In his book, The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind details how the Bush administration, having falsely claimed that their captive Abu Zubaydah was a key al-Qaeda operative with tons of information, had him tortured until he coughed up some bogus information. John Kiriakou, formerly of the CIA, told a different story to ABC, saying Zubaydah was tortured and gave up useful information but torture is wrong anyway.

Now FBI sources are striking back, sticking with a Suskindish version of events in which the torture didn’t accomplish anything useful. Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus have the story for The Washington Post. It’s hard to know where the truth lies here, and obviously I’m a biased observer at this point, but it’s hard to see what motive FBI people would have for going forward with their story if it’s false. It’s easy, by contrast, to see why administration and CIA sources who’d been torturing this guy might want to exaggerate how useful their torturing had been.

I’d been optimistic that the release of the newer National Intelligence Estimate on Iran and the apparent ascendancy of a more rational point of view within the Bush administration might lead to a more cooperative attitude from Russia with regard to the continuing concerns about Iran’s enrichment activities. That seems to not be the case, as Russia goes through with a nuclear fuel delivery that had been stalled for a bit. The Bush administration is taking a restrained line, presumably because they don’t want the Russians to start considering bad behavior on the Iran front an important point of national pride and principle, but this is definitely a step in the wrong direction.

Kevin Drum’s right that it’ll take more than backbone alone to end the Iraq War:

Maybe congressional Democrats need more backbone when it comes to Iraq, but as always, it’s public opinion that’s key. And public opinion just isn’t as overwhelmingly on our side as we often like to think. Fix that, and we’ll all be amazed at how fast Dems all grow a spine.

But here’s the thing. Public opinion doesn’t just “happen” — effective political leaders shape public opinion. The polls show that the public wants a pony in Iraq: People don’t want to beat a hasty retreat and they don’t want a decade or more of occupation. What they want is to give the war a little more time and then for it to come to a successful conclusion. People in the know, however, realize that that’s not a realistic course of action. The job of people who realize that it’s not a realistic course of action and who favor a policy of perpetual occupation is to obscure the choices by doling the war out in Friedman Units and getting people to focus on the waxing and waning of the tactical situation — if things get better, that’s a reason to keep trying; if things get worse, that’s a reason to hold on a bit until we can turn things around.

Conversely, the job of people who realize it’s not a realistic course of action and who favor a policy of withdrawal and strategic reorientation is to heighten the contradictions (to coin a phrase) and make people realize that unless they want to commit to 10+ years of this, we might as well leave quickly and expeditiously. If the leaders of the Democratic Party were serious about ending the war, they’d be trying to do this — trying to shape public opinion in a strategic way. Public opinion matters to all politicians, but serious political leaders don’t just take opinion in passively — they try to understand it and mold it to produce a political climate favorable to the policies they’re trying to push.

To grasp the full madness of the policy we’re pursuing in Iraq, you need to look toward Afghanistan. Consider Gregory Warner’s observation in The Washington Monthly that “according to the RAND Corporation, the American-led nation-building effort in Afghanistan is the least-financed such effort in sixty years.” Now why on earth would you think that’s a good idea?

And note that it’s not because of a shortfall in overall spending on defense-related matters. Lorelei Kelly notes that when you add together the DOD budget with the military programs in the Department of Energy and the special war supplementals we’re spending about $700 billion on defense this year. That’s a ton of money. In the context of such extravagant spending there’s simply no excuse for the vital military mission in Afghanistan to be getting shortchanged in this manner.

There’s no excuse but there is a reason: Iraq, where it seems that no amount of spending is too much, no duration of the war too long, and no amount of patience too much to ask for whether or not the war has any kind of clear strategic rationale. And beyond the money and manpower, there’s the crucial issue of attention: what preoccupies the top officials in Washington? Where have we sent our best-regarded commanders? All to Iraq rather than to a theater of more strategic importance to the United States, where our operation has more legitimacy, and where there’s a real chance we could secure more international assistance with our efforts if we were willing to make them a bigger priority. But rebalancing in that way would require people to implicitly admit that they’d made a strategic error in the first place by moving attention out of south/central asia and to the Gulf, and we can’t have that!

Via Julian Sanchez a nice rundown of the origins of FISA. It’s particularly crazy that we’re going down this path because the surveillance restriction were so specifically written in response to a long and well-documented chain of abuses of power. It’s not like anyone’s going to be able to plead ignorance when it turns out that President Someone Or Other is using these powers to spy on political opponents.

Despite Jonah Goldberg’s notions, it turns out that you can’t really major in education at Swarthmore. Sara was also telling me that a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore under any major wouldn’t ordinarily qualify you to teach grade school without some additional certification.

This is a bit hokey, but I was walking down Constitution Avenue yesterday when I found myself noticing an inscription on the National Archives building that read: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Coming on the day that a terrible surveillance bill got over forty votes in the Senate, it struck me as incredibly sad. We’re compromising important parts of the meaning of America.

Fortunately, it seems that Chris Dodd’s moves paid off and the bill has been pulled until the New Year. We’ll see what happens then.

UPDATE: Of course I mean that the terrible bill got over seventy votes, not “over forty” (except in the sense that seventy is greater than forty).

Photo by Flickr user Chris and Kelly used under a Creative Commons license