An article about efforts against Al Qaeda in AfPak that makes my spider-sense tingle, from the WaPo:

U.S. and international intelligence officials say that improved recruitment of spies inside the al-Qaeda network, along with increased use of targeted airstrikes and enhanced assistance from cooperative governments, has significantly reduced the terrorist organization’s effectiveness.

A U.S. counterterrorism official said that the combined advances have led to the deaths of more than a dozen senior figures in al-Qaeda and allied groups in Pakistan and elsewhere over the past year, most of them in 2009. Officials described Osama bin Laden and his main lieutenants as isolated and unable to coordinate high-profile attacks.

More from the article:

The most important new weapon in the Western arsenal is said to be the recruitment of spies inside al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations, a long-sought objective. “Human sources have begun to produce results,” Richard Barrett, head of the United Nations’ al-Qaeda and Taliban monitoring group, said Tuesday. Barrett is the former chief of Britain’s overseas counterterrorism operations.

Current and former senior U.S. officials, who spoke about intelligence matters on the condition of anonymity, confirmed what one former CIA official called “our penetration of al-Qaeda.” A senior administration official said that success had come “because of, first of all, very good intelligence capabilities . . . to locate and identify individuals who are part of the al-Qaeda organization.”

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair referred obliquely in an interview with reporters earlier this month to the use of spies, saying that “the primary way” that U.S. intelligence determines which terrorist organizations pose direct threats is “to penetrate them and learn whether they’re talking about making attacks against the United States.”

Now this is the part where I fervently hope that this revelation is psychological warfare against the Taliban and AQ to paralyze them with paranoia over moles in their organizations. It is a very effective tactic, see: James  Jesus Angleton. Given the incredible difficulty of inserting an intelligence officer into AQ, or even getting one of their members to flip and become a double agent, revealing that information for political reasons would border on the criminal.

Recent claims of significant success against al-Qaeda have become part of White House deliberations about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, centering on a request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American and NATO commander there, for an expanded counterinsurgency campaign that will require more U.S. troops. Discussions began in earnest Tuesday as senior national security and military officials met with President Obama.

Those within the administration who have suggested limiting large-scale U.S. ground combat in Afghanistan, including Vice President Biden, have pointed to an improved counterterrorism effort as evidence that Obama’s principal objective — destroying al-Qaeda — can be achieved without an expanded troop presence.

And in the first paragraph we have the reason that the White House leaked this story to WaPo. McChrystal’s public demand for tens of thousands of extra troops, which really are necessary if we are going to nation-build the way the Hillary-Holbrooke axis wants to, has put Obama in an awkward position, because the Congress doesn’t particularly want to do that.  The bright side is, they do seem to be rethinking their strategy of just throwing more soldiers into the meatgrinder. Cyncial as I am, I don’t want to think that this is just a stall to twist arms on Capitol Hill.

I don’t want to give the impression that I believe McChrystal (and Clinton and Holbrooke) are right.  Nation-building will never work in a place like A-stan; I wrote an article about it a few months ago. Joe Biden has the right strategy, though he has so far lost the internecine battles: A smaller number of American troops, mostly composed of Special Operations and Special Forces operators with close air support, in a strictly counterterrorism role. So, despite the fact that this article is disingenuous, if it helps stop a counterproductive and downright disastrous troop escalation, I’m willing to take that.

Technorati Tags: Afghan Surge, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Islamists, Pakistan, Taliban, Usama bin Laden, War on Terror, Washington Post

I really don’t know what Nancy Pelosi knew about the Bush torture regime, and to be honest, I’m not even entirely sure what it would mean if she were briefed about waterboarding in October of 2002. The meeting was reportedly so secretive that members of Congress weren’t even allowed to take notes, so I imagine it would have been a violation of the law for her to have said anything about what was discussed. On the other hand, it’s really rather ridiculous that anyone is getting worked up over someone having the gall to suggest the CIA might have lied to Congress. I mean, it’s not like the CIA doesn’t have a fairly distinguished history of…lying to Congress. But Republicans throw out some attacks on Pelosi, and all of a sudden journalists are more concerned about Pelosi “attacking” the CIA than whether or not…the CIA lied to Congress and broke the law by torturing detainees.

The press corps is going to be the death of us all.

Technorati Tags: CIA, Nancy Pelosi, Rotted Journalism, torture

I’m late to this (damn finals), but obviously the big news of the past couple of days is that the Obama administration will not, in fact, be releasing photos of Bush administration approved torture they had previously indicated they were going to release. I had previously applauded the decision to make the photos public, so my initial reaction was to join the chorus condemning the administration for this reversal, but the more I think about it, the more I’m not so sure.

To with, the only particularly convincing rationale I’ve heard for the decision is that it wasn’t so much about quashing “anti-American sentiment,” so much as it was avoiding enflaming Iraqis. With the rather large caveat that I have no way of knowing whether or not this is true, I guess this makes some pretty good sense to me. With national elections scheduled before the last US troops are set to leave the country in 2011, I do think it would be wise to avoid anything that is going to cause a disproportionate backlash among the citizenry so long as American troops remain in the country, not necessarily because it puts the troops in any increased danger (I think these claims are rather dubious) but rather because it would likely make the political situation unteneable for some time in that country. Assuming this really is the rationale, I suppose I can live with it for the time being, provided that we get more answers in the interim, or that the pictures are released after the last of US troops leave Iraq.

In other news, Robert Windrem reports on what could be a devastating wrinkle in the torture regime in The Daily Beast:

*Two U.S. intelligence officers confirm that Vice President Cheney’s office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner, a former intelligence official for Saddam Hussein, who was suspected to have knowledge of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection.

*The former chief of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, in charge of interrogations, tells The Daily Beast that he considered the request reprehensible.

He also claims that much of the information in the 9/11 commission report was based on information gained from torture.

This is an important revelation for two reasons. First of all, the typical conservative rational for why the Geneva Conventions are inoperable to terrorists (they’re “illegal combatants”) presumably don’t apply here. An Iraqi intelligence official would presumably have been a uniformed member of a duly constructed state military body, and would almost certainly have been a POW recognized under Geneva anyway you slice it, making Cheney a war criminal any way you look at it. Secondly, this is after the invasion. There’s no “ticking time bomb” logic in play for looking for an al-Qaeda/Iraq link after we’d already invaded Iraq. Rather, this was Dick Cheney looking to extract information that would confirm the political reasons put forward for the war. He was looking for false confessions plain and simple.

Also, not for nothing, but where the hell is George W. Bush (you know, the commander in chief) in all of these decisions?

Technorati Tags: Iraq, torture

Tyler Cowen ruminates on the potential downside of torture prosecutions:

At many blogs (Sullivan, Yglesias, DeLong, among others) you will find ongoing arguments for prosecuting the torturers who ran our government for a while.  I am in agreement with the moral stance of these critics but I don’t agree with their practical conclusions.  I believe that a full investigation would lead the U.S. public to, ultimately, side with torture, side with the torturers, and side against the prosecutors.  That’s why we can’t proceed and Obama probably understands that.  If another attack happened this would be all the more true.

I’m not really sure I agree with this or not, but on that note, I definitely don’t agree with the counterargument put forward (earlier) by Greenwald:

But leave aside the question of whether prosecutions would produce good or bad outcomes.  After all, the notion that the law can and should be ignored whenever we think doing so would produce good results or would constitute good policy was the engine that drove Bush lawlessness. 

This is just ridiculous. At best, it’s a dystopian outlook where outcomes are of no consequence, at worst, it’s the flip-side of the “I was just following orders” defense, wherein “I was just applying the letter of the law” becomes a way to shirk responsibilty for whatever outcomes your choices yield. You can imagine a police officer who decides to hold up someone rushing to the emergency room using it to defend himself when someone dies waiting for him to finish writing a speeding ticket on the side of the freeway. Obviously the torture question is a bit more serious, than that, but at the same time, assuming that Greenwald would agree that rushing to the hospital is a legitimate excuse for taking some leniency with traffic laws, and that police officers should be sensitive to such mitigating circumstances, then he would be admitting that discretion in applying the law is a fundamental part of a nation of laws. Or does Glenn think that local police actually should write citations to people mowing there lawns in shorts between the hours of 5 P.M. and 8 P.M. Monday to Friday?

The question then isn’t so much whether discretionary authority exists, but what circumstances make it proper to decline to prosecute. In particular it seems the question is whether the unlikelihood of earning a conviction, or the likelihood of producing a bad outcome in the larger society, is a legitimate reason to decline to prosecute someone. With regards to the former, I think the answer has to be yes. Especially considering double jeopardy protections, if a prosecutor thinks that someone has committed a crime, but feels that a conviction is unlikely, I would argue that he has a  duty not to bring charges, because doing so would prevent action if and when a conviction was more likey (assuming he’s right on both counts). The latter is a bit of a stickier question, but I would imagine there are some circumstances in which the potential cultural outcome is so dire as to compel the use of discretion, although such situations are certainly rare.

But what’s most troubling is Greenwald’s apparent lack of concern for the outcome of actions. Greenwald could certainly disagree with the premise that prosecutions are likely to produce bad outcomes, but I haven’t seen him make those arguments. Rather, I’ve seen him make arguments like the one above, that the question is completely irrelevant. Greenwald should respond to Cowen, and clearly articulate whether he agrees with Cowen’s conclusion or not. If he doesn’t, that’s certainly fair, and Greenwald can make that argument (and again, I’m not really sure if I agree with Cowen or not). But if he does, I don’t see how a logical person can rectify calling for an action you believe will produce bad outcomes. At best, it belies someone who is far too attached to rigidity, and unable to process exigent circumstances or concerns. At worst, David Broder is right, and Greenwald just wants vengeance against political opponents, consequences be damned. And I don’t want David Broder to be right.

Technorati Tags: Glenn Greenwald, torture

E.D. Kain, on torture apologist conservatives:

Beyond that, it seems very foolish – very short-sighted – for torture apologists to continue this charade.  It may seem necessary now, to many of them, to rewrite history or clean the slate or whatever – but in the end can this really be anything more than political suicide?  Maybe for the architects – the Cheney’s and the Yoo’s – it makes sense.  They face a real (if unlikely) chance at prosecution.  When the media finally starts using the word “torture” instead of “harsh interrogation tactics” and all of this comes spilling out – the pictures, the video recordings, etc. – is this the side you want to be on?  Standing over there in the spotlight with Cheney and Bush and Bybee and Yoo?

History is merciless.

There’s certainly a seemingly obvious incentive here for the conservative movement, and the Republican Party, to use the opportunity presented by the release of the torture memos to put some distance between themselves and the Bush administration, and many commentors have noted this. On the other hand, I’m not sure people aren’t overestimating this factor. It’s not, after all, the case that we really are just now learning all of these things, and movement conservatives are still reflexively defending all things Bush. This discussion has been ongoing since roughly 2002, and most of the “apologists” have been vigorous defenders of these “enhanced interrogation techniques” since day one. In other words, they’re not just defending Bush & Cheney, they’re defending themselves, and their own positions.

On the other hand, I think it’s time to start admitting the obvious; a lot of these people are just sadists who think that torture is good for its own sake. This is the mentality that’s on display every time a torture defender forgets the “ticking time bomb scenario” or something else they saw on 24 and veers into the realm of “well these are bad people, so who cares if we smacked them around” territory. This is a branch who feel that the detainees deserve everything they get, or worse, and so for them, torture is an end in and of its own right, a sick sort of catharsis. Consider Andy McCarthy, a man the conservative movement regards as a serious legal mind:

“As far as mental suffering is concerned, that involves at least the creation of a fear of imminent death,” said McCarthy. “While it’s a favorite talking point that people were waterboarded 180 times … it undercuts the fear that there was going to be imminent death. After the first or second time you get the point that there’s no death to be feared here.”

I’m hardly the first to point out that this makes no sense. After all, if the detainee does come to learn that he’s in no danger whatsoever from waterboarding the more he endures it, and presuming McCarthy accepts the notion that waterboarding does not induce “severe pain and suffering,” wouldn’t waterboarding someone 183 times in a month (just over 6 times a day, or once every 4 hours) be about the most ineffective thing you could possibly do? Wouldn’t the “interrogation technique” become ineffective by about day 3?

There’s simply no logical conclusion to be drawn from this, other than that Andrew McCarthy and the rest of the right’s torture apologists do, in fact, approve of the use of torture in general. That they realize the nature of American politics won’t let them say that in so many words doesn’t make it any less true. The interesting question is not why the right continues to defend the torture regime they whole-heartedly approved of all along, but how the American right got to this point in the first place.

Technorati Tags: torture, Wingnuts

No one could have predicted:

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.

“There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.

Of course, pointing out that the most common use of torture over the years, from the Inquisition to Stalinist Russia, was to elicit false confessions. Because while torture isn’t necessarily any more effective than good interrogating for getting accurate information out of people, imposing increasing levels of extreme physical pain on people until they say what you want them to is a great way to get people to, well, say what you want them to. Whether it’s true or not. The question at this point is whether Cheney and Rumsfeld were simply looking for confirmation of the things they “knew,” or if they were actually looking to extract false information from detainees to justify an aggressive war in Iraq. The fact that the inability to garner this information, even by torture, doesn’t seem to have phased the pre-conceived belief tells you all you need to know about the run-up to war; the administration wanted a war with Saddam from day 1, and nothing was going to stop them. Also, given that Rumsfeld seems to have reconciled the discrepancy by concluding that the torture didn’t work, one is left to wonder why, exactly, the torture regime was furthered.

It’s worth pointing out that this has been a very bad week for the Bushies. Revelations that they went to extraordinary measures to quash any official dissent from the legal opinions espoused in the OLC significantly undercuts the notion that the OLC opinions were issued in good faith, and senior policy makers simply acting on the legal advice they were getting. As does the reminder that the FBI strenuously objected to the interrogation methods, to the point that FBI director Robet Mueller directed FBI personnel to have nothing to do with it. Even worse, the Senate Armed Services Committee report on the matter is a brutal demolition of the Bush administration’s various line, and paints a portrait of a group of sadists who were determined to torture from the very beginning, and who took a number of actions that seem to demonstrate they knew what they were doing were legally dubious.

If you’d asked me about the matter on Monday morning, I would have said that I thought the biggest hurdle to action was that getting convictions in the matter would be extremely difficult, if not downright unlikely. After reading the SASC report, and given the plethora of information that was brought back to the front of the story yesterday, however, today I’d have to say that, on the whole, it’s exceedingly obvious that senior administration officials were engaged in serial lawlessness, human rights abuses, war crimes, etc. Prosecute them. Now.

But hey, Dubs didn’t get any oral in the Oval Office. Which is good, because otherwise we might have had to impeach him or something.

Technorati Tags: Al Qaeda, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Iraq, torture

Putting aside the laughability factor of treating the writing of a former Bush chief speechwriter credulously, Marc Thiessen’s Op-Ed in yesterday’s Washington Post contained a number of blatantly inaccurate claims, the most blatant of which being the contention that the torture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed provided the information that led to the foiling of a terrorist plot to attack the West Coast. But, as Sully catalogues, the plot was alleged to have been foiled in 2002, while KSM was not captured until 2003. In other words, it’s simply not possible for Thieseen’s claim to be true.

I think that getting worked up about Bush administration officials and staffers telling abject lies is rather pointless. On some level it would almost feel weird if they weren’t lying. But the real question here isn’t why Thiessen decided to write a column full of outright lies to defend his former boss, it’s why The Washington Post agreed to print something full of egregious factual inaccuracies. To be sure, these aren’t debateable points. It’s not Thiessen’s opinion that the torture of KSM yielded information that stopped a plot a year or so before KSM was captured. If Thiessen does, in fact, believe that statement is true, then Thiessen is ignorant of the facts in question, and the statement is still completely inaccurate. What’s not clear is why the Post editors, who are presumably paid to, you know, edit, apparently didn’t bother to do even a rudimentary fact check on Thiessan’s claims, or if they did, why they decided to print a piece they knew contained a number of flase contentions.

Obviously this isn’t anything new for the Post, but that pretty clearly doesn’t make it any better. The simple fact of the matter is that Fred Hiatt has turned the Post into the pre-eminent mainstream outlet of neoconservative propaganda in the country, and the people above Hiatt in the organization have allowed him to do it.

Technorati Tags: Fred Hiatt, torture, Washington Post