The Dish

A reader writes:

Your most recent post on the details of the terror plot investigation was superb.  You did your homework. We all need to know the facts and make our own decisions about what is, or is not, going on. The decision to go public with the plot seems to have been initiated by the forced confession of this guy in a torture chamber in Islamabad and NOT based on the actual facts of the case as developed by MI5 and others. What is even more concerning is that the Bush administration balked when the Brits wanted to let the one guy go ahead with his dry run, perhaps providing more information and more suspects.  Why?  That is a bit concerning to me.  Seems Bush may have done more to jeopardize the investigation than anyone else.

When you are on the extremes it is easy to get caught up in the spin.  Those who have been quick to judge and condemn you are perfect examples of what I call "goose steppers". They obviously have NOT done any due diligence and quite frankly, I would imagine that they could care less about the actual facts. We cannot win this war on terror without knowing all the facts.  Those in the center, like yourself, must continue to raise their voices and be heard. It is hard to be heard above the extremist din but it is necessary for our survival.

We’ll find out more at some point. But skepticism seems to me to be in order at this point.

More details are emerging. The Brits didn’t want to arrest all the suspects but plans shifted after a Pakistan detention:

In contrast to previous reports, one senior British official suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports. The sources did say, however, that police believe one U.K.-based suspect was ready to conduct a "dry run." British authorities had wanted to let him go forward with part of the plan, but the Americans balked.

So we have one Islamist planning a dry-run. We have no evidence that any of the others had even bought airline tickets. Malkin-stand-in Karol Sheinin produces a week-old story from the right-wing tabloid Daily Mail to bolster her view that an actual threat to innocent lives was "imminent". All I can say is that, since August 11, new data have cast that unsourced information more suspect, and if Sheinin were a little more savvy about the British press, and had absorbed information unveiled within the last week, she’d be a little more skeptical. From the Guardian today:

A security official said: "There was a mastermind, there was a planner, and there were the executioners." He claimed the al-Qaida link to the alleged plot in Britain had been established and that it had been at the planning stage when it was interrupted in London last week. [My italics].

I don’t know about you – but "a planning stage" does not mean "imminent" to me. But tell that to Karol Sheinin. If torture is permissible to get information for plots in the "planning stage," well you see how the narrow case for torture always expands as soon as it is entertained.

Still, there’s little doubt that there was a serious plot in the works. The Independent – a virulently anti-Blair paper – reported the following last Sunday:

It was the arrest of Rashid Rauf about a week to 10 days ago that triggered the security operation in Britain last week, according to accounts in Pakistan. After he disappeared from contact, a panicking fellow conspirator telephoned the UK to tell the bombers to bring the plot forward and go ahead immediately after Mr Rauf disappeared from contact. The call was intercepted, and the British police mounted an emergency operation to stop the bombers. [Apologies for the nutball site where the piece was reprinted.]

This kind of thing is always a tough call. But the danger is that you seize people too soon, don’t have enough evidence to detain them, and lose potential valuable intelligence. If what triggered this panic was a tortured confession that exaggerated the imminence of the attack, then we may have bungled again. Again, this plot was well-known and closely monitored for months:

The official shed light on other aspects of the case, saying that while the investigation into the bombing plot began "months ago," some suspects were known to the security services even before the London subway bombings last year.

He acknowledged that authorities had conducted electronic and e-mail surveillance as well as physical surveillance of the suspects.

Monitoring of Rauf, in particular, apparently played a critical role, revealing that the plotters had tested the explosive liquid mixture they planned to use at a location outside Britain. NBC News has previously reported that the explosive mixture was tested in Pakistan. The source said the suspects in Britain had obtained at least some of the materials for the explosive but had not yet actually prepared or mixed it.

So: no solid evidence of a) passports, b) tickets, c) prepared explosives. So far- and this may change, of course – we know of one individual allegedly prepping for a "dry-run." Everyone else was already under intense surveillance. And yet this group of potentially lethal Islamists was arrested suddenly, perhaps forfeiting subsequent evidence or intelligence, and maybe rendering a successful prosecution impossible. One wonders why. Faulty tortured evidence from Pakistan? Jitteriness in Washington? There did not seem to be much jitteriness in Downing Street in the week before the planned "dry-run." Tony Blair decided to go on vacation, and never left it. Most of the leading British officials were chilling. Brown was in Scotland. Two suspects have already been released without being charged. The British authorities are asking for time extensions on detaining the rest – not a good sign for the prosecution.

It’s been accelerated by the Israel-Hezbollah war, argues the Times’ Bronwen Maddox. Participating in an army in Southern Lebanon has increased the tension. Money quote:

As the columnist Yusuf Kanli put it in the Turkish Daily News: "Things are changing in Turkey. People are becoming more conservative. Conservatives are becoming more nationalist. And nationalists are becoming racist." He asks, like many of Erdogan’s critics, why "Turks [should] die in Lebanon for the security of Israel but not … in northern Iraq for the security of Turkey"? Lebanon is a diversion, some argue, from Turkey’s own battle against Kurdish separatist rebels in the southeast.

Many others say it will distract the Government from the arduous and expensive task of qualifying for EU membership — and of persuading an increasingly sceptical public that this is still in Turkey’s best interests.

"Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy. Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect, but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy," – a "military affairs expert" who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month.

I have long wondered whether Cheney and Rumsfeld ever believed that their job was to build a new democracy in Iraq. Rumsfeld had dealt with and supported Saddam in the past; Cheney was extremely suspicious of occupying Iraq in 1990. One subversive theory – which I’m not endorsing, just airing – is that both merely wanted to turn the Saddam regime to rubble, and then play along with neocon democracy supporters, while making sure that the military was never given enough resources to do nation-building. Then Cheney and Rumsfeld could prove their point about the impossibility of reforming the Muslim world, and promote the view that we need merely to pummel enemies, project military fear across the region, and deter Islamo-fascism by "shock and awe." The Likud strategy, in other words.

Under this interpretation, Bush was too trusting or dumb to understand the deviousness of their plan to fail in Iraq; Wolfowitz saw it too late and got out; Rice is stuck managing the debris that a democracy-promoting president and a democracy-hostile Pentagon created. The troops were just pawns in Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s strategy. This interpretation would mean that incompetence is not the issue. Cheney and Rumsfeld have succeeded: they have turned Iraq into a failed state, removed its capacity to make WMDs, and detonated a regional Sunni-Shi’a war. Now they want to use the same brutalist strategy against Iran. This theory is probably too complex and subtle to be true. The screw-up theory of history is more often the most plausible. But it does make some internal sense – if you assume that Cheney and Rumsfeld are not complete incompetents.

Mill Valley, California, 6.30 am.

The love affair continues.

A reader writes:

Though your blog is frequently insightful, the post about Sri Lanka is idiotic. Why has not the Sri Lankan government received greater scrutiny from the MSM?

Well why have not the Sri Lankan people received any MSM coverage over the past two decades during which they have been victims of a degree of terrorism worse than anything Muslim fundametalists have yet to do. Yet we know about each Israeli who has been killed over the past decade.

The MSM will take interest in the Sri Lankan government probably after it starts taking an interest in Sri Lankan people.

"As a supporter of the peace movement in the 1980s, I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups, whose views on women make western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic. Nor would I have predicted that today’s feminists would be so indulgent towards Iran, a theocratic nation where it is an act of resistance to show an inch or two of female hair beneath the veil and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not joking about his murderous intentions towards Israel and the Jews.
On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say. Instead of ‘I am woman, hear me roar’, there is a loud silence, punctuated only by remonstrations against Tony Blair and George Bush ‚Äî ‘the world’s number one terrorist’ as the marchers would have it," – my friend and colleague Sarah Baxter in the Sunday Times.

The usual suspects have deployed the usual rhetorical tropes against my questions about the evidence in the alleged terror plot based in Britain. Jeff Goldstein has me on an AIDS "dementia watch." Another had this charming metaphor:

Hell hath no fury like a man-bitch spurned.

They don’t even need a blood-level of 0.12, do they? A Malkin stand-in writes:

Of course, the fact that [Sullivan]’s hysterically arguing that there was no terror plot out of London makes his charges against me, let’s say slightly less believeable.

Well, read the post. I’m not arguing that "there was no terror plot". I’m asking questions about the evidence provided. So far: none. Maybe there’s an explanation for that – and we’ll find out in due course. But the Malkinian had previously written the following words in defense of torture in Pakistan:

An attack was imminent, and the information had to be obtained, no matter the method.

I have yet to read any evidence that an attack was "imminent". All the stories I’ve read have argued that the plot was for a dummy-run. Maybe Karol Sheinin has sources that I haven’t read. If she has, she should provide them, or correct her post. If she has a different understanding of the term "imminent," then it would be helpful for her to say so. My point about the use of torture is related to the reliability of the evidence. Torture is renowned for providing faulty information, even in totalitarian states whose techniques some conservatives now endorse. My question is about whether the evidence is indeed faulty. We don’t know. If there’s not much there and the British are forced to release the suspects without charging them, the backlash against Blair will be enormous. And that will make future counter-terrorism harder. I should add I don’t think I can be accused of disbelieving the potential of terrorists to strike again. I have a cover-story in the current New York Magazine premised on exactly that – on a far larger scale than anything alleged recently.

"Not one word about the Webb campaign’s dirty trick in having one of its volunteers, camcorder in hand, harrassing Allen as he campaigns around Virginia," – NRO’s Mark Levin, outraged that a racist remark in a public speech by GOP senator George Allen could actually be recorded by a political opponent. (Hat tip: Kevin.)