The Buie Knife

Obama Administration Confirms 'Worldwide War on Terror' Has Ended

The Obama Administration's point man on counter-terrorism and homeland security, John Brennan, has declared an end to the "war on terror," Spencer Ackerman reports in The Washington Independent. With Al Qaeda on the ropes, it makes no sense to elevate it to greater importance than it deserves, he said. It is no longer a “highly organized, global entity capable of replacing sovereign nations with a global caliphate,” and the administration is abandoning the use of the word “jihad” in reference to al-Qaeda, since the term carries “religious legitimacy” in the Muslim world that al-Qaeda’s “murderers… desperately seek but in no way deserve.” He did vow "with certainty" that the U.S. would defeat Al Qaeda.

He also emphasized that the United States is not locked in a struggle with the world’s billion Muslims.

This does not mean, however, that the U.S. is letting its guard down. Counterterrorism will remain a “vital part” of the administration’s national security and foreign policies, but not the lion’s share of them, he said. But political extremism and terrorism arise more from problems of global governance, economic crisis, social stratification and a denial of basic needs and legitimate grievances rather than from religious beliefs, he said. Read the whole thing.

Previous:

• On International Issues, So Many Hopeful Signs: An End Soon to the 'Worldwide War on Terror' and the 'Clash of Civilizations'?

On International Issues, So Many Hopeful Signs: An End Soon to the 'Worldwide War on Terror' and the 'Clash of Civilizations'?

Could the "Worldwide War on Terror" be ending soon? Or at least downgraded to a couple of hot spots of greatest concern to the U.S. -- the increasingly dangerous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the instability of those countries, and the continuing fanaticism of North Korea?

Compared to early 2002, when George Bush declared that the U.S. faced direct threats from an "axis of evil," the world from the U.S. perspective in 2009 is looking like a far more congenial place.  

Al Qaeda operatives have dwindled to less than 300 worldwide, according to U.S. intelligence estimates. The hysteria and paranoia after 9/11, that the attacks represented "a clash of civilizations" between West and East, between Judeo-Christian civilization and Islam, have subsided. The fears by many Americans, especially on the right, that "there are no moderate Muslims" now seem completely ignorant and preposterous.

President Obama's diplomatic overtures to Muslims, calling for a "new beginning between the United States and Muslims," is having an effect. His visits to Turkey and Egypt, his magnificent speeches in Ankara and Cairo, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's ongoing diplomatic efforts, have led to progress on a number of fronts.  

After downright hostility in the Middle East and Europe toward Bush, they've welcomed Obama with open arms. We've seen pro-Western election results in Lebanon, tentative progress in Iraq, and strong yearnings for democracy in Iran.

On NPR's "Fresh Air," Iraqi political analyst Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace stated that the democracy protests in Iran probably would not have occurred if Barack Hussein Obama had not been elected in the U.S. and if he had not offered an olive branch to Iran after the belligerence of George W. Bush. When Bush was in power, Iranians feared a U.S. invasion and therefore domestic dissidents downplayed their political differences as a matter of national security. Many Iranians were inspired by Obama's election, and decided to use some of the same tools from the Internet to organize opposition to the regime's despotism.

With Obama's encouragement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has for the first time called for a two-state solution and a Palestinian state.

In part to please Obama, Turkey and Armenia have established a framework to normalize relations after so many years of bitterness over the issue of Armenian "genocide." Indeed, Turkey may be a model for Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan for what a successful, relatively peaceful secular Islamic society can look like.

These positive changes are too tentative to mark history-making progress. By mid-2010, we'll have a better idea if they are mere flashes in the pan or evidence of sea changes spurred by the election of Obama and his refreshing world view.

Related:

• For Radical Islam, the End Begins
  

Former Interrogators Oppose Torture of Detainees

People who have no personal experience interrogating detainees (such as former vice president Dick Cheney) continue to argue and PRESUME that torture is an effective weapon in the war on terror. But a growing number of actual interrogators are speaking out on just how ineffective it is. Among them: Senior Military Interrogator Matthew Alexander:

Watch this on Youtube.com. 

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

I was also struck by a report on "60 Minutes" from the interrogator of Saddam Hussein, who also felt no need to use torture. The presumption of those who advocate torture is that the objective should be to keep upping the detainee's discomfort and fear. They presume the more discomfort and fear a prisoner has, the more he will talk or confess. The truth is precisely the opposite. Psychologically, the objective is to lessen defenses, not increase them.

Drill Deeper:

• Inconvenient truths about waterboarding, torture, and Cheney's assertions
• Detainee Was Tortured to 'Prove' Non-Existent Link Between Saddam, Al Qaeda, WMDs, and to Justify U.S. Attack on Iraq, Powell Aide Charges
• Gen. Petraeus Endorses Obama's Plans to Close Gitmo and End Torture

Inconvenient Truths About Waterboarding, Torture and Cheney's Assertions

Of the continuing debate on terrorism and torture, some have claimed that waterboarding is not torture. Conservative talk show host Mancow Muller was one of those who made the claim, and agreed to be waterboarded. But after just six seconds of waterboarding, he called a halt to it and agreed it was torture. Meanwhile, "Cheney Speech Ignored Some Inconvenient Truths" (McClatchy).

Columnist David Brooks charges: "When Cheney lambastes the change in security policy, he’s not really attacking the Obama administration. He’s attacking the Bush administration." In truth, he says, there is very little difference between the current Obama policies on terrorism and protecting the country and the policies in the latter days of the Bush administration. Cheney opposed the Bush administration's ban on waterboarding and other forms of "enhanced interrogation."

Meanwhile, Gen. Petraeus endorses Obama's plan to close Gitmo and end torture.

I wonder if Cheney approved of or tried to cover up the "enhanced interrogation" of Gitmo detainee Binyam Mohamed, whose "genitals were (allegedly) sliced with a scalpel"? Would Cheney draw the line on that?

Drill Deeper:

• Detainee Was Tortured to 'Prove' Non-Existent Link Between Saddam, Al Qaeda, WMDs, and to Justify U.S. Attack on Iraq, Powell Aide Charges
• Gen. Petraeus Endorses Obama's Plans to Close Gitmo and End Torture

Detainee Was Tortured to 'Prove' Non-Existent Link Between Saddam, Al Qaeda, WMDs, and to Justify U.S. Attack on Iraq, Powell Aide Charges

For all the attempts to dismiss the ongoing investigation into torture as a partisan witch hunt, so far the most compelling opponents of it have been Colin Powell's chief of staff, Condoleeza Rice's chief of staff, Sen. John McCain, and Ali Soufan, an ex-FBI agent who interrogated Al Qaeda suspects. Hardly a bunch of soft-hearted liberals.

We've learned that Cheney-Bush authorized "harsh interrogation" of suspected Al Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi in Egypt in April-May 2002 to force him to confess that he had contacts in Iraq, according to former Colin Powell aide Larry Wilkerson. (Hat tip: AS) Cheney, in particular, was hellbent on proving that Iraq was involved in 9/11, that it had weapons of mass destruction, that Al Qaeda was communicating with Saddam Hussein, and the U.S. was justified in declaring war on Iraq. 

The harsh interrogation ceased, Wilkerson says, "only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, 'revealed' such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop. There in fact were no such contacts." On May 10, 2009, he mysteriously "committed suicide" in Libyan custody. Human Rights Watch says he was "Exhibit A" on the relationship between pre-Iraq war false intelligence and torture. HRW, which met with him a few days before his death, also said there should be further investigation. (UPDATE: Wilkerson responds to  allegations in The Weekly Standard that he got his information wrong.)

So we have evidence that at least one detainee was tortured until he confessed something that Bush-Cheney wanted to hear, that wasn't in fact true, in order to wage a war against Iraq on FALSE PRETENSES. In addition, at the end of 2003, Cheney wanted to waterboard an Iraqi prisoner to make him confess a relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein which did not exist. Cheney had insisted in the run-up to the Iraq war that the "evidence was overwhelming" that Saddam had high-level contacts with Al Qaeda, that he had biological and chemical weapons, and a nuclear weapons program. He was wrong on all three counts.

'We Must Hold Accountable Those Who Tortured, Who Committed War Crimes'

"I do believe in holding responsible those high elected officials who broke the law and violated the Constitution in authorizing war crimes. It should take as much time as needed for a thorough accounting; it should be meticulously fair; it should be geared solely to ensure that the rule of law is no longer in question; and that only those truly responsible at the top of the chain of command are held liable. But if we do not hold these men to account, the precedent they set is alarming. They have, after all, argued that the executive branch can do anything to anyone to defend the nation's security as defined and measured by that executive branch itself. They have argued that that power is permanent and not restricted to a discrete length of time. They have declared the Constitution to be entirely subject to the executive's will, checked only by a four year "moment of accountability". And they are unrepentant - even boastful of their actions. We cannot leave that precedent in place." -- Andrew Sullivan

Anonymous Liberal responds with caveats, calling not for prosecutions but for a truth commission: "The goal here should not be maximal punishment, but maximal deterrence."

Is Waterboarding Torture? Is It Effective? An Objective Analysis

One of the most useful websites I've seen in understanding waterboarding and whether it is torture is http://www.waterboarding.org. The site was created by someone who apparently has no ax to grind.

The CIA has acknowledged waterboarding Khalid Shaikh Mohammed,and claims it as a success story:  http://waterboarding.org/success_story

He confessed to every terrorist act under the sun, 31 acts:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6452789.stm

He wants to plead guilty, and challenges the government to put him to death (as a form of martyrdom).

No doubt his confessions should be taken as gospel. No skepticism is necessary...?

Previous:

• Democrats Show Restraint in Pursuing Bush for Illegal Acts
• Bush Gulag

Bush Gulag

Despite President Bush's declaration that the U.S. "does not torture," the Senate Armed Services Committee has produced evidence that it was the policy of the U.S. government after 9/11 to use almost any aggressive technique, including beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation, waterboarding, starvation, tying detainees, enforced nudity for weeks, and repeated kicks in the groin by female interrogators. A lawyer for the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, Jonathan Fredman, told the committee that the only limit to the aggressive techniques was "if the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."

Thousands were falsely imprisoned, without any evidence of their guilt, and many of them were tortured and abused. At least 25 detainees were murdered out of a total of 100 detainee deaths, according to Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff.

U.S. Army General Antonia Taguba, who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, has accused the Bush administration of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held account, according to the McClatchy Washington Bureau.

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

Many former detainees eventually released as innocent still suffer from trauma, the Associated Press reports on a study by Physicians for Human Rights. Further, "military lawyers warned the Pentagon that some of the methods it used to interrogate and hold detainees after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks violated military, U.S. and international law. Those objections were overruled by the top Pentagon lawyer, who said he was unaware of the criticism."

(Download the full report from Physicians for Human Rights)

Meanwhile, an eight-month McClatchy Newspapers investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that hundreds of men have been wrongfully imprisoned by the U.S. in "Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments." 

Andrew Sullivan:  "Defending suspected terrorists' human rights isn't popular - especially when those suspects are foreign, have brown skin and speak a different language. But if most Americans fully understood how many innocents have been swept into the Bush gulag, they might be more circumspect."

Perhaps the most damning and thorough account so far comes from a book by Philippe Sands, a professor of law at University College London. The book is called Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. He summarizes some of it in "It was Top Down Stupid: The Bush Administration's 'Bad Apples' Theory Goes Sour," an article for Slate. A description of the book at Amazon.com hits quite a few nails on the head:

On December 2, 2002 the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed his name at the bottom of a document that listed eighteen techniques of interrogation--techniques that defied international definitions of torture. The Rumsfeld Memo authorized the controversial interrogation practices that later migrated to Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, as part of the policy of extraordinary rendition. From a behind-the-scenes vantage point, Phillipe Sands investigates how the Rumsfeld Memo set the stage for a divergence from the Geneva Convention and the Torture Convention and holds the individual gatekeepers in the Bush administration accountable for their failure to safeguard international law.

The Torture Team delves deep into the Bush administration to reveal:

·       How the policy of abuse originated with Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, and was promoted by their most senior lawyers

·        Personal accounts, through interview, of those most closely involved in the decisions

  ·        How the Joint Chiefs and normal military decision-making processes were circumvented

·        How Fox TV’s 24 contributed to torture planning

·        How interrogation techniques were approved for use

·        How the new techniques were used on Mohammed Al Qahtani, alleged to be “the 20th highjacker” (but the Pentagon in May 2008 dropped all charges against him)

·        How the senior lawyers who crafted the policy of abuse exposed themselves to the risk of war crimes charges

Previous:

• Abuse and Torture as Government Policy
• Has Justice Been Served in Iraq Prison Abuse Scandal? Is Abu Ghraib Part of a Pattern of Abuse by U.S.?
• Iraq, prisoner abuse are not partisan issues

An Afternoon in Pakistan

The assassination of 54-year-old Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan probably, tragically, dashes many hopes for a country that has endured too many dictators, too much intrigue, too much violence. I don't see how President Bush's statement is helpful: "she knew that her return to Pakistan earlier this year put her life at risk. Yet she refused to allow assassins to dictate the course of her country." Er, isn't that exactly what is happening? Assassins are once again dictating the course of Pakistan. Untimely deaths of Pakistan's leaders has pretty much dictated its modern history, hasn't it?

I'll never forget my own tense "afternoon in Pakistan" -- a visit to the Pakistan embassy in Washington, as a journalist trying to discern how totalitarian governments employ public relations agencies to soften their image in the nation's capital. At the time, Muhammud Zia-ul-Haq was Pakistan's president. He was a brutal military dictator who had overthrown Benazir Bhutto's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1977.

What I most remember about my visit to the embassy was:

• the attempt at the embassy to create a personality cult around President Zia, with large posters of him in many rooms, as if he was watching every move of every embassy employee.
• the high security and gold-plated bars that separated so many sections of the embassy, making it feel far more like a prison than an embassy;
• the goonishness of the media attache, who seemed not to have the slightest clue how to answer a Western journalist's questions, and instead lectured me without allowing interruption on the glories of Pakistan and President Zia's regime. Given the cluelessness of the media attache, it was no wonder Zia hired a Washington PR firm.
• The PR worked. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, dictator Zia became very much a Washington favorite. He may have been a despot, but he was anti-Soviet, and that's all the U.S. cared about then. A Washington PR firm helped him win the right to purchase U.S.-made fighter planes.
• This was around the same time the Reagan administration was hailing and funding the "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan, such as Osama Bin Laden, because they were anti-Soviet, and supplying Saddam Hussein with weapons, because he was anti-Iran. American foreign policy, when based on the theory that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" without enough caution or much scrutiny of individuals' pathological potential, can backfire.

Drill Deeper:

• Bin Laden Killed Bhutto: How Blind Can We Be?

MySpace or Facebook for Spies, and SC Woman Tracks and Scoops Bin Laden Online

Several years ago, just before 9/11/01, I consulted with Robert David Steele of Open Source Solutions, Inc. on a web site to encourage intelligence officers to use online tools to break down barriers, share information and analysis. Steele very presciently predicted that unless the intelligence community quickly embraced these tools, the U.S. would be far more vulnerable to a terrorist attack.

We were frustrated then by the slowness of the intelligence community to embrace these ideas. It's good to see them FINALLY embracing the power of social networking. They're creating a "My Space" or Facebook for spies -- "to generate better analysis by breaking down firewalls across the traditionally stove-piped intelligence community." Thomas Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, tells the Financial Times that technology can also help process increasing amounts of information where the number of analysts is limited.

A case study in the effectiveness of open source intelligence-gathering comes from South Carolina, where a mom, fluent in Arabic, works as a online consultant from her home and recently scooped Al Qaeda on the announcement of a new video by Osama Bin Laden. Read the story.

Related:

• Consumer Innovations to Inform Web Sites for Spies