The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus reports on a U.S. Special Operations Command “proposal to develop and operate ‘influence websites’ that, when needed, would support combat commanders in the war on terrorism.”

The Web sites, in local languages, would “shape the global media landscape” using Internet technologies.[...]

The purpose is to present “news, sports, entertainment, economics, politics, cultural reports, business and similar items of interest to targeted readers” following “guidance provided by the appropriate combat commander,” according to the proposal. “Content will provide open and unbiased analyses of major events in the targeted regions and the ramifications of those events on the target audiences,” it adds.

Contractor surveys and focus groups of target audiences are to help determine “design styles, colors and web site features” and develop “a network of indigenous content stringers and staff editors and site managers.”

Links to other “appropriate” national, regional and internationally oriented Web sites “that support the established objectives of each respective combat command” will be attached only after approval by the Special Operations Command. The “foot print of the government” must be low, but there must be “open attribution,” as with other Pentagon sites, in the clickable “about us” link at the bottom of the home page.

The Pentagon ran into some problems with this in 2006, when it was revealed that, because of global access to internet communications, the U.S. public was “increasingly exposed to propaganda disseminated overseas in psychological operations” by the Defense Department.

I’m curious, is there an example of this sort of thing ever having worked? And how would you measure that? Is there some substantial number of formerly anti-American people who report having been converted by U.S.-friendly blogs, sports and entertainment news?

There could obviously be a very significant tension between “open and unbiased analyses of major events” and “the established objectives” of the U.S. government. It seems that, much more likely than changing changing peoples’ opinions with bells, whistles, and web design, the effect of this operation would simply be to discredit the sites it approvingly links to. I can imagine few things more devastating to a website’s credibility than an acknowledgment by the U.S. Special Operations Command that that website “supports the established objectives” of the U.S. Special Operations Command. The new proposal seems to be an excellent way to undermine the very people we’re trying to reach out to.

Pseudonymous Air Force interrogator Matthew Alexander published an important item in yesterday’s Washington Post, noting what a disgrace the Bush administration’s embrace of torture has been. I think this section bears emphasis:

Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there’s the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

Here’s former FBI Special Agent Jack Cloonan — who also had an op-ed yesterday calling for closing Guantanamo Bay — explaining why torture is bad policy.

Watch it:

CLOONAN: If you want to recruit young jihadis, if you want elevate [them] to mythical status, torture them. Admit that you torture them. Because when they’re ultimately convicted, or whatever their ultimate fate is, there will be poems, songs, and their images are going to be emblazoned all over that world.[...]

Because we haven’t been attacked in the United States since 9/11, we think [torture has] been a successful technique that we’ve used. Let me tell you what Al Qaeda says about that: “We will get revenge against you. It may take a generation, but we will get it.” The worst has not been visited upon us yet.

For a lot of people, support for indefinite detention and torture is a quick and easy way to signal one’s “seriousness” about national security, as if the true belief in American values required a willingness to cast those values aside. Jonah Goldberg’s enthusiasm for the practice notwithstanding, we have no evidence that torture has stopped terrorist attacks on Americans (As Cloonan notes, the “ticking time-bomb” scenario is a “red herring. It doesn’t happen.”) We do, however, have a whole lot of evidence that torture has caused terrorist attacks on Americans.

At a press conference today where President-elect Barack Obama announced his national security team, a reporter asked Obama if he still intended to “withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq in 16 months after Inauguration.” “I believe that 16 months is the right time frame,” said Obama, noting that he has ‘consistently” said he will listen to the recommendations of his commanders on the ground.

Obama noted that during the presidential campaign he promised to “remove our combat troops from Iraq in 16 months with the understanding that it might be necessary, likely to be necessary, to maintain a residual force.” Obama then said that the status-of-forces agreement passed by the Iraqi Parliament last week means that “we are on a glide path to reducing our forces in Iraq.” Watch it:

Obama’s re-commitment to the 16 month withdrawal timeline is significant because the status of forces agreement passed by the Iraqi legislature last week contains a longer time frame for withdrawal. In the agreement, U.S. troops must be withdrawn from Iraq by December 31, 2011. Obama’s continued endorsement of the 16 month timeline is also important because some in the Pentagon are challenging Obama’s time frame:

Many senior military officials agree with Mr. Obama’s call to withdraw tens of thousands of troops from Iraq next year. They believe that the large U.S. military presence in Iraq is causing significant manpower strains on the armed forces and preventing needed reinforcements from being sent to Afghanistan, where conditions have worsened in recent months.

Still, there is a fair amount of skepticism within the Pentagon about Mr. Obama’s call to have all U.S. forces out of Iraq by 2010. In recent interviews, two high-ranking officers stated flatly that it would be logistically impossible to dismantle dozens of large U.S. bases there and withdraw the 150,000 troops now in Iraq so quickly. The officers said it would take close to three years for a full withdrawal and could take longer if the fighting resumed as American forces left the country.

This isn’t the first time since winning election that Obama has pushed back against media speculation that he will abandon his campaign promises. At a press conference last week, Obama said that “the vision for change comes” from him. He said that he will “provide a vision” and his team will implement it.