The New Pentagon Papers

The nearly 92,000 secret documents from 6 years of US military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan, obtained by Wikileaks and published simultaneously today by the New York Times, Guardian, and Der Spiegel, bring to mind nothing so much as the Pentagon Papers published in 1971. They’re a very different kind of dossier, of course. The latter was an official Defense Dept. study of US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The current dossier is more random – and thus in many ways more enlightening - a trove of on-the-ground reports from military and intelligence operations.

But what it shares in common with the Pentagon Papers is this: It provides a devastating portrait of

• a disastrous guerilla war that the public had already turned decisively against


• military operations that both tactically and strategically are a mess beyond any reasonable hope of repair


• intelligence operations that are acquiring almost no accurate, much less actionable, information about anything


• American officials who appear to have no answers to the daily intractable problems they face in an increasingly unpopular occupation


• an Afghan population that has huge and legitimate grievances against heavy-handed US attacks


• an Afghan government that is corrupt, incompetent, and mistrusted in more ways than most of us could have imagined


• grossly untrustworthy Afghan army and police forces


• obscenely fraught relations with our untrustworthy “allies” in the region


• an enemy that is better armed and more adaptable and successful than the public has been told


• the history of a war that went to pieces far earlier than the US government had told the public


• specific details about military operations that contradict what the US public had been told in the past

In short, just as with the Pentagon Papers, it is nearly impossible to read through the current dossier and conclude that this occupation is winnable; that the US military ever has had a coherent plan; that the government that American lives are being sacrificed for is solid, trustworthy, or has integrity; that our forces really know what is going on in the country they’re bogged down in; or that the US government has been honest about what we face there.

So the publication of these documents could prove to be a turning point in US involvement in Afghanistan. The Pentagon Papers proved to Americans, even to people who hadn’t been paying close attention to policy debates about the Vietnam War, that they’d been deceived for years by their own government’s grossly misleading public assessments of the situation there. The publication of these New Pentagon Papers ought to produce the same result.

The difference between 2010 and 1971, however, is that in an earlier day Americans in large numbers were prepared to sit down and read and discuss the secret documents. Today, I’m not so sure they’ll even bother. After all, virtually none of these documents fall below the 140-character threshold that appears to constitute the limit to attention spans in the US these days.

In addition, almost the entire Republican caucus in Washington is devoted to the idea that the single policy of Barack Obama’s that they can support is his decision (twice) to escalate the war in Afghanistan. It’s hard to imagine the opposition party allowing these unwelcome new facts to influence in any way their proud advocacy for an open-ended war on the Asian continent. I rather doubt that many in Congress from the President’s own party will want to embarrass him about the depressing picture these documents portray.

Obama himself, the last time he doubled the troops in Afghanistan (in December 2009), emphatically denied that Afghanistan was like Vietnam.

First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized and we're better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. I believe this argument depends on a false reading of history.

His administration certainly won’t be eager now to discuss whether Afghanistan is a quagmire. Even less will it want to allow public debate to be dominated by the apparent parallelism in the leaking of embarrassing documents that undercut the rationale for war. Not surprisingly, as soon as the world press reported on this dossier the White House released a statement denouncing the act of journalism as such rather than addressing the many concerns that readers of these documents would legitimately have.

I note in passing that on the main page of the White House website, under the heading ‘Issues’ you will find neither ‘Afghanistan’ nor ‘War’ (though ‘Rural’ and ‘Family’ both are somehow considered significant ‘Issues’).

So I guess we shall see whether the publication of the New Pentagon Papers has the effect that by rights it should have upon the course of this failed occupation.

In closing, I’d note the thing that struck me (as an historian) most forcefully about this trove of documents. I’ve already alluded to it. Nearly all the human intelligence gathered in the region by the US and evidently a good deal of the signal intelligence is highly fictionalized and therefore worthless - except as a reflection upon how grave our forces’ problems are there. Informants have many reasons to make things up, they’ve figured out what they can sell to us (some of this preposterous information is actually paid for), and US forces don’t have much reliable information to apply in testing the credibility of its sources. The task for Americans in Afghanistan is very much like trying to track a criminal suspect through a carnival hall of mirrors; something is going on, but who can say for sure what, where, when. This report from the Guardian is the best I’ve seen at highlighting that aspect of the documentary record:

Most of the reports are vague, filled with incongruent detail, or crudely fabricated. The same characters – famous Taliban commanders, well-known ISI officials – and scenarios repeatedly pop up. And few of the events predicted in the reports subsequently occurred.

A retired senior American officer said ground-level reports were considered to be a mixture of "rumours, bullshit and second-hand information" and were weeded out as they passed up the chain of command. "As someone who had to sift through thousands of these reports, I can say that the chances of finding any real information are pretty slim," said the officer, who has years of experience in the region.

If anything, the jumble of allegations highlights the perils of collecting accurate intelligence in a complex arena where all sides have an interest in distorting the truth.

"The fog of war is particularly dense in Afghanistan," said Michael Semple, a former deputy head of the EU mission there. "A barrage of false information is being passed off as intelligence and anyone who wants to operate there needs to be able to sift through it. The opportunities to be misled are innumerable."

[…]

Afghanistan has a long history of intelligence intrigues that stretches back to the early 19th century. Afghans have learned to use intelligence as a tool to influence the foreign powers occupying their land. In the past quarter century it has become a lucrative source of income in a country with few employment opportunities.

As many on-the-ground truths as can be found by digging through the New Pentagon Papers, there are at least an equal number of on-the-ground fabrications, falsifications, and frauds. Lies can be as revealing as truths, but only if you’re willing to look the lies square in the face.



crossposted from unbossed.com

Obama: We’ll be in Afghanistan forever

Consider these two starkly juxtaposed sentences from President Obama’s West Point speech tonight:

And as commander-in-chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

That makes no damned sense, as critics and political opponents will point out again and again in the coming years. If Afghanistan constitutes a “vital national interest”, then the US cannot afford to walk away from the country until all tranquility breaks out.

In fact Obama later went on to box himself in even more decisively:

I make this decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al-Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.

This is no idle danger, no hypothetical threat. In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror. And this danger will only grow if the region slides backwards and al-Qaeda can operate with impunity.

We must keep the pressure on al-Qaeda.

[…]

To abandon this area now and to rely only on efforts against al-Qaeda from a distance would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al-Qaeda and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.

If al Qaeda remains permanently wedded to a base of terrorist operations in Afghanistan directed at the US, as Obama asserts, then what possible justification is there for setting a withdrawal date in 2011? Or for talking about any manner of withdrawal as long as “pressure” is needed on al Qaeda? Why “abandon” Afghanistan starting in 2011 when it’s “an unacceptable risk” now?

Obama’s attempt to justify the inherent contradictions of his position doesn’t come close to addressing our supposedly vital stake in Afghanistan or the dangerousness of al Qaeda. What he says is simply that the cost of an open-ended commitment is too great to bear, and besides a timetable for withdrawal is needed to force the Afghan government to take responsibility for its own security. All that tells us is that the American government has little to work with in Afghanistan, a country that by the way is vital to our national security.

Obama’s pronouncements that the US has “vital” interests in Afghanistan imply that we’re never pulling out. He may or may not fully realize that.

We need less deference to US presidents, not more

Politicians and pundits are all atwitter today because a Republican member of Congress shouted out “You lie!” during the President’s speech, when Obama declared that health care benefits would not be extended to illegal immigrants. Their outrage is directed not so much at the accusation, which was false, as at the fact he displayed disrespect for the country’s chief executive.

Yet as the last eight years have made clear again and again, we need to show less respect to the president…much less. It’s our political class in particular that needs to learn how to be boldly and loudly confrontational whenever the president is behaving outlandishly.

To take but one example of an occasion when confrontation and, yes, bold disrespect was desperately needed for the welfare of the country, and yet totally lacking, there was George W. Bush’s State of the Union address in 2003.

It was a speech that nearly made my blood run cold. Bush strongly hinted at a secret and very ugly covert program to torture, assassinate, or ‘disappear’ terrorist suspects around the globe. The audience in Congress reacted not in shock or horror or disgust. They didn’t revile the President or demand an explanation for what he was bragging about. They didn’t shout “You un-American scum!” No, they just applauded enthusiastically.

All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries.

And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.

(APPLAUSE)

For whatever it’s worth, we now know that the great majority of terrorist suspects detained by the US were eventually released without charge – setting aside those who were killed in custody, of course. We still have not learned who these “many others” were or what their “different fate” turned out to be.

In the same speech Bush told his famous lies about Iraq, asserting falsely that Saddam Hussein had continued active nuclear and biological weapons programs in the 12 years since the Gulf War. Bush stated, falsely, that “we know” that Hussein had mobile biological weapons factories. The President repeated the canard, already exposed as nonsense, that aluminum tube imports into Iraq were intended for nuclear weapons centerfuges. Bush even cited a claim disproven by the CIA, based upon a forged document, that Hussein was seeking to import more nuclear material. Bush mischaracterized the UN resolution as an ultimatum to disarm, when in fact Iraq had no such weapons. Bush also described Hussein, falsely, as failing to cooperate with inspectors’ demands to destroy the non-existent weapons. Bush even went on to assert, falsely, that Hussein was sponsoring Al Qaeda. He concluded by announcing that even without UN authorization, he intended to invade Iraq to depose Hussein. No member of Congress had the decency, however, to shout out “You lie”. Instead, this farrago of transparent lies and proud war-mongering was greeted with applause, repeatedly.

Twelve years ago, Saddam Hussein faced the prospect of being the last casualty in a war he had started and lost. To spare himself, he agreed to disarm of all weapons of mass destruction.

For the next 12 years, he systematically violated that agreement. He pursued chemical, biological and nuclear weapons even while inspectors were in his country.

Nothing to date has restrained him from his pursuit of these weapons: not economic sanctions, not isolation from the civilized world, not even cruise missile strikes on his military facilities.

Almost three months ago, the United Nations Security Council gave Saddam Hussein his final chance to disarm. He has shown instead utter contempt for the United Nations and for the opinion of the world.

The 108 U.N. inspectors were sent to conduct--were not sent to conduct a scavenger hunt for hidden materials across a country the size of California. The job of the inspectors is to verify that Iraq's regime is disarming.

It is up to Iraq to show exactly where it is hiding its banned weapons, lay those weapons out for the world to see and destroy them as directed. Nothing like this has happened.

[…]

From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them.

The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb.

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.

The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary, he is deceiving.

[…]

And this Congress and the American people must recognize another threat. Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.

Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained.

Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.

We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes.

(APPLAUSE)

[…]

The United States will ask the U.N. Security Council to convene on February the 5th to consider the facts of Iraq's ongoing defiance of the world. Secretary of State Powell will present information and intelligence about Iraqi's--Iraq's illegal weapons programs, its attempts to hide those weapons from inspectors and its links to terrorist groups.

We will consult, but let there be no misunderstanding: If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm for the safety of our people, and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.

(APPLAUSE)

In the same speech, by the way, Bush stated that America had a crisis in health care and he was making reform a priority.

Our second goal is high quality, affordable health for all Americans.

(APPLAUSE)

The American system of medicine is a model of skill and innovation, with a pace of discovery that is adding good years to our lives. Yet for many people, medical care costs too much, and many have no coverage at all.

These problems will not be solved with a nationalized health care system that dictates coverage and rations care.

(APPLAUSE)

Instead, we must work toward a system in which all Americans have a good insurance policy, choose their own doctors, and seniors and low-income Americans receive the help they need.

(APPLAUSE)

Instead of bureaucrats and trial lawyers and HMOs, we must put doctors and nurses and patients back in charge of American medicine.

(APPLAUSE)

So far so good. But Bush’s proposals, when they finally emerge, do nothing to address bureaucracy, give health care to the poor, improve its quality, or bring costs down. It turns out that he’s advocating nothing more than tort reform for medical malpractice lawsuits, and a Medicare drug plan (for those who already had good medical coverage at low cost).

Instead of applauding deferentially, why didn’t any member of Congress demand to know “Where does that leave the poor and uninsured?”

As a country we’re practically addicted to deference toward our presidents. We even reflexively call him “The Commander in Chief” – as if that presidential role applied to anybody not currently serving in the military. We really need to unlearn those habits of deference that the nation picked up during the Cold War, and recognize anew that presidents gain or lose respect primarily by their actions.

I’m not advocating rudeness for the sake of rudeness, much less the anger and incivility that has coarsened our public discourse during the last generation. I’m certainly not excusing the shameless slanders that Obama’s Republican opponents have made their forte.

But I do think we need to welcome and encourage thoughtful, honest, and frank confrontation of the most powerful and least accountable members of our political class.

Republicans demand equal time to harangue students

Next Tuesday President Obama plans to talk to high school students in Virginia and make the speech available simultaneously to schools around the country as a White House video feed. His focus will be encouraging students to do well in school and to take their studies seriously.

As might be expected, when news of the plan became public it immediately caused a furor among conservatives, who are used to having only Republican presidents talk to students. Schools are being inundated with complaints about the attempt by that man in the White House to indoctrinate children with his 'socialist agenda' and to create a 'cult of personality' such as exist in Cuba and North Korea. Initially Republican critics sought to prevent schools from letting students see that man in the White House speak, or keep their children home from school to teach them a kind of civics lesson.

Today, however, GOP leaders settled on a more aggressive strategy. Congressional Republican leaders demanded that the television networks grant them equal time to respond to the President's message on September 8.

Schools in several states quickly agreed to show students the GOP rebuttal, and in Texas one school system near Dallas that already announced it will not allow Obama's address to be seen decided to make the Republican rejoinder mandatory.

The Republicans have selected Bill O'Reilly to deliver their rebuttal. His spokesman announced that O'Reilly will focus on the danger of personality-driven politics. He'll also stress that students should cease from studying foreign languages, which he'll describe as 'unAmerican', and disrespect their teachers, who are unionized. O'Reilly will especially encourage students to engage in bullying and harrassment. In the long term, he'll say, they should try to drop out of school before they can be confused by too much information.

He can be rolled

A watershed occurred today in the history of the Obama administration. For the first time, a major voice in the corporate media has stated what many other political observers must have been thinking for months now: that the President has shown that he can be rolled. Whether or not one agrees with that assessment, it has now become a definite part of the political landscape in Washington by virtue of having been enunciated in the press. The debate is on, whether Obama "can be rolled".

Sooner or later the President will have to address the problem of that perception, whether he wants to or not. It will seep into every major political struggle for the foreseeable future. If Obama cannot demonstrate the opposite - that he's willing and able to push back against his political opponents - then it will become a dominant perception and a nearly intractable political force for the remainder of his presidency.

Here is Paul Krugman in the NY Times:

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

Krugman's other point, that once in office President Obama has refused to dance with them that brung him, is well taken but also widely acknowledged by now. What Krugman has introduced into the mainstream of national political debate is the perception that Obama has been demonstrating that he seeks to avoid confronting his political opponents and doesn't have the will to make them pay a price for toying with him.

So, this is the point where we will see whether Obama can finally shake himself free of the delusions that post-partisanship is possible or even desirable in today's Washington; that by virtue of good will he can he turn congressional Republicans from opponents into allies; that it's possible to enact legislation to meet the country's pressing needs with the help of a party that has long opposed precisely those reforms that are most critical now.

We'll also discover whether the President has figured out by now that Americans really are not very interested in political process but rather in seeing results. Even without any bipartisanship whatever, new legislation that addresses the current crises or that makes a positive difference for people will be welcomed by voters. On the other hand, if getting Republican votes makes a bill ineffective, nobody will think any better of the President because the lousy measure was achieved through bipartisanship. Instead, Americans will just think less of Obama and of Democrats if they cannot advance their own agenda while holding the White House, the Senate, and the House.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Fouad Ajami, tutor to presidents

Almost everything that neocon Fouad Ajami writes is good for a laugh. Typically he serves up a preposterously incoherent mix of half-digested stray facts, heavily larded with a peculiar kind of incomprehension and preening about his own brilliance. His op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal is no exception. Perhaps I've already said too much about this once influential ninny, but it's hard to resist taking a stick to Ajami's latest excretion.

The central point, if there is one, appears to be that Ajami is smarter than Barack Obama, whose Iranian policy he considers to be weak and naive. He wants the President to be confrontational with the Iranian leadership. Ajami holds up Ronald Reagan as the model for clear-minded and hard-nosed foreign policy in the Middle East. Apparently Ajami forgets that Reagan sent that Bible and cake to the mullahs in Iran – oh, yeah, and a whole bunch of arms too. Hmmm...maybe it was Reagan's support of Saddam Hussein's attack on Iran, or perhaps his alleged October Surprise, or the Lebanon debacle, that impressed Ajami so much.

But that's just one of the many inconsistencies that render his 'argument' incoherent. Ajami can't decide whether Mousavi actually won the election, or was defeated by a popular Ahmadinejad. Even so, though he can't quite bring himself to say so explicitly, Ajami seems to think that Obama needs to take a strong stance against the Iranian regime and support the street protesters. Obama, he thinks, is subject to delusions about the possibility of a new detente with Iran.

But in truth Iran had never wanted an opening to the U.S. For the length of three decades, the custodians of the theocracy have had precisely the level of enmity toward the U.S. they have wanted -- just enough to be an ideological glue for the regime but not enough to be a threat to their power.

I wonder how many people in Washington are unaware that Iranian hardliners employ anti-Americanism to their own advantage? Anyway, try to reconcile the foregoing with this:

We must rein in the modernist conceit that the bloggers, and the force of Twitter and Facebook, could win in the streets against the squads of the regime. That fight would be an Iranian drama, all outsiders mere spectators.

If the struggle in Iran will be decided by the Iranians themselves, as of course it will be, then how could supportive rhetoric from an American president be of much assistance to the demonstrators? What's more, since Ajami admits that whipping up anti-Americanism helps the hard-liners to hold onto power, wouldn't it be counter-productive for Obama to declare that the demonstrators have US backing?

Yet Ajami dares to complain about "the administration's incoherence".

A final point: Ajami descibes President Carter as having "lost" Iran, as if that country ever belonged to the US. It's the same arrogance he displayed in the spring of 2003 when Ajami declared that "We are now coming into acquisition of Iraq". Ajami is so damned confused that he can't even distinguish between "ours" and "theirs".

crossposted from unbossed.com

WSJ: Obama set to reverse himself on criminal interrogations

Last year while campaigning candidate Barack Obama used to boast about a law he helped to enact in the Illinois state legislature, which required all police interrogations to be videotaped. This mandate of transparency, he said, would discourage abusive interrogation practices in the future and serve to hold accountable any public servant who dared to engage in them. Today, however, Evan Perez and Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal report that President Obama is on the verge of ordering the Justice Department to block the disclosure of evidence of extremely brutal interrogations – on the grounds that it would be too embarrassing for the public to see quite how abusively government employees behaved.

The three videotapes in question, from 2005, show the interrogations of multiple suspects (none ever charged with any crimes). Officers inflicted a variety of diabolically clever forms of torture on them as well as plain old physical brutality. For example, one preferred method of "interrogation" was to bang a suspect's head against the wall repeatedly.

Although the Justice Dept. wishes to publish the tapes, in compliance with an ACLU lawsuit seeking their release, some of the wise establishment types surrounding the new president reportedly are urging him to reverse his earlier position on transparency, accountability, and the rule of law. Their reasons?

According to the WSJ, they argue that release of the tapes would hurt the government's credibility, hand a propaganda victory to America's enemies, and alienate some officers - who might not be willing in the future to engage in such practices if their recent misdeeds are not concealed. As one government official commented anonymously, making public the details of government wrongdoing would make officers "disinclined to take any risks in the future."

And there you were thinking that the whole point of exposing criminal deeds was to disincline people from repeating them in the future.

A tip of the hat to Milo for alerting me to the WSJ report.

Advocacy vs. cheerleading

I wonder if this good news will help to convince some Democrats that hard-nosed advocacy is more effective than silent hand-wringing or wishful thinking or worst of all, mere cheerleading for Democratic rule? That demanding reform is a mark of loyalty to their principles, rather than an embrace of the opposite? That the time to raise one's voice is before, not after, disastrous 'compromises' have been set in stone? That Democratic politicians respond to pressure, not to its absence?

John Brennan, the deputy to George Tenet when the CIA was forging and implementing an array of illegal practices including the Bush administration's torture regime, a man who has since then defended and justified Bush's rendition, detention, and interrogation policies, was being widely touted as a likely choice to head the CIA under Barack Obama. This and several other liberal blogs decried the possibility, arguing that the next administration needed to break with the past and be seen to be doing so. And voila. Today Brennan announced that he was withdrawing his name from consideration for any intelligence posts in the next administration because of the opposition he has aroused. He did not want to be a distraction, he said.

Obama's advisers had grown increasingly concerned in recent days over online blogs that accused Brennan of condoning harsh interrogation tactics on terror suspects, including waterboarding, which critics consider torture.

His withdrawal was a concession to a political reality that Democratic activists created by concerted and principled opposition. It was not the result of an epiphany for Brennan or a sudden contrition over the positions he's adopted. Quite the opposite, in fact.

His letter of withdrawal, available here, shows that Brennan continues to deny any responsibility for the illegal policies. He says he "was not involved" in the decisions about the policies; and that his "criticism of these policies within government circles" was the reason he was passed over for promotion by the Bush administration. Those claims cannot easily be tested, of course, since they concern opinions and behavior manifested (if at all) only behind closed doors. Brennan even asserts now that he was (always?) "a strong opponent" of "coercive interrogation tactics" tout court. It's a claim that does not really measure up against his public statements - although Brennan later did renounce one specific technique, waterboarding. In any case, Brennan refuses to acknowledge that he was being criticized in particular for promoting and defending some of those policies after leaving the CIA. His public statements are the one arena in which we can assess his beliefs, and in that arena he looked rather shabby. Brennan can't bring himself in his letter to admit even this much, that he needed to explain his public positions on the CIA's legacy of controversial illegal policies.

Thus it's clear that what led to Brennan's withdrawal was not a sudden attack of conscientiousness. It was, instead, a concession to political reality. Activism creates such political realities.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Criminal neglect

No doubt by now you've seen the reports that say New Orleans is the city with the highest crime rate in America, with 19,000 reported crimes in 2007 according to FBI statistics. Among large cities, the three with the worst crime rates reportedly were Detroit, Baltimore, and Memphis, in that order.

Proverbial damned lies and statistics. These rankings are calculated based on just 6 categories of crime (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and auto theft). Hence they neglect most categories of crime and in particular many of the most severe kinds of criminal activity. If these were included, one city would stand head and shoulders above the others in its single-minded devotion to criminal enterprises: Washington, DC.

What sorts of major crimes have been excluded from consideration? For starters, all manner of war crimes – things like invading a sovereign country without justification and then neglecting its internal security, killing or driving into exile millions in the process. That's a criminal enterprise on a vast scale, isn't it? All of it headquartered in Washington.

But that's just the beginning of the list, whose outer limits are unknown and probably unquantifiable. For example, the illegal electronic surveillance of Americans without warrant by the NSA - and who knows how many other federal agencies - very probably affects tens of millions of us. But the White House won't fess up and the FBI and Congress refuse to investigate so we're left to guess how many crimes have been perpetrated in this category. Of course some haters of liberty would not want to press charges anyway, but plenty of others would leap at the opportunity to put the criminals behind bars.

If violating the wiretap laws isn't considered sufficiently felonious in your household to merit much concern, then consider instead the crime of torture. At least 775 prisoners have been locked up in Guantanamo Bay prison during the last few years, every one of them subject to extensive and prolonged tortures. But an untold number of prisoners have been abused in other sites around the world as part of a criminal conspiracy directed from Washington. Torture's pretty big as felonies go, isn't it?

As for the lesser crimes committed by this same gang, they too may be beyond count. Who can really say how many documents they've destroyed or concealed, in the attempt to obstruct justice, just with regard to their torture network? And the tally for subpoenas they've flouted has been limited only by the number that were served on them.

But you know all this. I call it to mind because of the very misleading statistics I began with, which apparently exclude torture and a variety of related white collar crimes. If included, they would qualify Washington as the crime capital of the country - for several years running. By extraordinary coincidence, those statistics are compiled by the very same cabal's self-styled "Justice Department". Not only does it not maintain a tally for torture and such crimes, but neither does it seek to prosecute for them.

Which brings me to a subject much discussed in recent weeks. Any number of news reports have passed along a viewpoint being expressed by anonymous advisers to president-elect Obama. It would be inadvisable to prosecute the really big criminals in Washington, the sources will have us to know, so we should anticipate that they'll be let off the hook for all their crimes - even or especially the most egregious ones.

It's an argument from expediency. Prosecutions of well-connected criminals would prove unpopular seems to be the gist of it. There's also a second argument from expediency being circulated: that Obama won't be able to concentrate on his own agenda if he wastes time prosecuting torturers and such. Cleaning up the crime wave in Washington forms no part of Obama's agenda, these anonymous types would have us believe.

On the face of it, their suggestion is preposterous. Prosecuting federal criminals is part of the presidency, a job Obama has been seeking for two years. If the president refuses to do it, there is nobody else who can take it on. It's not a prerogative, it's a duty. These advisers seem to be implying that Obama can't walk and chew gum at the same time.

Instead, they've been promoting the idea that a body such as the 9/11 commission ought to investigate the criminals thoroughly and then just maybe do nothing to hold them accountable. You remember the 9/11 commission, the one that decided as soon as it convened "not to play the blame game". The anonymous sources have also been promoting specific proposals that Obama create a new set of kangaroo courts to try some of the torture victims and a new legal status, "preventive detention", to keep other victims locked away without trial. The purpose would be to prevent that unpleasant discovery process from exposing awkward facts in open court about crimes that might not be expedient to prosecute.

The kangaroo court idea quickly was taken back off the table by Obama after the suggestion provoked outrage. Yet it's tempting to conclude, as many have, that his advisers have fanned out under instructions to use the media to tamp down public expectations that the worst crimes will be punished as crimes. Because to fail to do that would be such a betrayal of the rule of law that one could hardly be expected to swallow it without the ground being prepared carefully in advance. And on the other hand, to let on that such a betrayal is in the works without any authorization from the president-elect would be, well, presumptuous.

But on the whole, I don't see much sense in the theory that the next president truly intends to let all these criminals off the hook. For one thing the legacy of lawlessness becomes permanent if such crimes are put off limits now. How unseemly would that be? It might lower the crime rate in Washington, true, but only because nobody's allowed to count a whole range of what used to classed as crimes. The pretense that they're really crimes sooner or later will have to be dropped.

And the criminals themselves, what will they get up to next?

But more's the point, you'd have to assume that legal chaos would ensue if laws of the utmost gravity go unenforced. For how could the government legitimately prosecute lesser crimes in the future if greater ones get written right off? It would be criminal neglect on a grand scale.

And if the criminal code starts to crumble, why should anybody assume the rest of the legal code would remain intact? Are contracts any longer enforceable if criminal laws are not?

Hmm...those anonymous advisers don't seem to have mentioned it yet, but could a cancellation of debts be in the works? As long as the next president is hollowing out the law as a favor to big time criminals, there ought to be something in it for all the rest of us. And come to think of it, I'm getting awfully tired of paying that mortgage.

How about it then, an amnesty for everyone and everything? That way we all win.

crossposted at unbossed.com

How many Diebold voting machines failed in Pennsylvania?

What follows is a post written in the week after the election. Because it concerns an anomaly in election results that were then provisional, I delayed publishing it. As it turned out, the final results erased that anomaly – but in a way that suggests my original concerns may have been on target. An update at the end explains what I mean by that.

Are you certain that your vote was recorded and counted properly on November 4? If you live in Pennsylvania your answer may be "not at all".

On primary day in April, I happened to hear a poll worker comment that the Diebold AccuVote TSx machines at our precinct in Lehigh County (PA) aren't very credible. So I asked whether she trusted paperless DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) machines. She didn't. As it turned out neither did any of the other poll workers there - nor the other voters waiting in line. Nobody seems to trust them. That in itself is reason enough to get rid of these damnable black box systems. Without trust, what is left of democracy?

Ultimately there's no way of knowing whether those machines counted votes accurately in the April primary, or whether those votes were tabulated correctly. The very technology makes accountability impossible. As if that's not bad enough, the (ironically named) AccuVote has a history of flawed performance. What's more it can be hacked rather easily.

In fact, I see evidence that on Election Day one or more of these touch-screen machines in a local precinct may have failed to record as many as a few hundred votes in the presidential race.

The problem in question concerns the rural township of Lowhill, PA, where 767 voters (52%) are registered Republicans, 489 are Democrats, and 215 are Independents. Turnout on Election Day was at least 80%. The (still unofficial) vote totals in Lowhill for all the state-wide and local races ranged between 1117 and 1178. Even a bond referendum generated 1023 votes in the town.

However only 950 votes are recorded for president in Lowhill. That's 228 fewer votes than were cast in the (non-competitive) Congressional race. Thus the undervote in the presidential race in this town was extremely high (over 19%). By contrast, in neighboring rural towns with similar Republican majorities the normal pattern prevailed – that is to say, the presidential race received more votes than any of the down-ballot races did. I've not found any other precincts in the region where the presidential race this year generated fewer votes than down-ballot races, so the result in Lowhill is highly anomalous.

It looks like the entire undervote there is to be associated with John McCain. Clearly something's amiss with McCain's vote total, since he got only 15 more votes than Barack Obama in Lowhill (Obama 461, McCain 476). Democratic candidates simply do not come within 15 votes of winning Lowhill. In this century only a single Democratic candidate has lost by fewer than 120 votes in Lowhill Township (Ed Rendell in 2006, who lost to the hapless Lynn Swann by just 34 votes). To judge by the Democratic vote tallies in other races in Lowhill (past and present), and by the results this year in neighboring towns, 461 votes for Obama is about what you'd expect. However McCain's 476 votes in Lowhill is about 250 votes below what I would have anticipated based on these same factors.

Significantly, the estimated 250 vote deficit for McCain in Lowhill is also the entire amount of the undervote in the presidential race. Thus any 'missing' votes in Lowhill would have come from McCain's column.

It's possible that the peculiar vote tally in Lowhill was due to clerical error. Perhaps McCain's 476 votes should instead have been 746? A few days after the election I called the Lehigh County clerk's office to alert them to the anomaly. They refused to comment until official results have been certified. I've heard nothing from them since then.

It's also just barely possible that in this single town, for some unknown reason, vastly fewer Republicans supported McCain than in the area generally. The median income in Lowhill is higher, and it's true that national exit polls show McCain's support fell off by 3-4% as voters' income rose above the $200,000 mark. However that factor isn't remotely sufficient to cause the truly stark discrepancy between the recorded and the projected vote for McCain in this town. And in any case why would so many people cast no vote at all for president?

The Diebold DREs used in Lowhill are error-prone. Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, the same type of machines also malfunctioned so badly that an hour after the polls closed Judge Charles Saylor ordered them to be impounded – at the urging of both Democratic and Republican officials. Wired Magazine's Kim Zetter explains why all 185 of one county's AccuVote machines were impounded.

Touch-screen voting machines used yesterday in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, have been impounded on a judge's order after voters experienced problems on the machines when trying to vote a straight-party ticket.

County poll workers discovered around 7:30 am Tuesday morning that voters who chose to vote a straight-party ticket could not see their selections on the summary review screen. The summary review screen allows voters to verify that the machine has registered their selections accurately before they cast their ballot.

Northumberland County uses AccuVote paperless touchscreen machines made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems), which are supposed to display the chosen candidate's name on the review screen. But voters who voted a straight-party ticket could see only a message saying they had voted a straight-party ticket.

In short, the AccuVote machines that had been certified ready for use were instead malfunctioning in a consistent pattern that cannot be attributed to voter error. It's unclear so far whether the DREs in Northumberland County tallied any votes incorrectly, or perhaps caused frustrated voters to 'correct' their vote in such a way as to nullify their intent. What matters in the end is that the machines are demonstrably unreliable – and, since they lack a paper trail, any malfunctions are difficult if not impossible to reverse after the fact.

And let's not forget that a study by computer scientists at Princeton has demonstrated that the AccuVote machine is easily hacked.

We analyzed the machine's hardware and software, performed experiments on it, and considered whether real election practices would leave it suitably secure. We found that the machine is vulnerable to a number of extremely serious attacks that undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces.

Computer scientists have generally been skeptical of voting systems of this type, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE), which are essentially general-purpose computers running specialized election software. Experience with computer systems of all kinds shows that it is exceedingly difficult to ensure the reliability and security of complex software or to detect and diagnose problems when they do occur. Yet DREs rely fundamentally on the correct and secure operation of complex software programs. Simply put, many computer scientists doubt that paperless DREs can be made reliable and secure, and they expect that any failures of such systems would likely go undetected.

Not to put too fine a point on it, if you aren't concerned yet about the integrity of elections in the US, then it's about time that you were. Paperless DREs are subject to any number of problems that make their vote tallies suspect. Diebold in particular has worked hard to earn every bit of its public notoriety.

Indeed, in October the elections officials in Ohio learned that the PES (Diebold) vote tabulators used in conjunction with their unreliable DREs are also prone to malfunction. Kim Zetter again:

Several election watch dog groups have sent an advisory to election officials warning them about a problem with Premier Election Solutions' vote tabulating software that could cause the system to lose votes.

Premier (formerly called Diebold Election Systems) disclosed the problem in August after officials in Butler County, Ohio, discovered that 150 votes were dropped from a memory card during the state's March primary. Ten other Ohio counties discovered their system had dropped votes as well when vote totals on the memory card were uploaded to a county server. The problem occurred when officials tried to upload multiple memory cards at once.

All of the votes were recovered, but Ohio officials had to expend considerable time and energy to retrieve them and make sure all were accounted for.

The flaw is in Premier's Global Election Management System (GEMS), which is used in at least 31 states. GEMS software sits on a computer system at a county's election headquarters and is used to tabulate votes cast on both touchscreen voting machines and optical-scan machines. Premier said the flaw was in versions 1.20.2 and earlier of the software, though other versions may be affected as well.

After denying for some time any responsibility for the manifest problems with their vote tabulators, and getting sued in August by the Ohio Secretary of State, Premier finally admitted that it's software doesn't work properly (PDF). As a result, an alert went out in the hopes of containing the problem.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law sent an advisory to election officials Thursday -- along with Common Cause and Verified Voting -- urging them to follow the procedures and to conduct a rigorous post-election manual audit to reconcile vote totals on memory cards with those in the tabulation system.

Well, I hope that elections officials in Pennsylvania are conducting a rigorous audit to catch these malfunctions. Perhaps that will also suffice to correct the suspicious anomaly in Lowhill's presidential tally.

And after they're done trying to catch and correct all the mistakes caused by Premier Election Solutions' malfunctioning machines, I hope they'll have the good sense to ditch the damnable DREs, make a clean break, and find a more reliable technology to count votes - one that voters can reasonably place their trust in. At a minimum, we desperately need to adopt a voting technology that allows officials to audit and recount the vote with confidence. It's not good enough to rely upon DRE voodoo.

Update: This week Lehigh County posted on line its certified results here. In nearly every race in all the local precincts I'd examined earlier, including the races in Lowhill, the final tallies for every candidate were within 5 votes of the preliminary tallies posted immediately after the election.

However the vote tally for John McCain in Lowhill Township rose by 254 votes, from 476 to 730. The new total is approximately where I suspected it should be. Obama's total in Lowhill rose by only 4 votes (461 to 465).

So what happened? I'd hoped it was just a question of clerical error in transcribing or entering the completed vote tally. But given the McCain numbers before and afterwards, that doesn't appear a likely explanation. A problem with one or more of the 5 AccuVote machines used in Lowhill seems much the more likely explanation for the huge initial undervote.

If so, it may seem reassuring that elections officials were able to catch and correct a loss of that many votes. But on the other hand, when I discovered the anomaly I did press a County election official to investigate it carefully. So it's possible that their normal post-election certification process would not otherwise have caught a problem of this type.

In any case, the correction of the undervote does not reassure me that the technology in use is credible. Quite the opposite, it strengthens my concerns about Diebold's AccuVote machines.

If I'm able next week to get the Lehigh County clerk to explain how they discovered the error and what caused it, I'll post the information at this site.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Sorting out Bush's torture techniques

To find a vocal critic of the Bush administration's torture regime stumbling around while discussing its components is a little disconcerting. It confirms what I've long suspected - that even as bits of the torture program have been exposed little by little, the Bush administration managed never the less to sow confusion over those revelations. People really need to sort this out before the Obama administration comes to grip with its predecessor's vile record.

Briefly, the background is this: James Gordon Meek reported that Democrats like the "anti-torture views" of John Brennan, Barack Obama's chief adviser on intelligence matters. Brennan was the deputy to former CIA director George Tenet at the time that Bush's torture regime was implemented. It does seem strange to describe Brennan as "anti-torture" just because he's renounced waterboarding in the last few years and allowed that "the dark side has its limits". Glenn Greenwald documents how Brennan has advocated or made excuses for extraordinary rendition specifically and Bush's detention and interrogation policies generally.

Meek and Greenwald then got into a back and forth over Brennan's anti-torture credentials. Meek argues faux-naively that extraordinary rendition per se can be dissociated from the torture that awaits prisoners handed over to countries that routinely practice torture. Meek says nothing about the spiderweb of America's own secret prisons where Bush administration prisoners have been flown to be tortured.

In any case, Greenwald responded to Meek's tendentious argument with a certain degree of confusion about what is what in Bush's torture regime:

The most incriminating aspect of Brennan's views, in my opinion, is his support for the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation techniques." Since he says he opposes waterboarding and isn't on record opposing anything else, one can reasonably assume that must include some combination of things like stress positions, forced nudity, hypothermia, sleep deprivation, exploitation of paranoias, extreme isolation, hanging by the wrists, threats, and other previously forbidden techniques authorized by the Bush administration.

This needs sorting out. Several of the things Greenwald lists are not, apparently, part of what the Bush administration terms "enhanced interrogation techniques".

To judge by published reports, these consisted of a discrete and detailed list of coercive techniques, including waterboarding, to be used only with high-level authorization against specific prisoners...those who are described typically as "hardened" or "high-value" al Qaeda suspects. The CIA has claimed that "enhanced interrogation techniques" have been used against only about 30 prisoners. The list of "enhanced techniques" originally was approved at a White House meeting (in 2002, it seems) of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, Colin Powell, and John Ashcroft. During the next year or more, requests for authorization to use "enhanced" techniques against specific prisoners were, reportedly, discussed at several further meetings of the National Security Council Principals Committee.

But "enhanced interrogation techniques" are far from the only forms of abuse meted out to prisoners under Bush. They shouldn't be confused with the underlying programs of abusive treatment that were inflicted on many or all detainees abroad. For the latter, the Bush administration has used the term "exploitation". It was partly to clarify the distinction between the much-discussed "enhanced interrogation techniques" and the less understood but more widespread "exploitation" that I wrote this Abbreviated History of Exploitation Processes.

Abuse of prisoners in Bosnia and Afghanistan began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. By December 2001 at the latest, the Bush administration began to try to systematize that abuse by reverse-engineering techniques used in the military's SERE training schools. These existed to train US military personnel in techniques they'd need if captured by an authoritarian regime. The training included systematic psychological abuse of the kind practiced on American POWs during the Korean War. It was these "exploitative" practices in particular that the Bush administration decided in 2001 to adapt and apply against terrorism suspects. They became the baseline standard of abuse meted out to nearly all detainees held in secret prisons or transferred to Guantanamo. "Exploitation" focuses principally on prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation/overload, disorientation, stress, extremes of noise, light, and heat, forced nakedness, sexual humiliation, and generally creating psychological confusion and a state of infantile dependency. The result frequently is extreme mental degradation. Prisoners often become suicidal.

A few of these methods were later incorporated into the "enhanced interrogation techniques" so there was some overlap with baseline "exploitation". But it's absolutely vital to keep them distinct. Because the Bush administration and its apologists have tried to minimize the extent of their crimes by focusing all attention on the victims of "enhanced" techniques – who are few in number and can be depicted more easily as dangerous terrorists.

"Exploitation" is used to establish mental conditions favorable to manipulative interrogations. Many of the prisoners "exploited" were never in fact interrogated, or only in a very cursory way. Even after the US military and CIA lost interest in prisoners or concluded that they had no connection to terrorism, the prisoners often continued to be subject to "exploitation" for months or years on end. More to the point, "exploitation" has continued to be the standard for mistreating prisoners at Guantanamo down to this day. It's not the exception, it's the rule.

And since John Brennan has sought to justify extraordinary rendition flights, during which prisoners are "exploited" most repulsively, then it's very difficult to see how he has done anything other than align himself with the Bush administration's policy of torture.

crossposted at unbossed.com

The 'debate' about Gitmo

Either Barack Obama will show strength by adopting the core of Bush's policy regarding the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and continue to detain them without trial, or the next president will give in to political pressure from crazy civil libertarians, release known terrorists and endanger the US.

That's the message of much of the commentary on Gitmo churned out in the traditional media since the election, including this NYT report by William Glaberson. It has relied not so much on the staunchest critics of Bush's detention and torture policies – no surprise that - but instead on Washington establishment types with axes to grind or interests to protect. Their notion is that, while Obama remains most malleable, he needs to be gulled into thinking that the central issues concern political leadership and the need to protect America from dangerous terrorists.

They don't. The central issue is whether to restore the rule of law. Much to their regret, that's not a very complicated issue.

As a result, the 'serious' people (who generally did nothing under Bush to stop his illegal policies) are straining to find ways to complicate the question of what to do - now that Bush won't any longer be an impediment to change. The most intractable complication of any change in essential policy, we're told, is that restoring due process means - horribile dictu - that some prisoners might go free.

What if some detainees are acquitted or cannot be prosecuted at all?

In most constitutional states, that's considered a feature of due process rather than a bug: People whom the government cannot charge and convict of crimes should not be held in prison.

Apologists for Bush's Gitmo policies are worried principally about three things: (i) That the government has little evidence to charge most of the prisoners with crimes, and much of that is laughably weak or acquired by illegal means such as torture. (ii) The government's manipulation of evidence, of charges, and of the kangaroo courts it created would be exposed in real court proceedings. (iii) All the prisoners have been tortured through a system of "exploitation" crafted by the Bush administration.

Under those circumstances, few if any prisoners could be convicted of crimes. None could be charged without exposing government wrongdoing to public scrutiny in the US. In the civilized world, both those things would be welcomed: the release of prisoners long detained without adequate evidence, and the exposure of government crimes.

But Glaberson's cohort of experts is urging Obama to circumvent the imaginary 'problem' of due process by creating a new system of "preventive detention".

Benjamin Wittes, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued in a book published in June that Americans needed to cross a “psychological Rubicon” and accept the idea that preventive detention was a necessary tool for fighting terrorism.

“I’m afraid of people getting released in the name of human rights and doing terrible things,” Mr. Wittes said in an interview.

That is to say, because of Mr. Wittes' fearfulness and his disdain for human (i.e. legal) rights, Obama is supposed to restore the rule of law by creating a parallel system of injustice to cover the people the president (or Mr. Wittes) doesn't wish to put into the justice system (or prisoner of war camps).

“You can’t be a purist and say there’s never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone,” said one civil liberties lawyer, David D. Cole, a Georgetown law professor who has been a critic of the Bush administration.

Let me demonstrate that Mr. Cole is wrong: There is no circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone. I just said what he claimed could not be said.

Proponents of a president's 'right' (or 'duty' as some would have it) to incarcerate 'dangerous' people without trial 'preventively' point to our willingness to lock lunatics away in insane asylums. Just as in the Soviet Union, I guess, criminal charges are supposed to be likened to mental disorders. By this confusion of criminal charges with medical diagnoses, the presumption of innocence would no longer apply. That sort of argument might appeal to fools and Brookings fellows, but I won't waste further time on it.

The other main reason that Glaberson's cohorts favor a new law on 'preventive detention' is that they assume it will never be invoked against people like themselves. To the smart set, the presumption that presidents with monarchical power would lock up only 'truly dangerous people' makes the long-term damage to the very foundations of our legal system seem trivial. Indeed for them there's a considerable benefit if Obama cooperates in drawing a veil over the past by not exposing it to judicial discovery: the unpleasant business of prosecuting the worst crimes of the Bush administration can be pushed aside indefinitely.

It's generally an unspoken rule of the Washington establishment that very important people do not have to answer for their abuse of power. In particular, according to this viewpoint, each successive administration is supposed to give its predecessor a pass for any and all crimes it committed. That's considered the height of bi-partisanship. Prosecuting important criminals, by contrast, "could be perceived as vindictive". "It would not be beneficial to spend a lot of time calling people up to Congress or in front of grand juries," says former federal prosecutor Robert Litt – whose own law firm's clients specifically stand not to benefit by spending time in that fashion.

You see, for the Washington elite the benefits of upholding our legal tradition hinge upon whether or not the legal system is brought to bear upon oneself and one's friends and clients.

Interwoven into this shameless assault on accountability and the rule of law are several preposterous (and therefore unstated) assumptions. In particular we're supposed to accept that certain prisoners are indescribably dangerous...more dangerous than the attack on our legal tradition...and that the Bush administration has lots of reliable information that "someone is a threat" though it can't be proved in court. An essential corollary is the assumption that these somebodies are critical operatives in the machinery of terrorism. Their release, we're to suppose, would lead inevitably to further acts of terror, whereas their continued detention prevents terrorism.

Now, I don't accept the specious view that Common Law stops applying whenever an allegation of terrorism is made. Neither should anybody. It's authoritarianism presented in legal raiment, very much in the tradition of the infamous Sedition Act of 90 years ago.

The imperative of Panic does not trump all. But even if I did accept that cowardly notion, there are many good reasons for rejecting the assumption that prisoners at Gitmo are dangerous in ways that no other actual or potential criminal suspects can ever be. Because unless you accept that the rules, laws, or precedents set in this instance can never be applied to anybody other than the terrorism suspects already held at Gitmo or in George Bush's other secret prisons, then you're stuck with an extra-legal system of imprisonment ruled over by the president. Far from solving any problems, you've just created (or institutionalized) a big one.

In any event, a single reason for rejecting that assumption is sufficiently devastating that there's little point in dwelling upon any others. And that is this: The Bush administration has shown again and again that it does not truly believe the inflated allegations it directs against Gitmo prisoners.

For example, obscured in the 'debate' thus far concerning what to do about Guantanamo is the Seton Hall study delivered in August to the Senate Judiciary Committee. That's a huge omission. This meticulous study (PDF) documents how many former prisoners have been released to their home countries, and how little correlation there has been between the rate and speed of their release, on the one hand, and the gravity of the Bush administration's allegations against them on the other.

In his written testimony to the Committee, Professor Mark P. Denbeaux, director of Seton Hall Law’s Center for Policy and Research stated, “…the Center sought to determine how evidence gathered against any given detainee influenced the decision whether to release him. Center researchers expected to find that the detainees who presented the greatest threat would have been released last, or would still be held at Guantánamo.

“Center analysis shows that was not the case. The only significant correlation to one’s being released, the date of his release, and status upon release, is the nationality of the detainee. Those from Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia were more likely to be released, and more quickly.”

In other words, the allegations stop mattering once the Bush administration decides it wants to stop detaining a given prisoner. That makes perfect sense, of course, under the circumstances. Everybody involved knew that many of these prisoners had been purchased in the first place under a program so bizarre that the sales prices had to be euphemized as so-called "bounties". The allegations applied to the prisoners, once purchased, came straight off a menu of hyperbolic and simplistic tropes - as an earlier Seton Hall study (PDF) had shown conclusively.

Thus before the advocates for creating a new system of "preventive detention" ever get a hearing, they ought to be required to explain why we should give credence reflexively to allegations by a Bush administration that has a credibility gap. I really don't think they have an answer to that.

A fallacy about the election turnout

Votes continue to be counted and thus states have not released figures for the turnout for this election. Yet we see analyses like this one at Politico asserting confidently that turnout was no higher than in 2004. The point is to call into question the success of the Obama campaign's strategy to increase voter participation.

The Democratic increase struck some analysts as modest, considering the party’s immense get-out-the-vote operation, strong anti-Bush sentiment and Obama's popularity.

The argument is based on a painfully obvious fallacy, however.

It happens that I've been working for several days on research for a post about an election irregularity I uncovered in Pennsylvania. So I was able to spot the fallacy immediately in the Politico article, when the author David Paul Kuhn tried to produce some evidence to support his argument that turnout failed to increase this year:

In Pennsylvania, 5,851,730 voters cast ballots with 99.8 percent of votes counted — a rise of nearly 690,000 voters over 2004, according its secretary of state. But due to higher registration, the percent of eligible voters who cast ballots dropped from 68.96 in 2004 to 66.8 this year.

The first statement is false. The figure 5,851,730 is the number of votes that have been tallied for president in PA. Even without looking at PA results precinct by precinct, as I've done, Kuhn ought to have known that a significant number of voters did not cast a vote for president. That's especially going to be true in a year when so many Republicans were dissatisfied with their party's nominee.

We'll just have to wait for the official numbers for turnout. In the heavily Republican rural towns in my region of PA, the presidential vote generally was as high or slightly higher than in 2004. These are areas where, I believe, few new voters were added to the rolls. Thus the turnout increased or at least held steady in this demoralized Republican area.

In any case, we also need to consider the impact of lost votes – especially those not tallied correctly by electronic voting systems (I'll have more to say on this later), as well as the voters who were repulsed by long lines on Election Day.

At the polling place where I was working, the line became ridiculously backed up for much of the day. A Republican party "striker" showed up and, whether deliberately or through some combination of stupidity and incompetence, created a bottleneck that slowed the voting nearly to a halt. I recognized the problem immediately and called in for help. Obama campaign workers and lawyers came out repeatedly to help put a stop to this snarl-up, but even so we could barely contain the damage that this one Republican operative was doing. Thus as the day dragged on, scores of potential voters just walked away without casting their vote. In the space of just 20 minutes in late afternoon, I counted a dozen voters who left the line or turned away when they realized they'd have to wait for hours.

Poor planning, unnecessary delays, and lousy technology – which we continue to suffer from - all contribute in some degree to holding down the turnout. It's not reasonable to assume, on the basis of limited evidence, that the Obama campaign failed to get its voters to turn out on Election Day.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Focus on the Family likens Obama and Democrats to Nazis

This evening James Dobson's Focus on the Family Action sent out a fundraising email to members that likened the victories of Barack Obama and congressional Democrats in Tuesday's election to the Nazi bombing of England during World War II. The author of this vile letter is Tom Minnery, Senior Vice President of Focus on the Family Action. It was nearly inevitable that anger over losing the 2008 election would soon provoke right-wing extremists to violate Godwin's Law. Obama's victory in Colorado may have been particularly galling for the Colorado Springs based Focus on the Family, which has been heavily involved in the political campaign this year advocating for conservative issues. James Dobson personally endorsed the McCain-Palin ticket this fall.

Focus on the Family has not so far posted this hateful fundraising letter on the web. Here is the opening section of the letter:

Dear Friend,

The spirit of Winston Churchill was alive and well on Tuesday night at Focus on the Family Action headquarters.

You may recall that in the most desperate days of World War II – when Great Britain was being pounded daily by Hitler’s Luftwaffe – that Winston Churchill called on his countrymen not to despair from danger but to rise to the challenge.

“Do not speak of darker days,” he said. “Let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days — the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we shall all thank God that we have been allowed, each one of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable. ...”

As our incredible team of staff members watched the election results pour in on Election Night, an amazing thing happened that Churchill might have recognized. Despite some sobering disappointments, there was no mood of despair and no “bunker mentality.” Instead, a firm sense of resolve began to permeate our team — a spirited and determined recognition that now, more than ever, we must prayerfully and boldly shine the light of truth in the public arena and defend what is right.

Let me speak plainly. Our nation has never faced the kind of anti-family, pro-abortion assault that we’re likely to see in the coming weeks and months. We don’t have to guess what the Left will do now that they control Congress and the White House; they’ve told us:

• President-elect Obama has promised, “The first thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.” That bill could wipe out every abortion restriction in state and federal law and result in an increase in abortions each year in America.


• He has also pledged to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act — signed by President Clinton in 1996 — and force every state without a constitutional amendment or specific state law protecting traditional marriage to recognize same-sex marriages.


• And religious freedom will be badly damaged if and when the gay lobby’s two top bills — hate crimes and Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA) — become law. A veto threat is all that has stopped them before, and Obama has vowed to sign them.

To stop these tragic outcomes — and much more that I won’t take time to list right now — we must mobilize extraordinary numbers of citizens who care about upholding virtue, defending life and safeguarding religious liberty.

The letter carries on then with a typical appeal for money to stem the tide of liberalism, and concludes:

Together and with God’s help, we can turn these “sterner days” into great days in the history of America!

crossposted at unbossed.com

Whose October Surprise?

The Associated Press reports that two federal officials anonymously and illegally revealed confidential information about one of Barack Obama's half-sisters from Kenya, Zeituni Onyango. The sister has been living in Boston for several years. The officials told the AP late on Friday that Onyango applied for asylum and that her application was denied by an immigration judge. It's illegal to reveal information about asylum applications without the permission of the applicant.

Thus federal officials rifled through confidential files and then leaked information about them to the AP. The intent clearly was to embarrass Obama shortly before the election. It's reminiscent of Passportgate, the October 1992 scandal in which the elder Bush's administration rifled confidential files for Bill Clinton and his mother, and then leaked to the press various innuendo and smears regarding Bush's rival.

So far we don't have clear evidence that the White House ordered the breach of confidentiality. What we do have, however, are broad hints in the AP report that its sources are suspected of acting at the behest of top Republicans:

Zeituni Onyango (zay-TUHN on-YANG-oh), referred to as "Aunti Zeituni" in the Democratic presidential candidate's memoir, was instructed [in 2004] to leave the United States by a U.S. immigration judge who denied her asylum request, a person familiar with the matter told the AP late Friday. This person spoke on condition of anonymity because no one was authorized to discuss Onyango's case.

[...]

Information about the deportation case was disclosed and confirmed by two separate sources, one a federal law enforcement official. The information they made available is known to officials in the federal government, but the AP could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved in its release.

[...]

A spokeswoman for U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Kelly Nantel, said the government does not comment on an individual's citizenship status or immigration case.

The reason USCIS doesn't comment is that it's illegal to disclose information about an asylum application without the written consent of the individual – except to those whose official duty it is to review that information, or at the discretion of the Attorney General (8 CFR 208.6). Thus the facts that (i) the asylum information is known to 2 federal officials, that (ii) it's been revealed to the AP by them, and that (iii) the information also is "known to officials in the federal government", are all indications of criminal violations of the federal statute on asylum confidentiality.

How far up the political chain in the Bush administration did information about Zeituni Onyango's asylum application reach? Evidently quite high to judge by this information:

Onyango's case — coming to light just days before the presidential election — led to an unusual nationwide directive within Immigrations and Customs Enforcement requiring that any deportations before Tuesday's election be approved at least at the level of the agency's regional directors, the U.S. law enforcement official told the AP.

The unusual directive suggests that the administration is sensitive to the political implications of Onyango's case coming to light so close to the election.

In other words, Bush administration officials are happy to embarrass Obama by leaking the information, but don't want to risk embarrassing themselves by moving to arrest and deport Onyango before Election Day.

The grounds why Obama should be embarrassed by the revelation are few and trivial. The AP report passes along the information that Onyango has contributed small sums totaling $260 to Obama's campaign. It's illegal for resident non-citizens who lack a green card to contribute to a political campaign, but there's no reason why Obama should have known about these small donations (which he's now returning). Neither is there evidence that Obama knew Onyango was living in Boston much less that her asylum application had been turned down.

But clearly some people in the Bush administration think that they can help John McCain's faltering campaign by leaking this confidential information. It's unclear why one offical, much less two, should have known about this obscure immigration case unless the government had gone looking for dirt and coordinated the release of what it found.

Indeed it's possible that the leaks were rolled out first through a British newspaper so as to give the Bush administration some plausible deniability. Bush & Co. have frequently leaked propaganda through Rupert Murdoch's London paper, The Times, or the equally reliable shills at The Telegraph. The expectation is that US papers will pick up the reports, or that these British reporters will make the rounds on American TV shows spreading the stories. That's what happened, for example, with this infamous forgery leaked to the Telegraph in order to influence American public opinion.

The info that Zeituni Onyango was living in Boston first appeared in the Times of London on October 30. Although The Times did not report that Onyango was in the US illegally, it did raise the question of her status while mentioning that she'd donated to Obama's campaign, thus implying that the donations would have been illegal if she weren't a citizen. In the next breath, it quoted Onyango in a way that suggested she was indeed neither a citizen nor a legal permanent resident.

The Times could not determine their immigration status and an official at Boston City Hall said that Ms Onyango was a resident of Flaherty Way but not registered to vote on the electoral roll. However, that Ms Onyango made a contribution to the Obama campaign would indicate that she is a US citizen. Records at the Boston City Hall confirmed Zeituni Onyango’s birthdate as May 29, 1952.

It is not clear when Ms Onyango first came to the US. She said: “I have been coming to America ever since 1975. I always come and go.”

In the past The Times poked around in Kenya into Obama's family, however, so it's possible that without assistance from US officials it turned up information just this week on Onyango's whereabouts. On the other hand, its story does exaggerate the closeness of Barack Obama to his late father's half-sister – implying perhaps that the presidential candidate did know she resided illegally in Boston.

So it's possible that The Times played a part in rolling out a rather pathetic October Surprise engineered by Bush's political operatives. It's also possible that Bush administration officials decided to look in Onyango's files only after noticing the paper's story.

One way or the other, the flagrant lawbreaking by federal officials here strongly resembles the elder Bush's attempt in October 1992 to impugn Bill Clinton's bona fides as an American in what became known as "Passportgate". This was an attempt to whip up public outrage over a non-issue. In the dead of night, George Bush's people went rifling through confidential passport files they had no business touching. When they found nothing, they still decided to leak inflammatory and misleading information to Newsweek in an attempt to create a firestorm of speculation in the media. They then fed that speculation in the days that followed by speculating in public themselves about the history of Clinton's passport file – something they had no business discussing. There was no substance to any of it, but the hope was that the public would concentrate on the fake "issue" rather than on the real one (that is, why Republicans had been toying with confidential files).

What is forgotten mostly about this episode, I think, is that Bush administration officials went beyond opening Bill Clinton's files in their attempt to find embarrassing information. They also rifled the passport file of Clinton's mother.

For Bush operatives, in other words, family members are fair game in any attempt to smear Democratic rivals. If you're going to open a candidate's confidential files, then you might as well cast your net more widely and target his relatives too. And there perhaps is another strong indication that the attempt to smear Barack Obama was coordinated by political operatives in the younger Bush's administration.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Out of the Past

If we want to see anything like real transformation in Washington, we won't assume that a Democratic victory in November will achieve it. We'll have to continue to demand change from the next administration and fight for it. Joe Biden nearly admitted as much on Sunday when he asked voters to "gird [their] loins" to pitch in with a task that'll be "like cleaning the Augean Stables". Meanwhile, Barack Obama gave us a clear demonstration that the problem we'll face is a status-quo-plus during the next four years. Today Obama said he plans to make a discredited former member of the Bush administration a top adviser or even an official in his own administration. Predictable, yes, and perfectly depressing. To judge by the foreign policy advisers he has surrounded himself with, it doesn't really seem to matter how thoroughly any of Washington's hawks have been discredited by their support in the past for disastrous policies and for George W. Bush, or by events of the last 8 years. If voters want an end to all that, they're going to have to demand it. Now would be a good time to start making that known, before the policy landscape has been carved up by discredited ghosts out of the past.

Here is the AFP:

Former secretary of state and US military leader Colin Powell would serve as an advisor to a Barack Obama administration, the Democratic presidential candidate said Monday.

"He will have a role as one of my advisers," Obama told NBC in an interviewed aired Monday. "He's already served in that function, even before he endorsed me."

[...]

"Whether he wants to take a formal role, whether there's something that's a good fit for him, I think is something that he and I would have to discuss," Obama said.

While I'm not surprised by the move, never the less it's depressing as all hell. Powell has never acknowledged that the invasion of Iraq was illegal, unnecessary, and fundamentally a blunder of both military and foreign policy; nor that he played a crucial role in selling it to the US public; nor that he tried to pawn demonstrably false allegations off in his infamous UN speech. In fact as he made clear on Meet the Press just yesterday, Powell still refuses to come clean or to hold himself accountable for the disaster he helped to create.

MR. BROKAW: I want to ask you about your own role in the decision to go to war in Iraq. Barack Obama has been critical of your appearance before the United Nations at that time. Bob Woodward has a new book out called "The War Within," and here's what he had to say about Colin Powell and his place in the administration: "Powell ... didn't think [Iraq] was a necessary war, and yet he had gone along in a hundred ways, large and small. He had resisted at times but had succumbed to the momentum and his own sense of deference--even obedience--to the president. ... Perhaps more than anyone else in the administration, Powell had been the `closer' for the president's case on war."

And then you were invited to appear before the Iraq Study Group. "`Why did we go into Iraq with so few people?' [former Secretary of State James] Baker asked. ... `Colin just exploded at that point,' [former Secretary of Defense William] Perry recalled later. `He unloaded,' Former White House Chief of Staff] Leon Panetta added. `He was angry. He was mad as hell.' ... Powell left [the Study Group meeting]. Baker turned to Panetta and said solemnly, `He's the one guy who could have perhaps prevented this from happening.'"

What's the lesson in all of that for a former--for a new secretary of state or for a new national security adviser, based on your own experience?

GEN. POWELL: Well, let's start at the beginning. I said to the president in 2002, we should try to solve this diplomatically and avoid war.

Solve what exactly? The refusal of Hussein to admit to having weapons programs he didn't actually have?

The president accepted that recommendation, we took it to the U.N. But the president, by the end of 2002, believed that the U.N. was not going to solve the problem, and he made a decision that we had to prepare for military action.

Bush continued to say until March of 2003 that he was looking to avoid war and to back UN inspections in Iraq. After Hussein had permitted inspectors to search for weapons, what was the problem that could possibly be "solved" by going to war?

I fully supported that. And I have never said anything to suggest I did not support going to war. I thought the evidence was there.

If true, a clear disqualification for Powell to be offering future presidents advice. Even I, without the benefit of high-level briefings, could see there was no adequate evidence for the charges that Bush and Cheney were leveling.

And it is not just my closing of the whole deal with my U.N. speech. I know the importance of that speech, and I regret a lot of the information that the intelligence community provided us was wrong.

In other words, Powell still disavows responsibility for the "facts" he vouched for.

But three months before my speech, with a heavy majority, the United States Congress expressed its support to use military force if it was necessary.

Never mind that Congress was fed misleading information, war simply wasn't necessary except by the convoluted logic that it became necessary because Bush wanted to go to war.

And so we went in and used military force. My unhappiness was that we didn't do it right. It was easy to get to Baghdad, but then we forgot that there was a lot more that had to be done. And we didn't have enough force to impose our will in the country or to deal with the insurgency when it broke out, and that I regret.

Finally some "regret" for Powell, though not any responsibility as such. And what he regrets is not having started an illegal war, killed myriad innocent Iraqis, wrecked their country and ruined America's standing in the world while provoking increased hatred in the Middle East. Powell merely regrets that we didn't do all that "right".

MR. BROKAW: Removing the weapons of mass destruction from the equation...

GEN. POWELL: I also assure you that it was not a correct assessment by anybody that my statements or my leaving the administration would have stopped it.

Shorter Powell: I just went along for the ride because I knew the brakes were nonfunctional.

MR. BROKAW: Removing the weapons of mass destruction from the equation, because we now know that they did not exist, was it then a war of necessity or just a war of choice?

GEN. POWELL: Without the weapons of mass destruction present, as conveyed to us by the intelligence community in the most powerful way, I don't think there would have been a war. It was the reason we took it to the public, it was the reason we took it to the American people to the Congress, who supported it on that basis, and it's the presentation I made to the United Nations. Without those weapons of mass destruction then Iraq did not present to the world the kind of threat that it did if it had weapons of mass destruction.

Shorter Powell: The President's fear-mongering is no longer operative. That load of blather serves as a useful reminder that this "ambitious man with a weak moral compass" first gained notoriety for his double-talk during the Vietnam War.

MR. BROKAW: You do know that there are supporters of Barack Obama who feel very strongly about his candidacy because he was opposed to the war from the beginning, and they're going to say, "Who needs Colin Powell? He was the guy who helped get us into this mess."

GEN. POWELL: I'm not here to get their approval or lack of approval. I am here to express my view as to who I'm going to vote for.

Brokaw's question is entirely to the point, given the likelihood that Obama will want to give the (still) discredited Powell a job after receiving his endorsement. Who does need, or more to the point want, Colin Powell?

And for that matter, Brokaw also pointed out that some might consider Powell's opinion of the candidates to be pretty worthless.

MR. BROKAW: ...We'd like to share with our audience some of what you had to say about the two men who are at the top of the administration. At the convention in 2000, this is Colin Powell on President Bush and Dick Cheney at that time.

(Videotape, July 31, 2000)

GEN. POWELL: Dick Cheney is one of the most distinguished and dedicated public servants this nation has ever had. He will be a superb vice president.

The Bush/Cheney team will be a great team for America. They will put our nation on a course of hope and optimism for this new century.

(End videotape)

MR. BROKAW: Was that prophetic or wrong?

GEN. POWELL: It's what I believed. It reflected the agenda of the new president, compassionate conservatism. And some of it worked out.

That pretty much speaks for itself about the worth of Colin Powell's opinions and advice. Shame that Obama is already looking to tie himself publicly to the unrepentant Powell.

Obama admitted that he had asked Powell to hit the campaign trail on his behalf, but Powell refused.

"You know, I won't lie to you. I would love to have him at any stop he wants to participate in," Obama said.

crossposted at unbossed.com