with terrorist organizations and who did not fit the traditional Muslim profile.
In another hearing, General Petraeus claimed that recent Israeli actions have been exploited to recruit new people to Al Qaeda. This was a bombshell on the Hill because most members were attacking the administration for the misunderstanding with Israel. He also went further and said that continued Israeli-Palestinian tensions also gave Iran greater influence in the Middle East through their relationships with Hamas and Hizbullah. He further said that the conflict fueled anti-American sentiments because of perceived favoritism and has acted to limit the degree to which the United States could form partnerships with the Arab world and build relationships with moderate countries. In a later blog I'll try and reconstruct the briefing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that went further in-depth on this issue. But, with a strong caveat, the biggest client of Centcom right now are Arab states so the discussion obviously tilted in the direction of Arab national interests, which are not ours.
It will be interesting to see what General Petraeus has to say when he receives AEI's Irving Kristol Award. He is supposed to give a lecture that accompanies the presentation of the award. This was all decided before Petraeus came out for a repeal of DADT, criticized Israel and said today that the Iran nuclear project has gotten sidelined for a while.
Meanwhile Hillary Clinton was scheduled to talk to Mr. Sunshine, Bibi. The quick reactions by AIPAC and others in Washington has been undercut as more and more career people like Petraeus who have strong Republican support are continuing to speak out on this issue and elaborating in full detail some of the deeper issues. Here, I believe the Pentagon is pushing their own agenda, which is too favorable to Arab states. But once Bibi decided to play with fire, expect this debate to start opening up in ways it never has in Washington before. And, frankly, I am very sorry that it has.
Meanwhile back in Stoogeland, I headed to the House today and on the way back got stuck in traffic as the President's motorcade went pass. Besides the Batmobile, he has several SUVs, a bomb disposal truck and an ambulance as well as a phalanx of police motorcycles. He had been up to the House to speak to members on the Health Reform Bill.
Since it's the Year of the Tiger, we should expect good news but things are still tight. Dennis the Menace did the manly thing and endorsed the bill. A few of the Stupak gang also have signed on. Yet, the remaining Democrats are facing a blitz of corporate ads in their home district. The Chamber of Commerce announced in addition to their $25 million this week, they will devote $55 million for the mid-year elections and target those wafflers who vote for the bill in the end.
Tea Baggers expressed disgust with Dick Armey's effort yesterday and thought he had more resources to bear on the final health care event. Oh, I'm sure he did but it's for himself.
Conservatives are now threatening to take the health care bill to the Supreme Court. That is very intriguing. We know the corporations own the majority of the court--let's not pretend anymore. But the constitutional issue would center around mandates to buy health insurance. Progressives have criticized President Obama for omitting a public option. If the present bill passes, it is a type of TARP bailout for an industry that is currently operating on a failed business model. So the industry would be faced with the new regulations, but then if the Court ruled mandates were unconstitutional they would essentially go bankrupt and enter into a financial meltdown mood. It would be interesting to see where the insurance industry actually came down on such a court case. Currently, they are playing high-price chicken over the bill but at the end of the day they stand to gain over 30 million new customers. Do they want to lose them?
The right-wing radios keep telling people the bill doesn't take effect until 2014. But here's a list of things that start immediately:
*35% immediate tax break for small businesses who provide insurance for employees;
*Prohibit dropping people from coverage when they get sick in all plans;
*Lowers senior prescription drug prices;
*Eliminates lifetime limits and restrictive annual limits on benefits on all plans;!!!!
*Requires plans to cover dependent children until the age 26;
*Requires new plans to cover preventive services and immunizations without cost-sharing;
*Provides immediate access to insurance for uninsured Americans because of pre-existing conditions;
*Ensures consumers have access to an internal and external appeals process to appeal insurance plan decisions;
Requires premium rebates to enrolees from insurers with high administrative expenditures and requires public disclosure of the percent of premiums applied to overhead costs.
The Democrats also created a website at the House where one can see the benefits of the bill for each congressional district. It actually works great.
The Republicans are miffed that if the bill passes they aren't being invited to participate in the signing ceremonies at the White House. They hope they can get the simulus effect--voting no but showing up with the stimulus check for the project in their districts.
As of late afternoon today, the Senate has already drafted their bill, which accepts the House changes. This was a confidence-building measure for House Democrats, who were afraid the Senate would renege on their promises. The draft copy of this reads well and improves everything rather dramatically.
After seeing about a dozen representatives today performing their functions on other issues, I have severe doubts any of them would understand anything about the health care bill. It was a sorry bipartisan bunch. If you deal alot with young democracies, you forget that the first generation produces the best, most finely-tuned talent available. Thereafter the gene pool starts getting diluted.
The Senate actually passed an anemic $18 billion jobs bill with some Republican support. The bill is almost entirely tax cuts. What the Senate is really excited about is increasing the threshold for estate taxes to $10 million, instead of the Bush $7 million. Here we have alot of energetic Senators.
If the Health Bill passes, it will only provide a temporary halt to the slide of health care in the United States. For instance, Arizona, facing critical budget shortfalls and run by a neanderthal, will cut 42,000 children from the SCHIP program and another 376,000 from the health insurance rolls. The devastation of the current economy is blowing holes through almost every state's budget resulting both in health care cuts but also the wholesale closings of schools.
Apparently, the President is continuing his healthcare fight in the hustings. He's appearing a few miles away on Friday to fire people up.
On another military front, Leon Panetta testified that the Obama campaign against Al Qaeda has forced the organization deeper underground and that the group no longer has any systemic command and control. Intercepted communications had lesser Al Qaeda officials pleading with Bin Laden to show some leadership as the group has been devastated. Panetta indicated a drone killed Hussein al-Yemeni, the Al Qaeda operative thought responsible for the attack on the CIA outpost. He also served as their explosives expert for all the affiliate organizations. Panetta claimed that Al Qaeda no longer could plan large sophisticated operations against the United States. Instead, they were looking for recruits who had no arrest records or ties with terrorist organizations and who did not fit the traditional Muslim profile.
In another hearing, General Petraeus claimed that recent Israeli actions have been exploited to recruit new people to Al Qaeda. This was a bombshell on the Hill because most members were attacking the administration for the misunderstanding with Israel. He also went further and said that continued Israeli-Palestinian tensions also gave Iran greater influence in the Middle East through their relationships with Hamas and Hizbullah. He further said that the conflict fueled anti-American sentiments because of perceived favoritism and has acted to limit the degree to which the United States could form partnerships with the Arab world and build relationships with moderate countries. In a later blog I'll try and reconstruct the briefing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that went further in-depth on this issue. But, with a strong caveat, the biggest client of Centcom right now are Arab states so the discussion obviously tilted in the direction of Arab national interests, which are not ours.
It will be interesting to see what General Petraeus has to say when he receives AEI's Irving Kristol Award. He is supposed to give a lecture that accompanies the presentation of the award. This was all decided before Petraeus came out for a repeal of DADT, criticized Israel and said today that the Iran nuclear project has gotten sidelined for a while.
Meanwhile Hillary Clinton was scheduled to talk to Mr. Sunshine, Bibi. The quick reactions by AIPAC and others in Washington has been undercut as more and more career people like Petraeus who have strong Republican support are continuing to speak out on this issue and elaborating in full detail some of the deeper issues. Here, I believe the Pentagon is pushing their own agenda, which is too favorable to Arab states. But once Bibi decided to play with fire, expect this debate to start opening up in ways it never has in Washington before. And, frankly, I am very sorry that it has.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
An End to Al Qaeda
While bloggers are reposting Rachel Maddow's rebuttal to Glenn Beck, we have to note a segment on her show last night that is of interest to us. Retired Naval intelligence officer Malcolm Nance appeared on the show hawking his book An End to Al Qaeda, promising its defeat in 24 months. This isn't your John McCain boast that he knew how to get Bin Laden, a secret he has been withholding from everyone since the election. Rather, Mr. Nance, who is an expert on terrorism and also against torture, says we have neglected a key component in fighting Al Qaeda--the public relations front.
Mr. Nance makes the cogent argument that Al Qaeda is a cult and should be treated as such. He indicated how the gonad bomber's father couldn't relate to his son to talk him out of his Islamist trek and instead went to the CIA. That's like the blind leading the blind. But the overall message is that Al Qaeda's insistance that young recruits cut their ties to their families operates just like any cult we know. Nance argues that Al Qaeda is not some "knights heroically wandering the world" for the love of Islam but are people bent on upending all of Islam's structures and re-engineering the religion to its own ends. He said evidence of this appeared most dramatically in Iraq when it tried to take over the insurgency. Once Iraqis learned that Al Qaeda didn't care about them but insisted on killing civilians they rose up against it.
Mr. Nance claims that we have made the issue all about us--which is a mistake. Al Qaeda has basically determined how it would be perceived by Muslims by focusing on mistakes in American policy to justify their own actions. They can do this forever. Instead, Mr.Nance proposes we aim our information efforts at emphasizing Al Qaeda's ideology and how it runs against basic tenets of Islam. I have also suggested elsewhere what other steps we might make within the Moslem community to reach out to these young disaffected men. But Mr. Nance is on the right track.
Mr. Nance makes the cogent argument that Al Qaeda is a cult and should be treated as such. He indicated how the gonad bomber's father couldn't relate to his son to talk him out of his Islamist trek and instead went to the CIA. That's like the blind leading the blind. But the overall message is that Al Qaeda's insistance that young recruits cut their ties to their families operates just like any cult we know. Nance argues that Al Qaeda is not some "knights heroically wandering the world" for the love of Islam but are people bent on upending all of Islam's structures and re-engineering the religion to its own ends. He said evidence of this appeared most dramatically in Iraq when it tried to take over the insurgency. Once Iraqis learned that Al Qaeda didn't care about them but insisted on killing civilians they rose up against it.
Mr. Nance claims that we have made the issue all about us--which is a mistake. Al Qaeda has basically determined how it would be perceived by Muslims by focusing on mistakes in American policy to justify their own actions. They can do this forever. Instead, Mr.Nance proposes we aim our information efforts at emphasizing Al Qaeda's ideology and how it runs against basic tenets of Islam. I have also suggested elsewhere what other steps we might make within the Moslem community to reach out to these young disaffected men. But Mr. Nance is on the right track.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Fighting Terrorism by Reading
By now readers of this blog know how I believe the American policy against terrorism has become over-bloated, over-financed and in the long run counter-productive. I believe more analysis needs to be made of the type of young men being recruited by Al Qaeda and its affiliates and what are the psychological profiles of such men breaking off relations with their families and friends and joining a distant organization for the purpose of committing acts of suicide and terror. I believe we have been mesmerized by our own bias in locating this phenomenon deep in the religion of Islam instead of comparing today's Islamic terrorists with their historical counterparts. It sounds strange for today's reader to hear that the Enlightenment produced terrorists. We have long read about the Terror of the French Revolution but today's terrorist seem more modern in some ways and ancient in others.
Years ago I studied Russian for the sole purpose of reading a writer that mesmerized me in my adolescence (and whom I still read)--Fyodor Dostoevsky. In The Devils, he portrayed the intellectual milieu of Russia's nihilists and their long discussions about the morality and politics of terror.
Let's go back to a suicide bombing attempt on March 1,1887, when a group of students planned to kill Alexander III on the sixth anniversary of the assasination of the Tsar's father by the People's Will.
The leader of the group grew up in a very religious household and was raised by a very loving mother and an authoritarian father. The Father feared he would be "feminized" and sent him away to a military secondary school. There he manifested signs of deep depression and appeared to his fellow students as anxiety-ridden. He deliberately chose to live ascetically and immersed himself in science, winning top honors. He also developed a keen interest in Dostoevsky's House of the Dead and began reading authors like Nicholas Chernyshevsky. His sister wrote that he started distancing himself from the family and stop going to mass. She also wrote that he rarely showed any emotion or even attachment to people. However, he would walk by the neighboring prison and express his concern about the situation of the downtrodden in an abstract way but never personalize it. She records the one moment where they were close and how both he and her mother seem to have an adoring relationship.
Later his sister discovered that the son was hanging out with all the nihilistic students in their circles and that he made the decision to embark on terrorist acts because the police prevented students from commorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Nicholas Dobrolyubov, who died in his twenties and who was the closest collaborator of Nicholas Chernyshevsky.In those days, the students believed that if the Russian peasants got all the land through agrarian reform Russia would become a modern socialist economy. As a result, they often changed roles and went out into the countryside to provoke rebellion but had little success. Instead, the students planned events to provoke police repression in the hopes of sparking widespread unrest.
The young man started disappearing from his circle of student colleagues and took up residence in a small apartment that resembled something out of Notes from the Underground. He would go off on errands presumably for his family, which were his excuses to purchase nitrates and cynanide for explosives. He became the expert bomb-maker for a tight circle of terrorists, all of whom would knowingly die from the cynanide in their bombs. The young man, although he had rejected his faith, still maintained the basic Christian notions of martyrdom and suffering and the values of the passion narrative. These were explicit in his writings found after his arrest.
The young man and his colleagues were followed by the secret police. One of the more flamboyant of the group mailed a letter that outlined the plot, which was the break the authorities needed. Alexander III missed his assasination because his groom had been a half hour late getting his horses ready. The young man and his colleagues were captured, tried and all but two were hung.
The young man was Alexander Ulyanov, Lenin's older brother. Later , Lenin would have the son of Alexander III --Tsar Nicolas-- executed, partly for revenge of his brother. But Lenin had been critical of his brother as gambling so much for too little gain. He would never make that mistake in his development of his revolutionary organization.
Now with the Soviet Union gone, scholars are now more able to research these historical events. Wesleyan University professor Dr. Philip Pomper has done just that with Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution (W.W. Norton, 2010, 275p.) This short but dense book recreates the atmosphere of the young nihilists and the late 19th century revolutionary movements in Russia as well as examines for the first time Ulyanov family documents on Alexander. The book is a genuine contribution to our understanding of that time but also it foreshadows many of the dimensions of the terrrorist problems of today.
In the case of Alexander, we have a young man who has tired of the Tsar's autocratic rule, despite some incremental reforms, and believes his act of terror will help enlighten the people and lead them to socialism. His notion of revolutionary change is based on science, not religion, although religious sentiment floats through his writings. His terrorist colleagues are all upper class students who are alienated from both their class and the political culture of their country. Many of them self-consciously chose an ascetic life style, even deliberately living as the lower class. They adopted a revolutionary morality to deliberately sever relations with their families and adopt behavior very close to the criminals of their time. Almost all Alexander's circle became proficient in using that time's equivalent of plastic explosives. Lenin used to scoff about how little time his brother took to prepare for his actions, since he spent decades as a revolutionary. But Alexander spent an intensive four months mastering his bomb-making skills and planning the assassination--a time approximate to the Islamic terrorists of today.
The first generation of Al Qaeda fit a sociological profile very much like the young Alexander--whether they come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Algeria. Well-educated, connected to the elite, tired of the corrupt government and the leaders in their homeland, romanticize the tribal people in Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen, and believe terrorism will free their countries and initiate a time of Islamic renewal. The new generation seem to be alienated youth, also from elites,known for their sense of loneliness and despression, willing to adopt an ascetic lifestyle to become the terrorist equivalent of drug mules. The element of underdevelopment and poverty has nothing to do with it, except this abstract identification with those who are impoverished. There is a strong element of emotional deprivation in the biographies of all these characters.
Years ago I studied Russian for the sole purpose of reading a writer that mesmerized me in my adolescence (and whom I still read)--Fyodor Dostoevsky. In The Devils, he portrayed the intellectual milieu of Russia's nihilists and their long discussions about the morality and politics of terror.
Let's go back to a suicide bombing attempt on March 1,1887, when a group of students planned to kill Alexander III on the sixth anniversary of the assasination of the Tsar's father by the People's Will.
The leader of the group grew up in a very religious household and was raised by a very loving mother and an authoritarian father. The Father feared he would be "feminized" and sent him away to a military secondary school. There he manifested signs of deep depression and appeared to his fellow students as anxiety-ridden. He deliberately chose to live ascetically and immersed himself in science, winning top honors. He also developed a keen interest in Dostoevsky's House of the Dead and began reading authors like Nicholas Chernyshevsky. His sister wrote that he started distancing himself from the family and stop going to mass. She also wrote that he rarely showed any emotion or even attachment to people. However, he would walk by the neighboring prison and express his concern about the situation of the downtrodden in an abstract way but never personalize it. She records the one moment where they were close and how both he and her mother seem to have an adoring relationship.
Later his sister discovered that the son was hanging out with all the nihilistic students in their circles and that he made the decision to embark on terrorist acts because the police prevented students from commorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Nicholas Dobrolyubov, who died in his twenties and who was the closest collaborator of Nicholas Chernyshevsky.In those days, the students believed that if the Russian peasants got all the land through agrarian reform Russia would become a modern socialist economy. As a result, they often changed roles and went out into the countryside to provoke rebellion but had little success. Instead, the students planned events to provoke police repression in the hopes of sparking widespread unrest.
The young man started disappearing from his circle of student colleagues and took up residence in a small apartment that resembled something out of Notes from the Underground. He would go off on errands presumably for his family, which were his excuses to purchase nitrates and cynanide for explosives. He became the expert bomb-maker for a tight circle of terrorists, all of whom would knowingly die from the cynanide in their bombs. The young man, although he had rejected his faith, still maintained the basic Christian notions of martyrdom and suffering and the values of the passion narrative. These were explicit in his writings found after his arrest.
The young man and his colleagues were followed by the secret police. One of the more flamboyant of the group mailed a letter that outlined the plot, which was the break the authorities needed. Alexander III missed his assasination because his groom had been a half hour late getting his horses ready. The young man and his colleagues were captured, tried and all but two were hung.
The young man was Alexander Ulyanov, Lenin's older brother. Later , Lenin would have the son of Alexander III --Tsar Nicolas-- executed, partly for revenge of his brother. But Lenin had been critical of his brother as gambling so much for too little gain. He would never make that mistake in his development of his revolutionary organization.
Now with the Soviet Union gone, scholars are now more able to research these historical events. Wesleyan University professor Dr. Philip Pomper has done just that with Lenin's Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution (W.W. Norton, 2010, 275p.) This short but dense book recreates the atmosphere of the young nihilists and the late 19th century revolutionary movements in Russia as well as examines for the first time Ulyanov family documents on Alexander. The book is a genuine contribution to our understanding of that time but also it foreshadows many of the dimensions of the terrrorist problems of today.
In the case of Alexander, we have a young man who has tired of the Tsar's autocratic rule, despite some incremental reforms, and believes his act of terror will help enlighten the people and lead them to socialism. His notion of revolutionary change is based on science, not religion, although religious sentiment floats through his writings. His terrorist colleagues are all upper class students who are alienated from both their class and the political culture of their country. Many of them self-consciously chose an ascetic life style, even deliberately living as the lower class. They adopted a revolutionary morality to deliberately sever relations with their families and adopt behavior very close to the criminals of their time. Almost all Alexander's circle became proficient in using that time's equivalent of plastic explosives. Lenin used to scoff about how little time his brother took to prepare for his actions, since he spent decades as a revolutionary. But Alexander spent an intensive four months mastering his bomb-making skills and planning the assassination--a time approximate to the Islamic terrorists of today.
The first generation of Al Qaeda fit a sociological profile very much like the young Alexander--whether they come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Algeria. Well-educated, connected to the elite, tired of the corrupt government and the leaders in their homeland, romanticize the tribal people in Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen, and believe terrorism will free their countries and initiate a time of Islamic renewal. The new generation seem to be alienated youth, also from elites,known for their sense of loneliness and despression, willing to adopt an ascetic lifestyle to become the terrorist equivalent of drug mules. The element of underdevelopment and poverty has nothing to do with it, except this abstract identification with those who are impoverished. There is a strong element of emotional deprivation in the biographies of all these characters.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Down Cheney's 9-11 Rabbit Hole
Richard Clarke appears today in the Washington Post with an op-ed "The Trauma of 9/11 is No Excuse". Clarke was the national co-ordinator for security and counterterrorism under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and was at the White House on that fateful day of September 11. In the realm of the ever-moving bottom-line to justify the Cheney torture policy,both Condi Rice and Dick Cheney have invoked the trauma they experienced during that day. Dick Cheney called it "a defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second (my emphasis) look " at the threats to America. This is the more sophisticated version of George Tenet's memorable words," I hope to God they aren't the men from the pilot training schools."
Clarke slams both Rice and Cheney for the trauma argument, saying that the decisions they made in the following months and years--on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping--were simply not appropriate. Panic and impulse replaced careful analysis. Cheney's reass the threats statement underscored how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qeada attack. Remember the FBI had already interviewed the Millenium Bomber, who revealed the details of the plot months before it happened.
Concerned about the 2004 presidential elections if there was another attack, Bush officials authorized the most extreme measures available without any assessment whether they would do any good. Clarke argues the first response proposed, even as the Pentagon was still burning, was Don Rumsfeld arguing for an attack against Baghdad. Bush officials somehow could not believe that al Qaeda could have mounted such an attack themselves so they fell to the Iraqi explanation. Even though he was told there was no such connection, Cheney himself later ordered the waterboarding of Iraqi prisoners of war so they could provide evidence of an Iraqi role in the terrorist attacks.
Clarke argues that the Bush team leaped to the assumption that U.S. Courts,even though they had a 100% conviction rate against Al Qaeda terrorists, would not work. So the American system of justice was abandoned for the establishment around the world of secret prisons and Guatanamo Bay, where prisoners were and are still held without being charged or tried.
Similarly, as we all have heard over the past month from military officials and interrogators, the administration conducted no meaningful professional analysis of which techniques of interrogation worked and which did not. The FBI, which had successfully questioned al Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead, the Bush Administration jumped right to the extreme measures.
Finally, on wiretapping, they moved to the extreme, listening in on communications here at home without legal process. The FISA court system had been a fairly reliable procedure in the past and could have been corrected. The Bush adinistration dumped a Reagan appointed judge ,who had only denied 15 warrants out of 18,000 requests.
As Clarke concludes,Condi Rice and Dick Cheney were surprised by 9/11 because they had not listened. And this shock led to the adoption of extreme counterterrorism techniques ,which proved to be unnecessary and unproductive. According to Clarke, 9/11 may have changed many things but it did not change the Constitution, which even the Vice President had pledged to protect and preserve.
Clarke slams both Rice and Cheney for the trauma argument, saying that the decisions they made in the following months and years--on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping--were simply not appropriate. Panic and impulse replaced careful analysis. Cheney's reass the threats statement underscored how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qeada attack. Remember the FBI had already interviewed the Millenium Bomber, who revealed the details of the plot months before it happened.
Concerned about the 2004 presidential elections if there was another attack, Bush officials authorized the most extreme measures available without any assessment whether they would do any good. Clarke argues the first response proposed, even as the Pentagon was still burning, was Don Rumsfeld arguing for an attack against Baghdad. Bush officials somehow could not believe that al Qaeda could have mounted such an attack themselves so they fell to the Iraqi explanation. Even though he was told there was no such connection, Cheney himself later ordered the waterboarding of Iraqi prisoners of war so they could provide evidence of an Iraqi role in the terrorist attacks.
Clarke argues that the Bush team leaped to the assumption that U.S. Courts,even though they had a 100% conviction rate against Al Qaeda terrorists, would not work. So the American system of justice was abandoned for the establishment around the world of secret prisons and Guatanamo Bay, where prisoners were and are still held without being charged or tried.
Similarly, as we all have heard over the past month from military officials and interrogators, the administration conducted no meaningful professional analysis of which techniques of interrogation worked and which did not. The FBI, which had successfully questioned al Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead, the Bush Administration jumped right to the extreme measures.
Finally, on wiretapping, they moved to the extreme, listening in on communications here at home without legal process. The FISA court system had been a fairly reliable procedure in the past and could have been corrected. The Bush adinistration dumped a Reagan appointed judge ,who had only denied 15 warrants out of 18,000 requests.
As Clarke concludes,Condi Rice and Dick Cheney were surprised by 9/11 because they had not listened. And this shock led to the adoption of extreme counterterrorism techniques ,which proved to be unnecessary and unproductive. According to Clarke, 9/11 may have changed many things but it did not change the Constitution, which even the Vice President had pledged to protect and preserve.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Torture in Stoogeland--a Recap
The Obama Administration has tried to limit the torture issue to the handful of lawyers who wrote the DOJ memos authorizing the policy. Barack Obama himself pulled back from releasing more photos of detainee abuse ostensibly because he feared the reaction in the Middle East would endanger our troops. Likewise, Eric Holder assured the Senate the Administration will not release terrorists into your neighborhood.
However, the Obama Administration's strategy of a "modified limited hangout" is simply DOA. And thanks goes to Dick Cheney for pushing the envelope on this issue during public appearances that probably number more than he gave when he was in an undisclosed location. Kudos also go to Karl "Turdblossom" Rove, who thought it was a dandy idea to try and put the monkey on the Democrats' backs by writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal asking the Nixonian question,"What did Nancy Pelosi know and when did she know it?" To which Nancy Pelosi responded that the CIA lied to Congress and she was backed up on this by former Senator Bob Graham, who is notorious for his large ego that he keeps minute minute-by-minute diaries of his whole life, something Boy Genius Rove happen to forget in his rush to judgment.
The torture debate has gone where official Washington fears to tread. We can check off the boxes that it was amoral, illegal, unconstitutional, against all our treaty obligations. But torture enthusiasts still hung on to its effectiveness. This week hasn't been a good one for them. On the torture side is Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Liz Cheney,Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Charles Krauthammer, Mary Matalin and now Lindsey Graham, who touted the 500-year old history of torture as if he just read Danniel Mannix's History of Torture.
On the anti-torture side were interrogators from the FBI, Air Force, U.S. Marines and the CIA. Also former Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff, weighed in to drop the bomb that the torture policy was not aimed at discovering imminent plots of Al Qaeda against the United States but rather for intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. Kaboom!
The other little details dropped by Col. Wilkerson include the fact that the CIA and others were so scared about prosecutions because of the Abu Ghraib scandal that they stopped the torture policy by 2004, not 2005 as I believed. He asserts that the second Bush Administration was torture free. Previously, he claimed that there were over 100 homicides created by this policy. The same day Wilkerson claimed the second-term had been free of torture, the International Red Cross requested from the CIA notification about 100 people they had listed in the agency's custody but who were missing.
So if torture is such an effective policy, why suspend it? And also why are the Republicans stepping up the pressure on President Obama, who has been desparately trying to limit the areas of investigation, when the question about the policy became moot in 2004? Also, why would you pick a fight with an adversary who can release new information at his own time and pace?
Let's take the Stoogeland Smell test. If you are the intelligence community and you have been embarrassed by the largest intelligence failure since the Trojan horse (WMDs in Iraq), would you not have leaked the amazing successes you had in breaking up the Al Qaeda plots against the United States because of your "enhanced interrogation" program? Former CIA special agent Robert Baer claims this would have been out in a minute. The old saw," You know of our failures but never our successes", has never been true for a Washington bureaucracy in the mass media age.
By walking back the dog, one finds oneself in Cheneyland as he asserts that intelligence confirmed the links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda and that 9/11 had some relationship with Iraq. Waterboarding of Abu Zabaidah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the torture in Egypt of Ibn al-Shayk al-Libi had everything to do with producing intelligence to rationalize the invasion of Iraq and to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and nothing to do with actual Al Qaeda plots. Lawrence Wilkerson's recent statements reflect Secretary of State Colin Powell's mortification of using the erroneous information received from al-Libi in his address to the United Nations justifying the invasion of Iraq. This is payback time.
Another man with mud on his face is the respected former Governor of New Jersey, Tom Kean. Tom always was squeamish about using information from detainees who he knew had been tortured in the final 9/11 Commission Report. What he didn 't know until it was inadvertantly revealed in congressional hearings yesterday that the detainees were tortured specifically for testimony to the 9/11 Commission.
Ironically, the torture program modelled after the SERE training did what SERE training was meant to do--create false confessions. By trying to put the monkey on the back of Democrats, the Republicans have created a situation where there will be no alternative for the political world but either appoint a Special Prosecutor and/or a Truth Commission of distinguished personalities. Also, the accusations by the Democrats that the CIA lied in their briefings to Congress compel the declassfication and release of all the documents on these Hill meetings.
Will the American people support people like Dick Cheney when it comes out that the torture program was not meant to protect the country but to create false intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq? Yesterday, also produced the evidence that the Vice President's office itself directly ordered CIA agent Dilfer, the weapons inspector, to waterboard an Iraqi intelligence officer because the Vice President thought Dilfer's interrogation had been too "soft".
And speaking of Karl Rove, since he participated in NSC meetings and possessed top secret clearances, should we not investigate his role in this sordid affair? Historically, Rove had a longer relationship with Dick Cheney than George W.,contrary to the public perception.
So far, we have all the armed forces being on the record that the torture policy was against the rules of war, against our treaty obligations and the constitution. We also have experienced, seasoned interrogators, who actually broke up plots against the United States, state torture was ineffective and too cumbersome to produce worthwhile intelligence. The ticking-time bomb scenario, much beloved by Republicans and Fox news, has been rendered absurd over the past two weeks. And so we are left with no one with operational or military experience supporting the effectiveness or even the worth of torture.
This all leads us far from the moral and legal prohibitions against torture , past the "it works" assertions, past the stage where it was used to protect Americans, into the realm of pure politics. America tortured for a political agenda. Ironically, that has been my experience with torturers and the tortured in the developing world for three decades. Torture is never used to procure intelligence; it's to make a political point. The point can be the sadistic punishment or revenge against someone who dared to resist an oppressive regime or force false confessions to support the ideological agenda and ambitions of the State.
Stoogeland will try to play out of this mess without coming clean. But the odd thing is that it may be prevented from sweeping this under the rug as the political players keep mud-wrestling in ways that only provoke more information, not less. Dick Cheney's impulsive burst on to the scene after years in the bunker only puts him in the frame--it was his program and he owns it. Whether our political system has any courage, will or wit to deal with this is, in my opinion, dubious.
Next time, the U.S .might want to try drugs if it were serious about intelligence.
However, the Obama Administration's strategy of a "modified limited hangout" is simply DOA. And thanks goes to Dick Cheney for pushing the envelope on this issue during public appearances that probably number more than he gave when he was in an undisclosed location. Kudos also go to Karl "Turdblossom" Rove, who thought it was a dandy idea to try and put the monkey on the Democrats' backs by writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal asking the Nixonian question,"What did Nancy Pelosi know and when did she know it?" To which Nancy Pelosi responded that the CIA lied to Congress and she was backed up on this by former Senator Bob Graham, who is notorious for his large ego that he keeps minute minute-by-minute diaries of his whole life, something Boy Genius Rove happen to forget in his rush to judgment.
The torture debate has gone where official Washington fears to tread. We can check off the boxes that it was amoral, illegal, unconstitutional, against all our treaty obligations. But torture enthusiasts still hung on to its effectiveness. This week hasn't been a good one for them. On the torture side is Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Liz Cheney,Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Charles Krauthammer, Mary Matalin and now Lindsey Graham, who touted the 500-year old history of torture as if he just read Danniel Mannix's History of Torture.
On the anti-torture side were interrogators from the FBI, Air Force, U.S. Marines and the CIA. Also former Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff, weighed in to drop the bomb that the torture policy was not aimed at discovering imminent plots of Al Qaeda against the United States but rather for intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. Kaboom!
The other little details dropped by Col. Wilkerson include the fact that the CIA and others were so scared about prosecutions because of the Abu Ghraib scandal that they stopped the torture policy by 2004, not 2005 as I believed. He asserts that the second Bush Administration was torture free. Previously, he claimed that there were over 100 homicides created by this policy. The same day Wilkerson claimed the second-term had been free of torture, the International Red Cross requested from the CIA notification about 100 people they had listed in the agency's custody but who were missing.
So if torture is such an effective policy, why suspend it? And also why are the Republicans stepping up the pressure on President Obama, who has been desparately trying to limit the areas of investigation, when the question about the policy became moot in 2004? Also, why would you pick a fight with an adversary who can release new information at his own time and pace?
Let's take the Stoogeland Smell test. If you are the intelligence community and you have been embarrassed by the largest intelligence failure since the Trojan horse (WMDs in Iraq), would you not have leaked the amazing successes you had in breaking up the Al Qaeda plots against the United States because of your "enhanced interrogation" program? Former CIA special agent Robert Baer claims this would have been out in a minute. The old saw," You know of our failures but never our successes", has never been true for a Washington bureaucracy in the mass media age.
By walking back the dog, one finds oneself in Cheneyland as he asserts that intelligence confirmed the links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda and that 9/11 had some relationship with Iraq. Waterboarding of Abu Zabaidah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the torture in Egypt of Ibn al-Shayk al-Libi had everything to do with producing intelligence to rationalize the invasion of Iraq and to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and nothing to do with actual Al Qaeda plots. Lawrence Wilkerson's recent statements reflect Secretary of State Colin Powell's mortification of using the erroneous information received from al-Libi in his address to the United Nations justifying the invasion of Iraq. This is payback time.
Another man with mud on his face is the respected former Governor of New Jersey, Tom Kean. Tom always was squeamish about using information from detainees who he knew had been tortured in the final 9/11 Commission Report. What he didn 't know until it was inadvertantly revealed in congressional hearings yesterday that the detainees were tortured specifically for testimony to the 9/11 Commission.
Ironically, the torture program modelled after the SERE training did what SERE training was meant to do--create false confessions. By trying to put the monkey on the back of Democrats, the Republicans have created a situation where there will be no alternative for the political world but either appoint a Special Prosecutor and/or a Truth Commission of distinguished personalities. Also, the accusations by the Democrats that the CIA lied in their briefings to Congress compel the declassfication and release of all the documents on these Hill meetings.
Will the American people support people like Dick Cheney when it comes out that the torture program was not meant to protect the country but to create false intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq? Yesterday, also produced the evidence that the Vice President's office itself directly ordered CIA agent Dilfer, the weapons inspector, to waterboard an Iraqi intelligence officer because the Vice President thought Dilfer's interrogation had been too "soft".
And speaking of Karl Rove, since he participated in NSC meetings and possessed top secret clearances, should we not investigate his role in this sordid affair? Historically, Rove had a longer relationship with Dick Cheney than George W.,contrary to the public perception.
So far, we have all the armed forces being on the record that the torture policy was against the rules of war, against our treaty obligations and the constitution. We also have experienced, seasoned interrogators, who actually broke up plots against the United States, state torture was ineffective and too cumbersome to produce worthwhile intelligence. The ticking-time bomb scenario, much beloved by Republicans and Fox news, has been rendered absurd over the past two weeks. And so we are left with no one with operational or military experience supporting the effectiveness or even the worth of torture.
This all leads us far from the moral and legal prohibitions against torture , past the "it works" assertions, past the stage where it was used to protect Americans, into the realm of pure politics. America tortured for a political agenda. Ironically, that has been my experience with torturers and the tortured in the developing world for three decades. Torture is never used to procure intelligence; it's to make a political point. The point can be the sadistic punishment or revenge against someone who dared to resist an oppressive regime or force false confessions to support the ideological agenda and ambitions of the State.
Stoogeland will try to play out of this mess without coming clean. But the odd thing is that it may be prevented from sweeping this under the rug as the political players keep mud-wrestling in ways that only provoke more information, not less. Dick Cheney's impulsive burst on to the scene after years in the bunker only puts him in the frame--it was his program and he owns it. Whether our political system has any courage, will or wit to deal with this is, in my opinion, dubious.
Next time, the U.S .might want to try drugs if it were serious about intelligence.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Cheney's magical mystery tour to Crazy Town
Without the unitary theory of the executive to protect him anymore from the vagaries of public opinion, Dick Cheney's incessant tour to sell the virtues of the Bush torture policy baffles the mind. So far, no mature adult has stood up among Republicans and cried,"Silencio!" More troubling is to see Liz Cheney reappear as an apologist for the torture policy and prisoner abuse. Our corporate media loves the show but haven't asked Liz what she knows about torture, water-boarding or even interrogation. The answer is "Nothing." Treating Cheney's appearances as if they are serious, the media neglect to discuss that this may be a man who cried "Wolf" once too often. He assured the American public that Saddam Hussein was partners with Al Qaeda, had restarted his nuclear program and was certain to possess weapons of mass destruction. Almost as looney, Cheney offered his opinions on the Employee Free Choice Act during a Fox news program with Neil Cavuto.
The Hill reports that Republicans believe they can gain traction on national security issues by exploiting Obama's commitment to close Guatanamo within a year. The RNC surfaced an ad that Obama will be releasing detainees into your neighborhood, neglecting to mention our max prisons hold 150 or more Muslim terrorists already convicted in courts of law. Perhaps, this will pan out for the Republican Party, who have been banking on fear as their ticket to ride back into political power.
The Republican embrace of torture and secret prisons is curious in light of the fact that Cheney lost the bureaucratic fight during the Bush Administration. George W. Bush and Condi Rice planned on closing Gitmo in 2006 over Cheney's objections. The process was started then by the release of detainees and repatriation of some to European and Arab countries. Republican candidate John McCain agreed with President Obama that Gitmo should be closed because almost all informed sources agreed that the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo were the primary recruiting tools for foreign insurgents in Iraq.
The pathological appearances of Dick Cheney on all the networks and even obscure radio shows in North Dakota defending torture counter the Bush Administration's own policies in the second term, a period when Cheney's star was diminished. The CIA Inspecter General's report of 2004 ,which reviewed the torture program was blunt in calling it what it was and suggested that no impending attacks on the United States were broken up as a result. So-called enhanced interrogation techniques were at least overtly suspended in 2005 and the Bush Justice Department ended up revoking the original legal opinions justifying the program as legally sloppy--to say the least. Dick Cheney is in effect re-arguing a bureaucratic battle which he ingloriously lost.
The Republican full metal embrace of the torture policy is reckless. Dick Cheney's serial interviews reveal a series of moving benchmarks in his defense of the program. First, he asserted that it prevented the planned attack on Library Tower in Los Angeles. Within 24 hours of the remark, this was refuted by a timeline that showed the alleged sources for this plot had not been detained for six months the plot was disrupted. Secondly, he suggested within the last two days that a dirty bomb plot by Al Qaeda was disrupted using these methods. The known plot so far is the shoe-bomber who was picked up when the FBI received information from a detainees without any "enhanced interrogation". Four other alleged plots uncovered by these methods were analyzed in a December issue of Vanity Fair. The former head of British counter-intelligence said one plot was a complete fabrication and the other three were uncovered through local police work. Finally, Dick Cheney claims that Al Qaeda was basically unknown prior to 9-11 and that torture produced a detailed view of the Al Qaeda operations.
These assertions by Cheney and his demands for the declassification of documents are now triggering events which the Obama Administration wanted to avoid, the Democrats are cringing because of their own compliance in acknowledging these programs and Republicans should run for the hills from. The Obama Administration is now declassifying the "Holy Grail" document, the CIA's Inspector General's report on the torture program. As the Cheney deadenders keep hollering, more documents will be declassified. There is nothing coming down the pike which will make the torture program more appealing to the public. In fact, Republicans are just shooting themselves in the foot. As long as attention was focused on three Al Qaeda terrorists, the public has shown a frightening tolerance of the use of torture. But further documents show hundreds of homicides occurred because of the abuse of these methods.
Strangely, no Republican is aware at the degree to which Obama has been protecting them and the various intelligence agencies from exposure and prosecution. From a legal point of view, it is a not all that clear that Obama can in fact guarantee impunity as the CIA Inspector General report states clearly that the interrogators violated the Torture Convention and all federal laws covering war crimes. The latest Republican gambit of blaming the Democrats Nancy Pelosi in going along with this program is going to backfire as House Democrats agreed to investigate this. By trying to portray this as a partisan struggle, Republicans are only pushing the torture issue into the realm of the special prosecutor so that the Obama Administration "de-politicizes" it.
If I were Eric Holder, I would appoint Republican Patrick Fitzgerald as the special prosecutor so that Cheney-ites heads explode.
The Hill reports that Republicans believe they can gain traction on national security issues by exploiting Obama's commitment to close Guatanamo within a year. The RNC surfaced an ad that Obama will be releasing detainees into your neighborhood, neglecting to mention our max prisons hold 150 or more Muslim terrorists already convicted in courts of law. Perhaps, this will pan out for the Republican Party, who have been banking on fear as their ticket to ride back into political power.
The Republican embrace of torture and secret prisons is curious in light of the fact that Cheney lost the bureaucratic fight during the Bush Administration. George W. Bush and Condi Rice planned on closing Gitmo in 2006 over Cheney's objections. The process was started then by the release of detainees and repatriation of some to European and Arab countries. Republican candidate John McCain agreed with President Obama that Gitmo should be closed because almost all informed sources agreed that the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo were the primary recruiting tools for foreign insurgents in Iraq.
The pathological appearances of Dick Cheney on all the networks and even obscure radio shows in North Dakota defending torture counter the Bush Administration's own policies in the second term, a period when Cheney's star was diminished. The CIA Inspecter General's report of 2004 ,which reviewed the torture program was blunt in calling it what it was and suggested that no impending attacks on the United States were broken up as a result. So-called enhanced interrogation techniques were at least overtly suspended in 2005 and the Bush Justice Department ended up revoking the original legal opinions justifying the program as legally sloppy--to say the least. Dick Cheney is in effect re-arguing a bureaucratic battle which he ingloriously lost.
The Republican full metal embrace of the torture policy is reckless. Dick Cheney's serial interviews reveal a series of moving benchmarks in his defense of the program. First, he asserted that it prevented the planned attack on Library Tower in Los Angeles. Within 24 hours of the remark, this was refuted by a timeline that showed the alleged sources for this plot had not been detained for six months the plot was disrupted. Secondly, he suggested within the last two days that a dirty bomb plot by Al Qaeda was disrupted using these methods. The known plot so far is the shoe-bomber who was picked up when the FBI received information from a detainees without any "enhanced interrogation". Four other alleged plots uncovered by these methods were analyzed in a December issue of Vanity Fair. The former head of British counter-intelligence said one plot was a complete fabrication and the other three were uncovered through local police work. Finally, Dick Cheney claims that Al Qaeda was basically unknown prior to 9-11 and that torture produced a detailed view of the Al Qaeda operations.
These assertions by Cheney and his demands for the declassification of documents are now triggering events which the Obama Administration wanted to avoid, the Democrats are cringing because of their own compliance in acknowledging these programs and Republicans should run for the hills from. The Obama Administration is now declassifying the "Holy Grail" document, the CIA's Inspector General's report on the torture program. As the Cheney deadenders keep hollering, more documents will be declassified. There is nothing coming down the pike which will make the torture program more appealing to the public. In fact, Republicans are just shooting themselves in the foot. As long as attention was focused on three Al Qaeda terrorists, the public has shown a frightening tolerance of the use of torture. But further documents show hundreds of homicides occurred because of the abuse of these methods.
Strangely, no Republican is aware at the degree to which Obama has been protecting them and the various intelligence agencies from exposure and prosecution. From a legal point of view, it is a not all that clear that Obama can in fact guarantee impunity as the CIA Inspector General report states clearly that the interrogators violated the Torture Convention and all federal laws covering war crimes. The latest Republican gambit of blaming the Democrats Nancy Pelosi in going along with this program is going to backfire as House Democrats agreed to investigate this. By trying to portray this as a partisan struggle, Republicans are only pushing the torture issue into the realm of the special prosecutor so that the Obama Administration "de-politicizes" it.
If I were Eric Holder, I would appoint Republican Patrick Fitzgerald as the special prosecutor so that Cheney-ites heads explode.
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