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In the wake of the Christmas Day effort by Nigerian citizen Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to destroy an in-flight airliner over Detroit, Republicans are hammering home with renewed vigour the myth that Democrats are weak on national security.  Yet by any reasonable measure the invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration, with the enthusiastic support of congressional Republicans, has proved to be a national security as well as a foreign policy calamity.  And whilst it’s true that many Democrats voted for the Iraq War resolution, there can be no real doubt that the quest to invade Iraq was driven by the Republican Bush administration and its right-wing supporters in the GOP. 

Even setting aside the human and monetary cost, the adverse consequences to America have been severe indeed.  Perhaps the most serious is the fact that our failure to implement and sustain long term security and reconstruction in Afghanistan after driving out the Taliban has enabled the latter to rejuvenate and return as a more formidable enemy; one that we must now commit almost 100,000 troops to combat just when we were getting out from under the crushing Iraq commitment.  And the refusal of General Tommy Franks and then Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to commit American forces such as rangers to the effort to trap and destroy the remnants of al-Qaida in the White Mountains at Tora Bora, which stands as the best opportunity we’ve had to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden, must rank as both a colossal error of judgment and failure of nerve that ensured the terrorist organization’s survival.

Not only did our focus on Iraq divert needed military expertise and resources away from Afghanistan but, as we’ve learned to our cost recently, it also resulted in neglect of countries such as Yemen where branches of al-Qaida have taken root and flourished. 

If invading Iraq had truly been part of the war against al-Qaida rather than a fantasy and hoax peddled subliminally to the American people by the Bush administration and its right-wing cheer leaders at Fox News, maybe it could be forgiven.  But Saddam Hussein was hated by Islamic extremists and he, in turn, hunted them down as ruthlessly as anyone else who potentially threatened his hold on power.  Our invasion of Iraq may have unseated a tyrant but it also replaced an Iraq that represented a bulwark against al-Qaida with one in which a branch of the latter was able to establish and operate with devastating consequences, not least to the Iraqi people.

The Bush administration made other bone-headed decisions in the name of national security: Guantanamo and the secret CIA  prisons in Eastern Europe, torture, electronic domestic surveillance without court supervision to name but a few.  Along with the unprovoked invasion of Iraq they represent a darker America, one that is less than what we aspire to be.

Al-Qaida cannot destroy America but they can inspire a reaction that might change us into something we would hardly recognize.  Dick Cheney and the Republicans started us down that path in the panicked aftermath of 9/11 when what we showed was less strength than fear and weakness. President Obama and most Democrats recognize that in our quest to stay safe from attack we must not surrender what it is that makes us proud to be Americans in the first place.  That would indeed give the victory to al-Qaida.

Let’s get one thing clear:  the failure of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to detonate a bomb on an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day was not only an extremely good piece of luck for the passengers and crew (who deserve credit for their quick thinking and courage), but also for those charged with security in the United States.  Why?  Because it highlighted flaws in the way in which we analyze and use intelligence information that has been collected on potentially dangerous individuals, and in our screening procedures at airports. 

Yet instead of celebrating our good luck we’ve been treated instead to unseemly hand wringing and finger pointing. The sources for most of this, not unexpectedly, are Republicans and the right-wing punditry.  President Obama has been criticized for his delay in making a statement and for not lending it more urgency by not, presumably, sounding sufficiently breathless.  And of course the GOP lost no time trying to make political hay out of it.  Former vice-president Cheney sounds more and more as though he can’t wait for an al-Qaida attack to succeed so that he can begin an endless round of I-told-you-so interviews on prime-time network TV.  He evidently blames Obama for not reacting in the same panicky mode as he did in the wake of 9/11.

The fact is this near miss is a gold mine of an opportunity to improve our intelligence collection and handling procedures, as well as to tighten security screening practices by, for example, speeding the more widespread introduction of newer technology such as full-body scans.

We seem to be missing a couple of essential lessons from this and past incidents.  The first is that no matter how much we may want it, the government cannot guarantee our safety.  I don’t happen to think that explosives sewn into underwear is necessarily a sign that al-Qaida has increased its effectiveness or ingenuity; quite the contrary.  But the fact remains our human protectors will always be fallible and the efficiency of our technology limited.  Big Daddy cannot always protect us.

The second lesson is that maybe Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was unwittingly correct when she said that the system worked. Part of the “system” has to be us, the ordinary members of the public.  Just as it was the action of passengers and crew that saved that flight over Detroit, and of others who forced the 9/11 hijackers of United Flight 93 to abort their mission to crash into the White House or the Capitol, so we must all realize that we, too, have a role to play in preventing terrorist attacks from succeeding. 

After all the next attack may not come on an airliner at five thousand feet but on a crowded city bus at ground zero.

Dick Cheney on Face the Nation, May 10, 2009:

The group that’s left, the 245 or so, these are the worst of the worst. This is the hard core. You’d have a recidivism rate out of this group of maybe 50 or 60 percent. They want to get out because they want to kill more Americans. And you’re just going to find it very difficult to send them any place. Now, as I say, there has been some talk on the part of the administration about putting them in the United States.

So are they really the “worst of the worst?”

Hardly…

ST. GEORGE, Bermuda — Almost exactly seven years after arriving at Guantánamo in chains as accused enemy combatants, and four days after their surprise predawn flight to Bermuda, four Uighur Muslim men basked in their new-found freedom here, grateful for the handshakes many residents had offered and marveling at the serene beauty of this tidy, postcard island.

…

The men were among a larger group of Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) who had fled what they called Chinese persecution of Muslims in western China and spent part of 2001 in a Uighur camp in Afghanistan. They fled, apparently unarmed, when the Americans bombed the camp, and were later turned in to the authorities by Pakistani villagers in return for an American bounty.

The four brought here, like 13 other Uighurs still at Guantánamo but expected to depart soon to other destinations, had been cleared by American officials and courts of taking up arms against the United States or ties to global terrorism.

But proposals to resettle them in the United States caused a political furor that the Obama administration did not want to aggravate. On Sunday, these four expressed a surprising lack of bitterness toward the United States, saying — as they had during interrogations years ago in Guantánamo — that they had never been anti-American and just wanted to get on with their lives.

…

From the men’s own statements, it is clear that their presence in Afghanistan was linked to their animosity toward China. Whatever they might have wished in 2001, there is no evidence they sought to become part of a global jihad.

Now, over Chinese objections, the men are being released to third countries.

Around a dozen of the Uighurs will be going to Palau, an island nation of about 20,000 people just east of The Phillipines.  A New Zealand paper reports:

Palau is one of a handful of countries that does not recognise China and maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

President Johnson Toribiong said Palau was accepting the detainees “as a humanitarian gesture” intended to help them restart their lives.

And today’s Los Angeles Times quotes President Toribiong, a former defense attorney who earned his law degree at the University of Washington:

“These people are not monsters,” said Toribiong, who, with graying hair and glasses, looks pensive, even professorial. “They should be presumed innocent because no one has proven them guilty.”

That sounds perfectly reasonable to anyone with basic knowledge of Western laws and the concept of habeus corpus, but it sounds crazy to people like Dick Cheney who think the Executive Office has the power to detain and torture suspects indefinitely without ever even charging or convicting them of crimes.

Just last week Cheney said the only other option besides imprisoning “combatants” at Guantánamo was ”to kill them, and we don’t operate that way.”

Worst of the worst?  That would be Dick Cheney and his gang.

UPDATE:  or more like “backdate”  on this story…  N.J. Barnes wrote about the plight of the imprisoned Uighurs way back in 2007.  This post is about some of them being released to Albania.

From the Washington Post;

Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense.

…

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years — on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping — were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney’s admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores 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-Qaeda attack.

Thus, when Bush’s inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock — a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.

The evil one has a soft spot for gays…

That’s what it says on my Life in Hell calendar for May 14th.  I gave it some thought and I’ll have to say that the list of people I despise is not that long.  For this post, I am limiting it to people that have been alive during my lifetime.

Richard Nixon:  Because he was a hateful man and he destroyed the office of the President. 

Dick Cheney:  Because he is a vile, unscrupulous man that seems to exist only to grab power by any means necessary and wipe out all opposition.

Karl Rove:  See above.

Karl Malone:  Because he represents everything bad about the NBA.  His intentional fouls were vicious, he was a flopper, and he traveled every time he drove to the basket.

Sean Hannity:  Because he is a liar.  Every time I see him he says something demonstrably false to make his arguments for things that are incredibly wrong.

Rush Limbaugh:  Because he really is a big fat idiot, and people actually listen to him.

Terrell Owens:  Because he represents what’s wrong with the NFL.  Always changing teams; always wanting more money; and, in the grandest team sport in America, he thinks only of himself.

I went shopping around at Amazon.com for books about my top three.  Here are the books I found along with brief descriptions or reviews:

Dick Cheney

Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency

Above all, Angler is a study of the inner workings of the Bush administration and the vice president’s central role as the administration’s canniest power player.  Gellman exposes the mechanics of Cheney’s largely successful post-September 11 campaign to win unchecked power for the commander in chief, and reflects upon, and perhaps changes, the legacy that Cheney—and the Bush administration as a whole—will leave as they exit office.

Richard Nixon

President Nixon: Alone in the White House

“I have decided my major role is moral leadership,” Nixon wrote in 1972 in one of his myriad memos to himself. (As Reeves writes, “Whatever else he accomplished, Richard Nixon produced more paper and tape than any president before or since.”) That resolution quickly collapsed; instead, as the Vietnam War shaded into defeat and protests at home mounted, Nixon sank into a siege mentality, seeing himself as a lone crusader at war with the rest of the world.

Karl Rove

Boy Genius: Karl Rove, the Architect of George W. Bush’s Remarkable Political Triumphs

If you ever thought Karl Rove might be a man of questionable morals, but just didn’t know enough to be sure, this book will make your jaw drop.  What is truly remarkable is that a man of his low standards, willing to do anything regardless of ethics to win, could be closely associated with the most powerful man in the free world.

The New York Times reports:

Under fire from Republicans for what she knew about harsh questioning of terror detainees, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday asserted that the C.I.A. had misled Congress about its techniques, even as she acknowledged that she had learned in 2003 that the agency had subjected suspects to waterboarding.

At a tense press conference, Ms. Pelosi said for the first time that a staff member alerted her in February 2003 that top lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee had been briefed on the use of tough interrogation methods on terror suspects.

…

“I am saying that the C.I.A. was misleading the Congress and at the same the administration was misleading the Congress on weapons of mass destruction,” Ms. Pelosi said.

…

Republicans took sharp issue with the speaker’s remarks.

“The speaker’s comments continue to raise more questions than provide answers,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican minority leader. “It’s pretty clear that they were well aware of what these enhanced interrogation techniques were; they were well aware that they’d been used; and it seems to me that they want to have it both ways. You can’t have it both ways.”

A couple days ago The Daily Show show had a great segment about Pelosi’s tap dance around the inquiry into what and when she knew about the torture program.  Watch it here.

What she should have done is gone on the record as having objected to the “enhanced interrogation” techniques even though she was not cleared to say anything about about the program.  She didn’t do that and then went on to oppose the program as the details gradually became known to the public.  It’s true that she did not implement the program, but she in effect was an enabler before she publicly opposed it.

The Pelosi story is quite a sideshow that distracts us from the real issue:  Who are the parties responsible for implementing a prisoner interrogation program that violates the Geneva Conventions?  On the previous night’s Daily Show, Stewart showed a clip of Dick Cheney pointing his finger directly at George W. Bush.

So the more we learn, the more we know that torture was directed from the very top, and that orders were issued down to the soldiers manning the prisons, and the soldiers who did not object to using torture took the fall for following their orders.  It’s probably only those who were directly involved with those caught on film at Abu Ghraib.  I am quite certain there were many more that did the same things but were careful not to be photographed.

Pelosi’s problem is political.  Let’s deal with the real problem.  We The People will not be able to but this disgusting bit of history behind us until our government conducts thorough investigations, and those responsible for committing crimes are held to account.

Torture has been the lead story in the papers and the most talked about subject in the opinion columns for over a week now.  What we’ve learned from all the reports is that the use of torture by our military men and CIA operatives was a policy conceived and approved by high ranking government officials and passed down through the ranks to the “bad apples.”

Pierre Tristam quotes a passage from the book The Dark Side in his column about why and how the Bush Administration instituted its policy of torture:

“The Bush administration invoked the fear flowing from the attacks on September 11 to institute a policy of deliberate cruelty that would have been unthinkable on September 10. President (George W.) Bush, Vice President (Dick) Cheney and a small handful of trusted advisers sought and obtained dubious legal opinions enabling them to circumvent American laws and traditions. In the name of protecting national security, the executive branch sanctioned coerced confessions, extrajudicial detention, and other violations of individuals’ liberties that had been prohibited since the country’s founding.”

The New York Times reported on a Senate investigation’s findings that the policy was based on an old military program called “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape” (SERE ) “to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans,” and that they rushed in to implementing the SERE program as their own interrogation program without doing any research:

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce. 

The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.

Another NYT article reports that:

“The paper trail on abuse leads to top civilian leaders, and our report connects the dots,” Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said on Tuesday in a conference call with reporters. “This report, in great detail, shows a paper trail going from that authorization” by Mr. Rumsfeld “to Guantánamo to Afghanistan and to Iraq,” Mr. Levin said.

And in yet another article about whether the use of torture garnered any useful information, a memo from Admiral Dennis Blair was quoted:

“The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means,” Admiral Blair said in a written statement issued last night. “The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”

And in a NYT opinion piece this week, former FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan confirmed what Blair said:

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions – all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.

…

The debate after the release of these memos has centered on whether C.I.A. officials should be prosecuted for their role in harsh interrogation techniques. That would be a mistake. Almost all the agency officials I worked with on these issues were good people who felt as I did about the use of enhanced techniques: it is un-American, ineffective and harmful to our national security. 

McClatchy News reported on how Cheney and Rumsfeld rushed into using torture in their efforts to tie al Qaeda to Iraq so that they could justify their invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks:

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.

“Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”

Senior administration officials, however, “blew that off and kept insisting that we’d overlooked something, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information,” he said.

…

Rumsfeld approved extreme interrogation techniques for Guantanamo in December 2002. He withdrew his authorization the following month amid protests by senior military lawyers that some techniques could amount to torture, violating U.S. and international laws.

So there you have it.  The United States government hastily instituted a policy of torturing prisoners, tortured its prisoners, extradited its prisoners for torture in foreign countries, and lied about it all along the way.

So should we do something about it or should we just put it behind us and move ahead as Obama suggests?  (Check out Mr. Fish’s comic about Obama’s stance.)

Paul Krugman answers the question in today’s column:

No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.

And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.

…

That said, there are a lot of people in Washington who weren’t allied with the torturers but would nonetheless rather not revisit what happened in the Bush years.

Some of them probably just don’t want an ugly scene; my guess is that the president, who clearly prefers visions of uplift to confrontation, is in that group. But the ugliness is already there, and pretending it isn’t won’t make it go away.

While listening to the radio this morning, I heard somebody talking smack about somebody…

He has no scruples, no morals, no goal except anarchy, no plan except the end of planning. As Alfred patiently explains, “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

I thought the guy must have been talking about Dick Cheney.  Turns out it was Kenneth Turan’s review of The Dark Knight.