Appearing on CNBC this morning, Mark Krikorian propagated the now popular misconception that undocumented immigrants will receive health care subsidies if health care reform passes. Krikorian slammed Democrats for being dishonest with the Americans and decried the absence of a verification mechanism to assure undocumented immigrants do not receive coverage on the taxpayers’ dime:

KRIKORIAN: So the fact is what’s even more important, as far as the political prospects of the bill, is not so much that illegal immigrants will benefit — because they will — it’s the dishonesty of claiming to the public that illegal immigrants won’t benefit, while winking and nodding to the supporters of illegal immigration making clear that illegal immigrants will not be checked and they will be able to sign up.

Nativists and health care fear mongers have welcomed Krikorian’s argument with open arms, citing his concerns as just another reason why Americans should be opposed to “Obamacare” and immigration alike. However, former Undersecretary of Commerce Robert Shapiro — who appeared on CNBC alongside Krikorian — calls the debate at hand a “textbook case of a phony issue.”

Sec. 242 and 246 of America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 explicitly state that only individuals who are lawfully present in US will receive any of the benefits and §142(a)(3) appoints the Health Choices Commissioner with the responsibility of determining the eligibility of individual affordability credits which implies that he or she will also be in charge of instituting a verification mechanism. Other policy experts have also indicated that verification mechanisms are best determined after the bill is passed which allows the government to choose one that matches the underlying process for receiving the benefits allowed. The two amendments to verify citizenship were voted down because one would have given private insurance providers unprecedented access to the sensitive income and identity information of all those applying for health care assistance and the other would have “imposed a burdensome and costly documentation procedure that we know has been a sledgehammer for a non-existent problem.”

In the meantime, if immigration reform doesn’t pass, the health care bill will probably end up hurting undocumented immigrants more than it helps them. A report released by the Congressional Research Service shows that many immigrants who aren’t eligible for federal assistance will be forced to either purchase insurance at their own expense or face serious fines and penalties that will apply to all “resident aliens” and citizens alike. With that said, no one expects a health care bill to fix one of the many products of our country’s broken immigration system and that’s why it makes sense that Shapiro stated that it should be addressed by immigration reform, not health care reform. He also called Krikorian out on national television:

SHAPIRO: What I’d like to ask the other guest [Krikorian] and all these other opponents — if that [verification mechanism] was accepted would you then support health care reform?

KRIKORIAN: I don’t do health care reform, I do immigration.

SHAPIRO: Yeah, right.

Watch it:

In other words, Krikorian knows that his participation in the debate is contingent on his ability to use immigration to “whip up fear and anger” around health care reform while effectively winking and nodding at those who are working to block it.

In the latest issue of West Point’s CTC Sentinel, scholar Babak Rahimi looks at the question of why we didn’t see Iraqi Shia militias employ the tactic of suicide bombing. One of Rahimi’s key conclusions is that “local politics and shifting alliances in the context of a competitive political landscape play an important role in the emergence and thus also the absence of suicide attacks.”

Contrary to the Hizb Allah-Amal conflict in Lebanon during the 1980s, when suicide attacks were used as a way for the factions to outbid each other to gain more popularity and legitimacy within the Shia community, the Iraqi case of Sadr-ISCI rivalry has hardly given way to the emergence of suicide military campaigns. This is primarily because the nature of Sadr-ISCI competition within local Iraqi politics differs greatly from that of their Lebanese counterpart: while Iraqi militias already held relative political power within the Iraqi state in the post-war period, the two Lebanese groups lacked political authority due to a weak state and the highly marginalized and then-minority status of the Shia community within Lebanese society.

Unlike Hezbollah and Amal in Lebanon in the 1980s, who were competing for the allegiance of the Shia community amid a significant lack of political power within the Lebanese system, the Sadr-ISCI competition was between two groups with firmly established stakes in the Iraqi political order. ISCI and the Sadrists had more to lose by alienating their constituencies, which partly explains Muqtada al-Sadr’s decision to order his militia to stand down after ISCI-Sadrist fighting in Karbala in August 2007 resulted in significant collateral damage.

I think we can see a similar dynamic at work in Hamas’ use of suicide bombing in the 1990s and early 00s as a way of establishing greater “resistance” bona fides vis a vis its rival Fatah, followed by Hamas’ public abandonment of the tactic shortly after its January 2006 electoral victory. Having successfully competed against Fatah and established themselves firmly within the Palestinian political system, Hamas’ leaders came to see suicide operations as unacceptably harmful to their image and counterproductive to their political goals.

This isn’t to suggest that Hamas hasn’t been engaged in objectionable behavior since 2006, but, as Michael Bröning notes in this article in Foreign Affairs, its turn from radical violence toward the more prosaic concerns of state-building has been little appreciated in the United States.

Gary Kreep, head of the United States Justice Foundation and founder of DefendGlenn.com is a professional when it comes to defending the racist and bigoted actions of America’s radical right-wing. Aside from spearheading the creation of a website aimed at spreading smears about Color of Change and White House official Van Jones in defense of Fox News personality Glenn Beck, Kreep has also supported the hateful interests of nativists, homophobes, and anti-choice radicals.

After Beck called President Obama a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people,” Color of Change and its Co-Founder Van Jones convinced 46 companies to cancel their advertisements aired during Beck’s show. In response, Kreep then founded DefendGlenn.com. Kreep himself subscribes to the delusional notion that Obama “has been hiding the truth [about his birthplace] from the American people.” He has also expressed frustration about recent waves of immigration to the US, having told the Los Angeles Times:

“When the Italians came to America, they assimilated. When the Irish came to America, they assimilated…It isn’t the language barrier; it’s the willingness to assimilate. It’s not that hard to come here speaking only a little English and assimilate.”

In 1992, the gay community and the Anti-Defamation League expressed outrage when Kreep brought his “purportedly anti-homosexual views” to San Diego’s Human Relations Commission.

Those Kreep has chosen to defend as an attorney are even more telling of his radical right-wing agenda. Kreep’s professional biography reveals that he has served as General Counsel to the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps — a militant “nativist extremist” group — and has been honored by the anti-choice extremist group Operation Rescue for “his services to the community.” Most recently, Kreep defended the San Diego Minutemen and help win them more than $150,000 in damages for a lawsuit filed against Caltrans for revoking their Adopt a Highway permit. He also defended “anti-immigration crusader” John Monti who was charged with battery, interfering with the civil rights of two day laborers, and filing a false police report. In 2007, Kreep defended anti-immigration activist Roy Warden, who was convicted of one count of assault and two counts of threats and intimidation after burning a Mexican flag outside a Mexican consulate. Warden was also videotaped “threatening to blow a child’s brains out,” and vowed “he would continue to exercise his right to free speech, burn Mexican flags and protect himself from others.”

Fundamentalist pastor Wiley Drake, who has publicly prayed for Obama’s death, has hired Kreep to pursue a lawsuit challenging Obama’s birthplace and presidency.

The recently released 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report on the Bush administration’s interrogation policies revealed a program that was poorly supervised and resulted in “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented” tactics. This unauthorized coercion included menacing “a detainee with a handgun and a power drill,” staging a mock execution, saying that they were “going to kill your children,” and aggressive waterboarding.

Today on Fox News Sunday, Cheney said that he had no problem with these interrogation tactics — even though they went “beyond the specific legal authorization.” In fact, Cheney said these tactics were “absolutely essential” to keeping the United States safe:

WALLACE: Do you think what they did, now that you’ve heard about it, do you think what they did was wrong?

CHENEY: Chris, my sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives, in preventing further attacks against the United States, in giving us the intelligence we needed to go find al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed. … It was good policy. It was properly carried out. it worked very, very well.

WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you’re okay with it.

CHENEY: I am.

Watch it:

There have been no documents supporting Cheney’s claim that torture was essential to saving American lives. Even CIA memos from 2004 and 2005, which Cheney claimed would back him up, have been released and have no evidence linking torture to valuable intelligence. In fact, these memos show that “non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information.”

Transcript: Read more

The Washington Times’ Eli Lake has a great story today about how a close aide to Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi was detained by U.S. forces in 2008 “on suspicion that the aide served as a liaison to a Shi’ite group thought responsible for the 2007 execution-style slayings of five U.S. Marines and other violence against foreigners and Iraqis”:

The group, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or the League of the Righteous, also has been implicated in the kidnappings and slayings of four British contractors in 2007. The British government is negotiating for the release of a fifth abductee, Peter Moore. [...]

Three U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition they not be named because they were discussing sensitive matters, accused Mr. Chalabi of providing crucial guidance to the league — charges that led the U.S. government to sever ties with the mercurial Iraqi in May 2008 and to arrest his aide three months later. Two of the U.S. officials and a third coalition official who also spoke on the condition of anonymity confirmed that the aide was held for more than a month in a secret prison before being transferred to a facility at a U.S. base. The aide, Ali Faisal al-Lami, was released without charge earlier this month. [...]

One U.S. official said that Mr. Chalabi, through Mr. al-Lami, provided tactical intelligence to the leaders of the League of the Righteous in spring 2008 when U.S. and Iraqi forces began targeting Shi’ite militias in the aftermath of an offensive that restored central government control over the southern city of Basra. Mr. Chalabi had access to sensitive information about the campaign against the special groups through his relationship with the Iraqi government and U.S. military.

“This was a friendship killer,” the U.S. official said, leading the U.S. military to cut ties with Mr. Chalabi in May 2008.

Lake’s story contains several scoops — in addition to al-Lami’s detention on suspicion of aiding the special groups, there’s the continued operation of U.S. “black sites” in Iraq as late as last year, and al-Lami’s alleging of abuse at the hands of his U.S. interrogators — but it’s been clear for a long time now that Chalabi is an extraordinarily shrewd and shady self-dealer with close ties to Iran.

Back during the 2008 presidential campaign, I wrote about Chalabi’s close relationship with key members of Washington’s neoconservative faction based at the American Enterprise Institute (and later in the Pentagon) including Sen. John McCain’s campaign foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann (pictured above with Chalabi.)

I’ve always been a little surprised by the relative lack of attention by the mainstream media to the fact that a group of prominent foreign policy conservatives worked so intensively with and on behalf a man who turned out to have been working with Iran. Indeed, in 2004, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that “Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi.” It seems extremely likely that, were the situation reversed, that is, had a small faction of Democratic activists conspired with an Iraqi con man who was later revealed to have been cooperating with America’s enemies and likely gotten Americans killed, the sustained outcry from the right would have forced those activists, at the very least, to seek careers somewhere other than in American foreign policy. Yet Chalabi’s boosters remain, as far as I can tell, members in good standing of the D.C. policy elite. Very strange.

In June 2008, a federal appeals court ruled that Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers can search travelers’ laptops and copy their entire contents without probable cause or “reasonable suspicion.” CBP officers “can review and analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to enter, reenter, depart, pass through, or reside in the United States,” including information from laptops and other electronic devices. A CBP official dismissed growing public concern regarding this draconian policy at the time, saying the policy is akin to simply searching one’s backpack (it’s not).

The Washington Post reports today that the Obama administration will largely continue this policy:

The Obama administration will largely preserve Bush-era procedures allowing the government to search — without suspicion of wrongdoing — the contents of a traveler’s laptop computer, cellphone or other electronic device, although officials said new policies would expand oversight of such inspections.

The policy, disclosed Thursday in a pair of Department of Homeland Security directives, describes more fully than did the Bush administration the procedures by which travelers’ laptops, iPods, cameras and other digital devices can be searched and seized when they cross a U.S. border.

Privacy law expert Peter Swire noted a number of problems with this severely intrusive policy, namely that it limits privacy, free speech and business secrets, sets bad precedent for other more untrustworthy regimes throughout the world, and could discourage foreign travel to the U.S.

Obama administration officials say that more protections have been put in place. In one new “oversight,” CBP officers “should now generally take no more than 5 days” to conduct searchers (more than enough time to copy the entire contents of large hard drives). Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the new policy “strike[s] the balance between respecting the civil liberties and privacy of all travelers.” Civil Liberties advocates disagree:

“Under the policy begun by Bush and now continued by Obama, the government can open your laptop and read your medical records, financial records, e-mails, work product and personal correspondence — all without any suspicion of illegal activity,” said Elizabeth Goitein, who leads the liberty and national security project at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice.

The Center for American Progress Action Fund and the Electronic Frontier Foundation mobilized action campaigns last year calling on citizens to urge the federal government to abandon this policy. The Post reports that according to DHS data, “[b]etween October 2008 and Aug. 11, more than 221 million travelers passed through CBP checkpoints. About 1,000 laptop searches were performed, only 46 in-depth.”

Shortly after the Congressional Research Service released their report on the treatment of noncitizens in the House health care bill, the anti-immigrant hate group, Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), was already patting itself on the back. “Case closed. Illegal aliens will be eligible to participate in the health care program offered by the House bill unless Congress acts to amend the bill,” stated Dan Stein, president of FAIR. However, CRS’ analysis was much more nuanced than Stein would like to admit and — if anything — it highlights how the health care bill could actually hurt undocumented immigrants more than it helps them in the absence of any major reform of our immigration laws.

Sec. 242 and 246 of America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 explicitly state that only individuals who are lawfully present in US will receive any of the benefits provided in the bill. Stein is right that the CRS points out that the bill does not contain a mechanism to verify immigration status. Yet he downplays a key point of the report: under §142(a)(3), the Health Choices Commissioner is responsible for determining the eligibility of individual affordability credits which implies that he’ll also have to determine the mechanism to verify the eligibility and immigration status of noncitizens.

CRS’ analysis is pretty much in line with what others have been saying. Edwin Park of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Jonathan Blazer of the National Immigration Law Center have both asserted that verification mechanisms for the new subsidy program will be determined during the implementation process (after the bill is passed) which allows the government to choose the “mechanism [which] best matches the underlying process for getting a subsidy.” The report also points out that nothing in the House bill overturns the precedent set by the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act which prohibited undocumented immigrants from being eligible for most public benefits and even severely restricted the eligibility of legal immigrants. It should also be noted that, in the case of Medicaid, stringent verification mechanisms are known to have barred more American citizens than undocumented immigrants at a high cost to taxpayers: for every $100 spent by taxpayers to implement documentation requirements in six states, only 14 cents were saved.

The report also exposes one of the more problematic aspects of the bill’s treatment of noncitizens. The House bill currently mandates that all citizens as well as “resident aliens” must have health insurance. However, “resident alien” is a term defined by tax, not immigration law and it includes undocumented immigrants who meet the “substantial presence test.” That means that all undocumented immigrants who fall into the category of “resident alien” would be required to obtain health insurance and will be fined if they fail to do so. However, that doesn’t in any way imply that the government is going to help them since only individuals who are lawfully present in the United States are eligible for any of the federal assistance provided in the bill. Ultimately — if the nation’s broken immigration system isn’t addressed — the proposed health care bill essentially penalizes undocumented immigrants for not having insurance that they won’t even have access to in the first place.

With that said, the CRS report ultimately sheds more light on the desperate need for immigration reform that addresses the problem of current and future flows of unauthorized immigration as opposed to the deficiencies of the House health care bill related to its treatment of noncitizens. While anti-immigrant activists continue to exploit health care reform to recruit support for their nativist agenda, the smartest way to approach both issues would be to pass immigration reform and turn uninsured undocumented immigrants into legal residents who pay into the system.

In an excellent article on the legacy of the Church Committee, the mid-1970′s investigation of U.S. intelligence community abuses, Chris Hayes looks at the possibility of a similar investigation under President Obama:

Obama has insisted, routinely, unwaveringly, that he is “more interested in looking forward than…in looking backwards.” At one level this seems a shocking abrogation of the executive branch’s chief constitutional responsibility, to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” But presumably the thinking goes something like this: the president has a limited amount of political capital, and he can spend it on major, once-in-a-generation reforms of the American social contract — universal healthcare and cap and trade — or he can spend it pursuing justice for the perpetrators of the previous administration’s crimes. As morally worthy as the latter might be, it won’t get anyone healthcare or stop the planet from melting; it won’t provide a new foundation for progressive governance.

But as self-consciously pragmatic as this posture is, it’s proving wildly impractical to implement. The reason is that the White House has limited control over when and what is revealed about crimes and misdeeds of the Bush years, and every time a new revelation hits the papers, such as the recent disclosures of Blackwater’s involvement with the CIA assassination unit and interrogators’ use of “mock executions,” it dominates the news cycle. Since the White House itself has defined such revelations as a “distraction,” every time they are in the news it is, by its own definition, distracted.

The benefit of a new Church Committee would be that it would corral these “distractions” into a coherent undertaking, initiated in Congress, within a fixed time period. It would also provide a framework for systematic investigation of the policies rather than selective prosecutions of those at the bottom of the hierarchy who carried them out.

I find this pretty convincing. I’ve been concerned about such an investigation for precisely the “self-consciously pragmatic” reasons Hayes describes. I think we shouldn’t pretend that what we have here are simply questions of the law — any investigation of this sort is an inherently political enterprise, one that could have serious negative consequences for the progressive policy agenda. As I told NPR for this story, it would be darkly ironic if the Bush administration were, through its past criminality, effectively able to stymie Obama’s broader agenda by causing him to expend valuable political capital to investigate that criminality.

I think, though, that the enormity of the abuses, the fact that they go deeper than the Bush administration, as well as the fact that, as Hayes notes, Obama’s desire to “look forward” has not saved him from having to look backward with every new revelation, all argues for the sort of investigation that Hayes describes. I think the main goal here has to be to ensure that the U.S. never again utilizes torture, and it’s hard to see how that will be achieved without accountability for those who sanctioned the torture.

It’s in the nature of governing institutions to accrue greater power while resisting greater oversight and accountability. This is a central conservative insight, one that animates much of their hysterical opposition to health care reform, so it’s strange that conservatives seem to be the most resistant to applying it to executive overreach on intelligence. Broadening such an investigation beyond just the Bush administration may diminish some of that resistance, but I’m not sure how much.

In a USA Today article today crediting Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) for having “fashioned the modern day” immigration system, immigration advocate Frank Sharry pointed out that Kennedy “laid the groundwork” for the sort of humane immigration reform that he had spent much of his political career fighting for, but never achieved. It’s hard to imagine an immigration bill hitting the Senate floor without Kennedy’s binding support, but the truth is he’s already paved the legislative road for its debut and equipped progressives with the guts and principles to see it through.

Sen. Kennedy kicked off his political career in 1965 with a major overhaul of immigration laws that eradicated ethnically-biased immigration quotas that made it nearly impossible for anyone other than Western Europeans to emigrate to the US. “He created Americans,” says Dana Houle of the Daily Kos. After changing the face of immigration, Kennedy spent the next 40 years fighting to change how the nation treated its newcomers. Kennedy helped pass the Refugee Act of 1980 that brought “U.S. law into compliance with the requirements of international law.” He fought with all his might against the harshest provisions proposed in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, described in the Cornell Law Review as the most “the most diverse, divisive and draconian immigration law enacted since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.” In the more recent past, Kennedy cosponsored the DREAM Act to legalize hardworking undocumented students who have lived in the US most of their lives at no fault of their own and the Agricultural Job Opportunity, Benefits, and Security (AgJOBS) Act of 2005 to improve the lives of immigrant farmworkers.

Many aspects of Kennedy’s original Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act — which died in the Senate in 2007 — “continue to be the model” for comprehensive immigration reform today. With that said, there are some tough lessons to be learned from what went wrong that year. The final negotiated bill was attacked by both the left and the right, as both sides could point to major aspects of it that they were unwilling to swallow. Mary Giovagnoli says the immigration bill was “met with lukewarm support from many immigration advocates and was pilloried by those on the far right, who turned the Senate’s efforts to find a way out of our immigration mess into a personal vendetta against immigrants.” A small, but vocal minority of restrictionist constituents lit up the phones of Senate staffers who cowered and retreated in electoral fear. Labor was also adamantly opposed to the inclusion of a guest-worker program — something they perceived as a threat to wages, jobs, and immigrant worker rights. Kennedy will be remembered by many as the “master negotiater” and the “stalwart of the Senate.” But in 2007, it wasn’t enough.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is committed to giving immigration reform another shot, and he thinks he stands a good chance at passing it. Much like Kennedy partnered with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on immigration, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) will probably be Schumer’s Republican ally. But bipartisanship can’t just be symbolic. They’ll both have to reach out to conservative Democrats and other moderate Republicans — many who even Kennedy was unable to convince — in order to negotiate the votes needed to pass reform. Most importantly, Schumer will have to balance the delicate interests of business, labor, and immigration advocates, along with conservatives’ demands for harsh enforcement, without losing sight of the compassionate solutions that must be brought to immigrant communities across the country. It helps that the climate is a bit different this time around: immigration advocates are better organized, labor is on-board, the president is more engaged, and Latino voters have made clear that anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from Congress will render vulnerable nativist candidates obsolete. But if Kennedy were still around, he’d probably advise Schumer not to take any of that for granted.

When the 2007 immigration reform bill didn’t pass, Kennedy announced:

We will endure today’s loss and begin anew to build the kinds of tough, fair, and practical reform worthy of our shared history as immigrants and as Americans. Immigration reforms are always controversial. But Congress was created to muster political will to answer such challenges. Today we didn’t, but tomorrow we will.

While some argue that Kennedy’s death has left a “leadership gap,” the truth is his passing has yielded the floor to new voices who are versed in his political skills and progressive agenda. His notable absence doesn’t mean that his legislative triumphs and moral agenda won’t continue to guide the immigration debate closer to a fair and just solution. It would’ve been easier to reach with him, but it must be achieved without him.

I think most Americans would agree that the decision of the Scottish government to release Libyan terrorist Abdel Baset al-Megrahi — and the hero’s welcome he received from Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi — is an outrage. It’s interesting to see, however, where some conservatives are directing that outrage, and where they’re choosing not to.

Jamie Kirchick identifies Human Rights Watch as an accomplice of the Qaddafi regime, pointing to an article by HRW’s Middle East director, Sarah Lee Whitson, from a few months ago in which Whitson noted a “new spirit of reform” in Libya (while also noting that “the repression of Libyan citizens was as suffocating as ever.”) Kirchick writes that Whitson’s praise for Libya’s modest steps toward reform have enabled Libya to present “a softer image” on the world stage.

What this has to do with the Migrahi case is left unspecified. But if we’re criticizing people for legitimizing a bad regime, it seems rather blatantly tendentious for Kirchick to overlook Sen. John McCain’s recent visit to Libya. When he was there, McCain “praised Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi for his peacemaking role in Africa and said Congress would support expanding ties,” according to the Libyan state news agency.

As Josh Marshall noted previously, McCain even tweeted his new bromance from Qaddafi’s “ranch”, calling it an “interesting meeting with an interesting man.”

It seems like something like this — a nod of approval from a former U.S. presidential candidate — would be far more worthy of concern than Whitson’s article, especially since Human Rights Watch has a solid record of criticizing Libya’s human rights abuses.

Kirchick’s attack on Whitson and HRW makes sense, though, when understood as part of the the ongoing attempt by pro-Israel conservatives to gin up a scandal and delegitimize Human Rights Watch and other NGOs because of their criticisms of Israeli human rights abuses.

Allison Hoffman tries to make something of that story, putting the best face possible on the fact that the critics really have nothing. As we know, though, even baseless cries of bias can often produce a result if repeated loudly and frequently enough.

On Monday, the CIA released two memos from 2004 and 2005, which Vice President Cheney said would “show specifically what we gained” from the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation program. As people like Spencer Ackerman noted, those documents didn’t end up showing that at all, however:

Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

Despite the fact that they devoted heavy coverage to Cheney’s initial claims, major media outlets have largely buried these new facts. But as Greg Sargent notes, last night on CNN, even former Bush homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend had to admit that Cheney still hasn’t been vindicated:

It’s very difficult to draw a cause and effect, because it’s not clear when techniques were applied vs. when that information was received. It’s implicit. It seems, when you read the report, that we got the — the — the most critical information after techniques had been applied. But the report doesn’t say that.

Watch it:

Cheney, of course, refuses to back down from his initial claims. Earlier this week he put out a statement saying that “individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda.” However, there is still no evidence that the torture techniques were responsible and necessary for producing the intelligence.

Yesterday, “shock jock” radio host Michael Savage went into a nonsensical rant about how his father used to take him to the “filthy dirty” lower East Side so that he would develop an immunity to “microbes.” Somehow, his childhood story led him to conclude that undocumented immigrants are like invading snails, and Americans are the local clams and oysters that must contend with an “invading organism“:

“Why do you think that an invading snail can be dropped in the bay from off a back of a ship. It comes — let’s say from China — in a back of a freighter and it swims off in a bay in America. And it wipes out all the local clams. It wipes out the oysters because it’s hardier and the local oysters don’t have an immunity to it. It’s the same with invading cultures. Put your moronic heads together. The illegal aliens, whether you love them or you don’t love them, are an invading organism in a certain way. On a biological level you know I’m right.”

Listen:

While Savage worries about invading snails, the British government is more concerned with keeping out people who foster extremism and hatred. That’s why Savage’s name was added to a list of people who would be detained and refused entry by British immigration authorities if he attempted to visit the country.

Today, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) held an event to discuss the “environmental impact of immigration-driven population growth.” The panel discussion revolved around a paper authored by philosophy professor Philip Cafaro of Colorado State University entitled “The Environmental Argument for Reducing Immigration to the United States.” Cafaro identifies stopping immigration-driven population growth as a requisite to becoming “good global environmental citizens.” CIS’ Steven Camarota took the claim a step farther and argued that immigration reform would be a lot easier to pass than climate change legislation, so therefore the US should focus less on emissions caps and more on immigration caps.

Center for American Progress Senior Fellow and George Mason University professor Andrew Light challenged the very premise of the argument and warned against understanding climate change in terms of overpopulation and immigration. Light first wondered out loud about why the topic of immigration was being dragged into a conversation about population and argued that more focus should be placed on reducing the carbon footprint of those who are in the US — regardless of how they entered the country. He also pointed out that even if he were to accept CIS’ premise that people should live in parts of the world where they would do less harm, it would make more sense to actually encourage migration away from regions of high biological diversity along the equator to places of less bio mass, like the US. Light also highlighted the fact that Mexico has proposed one of the most progressive climate change policies, and the diplomatic fallout that could result from shutting down the borders and cutting off immigration could prove much more environmentally devastating than the CO2 emissions of immigrants. He encourages panelists to “talk about carrots before we talk about sticks” and avoid resorting to draconian policy recommendations. Watch it:

During the question and answer session, a representative from the League of United Latin American Citizens questioned the intellectual credibility of CIS’ argument considering the fact that it has been labeled a “hate anti-immigrant group.” Camarota called the claim “absurd on its base,” and while he’s right that no progressive group has labeled CIS a hate group, the Southern Poverty Law Center has described CIS as “the nativist lobby’s supposedly ‘independent’ think tank” which “has never found any aspect of immigration it likes.” Several groups which are designated hate groups such as the American Immigration Control Foundation and the Federation for American Immigration Reform have also made the same environmental argument against immigration that was presented by CIS. The question that immediately followed the confrontation illustrated the type of nativist supporters CIS has picked up:

“Being this the Center for Immigration Studies, there are several factors you consider. But I have not heard a very important factor that has not been mentioned here. See it Europe, see it Denmark, see it France, see it England, see Holland — they have had enormous problems because of the immigration they took. Not because of ecological consequences, no, because they brought new values. And this is extremely dangerous for a society. And this is what we must consider in this country — the values that the people that come in bring with them. Because this is the main cause of the fall of the Roman Empire: the immigration.”

Watch it:

A key factor in Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s electoral success in January’s Iraqi provincial elections was the perception among a good number of Iraqis that he had made Iraq safer. The massive attacks last week shattered that perception. Among other things, Maliki is taking criticism for having prematurely removed many of the concrete blast walls that had been placed throughout Baghdad by U.S. forces to frustrate the movements of insurgents and sectarian militias.

David Ignatius asks “Who’s to blame for the carnage?”

In today’s Iraq, that’s open to sectarian conspiracy theories. Maliki’s Shiite-led government last weekend broadcast the alleged confession of a Sunni Baathist named Wisam Ali Khazim Ibrahim, who said the truck-bombing plot had been hatched in Syria and that he had paid security guards $10,000 to pass through checkpoints.

But forensic evidence points to a possible Iranian role, according to an Iraqi intelligence source who is close to Shahwani. He said that signatures of the C-4 explosive residues that have been found at the bomb sites are similar to those of Iranian-made explosives that have been captured in Kut, Nasiriyah, Basra and other Iraqi cities since 2006.

Earlier today, the Islamic State of Iraq, Al Qaeda’s Iraq franchise, claimed credit for last week’s attack. This doesn’t necessarily preclude an Iranian role, but basing blame for attacks upon the provenance of particular weapons and explosives has always seemed to me to be a tricky business, because of the simple fact that Iraq is a country awash in weapons and explosives. (According to the pro-gun lobby, this should make it one of the safest places in the world, but interestingly this is not the case.)

Ignatius:

As security unravels in Iraq, U.S. forces there are mostly bystanders. Even in the areas where al-Qaeda operatives remain potent, such as Mosul, the Americans have little control. Sunni terrorists who are arrested are quickly released by the Iraqis in exchange for bribes of up to $100,000, according to an Iraqi source.

Should the Americans try to restore order? The top Iraqi intelligence source answered sadly that it was probably wiser to “stay out of it and be safe.” When pressed about what his country would look like in five years, absent American help, he answered bluntly: “Iraq will be a colony of Iran.”

I think that’s probably an overstatement — there’s a strong strain of anti-Iranian sentiment in Iraq that, much like the strain of anti-Americanism, will probably prevent Iraq from becoming a vassal of either — but the inescapable (and entirely predictable) reality is that when you remove an Iraqi Sunni regime deeply opposed to Iran and replace it with an Iraqi Shia regime with longstanding ties to Iran, you’re going to end up with an Iraq in which Iran exercises significant influence.

Meanwhile, Reidar Visser looks at the newly reconstituted United Iraqi Alliance, formed without Maliki, who wanted assurances that he would not face any challenge for the job of prime minister:

Agreement on the new alliance seems to have been arrived at in Tehran, and it is basically a case of Shiite Islamists with long-standing Iranian sympathies like Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim and Abd al-Karim al-Anizi reaching an understanding with other Shiite Islamists whose turn to Iran is of far more recent date (and probably is still disputed by many of their adherents in Iraq), as in the case of Muqtada al-Sadr. [...]

As for the reasons for the sudden haste in declaring the alliance -– with the apparent use of a deadline to put pressure on a Maliki -– we can only speculate. But at least two factors stand out. Firstly, in Tehran, Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim’s health once more seems to be deteriorating, with reports that he has been transferred to a more intensive form of hospital care. Secondly, from Qum, there are rumours that Muqtada al-Sadr may be about to return to Iraq, possibly even with enhanced scholarly credentials. Both these factors might unleash destabilising forces within the Shiite community that Iran may wish to avoid… To Iran, then, it may have seemed prudent to try to put in place some kind of integrative mechanism that could guarantee Shiite sectarian unity in the 2010 parliamentary elections.

All of this cuts pretty seriously against the overly optimistic narrative of declining violence and increasing state consolidation under Maliki. What we need to watch out for though, are the inevitable attempts by conservatives to blame future destabilizing violence on “Obama’s withdrawal,” and suggestions that Iraq’s being far from perfect argues for American forces to stay and stay.

Almost as ridiculous as the “death panel” conspiracy theories that are currently being propagated by right-wing lunatics is the notion that the “Obamacare bill will allow illegal aliens to receive taxpayer-funded health care.” Today, the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson tweaked his pro-immigrant argument to include the counter-intuitive suggestion that Democrats should essentially bow down to obstructionist nativist rhetoric to save both health care and immigration reform from its decimation:

“If Democrats lose health care over immigration, then they don’t just lose health care — they also lose immigration reform. Once Republicans stoke fears about illegal aliens snatching up all their taxpayer-provided Medicaid subsidies, the debate over immigration will have already been poisoned by the notion that Americans will not support reform that incorporates illegals. By nipping the illegal care issue in the bud, and strengthening the provisions to bar illegals from receiving subsidies, the Obama administration saves its gunpowder to fight for immigration reform at a later date.”

Thompson’s assessment is flawed on a variety of levels. To begin with, two eligibility enforcement amendments were already proposed in the House, and Democrats defeated them for a good reason. The Heller Amendment would have given private insurance providers unprecedented access to the sensitive income and identity information of all those applying for health care assistance while curtailing the privacy and redress responsibilities that the Social Security Act requires of government agencies. Another failed amendment presented by Rep. Nathan Deal (R-GA) would have “narrowed the categories of legal immigrants who would be eligible for affordability credits,” according to Health Policy Attorney Sonal Ambegaokar, and “imposed a burdensome and costly documentation procedure that we know has been a sledgehammer for a non-existent problem.”

Thompson should know that, ultimately, it doesn’t really come down to if an enforcement mechanism will be established, but rather when and how. Edwin Park of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities admits that the bill doesn’t articulate a specific eligibility verification system. However, he points out that it will be determined once health care reform is passed and “the work of establishing the new system gets underway.” In the meantime, right-wingers should rest assured that there is nothing in the bill that overturns the harsh verification requirements of Medicaid. Jonathan Blazer of the National Immigration Law Center further explains why verification mechanisms for the new subsidy program will be determined during the implementation process (after the bill is passed):
Read more

Back June, Robert Kagan criticized President Obama for being inappropriately unconcerned with the moral dimension of his foreign policy. Now he criticizes the president for being inappropriately obsessed with it.

In the aftermath of Iran’s presidential elections, Kagan published a pretty awful op-ed going after the president for his amoral “realism” in the face of the Iranian regime’s crackdown. Obama’s policy “requires getting past the election controversies quickly,” Kagan wrote, “so that he can soon begin negotiations with the reelected Ahmadinejad government.”

If you find all this disturbing, you should. The worst thing is that this approach will probably not prevent the Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon. But this is what “realism” is all about.

In my response to Kagan’s item, I questioned whether Kagan himself could possibly believe his own simplistic interpretation of Obama’s “realism.” Well, it turns out that he didn’t believe it!

Here’s what Kagan wrote yesterday in response to President Obama’s description of Afghanistan as a “war of necessity”:

[T]here is a deeper reason…for Obama to claim necessity in Afghanistan. It is part of what increasingly seems to be a striving for moral purity in international affairs by this administration. Obama and his top advisers apologize for America’s past sins, implicitly suggesting they will commit no new ones. And that goes for fighting wars. No one can blame you for fighting a war if it is a war of necessity, or so they may believe. All the inevitable ancillary casualties of war — from civilian deaths to the occasional misbehavior of the troops to the errors of commanders — are more easily forgiven if one has no choice.

So which is it? Is Obama a cold, calculating realist with no regard for morality in foreign policy, or is he inappropriately concerned with maintaining the moral high ground? Or is Kagan just throwing arguments up against the wall to see what sticks?

I should note that I agree with the idea (unoriginal to Kagan) that the war of necessity/choice distinction is not particularly useful. But it seems ridiculous to suggest that the president’s arguing for the strategic necessity of a particular action — whether or not one agrees with that argument — represents an attempt to absolve himself of the moral implications of the decision.

On his radio show this afternoon, shock jock Rush Limbaugh wondered why Latino groups are “lobbying” for the health care bill if “illegal immigrants” aren’t covered:

“If illegal aliens are not going to get Obamacare — and he’s been telling everybody that this week — why are the following groups lobbying for Obamacare via Health Care for America Now?…Here are the groups: The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the National Council of La Raza — by the way, La Raza the steering committee for Health Care for America Now, The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health — I’m sorry, the National Latina Institute for tax-payer funded abortion. If illegal immigrants aren’t going to get Obamacare, how come all of these Hispanic groups are lobbying for it?“

Listen:

It may come as a surprise to Limbaugh that not all Latinos are “illegal immigrants.” In fact, most Latinos have been here for generations and many are legal immigrants. Organizations like “La Raza,” LULAC, and others support health care reform because — despite explicitly excluding undocumented immigrants — they know it will benefit many in the Latino community who will be eligible to receive its benefits.

In response to Limbaugh’s comments, LULAC National President Rosa Rosales said:

“We want Rush Limbaugh to stop the lies about credible Hispanic civil rights organizations…If he had engaged in dialogue with us or read the proposed legislation he would have known and not falsified the facts. Limbaugh has insulted the largest and oldest Hispanic civil rights organization in the country.”

According to experts, one in three Latinos does not have health insurance.

Today, NumbersUSA’s Jennifer Magyari posted a video entitled “Grassroots America” which Magyari claims “explains the importance of taking a stand [on immigration] and forcing our Congressmen to listen to our opinions.” The video also features Mariann Davies, member of “You Don’t Speak for Me!,” saying that the idea that anyone who opposes immigration is a “racist” or a “nativist” is “simply not the case.”

That may be true, but the rest of the video’s speakers aren’t exactly the best spokespersons to prove her point. To begin with, the video was posted by NumbersUSA — an organization which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as the “leading immigration-restriction group” whose Executive Director Roy Beck’s “close ties to a key nativist raise questions.” Beck is said to have worked and vacationed with eugenacist John Tanton, edited a book by white supremacist Wayne Lutton, and been referred to by Tanton as his “heir apparent.” If that’s not enough, Davies’ own group was organized by the president of a designated hate group, Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Both Beck and Stein are also featured in the “Grassroots America” video.

Davies’ argument is also weakened by John O’Sullivan — a conservative journalist who the Cato Institute describes as part of the “anti-immigrant crusaders” who “hijack legitimate concerns about security to advance their pet political cause [reduced immigration].” Davies claims that her colleagues aren’t nativists, but in “Grassroots America” O’Sullivan decides to attack bilingualism:

“I talked to people about the language issue. How it was that bilingualism was spreading everywhere, bilingual education programs were being increasingly adopted. The more people I spoke to, the more I became convinced that this was important, but also mistaken.”

In a separate clip, Spanish-speaking Cuban-American “activist” Roan Garcia-Quintana also stated:

“It’s overwhelming — the people that testify for doing something to stop the illegal alien invasion are average citizens who all they care is to protect our heritage, our American culture, our way of life, and our language and not have all this new poverty — what I call 21st century slavery — be imposed upon us.”

Garcia-Quintana has made a point of making sure people know that his “family’s roots are in Spain,” and has described Mexican and Central American immigrants as “Indo-Hispanics” who “impose” their culture on him.

Stein wraps the video up with some harsh words of warning:

“Nobody has the right to force their way into my home. Nobody has the right to force their way into my country. And millions and millions of Americans all across this nation believe it too. And they’re not going to take this lying down.”

Watch it:

Yesterday Afghanistan conducted its second presidential election since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. While we won’t know the official results for a couple weeks — despite frontrunners, incumbent Hamid Karzai and challenger Abdullah Abdullah, both claiming victory — the reports about the voting that are coming out provide some important indicators on the state of Afghanistan today.

First, despite fears of widespread disruption by the Taliban and other militants, voting did occur. While there was violence across the country — nine civilians and 18 Afghan security force members were killed — the Taliban generally failed to follow through on threats to attack polling stations. Nevertheless, these threats did appear to suppress turnout in the violent south of the country. In Garmser district, where recently deployed U.S. Marines have been fighting the Taliban for almost two months, only 1,683 men voted out of a population of 80,000. Even Kabul had low turnout, though reports indicate that the capital’s low turnout was more due to disillusionment with the government than militant threats.

Second, there’s a real effort on the part of the international coalition to manage expectations. Special Representative Richard Holbrooke noted that “every prediction of disaster has turned out to be wrong” and “it seems clear that the Taliban utterly failed to disrupt these elections.” Marines on the ground in the town of Khan Neshin expressed surprise that the 250 to 300 people who voted did so at all. The local battalion commander “didn’t think we’d even get 10 people, to be honest with you, because of the intimidation campaign.”

Finally, the legitimacy of the vote is questionable. Most notably, female turnout appears to have been low across the country. There are two interrelated issues to be concerned about here: first is the effective disenfranchisement of Afghan women, which is in and of itself enough to delegitimize an election in the eyes of the international community. But this disenfranchisement leaves the door wide open for fraud — there are suspicions that registered female voters, both real and fictitious, will be used to stuff ballot boxes. The fact that voter registration cards were on sale for $10 a piece before the election further heightens suspicious of fraud. (Even Britney Spears managed to get registered to vote in Afghanistan.) A close election possibly decided by fraud only two months after a fraudulent election next door in Iran is a recipe for instability. Add the possibility of a run-off and the United States and NATO are looking at a precarious couple of weeks in Afghanistan.

So far, the U.S. has been right to manage expectations and emphasize the established election process in Afghanistan. But as Holbrooke stated, “The test is going to be in the counting.” If there is instability resulting from the official election results, the United States should continue to emphasize the primacy of the process without favoring one candidate or another. The elections process may slow down the counterinsurgency campaign by holding the Afghan government in stasis, but it is simply something that needs to be plowed through with an eye toward the legitimacy of the future government.

Here’s how Haaretz’s Avi Issacharoff reported on the Fatah conference earlier this month in Bethlehem:

President Mahmoud Abbas says his people must not “mar their legitimate struggle with terror” and that while his government seeks peace with Israel, it reserves the right to resort to “resistance.” [...]

“Although peace is our choice, we reserve the right to resistance, legitimate under international law,” Abbas said in a policy speech, using a term that encompasses armed confrontation with Israel and non-violent protests.

Colette Avital, in the Jerusalem Post:

[Fatah's] Bethlehem platform calls for “resistance by all legitimate means,” and leaves out the option of armed struggle.[...]

Abbas himself made his position very clear: “We must not stain our legitimate struggle with terror,” he said.

Here’s how The New Republic puts it:

What Fatah’s Defense Of Terrorism Means for Israel (8/20/09)

TNR contributing editor Yossi Klein Halevi reveals a variety of troubling details surrounding the Fatah convention in Bethlehem last week, arguing that the Palestinian faction’s alleged “right to terrorism”…

It is true that Fatah reaffirmed their right to armed struggle — a right retained by all people who suffer under foreign military occupation, as the Palestinians do. This is not synonymous with terrorism, Halevi’s flat assertion that it is simply a “code word” (and TNR’s misleading quotation marks) notwithstanding. As both Issacharoff and Avital report, but for some reason Halevi ignores, the conference ended with Fatah (again) choosing to abjure violence in favor of negotiation. This is a good thing, isn’t it?