Have any righties noticed that the terrorist plot to smuggle explosives onto airplanes was busted through police work?
Category Archives: Terrorism
Good New, Bad News, Part II
Back to the new James Fallows article in Atlantic, which I discussed here —
Recap: Fallows interviewed a number of experts to determine where we are in the “war” on terrorism. In spite of the Bush Administration’s multiple blunders, at the moment our national security situation isn’t all that bad. As explained here, the chance of al Qaeda or another terrorist group pulling off another September 11 is fairly small.
The fly in the ointment is Iraq.
About half of the authorities I spoke with were from military or intelligence organizations; the others were academics or members of think tanks, plus a few businesspeople. Half were Americans; the rest were Europeans, Middle Easterners, Australians, and others. Four years ago, most of these people had supported the decision to invade Iraq. Although they now said that the war had been a mistake (followed by what nearly all viewed as a disastrously mismanaged occupation), relatively few said that the United States should withdraw anytime soon. The reasons most of them gave were the need for America to make good on commitments, the importance of keeping the Sunni parts of Iraq from turning into a new haven for global terrorists, and the chance that conditions in Iraq would eventually improve.
One, I worry about the expertise of anyone who supported the decision to invade Iraq. Two, this article was written before the recent Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. I strongly suspect that whatever slim chance there might have been of a not-too-terrible outcome in Iraq is now utterly gone. And there’s no doubt the neocons are hoping to use the conflict to take the war to Syria and Iran.
“If the United States stays in Iraq, it keeps making enemies,” Fallows writes. “If it leaves, it goes dragging its tail.” The war is hurting us so many ways, from the misallocation of resources, growing deficits, erosion of civil liberties, and loss of moral high ground. Maybe a little tail dragging is in order.
The final destructive response helping al-Qaeda has been America’s estrangement from its allies and diminution of its traditionally vast “soft power.†“America’s cause is doomed unless it regains the moral high ground,†Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of Britain’s secret intelligence agency, MI-6, told me. He pointed out that by the end of the Cold War there was no dispute worldwide about which side held the moral high ground—and that this made his work as a spymaster far easier. “Potential recruits would come to us because they believed in the cause,†he said. A senior army officer from a country whose forces are fighting alongside America’s in Iraq similarly told me that America “simply has to recapture its moral authority.†His reasoning:
The United States is so powerful militarily that by its very nature it represents a threat to every other nation on earth. The only country that could theoretically destroy every single other country is the United States. The only way we can say that the U.S. is not a threat is by looking at intent, and that depends on moral authority. If you’re not sure the United States is going to do the right thing, you can’t trust it with that power, so you begin thinking, How can I balance it off and find other alliances to protect myself?
America’s glory has been its openness and idealism, internally and externally. Each has been constrained from time to time, but not for as long or in as open-ended a way as now.
I combed through the Fallows article looking for a compelling argument to stay in Iraq, other than “the need for America to make good on commitments, the importance of keeping the Sunni parts of Iraq from turning into a new haven for global terrorists, and the chance that conditions in Iraq would eventually improve.” No luck. If improving the security situation in Iraq by force of American arms were still possible, then perhaps those would be arguments for staying in Iraq. I doubt it’s still possible, however.
If the United States were to begin pulling troops out of Iraq now, it would be interpreted correctly throughout the Middle East as an open admission of defeat — one that would likely lead fairly quickly to a complete American evacuation of the country. (Maybe not literally by landing helicopters on the roof of the embassy, but all in the region would understand the military reality that as the force grows smaller it will become progressively more dangerous to keep it in Iraq.)
Such an outcome could well force Iraq’s Shi’a political leaders to snuggle up even more tightly to Iran, if only as a matter of physical survival. If the full-scale civil war everyone seems to expect were to break out following an American withdrawal, Baghdad might even feel compelled to call in Iranian troops. At a minimum, Iran could be left with enormous influence over, if not outright control of, the Iraqi government and its security forces. Access to Iraqi air space would give Iran a direct resupply corridor to Syria, and, through Syria, to Hizbullah. A ground presence could provide Tehran with a direct ground link — call it the Ayatollah Khomeini Trail — assuming the Kurds could be bought off and/or intimidated, or the Sunni belt pacified (one shudders to think of what that might involve.)
Presto: one Shi’a crescent to go.
The Israel situation has, um, complicated it all:
Of course, it might not actually come to this — or if it did it might not come quickly. But the fact remains that the U.S. Army is the only significant force standing between Iran and it’s closest allies, and thus between Iran and Israel. If, as it now seems, Washington and Jerusalem both perceive Iran as the primary threat (and/or target for aggression) in the region, then there is no real distinction between America’s occupation of Iraq and Israel’s intended re-occupation of southern Lebanon. They are, in essence, both part of the next war.
It seems increasingly probable that that war will come soon — perhaps as early as November or December, although more likely next year. Israel’s failure to knock out Hizbullah with a rapid first strike has left the neocons even deeper in the hole, enormously ratcheting up the pressure to try to recoup all losses by taking the war to Damascus and Tehran.
In other words, it’s almost time for the ultimate “flight forward” — the one that finally pushes the Middle East into World War III.
You’ll like this — Sidney Blumenthal writes in Salon,
The National Security Agency is providing signal intelligence to Israel to monitor whether Syria and Iran are supplying new armaments to Hezbollah as it fires hundreds of missiles into northern Israel, according to a national security official with direct knowledge of the operation. President Bush has approved the secret program.
Inside the administration, neoconservatives on Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security staff and Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative senior director for the Near East on the National Security Council, are prime movers behind sharing NSA intelligence with Israel, and they have discussed Syrian and Iranian supply activities as a potential pretext for Israeli bombing of both countries, the source privy to conversations about the program says. (Intelligence, including that gathered by the NSA, has been provided to Israel in the past for various purposes.) The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war.
While the much-derided Condi Rice muddles ahead with something that might resemble a foreign policy if you squint and cross your eyes when you look at it, the neocons are actively trying to marginalize her. Condi mostly has been buying time for the Israelis to continue to bomb Lebanon,
But the neocon scenario extends far beyond that objective to pushing Israel into a “cleansing war” with Syria and Iran, says the national security official, which somehow will redeem Bush’s beleaguered policy in the entire region.
Of course, it’s desirable to get the American people on board with the program. Back to Billmon:
A number of wealthy pro-Israel donors, including Ronald Lauder, the perfume heir, have given millions to something called the Israel Project — a “public education” cum PR cum grassroots lobbying machine — to fund a program specifically aimed at building support for a military strike on Iran. You can’t turn on Fox News these days without finding James Woolsey or Newt Gingrich or Bill Kristol or some other pro-Israel mouthpiece demanding war with Syria and/or Iran, and painting it as the only way to stop the rockets falling on Haifa.
Billmon writes that even if the Dems finally speak out against Iraq, he predicts they will remain loyal spear carriers for Israel.
I don’t want rockets falling on Haifa, and I believe most Americans don’t want rockets falling on Haifa. But at some point the American people need to have a serious discussion about how far we’re willing to go, and how much of our own security we’re willing to risk, to keep rockets from falling on Haifa. And, especially after more than three years in Iraq, I think many Americans could be ready to establish some boundaries.
It’s true that the latest Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg Poll shows that Americans think recent Israeli actions in Lebanon are justified, 59 to 28 percent, with 13 percent unsure. 50 percent of Americans believe the U.S. should remain aligned with Israel, although a hefty minority, 44 percent, think the U.S. should be neutral. None of the poll questions mentioned risk or cost, however. None of them asked Would you still support Israel if you knew that Israel’s actions are making the security situation in Iraq even worse? If it means drawing the United States into war with Iran and Syria? If it means inspiring new and better armed groups of jihadists to attack the U.S.? Are you willing to risk your life, or the lives of your loved ones, to keep rockets from falling on Haifa?
Of course, we’re not going to have that conversation, except perhaps on the blogosphere.
The President of the United States is lost in space. The Vice President and Secretary of Defense are delusional. The Secretary of State is incompetent. Republicans in Congress are yes men. A few Dems are finally standing up against the last war — the one started three years ago — but it’s unlikely they’ll stand in the way of the next war.
James Fallows’s article — again, written before the Israel-Lebanon conflict began — ends on a hopeful note. He says this is an ideal time to declare victory in the “war on terror” and launch realistic and practical policies for long-term security and anti-terrorism efforts. Too bad that won’t happen.
9/11 Unanswered Questions
There are unanswered questions about what happened on September 11 that, unfortunately, are being eclipsed by the “controlled detonation” nonsense. Today Dan Eggen of the Washington Post wrote about some big ones —
Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.
Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.
In the end, the panel agreed to a compromise, turning over the allegations to the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation departments, who can make criminal referrals if they believe they are warranted, officials said.
These questions dwell mainly on what NORAD and the FAA were up to on September 11. Someone painstakingly put together this moment-by-moment timeline that reveals the dropped balls and miscommunications that went on that day. (Caveat: I have not fact-checked the timeline point by point, but it appears to be well researched and it jibes with what I remember, so I’m linking to it. If anyone spots any discrepancies feel free to speak up. I have no idea who put it together. The site it’s on is, um, odd.) For example, Boston air traffic control realized that one airplane, American Airlines 11, had been hijacked at 8:25. Air traffic control informed NORAD Command Center at 8:28. NORAD Command Center told NORAD headquarters at 8:32 that an airplane may have been hijacked. NORAD headquarters was supposed to inform the military, but did not. At 8:34 Boston air traffic control called the military. There was some confusion about whether this emergency is real or part of a drill. At 8:46, NORAD finally got two F-15s in the air. At exactly the same time AA 11 crashed into WTC Tower 1. At this time, neither the President nor Vice President had been informed of the emergency.
And on and on. The FAA in particular was haplessly receiving information but not passing it on. The air traffic controllers of various airports were not told what was going on and had to figure it out for themselves. With no direction coming from their superiors (Bush appointees? We should check that.), middle managers at the FAA and NORAD were making decisions themselves. As the disaster progressed White House and top intelligence officials were getting all their information about what was going on from television news. Even after NORAD pilots were in the air, they were not receiving directions or information and were circling aimlessly over Long Island while the President sat in an elementary school classroom listening to children read.
The timeline is actually an entertaining bit of literature, as is the same author’s September 11 Conspiracy Theory page.
Back to Dan Eggen:
For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington.
In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD’s Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft — American Airlines Flight 11 — long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center.
Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold and Col. Alan Scott told the commission that NORAD had begun tracking United 93 at 9:16 a.m., but the commission determined that the airliner was not hijacked until 12 minutes later. The military was not aware of the flight until after it had crashed in Pennsylvania.
These and other discrepancies did not become clear until the commission, forced to use subpoenas, obtained audiotapes from the FAA and NORAD, officials said. The agencies’ reluctance to release the tapes — along with e-mails, erroneous public statements and other evidence — led some of the panel’s staff members and commissioners to believe that authorities sought to mislead the commission and the public about what happened on Sept. 11.
Already some “controlled detonation” people have caught wind of “making false statements to Congress” and “criminal referrals” and are hailing this story as vindication of their beloved controlled detonation theory, which of course it isn’t. What it is, is a documentation of utter disarray, most likely caused by incompetence. But I think it is extremely important to understand exactly what went wrong and exactly where balls were dropped and who dropped them. I want to know if corrections have been made. And I want to know if any Bush crony appointees were involved, even though I doubt Shrub had been president long enough to utterly screw up the FAA the way he screwed up FEMA. I’ve misunderestimated him before.
In August 2002 the BBC reported that some of the few military pilots who did get into the air that day were so unprepared they had no ammunition. The pilots were afraid that they’d have to crash their jets into commercial airplanes to stop them. I have yet to hear a word of this breathed on America media.
It’s been almost five years. Of course, they’re still finding bone fragment of victims, mostly on the roof of the Deutsche Bank building. Better late than never.
Update: Some still blame Bill Clinton.
Update update: See also Michael Bronner, “9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes,” Vanity Fair.
Another Terrorist Attack
For real. In India. Kashmir militants are suspected.
Barbarians Online
Like sharks to chum, so righties to beheading videos. They’ve got a new one, and they’ve dropped poor Debbie Frisch in mid-flame because, you know, why waste time baiting the psychologically miswired when you’ve got severed heads?
I’m not going to link to the rightie sites “discussing” the video — they aren’t that hard to find, if you really want to go there — but here’s a New York Times story about it. The video shows the the mutilated bodies of Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, of Houston, and Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker, 25, of Madras, Ore. Just the description of the video is sickening enough.
Of course I didn’t watch the video, but I inadvertently saw some “stills” posted on a rightie site, which is why I’m not linking to any of them. The last thing these sickos need is encouragement. However, I’m going to quote this from the Jawa Report anyway —
This video shows the true face of the enemies we fight. However you feel about the war in Iraq, this should enrage you. They are ruthless barbarians who boast about killing those they have taken hostage.
We show you these images so that you will understand what it is we are up against. The video and images should enrage you. If you do not have righteouss anger after seeing this, you are beyond hope. Update: Or, as reminded by Jason in the comments, they ought to at least give you clarity and resolve to defeat them.
Update: John at Powerline laments that POTUS has not followed Putin’s example, and ordered the killing of the AQ scum who did this. However, I have received several e-mails from officers serving in Iraq who wanted the video.
One Air Force officer told me he was about to do a brief and wanted to show it to his men. So, if POTUS hasn’t directly ordered revenge, I have a feeling the military is about to take it upon themselves to find and kill the AQ bastards who did this.
Vengeance may not always be swift, but it is always sweet.
I say vengeance is self-indulgent. To act out of vengeance is to abandon your own purposes. Instead, you’re letting your emotions jerk you around, like a puppet on strings, and the script for your theatrics is being written by your enemies. Disciplined people, wise people, don’t indulge in vengeance. They don’t take the bait.
Further, “resolve” born of rage rarely goes hand in hand with “clarity.” Enraged people are not thinking people. Enraged people aren’t weighing the consequences of their actions. They aren’t in control of themselves.
Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate about the U.S. Army’s new field manual on counterinsurgency (here in .pdf format). According to the field manual, getting vengeance for anything is about the last thing we need to be doing in Iraq now.
From first page to last, the authors stress that these kinds of wars are “protracted by nature.” They require “firm political will and extreme patience,” “considerable expenditure of time and resources,” and a very large deployment of troops ready to greet “hand shakes or hand grenades” without mistaking one for the other.
“Successful … operations require Soldiers and Marines at every echelon to possess the following,” the authors write. (Emphasis added.) They then list a daunting set of traits: “A clear, nuanced, and empathetic appreciation of the essential nature of the conflict. … An understanding of the motivation, strengths, and weaknesses of the insurgent,” as well as rudimentary knowledge of the local culture, behavioral norms, and leadership structures. In addition, there must be “adaptive, self-aware, and intelligent leaders.”
Meanwhile, a single high-profile infraction can undo 100 successes. “Lose moral legitimacy, lose the war,” the authors warn, pointedly noting that the French lost Algeria in part because their commanders condoned torture.
The authors note mistakes the U.S. has made already:
“The More Force Used, the Less Effective It Is.” “An operation that kills five insurgents is counterproductive if the collateral damage or the creation of blood feuds leads to the recruitment of fifty more.” “Only attack insurgents when they get in the way. Try not to be distracted or forced into a series of reactive moves by a desire to kill or capture them. Provoking combat usually plays into the enemy’s hands.” “A defection is better than a surrender, a surrender better than a capture, and a capture better than a kill.”
Kaplan observes, “as a nation we may simply be ill-suited to fight these kinds of wars.” He’s probably right. But even if most of us could countenance such an effort, most of us are not in charge. The righties are. And righties are way ill-suited to fight these kinds of wars. You can see that today in the calls for vengeance on the rightie blogosphere. The hell with the mission; to hell with the consequences; they want blood.
Back to the new video — according to Edward Wong of the New York Times, “A message with the video says the soldiers were killed out of revenge for the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl in March, a crime in which at least six American soldiers are suspects.”
“We present this as revenge for our sister who was dishonored by a soldier of the same brigade,†says a message in Arabic on a title card at the start of the nearly five-minute video. Militants had learned of the crime early on and “decided to take revenge for their sister’s honor,†the message says, according to a translation by the SITE Institute, which tracks jihadist Internet postings.
However, this explanation may be bogus:
It is questionable whether the soldiers were actually killed out of revenge. Iraqis around Mahmudiya, where the rape and murders took place, believed at the time that the girl and the other three victims were killed by other Iraqis in sectarian violence, according to the mayor of Mahmudiya and American military officials. The mayor said the possible involvement of American soldiers only became apparent on June 30, when the American military announced it had opened an investigation into the crime.
So, the “revenge” motive may have been post hoc. Still, we’ve had no end to revenge killings already. We’re already well into the “retaliations for retaliations” cycle, which I’m sure is a major cause of the escalation of violence.
The 2004 attack of Fallujah was, by many accounts, ordered by the White House in retaliation for the murder and mutilation of four civilian contractors. This order was given against the counsel of the commanders on the ground. The results are not, um, encouraging.
On a practical level it’s ill advised to be Sonny Corleone (“They hit us so — we hit ’em back.”) if you don’t have the muscle to settle all the family business at once. (Remember what happened to Sonny?) And we don’t have that kind of muscle in Iraq.
Another rightie argues that “I strongly believe we must know and understand who we are fighting against.” OK, but we’d better understand ourselves as well. Whether you thought the invasion was a good idea or not, from the beginning the effort in Iraq has been pulled in at least two directions. War supporters talk about nation building, unified governments, democracy, and security, and that’s fine. But, time and time again, our actions — Abu Ghraib comes to mind — say that we want something else entirely.
I’ve believed all along that, on a subconscious level, Iraq is a proxy war. It stands in for the war many of us, including me, desired after the 9/11 attacks. If only we’d been attacked by a nation-state instead of an international movement, we could have bombed the bleepers to hell and been done with it. But we couldn’t have that war, because we weren’t attacked by a nation-state. Most of us understood that, and we realized that counterterrorism and national security policies should be crafted to deal with the enemies we have instead of the enemy we wished we had.
But then there are righties. They blame us lefties because Iraq is less than the resounding triumph they wished for, but the fact is they and their Dear Leader have been working at cross purposes all along; their desires get in the way of their goals; their ids override their superegos. They haven’t yet come to grips with the fact that the enemies we face are not the same ones John Wayne took on in Sands of Iwo Jima.
(One of the rightie bloggers worked up over the new video has this blurb in his blog masthead: “Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” — H.L. Mencken. Observes Steve M., “I have to say I really enjoy being lectured on the savagery of people who slit throats by a blogger whose motto invokes the desirability of slitting throats.”)
I’m sure the righties want me to look at the video so that I will be “understand” and feel as they feel. But like I tell the “controlled detonation” theorists who drop by here from time to time — I saw the WTC towers fall with my own eyes. I don’t need to look at the video, thanks.
Oops
Rabbit Redux
I was out late last night, so bear with me, here — Michael Tackett and Jeff Zeleny write in today’s Chicago Tribune—
FBI agents in an undercover sting operation arrested seven terrorism suspects in Miami on Thursday who allegedly were plotting to attack the Sears Tower in Chicago, the FBI headquarters in Miami and other U.S. buildings, officials said.
The suspects had “aspirations” but “no means” to attack the Sears Tower or other buildings, a senior federal law-enforcement source said.
The men were all Muslims who thought they were plotting “in conjunction with Al Qaeda” but they really were dealing with law-enforcement undercover agents, one law-enforcement official told The Miami Herald.
The men, who told neighbors in the Liberty City area of Miami that they were starting a children’s karate class at a warehouse, had been plotting for an undetermined amount of time, but their scheme was thwarted well before any attack could be carried out.
“They talked about belonging to an Islamic army. They wanted to raise an army in the U.S.,” a second senior law-enforcement official said Thursday. “But they didn’t have the means to do this.”
“There was no threat at all,” the senior federal law-enforcement source said, referring to the Sears Tower. Chicago police said the city is not on increased alert despite the news.
And later in the article …
The men, who had been subjects of an undercover federal investigation, were apprehended without incident in an adjacent Miami neighborhood.
“There was no imminent danger to the community,” said Judy Orihuela, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Miami. “Everybody is in custody who was part of the group. We’ve been conducting the investigation and we know that it’s been dismantled.” …
… Sears Tower officials would not comment directly on the arrests. But a spokesman said that no plan to attack the building ever had been carried out. Tenants said they had not been notified about the plot.
“Law enforcement continues to tell us that they have never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that has gone beyond criminal discussions,” Sears Tower managing director Barbara Carley said in a statement.
No big bleeping deal, in other words. Of course, if you’d only seen the headlines (Fox News: “Seven Nabbed in Miami on Terror Charges in Plot to Hit Sears Tower“) you might have gotten a different impression of what went on.
In one of her most brilliants posts yet, Michelle Malkin calls the suspects “black Muslim radicals” and provides us with an overview of recent terrorist threats coming from black Muslim radicals, going back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and including the Beltway snipers and black Muslim inmates in Folsom Prison. She even takes a swipe at “the old school black Muslim thugs (and Jesse Jackson pals) of the Chicago-based El Rukn.”
And then she says … get ready for this … “Bob Owens catches the Democratic Underground already playing the race card.”
Awesome. You don’t have to parody Malkin. She does it herself.
Still, if indeed we are swimming in terrorist threats here at home … why are we in Iraq, again?
Ellen Goodman writes in today’s Boston Globe (emphasis added):
… over the past two weeks as the House and Senate debated exit and no-exit strategies, there emerged a phrase in the rhetorical war that has not fallen on deaf ears. It’s the assertion that we are fighting the terrorists there so we won’t have to fight them here. As the president said in the State of the Union address, in the West Point graduation speech, in the surprise visit to Baghdad, “we will stay on the offensive against the terrorists, fighting them abroad so we do not have to face them here at home.”
In the midst of the mutual taunting and sound biting, this still resonates with the American people. So it’s time to ask whether we are indeed fighting terrorists in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them in the New York subway. If so, what does it mean? What does it portend?
From the get-go, the Bush administration framed the war in Iraq as self-defense, as part of the war on terror. In fact, Iraq was never on the State Department’s dance card of terrorist strongholds. The attempt to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11 was as phony as the assertion of weapons of mass destruction. By no stretch of Dick Cheney’s imagination was Iraq a front line on the war on terror. But it is now.
Over three years, it’s become the recruiting ground, the favorite destination for terrorists who take their place alongside insurgents and civil warriors. No sooner is Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi killed than a claim comes in that the brutal torture and murder of two American soldiers is the work of his successor.
If Iraq is the neighborhood in which terrorists have chosen to fight America, are we now sending soldiers to keep them in that neighborhood? Are we now sending sons, daughters, husbands, wives to be the designated terrorist attractions? If not cannon fodder, are they I.E.D. fodder?
This week at a news conference, The Wall Street Journal’s David Rogers, a Vietnam veteran, challenged the House majority leader. “In Vietnam, they used to put us out in these fire support bases and hope we would get attacked. Is that what you are doing?” he asked. “You are putting people in Iraq and hoping they get attacked so you can bring out the terrorists?” Has it come to this?
Wasn’t that the “flypaper theory” all along? And shouldn’t we put the righties on the spot to explain, if all these black illegal immigrant Muslim radicals are swarming about the country anyway, doesn’t that mean we’re failing to fulfill the mission in Iraq?
Goodman adds, “This administration had no post-Saddam strategy for Iraq. Now it seems they have no post-Iraq strategy for the war on terror.”
Yesterday, Dan Froomkin discussed Karl Rove’s exploitation of Iraq for political purposes. The plan is for Republicans to deride any Democratic plans to withdraw or redeploy troops in Iraq as a “cut and run.” It seems Karl has no post-Iraq strategy for winning elections, either.
Great Minds Thinking Alike
Joshua Holland has an article on Alternet that makes the same point I attempted to make in the “Muddying Questions, Squandering Answers” post on 9/11 conspiracy theories.
Having taken a long bath in the world of 9/11 conspiracism, I still think the most likely scenario is that the Bush administration was obsessed with rival powers — Russia and China — and ignored the terror issue. After the attacks, the security agencies were under enormous, unrelenting pressure to show Americans they were in control and they needed to show that they were on top of the investigation at all costs. These things would certainly require sanitizing in the 9/11 report and other official narratives for the sake of expediency and creating the appearance that the government was on the job.
Having said that, I’d also be receptive to evidence that the Bush administration had a far greater degree of knowledge about the how and why of the attacks, and looked the other way and let them happen. All I’d need to buy that would be a bit of evidence. After all, we’ve recently learned in a report published on AlterNet that New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who had a direct link to the most powerful office in Washington (Dick Cheney’s), said she had been warned of a terrorist attack.
But that kind of evidence is almost certainly not forthcoming; there will be no further serious investigation into the events of 9/11. Ironically, that’s largely because of the 9/11 “truth movement” itself — by embracing fanciful notions that the government blew up the World Trade Center with thermite charges, or that the Pentagon was hit by a missile — makes it hard for the rest of us to express rational skepticism of the official account.
Braying of Hounds
Those outraged because Zacarias Moussaoui got off easy with a life sentence can take comfort that he faces a fate worse than death. Dan Eggan writes in today’s Washington Post about the Administrative Maximum United States Penitentiary, or Admax, in Florence, Colorado:
Dubbed the “Alcatraz of the Rockies” by prison experts — and “The Tombs” by many prisoners and their lawyers — the 12-year-old “supermax” facility houses about 400 of the most dangerous and infamous prisoners in the federal system, from “Unabomber” Theodore J. Kaczynski to Ramzi Yousef, architect of the 1993 World Trade center bombing. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons transferred most, if not all, of its terrorism-related inmates to the prison.
But Moussaoui is unlikely to meet, or even glimpse, Yousef or any other fellow jihadists at the Florence facility anytime soon, according to federal officials, lawyers and others familiar with operations there.
In the most tightly monitored part of the facility, known as the “control unit,” inmates are kept in segregation at all times — living, sleeping and eating in individual cells poured from concrete that measure approximately 7 feet by 11 feet. They are designed to ensure that inmates cannot speak to or make eye contact with each other, according to defense lawyers, human rights advocates and others who have had access to the facility. Some prisoners are monitored 24 hours a day by surveillance cameras in their cells, as Moussaoui has been during his years in the Alexandria jail. …
… Some inmates are allowed a handful of visitors and phone calls each month, but many of those incarcerated for terrorism-related crimes have no visitors other than their attorneys and the guards who shackle them whenever they are removed from their cells, according to defense attorneys and court testimony.
Ramzi Yousef, for example, often spends days at a time not leaving his cell, because using his daily one-hour exercise time requires submitting to body cavity searches. The only person allowed to visit him is his lawyer, whose offices and practice are in New York.
Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian adds the detail that “Religious services of numerous denominations are piped in from a small chapel.”
I keep thinking of a calf confined in a veal crate. They usually go mad.
Richard Serrano at the Los Angeles Times says that prisoners at Admax experience a slow rot.
They exist alone in soundproof cells as small as 7 feet by 12 feet, with a concrete-poured desk, bed and stool, a small shower and sink, and a TV that offers religious and anger-management programs.
They are locked down 23 hours a day.
Larry Homenick, a former U.S. marshal who has taken prisoners to Supermax, said that there was a small triangular recreation area, known as “the dog run,” where solitary Supermax prisoners could occasionally get a glimpse of sky.
He said it was chilling to walk down the cellblocks and glance through the plexiglass “sally port” chambers into the cells and see the faces inside.
Life there is harsh. Food is delivered through a slit in the cell door. Prisoners don’t leave their cells to see a lawyer, a doctor or a prison official; those visitors must go to the cell.
Prison expert James E. Aiken told the jury what Moussaoui’s life would be like at Admax.
In his trial testimony, Aiken said the whole point of Supermax was not just punishment, but “incapacitation.”
There is no pretense that the prison is preparing the inmate for a return to society. Like the cellmate of the count of Monte Cristo who died an old, tired convict, Aiken said, “Moussaoui will deteriorate.” …
… Christopher Boyce, a convicted spy who was incarcerated at Supermax, left the prison about 100 miles south of Denver with no regret. “You’re slowly hung,” he once told The Times. “You’re ground down. You can barely keep your sanity.” …
… Ron Kuby, another New York defense lawyer, has handled several East Coast “revolutionaries” who went on a killing spree, and a radical fundamentalist who killed a rabbi in 1990. All were brought to Supermax.
He thought Aiken’s description that prisoners rot inside its walls was too kind.
“It’s beyond rotting,” he said. “Rotting at least implies a slow, gradual disintegration.”
He said there were a lot of prisons where inmates rot, where the staff “plants you in front of your TV in your cell and you just grow there like a mushroom.”
“But Supermax is worse,” he said. “It’s not just the hothouse for the mushrooms. It’s designed in the end to break you down.”
I’ll leave it to others to decide if this is justice. I’m more concerned about what David Cole says in today’s WaPo. Cole calls Moussaoui’s prosecution an “object lesson in how the government’s overreaching has undermined our security.”
Four years ago Moussaoui was on the verge of pleading guilty to offenses that would have resulted in a life sentence. But he was unwilling to accept the government’s insistence that he admit to being the 20th hijacker of Sept. 11, 2001 — an allegation the government has long since dropped.
For almost two years, the case was stalled as the government sought Moussaoui’s execution while denying him access to witnesses in its control who had testimony establishing that he was not involved in the Sept. 11 plot at all. Due process has long required the government to turn over such “exculpatory” evidence, but the government, citing national security, refused to afford Moussaoui access to this evidence. In October 2003 the trial court offered a reasonable solution: Allow the trial to proceed but eliminate the death penalty, because that’s what the government’s exculpatory evidence related to. The government refused that solution and spent several more years trying Moussaoui. The case ended where it began — with Moussaoui facing life in prison.
Your tax dollars at work.
Meanwhile, at a secret CIA “black site” prison, the United States is holding the alleged mastermind of Sept. 11, Khalid Sheik Mohammed. And at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, it has Mohamed al-Qahtani, who the government now claims is the real would-be 20th hijacker. But the administration can’t try either of these men, because any such proceeding would turn into a trial of the United States’ own tactics in the war on terrorism. The CIA has reportedly water-boarded Khalid Sheik Mohammed — a practice in which the suspect is made to fear that he is drowning in order to encourage him to talk. And Army logs report that interrogators threatened Qahtani with dogs, made him strip naked and wear women’s underwear, put him on a leash and made him bark like a dog, injected him with intravenous fluids and barred him from the bathroom so that he urinated on himself. With these shortsighted and inhumane tactics, the administration essentially immunized the real culprits, so it was left seeking the execution of a man who was not involved in Sept. 11.
As a PR tactic it seems to have worked pretty well with Bush’s Bitter Ender base, who don’t seem to have noticed that Moussaoui was a bit player, if that, in the 9/11 atrocity. They enjoyed a two-day virtual rampage over the verdict. You’d have thought Moussaoui was Osama bin Laden’s best bud and piloted one of the hijacked planes himself. I’m sure they’d still be at it except for the allegations that Patrick Kennedy was caught driving drunk and got special treatment from DC cops. No rightie will pass up an opportunity to wallow in the depravity of the Kennedys; they dropped Moussaoui and went after ol’ Patrick like hounds catching scent of a raccoon.
(I know hounds chase foxes in civilized places, but it’s raccoons where I come from.)
The Moussaoui case is emblematic of the administration’s approach to fighting terrorism. It has repeatedly overreached and sought symbolic victories, adopting tactics that have undermined its ability to achieve real security while disregarding less flashy but more effective means of protecting us. In the early days after Sept. 11, Attorney General John Ashcroft sought to reassure us with repeated announcements of the detention of large numbers of “terror suspects” — ultimately the government admitted to detaining 5,000 foreign nationals in the first two years after Sept. 11. Yet to this day not one of them stands convicted of a terrorist offense. Similarly, the administration launched a nationwide ethnic profiling campaign, calling in 8,000 young men for FBI interviews and 80,000 more for registration, fingerprinting and photographing by immigration authorities, simply because they came from Arab and Muslim countries. Not one of those 88,000 has been convicted of terrorism.
Come to think of it, some good ol’, coon dogs might do a better job.
Cole goes on to note that only 8 percent of the Guantanamo detainees are even accused of being fighters for al Qaeda. “The majority are not accused of engaging in any hostile acts against the United States.” Jose Padilla was stripped of his rights as a citizen and held in military custody for being “a marginal player in a hazy conspiracy to support terrorism. His indictment cites no terrorist acts or terrorist groups that were actually supported.”
While the government rounded up Arabs and Muslims with no ties to terrorism and authorized torture and disappearances, several of its highest-profile cases fell short, and it failed to carry out the more mundane work that might actually make us safer. In December the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission gave the administration a disastrous report card on its progress in implementing a series of practical security recommendations — such as better screening of cargo on airlines and containers coming into ports, securing of nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union to keep them out of terrorists’ hands, and protection of vulnerable targets such as chemical plants.
Tough talk in news conferences, overheated charges that evaporate under scrutiny and executions for symbolic purposes will not make us safer. The administration needs to turn away from symbolism and toward substance if it is to have any hope of protecting us from the next attack.
One of the many peculiarities of righties is that for them, symbolism is as good as substance. For them, image is character and rhetoric is accomplishment. Boasting is victory. Ideology is the only reality. Truly, the Bushies could just snatch random Muslims off the streets (which of course they’ve alrady done) and hang them publicly without evidence or trial, and a large part of the righties would accept this without question. They’d probably find a way to defend it as a bold antiterrorist initiative.
Finally, from the site Homeland Security Watch, we find a list of the people in U.S. custody that played a much larger role than Moussaoui in the 9/11 attacks. They are:
Strangely, the Bitter Enders seem unconcerned about prosecuting these guys. It seems they’re too busy blogswarming Patrick Kennedy. Gotta keep those priorities straight.
“The Making of Zarqawi”
Alert Mahablog reader David M. of Melbourne sent a link to the transcript of the Mike Scheuer interview discussed yesterday. Read more about the program, “The Making of Zarqawi,” here, and you can read a transcript of just the Mike Scheuer portion of the interview here. Interesting stuff. I don’t have time to analyze it all right now, but please feel free to have a go at it.