Last night on MSNBC Rachel Maddow highlighted a report from the Wall Street Journal that said that President Bush is unlikely to pardon any officials involved in engineering or executing the Bush administration’s torture program. According to the Wall Street Journal report, the White House believes that the Justice Department’s torture memos give the officials all the legal cover they need.

Maddow’s guest, constitutional legal scholar Jonathan Turley, said that he also believes that Bush is unlikely to pardon his torture officials, but for reasons that have little to do with the torture memos:

TURLEY: What the administration is doing is they know that the people that want him to pardon our torture program is primarily the Democrats, not the Republicans. The Democratic leadership would love to have a pardon so they could go to their supporters and say, “Look, there’s really nothing we could do.”

Well, the Bush administration is calling their bluff. They know that the Democratic leadership will not allow criminal investigations or indictments.

Turley explained that without the pardons, Bush is clearing the way for Democrats to repair the president’s torture legacy. Bush will be “able to say there’s nothing stopping indictments or prosecutions but a Democratic Congress and a Democratic White House didn’t think there was any basis for it,” Turley said. Watch it:

But not all of the Bush administration’s torture critics are on the same page. Jack Goldsmith, the individual responsible for withdrawing the torture memos and author of the Terror Presidency, penned an op-ed in today’s Washington Post entitled, “No New Torture Probes.” Goldsmith argues today that rather than initiating criminal investigations or even a bipartisan truth commission, the next administration should simply let the current torture investigations conclude and release their findings:

[The current] investigations were politically necessary, and the Obama administration should let them continue. When they are complete, the administration should disclose the facts and documents (including legal opinions) that can be made public without jeopardizing national security.

He explains that in his view the “danger now is that lawyers will become excessively cautious in giving advice and will substitute predictions of political palatability for careful legal judgment.”

As Goldsmith notes, many of the facts related to who engineered Bush’s torture programs are already public. Whether or not Congress initiates new investigations, Bush will likely remain the torture president.

During a press conference earlier today, CNN’s Ed Henry challenged President-elect Barack Obama on his naming of some recent appointees who have had experience serving in the government. “What do you say to your supporters looking for change?” Henry wondered. Obama noted that there is a “conventional wisdom floating around Washington that ‘well, there’s a recycling of people who were in the Clinton administration.’”

Addressing the media criticism directly, Obama explained:

It would be surprising if I selected a Treasury secretary who had had no connection with the last Democratic administration because that would mean the person had no experience in Washington whatsoever. And I suspect you would be troubled and the American people would be troubled if I selected a Treasury secretary or a chairman of the National Economic Council…who had no experience whatsoever.

Obama said his personnel selections will “combine experience with fresh thinking.” But he underscored that the buck stops with him:

But understand where the vision for change comes from first and foremost. It comes from me. That’s my job — is to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure that my team is implementing it.

Watch it:

Obama concluded, “What I don’t want to do is to somehow suggest that because you served in the last Democratic administration that you’re somehow barred from serving again — because we need people are going to be able to hit the ground running.”

This morning’s report that the U.S. military has decided to transfer Salim Hamdan to his home country of Yemen provides an opportunity to examine the way in which several failures of the Bush administration have combined to create a huge potential challenge for the next administration.

Back in August, a military tribunal in Guantanamo found Hamdan guilty of providing material support for terrorism, a crime he had never denied. Hamdan had been Osama bin Laden’s driver, and was picked up in Afghanistan in 2001, and thrown in Gitmo.

Hamdan “is expected to arrive within 48 hours in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, where he will serve out the rest of his military commission sentence, which is set to expire Dec. 27, two government officials said.”

Hamdan’s release will be a preliminary test of Yemen’s ability to follow through on detainee transfers and continued custody, as the United States has questioned the Yemeni government’s ability to enforce such agreements. Yemen is working to set up a rehabilitation program for released terrorism suspects, similar to one in Saudi Arabia.

Last week the Post reported that “despite intensive diplomatic discussions in recent months, and the Yemeni government’s promise to put released prisoners through a rehabilitation program, the Bush administration remains unconvinced that the impoverished Arab nation is capable of absorbing a group of men that officials believe includes hardened extremists.”

In 2006, twenty-three Al Qaeda detainees escaped from Yemeni custody, including the mastermind of the 2000 USS Cole bombing, Jamal al-Badawi.

Yemenis make up some 40% of detainees at Guantanamo. In a recent speech, CIA Director Michael Hayden stated that Yemen is among the countries — along with Algeria and Somalia — where Al Qaeda is a growing threat. Gates said that “North Africa, East Africa, Yemen serve as kind of a counterweight to the good news out of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere,” where Al Qaeda is in decline.

Yemeni Al Qaeda is believed to have carried out the September 17 attack against the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa. A Yemeni security official also reported that three of the six attackers had recently returned from Iraq.

So follow this: After 9/11, the Bush administration declared a global war on terror, and asserted the right to detain prisoners in that war indefinitely, which continues to be a source of global outrage. Then the Bush administration invaded Iraq, which served both as a recruiting mechanism and a training ground for scores of newly radicalized young extremists. Although the Bush administration has gradually been forced to admit that many of the “worst of the worst” that were supposedly locked up in Gitmo were nothing of the sort, it’s highly likely that many of these detainees have been radicalized by their detention, and now represent potential pool of recruits for extremist networks in their home countries.

Just something to keep in mind whenever you hear someone talking about the Bush administration’s “successes” in the war on terror.

Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University, has been one of modern American foreign policy’s most astute critics. In his new book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, Bacevich questions the dominant U.S. national security consensus which privileges the vigorous exercise of American military power in order to maintain “the American way of life,” arguing that neither of these things will be sustainable in the future.

Think Progress/Wonk Room editor Faiz Shakir and I spoke to Prof. Bacevich about some of the issues and arguments in his book. Bacevich writes that the US currently faces three crises: a crisis of profligacy, a political crisis, and a military crisis, and that the Iraq war is the clearest manifestation of all three of these. Asked to elaborate on this point, Bacevich said that the Iraq war “embodies the tendency to think that by relying on military power we can address the most fundamental problems that face the nation.”

I’ve become convinced that the solution to the biggest problems we face lie at home. That the best way to try and preserve the American way of life is actually to change the American way of life, rather than fancying that through the exercise of hard power we can change the world to accommodate the the American way of life.

Later, I referenced a July article in which Bacevich wrote that “absent a willingness to assess in full all that Bush has wrought, the general election won’t signify a real break from the past.”

The challenge facing Obama is clear: he must go beyond merely pointing out the folly of the Iraq war; he must demonstrate that Iraq represents the truest manifestation of an approach to national security that is fundamentally flawed, thereby helping Americans discern the correct lessons of that misbegotten conflict.

I asked Bacevich whether he felt at this point whether Obama was willing to to make this kind of break. He said that “the appointments that have been announced thus far strike me as indicative of a preference for people who are seasoned and accomplished, but who don’t necessarily signify a determination to change the way Washington works, as was promised.”

President Bush proclaimed immediately after 9/11 that the proper response to violent Islamic radicalism was global war. His vision of that global war was one that assumed that we had both the capacity, and indeed the need, to radically transform the greater Middle East. And he shortly thereafter claimed the prerogative of waging preventive war, which is the essence of the Bush doctrine, in order to pursue those objectives.

I would want to see a President Obama explicitly abrogate the doctrine of preventive war and to question fundamentally whether global war — open-ended global war — really provides the proper framework in which to address the threat posed by violent Islamic radicalism. I did not hear him pose those fundamental questions on the campaign trail, and it’s not clear to me that — given the kind of people he’s appointing — it’s not clear to me that those most fundamental questions are going to be asked after January 20.

Listen:

In October, ABC News reported that despite President Bush’s promises that the National Security Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program was aimed only at terrorists, the NSA frequently listened to and transcribed the private phone calls of Americans abroad. The network’s report was based on whistleblower interviews with two former military intercept operators.

One of the whistleblowers, former Navy Arab linguist David Murfee Faulk, told ABC News that he and his co-workers listened in on “hundreds of Americans” over the years:

Another intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, 39, said he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad’s Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007.

“Calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another,” said Faulk.

But it wasn’t just ordinary Americans. In a new report today, Faulk tells ABC that during his time working for the government, “U.S. intelligence snooped on the private lives of two of America’s most important allies in fighting al Qaeda: British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Iraq’s first interim president, Ghazi al-Yawer”:

David Murfee Faulk told ABCNews.com he saw and read a file on Blair’s “private life” and heard “pillow talk” phone calls of al-Yawer when he worked as an Army Arab linguist assigned to a secret NSA facility at Fort Gordon, Georgia between 2003 and 2007.

Though “collecting information on foreign leaders is a legal and common practice of intelligence agencies around the world,” former intelligence officials tell ABC News that the U.S. and Britain have a long-standing agreement “not to collect on each other“:

The NSA works extremely closely and shares data with its British counterpart, the GCHQ, Government Communications Headquarters.

“If it is true that we maintained a file on Blair, it would represent a huge breach of the agreement we have with the Brits,” said one former CIA official.

After ABC’s initial report in October, Senate Democrats promised to investigate the whistleblowers’ allegations. The Inspector General for the NSA is also reported to be investigating the allegations by Faulk and another former military intercept operator, Adrienne Kinne.

Last week, in an article on U.S. efforts to foster reconciliation among Iraq’s different political and religious, and ethnic groups, the Washington Post reported that “Iraqi government officials have praised the American peace efforts but say they have their limits.”

Safa Rasul Hussein, the deputy national security adviser, said the U.S. programs had been helpful, particularly on outreach to the Sunni minority. But he noted that some Iraqi parties and armed groups refuse to talk to the American military.

“Maybe reconciliation will be more when they leave,” he said.

Over the weekend, I attended a conference at which Mr. Hussein was one of the presenters. I had an opportunity to ask him to elaborate on his statement.

Watch it:

Read more

Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, a Research Associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In Iraq, the proposed Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the United States is generating a heated and near-violent debate in parliament. But here in the United States, the Bush administration has kept a tight lid on the contents of the agreement.

The Bush administration argues that the SOFA is an “executive agreement” that, unlike treaties or other international agreements, does not require congressional approval. Only after the agreement passed the Iraqi cabinet last weekend did the Bush administration deign to give lawmakers a closed-door briefing on it. As Rep. William Delahunt (D-MA), who has held a number of hearings on the subject of a U.S.-Iraq security agreement, noted in an opening statement on Wednesday:

… there has been no meaningful consultation with Congress during the negotiation of this agreement. And the American people have been kept completely in the dark.

Even now the National Security Council has requested that we do not show this document to our witnesses or release it to the public…

Now that’s incredible – meantime, the Iraqi government has posted this document on its media website, so that anybody who can read Arabic can take part in the discussion.

Oona Hathaway, a legal scholar and one of Delahunt’s witnesses, argues that the SOFA the administration has negotiated – at least its Arabic translation – amounts to a new authorization to use military force, and that it therefore requires congressional approval. Delahunt similarly believes that the SOFA requires congressional approval, and President-elect Barack Obama made pledges during the campaign to a similar effect.

Beyond the domestic legal authority issues pointed out at Delahunt’s hearing, there appears to be language in the SOFA that refers to a U.S. security guarantee toward Iraq:

In the event of any external or internal threat or aggression against Iraq that would violate its sovereignty, political independence, or territorial integrity, waters, airspace, its democratic system or its elected institutions, and upon request by the Government of Iraq, the Parties shall immediately initiate strategic deliberations and, as may be mutually agreed, the United States shall take appropriate measures, including diplomatic, economic, or military measures, or any other measure, to deter such a threat.

This language suggests that the SOFA is, in fact, a treaty committing the United States to act in the defense of Iraq if its security is threatened. Even if it does not rise to the level of a firm security guarantee, the SOFA’s language is close enough to a treaty that Congress should have a say in it.

As we noted a month ago, there has been too little debate on the proposed security agreement between the United States and Iraq. This lack of debate is due largely to the incredible secrecy with which the Bush administration has conducted SOFA negotiations with the Iraqi government, while a necessary focus on the crashing economy here at home has distracted Congress. But Congress cannot let the Bush administration push forward a far-reaching agreement without having giving its own constitutionally-mandated input.

Today, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with Libyan leader Moamer Gadhafi’s son, Seif al-Islam. In a press briefing yesterday leading up to the meeting, reporters pressed State Dept. spokesperson Sean McCormack on whether Rice would urge Libya to release Libyan activist Fathi al-Jahmi, a political prisoner who is gravely ill.

McCormack offered a defensive response: “I have to make it very clear we are concerned not only about Mr. al-Jahmi’s case, but other human rights cases around the world.” McCormack also claimed that President Bush’s human rights record could perhaps be the best in American history:

McCORMACK: And — and one thing I do take exception to is the idea that somehow we are not attentive to pushing the issue of human rights, whether it’s in Libya or any place else around the world. I don’t think — I would put the record of this administration up against any American administration or any other government around the world in terms of promoting universal human rights and pushing for human rights.

Watch it (around 8:20):

Under the Bush administration, the world has witnessed torture, rendition, and the revocation of habeas corpus rights. Amnesty International’s 2008 report rips the United States’s human rights record, citing the following Bush policies:

– Indefinite military detention
– Torture of detainees
– Imprisoning soldiers refusing to serve in Iraq on grounds of conscience.
– Government response to Hurricane Katrina

In 2005, the Center on Democratic Performance at Binghamton University gave Bush a “D” on human rights. The “D” grade was down from a “C” in 2004, due to “reports on the use of political detention without trial, torture of political detainees, and the use of secret detention of political prisoners.” Bush’s record is nothing to be proud of.

Our guest bloggers are Caroline Wadhams, National Security Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and Jenny Shin.

In more disturbing news for Pakistan’s security situation and the U.S.-NATO mission in Afghanistan, yesterday, the Washington Post reported that U.S. officials are now looking to find safer alternative routes into Afghanistan for strategic supply lines that pass through Pakistan. The Taliban have been attacking these supply lines, which deliver about 75 percent of NATO and U.S. supplies, at unprecedented levels, stealing military equipment, ammunition and arms, and food, valued around $13 million. New routes through Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan are being considered by the Department of Defense to protect these convoys and secure the flow of supplies for NATO and U.S. forces.

The Taliban have also begun to target Western aid workers and journalists with increasing ferocity in Pakistan, as well as in Afghanistan. This past week, in Pakistan, two journalists were attacked; a USAID contractor was assassinated, and an Iranian diplomat was abducted.

The backdrop for these incidents is a steady stream of violent clashes, bombings and assassinations by insurgents in Pakistan against Pakistanis themselves. On Wednesday, General Amir Faisal Alvi, the former chief of Pakistan’s elite commando unit, was shot dead. On Tuesday, Taliban and tribal elders clashed in the Bajaur Agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan; ten members of the Taliban and four elders were killed. And on Monday, at least four paramilitary soldiers of the Pakistani Frontier Corps were killed when a suicide bomber drove a car into a security checkpoint.

As security deteriorates in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the United States finds itself increasingly drawn into military action in both countries. Yesterday, for the first time, the United States conducted an attack with a Predator drone outside of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan– deeper inside Pakistan territory than ever before. Read more

Our guest blogger is Andy Grotto, a Senior National Security Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

According to data in a new IAEA report, Iran appears to have acquired enough enriched uranium for a single crude nuclear bomb on the Bush administratrion’s watch.

Here’s the back-of-the-envelope math for all you geeks out there:

– Iran possesses an estimated 630 kg of low-enriched uranium (LEU) containing 3-5% of the fissile isotope U-235. Uranium enriched at this level of U-235 purity is suitable for use in energy reactors. But uranium enriched to 90% U-235 (or greater) is considered weapons-grade highly-enriched uranium (HEU).

– Iran could acquire weapons-grade HEU by further enriching its existing LEU stockpile, which contains somewhere between roughly 19 and 30 kg of U-235. This translates to around 21 to 33 kg of weapons-grade HEU.

– Both the IAEA and the U.S. DOE say 25 kg of weapons-grade HEU is enough for one bomb; many experts believe the threshold is much lower, perhaps even half that.

Thus, with its existing stockpile of LEU, Iran is well within range of having sufficient feed for one nuke.

This is more of a political milestone than a technical one — there is no evidence to suggest that Iran has an actual bomb or the highly-enriched uranium needed to make one just yet. Iran would still need to further enrich its LEU, and there’s a good chance that the IAEA would eventually notice this if it took place in Iran’s known enrichment facilities. Moreover, Iran would still need to make the actual warhead and develop a suitable delivery mechanism. Finally, having a single bomb is a long way from having a credible arsenal.

But make no mistake: Iran achieved this milestone on President Bush’s watch.

Speaking to Hugh Hewitt on Monday, surge architect Fred Kagan — who just last year wrote that “setting hard-and-fast timelines for the withdrawal of U.S. forces… is equivalent to accepting failure in Iraq” — explained how the new security agreement setting a hard-and-fast timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. forces is equivalent to a huge U.S. victory over Iran.

Kagan said “the Iranian leadership has been pulling out all the stops to get the Iraqis not to” sign the status of forces agreement.

The Iranians are desperate for Iraq not to align itself strategically with the United States, and they have been literally trying to bribe everybody they can bribe in Iraq, and running a fantastic information operations campaign in Iraq to make this an unpopular and hard thing to do. And the Iraqi government has done it anyway. And that is actually a great accomplishment for us, and it tells us a lot about where this Shia Iraqi government actually stands on whether it wants to be aligned with the United States, or whether it wants to be aligned with Iran.

As we’ve written before, the new Iraqi government is dominated by Shia parties which either have a longstanding supportive relationship with Iran (the Da’wa), or were drawn into an alliance of convenience with Iran (Muqtada al-Sadr), or were themselves founded in Iran, under Iranian auspices (ISCI, whose leader, Abdul Aziz la-Hakim, actually okayed the security agreement from Tehran). It’s patently ridiculous to claim, as Kagan does, that an agreement concluded with such a government represents a “defeat” for Iran, especially when that agreement happens to contain provisions that Kagan himself previously warned would represent American failure.

Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, a Research Associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In a recent post, our good friend Ilan Goldenberg over at the National Security Network recommended the “three nos” on Iraq advanced by the Center for a New American Security as a guide to U.S. policy: no regional war, no al Qaeda safe havens, and no genocide. This of course has a lot of rhetorical appeal – who can be in favor of those three things? The problem is that the three no’s really aren’t very helpful when it comes to addressing the challenges posed by Iraq and examining ways to advance U.S. national security interests globally.

The overall problem is that the three nos framework constitutes mostly a wish list not unlike the Bush administration’s early fantasies of a secular, pro-Israel democracy on the Tigris. As the old saying goes, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Beyond this basic conceptual problem, there are three main problems with the three nos.

First, it ignores the fact that large scale sectarian cleansing, if not outright genocide, has already occurred in Iraq and is even occurring TODAY, with the U.S. troop presence at its likely maximum. Most people are aware of the Sunni-Shi’a sectarian cleansing that happened at the height Iraq’s civil war in 2006-2007, which led to the murders of tens of thousand and displacement of millions — even while the surge was being implemented. But less visible is the plight of Iraqi minority groups, particularly Christians. Just last month sectarian violence forced large numbers of Iraqi Christians from Mosul, their last major safe haven. Canon Andrew White, the vicar of St. George’s church in Baghdad, estimates only 200,000 Iraqi Christians of a population of 800,000 remain in the country. All of this has occurred despite the presence of 140,000-plus U.S. troops in Iraq; the three nos ignore the fact that massive sectarian cleansing has already occurred despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of American troops in Iraq –- and this of course raises the question of how useful the three no’s framework is beyond a rhetorical device and mantra Americans can repeat to make themselves feel better. The tough work is actually in crafting a policy that simultaneously advances U.S. interests and actually improves the situation for Iraqis. Read more

Our guest blogger is Caroline Wadhams, National Security Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

While much of the recent attention on Pakistan has been focused on the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Pakistan’s economic crisis has largely been under the radar screen. This crisis has the potential to be even more destabilizing to Pakistan’s democratically elected government and the population than the terrorist threat.

Pakistan’s economy is in free-fall. Inflation is at 25 percent, causing dramatic food price spikes and hitting Pakistan’s poor the hardest. Pakistan’s government faces mounting fiscal and trade deficits, and Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves have fallen to $6.9 billion, enough to pay for only an estimated nine weeks of imports. The repercussions of bankruptcy could be devastating for Pakistan’s efforts to combat the militant groups, to provide for its people, and to move forward in its democratic transition.

On Monday, the Center for American Progress released a report (pdf), Partnership for Progress: Advancing a New Strategy for Prosperity and Stability in Pakistan and Region. We argue that the United States has failed to focus on the other drivers of Pakistan’s instability apart from the militant threat, such as its economic problems. Nor has the US leveraged the resources, influence and expertise of other countries, including China and Saudi Arabia in tackling Pakistan’s challenges. We propose that the U.S. assist Pakistan through an integrated, international effort rather than trying to impose U.S. solutions. Not only do we have our own economic crisis to deal with, Pakistanis perceptions of Americans are so dismal as to often discredit any American efforts in Pakistan.

Fortunately, it appears that the United States and the international community are beginning to recognize that Pakistan’s problems affect us all, and that they need urgent assistance. Yesterday, the Friends of Pakistan group, which includes the U.S., Saudi Arabia, China, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, the United Nations, the European Union and others, met for the second time in Abu Dhabi to discuss ways to assist Pakistan economically. While no aid was pledged at the meeting, officials at the session drafted a framework to promote economic development and financial stability in Pakistan, and agreed to follow-up sessions in January and February. On Saturday, the International Monetary Fund agreed to provide a $7.6 billion emergency loan to Pakistan, contingent on Pakistani economic reforms that will hopefully restore some measure of investor and donor confidence.

Our report contains a series of recommendations to assist Pakistan in addressing its economic problems, such as creating a comprehensive inter-agency development strategy that focuses on Pakistan’s education and vocational skills training, health care quality and access, the energy sector, and water shortages. We propose convening an economic donors’ summit with key regional investors to facilitate increased trade between Pakistan, its neighbors and other key countries. While no Pakistani or American administration can afford to ignore the immediate short-term threats posed by militants based in safe havens on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, addressing Pakistan’s long-term economic challenges will be a crucial task for the incoming administration and new Congress.

The Bush administration repeatedly insists that it does not practice torture: “We do not torture,” President Bush declared in 2005. The U.S. “is not torturing any detainees,” White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said last April. Dismissing a Red Cross report describing interrogation techniques that were “tantamount to torture,” Bush proclaimed last year, “Haven’t seen it, we don’t torture.”

Today, Perino took the Bush administration’s torture denials to a new level when she insisted that it had never engaged in torture:

PERINO: This president has said that we did interrogate terrorists, and we did so to protect the country from possible imminent terrorist attack. We did not torture.

Watch it:

It is simply a lie to say that the United States “did not torture.” Even setting aside the infamous Abu Ghraib incidents, Bush’s own CIA director Michael Hayden confirmed that his agency had subjected at least three detainees to waterboarding. And as Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has explained, waterboarding is clearly torture:

All I can say is that it was used in the Spanish Inquisition, it was used in Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia, and there are reports that it is being used against Buddhist monks today. … It is not a complicated procedure. It is torture.

There’s no question that waterboarding — a technique the Bush administration admits committing and says it would “definitely want to consider” reusing — is torture, and McCain is hardly alone in his judgment:

– Malcolm Wrightson Nance, a former Navy instructor of prisoner of war survival programs: “Waterboarding is torture and should be banned.”

– Tom Ridge, former Homeland Security Secretary: “There’s just no doubt in my mind — under any set of rules — waterboarding is torture.”

– Four retired Judge Advocates General (JAGs), in a letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT): “Waterboarding is inhumane, it is torture, and it is illegal.”

Perino is trying to rewrite the sorry history of the Bush administration. Luckily, President-elect Obama has promised to “make sure that we don’t torture” — a vow that entails a robust investigation into Bush’s deliberate decision to implement a torture regime.

As I noted yesterday, the assent of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was essential for the passage of the status of forces agreement, as it is for almost any significant political issue in the new religious Shia-dominated Iraq.

Today, Sistani reiterated his position in favor of strong political consensus, indicating in a statement issued by his office in Najaf that the pact would only be viable if it secured the “restoration of full sovereignty and the realization of Iraq’s stability and security,” and that it had to “win the support of all Iraqis and their main political groups.”

[Sistani] did not suggest that he wanted it passed unanimously, instead using the Arabic word for “accord,” or support by a large and representative number of lawmakers.

“Any agreement that does not meet those two demands … cannot be accepted,” said al-Sistani, who called on lawmakers to “rise to their historic responsibility before God and the people.” [...]

Al-Sistani’s comments did not constitute a change in the cleric’s position on the agreement, but the timing and the tone of the statement suggested that he may have lingering concerns.

The lingering concerns probably have to do with resistance to the agreement from other Iraqi nationalist trends, such as the Sadrists and the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party. Sistani’s first-order goals have always been the security of the Shia community and the maintenance of that community’s relationship to its clerics, and the unrest that could very likely result from the perception that the SOFA was passed through legislative trickery would not serve those goals. Sistani is also probably wary of the challenge to his own authority that may arise if an agreement which he has approved fails to pass the legislature, so he’s hedging a bit.

Here, in part 2 of my interview with CNN’s Michael Ware, we discuss the continuing role of Sistani in Iraqi politics, as well as some developments which may eventually pose just such a challenge, such as the growing political power of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI). We also talk about the relationship between the Iranian-backed Special Groups and the mainline Jaysh al-Mahdi, and Ware’s belief that JAM could be back on the street “in the blink of an eye.”

Watch it:

On Sunday, the Iraqi cabinet “overwhelmingly approved” a security agreement requiring the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq by 2011. The agreement’s meaning was clear to Iraqis: The New York Times reported that “Shiite legislators could barely conceal their delight” at the agreement, and noted that “they referred to the pact as the ‘withdrawal agreement.’” As proof of its determination to a firm withdrawal date, the Iraqi government even required that the U.S. “scrap the language that would have allowed the American troops to stay beyond 2011 if Iraq requested.”

Iraqi officials made it perfectly clear that they would take the withdrawal agreement seriously:

– Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh: “The total withdrawal will be completed by December 31, 2011. This is not governed by circumstances on the ground.”

– Deputy parliament speaker Khalid al-Attiya: The “Americans have responded positively on two important amendments. The first one is the Americans should withdraw from cities and suburbs on June 30, 2009, and the second one is that Americans should leave Iraq in 2011.‘”

The Pentagon, however, seems to view things differently. Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said today that he still supports “conditions-based” withdrawal only, and indicated that the agreement could always change long before 2011:

MULLEN: Three years is a long time. Conditions could change in that period of time. … [W]e will continue to have discussions with them [the Iraqis] over time as conditions continue to evolve.

Q: So you could change the agreement, is what you’re saying?

MULLEN: Well clearly that’s theoretically possible.

Watch it:

Earlier today, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino insisted the security agreement included only “aspirational” dates for withdrawal.

On Saturday, in what has become one of the rituals of Iraqi politics, a delegation of Shiite lawmakers and government officials met with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani to review the latest changes to the status of forces agreement. According to “an official in Sistani’s office who spoke on the condition of anonymity,” Sistani “gave the Iraqi side the green light to sign it.”

On Sunday, Iraq’s cabinet “overwhelmingly approved a proposed security agreement that calls for a full withdrawal of American forces from the country by the end of 2011.” The agreement now moves to the full parliament, where it is expected to be voted on by next week.

Earlier today, I sat down with CNN’s Michael Ware, who has been reporting from Iraq for the last six years, to discuss the cabinet’s approval of the status of forces agreement. Specifically, I asked Michael to respond to the idea that the cabinet’s approval represents a “defeat” for Iran, as former Coalition Provisional Authority adviser Dan Senor argued this morning on Fox News.

Watch it:

WARE: I would argue that it could potentially be a victory for Iran. In some ways you can argue that these [the SOFA negotiations] have been a form of indirect peace talks with Iran to end that part of the conflict.[...]

Iran has a whip hand, or a key hand at least, within the political framework there. So during these negotiations between Baghdad and Washington, Tehran — whether we like it or not — was in the room. Tehran, in some ways, in some fashion, is a party to this agreement. And you’ll see that some of the sticking points and some of the nuances within the negotiations were issues that were very close to the heart of Tehran….Iran is in a position where it didn’t get everything that it wanted, but then neither did Washington — and indeed neither did Baghdad — but Iran still will feel that it has something of a comfort zone as a result of this in the form that it should hopefully pass the Iraqi parliament.

Meanwhile, NRO’s James Robbins thinks it’s funny that Muqtada al-Sadr has been “making firey demands that the US agree to conditions for the status of forces agreement that both sides had pretty much agreed on anyway.” I think it’s more funny that Sadr has been making these demands for years, that Maliki managed to steal some of Sadr’s nationalist thunder by adopting those demands and then getting the Bush administration to agree to them, and that Robbins thinks this represents a victory for the Bush administration.

Over the weekend, Iraq’s cabinet “overwhelmingly approved a proposed security agreement that calls for a full withdrawal of American forces from the country by the end of 2011.” Noting President Bush’s long-held opposition to “artificial timetables,” one reporter asked at today’s White House press conference if the inclusion of a deadline in the security agreement was a “departure” from or “repudiation” of Bush’s views on Iraq.

Press Secretary Dana Perino demurred, claiming that the security agreement is, in fact, in line with Bush’s views on Iraq because it included only an “aspirational” deadline for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq:

QUESTION: The President has said for months that he opposes any timetable and that any decision should be based on the conditions on the ground. How much is the latest agreement a departure, if not a repudiation — ?

PERINO: [W]hen you work with a partner on a negotiation, you have to concede some points. One of the points that we conceded was that we would establish these aspirational dates.

Watch it:

In reality, there is nothing “aspirational” about the security agreement’s withdrawal deadline. Members of the Iraqi government are referring to the pact as a “withdrawal agreement” and the Washington Post reported just how firm the deadline is:

“The total withdrawal will be completed by December 31, 2011. This is not governed by circumstances on the ground,” the [Iraqi government] spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, told Iraqi reporters, pointedly rejecting the more conditional language that the U.S. government had sought in the accord.

In addition, the “Iraqi spokesman noted that his government could cancel the agreement if its own forces became capable of controlling security at an earlier time.”

The agreement guarantees a more complete withdrawal from Iraq than even President-elect Barack Obama proposed. As Spencer Ackerman noted, “Obama’s plan for a 30,000-troop residual force? Officially overtaken by events.” The agreement also prohibits the U.S. military from conducting raids on Iraqi homes “without an order from an Iraqi judge and permission of the government,” and requires U.S. forces to “leave the streets of Iraq’s towns and villages by the middle of 2009.”

In recent weeks, there has been rampant media speculation that President Barack Obama would back off his campaign pledges to end torture.

The Wall Street Journal recently wrote, “President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies.” In addition, some in the blogosphere have raised concerns about the fact that a key intelligence adviser to Obama has supported the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation techniques.

Tonight, in his interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, Obama bluntly and directly clarified his incoming administration’s position:

CBS: There are a number of different things you can do early on pertaining to executive orders.

OBAMA: Right.

CBS: One of them is to shut down Guantanamo Bay. Another is to change interrogation methods that are used by U.S. troops. Are those things that you plan to take early action on?

OBAMA: Yes. I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture, and I’m going to make sure that we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.

Watch it:

Obama also emphasized that “capturing or killing” Osama bin Laden is a critical aspect of his national security strategy of stamping out al Qaeda. “He is not just a symbol, he is also the operational leader of an organization that is planning attacks against U.S. targets,” Obama said of bin Laden.

Ali Abunimah is correct to say — in reference to the racist remarks by Benjamin Emanuel, Rahm’s father — that “sons are not responsible for the racism of their fathers.” But Abunimah is also correct to expect Emanuel to distance himself from those remarks, as he has been asked to do by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

As Abunimah notes, Benjamin Emanuel was a member of Irgun, “the pre-state Jewish militia that carried out terrorist attacks on Palestinians and the British in the 1940s.” You may have noticed that National Review and Commentary have not been digging into the extremist past of the Emanuel family the way that they obsessively scrutinized every bit of information about Barack Obama’s other “extremist associations.” This is because these conservative organs don’t really consider political violence on behalf of causes of which they approve to be terrorism.

I do not suggest that Rahm Emanuel deserves to be judged on anything other than his own words and accomplishments, but I don’t think many would disagree that, were he the son of a former Arab Palestinian extremist, rather than a former Jewish Israeli extremist, he simply wouldn’t have been considered for the position of White House chief of staff, or probably have been able to make much of a political career at all.

This is because of the double standard that applies to the discussion of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the U.S. Americans identify much more closely with Israel than they do with the Palestinians, and thus tend to treat negative information about the former as exceptional, and negative information about the latter as the rule. Leaving aside why this is the case, the fact is that it places certain strictures on U.S. policy options, and create serious consequences both for the U.S.’s reputation and for the situation on the ground for Palestinians. Read more