Month: October 2009

He was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan during the first years of the Bush-Cheney-Blair war on terror, after twenty years in the foreign service. What he saw in Uzbekistan turned his stomach. But not as much as this:

We were receiving CIA intelligence. MI-6 and the CIA share all their intelligence. So I was getting all the CIA intelligence on Uzbekistan and it was saying that detainees had confessed to membership in al-Qaeda and being in training camps in Afghanistan and to meeting Osama bin Laden. One way and another I was piecing together the fact that the CIA material came from the Uzbek torture sessions.

I didn’t want to make a fool of myself so I sent my deputy, a lady called Karen Moran, to see the CIA head of station and say to him, “My ambassador is worried your intelligence might be coming from torture. Is there anything he’s missing?”

She reported back to me that the CIA head of station said, “Yes, it probably is coming from torture, but we don’t see that as a problem in the context of the war on terror.”

In addition to which I learned that CIA were actually flying people to Uzbekistan in order to be tortured. I should be quite clear that I knew for certain and reported back to London that people were being handed over by the CIA to the Uzbek intelligence services and were being subjected to the most horrible tortures.

I didn’t realize that they weren’t Uzbek. I presumed simply that these were Uzbek people who had been captured elsewhere and were being sent in.

I now know from things I’ve learned subsequently, including the facts that the Council of Europe parliamentary inquiry into extraordinary rendition found that 90 percent of all the flights that called at the secret prison in Poland run by the CIA as a torture center for extraordinary rendition, 90 percent of those flights next went straight on to Tashkent [the capital of Uzbekistan].

As a result of his resistance, his career was killed by tabloid muck-raking:

I was suddenly accused of issuing visas in return for sex, stealing money from the post account, of being an alcoholic, of driving an embassy vehicle down a flight of stairs, which is extraordinary because I can’t drive. I’ve never driven in my life. I don’t have a driving license. My eyesight is terrible. …

But I was accused of all these unbelievable accusations, which were leaked to the tabloid media, and I spent a whole year of tabloid stories about sex-mad ambassador, blah-blah-blah. And I hadn’t even gone public. What I had done was write a couple of memos saying that this collusion with torture is illegal under a number of international conventions including the UN Convention Against Torture.

All the charges were eventually dropped or found to be baseless. But Murray's career was over. He's clearly a colorful character and prone to some uncheckable claims about the motivations for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. But his first-hand exposure to Uzbekistan's torture and tyranny makes his testimony on those facts persuasive.

Could any Irish readers help me and other readers understand what exactly it was that Donal Og Cusack's brother said to his father after he came out? The video is here. The quote is in the last few seconds.

Judah Grunstein explains why he supports a time-bounded surge in Afghanistan:

I'm not optimistic that a year from now, we'll find ourselves in a significantly better situation. And even if we are, it might not be a direct result of the increased troops. But signaling matters, and although it might be too late, a message of strong commitment now, accompanied by more forceful and conditioned demands of our partners in the effort, might make the difference between a measured drawdown and an unraveling. And that's a pretty big difference.

So this surge would be what the last surge was: a face-saver for withdrawal with no guarantee of any long-term gain. And how do you ask a soldier's mother to sacrifice her son for a face-saver?

Here's an interesting nugget from the Army secretary's recent sit-down with the Army Times:

Selling the idea [of repealing DADT] to Congress, which has the final say, could depend on exactly what the administration tries to do in terms of the timing of repeal and how it is applied, McHugh said.

It’s possible, for example, that homosexuals could be allowed into some occupations or units but barred from others, McHugh said, stressing that he was not aware of any such plans but only discussing how the issue might play out.

“I don’t want to prejudge the situation,” he said. “I am saying if he did that, it would be my job to explain it when the appropriate time comes.”

When asked specifically if lifting the gay ban would seriously disrupt the military, as predicted by those who oppose repeal, McHugh said there is no reason to think major turmoil would ensue.

“Anytime you have a broad-based policy change, there are challenges to that,” he said. “The Army has a big history of taking on similar issues, [with] predictions of doom and gloom that did not play out,” he said.

In a sign that all cable news is becoming talk radio, CNN slips behind even its own HLN in peak hours. At some point, blog readerships will eclipse CNN's at this rate. In some cases, that has already happened.

Bruce Bawer reports on violence and intimidation in an increasingly Muslim town in Denmark.

Taegan Goddard is as bemused by Rasmussen as I am. The polling outfit responds here. They claim it is all due to their sampling of likely voters rather than all voters.

This is rich:

“Is the United States a reliable partner with Afghanistan? Is the West a reliable partner with Afghanistan?” Karzai asked. “Have we received the commitments that we were given? Have we been treated like a partner?”

Yglesias provides a nice rebuttal:

[A] hawkish disposition and an obsession with toughness tend to erode our ability to play hard to get. For example, consider the widespread ideas that we’re fighting a “necessary” war in Afghanistan and that the cooperation of Hamid Karzai is vital to our success in that war. These two ideas, when put in combination, lead to the slightly absurd conclusion that securing the cooperation of Hamid Karzai is necessary for the national security of the most powerful country on earth.

In the real world, it should be the other way around.

We have interests in Afghanistan that it would be nice to successfully pursue. But Karzai’s interests are much more fundamental than ours. What’s necessary—or at least closer to necessary—is for him to secure our cooperation by acting in a way that’s helpful. And it’s the same for Poland and Georgia and all the rest. Relationships with friendly clients are nice to have, but the wise superpower should know how to play hard to get.

The Boston Globe's circulation is down 18 percent in one year; the San Francisco Chronicle's is down 26 percent. The WSJ is actually stable. But these slides and the readerships they now represent are hard to ignore. They are not signs of an industry as we have known it in trouble. They are signs of it ending.

Robert Reich is momentarily in agreement with Alan Greenspan:

The Street obviously detests the notion that its behemoths should be broken up. That's why the idea isn't even on the table. But it should be. No important public interest is served by allowing giant banks to grow too big to fail. Winding them down after they get into trouble is no answer. By then the damage will already have been done.

Whether it's using the antitrust laws or enacting a new Glass-Steagall Act, the Wall Street giants should be split up — and soon.

It seems to me that this should not be an ideological matter. It's an empirical one: how do we prevent Wall Street from repeating its recklessness of the past decade? How do we ensure that no single entity can hold the rest of us to ransom as these banks did? If Obama's reform measures are milque-toast, then he will have missed a critical moment to help capitalism help itself.