Last night in a speech to the Center for Security Policy, Vice President Cheney attacked President Obama for “dithering” on whether to add more troops to Afghanistan. “[T]he success of our mission in Afghanistan is not only essential, it is entirely achievable with enough troops and enough political courage,” said Cheney.

As ThinkProgress has pointed out, in 2008, the Bush administration rejected the request for 30,000 more troops from Gen. David D. McKiernan, then the top U.S. commander in Kabul. “There was a saying when I got there: If you’re in Iraq and you need something, you ask for it,” McKiernan said in an interview after he was fired. “If you’re in Afghanistan and you need it, you figure out how to do without it.”

In today’s White House press briefing, Gibbs referenced McKiernan’s troop request to hit back on the emptiness of Cheney’s accusations:

GARRETT: So that was a specific reference to McKiernan’s request that said that specific troop request was not taken seriously.

GIBBS: It wasn’t — Whether it was taken seriously or not, it wasn’t filled. I assume since it wasn’t filled, it was not taken seriously. Maybe they filled unserious ones and didn’t fill serious ones. That’s a fabulous question for the Vice President, who seems to have forgotten his role in the last seven years of Afghanistan.

When Fox News reporter Major Garrett then asked whether it was “proof of unseriousness to not necessarily agree with a request for troops submitted by a commander in the field,” Gibbs replied:

GIBBS: No. I’m simply saying, I think it’s interesting what the Vice President is suggesting the President isn’t acting on is what the previous administration didn’t act on, right? [...]

Help me understand the rationale how one goes from half as many troops as are now in Afghanistan under his watch, to 68,000, to now wanting an additional 40 [thousand], when you didn’t want the additional troops that President Obama approved. I mean, how do you go from 68-plus, when you didn’t want 34-plus? How — Do you — It defies some modicum of logic to get “I didn’t want to go from 35,000 to 65,000, but I want to go from 65,000 to 100,000.” Fuzzy math.

Watch it:

Transcript: Read more

The upcoming conference of the pro-Israel, pro-peace group J Street has unhinged a faction of hawkish pro-Likud types, who see J Street’s pro-peace message as a threat to their particular conception of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Yesterday I posted on Lenny Ben-David, the former AIPAC researcher, Netanyahu adviser, and current West Bank settler who launched a racist attack on J Street, accusing them of consorting with Arabs.

Today the Weekly Standard’s Mike Goldfarb carries on the effort, going after journalist Helena Cobban, who is participating in a discussion panel next week to which I’ll also be contributing. The panel is neither endorsed by nor connected with J Street, but this doesn’t matter to Goldfarb, who is fairly desperate to smear the organization with anything at hand.

Goldfarb accuses Cobban of using “Holocaust metaphors when talking about Israel.” Cobban’s offense was pointing out that the watchtowers, walls and barbed-wire of Israel’s separation barrier reminded her of a concentration camp. Goldfarb is also outraged that Cobban noted the rather uncontroversial — though inconvenient for a Muslim-baiter like Goldfarb — fact that Hamas’ program includes a strong social work component, and that defining them solely as a “terrorist organization” fails to understand the nature of their appeal to many Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

But Goldfarb’s limited knowledge of these issues is really beside the point. Cobban has studied the Arab-Israeli conflict for decades, and has spent a career working to build bridges of understanding between the various sides. Helena is a friend of mine, and her deep commitment to a peaceful and just solution to the conflict speaks for itself. In fact, she’s so well regarded that Mike Goldfarb himself has cited her work.

Goldfarb, on the other hand, has written in favor of killing Palestinian children in order to deter attacks on Israel.

It’s understandable that pro-Likud hawks like Ben David and Goldfarb (who is also a friend of mine) are freaking out about J Street, whose pro-Israel, pro-peace message threatens their deeply held view that the Arabs — or, depending on the day, Iranians — are the problem, and Israeli violence is the solution. Being targeted by wild, slanderous attacks like theirs is, unfortunately, the price one often pays for engaging in the public debate on this issue.

And here’s a new target for them: Former Israeli Foreign Minister and current Opposition Leader Tzipi Livni. Steve Clemons posted a letter from Livni congratulating J Street on its inaugural conference, noting that J Street shares her vision of “ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by realizing the vision of two nation state living side by side in peace and security is in the best interests of Israel, the United States, the Palestinians and the region as a whole.”

“In my view,” Livni writes, “the discussion [in] the pro-Israel community of what best advances Israel’s cause should be inclusive and broad enough to encompass a variety of views, provided it is conducted in a respectful and legitimate manner.” I anxiously await Goldfarb’s explanation of how Livni isn’t really pro-Israel.

A local Phoenix news station reports that Sheriff Joe Arpaio admitted last Saturday that his deputies are suspicious of people “who look like they just came from Mexico.” Arpaio has adamantly denied racial profiling allegations, but at a press conference yesterday morning, Arpaio refused to provide a straight-forward comment on the remarks he made this past weekend. In fact, he became confrontational with the reporter who asked him what someone who “just came from Mexico” looks like:

REPORTER: What does someone who just came from Mexico look like? What are the characteristics? You said it over the weekend.

ARPAIO: I never said the characteristics. Don’t mislead me. Hold on — no — I said we are using the protocol and the indicators that ICE has taught my deputies.

REPORTER: What are the indicators?

ARPAIO: No, I’m not going to talk about this anymore. I said we’re doing this legally. Put that in your camera and just say I said we’re doing it legally.

Watch it:

Arpaio later sent the news station a list of “indicators” his deputies use to determine if someone is an undocumented immigrants. Those indicators include a “thick accent” and riding in an “overcrowded” automobile. On CNN a couple weeks ago, Arpaio cited a nonexistent law which he claimed allowed his deputies to determine if someone is “illegal” by looking at their “clothing, speech, and conduct.” The “law” was actually an anti-immigrant designated hate group’s “legal analysis” of a federal statute that says nothing of the such.

Immigration authorities recently took away Arpaio’s authority to enforce immigration laws on the streets of Maricopa County. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is conducting an investigation into widespread allegations of racial profiling and civil rights abuses on behalf of Arpaio’s deputies. However, Arpaio has vowed to continue his immigration “crime sweeps” and is now calling on the county attorney, a “close political ally,” to give him an “official opinion” as to whether he can continue to enforce federal immigration laws. Arpaio’s other friend, Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce (R) has introduced local legislation to support the Sheriff’s activities. The “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” would allow Arpaio’s deputies to arrest undocumented immigrants under the state’s trespassing statute and bar cities from enacting policies that would prevent them from enforcing federal immigration laws.

Yesterday, Vice President Cheney spoke at the Center for Security Policy, run by former Reagan official and prominent neoconservative Frank Gaffney. Cheney used the opportunity to aggressively attack President Obama, accusing him of “giving in to the angry left” and “dithering while America’s armed forces are in danger.” He added that because Obama “seems afraid to make a decision” on whether to add more troops to Afghanistan, he should just emulate the Bush administration’s strategy since it was so successful:

We should all be concerned as well with the direction of policy on Afghanistan. For quite a while, the cause of our military in that country went pretty much unquestioned, even on the left. The effort was routinely praised by way of contrast to Iraq, which many wrote off as a failure until the surge proved them wrong. Now suddenly – and despite our success in Iraq – we’re hearing a drumbeat of defeatism over Afghanistan. These criticisms carry the same air of hopelessness, they offer the same short-sighted arguments for walking away, and they should be summarily rejected for the same reasons of national security.

Watch the speech here:

With his criticisms, Cheney joins former White House adviser Karl Rove, who has been using his on-air and print outlets to blast Obama’s Afghanistan policies and rewrite history of President Bush’s legacy.

Many Americans — both on the left and commanders in the military — were critical of the Bush administration’s policies in Afghanistan. As early as 2005, the Center for American Progress called for a strategic redeployment from Iraq, urging more troops for Afghanistan where greater resources were “urgently needed to beat back the resurging Taliban forces and to maintain security throughout the country.” Additionally, in 2008, Gen. David D. McKiernan, then the top U.S. commander in Kabul, specifically asked the Bush administration for more troops for Afghanistan, but was rebuffed:

“There was a saying when I got there: If you’re in Iraq and you need something, you ask for it,” McKiernan said in his first interview since being fired. “If you’re in Afghanistan and you need it, you figure out how to do without it.” By late last summer, he decided to tell George W. Bush’s White House what he knew it did not want to hear: He needed 30,000 more troops. He wanted to send some to the country’s east to bolster other U.S. forces, and some to the south to assist overwhelmed British and Canadian units in Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

The Bush administration opted not to act on McKiernan’s request and instead set out to persuade NATO allies to contribute more troops.

Cheney also claimed, “Make no mistake, signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries. Waffling, while our troops on the ground face an emboldened enemy, endangers them and hurts our cause.” What endangered U.S. troops in Afghanistan was Bush and Cheney’s shift of focus to the Iraq war. Military officials have said that the Taliban was pretty much defeated in 2002, but regrouped when the Bush administration decided invade Iraq.

In 2004, documents were released showing that FBI agents witnessed abusive treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay that included “detainees being chained to the floor for extended periods of time and being subjected to extreme heat, extreme cold or ‘extremely loud rap music.’” In fact, the use of loud music as “torture lite” has been a common tool employed at not just Guantanamo, but also at prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Last year, a coalition of musicians, along with British human rights charity Reprieve, created an anti-torture initiative called “Zero db” that sought to end the use of music in torture. Now, a new coalition of international musicians, including Trent Reznor, R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Jackson Browne, Rage Against the Machine, Rosanne Cash, Billy Bragg and the Roots, is launching a new protest against the use of music used during torture and are joining the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo.

As part of their protest, the musicians are supporting an effort seeking the declassification of all secret government records pertaining to how music was used in interrogations. From the group’s press release:

“At Guantanamo, the U.S. government turned a jukebox into an instrument of torture,” said Thomas Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archive, a freedom of information act organization that is assisting the musicians in seeking the documents. “The musicians and the public have the right to know how an expression of popular culture was transformed into an enhanced interrogation technique.” [...]

On behalf of the campaign, the National Security Archive is filing a series of FOIA requests today seeking still-secret documentation from CIA, U.S. Special Operations Command, and FBI, among other agencies, pertaining to how the music was chosen and the specific role it played in interrogations of detainees at the base.

For the musicians, Guantanamo is a symbol of the legacy of torture the Bush administration left behind. “As long as Guantanamo stays open, America’s legacy around the world will continue to be the torture that went on there,” said R.E.M. in a statement. “Guantanamo may be Dick Cheney’s idea of America, but it’s not mine,” said Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello. “The fact that music I helped create was used in crimes against humanity sickens me – we need to end torture and close Guantanamo now.”

“When we found out that music was being used as part of the torture going on at Guantanamo, shackling and beating people – we were angry,” said The Roots. “Just as we wouldn’t be caught dead allowing Dick Cheney to use our music for his campaigns, you can be damn sure, we wouldn’t allow him to use it to torture other human beings. Congress needs to shut Guantanamo down.”