. . . Earlier this week, we learned that congressional leadership, Republicans and Democrats alike, had been informed in 2002 that the CIA had harshly interrogated high-value al-Qaeda operatives, using, among other methods, waterboarding. One of the Democrats in the room: Nancy Pelosi, the current speaker of the House.
This is, shall we say, intriguing, since Pelosi and her party have been until recently reaching new heights of sanctimony on the issue of torture and waterboarding.
There was no objecting, no hand-wringing, an official who was there told the Washington Post. The attitude was, We dont care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people. Not only did Pelosi not offer a peep of protest, the Washington Post reports that at least two lawmakers (out of only a few present) pressed the administration about whether the methods were tough enough to get the job done. Either Pelosi asked the question herself, or she sat quietly while one of her colleagues inquired whether the screws were being turned tightly enough.
Either way, her defenders say we need to look at the context. This was just after 9/11, and Pelosi was as angry about the attack and as eager to prevent another one as anyone. Time magazines liberal columnist Joe Klein writes: There was fear that we would be attacked again by terrorists, and on a regular basis. Few were thinking clearly about the nature of the threat and how to deal with it. So, whats the big deal?
Well, its a big deal for a lot of reasons. But the one that left-wingers should take to heart is that you cant rely on your leaders and champions when the buildings collapse, the bombs explode or the planes fall from the sky.
If its O.K. for liberal Democrats to condone what they consider to be torture when theyre scared and angry, then the lesson is that the only way you can count on Democrats not to be scared and angry is to prevent future 9/11s. . . .
. . . were not talking about me and my right-wing pals. Were talking about good, decent liberals. And if youre the sort of person who thinks George W. Bush and his evil henchmen have stolen our civil liberties and our souls, you need to at least consider the likelihood that in the wake of another 9/11 a President Hillary Clinton or President Barack Obama wouldnt do things very differently. Or, if thats too gloomy for you, comfort yourself in the fact theyd be powerless to do things very differently. In the wake of another 9/11, the voters and Congress would roll right over them.
The point is that terrorism has consequences beyond life and property. It requires a tightening of liberty no one desires. The prevention of terrorism prevents the need, real or perceived, for further tightening. The Pelosi cop-out is that if youre scared and angry, you get a free pass to do things you find morally objectionable. Well, terrorism makes people scared and angry; thats sort of why they call it terrorism.
The Left loves to snicker at Bushs assertion that the war on terror is a war for the freedom of Iraqis and Muslims abroad. However dubious that proposition may be to the Left, it seems that by their own standards we need to win the war on terror if we are going to better secure freedom at home.
Posted by: Mike ||
12/14/2007 08:21 ||
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#1
Well in 2002 both parties were afraid of another 9/11. Nowadays they've afraid of other things.
#3
I'll bet some of Nancy's constituents enjoy doing some shit to each other that makes waterboarding look like recess at kindergarten.
See what she thinks about outlawing that...
#5
I want her under oath and questioned about who she may have leaked this to. We know full-well "when she knew it"... I care only about who did she or her staff leak to.
The extraordinary spectacle of the president's national security adviser obliged to defend the president's Iran policy against a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) raises two core issues: How are we now to judge the nuclear threat posed by Iran? How are we to judge the intelligence community's relationship with the White House and the rest of the government?
The "Key Judgments" released by the intelligence community last week begin with a dramatic assertion: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." This sentence was widely interpreted as a challenge to the Bush administration policy of mobilizing international pressure against alleged Iranian nuclear programs. It was, in fact, qualified by a footnote whose complex phraseology obfuscated that the suspension really applied to only one aspect of the Iranian nuclear weapons program (and not even the most significant one): the construction of warheads. That qualification was not restated in the rest of the document, which continued to refer to the "halt of the weapons program" repeatedly and without qualification.
The reality is that the concern about Iranian nuclear weapons has had three components: the production of fissile material, the development of missiles and the building of warheads. Heretofore, production of fissile material has been treated as by far the greatest danger, and the pace of Iranian production of fissile material has accelerated since 2006. So has the development of missiles of increasing range. What appears to have been suspended is the engineering aimed at the production of warheads.
#3
Henry Kissinger has spoken against the NIE and those who wrote it? In the Washington post, which is what those people read and believe? Oh dear. Seafarious, please, please, please go to a dinner party or two this weekend and report back on the conversation!
#4
Henry's a snake, but he's a smart, interesting snake who sees things clearly. He understands that it's not the job of the CIA to make politics -- that's the job of elected officials and their designated servants (e.g., him when he was SoS).
I think the fools at CIA who've been orchestrating the hit pieces on Dubya tipped their hand too much this time. There's going to be blowback.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/14/2007 11:31 Comments ||
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#5
The CIA is broken.
Disband it, parcel out operations to the DIA, electronics to the NSA, overhead to the NRO, and reformulate it as a HUMINT-only and small-scale direct action agency. Put the most of the analysis, especially fusion analysis, at DNI as an "uber" agency. USe the old soviet system for analysis: prepare 3 sets of analysis: Best case, Worst case and Middle Case.
#6
Could the Iranians have suspended warhead enginieering (if they did) because they got the plans, tooling, and know-how from someone else who already had it?
Could it be hidden if they did?
Posted by: D. R. M. ||
12/14/2007 12:37 Comments ||
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#7
Yes, and yes D.R.M. Yesterday one of our Rantburgers mentioned that the missiles themselves are just renamed North Korean ones... and one of Saddam Hussein's researchers had buried the plans for the Iraqi nukes under his rosebushes. And Saddam Hussein's war gasses were found post-invasion stored in barrels labelled "Insecticide".
India aims to have a missile defence system able to track and shoot down incoming warheads by 2010, scientists in the capital announced yesterday, in a move that analysts say could spark a new arms race in the region.
The announcement would see India join an elite club of countries that have such military capabilities - with the US, Russia and Israel. It came just days after Pakistan tested a cruise missile capable of carrying nuclear weapons.
India's top military scientist, Dr VK Saraswat of India's Defence Research and Development Organisation, said: "If I keep quiet and wait for [a missile] to fall on my city and then start sending my own deterrent missile ... a lot of damage is done. It is essential you have a system which will first take on that kind of a threat.
"Because we have a ballistic missile defence system ... a country which has a small arsenal will think twice before it ventures," he added, in an apparent reference to nuclear-armed rival Pakistan.
Last week the Indian military demonstrated its missile defence systems by shooting down a warhead off its east coast. Saraswat said that within three years, major cities such as Delhi and Mumbai would be under a protective shield.
India is also beefing up its armoury. It has announced a nuclear-capable missile with a range of 3,700 miles - far enough to hit Beijing or Rome.
Analysts say Pakistan's rapid build-up of short- and medium-range missiles is of special concern to India despite an ongoing peace process between the two.
K Subrahmanyan, a writer on defence issues, said that India needed to raise the "uncertainty levels for Pakistan".
"Pakistan is acquiring advanced missile technology from China. No missile defence system is perfect, but if we can knock out three out of every five warheads, it means our adversary has to fire more rockets. It is a means of deterrence."
Analysts in Pakistan say such thinking is hastening an arms race. "The first impulse is to ask how does Pakistan get [a missile defence system]," said Ayesha Siddiqa, a defence analyst. "The next will be to increase the number of missiles to make sure it has enough to evade the shield."
Other countries are also racing to develop "Star Wars" technologies. This year, after Tokyo saw North Korea test ballistic missiles and conduct a nuclear test, Japan's parliament authorised $2.5bn (£1.3bn) to develop a missile defence system. The US, which has run 36 missile defence tests since 2001, has authorised an annual spend of a half a trillion dollars on a missile shield.
There are no indications of the cost of the Indian missile defence system, but many analysts say there are better uses for India's money. "The US can afford such follies, but a developing country like India cannot," said Bharat Karnad from Delhi's Centre for Policy Research. "We should be getting more missiles, not finding ways of shooting them down."
Posted by: john frum ||
12/14/2007 05:44 ||
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This is the Guardian folks, home of undiluted progressive PC nonsense for the last century. Of course they think that defending yourself is immoral and illegal.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/14/2007 11:33 Comments ||
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Israel is only the latest example of governments throughout the free world that, sadly, share a common malady that continues to put our lives at risk
Life in southern Israel is unbearable. Since last January, on average, 6.3 mortars and rockets have been fired from Gaza on southern Israel every day. As Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna'i warned the heads of the communities around Gaza last week, due to the improvements in the Palestinian arsenal since Israel vacated Gaza two years ago, the Palestinians now field missiles and rockets with extended ranges that place 130,000 Israelis under threat of missile attack.
Wednesday, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi made clear that if Israel wishes to secure its citizens there is only one thing it can do. It can conquer Gaza.
In a speech at Tel Aviv University Ashkenazi explained, "It is impossible to defeat a terrorist organization without eventually controlling the territory. The good situation in Judea and Samaria is the result of our control over the area and we will not be able to achieve victory in the conflict [in Gaza] simply with indirect fires and attacks from the air."
Presumably Ashkenazi made this point Wednesday morning at the security cabinet meeting. But apparently, he was no match for his competition.
Squared off against Ashkenazi was Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Livni warned her colleagues that securing southern Israel will destroy the peace process. If Israel secures the south, the Arabs and the Bush administration will get really mad. And "moderate" Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas will turn his back on the peace process and reunite his US-trained Fatah forces with the Iranian-trained Hamas forces. Livni's message was clear: The government must choose between security and the peace process.
Livni won the argument. The peace process won out against the security of southern Israel.
The Olmert government's preference for process over substance is not unique. Indeed, it is malady shared governments throughout the free world. The philosophical foundations of this malady are similarly common ones.
The September 11 attacks on the US intensified a dispute that had been brewing since the end of the Cold War about the definition of rationality. The two warring factions in the debate, which has raged throughout the free world, can be referred to as the rationalizers and the rationalists. Each side has given its own definition of rationality and those competing definitions have formed the basis of the camps' competing policy prescriptions for contending with the threat of Islamic terrorists and their state sponsors ever since.
The rationalizers include politicians like Olmert and Livni and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and security and policy apparatuses like the CIA, the State Department, the Foreign Ministry and their counterparts in Europe.
The rationalizers define rationality as susceptibility to foreign pressure and willingness to be appeased. According to this view, if your antagonist is willing to negotiate with you, then he is rational. And since he is rational, he is capable of being appeased. And since he is willing to be appeased, he isn't really your enemy.
The US intelligence community's National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear capabilities and intentions is a textbook example of the rationalizers' view. The NIE, which asserts that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 as the result of the program's exposure and the international scrutiny that followed, concludes that "Teheran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs."
And since Iran is rational, the NIE recommends that the US and its allies make Iran an offer which entails, "some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways."
The rationalizers' view of rationality is alluring for two main reasons. First, its essential argument is that the West is solely responsible for determining whether the world will enjoy peace or suffer the ravages of war. If Western states cough up a proper package of concessions, then the terrorists and their state sponsors will negotiate with them. If Western nations refuse to make the necessary concessions then the terrorists and their state sponsors will attack them and the nations of the West will have only themselves, and their obstinacy to blame.
Beyond that, since the Arab and Islamic world's rationality is solely a function of Western will, the ideology of jihad which informs terrorists and their state sponsors is immaterial. As far as rationalizers are concerned, there is no reason to close down jihadist websites or indoctrination centers. Indeed, there is no reason to challenge the validity of jihadist doctrines and values as all.
This view too, resonates in the NIE. The report makes no mention of the fact that Iran's regime was founded on the values of jihad. It ignores the fact that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters believe that by fomenting Armageddon they can hasten the coming of the Shiite messiah and bring forth an era of Islamic global domination in a world in which the US and Israel are but bitter memories. Had the NIE taken these ideological views into account, its authors might have noted that it makes perfect sense for the ayatollahs to be pursuing nuclear weapons.
But taking the Iranian regime's ideology, values and aspirations into account would involve crossing the lines into the opposing rationalists' camp. For rationalists, it is rational for a state's policies and actions to reflect and advance its values, aspirations and beliefs. As a consequence, it is essential to understand and confront those beliefs, values and aspirations.
Just as the rationalizers' views are attractive because they place all the power to determine issues of war and peace in the hands of Western nations, so the views of the rationalists are unattractive because they assume that the free world cannot alone determine the course of events. It cannot influence a society's adherence to jihadist beliefs and aspirations. The most it can do is take actions to prevent jihadist societies from acting on their beliefs.
When Lt. Gen. Ashkenazi explained that the conquest of Gaza is the only way to secure southern Israel, he was representing the rationalist camp's view of rationality. Since the Palestinians overwhelmingly support the jihadist aim of destroying Israel, it is rational for them to attack Israel for as long as they can. Since Israel cannot change the way the Palestinians understand the world and the meaning of life, the only way it can protect its citizens from murder is by taking away the Palestinians' ability to attack.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the rationalizers' disparagement of the importance of ideology is the lengths they go to in order to ignore jihadist ideology on the one hand and appease it on the other. Agents in counter-terror units of the FBI for instance are discouraged from studying the Koran. Their chiefs argue that only a tiny minority of Muslims in the US and worldwide ascribe to a religious-supremacist interpretation of the Koran which upholds and encourages terrorism, slaughter and war to the death against non-Muslims and therefore what the Koran says is irrelevant.
Yet if it is true that only a tiny minority of Muslims think that Islam is a supremacist political as well as religious creed, then the rationalizers should treat the actual jihadists with contempt similar to that which they exhibit towards white supremacists. After all, doing so shouldn't bother the rest of their co-religionists who reject their views. But the opposite is the case.
FBI agents undergo Islamic "sensitivity training" by people who are themselves the subjects of their counter-terror investigations. US military personnel at Guantanamo Bay are forced to wear gloves when they touch copies of the Koran belonging to their jihadist prisoners.
More disturbingly, in their rush to placate this irrelevant tiny minority of jihadists, Israeli, US and European officials willingly trounce their core values of the rule of law and freedom of expression. In Israel, Israeli Jews who build homes without permits are prosecuted to the full limit of the law and ejected from their homes. Israeli Arabs who have built entire towns illegally are ignored by authorities in the interest avoiding diplomatic consequences or stirring up passions.
In the US, one can stand outside the White House and burn the American flag without fear of criminal charge. But if a person draws a pig on a copy of the Koran in a public library, he is liable to find himself under arrest for committing a hate crime. And in Europe, you can participate in a demonstration invoking Islam as you call for the destruction of Britain or Holland or Demark without fear of legal action, but if you publish a caricature of Muhammad in your newspaper, you may find yourself the subject of a criminal probe and forced into hiding for promoting racism.
In Israel, it is difficult to convince people that the ideology of jihad is unimportant. But the rationalizers have two other ways to convince the general public and their political base that they are right to ignore the enemy's actions and intentions and concentrate on efforts to appease. First there is the fear factor. Given the overwhelming nature of the Arab and Islamic world's hatred of Israel and the Jewish people, Israel's rationalizers defend their preference for imaginary peace processes over security by arguing that Israel cannot afford to fight a war. Far better than facing that hatred on the battlefield is the option of preemptive surrender. As the rationalizers argue, if Israel shrinks into the 1949 armistice lines, builds a big wall and hides behind it, then maybe the Arabs will forget that we're still here and leave us alone.
Politically there is the fact that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima party was founded on the view that territory has no defensive value and that preemptive surrender is a reasonable national strategy. To acknowledge that territory is important or that surrendering territory to your enemy strengthens your enemy and weakens you would involve admitting that Kadima's founding principles are all wrong. So Olmert and Livni and their associates maintain the fiction, do nothing to secure southern Israel and seek to transfer Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to Fatah terrorists.
Since Sept. 11, the rationalizers have won most of their policy battles with the rationalists and the results of their victories have been both ironic and tragic. As a result of the rationalizers' control of policy, the only ones who consistently engage in the rational pursuit of their interests, values and aspirations are the jihadists and their state sponsors. For their part, the leaders of the free world seem intent on living out George Orwell's observation that "the quickest way of ending a war is to lose it."
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
12/14/2007 13:31 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
