Our guest blogger is Ken Gude, Associate Director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In a Washington Post op-ed today, Mark Thiessen claims that torture kept Americans safe, but his piece reveals far more about Thiessen’s ignorance about both torture and intelligence than about “enhanced interrogation” techniques.

Thiessen claims that “without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.” Thiessen is referring to the Library Tower attack that President Bush revealed in a February 2006 speech at the height of the outcry over the NSA warrantless wiretapping program. Khalid Sheik Mohammed apparently told his CIA interrogators about this “plot” during one of his 183 waterboarding sessions.

This is exactly the kind of garbage you get from torture when the detainee will grasp for whatever he thinks his captors want to hear. One former National Security Council official put the “Library Tower story” in Al Qaeda’s “what if” category along side “what if Superman had worked for the Nazis.” In a report debunking the Library Tower claim a full year before Bush’s 2006 speech, the Los Angeles Times quoted a senior FBI official saying “to take that [Library Tower] and make it into a disrupted plot is just ludicrous.”

Its not surprising that Thiessen would resurrect a supposed plot from a Bush speech because he probably wrote it. That’s right: Thiessen was a speechwriter, not an intelligence analyst, something that comes through loud and clear in his writing. He notes approvingly that torture “has resulted in more than 6,000 intelligence reports,” which is like saying a baseball game resulted in 250 pitches. It’s an accurate figure, but a completely meaningless measurement. One CIA official who read all the reports on the KSM interrogations described them as, “total f***ing bulls***.”

For the sake of argument, lets just accept that LA was saved from another 9/11 because we tortured KSM. Even then, Thiessen’s claim that torture has kept Americans safe dissolves when one considers that our official policy of torture has resulted in hundreds of American soldiers and Marines being killed in Iraq.

Matthew Alexander, the pseudonym for the military interrogator in Iraq who uncovered — through a humane interrogation — the information that led to the airstrike that killed al Qaeda in Iraq’s leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, said he “listened time and time again to foreign fighters, and Sunni Iraqis, state that the number one reason they had decided to pick up arms and join Al Qaeda was the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the authorized torture and abuse at Guantanamo Bay.” He also wrote that “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…. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.”

It’s depressing to watch former Bush administration officials defend “enhanced interrogation.” I wish Thiessen would have the guts to call it torture, but I guess that’s expecting too much from these guys. A former Pentagon analyst provided a perfect epilogue for this entire episode, “KSM produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.”

While I generally concur with Middle East Quarterly editor Michael Rubin’s contention that journalist Roxani Saberi was “a target of convenience, arrested to make a diplomatic statement” by the Iranian regime against the United States, Rubin’s presentation of the history of the U.S.-Iran-Iraq relationship commits a serious sin of omission.

Rubin asserts that “throughout the 1980s, foreign-policy ‘realists’ in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, as well as a bipartisan array of congressmen and senators, sought to engage Saddam Hussein, calling the Iraqi president a moderate and a bulwark against Islamism.” Rubin means to warn against what he sees as similarly misconceived attempts to engage Iran, whose regime Rubin believes to be irretrievably hostile to the United States.

In reality, though it was not just “realists” who sought to engage with Saddam against Iran, but neoconservatives as well, including, notably, Michael Rubin’s employer Daniel Pipes, the founder and president of Middle East Forum and publisher of the Middle East Quarterly.

Writing in the New Republic in 1987 (“Back Iraq” pdf), Pipes and co-author Laurie Mylroie called for greater U.S. support for Iraq in almost precisely the terms that Rubin imputes to “realists” — as a bulwark against Iran. Though Pipes recognized that Saddam had “a history of anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, support for terrorism and friendliness toward the Soviet Union,” Pipes claimed that “the Iranian revolution and seven years of bloody and inconclusive warfare have changed Iraq’s view of its Arab neighbors, the United States, and even Israel…Iraq is now the de facto protector of the regional status quo.”

It’s important to understand here that Pipes was arguing within the “authoritarian vs. revolutionary” framework established by neoconservative elder — and Iraq war skeptic — Jeanne Kirkpatrick in her seminal essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards.”

Like many others, Daniel Pipes turned out to be wrong about the stabilizing role that a mass-murdering dictator like Saddam Hussein could play in the Middle East. Pipes is somewhat unique, however, in that he was also eventually wrong about the salutary effects of removing Saddam. But Rubin has to ignore all of this in order to set up the “realists” as the villains of his story.

The release of the OLC torture memos by the Obama administration last week has proven to be a deeply clarifying event in American politics. Dedicated supporters of torture have responded with a number of tired arguments in favor of torture, the most common being:

1. Waterboarding is not torture.

Waterboarding was invented by torturers as a method of torture. It does not magically become “not torture” just because America is attacked by terrorists. Leaving aside his regrettable past vote against prohibiting CIA torture, Sen. John McCain performed an important service today, stating flat-out that “waterboarding is torture, period.”

2. “Enhanced interrogations” were an effective tool in obtaining intelligence about Al Qaeda.

There is in fact no evidence — apart from the claims of people like Dick Cheney, who I think we can safely say at this point is one of the least credible people in the United States — that “enhanced interrogation” produced any actionable intelligence. All such intel was gleaned before “enhanced interrogation” began, using methods approved in the Army Field Manual, whose standards President Obama has stated will now govern interrogations. Last February, Lt. Gen. Michael Maples of the Defense Intelligence Agency said torture was unnecessary, and that he believed “that the approaches that are in the Army Field Manual give us the tools that are necessary” for conducting effective interrogations.

3. By releasing these memos, President Obama has alerted our enemies to our interrogations methods, allowing them to train to resist them.

All of the methods mentioned in the OLC memos had been publicized long before now.

Simply put, there is not credible argument for the use of these “enhanced” techniques. Whatever information they produced — and again, there’s no evidence that they produced any — is surely outweighed by their functioning as a recruiting mechanism for terrorists.

So the question that needs to be answered is: Why are so many conservatives so committed to torture?

In today’s Wall Street Journal David Rivkin and Lee Casey — who have made something of a cottage industry out of defending the worst actions of the Bush administration — argue that the OLC torture memos released last week by the Obama administration “prove” that the Bush administration did not torture detainees. “Far from ‘green lighting’ torture…the memos detail the actual techniques used and the many measures taken to ensure that interrogations did not cause severe pain or degradation,” they write.

To support their argument, Rivkin and Casey claim that the memos show that the Bush administration made use of waterboarding only on a very limited and controlled basis. The tactics were “harsh,” they acknowledge, but “fall well short of torture.” Anyone claiming otherwise is exaggerating as a result of what they call “speculative rage”:

The memos are also revealing about the practice of “waterboarding,” about which there has been so much speculative rage from the program’s opponents. The practice, used on only three individuals, involved covering the nose and mouth with a cloth and pouring water over the cloth to create a drowning sensation.

This technique could be used for up to 40 seconds — although the CIA orally informed Justice Department lawyers that it would likely not be used for more than 20 seconds at a time. Unlike the exaggerated claims of so many Bush critics, the memos make clear that water was not actually expected to enter the detainee’s lungs, and that measures were put in place to prevent complications if this did happen and to ensure that the individual did not develop respiratory distress.

But as Marcy Wheeler first noted and the New York Times reports today, the OLC memos actually “prove” that waterboarding was used far more often than Rivkin and Casey acknowledge and far more often than the Bush administration previously admitted. Indeed, waterboarding was used “at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah” and “183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.”

Rivkin and Casey’s defense of waterboarding is puzzling given Rivkin’s recent remarks about the torture technique. In a December 2008 appearance on Al Jazeera English, Rivkin stated emphatically that torture is “always unacceptable” and that in his view “waterboarding is torture“:

RIVKIN: Let me clarify, torture in my view is always unacceptable, and in fact I frankly think characterizing American interrogation policy, or debates about interrogation policy, as torture is misleading. … Torture is defined somewhat imprecisely in international law, but basically, in my view, waterboarding is torture.

Watch it:

This morning on Fox News, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) responded to the startling information — first noted by blogger Marcy Wheeler — that detainee Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times. “It’s unacceptable,” McCain said, adding:

One is too much. Waterboarding is torture, period. I can ensure you that once enough physical pain is inflicted on someone, they will tell that interrogator whatever they think they want to hear. And most importantly, it serves as a great propaganda tool for those who recruit people to fight against us.

McCain later reiterated his point, “The image of the United States of America throughout the world is a recruiting tool for Islamic extremists.” Watch it:

Despite his outspoken advocacy against torture, he said it was a “serious mistake” for the Obama administration to release the torture memos. “The release of these memos helps no one, doesn’t help America’s image, does not help us address the issue.” Obama adviser David Axelrod said the president’s belief in “the law and his belief in transparency” ultimately convinced him to release the memos.

McCain touted his sponsorship of the Detainee Treatment Act, which “prohibited torture.” In fact, that legislation contained a loophole permitting CIA agents to continue engaging in torture.

Responding to the charge of being pro-torture, Commentary’s Abe Greenwald defends his support for the waterboard torture technique — which he calls “painless” — by insisting that “anything to which Christopher Hitchens is willing to submit himself in pursuit of a Vanity Fair article is not torture. This covers, among other things, back-waxing, exercise class, and waterboarding.”

Greenwald, of course, neglects to mention that Hitchens’ experience being waterboarded led Hitchens to conclude that “if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.”

When President Obama released the four of the Office of Legal Counsel’s (OLC) Bush-era torture memos last week, he issued a statement promising not to pursue torture prosecutions against CIA agents who relied on the memos to justify their use of torture tactics on terrorist suspects in U.S. custody. (Notably, Obama left open the possibility of prosecuting the torture architects.) “[I]t is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution,” Obama said.

But in an interview with the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Professor Manfred Nowak, explained that Obama’s grant of immunity is likely a violation of international law. As a party to the UN Convention Against Torture, the U.S. is obligated to investigate and prosecute U.S. citizens that are believed to have engaged in torture:

STANDARD: CIA torturers are according to U.S. President Obama not to be prosecuted. Is that decision supportable?

NOWAK: Absolutely not. The United States has, like all other Contracting Parties to the UN Convention Against Torture, committed itself to investigate instances of torture and to prosecute all cases in which credible evidence of torture is found.

Indeed, Article 2 of the convention on torture explains that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever” can be used to legally justify torture. Further, the convention states that an “order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Nowak explained that by invoking the OLC’s memos as justification for the actions of CIA agents against terrorist suspects in U.S. custody, Obama is acting contrary to U.S. obligations under the treaty:

STANDARD: In other words, by making this announcement, Obama has violated international law?

NOWAK: Correct. It is a violation of binding international treaty law in this case, because this is an international law convention — and it provides unequivocally that states are not merely obligated to make torture a crime, but also to prosecute any incidents of which credible evidence can be found.

In announcing his decision to release the OLC memos, Obama also suggested that he is not inclined to conduct a full investigation into the government’s use of torture. Nowak, however, said the he believes that such an investigation ought to be Obama’s highest priority. “Most importantly, there should be a comprehensive investigation undertaken by an independent body. Whether by a special investigatory commission created by Congress or by a special investigator — there are different approaches,” Nowak expalined.

Today on Fox News Sunday, former CIA director Michael Hayden blasted President Obama’s decision to release the Bush-era torture memos. Hayden claimed that he and other former CIA directors opposed making the documents public because it would compromise future interrogations of detainees by letting them know the “outer limits” of what the United States does:

HAYDEN: At the tactical level, what we have described for our enemies in the midst of a war are the outer limits that any American would ever go to in terms of interrogating an al Qaeda terrorist. That’s very valuable information. Now, it doesn’t mean we would always go to the outer limits, but it describes the box within which Americans will not go beyond. To me, that’s very useful for our enemies, even if as a policy matter, this President at this time had decided not to use one, any or all of those techniques. It reveals the outer limits. That’s very important.

Watch it:

The enhanced interrogation tactics were not “the outer limits”; they were in fact torture techniques that operated outside the law. In one of his earliest acts after taking office, Obama signed executive orders ending the CIA’s secret prisons and ending torture by requiring interrogations to abide by the Army Field Manual.

Since at least last month, Hayden has been pressing the Obama administration not to release these torture memos. But his attempts to cover-up abuses go back much further. He has tried repeatedly to prevent the public from learning about the Bush administration’s torture, pushing the “outer limits” of what’s legal:

– In 2005, the CIA destroyed videotapes of agents administering harsh interrogation tactics against two al Qaeda operatives. Hayden defended the move, saying, “What matters here is that it was done in line with the law.” Hayden also claimed that videotaping of interrogations had stopped in 2002, even though evidence later came out suggesting that taping had continued.

– In 2004, IG John L. Helgerson issued a report warning “that some C.I.A.-approved interrogation procedures appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, as defined by the international Convention Against Torture.” He continued to exert aggressive oversight of the agency, and in 2007, Hayden ordered an unprecedented internal investigation of the IG. The move appeared to “undermine the independence of the office.”

Host Chris Wallace also asked Hayden about the revelation that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003, based on information released in the new torture memos. Hayden claimed that such information had not been made public and refused to confirm or deny the accounts.

In the wake of the release of the OLC torture memos, right-wing torture supporters have been insisting all over cable that torture works. For example, torture supporters Marc Thiessen and Cliff May:

MARC THIESSEN on FOX: The dirty little secret of this ["enhanced interrogation"] program is it worked. It stopped the next terrorist attack… This whole thing is dozens and dozens of unredacted information about the techniques. And then all of a sudden you get to the point where they start talking about the results of the techniques and guess what? They pull out their black little pen and this is what’s there [holds up redacted page.] What is behind here, Mr. President, is what I want to know. What is behind here is proof that the terrorist interrogation program stopped the next 9/11.

CLIFF MAY on MSNBC: We have real world experience. If you think that some hardened terrorist will talk to you because you ask him nicely, and you don’t think that coercive interrogations ever work, you don’t know the evidence.

To listen to Thiessen and May’s claims about “evidence” about torture’s effectiveness, you might think that evidence about torture’s effectiveness actually exists. It does not. While actionable intelligence was obtained from terror detainees such as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and Abu Zubaydah, this intelligence was obtained before they were tortured. There is no evidence that any actionable intelligence has been produced by torturing terror detainees, which is why Marc Thiessen is reduced to insisting that evidence of torture’s effectiveness must be what was redacted.

As military interrogator Matthew Alexander wrote last November, not only doesn’t torture work, it actually makes Americans less safe. “The No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked [to Iraq] to fight,” wrote Alexander, “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.

So, on one side you’ve got a couple of right-wing hacks who insist — based on unseen evidence — that torture works, and on the other you’ve got an actual military interrogator who insists — based his own first-hand experience — that it doesn’t. This isn’t really a tough one.

Our guest bloggers are Peter Juul, Research Associate and Colin Cookman, Special Assistant for National Security at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Yesterday, the Pakistani supreme court released Maulana Abdul Aziz, a militant ideologue and leader of Islamabad’s Red Mosque. During the siege of the Red Mosque in July 2007, triggered by his supporters’ unchecked vigilantism in Pakistan’s capital finally provoked a reaction from Pakistani security forces, Aziz was arrested attempting to escape dressed as a woman. The siege, in which at least a hundred were reportedly killed, has since become a rallying cry for a disparate array of militant groups along the country’s northwest border and in the heartland of Punjab itself. Conducting Friday prayers at the mosque today, Aziz told the crowd of followers that “the blood of those who were martyred here will usher in an Islamic revolution.”

While Aziz’s release should raise alarms, as Joshua Frost at Registan.net notes, the Supreme Court decision is part of a broader ongoing rebuke by the judicial establishment and civil society of the Musharraf regime’s use of indefinite extra-constitutional detentions as a means of handling terror suspects — a problem the Obama administration itself is attempting to grapple with itself as it examines options for closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Aziz still faces 26 charges, including abetting murder and incitement, but the government’s failure to bring any of those to court during his nearly two years’ long imprisonment speaks to the incapacity of Pakistan’s judicial system to effectively respond to those who seek its overthrow. The pattern of reluctance or inability of the government to carry out swift legal action in the case of major terror suspects such as Aziz, Rashid Rauf, and several Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives linked to the Mumbai attacks has increased tensions with Pakistan’s neighbors and international allies, fueling suspicion that Pakistan’s security services are playing a double game to preserve their former militant clients.

In both the long and short runs, the goal of the United States must be to help build an effective, democratic Pakistani state able to defend itself from an aggressive internal insurgency. Without an effective, efficient justice system, a democratic Pakistan will remain weak and unable to enforce its own laws throughout the country. As the New York Times article on the rise of the Swat valley Taliban makes clear, the absence of effective state institutions to rectify societal inequities -– especially a fair and efficient judicial system –- give militants the space in which to seize power and impose their own rules.

Contrary to Maulana Abdul Aziz’s claim that “the whole country resounds to cries for the implementation of Islamic law,” the vast majority of Pakistanis voted for secular political parties in the most recent national elections in February 2008. Pakistan’s most recent large protest movement was not for the state enforcement of religious regulations, but the reinstatement of the Musharraf-dismissed chief justice of the Supreme Court. Pakistanis, as far as can be determined, want an effective democratic state, not a brutal religious dictatorship.

But in the short term, at least, the release of Aziz will serve to empower militants at a time when they are already buoyed by the open establishment of parallel government structures in the Northwest Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Aziz’s vow to build on the Taliban’s success in Swat should be taken seriously by the Pakistani government and the United States. The increasing infiltration of militancy into the heart of Pakistan will only continue to accelerate. At a certain point, the United States will have to decide if it wants to persist in its efforts to build up the Frontier Corps to deal with the Taliban in the border areas, or perform triage and build up the Pakistani civilian security apparatus –- especially the police -– in the “settled areas” of Pakistan.

Yesterday, as he released four Bush-era legal memos authorizing the torture of terrorist suspects, President Obama made it clear he would not support any prosecutions of low-level interrogators who actually carried out Bush’s policies. “[I]t is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”

Obama also added, “This is a time for reflection, not retribution,” and said “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.” Some progressive commentators were outraged; Keith Olbermann pleaded, “Prosecute, Mr. President.” CBS’s Andrew Cohen interpreted this to mean Obama would not support any prosecutions for torture:

One by one, the hammer blows fell upon civil libertarians and millions of other Americans who believe that the people who legally sanctioned and then implemented torturous “enhanced interrogation tactics” should have had to defend their conduct in our courts of law. One by one, those enthusiastic supporters of the Obama administration’s legal values and policies realized that they had just lost a battle (been wiped out, in fact) that they had every reason to believe they would win. There will be no torture trials. Period.

However, Obama’s statement was carefully worded to include only “those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice” — not the Bush officials who actually gave out that advice. ACLU lead counsel Jameel Jaffer told Glenn Greenwald that Obama did not shut the door to all prosecutions:

I think it’s a mistake to read the grant of immunity too broadly. I don’t think that President Obama’s statement should be taken as a sign that there’s no chance that the architects of torture program will be prosecuted. And even with respect to the interrogators, it’s only the interrogators who relied “in good faith” on legal advice who are protected.

Indeed, Marc Ambinder reported yesterday that “senior administration officials have made it clear” to him that the immunity would not apply to those officials who “who did NOT act in good faith, or who did not act according to the guidelines spelled out by the OLC.” Obama himself seemed to indicate that some sort of investigations have already begun, telling CNN en Espanol, “I think that we are moving a process forward here in the United States to understand what happened.”

Greenwald notes that the door for investigations and prosecutions is still open, but it will take enormous pressure from the American public to push Obama through. “[T]he burden is on us to demand that something be done,” he writes.

Dr. Tariq Al-Abdullah is a tribal sheikh in Iraq’s Anbar province, and one of the leaders of what became known as the “Awakenings” movement, in which members of Sunni tribes — many of them former insurgents — allied with U.S. coalition forces against Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Yesterday I spoke with Dr. Al-Abdullah about the current situation in Iraq, specifically the state of Iraq’s political reconciliation in the wake of a series of battles between Awakenings forces and Iraqi government troops. Dr. Al-Abdullah offered a discouraging diagnosis. “I can assure you,” he said “that it [reconciliation] doesn’t go even slowly, it is stopped completely. There is no action regarding reconciliation.”

My dream, like any other Iraqi, we are looking for stability and democracy and freedom, and we think we cannot deliver…these things if we are not united. And because we have our own government, our elected government, they should deal — even if there are many concerns about the election as we heard, and you heard in the past time — but it’s a matter of fact that they are existing and we should deal with them and they should deal with the situation as a government for the whole Iraq. To bring stability and progress and the reconstruction of Iraq I think they should be looking for the unity of the Iraqis, and reconciliation. And here when we say we want reconciliation, we want a real reconciliation.

Watch it:

While Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had promised that significant numbers of Awakenings members would either be incorporated into Iraq’s security forces or provided other government jobs, a promise that Maliki’s government has thus far failed to keep.

Full transcript below. Read more

Our guest blogger is Shiyong Park, an intern with the National Security team at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

On April 13th, China released the National Human Rights Action Plan of China (2009-2010), becoming the 26th country to respond to the call by the United Nations for such a plan. In the 54-page document, first announced last November, the CCP outlined reforms ranging from increased transparency to rural health care. Although China’s first comprehensive human rights plan warrants praise, it should only be welcomed with a critical eye.

The document states “While respecting the universal principles of human rights, the Chinese government, in the light of the basic realities of China, gives priority to the protection of the people’s rights to subsistence and development,” reaffirming the regime’s intention to promote development at the cost of human rights when necessary. In a time when even its neighbor Russia’s President Medvedev rejects the idea of giving up rights in exchange for prosperity, the CCP’s stance is inadequate, and it is important to recognize that the Chinese people cannot enjoy the benefits of economic prosperity without basic rights.

The most notable failures of the plan are in the protection of civil and political rights. While the plan sets to eliminate “illegal detention” by law enforcement, it does not abolish the administrative system of “re-education through labor,” in which civic leaders and political dissidents are often sent to labor camps for up to four years without a trial.

The promise of curbing torture, forced confessions, and arbitrary arrests are also undermined by the conditions in more than 2,700 pre-trial detention centers and an unknown number of unregistered jails. The New York Times and Amnesty International report that since February, at least seven inmates have died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody.

Despite the shortfalls, the publication of the two-year plan is a significant step for a nation with a history of neglecting basic human rights. But it is not enough to simply reaffirm the principles already enshrined in the Chinese Constitution. China must open up for discussions of concrete cases, such as the conviction of Hu Jia, a prominent AIDS activist, and the detention of Liu Xiaobo, one of the authors of Charter 08. In both instances, the men’s “right to be heard” outlined in the Action Plan and the freedom of speech engraved in the Constitution were violated, and the situation must be addressed.

In the shadows of the U.S. State Department’s negative China human rights report in February, the ambitious Action Plan provides a reason for optimism. However, we cannot let the promises of a better future cloud our sight in observing the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, nor can we forget about the current reality of neglected and systematically violated human rights. To overcome its stigma, China must couple the reaffirmation of principles with tangible actions.

Last night, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists James Risen and Eric Lichtblau reported in the New York Times that “the National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year.” According to intelligence officials, the problems grew “out of changes enacted by Congress last July in the law that regulates the government’s wiretapping powers.”

In July 2008, as Congress — including then-Sen. Barack Obama — moved towards approving the re-write of surveillance law, progressives mobilized against the legislation. As Glenn Greenwald points out, many of the concerns held by progressives at the time are proven by the NYT report. Here’s how Greenwald summarized the opposition in June 2008:

The ACLU specifically identifies the ways in which this bill destroys meaningful limits on the President’s power to spy on our international calls and emails. Sen. Russ Feingold condemned the bill on the ground that it “fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home” because “the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power.” Rep. Rush Holt — who was actually denied time to speak by bill-supporter Silvestre Reyes only to be given time by bill-opponent John Conyers — condemned the bill because it vests the power to decide who are the “bad guys” in the very people who do the spying.

On July 3rd, Obama explained his support for the “improved yet imperfect bill” by saying that as president he would have his Attorney General “conduct a comprehensive review of all our surveillance programs” in order to make further recommendations on protecting civil liberties. According to the Lichtblau and Risen, the “overcollection” of domestic collection was “detected” during a “periodic review” of the NSA’s activities:

As part of a periodic review of the agency’s activities, the department “detected issues that raised concerns,” it said. Justice Department officials then “took comprehensive steps to correct the situation and bring the program into compliance” with the law and court orders, the statement said. It added that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. went to the national security court to seek a renewal of the surveillance program only after new safeguards were put in place.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), who opposed the 2008 FISA Amendment Act, issued a statement today calling on Congress to “get to work fixing these laws that have eroded the privacy and civil liberties of law-abiding citizens.” Feingold also called on the Obama administration to “declassify certain aspects of how these authorities have been used so that the American people can better understand their scope and impact.”

In an intriguing post yesterday discussing this article on democracy in the Middle East, Andrew Exum wrote that “one of the tragedies of the neo-conservative era (2001-2006) is that it got the ends right and the means so very, very wrong — thus discrediting the ends in both the Arabic-speaking world and in domestic U.S. politics. How the hell we Americans managed to discredit the idea of democracy promotion at home and abroad is anyone’s guess.”

It’s a question well worth asking, and one that I think neocon-in-good-standing Reuel Marc Gerecht’s item in today’s Wall Street Journal goes quite a ways toward answering, by demonstrating precisely the sort of half-read arrogance that got us here. Taking issue with President Obama’s charm offensive toward Muslims, Gerecht mounts what I think can fairly be described as a rudeness-counteroffensive, insisting that “we — the West — are the unrivaled agent of change in the Middle East.”

Modern Islamic history — including the Bush years — ought to tell us that questions non-Muslims pose can provoke healthy discussions. [...]

Although it is now politically incorrect to say so, George W. Bush’s democratic rhetoric energized the discussion of representative government and human rights abroad. Democracy advocates and the anti-authoritarian voices in Arab lands have never been so hopeful as they were between 2002, when democracy promotion began to germinate within the White House, and 2006, when the administration gave up on people power in the Middle East (except in Iraq).

I don’t think it’s really “politically incorrect” to say that Bush’s democratic rhetoric energized the discussion of representative government and human rights abroad as much as it is simply dishonest not to mention that most of that discussion revolved around how incompetent and counterproductive his actual policies for doing these things were. Burning my neighbor’s house down might provoke a healthy discussion of how better to fight fires, but that doesn’t mean that setting fire to my neighbor’s house was the correct policy.

While it may be true that anti-authoritarian voices in Arab lands “have never been so hopeful as they were” between 2002 and 2006, those voices have also never been so marginalized as they have been now in the wake of Bush’s war on terror. As the New America Foundation’s Michael Cohen and Maria Figueroa Kupcu write in a new report, Revitalizing America’s Democracy Promotion, “not only has the Freedom Agenda failed to fulfill its promise, it has likely set back America’s overall democracy promotion efforts.”

The agenda was compromised by the perception that America’s rhetoric was not always matched by its actions, either at home or abroad. Meanwhile, the conflation of democracy promotion with regime change in Iraq has further undermined the U.S. effort.

By offering democratic reform as a component to the war on terror, which many in the Muslim world see –rightly or wrongly — as a war against Islam, Bush alienated at the outset scores of potential reformist allies. By then promoting the war in Iraq as a showpiece for his broader agenda (“This could be your country! Who’s in?”) he discredited it even more. (Despite attempts by the war’s remaining supporters to present Iraq’s struggling, violence-plagued sort-of democracy as a beacon to the Arab world, you’d be very hard pressed to find actual Arab democrats who agree. It’s not hard to understand why.)

There was nothing particularly unique or original in neoconservatives’ critique of the Arab world’s political malaise — what was unique was neoconservatives’ insistence that the brutal application of American power was the only thing that could shake the Arab world out of that malaise. I think the results speak for themselves. And, given the fact that they saw it necessary to rebrand themselves, I think the neocons, at least the smart ones, do too.

Earlier this month, a Spanish court said it would consider opening a criminal case against six Bush administration officials “over allegations they gave legal cover for torture at Guantanamo.” The Spanish attorney general said today that he would not recommend a case, but Judge Baltazar Garzon “will decide whether to press ahead with a criminal investigation.”

Thus far, Obama administration officials have tried to skirt questions on the matter. On Tuesday, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs responded, “We may have some reaction based on what ultimately happens.” Today, CNN’s Juan Carlos Lopez asked Obama about the investigation ahead of his trip to Mexico. Obama repeated his desire to look forward:

OBAMA: I’m a strong believer that it’s important to look forward and not backwards, and to remind ourselves that we do have very real security threats out there. So I have not had direct conversations with the Spanish government about these issues. My team has been in communications with them.

Obama did, however, say he was aware of a “process” moving forward in the U.S. to “understand” what happened under Bush. Notably, he did not endorse or rule out an investigation or commission:

I think that we are moving a process forward here in the United States to understand what happened, but also to focus on how we make sure that the manner in which we operate currently is consistent with our values and our traditions.

Obama concluded: “And so my sense is, is that this will be worked out over time.” Watch it:

It’s unclear what process Obama is referring to. Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT) has prominently called for a truth commission to investigate Bush-era abuses, but he is uncertain whether it can proceed. House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) recently called for “congressional investigations,” “a blue ribbon commission, or “independent criminal probes to be conducted by federal prosecutors.”

Attorney General Eric Holder told Katie Couric last week that a commission is something that “Senator Leahy, the people in the Senate Judiciary Committee, the President will ultimately have to decide.”

Transcript: Read more

Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, research associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported on the growing convergence of Punjabi and tribal area-based militant groups in Pakistan. The relationship between these two geographically distinct militant groups is more than ideological — tribal militants and al Qaeda have money, training sites and sanctuaries, and suicide bombs, while Punjabi militants have logistical networks in major cities like Lahore to survey possible targets and safe-house bombers. As Bruce Reidel, a former CIA analyst and the head of President Obama’s Pakistan and Afghanistan policy review, put it, “You are seeing more of a coalescence of these militant groups… Connections that have always existed are becoming tighter and more public than they have in the past.”

As CAP Senior Fellow Brian Katulis and I noted at the end of March, Pakistani militants were more likely to penetrate deeper into a weak Pakistan than they were to conduct their own “surge” against additional American forces in Afghanistan. Using existing links, militants (some still sponsored by elements of the Pakistani security establishment) have mounted increasing attacks deep in Pakistan’s “settled” areas -– especially Punjab -– even before President Obama announced his new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy.

This more public alliance between militant groups has been driven not by a build-up of U.S. troops in Afghanistan or increased U.S. drone strikes in the tribal region but by former President Pervez Musharraf’s military assault on the vigilante Red Mosque compound in Islamabad in July 2007. It’s also a consequence of the myriad dysfunctions of the Pakistani state –- which include double games with militant groups, politicians concerned more with intrigue than national interests, and the overall inability to govern the country.

Most people in the upper echelons of the Pakistani state seem to prefer to look the other way as militants gobble up sections of the country outside the tribal areas -– President Asif Ali Zardari recently assented to imposing Islamic law in the Swat region, effectively turning that area over to militants. As a Punjab landlord told the Times, “The government is useless… They live happy, secure lives in Lahore. Their children study abroad. They only come here to contest elections.”

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Via Tom Ricks, a very interesting Dar al-Hayat interview with Ahmad Chalabi, in which Chalabi shares his views of President Bush and the strategic consequences of the Iraq invasion for Iran:

[Al-Hayat]: If you want to describe George Bush, then how would you describe him?

[Chalabi]: A man with very little skill and knowledge.

[Al-Hayat]: He did Iran a great service by toppling Saddam?

[Chalabi]: Iran benefited from toppling Saddam. Bush didn’t mean to do it a favor but it was clear that Iran would benefit from Saddam’s fall. I am convinced that Saddam would not have fallen except for an implicit agreement between America and Iran.

[Al-Hayat]: This happened?

[Chalabi]: Yes, of course it did.

[Al-Hayat]: Through whom?

[Chalabi]: We worked on this and so did the Supreme Council and Jalal Talbani.

The idea that Iran has been the main beneficiary of the Iraq war isn’t particularly controversial any more — except, of course, among the war’s neoconservative advocates, who continue to insist that removing Iran’s greatest enemy and empowering Iraqi factions with longstanding close ties to Iran was a huge defeat for Iran. Incidentally, many of these people — Sen. John McCain and his adviser Randy Scheunemann among them — were also Chalabi’s biggest boosters.

Like Ricks, I’d be very interested to hear more about the “implicit agreement” that Chalabi asserts between the U.S. and Iran. Given what’s known now about Chalabi’s cooperation with Iran’s intelligence services, though, it’s pretty chilling to consider how close some of Chalabi’s marks came to taking the White House last November. Unfortunately, as shown by the continuing prominence of McCain, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and other neocon fantasists, inadvertently aiding America’s enemies is no barrier to influence in American foreign policy, as long as one is always careful to err on the side of war, and meticulous about dressing one’s belligerent strategic stupidity in patriotic drag.

Via Ilan Goldenberg, conservative nutter Ralph Peters reacts to the successful use of law-enforcement techniques against Somali pirates by insisting that “piracy is not a law-enforcement problem. It’s a military problem.”

And retribution can’t be “proportional,” a tit-for-tat tap. Pirates and their supporters must be punished fiercely and comprehensively.

Attack their harbors with land, sea and air power. Kill pirates, sink their vessels (including those dual-use fishing boats) and wreck their support infrastructure. The clans behind the pirates must feel sufficient pain to rein in their young thugs. The price for piracy should be stunning.

And we don’t need to stay to rebuild Somalia. End the fix-it fetish now. We need to leave while their boats are still burning down to the waterline.

Interestingly, the “make them feel the pain” approach is precisely what Peters advocated for Iraq back in October 2006:

If we can’t leave a democracy behind, we should at least leave the corpses of our enemies. The holier-than-thou response to this proposal is predictable: ‘We can’t kill our way out of this situation!’ Well, boo-hoo. Friendly persuasion and billions of dollars haven’t done the job. Give therapeutic violence a chance.

Among those who believed we couldn’t “kill our way” out of Iraq’s insurgency: General Petraeus. (Though the fact that Petraeus’s counter-insurgency strategy represented a complete rejection of Peters’ ideas didn’t stop Peters from mocking critics of the surge.)

As Ilan notes, “just about everyone who has seriously covered this [Somalia] issue would tell you that [Peters' suggestions] would only make things worse.” Right now we’re dealing with a piracy problem that’s driven primarily by profit. If, however, we wanted to transform Somalia into yet another front in the global jihad — with all of the staggering costs in lives, resources and security that would involve — we could follow Peters’ recommendations.

There are a couple of key points to draw from the reports that the Obama administration is planning to drop a long-standing U.S. demand that Iran suspend uranium enrichment as a pre-condition for talks. The first is that, while the Obama administration has not dropped enrichment suspension as a goal, they seem to have grasped the basic idea that you’re more likely to get your adversary to give up something he values by talking to him and offering incentives than you are by insisting that he give it up in exchange for talking in the first place.

The second is that the Obama administration has understood the extent to which the Bush-Cheney approach to Iran — in which talking to one’s enemies was itself seen as a form of appeasement — essentially gave a free pass to the Iranian regime. As John Lee Anderson writes in the New Yorker, “it was easy for [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad to argue that President Bush was not interested in anything but a hostile relationship with Iran.”

Obama’s [Nowruz] message was “a game-changer,” Vali Nasr, an expert on Iran and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said. “Now the U.S. has come out with an extraordinarily different kind of message, one that is warm, and seems sincere about engaging with Iran. So the Iranians now will ask of their government, why aren’t you engaging?” Nasr added, “Obama has cleverly created a debate between the Iranian people and their leaders, and within the leadership itself — and also, because this comes just three months before the elections, made it a campaign issue.”

As CAP analyst Andrew Grotto wrote last May, moving toward greater engagement with the Iranian government “would clarify the choice being presented to the Iranian nation by the international community: the poverty and isolation that extremism brings, or the prosperity and global respect that Iran would enjoy if it adopted a more constructive foreign policy.” Iran’s conservatives would very much prefer that that choice not be clarified.

The Bush administration’s approach to Iran — typified by Dick Cheney’s ideologically hidebound insistence that “we don’t negotiate with evil, we defeat it” — was not only a propaganda gift to Iran’s conservative hardliners, it both confirmed and mirrored their own worldview. By steadily reorienting the U.S. approach to Iran and making it abundantly clear both to the Iranian people and the world that America is not the recalcitrant party, President Obama is putting the onus on Iran’s hardliners to justify their own intransigence. He’s also taking away one of President Ahmadinejad’s most treasured propaganda tools — fear of an aggressive, threatening America — months before Iranians go to the polls to choose a new president.