Category ►►► Terrorism Intelligence

December 14, 2006

That Was Thener; This Is Even Nower

This is an update to our previous post a couple of weeks ago, That Was Then, This Is Now. In that post, we linked to a Washington Post story about the Democrats rejecting the most important congressional reform of intelligence that the 9/11 Commission recommended. Oddly, however, I notice now that I forgot to quote from it! I can only plead premature senility and correct the oversight now:

It was a solemn pledge, repeated by Democratic leaders and candidates over and over: If elected to the majority in Congress, Democrats would implement all of the recommendations of the bipartisan commission that examined the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But with control of Congress now secured, Democratic leaders have decided for now against implementing the one measure that would affect them most directly: a wholesale reorganization of Congress to improve oversight and funding of the nation's intelligence agencies. Instead, Democratic leaders may create a panel to look at the issue and produce recommendations, according to congressional aides and lawmakers.

Well that Democratic panel has now produced its recommendations... and sure enough, the panel's only recommendation is -- to create another panel!

If you parse through the Clintonspeak, they're not accepting the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission to remove control of the funding of intelligence agencies from the Appropriations committees and give it instead to the Intelligence committees:

[Rep. Nancy] Pelosi, D-Calif. [100%], also said that one of the first tasks of the Democratic-controlled House she will lead beginning in January will be approving the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, including taking steps to make intelligence decisions more transparent.

The Select Intelligence Oversight Panel proposed by Pelosi would be made up by members of the Appropriations Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence, and would work within the Appropriations Committee.

Simply put, if the panel works "within the Appropriations committee," then it's controlled by that committee -- and that means Appropriations will still control the budget that will be "overseen" by the panel that it also controls:

[The panel] would examine, through hearings, the president's intelligence budget, prepare the classified annex to the annual defense spending bill and conduct oversight of the use of appropriated funds by intelligence agencies.

In other words, it will not itself appropriate the funds or even (it appears) recommend to the Appropriations committees how much to appropriate or how to use those appropriations. And it goes without saying (though I'm going to say it anyway) that nowhere in this statement does Pelosi or anyone else say that Appropriations will lose budgetary control over the clandestine and intelligence agencies, as the 9/11 Commission recommended, nor that the House and Senate Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence will gain that budgetary authority.

In fact, they don't even pledge to create a new Appropriations subcommittee devoted to intelligence... the bare minimum recommendation of the commission, which they offered if Congress couldn't bring itself to strip Appropriations of the least little bit of control.

Rather than actually accept the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission -- which are very clear (see our previous post) -- the Democrats plan only to create a PR stunt instead: a "panel" that is controlled by the Appropriations committees and will simply ensure that the administration actually uses the money as Appropriations directs.

Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Wynn Las Vegas, 100%) believe they can get away with creating a committee to study the committee, rather than actually implement the recommended change.

But you know what I think? I believe that this time, they may not get away with it: if the Washington Post, of all liberal media outlets, is already publishing a major story chastising them for blowing off the Commission (after campaigning obsessively on "fully implementing" those same recommendations)... then the incoming Democratic 110th may find it's no longer immune from harsh criticism -- in any medium.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 14, 2006, at the time of 04:54 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 01, 2006

That Was Then; This Is Now

The headline says it all: Democrats Reject Key 9/11 Panel Suggestion.

Not that that could stop me from saying even more!

Specifically, one of the most important findings of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (a.k.a., the 9-11 Commission), from chapter 13 of the final report, is that appropriations for the clandestine agencies -- the CIA and the "national agencies," comprising the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) -- should be separated out from the normal Defense Department appropriations and handled via a special committee, or else by the House and Senate Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence.

Currently, intelligence-agency appropriations are under the purview of the Defense subcommittees of the Appropriations committees. But here is the recommendation of the 9-11 Commission:

Recommendation: Finally, to combat the secrecy and complexity we have described, the overall amounts of money being appropriated for national intelligence and to its component agencies should no longer be kept secret. Congress should pass a separate appropriations act for intelligence, defending the broad allocation of how these tens of billions of dollars have been assigned among the varieties of intelligence work.

Earlier in the chapter, the Commission explained the problem quite clearly:

The current DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] is responsible for community performance but lacks the three authorities critical for any agency head or chief executive officer: (1) control over purse strings, (2) the ability to hire or fire senior managers, and (3) the ability to set standards for the information infrastructure and personnel. [The DCI position was terminated in April of last year in response to another recommendation of the 9-11 Commission; the head of the CIA now reverts to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who is under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence]....

When Congress passes an appropriations bill to allocate money to intelligence agencies, most of their funding is hidden in the Defense Department in order to keep intelligence spending secret. Therefore, although the House and Senate Intelligence committees are the authorizing committees for funding of the intelligence community, the final budget review is handled in the Defense Subcommittee of the Appropriations committees. Those committees have no subcommittees just for intelligence, and only a few members and staff review the requests.

The appropriations for the CIA and the national intelligence agencies- NSA, NGA, and NRO-are then given to the secretary of defense. The secretary transfers the CIA's money to the DCI but disburses the national agencies' money directly. Money for the FBI's national security components falls within the appropriations for Commerce, Justice, and State and goes to the attorney general.

This is absurdly cumbersome, hence dangerous to national security: in Congress, the committees that are supposed to control and provide oversight for the intelligence agencies, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, have no say over the budgets of the agencies they supposedly control.

While many recommendations of the 9-11 Commission were controversial, there is virtually no controversy among intelligence officers over this aspect: appropriations for intelligence agencies should be made by committees or subcommittees that are exclusively devoted to intelligence, not a wart on the behind of the Department of Defense. That means appropriations should either by handled by the Intelligence committees themselves (best) or at least by dedicated Intelligence subcommittees of the Appropriations committees (adequate).

There is, however, enormous controversy about this recommendation in Congress: on a nutshell, they just don't want to do it.

Robert Novak was on Hannity and Colmes yesterday, and he explained the problem succinctly:

1. The Republicans never took up rearranging Congressional appropriations for the intelligence agencies, so they hardly have clean thumbs themselves;
2. The Democrats campaigned on the promise -- it was one of only three they made -- to "fully implement the 9-11 Commission's recommendations." That would especially include this one, as the higgledy-piggledy nature of intelligence funding undermines the most important aspect of the GWOT;

3. Yet now that the Democrats will be the majority, incoming Squeaker Nancy Pelosi is completely unwilling to take any appropriations authority away from her pal and loyal ally, Rep. John "Mad Jack" Murtha (D-PA, 75%), who is pegged to be Chairman of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee of the Appropriations committee. [Yow!]

   (This is especially true after Pelosi's fiasco, trying to install the ethically challenged Mad Jack as Majority Leader, instead of Steny Hoyer -- who trounced Murtha in the caucus vote.)

So... what is the upshot of this "lame duck" period, leading up to the ascension of the Reality-Based Party to the petal-throne of Congressional control? Let's review the bidding:

• The Democrats more or less campaigned on a promise to "redeploy" American troops out of Iraq and into next-door Okinawa before June 2007; in reality, they probably cannot even get a majority of the caucus to vote for that.
• The Democrats absolutely, emphatically, almost hysterically campaigned on the promise to clean up "the Republican culture of corruption," leading to "the most ethical Congress in history;" but they have suddenly decided -- now that they will have the lion's share of power and attract the lion's share of funding from lobbyists -- that the most widely abused "legalized corruption" in Congress -- earmarks -- are just fine as they are and don't need any reform... not even the House rule enacted in the 109th Congress to open all earmarks to the light of day (a rule we predict will "softly and suddenly vanish away" when the 110th Congress convenes on January 4th, 2007).
• The Democrats made virtually a fetish of campaigning on the promise to "fully implement" the 9-11 Commission's recommendations; but as soon as they won, they decided they would follow the lead of the outgoing GOP and refuse to implement the only remaining major recommendation that related to Congress -- because Nancy Pelosi doesn't want to take away any of Jack Murtha's consolation prize. I can't say what the excuse in the Senate will be; but rest assured, there will be one.

So in the three weeks since winning the midterm election, the Democratic majority has managed to betray their voters on all three of their major platform planks. That's even better than Bill Clinton managed!

Not a bad month's work; they may as well knock off now and go on holiday for the next 34 days. Or, heck, the next two years; America won't mind.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 01, 2006, at the time of 04:54 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

September 27, 2006

Weak Leak Soup, Ctd: Evolution of a Punk Job

I was going to put a post up here noting that the president saw fit Tuesday to declassify the "key judgments" of the National Intelligence Estimate from April (the one we discussed here too early Tuesday morn, before the announcement). If you'll recall, on Saturday, the New York Times published a story that claimed -- falsely, we now discover -- that the NIE concluded that the Iraq War had "worsened" the threat from terrorism:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

But when the document itself was released Tuesday, it turns out the key findings were far more mixed and balanced; and nowhere did the NIE say that the Iraq War had made terrorism worse: to use the phrase Hugh Hewitt used all afternoon, the Times got punked. Its sources sold it a bill of goods; and like the Sy Hersh travesty on Abu Ghraib, its reputation (heh) lies in tatters. Tatters.

So the MSM came out swinging, here, here, and here: with grim determination, as soon as the document was made available by the NID, they slapped up their stories saying: it confirms eveything we said before! Don't look! Just take our word for it! We wouldn't lie to you 365 days in a single year, would we? (They're nothing if not persistent!)

So I was going to write a post quoting from AP, Reuters, and the New York Tombs, then quoting from the NIE itself, to make them all look like the farkakte macacas they are. Alas, I spent too long on my hobby of painting extra zeros on all my $10 bills... and you-know-who slithered in ahead of me, posting exactly the article that I was going to post (except mine would have been better; no, really). If only I posted it. Or wrote it. Or came out of my digestive torpor soon enough.

So I'm just posting to let you know I won't be posting on this topic. I think, where one's friends are concerned, it's only polite to keep them apprised of one's good intentions, for future reference.

Well... maybe just a little. This is a brief sketch of what I might have said, if I'd said anything (which I didn't, and I'm not).

Prior to the release, the elite media tried to play the Sy Hersh game of creatively (and tendentiously) misinterpreting classified intelligence someone leaked to them, confident that the "secretive" Bush administration would never dare declassify and release it... thus proving them liars. When Bush double-crossed them, they found themselves like a Wile E. Coyote, when he runs off a cliff but doesn't fall... until he looks down.

For God's sake, don't look down! The MSM's instinctive reaction was to double-down and pretend that the law of gravity had indeed been repealed. Here is how AP began their first story after the publication of the NIE showed the entire world that they had relied upon sources who lied to them (the first link in the "so the MSM came out swinging" paragraph above); this was from late Tuesday morning, shortly after the release:

The war in Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for Islamic extremists, breeding deep resentment of the U.S. that probably will get worse before it gets better, federal intelligence analysts conclude in a report at odds with President Bush's portrayal of a world growing safer.

In the bleak report, declassified and released Tuesday on Bush's orders, the nation's most veteran analysts conclude that despite serious damage to the leadership of al-Qaida, the threat from Islamic extremists has spread both in numbers and in geographic reach.

Bush and his top advisers have said the formerly classified assessment of global terrorism supported their arguments that the world is safer because of the war. But more than three pages of stark judgments warning about the spread of terrorism contrasted with the administration's glass-half-full declarations.

Note the specific word "bleak," which they used in their story before the release. In fact, this by and large is the same story they ran before the release; all they did was pop the hood and install an aftermarket clause noting that the report had been "declassified and released."

Don't look down!

By early Wednesday, the AP had added a bit more to their article, softening the hard line that the full document completely vindicated their clumsy hit job:

White House release of a previously secret intelligence assessment depicting a growing terrorist threat gives both political parties new ammunition in the election-season fight over the Iraq war.

For Republicans, the excerpts of the document - declassified under orders from President Bush on Tuesday - are more evidence that Iraq is central to the war on terrorism and can't be abandoned without giving jihadists a crucial victory.

For Democrats, the report furthers their argument that the 2003 Iraq invasion has inflamed anti-U.S. sentiments in the Muslim world and left the U.S. less safe.

In a bleak National Intelligence Estimate, the government's top analysts concluded Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for jihadists, who are growing in number and geographic reach. If the trend continues, the analysts found, the risks to the U.S. interests at home and abroad will grow.

For the first time, AP recognized that there were points on the side of those supporting the Iraq War; but they refused to get all radical on us and actually quote any of those findings. That would have been asking too much.

And note that the NIE is still characterized as "bleak," which is interesting; throughout these permutations, they cling to that word as a liferaft... despite the fact that it never appears in the NIE key conclusions themselves, and the fact -- easily ascertainable by reading them -- that they present a picture that is neither bleak nor rosey but simply a list of challenges and assessments.

Later on Wednesday afternoon, AP put up this story -- still written by the same reporter, Katherine Shrader. It begins thus:

The White House refused Wednesday to release the rest of a secret intelligence assessment that depicts a growing terrorist threat, as the Bush administration tried to quell election-season criticism that its anti-terror policies are seriously off track.

Note the counterattack; AP begins to lay the groundwork here for an infamous argument made popular in the days of bulletin-board systems: the lurkers support me in e-mail. (I think it even became a "filk song" -- not a typo.) That is, the Bush administration is suppressing secret evidence that would actually prove we were right all along. Over the next few days (or weeks), this argument will take shape within other branches of the Democratic Party besides the antique media:

After a few paragraphs wasted arguing with Tony Snow over the release of the really heavily classified portions of the report, AP continues:

In the bleak National Intelligence Estimate, the government's top analysts concluded Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for jihadists, who are growing in number and geographic reach. If the trend continues, the analysts found, the risks to the U.S. interests at home and abroad will grow.

Peppered with questions Wednesday about the report, he [Snow, we presume] said the NIE report was "not designed to draw judgments about success or failure, it's an intelligence document, it's a snapshot."

Snow said the report confirms the importance of the war in Iraq as a bulwark against terrorists. "Iraq has become, for them, the battleground," he said. "If they lose, they lose their bragging rights. They lose their ability to recruit."

He said that a bleak intelligence assessment depicting a growing terrorist threat was only a "snapshot" - not a conclusion

The last line I quote above is especially illuminating; no, I didn't accidentally cut off the period; it's missing in the original. It's clearly an editing mistake; she rewrote the line and separated "bleak" and "snapshot" onto two different lines, then forgot to go back and erase the original (so much for the vaunted "multiple layers of editing!") But note how important it was for Shrader, hence AP, to keep that word "bleak" prominently in the story. She was only dithering whether to place it lower or higher -- and she chose the latter.

AP picks up the Tony Snow argument again:

"The American people deserve the full story, not those parts of it that the Bush administration selects," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, warned, however, that releasing more of the intelligence assessment could aid terrorists. "We are very cautious and very restrained about the kind of information we want to give al-Qaida," Hoekstra said....

A separate high-level assessment focused solely on Iraq may be coming soon. At least two House Democrats - Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Rep. Jane Harman of California - have questioned whether that report has been stamped "draft" and shelved until after the Nov. 7 elections.

An intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the process, said National Intelligence Director John Negroponte told lawmakers in writing only one month ago that he ordered a new Iraq estimate to be assembled. The estimate on terrorism released Tuesday took about a year to produce.

AP rejects that obviously concocted explanation that an intelligence assessment might take longer than a month to prepare; it's patently obvious to Ms. Shrader that this is just a dodge to avoid releasing a report that would completely vindicate her -- oops, I mean vindicate the Associated Press -- along with the happy side-effect of bringing about the downfall, ah, defeat of the Republicans in the 2006 election. (Secret evidence that would support me...)

It ends with a couple of rollicking quotes from Joe Biden (D-DE, 100%) and John D. Rockefeller (D-WV, 100%), savaging the president and the war without allowing supporters to confuse matters by participating in the discussion. And once again, AP does not quote those paragraphs that actually make Bush's case about the war -- the complete quotation from which the snippet "cause celebre" was cherry-picked:

By contrast, here is how the Iraq War's effect was described in the original New York Times story about it that was published when the elite media still thought the NIE would remain forever classified and uncheckable:

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

Clearly, the Times' source is describing an earlier section before the "key judgments" that come later; but equally clearly, that earlier section cannot have concluded that "the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse," as the anonymous source smirked; because if it had, then the corresponding key judgment would not have been so supportive of continued fighting in Iraq.

At worst, the early sections might have quoted one official saying such a thing (possibly Jay "100%" Rockefeller). But that is why we don't release the entire NIE: it's like a packet of court filings that contain arguments from both the plaintiff's attorney and the defendant's attorney... you can't just grab a claim from one and act as if it's been proven in court.

If there were such an assessment by one specific person -- and we don't even know that much -- clearly it was not accepted in the final analysis, not even for a candid document that none of the principals thought would ever be released.

So far, most of the mainstream news stories about the released NIE have shied away from quoting this paragraph in full... likely because it so clearly argues the case for the Bush policy: if, at the end of the day, the jihadis are seen to be winner in Iraq, they will be emboldened and their recuitment will soar; contrariwise, if they are seen as failures -- if Iraq remains as a democratic state in control of its own destiny, rather than a Somalia-like failed state full of terrorist training camps -- then the jihadis will suffer a terrible blow, and their recruitment will drop off.

So the real conclusion of the NIE anent Iraq is that we must win at any cost; cutting and running is not a viable option, no matter what Joe Biden and Jay Rockefeller -- or Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francsico, 95%) and John Murtha (D-PA, 75%) -- say.

Eventually, the media will be forced to admit this; it's been widely quoted in blogs and on the radio, and even in a few television programs. It's possible they've already snuck it into a few stories, buried deep.

But it won't help: they've been exposed, as Hersh was, not only as rampant partisans... but as DNC house organs so partisan they're willing, even eager, to lie, or at least pass along lies in reckless disregard for the truth, to further the political ambitions of their Democratic friends in Congress.

In Othello, the Moor of Venice, Shakespeare wrote:

How much poorer then is a person, an entire organization, that throws its own century-old reputation into the sewer, merely to help elect its favored party into power?

I actually feel sorry for them. What must it be like to live behind those eyes?

Anyway, that's more or less what I would have written. Except I'm not going to post on this topic.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 27, 2006, at the time of 03:10 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 26, 2006

Weak Leak Soup

In keeping with the madly egotistical Big Lizards motto -- Never first, always final -- I've been pondering Saturday's New York Times story about the impact of the Iraq War on the global war on terrorism (GWOT) ever since, er, Saturday. (Maybe Sunday; Saturday, I think I was pondering whether to raise the pot on the strength of a king and a trey with a queen-jack-eight on the flop.)

There is a powerful lot that the Times failed to tell us about that story; my idol, John Hinderaker at Power Line, has a great story up quoting several other passages from that same national intelligence estimate (NIE) (enough with the alphabet soup already!) that tend to undercut, to say the least, the spin put on the thing by the Times, as well as their sidekick and pale shadow, the Washington Post.

But craven that I am, I shrink from duking it out with Power Line, who has the actual factual response pretty well covered. Oh, I could think of better arguments to make against the bizarre claims in the media; but I'd just be making them up, so I'd better not.

Let's instead focus on the problems and deficiencies in the two main antique-media stories... by an amazing coincidence, the two I already linked above. Slither on, dude.

Journalistic clairvoyance

Let's start with a startling admission against interest on the part of the "elite" media:

1. Neither the New York Times reporters nor the Washington Post reporters have actually seen the NIE. Or any portion of it; they rely entirely upon their various sources' characterization of the NIE.

In other words, they do not actually know if the report "has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks," as the Times puts it in a traditionally quaint run-on sentence; they have absolutely no idea. All they know is that one or more of their (anonymous and undescribable) sources claims that's what it says.

Von Unaussprechlichen Külten

Here's another good one:

2. Neither the Times nor the Post deigns to name even a single source. Not one. O, for the good old days of Watergate, when Ben Bradlee demanded at least two sources for every claim -- only one of which could be anonymous! (Were that rule in effect today, both the Times and the Post would have to shut down and convert operations to printing vacation brochures and cereal boxes.)

They don't even characterize these sources; for all we know, they could be Oompa-Loompas. Here is how the Times introduces the presumed humans upon whom the entire shebang depends, which they finally get 'round to doing in paragraph 6:

More than a dozen United States government officials and outside experts were interviewed for this article, and all spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were discussing a classified intelligence document. The officials included employees of several government agencies, and both supporters and critics of the Bush administration. All of those interviewed had either seen the final version of the document or participated in the creation of earlier drafts. These officials discussed some of the document’s general conclusions but not details, which remain highly classified.

So let's see... a senior CIA analyst would count, but so would a junior-grade employee of the Department of Agriculture. An "official" might be an aide to Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI, 100%) or Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI, 100%), both of whom sit on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (hence could have access) -- or for that matter, an aide to the disgraced, corrupt liar, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL, 90%), who sits on the House equivalent.

But we do know one thing about some of them, courtesy of the Washington Post; we know that some, at least, of these "officials" have a partisan axe to grind:

"It's a very candid assessment," one intelligence official said yesterday of the estimate, the first formal examination of global terrorist trends written by the National Intelligence Council since the March 2003 invasion. "It's stating the obvious."

If this source begins with the idea that it's "obvious" that the Iraq War has caused us to be less safe, then he's hardly an unbiased source for relaying what the NIE has to say about that subject.

Past the expiry date

3. The assessment was begun in 2002, before the Iraq War began -- and it was completed back in April of this year... five months ago.

An awful lot has changed in the past five months... much of it for the better, including the increasing tempo of turning provinces over to the Iraqis, the stunning buildup of the Iraqi military and national police forces, and of course the death of Musab Zarqawi. But this NIE cannot have taken those changes into account, because they hadn't happened yet when it was written.

The school for wives

Here is a minor point that is emblematic of how easy it is to get so lost, you can't see the forest for the weeds:

The Times notes, in a paragraph notable mainly for being oddly out of place in the article, that one danger is that jihadis fighting in Iraq can learn techniques that they subsequently pass along to others:

The report mentions the possibility that Islamic militants who fought in Iraq could return to their home countries, “exacerbating domestic conflicts or fomenting radical ideologies.”

The implication is clear, if rather unbalanced:

4. The Times frets that all we're doing in Iraq is training the next generation of jihadis, who will be faster, stronger, and more deadly because of the skill they learn from encounters with American forces.

But this discounts two very important points:

First, that it's the United States, not the jihadis, which has learnt the most from the Iraq War. The American military of 2003 was the most powerful and effective that had ever existed... but that is no longer the case: today, they could get their butts kicked -- by the American military of 2006. We have learned from every encounter, every battle, every victory, and even from the occasional defeat.

Our own effectiveness has grown much faster than that of the jihadis... that's why the death rate of our troops has dropped by nearly 1/3 from "period 3" (from the turnover of sovereignty to the Iraqis to the first set of elections) to "period 5" (from the last set of general elections to today) -- and dropped even further in the last year.

Second, this argument presumes that large numbers of Iraq-based jihadis survive their encounters with the Americans, so that they can pass their experience along to others. In fact, most of those who leave Iraq and head back to their home countries never actually engaged American forces, because we kill or capture a very high percentage of all the terrorists we engage.

In hock to post hoc

Finally, here is the most glaring omission -- whether from the NIE itself or merely from its mischaracterization by the elite media's "sources," we cannot possibly say without seeing the document itself:

5. The storyline does not consider what might have happened had we not invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein.

A lot would have happened: most analysts believe that Hussein was on the verge of cutting a deal with the Europeans (via the corrupt U.N. "Oil for Fraud" program of direct and indirect bribery) to end the sanctions and inspections. As Charles Duelfer and the Iraq Survey Group (ISG... more letters, I'm afraid) assessed in its final report:

There is an extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial, body of evidence suggesting that Saddam pursued a strategy to maintain a capability to return to WMD after sanctions were lifted by preserving assets and expertise.

Instead of considering this possibility and exploring which American action would have been better for the terrorists -- attacking Iraq or not attacking Iraq -- the argument of both these articles is strictly "post hoc ergo propter hoc": after the fact, therefore because of the fact. The Leftist, anti-war leakers in the CIA or NSA argue (through their sock puppets in the Times and Post) thus:

1. We invaded Iraq, deposed Hussein, and occupied the country;
2. Jihadi websites now cite the war to try to drum up recruits;
3. Therefore, the Iraq War was a boon to jihadis!

But this is logical gibberish: if, after ranting on and on about Hussein, we had let him stay and even lifted sanctions, then that would be cited by jihadi websites to drum up recruits... just as they cite our failures in Somalia and Sudan, our refusal to retaliate for the Cole bombing, and so forth. The jihadis cite anything that shows us either running away or standing and fighting: either way, they'll spin it to their advantage.

If this is the central conceit of the NIE, as opposed to the media's misinterpretation, then this signals a fatal flaw still extant in the raciocination of our top intelligence services: they are still thinking linearally, as if al-Qaeda and its spinoffs and wannabes are really just funny-looking Europeans in headscarves, using Western two-value logic and classical game-theory analysis of their own actions and our responses.

If we keep thinking that way, Western civ will fall.

Moslems in general, and especially Middle-East Moslems, and most especially Middle-Eastern jihadis, think in very different, apocalyptic terms. They don't perform a rational calculus to decide whether, say, to try to explode a nuclear weapon in the middle of a Western city: in fact, the "Hidden Imam" theory of players like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says that Mohammed al-Mahdi will arise when the jihadis have precipitated the final battle -- and are losing it badly!

In other words, Ahmadinejad expects to start World War III (or IV, if you count the Cold War), and he expects his side to lose; after which the Mahdi will come, leading the heavenly host of Allah, and wipe away all the infidel armies, ushering in the age of Islam. How do we threaten a man who believes that? Should we threaten not to fight, allowing them to win, and thereby failing to fulfill the conditions that will activate the 12th Imam's return?

If the media's understanding of this not-very-momentous NIE is accurate, then the CIA is still fighting the Soviet Union in the Cold War; and we're in desperate trouble indeed!

As the Bangles sang, we've got to "Walk Like an Egyptian" (or a jihadi) to have a prayer of winning this last crusade. Doesn't mean we have to act like they; only that we must be able to think like they, lest we be surprised again and again by their unconventional and unexpected moves.

So nu?

What's wrong with this "report," at least as recounted in the mainstream media? Virtually everything. It's vague, unsourced, unbalanced, and shows clear signs of mental sclerosis.

But if this is not the NIE's real view, then how low the American media has sunk, if this is the best hit piece on the president and the GOP that they can muster in the last weeks before the election.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 26, 2006, at the time of 05:15 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

September 23, 2006

VegasBlogging 2: Bin Laden Is Either Dead - Or He's Alive

Open post:

So is he is, or is he ain't?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 23, 2006, at the time of 02:53 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

September 21, 2006

Scion of Hopeful News: Frist Was Right

So Bill Frist did indeed have inside information, and President Bush and his crickets in the Senate did indeed craft a compromise on interrogating captured terrorists.

But it's still unclear just exactly what was won and what lost.

The president is claiming victory:

The White House said the deal would allow the CIA's questioning of foreign terrorist suspects to continue.

"We got what the president asked for," White House spokesman Tony Snow said. "The CIA program to question detainees to get important information about al Qaeda, to foil plots and save American lives -- this program is going forward."

Reuters flatly states that Bush made concessions but doesn't give any examples:

Bush, who wanted authority for tough interrogations that critics said bordered on torture, was forced to make concessions after three leading Senate Republicans challenged his plan last week and offered a rival bill that drew more Senate support.

The Bush administration denies that prisoners are tortured.

So... is he is or is he ain't? Did the turncoats blink, or did the White House give away the farm? Or did they actually come up with some astonishing, real, hitherto unguessed-at compromise?

I find the one detail in the New York Times story very disturbing and worrisome:

The central sticking point had involved a demand from McCain, Sen. John Warner of Virginia and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina for a provision making it clear that torture of suspects would be barred.

One official said that under the agreement, the administration agreed to drop language that would have stated an existing ban on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment was enough to meet Geneva Convention obligations.

Convention standards are much broader and include a prohibition on ''outrages'' against ''personal dignity.''

In turn, this official said, negotiators agreed to clarify what acts constitute a war crime. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he had not been authorized to discuss the details.

First, we don't know whether this "official" really knows what he's talking about, or for that matter who -- or what -- he is; second, we don't know what rules Congress will enact in place of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2004.

It's great to have clarity... but if Congress "clarifies" interrogation by saying waterboarding shall now constitute a war crime; a belly-slap, attention-grab, and harsh language shall now constitute war crimes; and continuing to interrogate a detainee after he has demanded a lawyer shall now constitute a war crime -- well, that's considerably worse than the situation of "uncertainty" we have now.

So the stink of sulphur is in the details (not the U.N.); who caved and by how much?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 21, 2006, at the time of 03:06 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

September 20, 2006

Hopeful News: Frist Still Expects Interrogation, Wiretap Bills

The bill to put Congress and the White House on the same page anent interrogating high-value terrorist targets, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (hence KSM), seemed on life support just yesterday: the four Republican turncoats on the Armed Services Committee -- John McCain (AZ, 80%), Lindsay Graham (NC, 96%), Susan Collins (ME, 32%), and even Chairman John Warner (VA, 88%) -- had rejected the president's plan the first time, and they reportedly rejected Bush's revised plan.

Similarly, a bill to put Congress behind the NSA al-Qaeda intercept program was nearly derailed yesterday when Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM, 75%) proposed the main "wiretapping" bill for the House... and in her version, the president would only be able to order intercepts without a warrant after a devastating attack had occurred! She didn't quite seem to get the point, which is to prevent such attacks from occurring, not develop a legal case to prosecute, post facto, those responsible.

But today, things look perhaps just a little brighter. We're not at the dawn yet, but the East is brightening -- if Majority Leader Bill Frist (TN, 92%) can be believed:

President Bush's embattled anti-terrorism agenda got a boost Wednesday when a wiretap bill was revised and a Senate Republican leader said he was hopeful a deal was near on treatment of detainees.

But prospects for the two critical pieces of legislation remained unclear; Congress is speeding toward a recess next week as Republicans fight to retain majority control in the midterm elections.

First, Heather Wilson has now rewritten her bill to allow for such communications intercepts when the president believes an attack is imminent, not only after it's already occurred. Frankly, I still consider that a second-best: I believe the president has the inherent authority to order such warrantless intercepts of foreign intelligence with or without a finding of imminence of attack; he only has to find that national security is at stake.

But it's a heck of a lot better now than yesterday! And the "quo" she extracted for this "quid" is very positive in pointing the way forward:

Wilson's bill initially would have given legal status to Bush's domestic surveillance program only after an attack. Instead, her bill now would grant the administration's plea to allow wiretapping against Americans without warrants when it is believed a terrorist attack is "imminent."

But that concession carried a price for the president, according to a draft.

Under the measure, the administration would be required to share more details of the nature of the threat with the House and Senate leaders and the chairmen of both intelligence committees, who then would decide without administration input which lawmakers would receive the classified information.

"Excesses are best prevented when intelligence activities are operated within a framework that controls government power by using checks and balances among the three branches of government," Wilson, R-N.M., said in a statement.

Great Scott, is that all it takes? The critics in Congress will be satisfied with the "wiretapping" if a few more of them get to hear about it, so they can brag to their buddies? Of course that increases the risk that somebody will blab and the terrorists will figure it out; but that slim chance is to be weighed against not being able to intercept at all. I would happily trade congressional approval of the communications intercepts for that small increase in the number of those who know about each incident.

This may even help find compromise on the interrogations issue I discuss below. None of the turncoat Republicans is on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; maybe all it will take to reel them in is to commit to brief the chair and ranking member of the Armed Services Committee at the same time as the Intelligence chair and ranking are briefed, and then allow both chairs and both ranking members to brief whomever they choose.

It might be something as stupid and childish as three grumpy, old men (and one grumpy, old woman) having a fit of pique that they weren't "in the loop."

So much is my own speculation. The hopeful news in the AP story about the interrogations policy is more inchoate; it comprises the majority leader offering his prediction:

Despite the stalemate, Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist sought to reassure the GOP troops that a deal still was possible.

" I am hopeful that very soon agreement can be reached with the president and with the majority of Republicans," Frist, R-Ky., said in a statement. "But we need to do it in a way that were not sharing classified information with those terrorists who clearly will pass it on to others around the world to be used against us."

Take it for what it is: a prediction, not necessarily inside information about how senators will vote.

Here is the interrogation dilemma on a nutshell:

• The Supreme Court, in Hamdan, held that we must follow Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, to which we are signatories;
• Common Article 3 bans a number of offenses against civilians under enemy control (including captured terrorists); among those offenses are:
  • Cruel treatment
  • Torture
  • Outrages upon personal dignity
  • Humiliating and degrading treatment

  At their most restrictive, these prohibitions could stop CIA interrogators from asking any questions of KSM at all after he refused to answer;

• In addition, the article requires that if such civilians are tried for offenses, it must be by "a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples." At its most restrictive, this rule would allow KSM to see all classified information in any way related to his trial -- including sources, means, and methods. This could be passed along to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups to hone their attacks and make them less detectable, hence deadlier. The danger of this would likely lead to the charges being dropped... and it's an open question whether we could continue to hold him under those circumstances; we might have to let him go....
• If enforcement of the Geneva Conventions is going to become a part of the police power of the United States, as the Court ordered, then all of these terms must be legally defined in a way that a court or military tribunal can pass judgment on members of the U.S. armed services and on civilians (such as CIA interrogators) accused of violating them; similarly, the interrogators themselves must know what they can and cannot do during an interrogation -- without worrying that a court will come along later and second-guess everything (from the comfort of their chambers), with the interrogator possibly finding himself up on criminal charges or being sued.
• However, these terms did not arise from American law and their legal meanings are not inherently obvious (such as a prohibition on "cruel and unusual punishment" would be, since that's well defined by caselaw);
• Thus, the terms must be defined by law now, in order to implement the Court's Hamdan decision, or our personnel will be under constant threat of criminal prosecution or civil litigation, merely for doing their jobs.

Curiously, as others have reported (John on Power Line, e.g.), all these terms were already defined in law: they were defined by the Detainee Treatment Act of 2004... the specific definitions in that act authored by none other than Sen. John McCain!

So McCain already defined these terms in a bill, and President Bush signed McCain's bill into law -- and now relies upon that exact definition (by name) in his bill to clarify detainee treatment following Hamdan... and McCain and three other Democratic senators say that's not good enough. We have to treat the terrorists even better than McCain himself wanted to treat them two years ago.

But Bill Frist still thinks he sees movement on both sides that could lead to an acceptable compromise. Most likely, nobody at AP bothered asking him what cause he had to say that. They probably weren't even listening; it's pro-forma to get a quote from the majority leader... if he happens to be a Republican, the journalist holds his nose and does it anyway. But he doesn't have to like it; and he doesn't have to listen to the reply.

So let's keep our collective digits crossed that both these two go through... along with the House-enacted bill that requires voters to show picture-proof of citizenship before they can vote in any federal election, regardless of any state laws to the contrary -- though I suspect this goes nowhere in the Senate; it's off-topic, but I thought I'd throw it in as something to watch as it goes through the sausage mill.

Happy days aren't yet here again, but at least the corners of my mouth are beginning to twitch upward.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 20, 2006, at the time of 06:19 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 14, 2006

Mr. Graham Regrets He's Unable to Lunch Today

Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC, 96%), one fourth of the Lynne Stewart Quartet, was just on Hugh Hewitt's show, frantically trying to spin away his vote on the Senate Armed Services Committee (see below).

From what I could gather, what he thinks he was trying to do was not to allow al-Qaeda personnel to see all of our classified information... he only demands they be allowed to see any classified information that the prosecution wants to use against them.

If President Bush doesn't want them to discover sources, methods, and personnel... why, he has only to instruct the military prosecutor not to introduce any of the voluminous classified evidence at trial. Just allow KSM to walk for lack of evidence, and all will be well.

It's interesting to know that even under the rules rammed through committee by the Lynne Stewart Quartet, a terrorist on trial for mass murder in Iraq will not be able to demand a list of all our covert agents in Venezuela. But I am not reassured.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 14, 2006, at the time of 04:48 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 10, 2006

No Difference Between Democrats and Republicans? Think Again

According to CBS News, Democratic Senator John D. "Jay" Rockefeller (D-WV, 100%) -- who has announced to the world that he's a dimwitted "dupe" of the idiot evil genius George W. Bush -- still thinks that we'd be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in charge of Iraq:

Rockefeller went a step further. He says the world would be better off today if the United States had never invaded Iraq — even if it means Saddam Hussein would still be running Iraq.

He said he sees that as a better scenario, and a safer scenario, "because it is called the 'war on terror.'" [Say, that's pretty hard to refute!]

Does Rockefeller stands [sic] by his view, even if it means that Saddam Hussein could still be in power if the United States didn't invade?

"Yes. Yes. [Saddam] wasn't going to attack us. He would've been isolated there," Rockefeller said. "He would have been in control of that country but we wouldn't have depleted our resources preventing us from prosecuting a war on terror which is what this is all about."

It's almost as if Karl Rove has been sending his mind-control beam directly into Jay Rockefeller's head, the latter having forgotten to wear his tinfoil hat. Are the Democrats actually trying to lose the election? If so, I certainly don't want to get in their way; but isn't if awfully precipitous for Rockefeller to rip the mask off before November 7th?

And is Rockefeller the only bloke in the Senate who doesn't understand that if we hadn't invaded Iraq in 2003, then today, in 2006, there wouldn't be any sanctions anymore?

Hussein would not be "isolated;" au contraire, he would be more powerful than at any time in the past fifteen years: he would have restarted his nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs; both the Iraq Survey Group and the recent Senate Intelligence Committee report say that was Hussein's intent all along. And European and Latin American representatives would be beetling to Baghdad to genuflect to the great man, hands out for oil allocations.

This is what Rockefeller considers "a better scenario, and a safer scenario" for America. And you want to know the worst part? If the Democrats win the Senate in the upcoming election, Jay Rockefeller will be the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Stick that in your pipe and step on it.

So Jay Rockefeller, nutty as a Froot Loop, would chair the Senate Intelligence Committee -- and spend the next two years investigating Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld... rather than al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Iran. All because some Republicans insist there's "not a dime's worth of difference" between Republicans and Democrats, which means between Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS, 88%) and Chairman Jay Rockefeller.

Yeah, stay home and sulk instead of voting. Better yet, vote for a third-party candidate to "teach the Republicans a lesson." Great idea!

I'm sure hard-core conservative Republicans will be elected in droves in 2008. And their first order of business will be to begin the task of rebuilding half a dozen major American cities that were destroyed by al-Qaeda, while Congress was busy impeaching Bush for intercepting al-Qaeda phone calls.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 10, 2006, at the time of 05:11 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

September 08, 2006

Senate Report: Iraq and al-Qaeda

The first in a series of continuing, relatively short posts on the September 2006 report from the Senate Intelligence Committee comparing prewar and postwar intelligence on Iraq.

In contrast to the good news from Iraq, which the elite media bury in a dark editing room, in a locked closet, inside a filing cabinet, and stuffed into an old sardine tin, every headline today screams a wildly misleading characterization of what the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Postwar Findings About Iraq's WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How They Compare to Prewar Assessments actually reports. Viz., this Associated Press story:

Saddam Hussein regarded al-Qaida as a threat rather than a possible ally, a Senate report says, contradicting assertions President Bush has used to build support for the war in Iraq. The report also newly faults intelligence gathering in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion.

Released Friday, the report discloses for the first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that prior to the war Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward" al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates.

As recently as an Aug. 21 news conference, Bush said people should "imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein" with the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction and "who had relations with Zarqawi."

Democrats contended that the administration continues to use faulty intelligence, including assertions of a link between Saddam's government and the recently killed al-Zarqawi, to justify the war in Iraq.

The way that AP carefully parses their sentences, it's hard to argue; they imply rather than demonstrate, making it difficult to refute. But having just finished reading the entire Senate Intelligence Committee's report, I have to say that it's far more tentative than AP makes it out to be.

And even the report itself fails to draw obvious conclusions from physical evidence, often relying instead upon what actors in the drama say during interrogations... actors with interests of their own.

The Senate report is a marvel of missing the forest for the trees: the senators spend too much time in the weeds; they never take a step back, a deep breath, and look at the whole picture. This leads them into folly again and again... and the Zarqawi-connection section is a perfect example.

I am utterly persuaded that Saddam Hussein saw al-Qaeda, and especially Musab Zarqawi up in Ansar al-Islam, as a "threat" to his regime. But that does not mean Hussein made any attempt to remove Zarqawi, nor that he did not harbor Zarqawi, nor even that he did not have an operational relationship with Zarqawi.

For heaven's sake, many Americans in the 1940s saw Communism as a threat to the United States (though the president did not)... but that did not stop FDR, with the support of the entire political establishment, from allying with Josef Stalin against Adolf Hitler. There is an old proverb: Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer. Thus, the central dichotomy of the AP story is a canard: there is no inherent conflict between fearing an enemy and allying with that same enemy.

So let's get to specifics.

It's absolutely correct that in October 2005, the CIA issued a report with that quotation, that "the regime did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates." AP's style in this endeavor (attempting to "prove" that Bush lied us into war) will not be one of overt, bald-faced lying, but rather subtle inueno that allows the reader to leap to a false conclusion.

The CIA in 2005 thus reversed its earlier assessment (in 2002) that Hussein did tolerate Zarqawi's presence in the Kurdish north. However, what AP omits is that other facts cited in that same section of the Senate report belie that mysterious reassessment by the CIA.

Notably this, covered on pages 93-96 of the pdf linked above (pp. 90-93 of the actual document): in October 2002, an unidentified foreign government -- probably acting as an Iraq-United States go-between -- demanded that Iraq arrest Zarqawi and four associates and extradite them to the U.S. Hussein -- desperately trying to stave off the pending American invasion, issued a written order to the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) to arrest the five, who were up in Ansar al-Islam.

However, there is no indication that there was any serious attempt to act on these orders... which most likely means the written orders were for show and were countermanded by oral orders not to be vigorous about it. Instead, some low-level IIS agents were tasked with the job; but there's no indication they even went to Ansar al-Islam.

However, had Hussein really wanted to get Zarqawi -- thinking him such a danger to Iraq and having absolutely no connections to Zarqawi's group -- why didn't he use the IIS agents who had already infiltrated Ansar al-Islam? These infiltrators, discussed in the same passage of the Senate report, played no role in the supposed manhunt for Zarqawi.

Or for that matter, why didn't the Iraqis send troops into Ansar al-Islam itself to hunt for Zarqawi and his cabal? If Saddam Hussein really saw them as a threat, why not expend at least as much military force removing them as he expended massacring, relocating, and brutalizing his own people?

Eventually, Zarqawi left northeastern Iraq for Iran, transited Iran, and reentered Iraq in the south. But one of his associates named in the demand, Abu Yasim Sayyem, was captured. The Iraqis determined that he was indeed a member of (or contractor to) al-Qaeda, just as Zarqawi was. But rather than extradite him to the United States, they released him -- on direct orders from Saddam Hussein.

If we can pull our heads out of the weeds of specific bits and dribbles of intel for a moment, here is the big picture: Hussein's actions are not those of a brutal dictator who really wants to get rid of Musab Zarqawi or his band of merry men at Ansar al-Islam.

They are instead the actions of a brutal dictator who still thinks he can stave off a U.S. invasion and get sanctions lifted, especially "with a little help from his friends," the French, the Russians, and the Chinese. So he issues an order never intended to be obeyed, but which he can point to in order to show "good faith."

It turns out that the CIA's reassessment above was almost entirely based upon interviews with captured IIS agents and al-Qaeda members at Ansar al-Islam: each side denied there was any cooperation or treaty. Again, however, a little bit of common sense:

1. Why would low-level flunkies in either the Iraqi Intelligence Service or Ansar al-Islam have any idea of a secret concordance between Hussein and Zarqawi? How many people do you think would be told about this?

   Is Zarqawi going to tell his fanatical Wahabbi followers that he's made a deal with that secular devil who outlawed Wahabbism? Is Hussein going to tell junior IIS officers that he has a cooperative agreement with the world's number-one terrorist, when that connection is already being used by the United States to push for war? This is silly; people at that level have no "need to know" and every reason to be kept in the dark.

2. Even assuming that some of the detainees that the CIA interviewed were high enough up -- and trusted enough by Hussein or by Zarqawi -- to be privy to this information... why would they tell the truth to the CIA? What's in it for some fanatical Baathist or al-Qaeda jihadi? Answer: nothing!

So most detainees wouldn't even know, and those who did know have no incentive to tell the truth. Thus, the evidence upon which the CIA based its conclusion that there was no connection is utterly non-dispositive. So we're left with Hussein's actions: making no serious effort to capture them, and even turning loose the only Zarqawi affilliate he had.

At the very least, this is "turning a blind eye;" and it's equally consistent with "harboring" and having a "relationship." Once again, the CIA does yeoman work in muddying up the intel waters, casting vague aspersions on the Bush administration while never really coming out and alleging any specific crime, exaggeration, or moral failing... just a vague whiff of the "Bush lied" meme.

This first piece is important: for if the Senate report is faulty, vague, and misleading on the simple question of Saddam Hussein's relationship with Musab Zarqawi -- and if the pedestrian and non-specific "conclusions" of the report are mischaracterized into flat accusations by the elite media -- then how can anyone imagine they're dispositive on the much more complex questions of WMD programs, Saddam Hussein's intentions, his possible future relationship to terrorist groups, and indeed, the entire rationale of the war: that Hussein's Iraq represented a serious enough threat to the United States to warrant the invasion.

It cannot. This report is not, as Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI, ) alleges,

“A devastating indictment of the Bush-Cheney administration’s unrelenting, misleading and deceptive attempts” to link Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda.

There is as much in this bipolar report to support such links as to refute them. Rather, Tony Snow is absolutely correct:

The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, told The Associated Press there was “nothing new” in the report, and that members of both political parties had agreed before the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States.

“In 2002 and 2003, members of both parties got a good look at the intelligence we had, and they came to the very same conclusions about what was going on,” Mr. Snow said.

Keep that in mind as we move on to other sections of the report over the next few days.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 08, 2006, at the time of 07:49 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 17, 2006

Anna Katherine Diggs Deep

"The game is afoot," as Sherlock Holmes said. (Oh yes he did; in "the Adventure of the Abbey Grange," for example.)

The first federal judge has struck down President Bush's NSA al-Qaeda intercept program as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. Anna Katherine Johnston Diggs Taylor ruled for the plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union:

The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit on behalf of journalists, scholars and lawyers who say the program has made it difficult for them to do their jobs. They believe many of their overseas contacts are likely targets of the program, monitoring phone calls and e-mails between people in the U.S. and people in other countries when a link to terrorism is suspected.

I can only suppose that the ACLU's argument is similar to the well-known constitutional doctrine that police may not tail a reporter they believe may be meeting with a wanted serial killer for for purpose of writing a book about him, as the police action might make it more difficult in future for that reporter to arrange interviews with other wanted felons.

The White House reacted quickly and predictably. Tony Snow said:

"United States intelligence officials have confirmed that the program has helped stop terrorist attacks and saved American lives," he said. "The program is carefully administered and only targets international phone calls coming into or out of the United States where one of the parties on the call is a suspected al-Qaida or affiliated terrorist."

The ACLU reacted quickly and predictably. Anthony Romero said:

"At its core, today's ruling addresses the abuse of presidential power and reaffirms the system of checks and balances that's necessary to our democracy," ACLU executive director Anthony Romero told reporters after the ruling.

He called the opinion "another nail in the coffin in the Bush administration's legal strategy in the war on terror."

Thank God for the Associated Press, or we would never guess how each party viewed the decision.

Interestingly, Judge Taylor was not appointed by Bill Clinton.

She was appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1979 (type Taylor,Anna in the text box and click Go, then click on her name when it pops up). Thus, her decision was not only quick but also predictable.

Having such a high predictability factor makes the decision itself meaningless -- except as a starter's gun to tell us that the game... but I repeat myself.

I see this as more grist for my argument that it would indeed matter tremendously whether a Democrat or a Republican is elected president in 2008: even if their foreign policy goals would be more or less the same, I believe Democrats are allergic to decisive presidential authority in the collection of intelligence information on our enemies, when that requires tapping phones within the U.S., and its dissemination to the military (or even law enforcement), when that requires breaching Gorelick's Wall.

Since I also believe that Congress and the courts are lagging indicators in the war against jihadi terrorism, and that we can only win with robust use of the military authority of the executive branch, I conclude that electing a Democrat in 2008 would have profoundly bad consequences in the war -- as in, we would be much more likely to lose, or at least suffer terrible attacks that dwarf 9/11, while en route to the next Republican president.

Taylor's decision is not the final word, of course; we always knew this would eventually be decided by the Supreme Court. The next step will be a stay of the judge's order pending review by a circus court; then that court's decision will be stayed pending review by the Supreme Court (which will definitely accept the writ of certiorari).

As John Hinderaker of Power Line has pointed out in a number of posts, Judge Taylor's decision flies in the face of repeated rulings by various federal appellate courts, including the FISA court so much beloved by the Democrats -- today, that is, when they fantasize it might stand in Bush's way while he tries to defend the nation. Those rulings held uniformly that the president does indeed have such broad authority. More than likely, the Sixth Circuit will overturn Judge Taylor's decision, and it will be the ACLU that files for Supreme Court review.

But let's keep a sharp weather eye on this case; or, to quote Mr. Holmes once more, in an analogous context, "I have investigated many crimes, but I have never yet seen one which was committed by a flying creature."

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, August 17, 2006, at the time of 01:49 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

July 11, 2006

Article 3

So today's media-driven episode of Bush Derangement Syndrome is the fallacious claim that, in some dramatic turnaround, the Bush administration now finally "admits" that terrorists are prisoners of war, entitled to the full protection of the Geneva Conventions as POWs -- including the right never to be interrogated. For example:

• AP: U.S. Will Give Detainees Geneva Rights

  The Bush administration, called to account by Congress after the Supreme Court blocked military tribunals, said Tuesday all detainees at Guantanamo Bay and in U.S. military custody everywhere are entitled to protections under the Geneva Conventions....

  The policy, described in a memo by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, appears to change the administration's earlier insistence that the detainees are not prisoners of war and thus not subject to the Geneva protections.

• Reuters: US applies Geneva Convention to military detainees

  The Pentagon acknowledged for the first time that all detainees held by the U.S. military are covered by the protections of an article of the Geneva Conventions that bars inhumane treatment, according to a memo made public on Tuesday.

• New York Times: In Big Shift, U.S. to Follow Geneva Treaty for Detainees

  The Bush administration called today for Congress to fix, rather than scrap, the system of military tribunals that was struck down by the Supreme Court last month, while the Pentagon pledged to treat detainees in accordance with the Geneva Conventions as the court required.

But as Ryan Sager [whoops, make that Jed Babbin... sorry, Jed!] at Real Clear Politics noted (I thought the same thing, but Babbin was there first), this is being completely -- and I (not Babbin) claim deliberately and with malice aforethought -- misreported by the antique media... because in fact, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, who wrote the memo on July 7th, did not make any "shift" in U.S. policy; he quite openly proclaimed that this has been administration policy from the beginning: to apply specific elements of Article 3 to detainees in the war against jihadi terrorism.

There is certainly a danger, which Big Lizards recognized earlier, that subsequent and iterative federal court rulings may lunge further than the Hamdan decision and try to declare the detainees full-blown "prisoners of war." In fact, it appears that Justice John Paul Stevens, leading the pack of braying liberals on the Court, tried to do exactly that. If this happens, it will have catastrophic results in the GWOT.

But that is not what this memo does.

So we don't proceed in a vacuum, here is the relevant text:

The Supreme Court has determined that Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 applies as a matter of law to the conflict with Al Qaeda. The Court found that the military commissions as constituted by the Department of Defense are not consistent with Common Article 3.

It is my understanding that, aside from the military commission procedures, existing DoD orders, policies, directives, execute orders, and doctrine comply with the standards of Common Article 3 and, therefore, actions by DoD personnel that comply with such issuances would comply with the standards of Common Article 3. For example, the following are consistent with the standards of Common Article 3: U.S. Army Field Manual 34-52, “Intelligence Interrogation,” September 28, 1992; DoD directive 3115.09, “DoD Intelligence Interrogation, Detainee Debriefings and Tactical Questioning,” November 3, 2005; DoD Directive 2311.01E, “DoD Law of War Program,” May 9, 2006; and DoD Instruction 2310.08E, “Medical Program Support for Detainee Operations,” June 6, 2006. In addition, you will recall the President’s prior directive that “the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely,” humane treatment being the overarching requirement of Common Article 3.

You will ensure that all DoD personnel adhere to these standards. In this regard, I request that you promptly review all relevant directives, regulations, policies, practices, and procedures under your purview to ensure that they comply with the standards of Common Article 3.

This is followed by a quotation of Article 3 of the 1947 conventions, which you may read for yourself here.

The most relevant sentence in the entire memo is the first sentence of the second paragraph, in which England makes plain that the administration's position is that currently existing DoD procedures already comply with Article 3; thus, except for the rules of military tribunals, there is no reason to change policy. Far from being a "big shift," England argues that this is what President Bush has been doing all along.

Note also how he answers the specific worry that Big Lizards enunciated earlier: that this ruling might lead to further rulings banning any interrogation at all of al-Qaeda "POWs," in accordance with other articles of the Geneva Conventions. For example, from Article 17 of those same conventions:

No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.

If the courts were ever to rule that terrorist detainees were to be given all the rights and privileges of POWs, then Article 17 would apply -- and all interrogation of al-Qaeda detainees of any kind would have to cease the moment the detainee said "I refuse to answer." Instead, all we would be allowed to insist upon was his "surname, first names and rank, date of birth, and army, regimental, personal or serial number, or failing this, equivalent information."

In England's memo, he makes as crystal the administration's position that detainees are not "prisoners of war." The AP story is flatly wrong. If, as AP claims, the memo "appears to change the administration's earlier insistence that the detainees are not prisoners of war and thus not subject to the Geneva protections," then how does AP read the next sentence in the second paragraph -- where England specifically notes that the DoD's policies anent "Intelligence Interrogations" are legal?

In addition, Article 21 begins thus:

The Detaining Power may subject prisoners of war to internment. It may impose on them the obligation of not leaving, beyond certain limits, the camp where they are interned, or if the said camp is fenced in, of not going outside its perimeter. Subject to the provisions of the present Convention relative to penal and disciplinary sanctions, prisoners of war may not be held in close confinement except where necessary to safeguard their health and then only during the continuation of the circumstances which make such confinement necessary.

That means, I believe, that they cannot be held in separate cages or prevented from assembling together and speaking privately -- as we currently do at Guantánamo Bay and likely every other terrorist detainment facility we operate. Again, if the courts started holding that terrorists were POWs, we would have to release them internally within Guantánamo to roam around freely within the camp, conspire together, and coordinate false answers to intelligence interrogations we wouldn't be allowed to conduct in the first place.

You cannot in the same breath say that al-Qaeda detainees are "prisoners of war" and also that we can engage in lengthy interrogations of them, treat them harshly to break them down, and deprive them of privileges if they don't answer or if they lie. There is no rational way that the reporters for the elite media could possibly have read the memo and actually come away with the misunderstanding that from now on, terrorists were POWs. Thus, any reporter who says such a thing is simply lying, as is the editor who allows him to publish.

Some people argue we should "never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity." But in many venues, the precise opposite is more true: never attribute to stupidity what can adequately be explained by malice.

Though it may comfort some to think so, reporters and editors at top media sources are not imbeciles. Bill Keller and Dean Baquey did not blow the NSA al-Qaeda intercept program and the terrorist-finance tracking program because they were ignorant; they, along with the reporters they edit, blew those programs (in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, respectively) because they hate those programs, they hate the war, they hate Bush, and they want America to lose.

Don't get me wrong, I do not question their patriotism; I nakedly say they have none. They hate Republicans and the president so intensely, it becomes an exquisite experience. It easily overwhelms whatever feeble love for country still remains after decades of relentless liberal brainwashing. As Churchill (Winston, not Ward) said, they swim in currents of hatred so strong, it sears their very souls.

So lying about some sort of flip-flop on the part of George W. Bush is a mere trifle, a bagatelle to the MSM. That's the one they do "twice on Sundays."

Thus, when you read the inevitable flood of stories sneering that Bush has surrendered, that he's been made to eat crow, that the administration has undertaken a "big shift," a turnaround, a 180 -- just bear in mind what you already know about the "lies and the lying liars who tell them" in the nation's newspapers, on television, and especially in the liberal blogs.

There is no policy change here: Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England has simply reiterated that administration policy already complies with the specific demands of Geneva that apply to non-POWs... with the one exception of the specific procedures to be followed by the military tribunals.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 11, 2006, at the time of 02:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 29, 2006

Privacy? What Privacy?

The recent leak by the New York Times and other news organizations, disclosing how the government tracks the money of terrorists, is quite a little puzzle to me: the Times acts as if this government program somehow violates our financial privacy.

But if they think the feds never looked into our bank accounts prior to this program, they're dreaming! The FBI has been monitoring our private banking transactions, in far more intrusive ways, for literally decades.

I used to work at Sanwa bank, and every morning we received a report of "suspicious transactions," sent us by the central office. In addition, we constantly monitored transactions looking for certain patterns that might indicate check kiting (large deposit quickly followed by a large withdrawal, low average balance, all timed around a check's "floating" period).

If we decided a crime might be occurring, we reported all this information to the FBI... including records of the account transactions (without any warrant). Besides that, we also reported to the FBI anyone who deposited or withdrew a large amount of cash. Overseas wire transfers with certain characteristics were also reported to the feds.

All this intrusive monitoring and information-sharing with law enforcement was mostly to track money laundering by drug runners. All banks in the United States are still required by the federal government to follow these monitoring and reporting rules. If the Timeses (New York and Los Angeles) ever complained about this Orwellian violation of "privacy" by the FBI, I must have missed the article.

It seems these newspapers can tolerate incredible penetration into our personal bank account information just to catch check kiters and drug dealers... but they cannot abide the much smaller intrusions, looking only at the transactions of large businesses, governments, and NGOs, in order to catch terrorists who have killed our fellow citizens and plot to destroy the rest of us!

It's beyond me. Maybe someone can explain how it's "totally different."

Hatched by Sachi on this day, June 29, 2006, at the time of 03:03 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 25, 2006

The InSpecter General

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA, 63%) announced on Fox News Sunday that he and la Casablanca were nearing "agreement" on a bill to gift the president with the power he already has via the Constitution.

That's mighty big of him.

Bush and senior officials in his administration have said they did not think changes were needed to empower the National Security Agency to eavesdrop - without court approval - on communications between people in the U.S. and overseas when terrorism is suspected.

But Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and other critics contend the program skirted a 1978 law that required the government to get approval from a secretive federal court before Americans could be monitored.

"We're getting close with the discussions with the White House, I think, to having the wiretapping issue submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," Specter told "Fox New Sunday."

My first question is -- has Specter even bothered to look at the voluminous case history on this subject... including a case already decided by the FISA court? As John Hinderaker has discussed (repeatedly) on Power Line, the FISA court decided Sealed Case No. 02-001 in 2002; in the opinion, the court wrote:

The Truong court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. It was incumbent upon the court, therefore, to determine the boundaries of that constitutional authority in the case before it. We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power.

John himself concludes,

That is the current state of the law. The federal appellate courts have unanimously held that the President has the inherent constitutional authority to order warrantless searches for purposes of gathering foreign intelligence information, which includes information about terrorist threats. Furthermore, since this power is derived from Article II of the Constitution, the FISA Review Court has specifically recognized that it cannot be taken away or limited by Congressional action.

That being the case, the NSA intercept program, which consists of warrantless electronic intercepts for purposes of foreign intelligence gathering, is legal.

So did Arlen Specter really look at any of this before proclaiming that "the program skirted a 1978 law that required the government to get approval from a secretive federal court before Americans could be monitored?" I have never heard a single word from the InSpecter General to indicate he has inspected the case histories, or in fact, that he even knows case histories exist.

I have always thought Arlen Specter is a doofus. He is a self-important, narcissistic pinhead with delusions of adequacy. Viz:

Specter has said that the president "does not have a blank check"....

"We're having a lot of conversations about that," Specter said Sunday. He added that he and Vice President Dick Cheney have exchanged letters and that Cheney has indicated that he was serious about discussing the issue.

"I've talked to ranking officials in the White House, and we're close," Specter said. "I'm not making any predictions until we have it all nailed down, but I think there is an inclination to have it submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and that would be a big step forward for the protection of constitutional rights and civil liberties."

What did Specter do, swallow a copy of Jane's All the World's Platitudes? This is vacuity on parade.

Thank God we have Specter washing our backs, that's what I say; so let's put it out on the stoop and see if anyone salutes. Let's give it the old college cry -- to the bottlemints! But we can't expect to make a silk purse out of a mole hole: sooner or later, we'll have to bite the bulletin, so it's time to fish or get off the pot. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen sink.

I'm with Arlen: it's time to drain the fever pitch. If wishes were horses, beggars would be a different color. Lie down with pigs, get up smelling like gazpacho.

Does anybody in Pennsylvania ever listen to this guy?

In the Danny Kaye move The Inspector General, Kaye plays Georgi, an illiterate shill in a snake-oil medicine show who impersonates an important government official (hijinks ensue). Considering the similarities between him and Arlen Specter, I think Sen. Georgi would be better for the country.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, June 25, 2006, at the time of 07:27 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

May 11, 2006

Excavating For Bones of a Scandal

The scandal du jour is that the National Security Agency (NSA) has evidently been data-mining records of phone calls, which has every Democrat and a few hand-wringing Republicans in an uproar. (And does anyone doubt that USA Today chose yesterday, of all days, to release their original story in an effort to torpedo the nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden to head up the CIA?)

Alas, but hardly unexpectedly, many medioids and politicians appear to be conflating this story with the unrelated NSA al-Qaeda intercept story (Reuters most obviously, which I'll highlight below). But I'm way ahead of myself; let's first describe what is actually going on, assuming USAToday can be believed.

Journalistic archeology

The first point to make is that this is not a new story. The New York Times first published a story about this back in December, 2005, just a week after the NSA al-Qaeda intercept program was blown. It is thus quite clear that the USA Today story is recycled old scandal-mongering from last year... and the only NSA-related story recently that could have sparked this renewed interest is (quite obviously) the nomination of Gen. Hayden. From the December NYT story:

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

Sounds strangely familiar, yes? This is clearly the exact, same story as the one USA Today "broke" yesterday. Nowhere does yesterday's USA Today article divulge that the Times scooped them by four and a half months, and neither AP nor Reuters seems to be able to remember back that far.

Today's Times story credits USA Today with the story in paragraph two; but it does not mention that this is old stuff, long ago reported by the Times itself, until the twelfth paragraph. Even then, it mentions its own earlier story in such an oblique, laconic fashion -- followed by a lurid charge supported only by Mr. Anonymous -- that readers could easily be excused for missing the point that this is old, dessicated outrage:

The New York Times reported last December that the agency had gathered data from phone and e-mail traffic with the cooperation of several major telecommunications companies.

But Democrats reacted angrily to the USA Today article and its description of the program's vast size, including an assertion by one unnamed source that its goal was the creation of a database of every phone call ever made within the United States' borders.

(I find it more than a little surprising that the Times would be more interested in pushing this as Today's scandal than claiming their own primacy from yesteryear. But then, there is the urgent task of preventing George W. Bush from naming a new CIA chief... at least, anyone other than, oh, Francis Fargo Townsend -- whom I discussed in dire, sepulchral tones, and not without some boxing about the ears, some months ago on Captain's Quarters.)

So with all this as prelude, what exactly is the NSA doing? What's the hoo-hah all about?

How it works

The Times (today's) has a succinct description:

The article, in USA Today, said that the agency did not listen to the calls, but secretly obtained information on numbers dialed by "tens of millions of A