This was an interesting passage from yesterday’s Politico profile of Charles Krauthammer:

Krauthammer’s formative departure from liberalism came in response to the anti-nuclear movement of the early Reagan years. In 1981, he wrote a scathing attack on the massive nuclear freeze movement, which he now describes as “hysteria.”[...]

“I don’t get caught in enthusiasms,” Krauthammer said of the nuclear freeze movement and of Obama’s mass appeal.

Krauthammer’s view of the nuclear freeze movement is charmingly antique. Histories of the the Cold War have increasingly acknowledged the extent to which the nuclear freeze movement played a part both in President Reagan’s decision to seek reductions on nuclear arms (a policy for which brave warriors like Norman Podhoretz condemned Reagan as a “traitor to anti-Communism”) and in creating and strengthening networks of pro-human rights and democracy activists and dissidents in Eastern Europe.

In her 1995 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article “Who Killed the Cold War?” — which warned that the role of peace movements in shaking the nuclear status quo was being “written out of accounts of the 1980s” — historian Mary Kaldor noted that “Five million people demonstrated in the capitals of Western Europe in 1981 and 1983.” The movement was unprecedented in scale and in its transnational character.”

What made the peace movement of the 1980s different from earlier movements was the explicit link between peace, and democracy and human rights…From the beginning, this new movement sought links with individual dissidents and groups in Eastern Europe.

Dissidents like Czechoslovakia’s Vaclav Havel and Poland’s Adam Michnik, among others, have acknowledged that the cultural, intellectual, and scholarly exchanges which grew out of the anti-nuclear movement were extremely important for the training and morale of their movements, for helping them agitate against their governments, and for preparing them to participate in a peaceful transition of power after the Soviet Union collapsed. The conservative hero myth of the Cold War, in which Reagan scared Communism to death with a threatening wave of his big, shiny missile, essentially writes this aspect out of existence.

As for Krauthammer’s claim that he doesn’t “get caught in enthusiasms,” any casual examination of his work reveals that Krauthammer is in fact enormously enthusiastic about at least a couple of things: American military power, and the necessity of vigorously applying that power against the “existential” threat of radical Islamic extremism.

In his 2004 explication of his neoconservative worldview, which he called “democratic realism“, Krauthammer claimed that the U.S. should be “friends to all, but…come ashore only where it really counts. And where it counts today is that Islamic crescent stretching from North Africa to Afghanistan.”

In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile crisis, we came to the edge of the abyss. Then, accompanied by our equally shaken adversary, we both deliberately drew back. On September 11, 2001, we saw the face of Armageddon again, but this time with an enemy that does not draw back. This time the enemy knows no reason.

Were that the only difference between now and then, our situation would be hopeless. But there is a second difference between now and then: the uniqueness of our power, unrivaled, not just today but ever. That evens the odds. The rationality of the enemy is something beyond our control. But the use of our power is within our control. And if that power is used wisely, constrained not by illusions and fictions but only by the limits of our mission — which is to bring a modicum of freedom as an antidote to nihilism — we can prevail.

About this, a few things: It’s pretty enthusiastic. It’s pretty hysterical. And it’s pretty clear that anyone who thinks you can apply the term “realism” to the proposition that the United States deploy forces across the entire Middle East and North Africa is either crazy, or is just fooling around. Make up your own mind.

The intervening years have, of course, not been kind to Krauthammer’s vision of an America untroubled by gravity, not that he or any of his fans seem to have noticed. It’s worth pointing out, however, that what Krauthammer’s continuing refusal to grant a Cold War role to the peace movement and his persistent and destructive illusions about the transformative potential of American ordnance have in common — indeed, something which is a defining characteristic of neoconservatism — is that, for all of the wind about freedom and democracy, it’s a view of history that is largely dismissive of the historical role of actual people in taking their freedom and making democracy.

But, on the other hand, he’s really popular with people who hate the president.

Here’s an interesting Jerusalem Post interview with Keith Weissman — the former AIPAC Iran expert against whom espionage charges were recently dropped — on the prospect of changing the U.S.-Iran relationship. Weissman, who the Post notes “has lived in Iran, knows Farsi (as well as Arabic, Turkish and French) and wrote his doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago on Iranian history,” said that “The only viable solution is dialogue. You don’t deal with Iran with threats or preaching regime change.”

“President Bush’s demand that Iran halt all nuclear enrichment before we would talk with the regime was an excuse not to talk at all,” Weissman said. “And the administration’s preaching of regime change only made the Iranians more paranoid and told them there was no real desire to engage them, only demonize them. The thing they fear most is American meddling in their internal politics.” [...]

There’s no assurance an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities — even if all of them could be located — would be anything more than a temporary setback, Weissman told me. Instead, a military strike would unify Iranians behind an unpopular regime, ignite a wave of retaliation that would leave thousands dead from Tehran to Tel Aviv, block oil exports from the Persian Gulf and probably necessitate a ground war, he said. [...]

Weissman said Israel’s worries about Iran getting a nuclear weapon are understandable, but despite some of the rhetoric coming out of Teheran, the Iranian leaders “are not fanatics and they’re not suicidal.”

That last point is important to keep in mind in the face of “doomsday” scenarios being pushed by Israeli hardliners and their allies here in the U.S. Endless neocon appeals to “seriousness” notwithstanding, there’s really no serious analyst of Iran who believes that the clerical regime is interested in triggering a nuclear exchange in the Middle East, or even incurring the greatly increased isolation that the regime very likely knows would result from its acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Speaking at a private dinner last night, a senior European diplomat stressed that diplomacy must be given time to work, and that it was “much too early” to discuss hard and fast timelines. While it’s true that diplomacy shouldn’t be “open ended” and there should obviously be some sort of metric for judging whether progress is being made, establishing a strict timeline for talks — at least the sort that Netanyahu wants — isn’t diplomacy, it’s an ultimatum. Israel wouldn’t respond kindly to one, neither would the U.S., and we shouldn’t expect Iran to, either.

Today the Senate is expected to pass an amendment banning the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States, even U.S. prisons. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) explained yesterday, “Can’t put them in prison unless you release them.”

This morning on CNN, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), author of the amendment, declared that moving detainees to maximum-security prisons or military bases would make those facilities “magnets to terrorism.” He claimed that the U.S. is “not set up to handle terrorist detainees”:

CHETRY: You don’t think that those facilities could keep some of these detainees secure, at the same time, protecting the surrounding communities?

INHOFE: No, I don’t, Kiran. [...]

CHETRY: There has been, though, here in the United States a number of people who have been convicted on terrorism-related charges in U.S. courts. … They’ve been held in our U.S. prisons. Why can’t that be replicated with the Guantanamo Bay detainees?

INHOFE: Because those individuals who are actually criminals, they actually committed crimes and were not involved in the type of — in the type of terrorist activity as we’ve been experiencing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Watch it:

In truth, the United States is more than equipped to handle a few dozen terrorist suspects. Indeed, dozens of dangerous terrorists are already held in American prisons. Inhofe tries to distinguish between those “criminals” and today’s terror detainees, but everyone knows that Timothy McVeigh, the Blind Sheikh, and Zacarias Moussaoui are terrorists. They know that because these men were convicted in U.S. courts and either executed or sentenced to life in prison at the Colorado Supermax.

Supermax isn’t the only place for terrorists or terrorist suspects. The high-security wing of the naval brig in Charleston, SC, confined Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri for more than five years; the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer notes that, “[u]nlike the staff at Abu Ghraib, the brig staff had been trained for the job. Their mission, as they saw it, was to run a safe, professional, and humane prison, regardless of who was held there.”

As the Center for American Progress’ Ken Gude told ThinkProgress, the U.S. has a long tradition of incarcerating terrorists:

The truth is that we have prosecuted and incarcerated some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists in the United States for decades, and doing so has made America safer. Beginning in the Reagan administration, the United States has captured more than a dozen terrorists overseas and brought them to justice in America. These terrorists are guilty of murdering dozens of Americans and more than 500 people worldwide, and include 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Ramzi Yousef, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed of the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings, and Aafia Siddiqui who was captured in Afghanistan in 2008 and is awaiting trial in New York for the attempted murder of U.S. soldiers.

“Thousands of Americans work hard every day in maximum security prisons to keep these and other dangerous convicts safely locked away,” Gude said. Why do conservatives have such little faith in American security officials?

Read the Center for American Progress’ report on how to safely close the Guantanamo prison here.

Today, Senate Democrats announced that the Senate will strip $80 million in funding for closing Guantanamo until the Obama administration devises a specific plan for transferring detainees. The move comes as conservatives are pushing the claim that Guantanamo “terrorists” could escape into Americans’ backyard if the facility is closed.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) declared in a press conference today, “We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States.” In several tense back and forths with reporters, Reid said he opposes imprisoning detainees on U.S. soil, saying flatly, “We don’t want them around the United States”:

REID: I’m saying that the United States Senate, Democrats and Republicans, do not want terrorists to be released in the United States. That’s very clear.

QUESTION: No one’s talking about releasing them. We’re talking about putting them in prison somewhere in the United States.

REID: Can’t put them in prison unless you release them.

QUESTION: Sir, are you going to clarify that a little bit? …

REID: I can’t make it any more clear than the statement I have given to you. We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.

Later, Reid repeated that he would not support Guantanamo detainees being transferred to U.S prisons:

QUESTION: But Senator, Senator, it’s not that you’re not being clear when you say you don’t want them released. But could you say — would you be all right with them being transferred to an American prison?

REID: Not in the United States.

A reporter then asked, “[I]f a detainee is adjudicated not to be a terrorist, could that detainee then enter the United States?” Reid refused to answer directly, saying, “Why don’t we wait for a plan from the president? All we’re doing now is nitpicking on language that I have given you. I’ve been as clear as I can.” After being peppered by questions, Reid joked, “I think I’ve had about enough of this.”

Reid said he wants Guantanamo closed, but his claim that he would not support transferring detainees to the U.S. clashes with this goal. Currently, dozens of convicted terrorists are being held securely in federal prisons, and the U.S. has already prosecuted 145 terrorism cases in federal court. Reid’s position aligns him with Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), who also opposes “the transfer of the detainees to US soil.”

If not American prisons, where will detainees be sent after Guantanamo is closed?

Despite the notable absence of Sen. Arlen Specter — who pulled out due to a “scheduling conflict” — today’s Middle East Forum-sponsored Libel Lawfare conference went on as planned.

In a press release on Sen Specter’s withdrawal, MEF responded to charges from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) that the conference was an “anti-Islam” event:

The conference is not an anti-Islam event, but addresses the phenomenon of libel lawfare, being waged by Islamists who seek to censor discussion of Islam, radical Islam, terrorism, and the sources of terrorist funding….CAIR alleges that the conference is based on the premise that “American Muslims are involved in a concerted effort to suppress free speech by misusing the American legal system.” This is CAIR’s fantasy, not a view held by the conference organizers.

CAIR is demonstrating, once again, why such a conference as this one, protecting free speech from Islamists, is necessary.

Did you follow that? The point of the conference is not to say that American Muslims are involved in a concerted effort to suppress free speech, but the fact that American Muslims have expressed anger over the conference proves the need for a conference protecting free speech from Islamists. All doubletalk aside, a brief perusal of conference materials showed that American Muslims being involved in a concerted effort to suppress free speech by misusing the American legal system was, in fact, the intended message of the conference.

In her welcome address, Brooke Goldstein, the director of Middle East Forum’s Legal Project, seemed to be aware of the fact that holding a conference on the creeping threat of Islamists using the legal system to stifle speech critical of Islam amounted to a pretty strong refutation of the idea that Islamists are using the legal system to stifle speech critical of Islam, but she darkly warned that we might not even be able to have such a conference five years from now. (A panelist later responded “Or even one year from now!”)

Interestingly, in her description of various methods of “lawfare” Islamists use, Goldstein included the successful lawsuit brought by Palestinians against Israel for its “separation wall.” In 2004, the International Court of Justice found that the construction of the wall involved “the widespread confiscation and destruction of Palestinian property” violated international law and amounted to an illegal land grab. Whatever one thinks of the merits of the case or the ruling itself, it seems that the Palestinians fighting the occupation through the international legal system, rather than through terrorism, is something that should be applauded rather than condemned. It gives you an idea of the sort of careless conflation of movements and threats in which Middle East Forum specializes.

Speaking of careless conflation, neocon activist Frank Gaffney used his allotted time on the morning’s panel to discuss the threat to America posed by the twin forces of Islamic sharia — his personal obsession — and “secular transnationalists” like Harold Koh, President Obama’s nominee for the State Department’s legal adviser. “Our sovereignty and constitutional freedoms are under assault,” Gaffney said, “from what I think [are] best described as transnationalist forces. They come in two strains: The religious and the secular.”

GAFFNEY: Brooke has already mentioned one of the manifestations of the internationalists of the religious strain, in their effort to constrict free speech elsewhere and around the world, and in the US through sharia blasphemy laws. [...]

This is being made possible, both the sharia blasphemy program and the other aspects of sharia, of course by the secular strain of transnationalism, one that holds that the United States must be subject to international laws, rulings, and even norms. [...]

To put a fine point on it, we have before the United States Senate as we speak a nominee that is a radical adherent to this notion of secular transationalism, Harold Koh, the recently departed dean of the Yale Law School, who President Obama would like to have to be the State Department’s legal adviser, a position from which he would have unprecedented opportunities to promote this form of secular transationalism. And I think we will see much more of this sort of insinuation of this sharia programs, sharia blasphemy laws, and other forms of international norming in our society if indeed people like Harold Koh — who has also been bandied about as a prospective Supreme Court nominee — are given positions of great trust and influence. [...]

This, in other words ladies and gentlemen, constitutes a pincer movement, between the secularists on the one hand and the religious transnationalists on the other. Wielding lawfare as the Lilliputians wielded their tiny strands to secure and immobilize Gulliver, it is aimed at the very heart of our sovereignty and indeed our freedoms as they seek to remake the world in their image.

Watch it:

In recent days, conservatives have been on a media blitz accusing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) of lying last week when she said that she believed she had been “misled” by the CIA during intelligence briefings regarding the use of torture. Last night on Fox News’s On The Record, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) continued this blitz, arguing that Pelosi did not want to “take accountability and responsibility for the actions that she took in 2002, 2003″ and is instead simply “blaming the CIA.”

When host Greta Van Sustern pointed out that “CIA has not been perfect” in recent years, Hoekstra explained that in his view it is okay to criticize the agency’s performance, but it is another thing to accuse the CIA of having misled Congress:

HOEKSTRA: I think you do go back and you break it into two different issues. One is the performance, how well, they’re doing their job. The second is whether they have misled or lied to Congress, two very, very different issues.

Watch it:

Yesterday on CNN’s American Morning, Hoekstra made similar remarks, referring to Pelosi’s claims as “outrageous accusations.” He also appeared last night on CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight and this morning on talk radio with Bill Bennett and Laura Ingraham.

Hoekstra’s repeated objections to Pelosi accusing the CIA of having lied to Congress is quite odd given the fact that he’s made nearly identical claims on multiple occasions. As Marcy Wheeler first noted, Hoekstra wrote a letter to President Bush in 2006 accusing the intelligence community of withholding information on their activities from Congress. “I have learned of some alleged Intelligence Community activities about which our committee has not been briefed,” Hoekstra wrote. He said that he believed the Bush administration’s failure to fully brief his committee could constitute “a violation of law“:

Similarly, in 2007, Hoekstra described a closed-door briefing by representatives from the intelligence community (including CIA) on the National Intelligence Estimate of Iran’s nuclear capability, saying that the members “didn’t find [the briefers] forthcoming.” More recently, in November 2008, Hoekstra concluded that the CIA “may have been lying or concealing part of the truth” in testimony to Congress regarding a 2001 incident in which the CIA mistakenly killed an American citizen in Peru. “We cannot have an intelligence community that covers up what it does and then lies to Congress,” Hoekstra said of the incident.

In yesterday’s New York Times, Jeffrey Goldberg gave voice, and some historical context, to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s fears about Iran:

[Netanyahu]’s preoccupation with the Iranian nuclear program seems sincere and deeply felt. I recently asked one of his advisers to gauge for me the depth of Mr. Netanyahu’s anxiety about Iran. His answer: “Think Amalek.”

“Amalek,” in essence, is Hebrew for “existential threat.” Tradition holds that the Amalekites are the undying enemy of the Jews. They appear in Deuteronomy, attacking the rear columns of the Israelites on their escape from Egypt. The rabbis teach that successive generations of Jews have been forced to confront the Amalekites: Nebuchadnezzar, the Crusaders, Torquemada, Hitler and Stalin are all manifestations of Amalek’s malevolent spirit.

If Iran’s nuclear program is, metaphorically, Amalek’s arsenal, then an Israeli prime minister is bound by Jewish history to seek its destruction, regardless of what his allies think.

There’s a bit more to the significance of “Amalek” here than Goldberg lets on. It’s true that the biblical role of the Amalekites is essentially to harass and persecute the Israelites, but that’s only part of it. The other part is that the Amalekites — men, women, children, and livestock –get destroyed in huge numbers by divine command (I Samuel 15:3) — something we would probably refer to as “widespread atrocities,” if not outright “genocide” in a modern context.

Interestingly, as Goldberg himself has reported in the past — but for some reason neglects to mention in his article — invocations of “Amalek” are a feature of extremist Israeli settler propaganda against Palestinians and Arabs, something which I’m sure is not lost on Israel’s more right-wing American supporters. In a 2004 New Yorker article on the Israeli settler movement, Goldberg asked Benzi Lieberman, the chairman of the council of settlements “if he thought the Amalekites existed today.” Lieberman responded:

“The Palestinians are Amalek!” Lieberman went on, “We will destroy them. We won’t kill them all. But we will destroy their ability to think as a nation. We will destroy Palestinian nationalism.”

It seems like an adviser to the Israeli prime minister deploying this historical metaphor against Iran is just the kind of thing that might encourage a rational Iranian regime to try and obtain some sort of a deterrent. It’s also interesting that Goldberg — who has been one of Israel’s chief Iran alarm-bell ringers here in the U.S., always noting with great concern the various utterances of Iran’s leaders against Israel — should have no problem conveying it. Just as with Rick Warren’s comments about biblical support for assassination, it’s the kind of thing that Americans and Israelis tend to freak about when it comes from the other side, but downplay or apologize for when it happens in our own political-cultural context — when we even notice it.

Clearly, Iran presents a challenge for both the U.S. and Israel. But I’m not sure what purpose is served by casting Iran as such an unreasoning, irrational, and undeterrable foe, other than maybe frightening people in order to short-circuit attempts at diplomacy.

Also, read Bernard Avishai and Tony Karon.

A newly-disclosed 2005 memo, authored by then-State Department counselor Philip Zelikow, then-Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, and then-Deputy Assistant Secretary for Detainee Affairs Matthew Waxman, gave President Bush “clear and unequivocal advice encouraging a detainee interrogation system that followed humane practices that adhered to US and international law.” The memo was authored as the Bush administration was seeking a “fresh approach” handling terror detainee and just weeks after the OLC issued its second round of torture memos.

In the memo, the three Bush administration officials argue that the President should appoint a “special board” to “review general U.S. government detainee policy and operations” and “evaluate issues of effectiveness and intelligence value.”

While that review was taking place, the authors recommended that U.S. forces treat detainees in the so-called war on terror as if they were “civilian detainees under the law of war.” “This is the system generally being used by our forces in Iraq. Adopting this interim approach allows us to handle the detainees on a well understood basis that gives our forces clear, unambiguous guidelines for conduct,” they wrote, adding:

WE ARE NOT SAYING THAT THESE DETAINEES ARE, NECESSARILY ENTITLED TO THIS STATUS. TO BE CLEAR: WE ARE GIVING THEM A TEMPORARY STATUS THEY DO NOT DESERVE. BUT WE ARE NOT DOING THIS FOR THEM. WE ARE DOING IT FOR US.

Their approach would have harmonized detainee treatment procedures in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Jane Mayer explained in The Dark Side that the differing guidelines for detainee treatment in the three different theaters had, in part, lead to the abuses at Abu Gahrib.

As the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman explained in his account of the Cheney vice presidency, Angler, the memo was a “top-to-bottom assault on the Cheney-Addington legal model. Its authors proposed to seek legislation, acknowledge secret prisons, give the worst of the terrorists Geneva rights, and bring them back within the full jurisdiction of American courts.” But the memo’s arguments were not well received. As Gellman writes, after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice showed the memo to an “intrigued” President Bush, it was shown to other high-level administration officials:

England, Rumsfeld’s deputy, brought the paper to his boss…Rumsfeld reacted coldy. He had not authorized this. … Rumsfeld directed that all copies be withdrawn from circulation and shredded. (p. 349)

National Security Adviser Steve Hadley canceled a discussion of the document upon hearing about its contents from Cheney’s office. Zelikow explained his goal in writing the memo last week in testimony before the Senate Judiciary committee saying that he wanted to “effectively prohibit ‘cruel, inhuman, and degrading’ treatment of detainees.”

When President Obama announced on his second day in office that he would close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) said on MSNBC that Obama had “given a reasonable timeline here.” He praised Obama for “helping us reassert ourselves around the world as a moral beacon, in terms of how people are being handled.”

However, on ABC’s “This Week” today, Webb reversed course and appeared to condemn the Obama administration for “creating artificial timelines” to close Guantanamo, where he said detainees should stay. He also objected to a truth commission on torture. On the most important national security issues, Webb sided with the right wing:

ON TRUTH COMMISSION

STEPHANOPOULOS: That’s the irony here , Senator Webb, as Speaker Gingrich says, investigate. He wants a separate House investigation. Speaker Pelosi says, fine, let’s have a truth commission, the one that Senator Kyl doesn’t want. Where do you stand on this?

WEBB: I just don’t think it’s that big a deal. [...]

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, no truth commission?

WEBB: I think this will resolve itself without something like that.

ON RELEASING NON-DANGEROUS UIGHURS

STEPHANOPOULOS: I know there are about 17, I believe, Chinese Uighurs, they are called, who have been ordered released by a federal court, they’ve determined not to be a threat to the United States. And the administration has been working on plans to bring them to Virginia. Can you accept them in your state?

WEBB: Well, let me back up for a minute. The answer is no. No.

ON CLOSING GUANTANAMO

WEBB: We spend hundreds of millions of dollars building an appropriate facility with all security precautions in Guantanamo to try these cases. … I do not believe they should be tried in the United States. … We should, at the right time, close Guantanamo. But I don’t think that it should be closed, and in terms of transferring people here.

Watch a compilation:

Webb said repeatedly that the Guantanamo detainees “deserve due process.” But at the same time, he refused to accept a court’s ruling that the Chinese Uighurs are not terrorists, pose no threat, and should be released.

And Webb’s opposition to allowing detainees their due process rights in Virginia courts is not shared by everyone: Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) recently wrote about the “courage and patriotism” of Virginians who supported courts in their state in trying and convicting Zacarias Moussaoui, John Walker Lindh, and Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad:

[S]hould President Obama determine that Alexandria needs to play a reasonably limited role in a nationwide effort to bring justice to the Guantanamo detainees and close this unfortunate chapter of American history, I am confident that Alexandrians will stand strong as they always have: gritting their teeth, stiffening their spines and carrying the load required so that the American values of justice and the rule of law are not overridden but, rather, respected and honored, as is our heritage as a great nation.

Andrew Sullivan has been doing good work looking into some troubling aspects of the career of Lt Gen Stanley McChrystal, the new top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Specifically, McChrystal’s oversight of Camp Nama in Iraq, where serious abuses were committed by U.S. troops under his command.

While many of the stories on McChrystal’s recent promotion have mentioned the fact that his special ops team was responsible for finding and killing Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, it’s good to remember that, according to the interrogator responsible for generating the intelligence that led directly to Zarqawi, that information was gotten using traditional interrogation methods and without recourse to the abusive measures that were apparently commonplace in McChrystal’s unit.

Just something to keep in mind the next time you hear some business class Patton banging on about doing “what’s necessary.”

Anthony Shadid had a follow-up yesterday to this January 13 story about Nadhim Khalil. Khalil, a thirty year-old Sunni cleric and former insurgent, had, through an alliance with U.S. forces, essentially become the law in his town of Thuluyah, running it as his own little mob fiefdom.

Shadid reports that Khalil has now been arrested by Iraqi government troops:

Khalil’s rivals have hailed his detention. His colleagues call it caprice. Either way, it underlines the free-for-all of elusive loyalties, stinging betrayals and unrequited vengeance as the U.S. military withdraws, its erstwhile allies splinter, the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki remains tentative and everyone vies for power ahead of national elections.

In short, no one is in charge in Thuluyah. Khalil was — until his arrest. [...]

He was taken to neighboring Balad, where, Khalil said, cheering members of the Iraqi security forces began shouting slogans for Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric.

While Khalil obviously has reason to lie about his jailers chanting Sadr slogans — it strengthens his claim that his detention is politically motivated — it’s not particularly surprising to hear, as the Iraqi security forces are riddled with Sadr supporters and former Mahdi Army militiamen. It’s worth recalling, too, that in 2006 Balad was the scene of Iraq’s worst episodes of sectarian cleansing, a four-day rampage in which Shia militias “all but emptied Balad of Sunnis.”

The Washington Post has an article this morning that does a good job explaining the thinking behind Defense Secretary Gates’ rebalancing of defense spending toward things that actually help our troops in wars America is fighting now and away from spectacular big-ticket items that the defense industry favors:

For decades, the Pentagon’s focus has been on building expensive, high-tech weapons programs for conventional wars. Gates has embarked on an ambitious effort to force the department to focus more of its energy on developing arms and equipment that can help troops on the ground as they battle insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq. [...]

The deteriorating conditions in [Afghanistan and Pakistan] seem to have sharpened the secretary’s sense of urgency. His 2010 defense budget, introduced this month, proposes to cut or curtail a spate of large-scale weapons programs.

“Listening to our troops and commanders, unvarnished and unscripted, has from the moment I took this job been the greatest single source of ideas on what the department needs to do,” he told lawmakers Wednesday. When some lawmakers questioned whether he had done the rigorous analysis to justify his budget cuts, Gates responded in his flat Kansas twang that the Pentagon is “drowning in analysis.” Most of the changes he’d made were “kind of no-brainers,” he said.

The article also includes the usual quotes from the usual disgruntled sources sounding the usual alarms over the fact that the United States is embracing defeat — excuse me, a “peace dividend” — by not maintaining a military force that is enough orders of magnitude larger and more advanced than our closest competitor. While the changes that Gates has made may be “no-brainers,” each and every one runs up against an entrenched and determined constituency. It’s to Gates’ credit, and the president’s, that the administration is standing firm behind the difficult but necessary choices they’ve made regarding America’s defense priorities.

Related, one of the problems with cutting projects like the F-22 — which Gates wants to cap at 187 — is that they are just so cool. And they look great when set to techno music. However, with the help of technicians here at Wonk Room Labs I have completed what I think is a successful experiment to prove that anything can be made to seem more silly — and less necessary to America’s defense — when sped up and set to Benny Hill music.

Watch it:

Many conservatives, including Liz Cheney, who is the daughter of Vice President Cheney, have been defending the Bush administration’s torture regime arguing that many of the techniques authorized were derived from U.S. special forces training called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Evasion (SERE) and were used on American troops.

While the situations are clearly not analogous (mainly because the circumstances in which techniques are applied are “very different“), former master instructor and chief of training at Navy’s SERE school Malcolm Nance said last night on MSNBC that that argument is “ridiculous on its face” and he called those making it “torture apologists”:

Host Rachel Maddow then asked Nance if he would use SERE techniques in the “faulty” premise of a “ticking time bomb scenario.”

MADDOW: In the case of an actual ticking time bomb scenario, which is a faulty premise because things don’t work out this way in the real world, would you do SERE, these techniques on a prisoner in that scenario? [...]

NANCE: No of course not, because one, it defeats the ticking time bomb scenario, in that all the prisoner has to do is not answer the question or, better yet, the prisoner will lie. And once the prisoner lies, especially with al Qaeda members. Let me tell you something, their ideology — they have a concept within their ideology called “al-warrah el barrah” (sp) and that is absolute devotion to their god, but absolute disavowal and hatred of anything that’s not their god.

Nance added that when these techniques were used, detainees knew they were were giving “gibberish,” thus seeing “that as a victory.” “[W]hat we’ve done is we created al Qaeda SERE school for them,” Nance said. Watch it:

Incidently, “torture apologist” Liz Cheney also made this ticking time bomb argument earlier this week: “We are talking about a situation in which there are imminent threats to the United States so if you say to me, this guy’s got information that’s gonna save my kids’ lives and your kids lives that’s going to keep this country safe but we gotta waterboard them to get it, I got no problem with that.”

Transcript: Read more

Ralph Peters’ latest cry for help supports a suspicion that I’ve long had about conservatives and counterinsurgency. For all of their praise of General Petraeus for having “turned Iraq around” using population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) methods, (what COIN guru David Kilcullen has called “armed social work“) conservatives remain generally committed to the proposition that the best way to protect Americans from terrorism is to just go out into other countries and kill lots and lots of people.

Praising the promotion of former joint special operations chief Lt. Gen. Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Peters writes that “Petraeus’ deservedly lauded performance in Iraq appears to have inhibited his ability to think clearly about Afghanistan”:

[Petraeus] doesn’t seem to grasp that, while al Qaeda was a foreign and ultimately unwanted presence in Iraq, the Taliban’s the home team in Afghanistan. Afghan tribesmen just don’t share our interests. And Iraq’s a state. Afghanistan’s an accident. [...]

Will McChrystal, our special operator without peer, be allowed to do what’s necessary — and to jettison huggy-bear programs that sound good but don’t work? Can he focus on the destruction of our enemies?

While recognizing that violent kinetic operations such as those that McChrystal oversaw in Iraq are often an underplayed aspect of counterinsurgency — and McChrystal’s promotion strongly indicates that such operations will play a major role in Afghanistan — it’s important to note here that we spent a number of years doing “what’s necessary” in Iraq, (as Peters wrote so charmingly at the time, “if we can’t leave a democracy behind, we should at least leave the corpses of our enemies… Give therapeutic violence a chance.”) and only managed to incite a violent insurgency and midwife a sectarian civil war that killed tens of thousands and utterly changed the face of the country. Of course, Peters’ view was that we weren’t doing enough of “what’s necessary” — we just needed to do more of it, and harder.

He was, of course, proved wrong on that, just as were many on the other side like myself who were skeptical that any strategy conducted under the auspices of a U.S. occupation could actually succeed in bringing violence down. (It still remains to be seen, however, whether that strategy will result in a stable and unified Iraqi state.) While I think it’s correct to note the difference between Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, it seems to me that the fact that the Taliban (or the various insurgent factions that are often carelessly referred to together as “the Taliban”) are more deeply embedded in Afghan society argues even more for a careful population- and governance-centric approach to isolate the irreconcilable hardcore from the reconcilable opportunists.

Peters’ basic argument, though, is that protecting the population was all fine and nice in Iraq, but in Afghanistan it’s time to get back to the KILLIN’. Add this to the tendency of people like Bill Kristol to diminish or dismiss the role that public relations and symbolism play in counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency and you really have to question whether they really understand or believe in the strategic approach that they’ve been hailing so vociferously for the past couple years. I have my own concerns about the Cult of COIN that’s been developing here in Washington, but I think it’s becoming clear that, for many pro-war conservatives, what Petraeus and the COINdinistas really deserve praise for is helping them save face.

In yesterday’s Senate Judiciary subcommittee torture hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) lashed out at witnesses and questioned whether the hearing was “a political stunt,” contending that “it’s not really fair” to the Bush administration. He repeatedly emphasized that the “other side of the story” is that torture produced “good information.”

Later, however, Graham broke with the conservative line and candidly admitted that torture has not make the U.S. “safer.” Talking to reporter Spencer Ackerman after the hearing, Graham claimed that the interrogation program “saved lives,” but at the same time, he stated that torture didn’t “as a whole” result in greater U.S. security:

GRAHAM: Well, I’m just saying there’s information that was devised, was received from enhanced interrogation techniques that did tell us about what the enemy was up to and probably save lives. That’s the other side of the story. I don’t think that these techniques as a whole have made us safer, because of the problems we’ve had. We’ve got a new way of going forward.

“Let’s have interrogation techniques within our values, but let’s don’t tell the enemies exactly what they are,” Graham concluded. Watch it:

Graham did not specify what “problems” the U.S. has had because of torture, but the evidence is clear. Torture has led to the deaths of coalition troops, inflamed anti-American sentiment, and shattered the reputation of the U.S. Graham’s statement is a significant break from Vice President Cheney, who insisted on Sunday that torture “kept the nation safe for nearly eight years.”

Graham, a former JAG lawyer, has tried to walk a fine line in the torture debate. To his credit, he has been a frequent critic of the Bush administration’s interrogation program, saying that waterboarding is torture and forcefully criticizing Bush officials who have hedged on the topic. Yet he has also voted against banning waterboarding, tried to argue just yesterday that waterboarding was effective, and opposes efforts to investigate the Bush administration.

In the Wall Street Journal this morning, Karl Rove declared that House Speaker Nancy Pelsoi (D-CA) was “an accomplice to ‘torture,’” repeating the right wing’s latest talking point that Pelosi is responsible for Bush’s torture program and should be demonized — even as Rove insists it wasn’t really “torture” and actually was a really great program.

This morning, Pelosi held a press conference to address these allegations. Reading a statement, she said that the CIA had told her in September 2002 — falsely — that waterboarding was not being used:

PELOSI: The CIA briefed me only once on enhanced interrogation techniques in September 2002, in my capacity as ranking member of the intelligence committee. I was informed then that the Department of Justice opinions had concluded that the use of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques were legal. The only mention of waterboarding at that briefing was that it was not being employed. [...]

We also now know that techniques including waterboarding had already been employed and that those briefing me had given me inaccurate and incomplete information. At the same time the Bush administration…was misleading the American people about the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Indeed, we now know that the CIA had waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times in August, 2002, after receiving approval from Condoleezza Rice in July.

Pelosi also accused the CIA and the Bush administration of repeatedly misleading Congress and the American people, and repeated her call for a truth commission to examine the issue:

PELOSI: So on the subject of what’s happening in Iraq, when it’s talking about the techniques used by the intelligence community on those they’re interrogating, at every step of the way, the administration was misleading the Congress. And that is the issue. And that is why we need a truth commission to look into the issue.

REPORTER: So Madame Speaker, just to be clear, you’re accusing the CIA of lying to you in September of 2002?

PELOSI: Yes. Misleading the Congress of the United States.

Watch it:

In today’s White House press briefing, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was bombarded by questions from reporters about the Obama administration’s decision not to release dozens of photos showing the abuse of detainees by U.S. military personnel. Gibbs argued that releasing the photos would “provide a disincentive for detainee abuse investigation”; people would be afraid to take the photos if they knew they were going to be released. He called the release of the photos “sensationalistic”:

GIBBS: The disincentive is in the notion that every time one of these photos is taken, that it’s going to be released — that nothing is added by the release of the photo, right? The existence of the investigation is not increased because of the release of the photo. It’s just to provide, in some ways, a sensationalistic portion of that investigation. [...]

But the — I think if every time somebody took a picture of detainee abuse, if every time that — if any time any of those pictures were mandatorily going to be necessarily released, despite the fact that they were being investigated, I think that would provide a disincentive to take those pictures and investigate.

Watch it:

The real disincentive caused from the release of the photos is that it will hopefully caution U.S. officials from ever engaging in torture again. As the ACLU’s Amrit Singh explained, the photographs are “critical for helping the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as for holding senior officials accountable for authorizing or permitting such abuse.”

On April 23, the Justice Department said that it would release the 44 photos as part of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU. At the press briefing the next day, Gibbs made clear that the Obama administration believed it was legally bound to take this action:

GIBBS: The Second Circuit Court ruled in December of 2008 that the photos had to be released. The previous administration lost a court case on that. The Department of Justice decided based on the ruling that it was hopeless to appeal, and a mandate ordering the release of those photos came Monday. And the administration, the Pentagon, and the court entered into an agreement to release those photos.

Additionally, Obama reportedly decided not to release the photos because he was concerned that it would put U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan in danger of reprisal. But in April, a Pentagon spokesman told the New York Times that while officials were “still concerned that release of the pictures could make the military’s mission more difficult, that consideration was less pressing now, given that Iraq is more stable than it was two or three years ago.”

Transcript: Read more

In 2006, President Bush proudly described the “alternative set of procedures” used on detainee Abu Zubaydah to extract “information that could save innocent lives.” “I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary,” Bush said.

During today’s judiciary subcommittee hearing on torture, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) questioned former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, who led a successful interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. Whitehouse read a portion of Bush’s speech describing Zubaydah’s interrogation, and asked Soufan whether it was an “accurate” depiction. Soufan said it appeared Bush had been told “half-truths,” and agreed with Whitehouse that he then repeated these “half-truths”:

WHITEHOUSE: Does that statement accurately reflect the interrogation of Abu Zubydah?

SOUFAN: Well, the environment that he’s talking about, yes, it reflects, you know, he was injured, he required medical care. But I think the president — my own personal opinion here, based on my recollection — he was told probably half-truth.

WHITEHOUSE: And repeated half-truth obviously. The statement as presented does not conform to what you know to be the case from your experience on hand.

SOUFAN: Yes. Yes sir. Yes sir.

Watch it:

Whitehouse also read a portion of the May, 2005 OLC memo that claimed that Zubaydah “identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the Sep. 11 attacks” only “once enhanced techniques were employed.” Whitehouse asked Soufan if this was accurate:

WHITEHOUSE: From your position at the actual interrogation of Abu Zubaydah you know that statement not to be true?

SOUFAN: Yes sir.

Indeed, Soufan and his team nursed extracted valuable information from Zubaydah — including, most importantly, the identify of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — while nursing him back to health. “We were able to get the information about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a couple of days,” Soufan told Newsweek. “We didn’t have to do any of this [torture]. We could have done this the right way.”

Yesterday, the Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel reported that newly Democratic Senator Arlen Specter will speak at a conference entitled “Libel Lawfare: Silencing Criticism of Radical Islam.” Specter is scheduled to deliver the welcome address.

According to the invitation, the “conference is substantially funded by the Middle East Forum, which thanks an anonymous donor for his generosity.” The conference lists no Muslims among its presenters or participants.

Middle East Forum is a think tank run by right wing scholar-activist Daniel Pipes, who is also speaking at the conference. Since 9/11, Pipes has become notorious for trafficking in hoary old Orientalist stereotypes in order to stoke Americans’ prejudice against, and fear of, Islam. Pipes also oversees Campus Watch, a project that keeps tabs on and harasses academic scholars it deems insufficiently supportive of Israel.

In keeping with his stated belief that Arab- and Muslim-Americans deserve to be subjected to “special scrutiny,” during the 2008 presidential campaign Pipes published three different articles questioning whether Barack Obama ever practiced Islam as a child.

Also speaking at the conference is Frank Gaffney, who heads the Center for Security Policy. In February, CSP released a report, The Rise of the Iran Lobby, which claimed that “a complex network of individuals and organizations with ties to the clerical regime in Tehran is pressing forward in seeming synchrony to influence the new U.S. administration’s policy towards the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Among those listed as part of the “network” were Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, Ambassador Dennis Ross, Council on Foreign Relations Committee president Richard Haas, and the Center for a New American Security, simply by virtue of the fact that “the foreign policy positions of [CNAS's] affiliates correspond strongly to the preferred policy positions of Tehran’s mullahs.” CNAS has contributed a number of people to the Obama administration, including CNAS co-founder Michele Flournoy, who is now undersecretary of defense for policy.

The question for Sen. Specter is, why would he want to share the stage with, and help legitimize, characters such as Pipes and Gaffney who have leveled such baseless and irresponsible innuendos and accusations against both the president and key members of his administration?

It’s official: Accusing President Obama of trying to cash in a “peace dividend” is now a conservative talking point. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) first floated this argument in a speech last week at the American Enterprise Institute (a place which has contributed far more than its share of bad conservative ideas.) It was then pushed by AEI’s magazine wing. Today it’s a headline in the Washington Times and parroted by Washington Post blogger Bill Kristol, who lets fly with this gem:

It’s one thing to run deficits to fight wars and defend the country. It’s another to throw money at everything except defense and to increase the national debt while skimping on defense spending over the next several years, to the point where such spending will be, by 2016, at its lowest percentage of GDP since before World War II. Is the world really the safest it has been since the 1930s? Is it responsible to declare a peace dividend when we’re not at peace?

To read this, you might think that someone had actually “declared a peace dividend,” other than conservatives attacking the idea that there is one. As conservative talking points go, charging President Obama with trying to cash in a “peace dividend” seems pretty silly, both stylistically and substantively. A peace dividend sounds like something people would really like, not something they’d hate the president for cashing in.

As for comparing defense spending in 2016 to 1930 as a function of GDP — well, let’s just say that your average eighth grade could probably explain why that’s silly. But I will use this graph which I’ve stolen from Yglesias:

As always, conservative arguments speak volumes about the esteem in which they hold their intended audience.