Stygius

A stunned silence?

Yesterday's bombshell piece by Murray Waas has received a lot of blog coverage. Not surprising, since it outlines a coverup conspiracy that renders the Valerie Plame leak an offhand sideshow. Sean-Paul Kelley recommends the BooMan Tribune's synopsis of Waas' lengthy piece.

However, so far the piece hasn't received much mainstream coverage. Dan Froomkin:

But in the traditional media, the reaction has been utter and complete silence -- both after Waas's well-documented March 2 story, and again today. There's not one word about it in a single major outlet this morning.

And that's just not acceptable. Waas's fellow reporters at major news operations should either acknowledge and try to follow up his stories -- or debunk them. It's not okay to just leave them hanging out there. They're too important.

I know we all have aluminum tube fatigue, to a certain extent. However, the political issues behind the "intelligence" (covering up presidential complicity in intelligence abuse in order to keep control of the White House) are too important to ignore.

KSM & operational security

Bill Arkin gives an overview of CIA interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. The operational security he built into the plot is particularly striking, as well as details about the "second wave" of attacks that were in the early stages of planning.

Arkin concludes by trying to analogize September 11 and the invasion of Iraq as "catastrophic successes" leading to unanticipated consequences.

Denial. Distraction. Disinformation.

Politically, America has been reduced to the condition where if a president really just believes something hard enough, it's sound evidence and a good basis for decision making. Via Ezra Klein, Murray Waas complicates even that:

The White House was largely successful in defusing the Niger controversy because there was no evidence that Bush was aware that his claims about the uranium were based on faulty intelligence. Then-CIA Director George Tenet swiftly and publicly took the blame for the entire episode, saying that he and the CIA were at fault for not warning Bush and his aides that the information might be untrue.

But Hadley and other administration officials realized that it would be much more difficult to shield Bush from criticism for his statements regarding the aluminum tubes, for several reasons.

For one, Hadley's review concluded that Bush had been directly and repeatedly apprised of the deep rift within the intelligence community over whether Iraq wanted the high-strength aluminum tubes for a nuclear weapons program or for conventional weapons.

For another, the president and others in the administration had cited the aluminum tubes as the most compelling evidence that Saddam was determined to build a nuclear weapon -- even more than the allegations that he was attempting to purchase uranium.

And finally, full disclosure of the internal dissent over the importance of the tubes would have almost certainly raised broader questions about the administration's conduct in the months leading up to war.

"Presidential knowledge was the ball game," says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. "The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn't in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn't do that with the tubes."

Multiples warnings. Multiple occasions. And here's how success is measured these days:

In the end, the White House's damage control was largely successful, because the public did not learn until after the 2004 elections the full extent of the president's knowledge that the assessment linking the aluminum tubes to a nuclear weapons program might not be true. The most crucial information was kept under wraps until long after Bush's re-election.

But I'm sure history will vindicate this president's greatness . . . .

Oil and Water

Cruising the streets of Fort Collins, Colorado, the Biofuels Demonstration Vehicle -- which runs on 100% vegetable oil -- has been drawing stares. Check out www.oilandwater.org. Adorned with kayaks and New Belgium Brewery cases, the truck struck a proper Colorado pose.

Habeas Corpus not yet a corpse

In listening to some of the tape from the Supreme Court oral argument in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, it seems clear that the Bush Administration's core legal theories arguing for extra-legal authority to detain, try, and execute are collapsing under their own weight. (See Jurist for a forest of excellent links.) Solicitor General Steven Clements' torturous arguments were a collection of subject-changers, misdirections, and cliches, barely buttressed by a sympathetic Justice Scalia's employment of bad metaphors and red herrings.

Charging RINO has a quick roundup:

Linda Greenhouse is on the story as always for the New York Times; David Savage writes for the LA Times, and Dahlia Lithwick complements those pieces with her marvelous dispatch over at Slate.'

I remain sympathetic to certain counter-terrorism tactics considered "dirty," although the bungled exercise of authority by this administration has so robbed the country of moral authority that even this position seems totally delegitimized. The administration's attempt to universalize them into a  regime of unaccountable executive authority is an affront to the Constitution and the American way of life, at a time when we should be seeking to affirm both as a way to neutralize terrorist ideology. Previously, I wrote:

The president has resisted any effort to bring the conduct of war under Congress' purview, even the domestic capture of an American citizen by civilian authorities. This means there are gaping legal holes in the American system in the absence of legislation clarifying when and how captured enemies can be held. That's my beef. Pass a law permitting the president to detain indefinitely American members of al-Qaeda. Subject it to Congressional review or even some kind of quasi-judicial mechanism. But this argument for absolute presidential war power authority is bogus and the judiciary is right to blow it out of the water. I'm not particularly interested in Padilla's rights, rather my own.

I'm open to the suspension of habeas corpus for al-Qaeda suspects who meet certain conditions, set and established by the Congress. Yesterday, much of the argument turned on Clement's rather stupid assertion that Congress implicitly -- or "inadvertently," in Souter's characterization -- suspended the Great Writ. Talk about amateurish. Time to stop screwing around, Mr. President; go to Congress with a specific request to suspend the writ, in a way tailored specifically to the threat facing America. Abide by the Constitution.

The absence of a proper legislative framework -- one passed by Congress -- to deal with terrorism crimes, has left gaping holes in our national counterterrorism strategy. One can't blame the courts for this as they deflate the administration's arguments, but rather the self-serving legal theories of of this emergent authoritarian streak in American conservatism. This imperial reading of the US Constitution is a gross absurdity on its own face. It's legally as well as morally bankrupt, and it's time to move on.

Fitzgerald prepping more indictments?

Jeralyn Merritt passes along a Truthout report that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is preparing to issue more indictments within the next month. The report comes from anonymous sources with a seemingly deliberately muddled  relationship to the case.

In lengthy interviews over the weekend and on Monday, they said that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has started to prepare the paperwork to present to the grand jury seeking an indictment against White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove or National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

Although the situation remains fluid, it's possible, these sources said, that Fitzgerald may seek to indict both Rove and Hadley, charging them with perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy related to their roles in the leak of Plame Wilson's identity and their effort to cover up their involvement following a Justice Department investigation.

Also, Jeralyn writes that it was Karl Rove himself who sold out the Vice President's chief-of-staff, by revealing to Fitzgerald an obvious attempt to obstruct justice in an attempt to avoid a perjury charge.

Yesterday, I wrote a long legal analysis of Raw Story's report that Rove was responsible for directing Fitz to the 250 pages of e-mails discussed at the Scooter Libby hearing on February 23.

Rove's lawyer, Don Suskin, thus has to sell two mutually inconsistent stories: first, that Rove has been heroically cooperating with Fitzgerald in the interest of the rule of law; second, that Rove is loyal in the face of pressure.

Not many chances left, folks

Several times in the past, I've encouraged readers to get the free DVD, Last Best Chance.

I do so again, in the context of this New York Times article:

Undercover Congressional investigators successfully smuggled into the United States enough radioactive material to make two dirty bombs, even after it set off alarms on radiation detectors installed at border checkpoints, a new report says.

But investigators bluffed their way into the country:

In the test case, undercover investigators bought a small amount of radioactive material, most likely cesium. Then on Dec. 15, they drove across the border at undisclosed locations from Canada and Mexico, intentionally picking spots where the detection equipment had been installed.

The alarms went off in both locations, and the investigators were pulled aside for questioning. In both cases, they showed the agents from the Customs and Border Protection agency forged import licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, based on an image of the real document they found on the Internet.

The GAO's 12-page report is in PDF here. Investigators penetrated both a US-Canada crossing, and a US-Mexico crossing.

 

Better ideas? You bet!

Francis Fukuyama and Adam Garfinkle answer a fatuously put rhetorical question:

As an editorial in The Wall Street Journal recently asked: "Anyone out there have a better idea" than the Bush administration's policy of high-profile democracy promotion in the Arab and Muslim worlds as a means to fight terrorism? Well, yes, there is one. That better idea consists of separating the struggle against radical Islamism from promoting democracy in the Middle East, focusing on the first struggle, and dramatically changing our tone and tactics on the democracy promotion front, at least for now.

End the conflation of the two, they demand. The pseudo-Wilsonian blathering actually obscures the nature of both problems, they are arguing, and thus impedes the identification of their solution. Given that this conflation effectively constitutes the United States' current strategic worldview, as set out by the president and his government, this piece attacks the key prop of the administration's self-mythology. (It's not a strategy, so much as one of the after-the-fact arguments grasped to justify the Iraq invasion. As the most rhetorically inspiring, it was seized on by the administration, and "Lo!" a "strategy.")

The nub of the conflation is drawing a specious causal relation between the two:

Authoritarian political cultures do function as enablers of radical Islamism, but the essential cause of the latter--today as before, in dozens of historical cases concerning violent millenarian movements--is the difficulty that some societies and individuals have in coming to terms with social change. That is why rapid modernization is likely to produce more short-term radicalism, not less. Muslims in democratic Europe are as much a part of this problem as those in the Middle East. This is not a trivial point; it is a central one that directly challenges a key tenet of the administration's view.

What the administration sees as one problem ought to be seen as two. Radical Islamism needs to be dealt with separately from democracy promotion. This involves doing everything we can to ensure the political success of the governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. It also involves killing, capturing or otherwise neutralizing hard-core terrorists in many parts of the world, and keeping dangerous materials out of their hands, in what will look less like a war than like police and intelligence operations.

Hmm, that last bit sounds familiar. They call for an effort to "stigmatize" terrorism, one approach for which I examined some time ago.

Democracy promotion should remain an integral part of American foreign policy, but it should not be seen as a principal means of fighting terrorism. We should stigmatize and fight radical Islamism as if the social and political dysfunction of the Arab world did not exist, and we should shrewdly, quietly, patiently and with as many allies as possible promote the amelioration of that dysfunction as if the terrorist problem did not exist. It is when we mix these two issues together that we muddle our understanding of both, with the result that we neither defeat terrorism nor promote democracy but rather the reverse.

Fukuyama's and Garfinkle's piece helps reintrroduce into both policy problems the political oxygen necessary for solving both of them, whereas both have been paralyzed for years by the administration's need for ex post facto justifications for its military adventurism.

Cross-posted to American Footprints.

Dissecting the laundry machine

Pardon the above mixed metaphor; I'm in a hurry, which means it's time to parasite-blog Laura Rozen again:

Jack Abramoff's money-laundering cut outs. Can't keep track of which vehicles Abramoff used to launder the Marianas sweatshop money, vs. that of the Russian energy firm, and the tribal cash? Paul Kiel has a handy reference guide. Still curious about the Caucasus foundation, the Hong Kong outfit, and how Abramoff became a lobbyist for a brief while for the Pakistani military.

Hearts and minds in the Philippines

Interesting article flagged by EagleSpeak. (Balikitan is an annual joint exercise between the United State and the Philippines, whose constitution bars a permanent presence by foreing military. Yet a constantly present US unconventional force helps combat the transnational jihadist networks that operate in Southeast Asia.)

Stars and Stripes on US counterinsurgency tactics in the southern Philippines:

After Balikatan training between U.S. and Philippine troops ended March 5, a small group of mostly U.S. special forces remained in the country under the umbrella Joint Special Operations Task Force — Philippines.

The task force has maintained a continuous presence in the southern Philippines since July 2002, with people rotating in and out about every six months, said Army Lt. Col. Mark Zimmer, task force spokesman.

The mission is counterterrorism.

More specifically, the mission is denial of sanctuary, something which requires a whole host of proactive strategies; most of them aiming toward not alienating the locals, which in the short term denies the real enemy breathing space, thus creating conditions for eventually coopting the populace towards killing off that enemy. Voila!

To this point, the short JFQ paper, "The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture" [pdf] is helpful.

This is important, since al-Qaeda affiliates have long targeted the southern islands -- which are predominantly Muslim, and "overseen" by a predominantly Catholic government in Manila -- for operations. The incompetent central government has at times either brutalized the population, or else neglected it such that it encourages the kind of statelessness in which terrorist networks thrive politically; hence, the worst of both worlds. Last year,  the US charge d'affaires last year even described -- rather haplessly -- the island of Mindanao as a "new Mecca for terrorism."

While Stars and Stripes is a strange beast journalistically (an "editorially independent" entity of the DOD), it is satisfying that the paper lauds this kind of work. In a way, it helps that this facet of the "war on terrorism," or whatever you want to call it, is below the radar in the US. Oddly, that seems to be contributing towards the likelihood of success in the Philippines, since keeping the civilian leadership from devoting it much attention decreases the probability they'll screw it up.