Today, Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Max Boot continued to cheerlead for the “success” of the surge in Iraq in an online debate. Boot insisted that Iraq has met two-thirds of the original 18 benchmarks, that the government’s offensive in Basra was successful, and that the so-called Sons of Iraq will always remain loyal to the Shiite-controlled Iraqi state.

Boot concluded by conceding that there are walls separating Sunni neighborhoods from Shia, but dismissed the fact by stating simply that “there are walls around many gated communities in the U.S. too”:

It’s true that there are walls around Dora and other Baghdad neighborhoods. … But then there are walls around many gated communities in the U.S. too. The walls per se are not evidence of reconciliation, I’ll grant you that. But nor are they evidence that reconciliation is impossible. They are one of the important security measures implemented in the past year that is reducing violence and making possible political progress—which is real, whether you admit it or not.

There is a world of difference between American gated communities — where at least 7 million families have chosen to live — and the walls that divide Baghdad. The policy, begun last April, of walling off neighboring communities with a “12-foot high, three mile long wall” is hardly the benign trend Boot describes. The move was widely condemned by the Iraqi press, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered a halt to its construction almost immediately. As one Iraqi put it, “This will make the whole district a prison.”

Despite what Iraq war hawks are willing to admit, the surge has transformed Baghdad into an ethnically-cleansed and religiously divided city that bears little resemblance to its former character.

Yesterday, the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties held a hearing on the Bush administration’s use of torture. During the hearing, Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) scoffed at what he called the “Oprah Winfrey methods” of interrogations built on long-established relationships — the same method used to successfully interrogate Saddam Hussein. He also seemed to defend waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a 9/11 mastermind:

Some have said relationship-building interrogation techniques are preferable and even more reliable in the long run than stress methods. … I can tell by your grin that you acknowledge the somewhat absurd thought that you could move people who have masterminded the death of 3,000 Americans by Oprah Winfrey methods.

International lawyer Philippe Sands, who recently published a book on Bush’s interrogation program, replied by stating simply, “Coercion doesn’t work.” He cited the British fight against the IRA, and said the use of torture “extended the conflict” by 15 to 20 years:

The thinking in the British military and the thinking across the board politically — it’s really not a left right issue, it is a broad consensus in the United Kingdom — is that coercion doesn’t work. That the experience of the United Kingdom, which moved in the early 1970′s to use techniques that were very similar to those that were used on Detainee 063, putting stress positions, humiliation, and so on and so forth, didn’t not work. The view is taken in the United Kingdom that it extended the conflict with the IRA probably by between 15 and 20 years.

Watch it:

Sands also rejected the term “war on terror,” which he said “transform[s] criminals into warriors.” He said by using such language, “you create a context in which they are able to recruit in their struggle.” Despite some attempts in 2005 to shift away from the term, President Bush has maintained his determination to call the fight a “war on terror.” Britain dropped the terminology language in December.

Though the right wing refuses to believe that torture does not work, experts agree with Sands’s assessment. As Gen. David Petraeus said clearly last year, “Certainly, extreme physical action can make someone ‘talk;’ however, what the individual says may be of questionable value.”

Transcript: Read more

One of the right wing’s favorite talking points to defend torture is that it could be useful in a so-called “ticking time bomb” scenario. In 2005, for example, a “senior administration official” said President Bush’s signing statement waiving a torture ban was justified because a ”ticking time bomb” could necessitate the need for torture. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently endorsed “smacking someone in the face” if he were hiding “the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles.”

But in a House Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) asked three jurists who have extensively studied interrogations if they have ever heard of such a scenario. As Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) put it, they responded with “radio silence“:

Marjorie Cohn, President, National Lawyer’s Guild: I know of one. It’s on the show 24. And that’s the only one I know of.

Philippe Sands, University College, London: I know none other, and I’ve never seen the show 24, so I don’t even know of that one.

David Luban, Georgetown University: I have been trying to chase down true ticking time bomb cases for a couple of years. There have been a couple that have been alleged to be ticking time bomb cases. They turned out not to be true.

Watch it:

Luban said that even a “poster child” ticking bomb scenario was bogus. He described a situation where an al Qaeda member was tortured in the Phillippines, eventually confessing about a plot on U.S. airliners and the pope. But Luban said the detainee “broke” under the threat of being turned over to another country — not after torture. “When you have torture as your A option, you don’t look at your B option,” he noted.

Even torture proponents can’t think of a scenario. One of the lawyers in the hearing, David Rivkin, a former Reagan Justice Department official, defended the administration throughout the hearing. But even he couldn’t think of a scenario, saying, “I personally do not have complete proof” of a particular instance.

Our guest blogger is Jon Soltz, chairman of VoteVets.org and veteran of the Iraq war.

Yesterday, ThinkProgress highlighted the latest reason from the Bush administration to oppose a real GI Bill for troops, offered by Senators Webb and Hagel. The Pentagon spokesperson said, in part:

[W]e are certainly concerned that this would be eligible to them after only two years of service. We think pegging it to a longer period of service — the number we have in mind, at this point, is six years of service — that the longer you stay in, the sweeter the benefits are to you. Six years would show a commitment to service. … The last thing we want to do is provide a benefit — or the last thing we want to do is create a situation in which we are losing our men and women who we have worked so hard to train.

Wow. There are a few very serious flaws in this logic:

First, the time of service isn’t a measure of commitment to service. What about the troops who served under six years, did a few tours in Iraq, and came back without a limb, and could no longer serve? Have they shown less of a commitment to America? I would love for this spokesperson to go to Walter Reed and tell anyone there who served three years, but now cannot continue their service, that they haven’t shown a commitment.

Second, no one is leaving the military after two years. I’d note that when you sign up, it’s for an eight year contract, most for four years active. They can serve in a number of ways. For example, I served four and a half years active (because I was Stop Lossed), went to grad school and served in the reserves, but was called back up after ten months. So, the point remains that you’re not talking about a flood of people breaking their contract after three or four years. The overwhelming majority of men and women serve out their contract for eight years, so even if they do begin school when they’re done with their active duty commitment, the military can call them up at any time they need them, for the life of the troop’s contract. A GI Bill isn’t going to change it.

Third is that if the administration was serious about retention, they would focus on the role of contractors, who continually snatch up troops, offering them up to 10 times their military pay to do a similar job in Iraq. That’s a much bigger threat to retention than offering a service-member the chance to get a quality education. Read more

In a story on the continuing fighting in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood, the LA Times reports that “the U.S. military has tied itself into a verbal knot as it tries to avoid further inflaming tensions with Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr while confronting members of his Mahdi Army militia.”

U.S. forces battle almost daily with Shiite militiamen in Sadr City, including Sadr loyalists, but commanders are careful to avoid blaming the Mahdi Army for the violence. [...]

The military still insists that Sadr’s Mahdi Army is not its main problem, saying it is “special groups” that have broken away from Sadr’s control. Those groups are trained and armed by Iran and not bound by Sadr’s directives.

However, military officials acknowledge that mainstream Mahdi Army elements took part in the initial fighting that erupted March 25 against an offensive launched by U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces.

Abu Muqawama’s Dr. iRack notes rightly that “the notion of ‘special groups’– JAM factions that supposedly have close ties to Iran’s Quds force –is, in many respects, a useful fiction,” as it allows U.S. forces to move against elements of Sadr’s militia without appearing to directly challenge Sadr’s wider political movement, which is the largest in Iraq. But, as iRack notes, the U.S. military has “made a habit of describing all JAMsters who violate the ‘freeze’ on armed activities declared by Moqtada al-Sadr last August as ‘special groups.’ ”

[This] creates a false impression that the majority of JAMsters fighting U.S. forces take their orders directly from the mullahs in Iran (much as the use of the label “Al Qaeda in Iraq” as a catch all term for a disparate and very loosely aligned collection Sunni insurgent groups creates the false impression that most Sunni insurgents take their orders from Bin Laden or the foreign leadership of AQI).

The Bush administration has consistently tried to blame outside actors for violence in Iraq in order to avoid facing the unpleasant truth that the U.S. occupation is opposed by a substantial majority of the population who the U.S. is ostensibly there to support. In seeking to defend a continued U.S. presence in Iraq, the administration and its supporters have drawn a deeply distorted picture of the political struggles currently taking place within various Iraqi communities.

In this podcast, New York Times reporters Alissa Rubin and Stephen Farrell discuss the situation on the ground in Sadr City. Farrell characterizes the current fighting as part of an intra-Shia struggle between “the haves and have nots, the establishment and outsiders.”

You have the people who rule the street and the people who run the government. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find many Iraqis who would wholeheartedly side with the idea that somehow the official democratic clean honest wonderful government is bringing law and order to an undisciplined rabble. I think most people, certainly most Sunnis that you talk to, would see this as a fight between a militia [ISCI/Badr] which happens to have turned itself into the government army and a militia [Sadr's Mahdi Army] which hasn’t. The insiders and the outsiders.

Since very early in the occupation of Iraq, the United States has been willing to work with ISCI because it was willing to work with the U.S. That is, they recognized, for the moment, the authority of the U.S. occupation. The Sadrists did not, which resulted in the U.S.’s freezing them out of a political process which the Sadrists in any case viewed as illegitimate. This allowed ISCI to establish itself within the Iraqi government to a far greater extent than its relatively small political base could reasonably justify, and to incorporate large numbers of its (Iranian trained and supported) militia into the security services.

To put it simply, the U.S. is opposing Sadr because he opposes the U.S. occupation, and the U.S. is supporting ISCI because ISCI supports the occupation. As Brian Katulis and I noted in an op-ed several weeks ago, the irony of this strategy is that it has allied the United States with Iran’s primary proxy in the Iraqi government, against what is arguably the most potent nationalist political force in the country.