The Dish

Good news: HHS has now forwarded the rule to OMB. That leaves OMB with 60 days to clear the rule for publication. I've been giving the Obama administration some grief for stalling on civil rights. But they've done this very carefully and methodically. Yes, the length of time between the law's passage and the rule change will be around a year and a half. But the change of administration was responsible for half of that and the Obama peeps' determination to do this very, very carefully is responsible for the rest. That care has been taken to make sure the rule change is secure, that every legal obstacle is persuasively overcome and that the details work.

The Obama administration may take its time, but the evidence is showing that it gets there in the end. For me, my family and countless others caught in the HIV net, this is wonderful news. We're grateful. And we'll remember.

Berlin Block Tetris from Sergej Hein on Vimeo.

The latest in the NY-23 Republican civil war: Pawlenty backs Hoffmann (via Erickson, clearly pandering to the base he will need next time) while Newt holds off.

Musing On Iraq addresses yesterday's bombings:

Monthly [Iraqi] deaths are still at their lowest levels since the 2003 U.S. invasion.

The ebb and flow of violence shows the relative weakness of militants. They are only able to launch large attacks every other month. This month does show their increasing ability to carry out headline grabbing bombings however, in their attempt to destabilize the government, just as they did in August when they bombed the Finance and Foreign Ministries. That incident along with today’s undermine Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s claim that he has brought security to Iraq, which might hurt his re-election campaign in the 2010 vote.

It’s also important to remember not to track overall security in Iraq based upon such bombings. There is no direct correlation between such attacks and overall security incidents in Iraq or casualties.

Ignatius is positively chipper as well.

Roger Cohen reads the tea leaves on Obama's approach to Af-Pak by speaking at length with the British foreign minister:

When I asked if the mission needed substantially more troops, Miliband said, “What I think that you can see from the prime minister’s strategy is that we believe in serious counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency is a counterterrorist strategy.” […] That’s a clear rebuttal of the ever-larger school, most often identified with Vice President Joe Biden, advancing the view that Al Qaeda is the real threat, the Taliban much less of one; and so the United States should not commit more military resources to a nation-building struggle in Afghanistan that’s an expensive diversion from core U.S. strategic interests.

Cohen sees an increase of troops in the serious but fewer than 40,000 range. Britain has a reason to give it "one more try":

Three-quarters of all terrorist plots uncovered in Britain in recent years had links to Islamic extremists in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

But is it doable? Or does the attempt to squash it fuel it?

If it's true of Bachmann, it's also surely true of this.

Will of Ordinary Gentlemen writes:

I know this article on race and progressive cities has taken a lot of criticism, but its central observation – that liberal policies and homogeneous cities are closely correlated – seems pretty intuitive. Progressives frequently argue that American hostility to redistribution stems from lingering racial anxiety. Conservatives are less eager to blame our welfare policies on straightforward racism, but many will argue that Scandinavian-style social democracy won’t work in the United States because we lack similar levels of cultural homogeneity. Either way, there seems to be a universal consensus that people from similar backgrounds are more amenable to redistributive policies.

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?