Month: October 2009

A reader writes:

As a trial attorney with the Department of Justice, I am

familiar with the al-Rabiah case (however, to be clear, I am not a trial attorney who worked on the case).  My opinions stated herein, of course, are not the opinions of the Department.  I write for myself and myself alone.

I had a long conversation regarding the al-Rabiah case with colleagues when the decision came down.  Our expertise and experiences are varied, but we all work on matters ranging from criminal matters to civil habeas cases.  We are litigators, and we know what makes a case, and when a case is weak. 

The conclusion drawn by each of my colleagues – some of whom are liberal Democrats, some of whom are conservative, law-and-order Republicans – is, to a person, that the detention and interrogation programs the United States implemented in the months and years following 9/11 is not only a complete abrogation and violation of international law and, in many cases, federal law – it is also fundamentally immoral.  We also agree that the al-Rabiah case is by far the most egregious yet to come to light.  To repeat: yet to come to light.  I can only guess that there are other, far worse cases. 

That said, I am surprised you did not highlight what me and my colleagues agreed was the single most horrifying passage from the Court’s decision.  It was the Court’s quotation of something an interrogator said to al-Rabiah during his interrogation.  The interrogator told al-Rabiah:

“There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent.”

Court Memorandum and Order, p. 41 (emphasis mine). 

This was an agent of the United States saying this.

This was not a statement pulled from the transcripts of the Nuremburg trials, nor archival evidence taken from reports smuggled out of one of Stalin’s gulags.  This was a statement made by an agent of this government less than 7 years ago to a detainee.  The enormity of that is nearly incomprehensible. 

But even worse – far worse – is the fact that the government would nevertheless still seek to convict based on the resulting confession.    

To those of us who read that passage and who vowed and make it our vocation to serve and protect the Constitution of the United States, that fact is a gut-punch.  For me and my colleagues, it literally took our breath away.  It makes one wonder how far down into the abyss we have allowed ourselves to drop.  And whether there is the political will to find our way out. 

It took my breath away as well. I used to wonder how democracies became tyrannies. I know now. Because good men like Obama do nothing.

Ackerman highlights this paragraph from Gen. McChrystal's remarks in London:

Iran, of course, being, you know, in such proximity to Afghanistan and having significant influence inside Afghanistan, is a big player. They, in my view, they have a lot of very positive influence inside Afghanistan, some of it cultural, some of it financial, just things that any neighbor would have to try to build the stability. I think that if Iran takes a very mature look at a stable Afghanistan and support the government of Afghanistan, then we’ll be — we’ll be in good shape. If they were to choose not to do that, and they were to choose to support insurgents, I think that would be a significant miscalculation.

Ackerman swipes:

I can’t wait for the braying conservative outcry against McChrystal’s craven appeasement of the butchers of Tehran or whatever.

My assignment for the Sunday column this week is Afghanistan. I tried last night but was blocked ( a rare event for an OCD hack like me). Of course, I’ve been thinking about it for quite a while now and airing a range of opinions on this blog. What the president faces is an excruciatingly difficult choice in an immensely complex and dangerous region where power is in flux and the future very hard to assess. The way he’s handling this decision – as transparently as feasible – is admirable. I’ve had some deep worries about general McChrystal, and was appalled that he was allegedly threatening to resign if he didn’t get his way. But it seems clear now that he never threatened to resign, and those who leaked that non-fact were trying to bounce him as much as the president. And his speeches and comments this past week seem to me to speak very highly of him, and his bluntness in public and private suggest a man serious about winning this war. On a human level, anyone who can recite whole sections of Monty Python And The Holy Grail by heart is all right with me. But I worry that his analysis – “all in or all out” – is not quite right. I’ve relied on this formula myself in the past, but every time I follow through in my head the full consequences of either path, I end up feeling deeply uncomfortable. I’ll be candid and note, as readers will surely have twigged by now, that my Tory pessimism is resurgent. This is not just Afghanistan; it’s Afghanistan after thirty years of violence, mayhem, brutality and anarchy. To believe that America can create a functioning stable state in that context seems insane to me, and given this country’s fiscal crisis, a reckless commitment for the distant future. At the same time, letting Afghanistan unravel still further right now, with the ramifications for Pakistan’s knife-edge struggle with Islamism, is a risk few American presidents would willingly take. Pakistan’s military is on the verge of a major offensive against the Taliban. Last time, they lost. This time, they sound more determined. We don’t know the outcome of that. The election in Afghanistan is unresolved, with serious and credible allegations of fraud, and the possibility of a run-off or any number of possible unforeseen developments. Again, we do not know the outcome of that. Iraq is far from stable and could descend into sectarian anarchy when the US leaves. There are some encouraging signs there – especially Maliki’s inclusion of Sunni groups in his new coalition and an apparent resurgence of national unity as a theme in the current campaign. If Iraqis are finally ready to leave the past behind, if the bloody chaos of the worst years have shifted that national psyche, then that would indeed be miraculous. But anyone boldly predicting triumph needs their head examined. The truth is: we do not know the outcome of that either, and since the US has limited resources, and has already pummeled the troops beyond what most mortals could tolerate, we should, it seems to me, be very cautious about over-extension in very volatile regions. Marc Lynch is pretty much on the same page at this point, and he draws the following conclusion:

What’s so terrible with muddling through for a while, giving the new tactics a chance to work at the local level while preventing the worst-case scenarios from happening? Why choose between escalation or withdrawal at exactly the time when the political picture is at its least clear? Why not maintain a lousy Afghan government which doesn’t quite fall, keep the Taliban on the ropes without defeating it, cut deals where we can, and try to figture out a strategy to deal with the Pakistan part which all the smart set agrees is the real issue these days? Why not focus on applying the improved COIN tactics with available resources right now instead of focusing on more troops? If the American core objective in Afghanistan is to prevent its re-emergence as an al-Qaeda safe haven, or to prevent the Taliban from taking Kabul, those seem to be manageable at lower troop levels.

At this point, it seems to me we have to leave our past behind as much as Iraqis need to leave theirs’. What’s vital is that we make this decision based on the facts on the ground and as hard-nosed an assessment of reality as we can muster – not as a means to further or inflame our ideological and political battles of the past eight years. At this point in time, I think Lynch’s case for kicking the can down the road for a little while longer, while we absorb as many data points as we can about the events in the region and beyond, is pretty damn persuasive.

It isn’t weakness; and it isn’t surrender. It’s just being responsible. Too much is at stake to be anything else right now. And, to be honest, I have every confidence in this cabinet and this general and this president will do the best they absolutely can. And while we shouldn’t stint in criticism, we should allow them some lee-way in an immensely difficult and fateful call.

(Photo: the great Paula Bronstein/Getty.)

If by any chance you are a fundamentalist Christian, skip this post. You can't handle the truth. But if you're a believer that the family is as deep and as old as humanity itself, read on.

Carl Zimmer highlights a few findings from the Ardipithecus fossil research unveiled this week:

Those of you reading this post that have a Y chromosome have canine teeth that are about the same size as those of my XX readers. The same rule applies to the teeth of some other primate species. But in still other species, the males have much bigger canines than the females. The difference corresponds fairly well to the kind of social lives these primates have. Big canines are a sign of intense competition between males. Canine teeth in some primate species get honed into sharp daggers that males can use as weapons in battles for territory and for the opportunity to mate with females.

Men have stubby canines, which many scientists take as a sign that the competition between males became less intense in our hominid lineage. That was likely due to a shift in family life. Male chimpanzees compete with each other to mate with females, but they don’t help with the kids when they’re born. Humans form long-term bonds, with fathers helping mothers by, for example, getting more food for the kids to eat. There’s still male-male competition in our lineage, but it’s a lot less intense than in other species.

White and his colleagues  found so many teeth of different Ardipithecus individuals that they could compare male and female canines with some confidence. The male teeth turn out to be surprisingly blunted. This result suggests that hominids shifted away from a typical ape social structure early in our ancestry. If this was a result of males forming long-term bonds with females and helping raise young, this shift was able to occur while hominids were still living a very ape-like life. Ardipithecus existed about 2 million years before the oldest evidence of stone tools, suggesting that technology was not the trigger for the evolution of nice hominid guys.

Much more fascinating shit here.

"My honest view is that she would not be a winning candidate for president and if she was the results would be … catastrophic," – McCain '08 manager Steve Schmidt, on Sarah Palin.

Whatever happened to the subjunctive?

Absorbing the latest from the Iran talks will take time. First off: the reality-based caveats:

Most analysts had agreed coming into the talks this morning that the bare minimum for a successful meeting is an agreed framework for continuing the negotiations.  This (low) bar seems to have been met in today’s talks.

Enduring America's judges the talks a win for the Iranian government:

What it needed, even more than the disappearance of the sanctions threat and space for its nuclear programme, was the drama and spectacle of recognition to take back home.

I'm not so sure. Iran "agreed in principle Thursday to ship most of its current stockpile of enriched uranium to Russia, where it would be refined for exclusively peaceful uses." This strikes me as big news. Greenwald's framing:

As is true for any tentative agreement with anyone, there is always the possibility that something could happen prior to compliance, but this was a deal reached after a single-day meeting.  Just consider that, as Hynd said on Twitter, the "Obama WH already got more from one buffet lunch with Iran than Bush WH did in 8 years of saber-rattling." 

Gary Sick is also optimistic:

By all accounts, instead of being a food fight leading to a total breakdown, the Geneva talks were serious, businesslike, and even cordial. The top U.S. negotiator, Undersecretary of State William Burns, had a one-on-one meeting with Iranian top negotiator Saeed Jalili, in which they reportedly talked substantive issues. That is something that had not happened in thirty years. During the latter years of the Clinton presidency, Iranian officials conducted desperate evasive maneuvers to avoid any direct contact with American officials, and during the first six years of the George W. Bush administration, American officials did the same with their Iranian diplomatic counterparts. The orders on both sides to avoid official contact at risk of one’s professional career seem to have been relaxed, at least for this occasion.

A reader writes:

Reading the opinion, a link to which you posted. Page 14:

“He further explained that he was “detained by the American troops and thanks to God they are good example [sic] of humanitarian behavior.”

is heartbreaking.  No other word for it. I see that Worthington calls it “ironic” but I stand by my adjective.

“Thanks to God,” at least, that our system includes still a judiciary that could eventually set forth an opinion like this.  But look again, just look at what Fouad al-Rabiah, then 42 years old, father of four, wrote at the time to his family in Kuwait, from an Afghanistan overcome with war.

He was desperately trying to get back to them, and he was in prison, held by American troops.  And he said the American troops, thanks to God, are good example[s] of humanitarian behavior.

How many Muslims or Arabs, anywhere in the world, would say that now?

This is among the things Cheney and his utterly foul, despicable crew just fucking threw away, thinking that doing so would make us strong and safe.

Get angrier.

Matt Welch digs through Roman Polanski's memoir. 

Juan Cole busts ten myths about Iran. Number two:

Iran's military budget is a little over $6 billion annually. Sweden, Singapore and Greece all have larger military budgets. Moreover, Iran is a country of 70 million, so that its per capita spending on defense is tiny compared to these others, since they are much smaller countries with regard to population. Iran spends less per capita on its military than any other country in the Persian Gulf region with the exception of the United Arab Emirates.

I wonder what the equivalent would be for Israel, which you and I partly pay for.

Leonhardt parses.