In a New York Post commentary, former Kansas GOP chairman Kris Kobach described Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try five Guantanamo Bay detainees in civilian court as “blatantly political,” arguing that it “jeopardizes the interests of the nation.” Kobach, a former Bush Justice Department official who is running for Kansas secretary of state next year, criticized Holder for “blurring the line between ordinary crimes and acts of war,” for making New York City “an enticing target for terrorists around the world” (wasn’t it already?) and for delaying justice. “Once these terrorists are placed into the civilian justice system, an avalanche of motions from their lawyers will ensue,” he wrote. “Military commissions can avoid these delays.”
Critics have complained that President Obama is “dithering” on deciding whether to send more troops to Afghanistan. But two classified cables sent to Washington, D.C., by the U.S. ambassador in Kabul illustrate how the decision isn’t as simple as some portray it. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, a retired three-star general who commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2006-07, warned against sending more troops until Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government becomes less corrupt and more competent, the Washington Post reported. The success of a surge in troops depends on a partnership with the Afghan government, and U.S. diplomats say they have seen little sign that Karzai plans to deal with corruption and other management problems.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that the United States has limited options in dealing with Karzai.
Gov. Mark Parkinson told the Hutchinson News last week that Guantanamo Bay detainees “were never coming to Kansas.” He said that he received assurance more than a month ago that Fort Leavenworth wasn’t a likely destination. A Hutch News editorial criticized Sens. Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts for “whipping up some frenzy about Gitmo detainees potentially coming to Kansas,” and for blocking Obama administration appointments over the issue. “Brownback’s and Roberts’ theater smacks of cheap, and childish, politics,” the editorial said.
The war in Afghanistan started in October 2001 as a response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 Americans, toppled the World Trade Center and badly damaged the Pentagon. Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorist organization had been using Afghanistan as a base of operations with the consent of the Taliban-controlled Afghan government. American troops were sent in to disrupt the terror network and topple the Taliban and, in the beginning, they seemed to be having success. After eight years fighting in the South Asian country, it is time we realize that our mission there has been a failure. The concern now should be with what comes next, and it is becoming increasingly clear that a continued commitment to this war will do little more than further inflame an already inflamed region and sap our budget. — CentralJersey.com editorial
Lacking details of a new stabilization plan by Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of allied forces in Afghanistan, the debate in Washington over the U.S. military commitment in Afghanistan strikes us as grossly premature. One thing is undeniable: Without a strong U.S. commitment, Afghanistan will certainly return to the crazed lawlessness that predated the U.S. invasion of 2001. Those who suggest turning our backs on Afghanistan while the Taliban spreads its tentacles are conveniently forgetting: This is the same group that provided a safe haven for al-Qaida’s leadership to plan the 9/11 attacks. Remember: Afghanistan is not Iraq. It’s not another Vietnam. It is the birthplace of 9/11. — Dallas Morning News editorial
The Bush administration spent from 2003 to 2006 quietly trying to relax the draft language of a treaty meant to bar and punish “enforced disappearances,” the Washington Post reported. Why? Because the treaty aimed at ending official kidnappings and detentions in Latin America, Russia, China, Iran and other countries — a treaty that the United States has long supported — could expose the CIA to possible punishment because of the secret prisons it was operating to hold terrorism suspects. Foreign governments opposed the proposed wording change, and the Bush administration ended up not endorsing the ban, which has since been signed by at least 81 countries.
Beyond the arguments over whether Bush administration lawyers should be held accountable for their tortuous arguments justifying torture, what about the medical professionals who designed and signed off on the interrogation techniques? “Doctors and psychologists might have been able to prevent this whole shameful episode by refusing to participate,” writes the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson. “Instead, professionals who were trained in the healing arts used their experience and skill in a way that facilitated harm. They played a vital role in enabling torture. I like to believe that some psychologists and physicians took a stand and said no. As for those who said yes, the law should hold them accountable — just as conscience, one hopes, is already doing.”
Washington Post columnist David Broder respectfully disagrees with Attorney General Eric Holder’s (in photo) decision to have a special counsel look into CIA interrogations, viewing it as the “first step on a legal trail that could lead to trials” and a dangerous precedent. He writes: “Obama’s argument has been that he has made the decision to change policy and bring the practices clearly within constitutional bounds — and that should be sufficient. In times like these, the understandable desire to enforce individual accountability must be weighed against the consequences. This country is facing so many huge challenges at home and abroad that the president cannot afford to be drawn into what would undoubtedly be a major, bitter partisan battle over prosecution of Bush-era officials. The cost to the country would simply be too great.”
Columnist George Will is urging the United States to rapidly reverse the trajectory of its involvement in Afghanistan. He noted that the war “already is nearly 50 percent longer than the combined U.S. involvements in two world wars, and NATO assistance is reluctant and often risible.” And as for the U.S. strategy to “clear, hold and build,” Will argued: “Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how.” Instead, Will argued: “America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent Special Forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters.”
Former Vice President Dick Cheney said on “Fox News Sunday” that the attorney general’s decision to investigate prisoner abuse by the CIA “offends the hell out of me.”But many Americans, including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., are offended that the United States, at Cheney’s urging, violated U.S. and international law prohibiting torture and set aside its own values and moral leadership. Though McCain doesn’t support a CIA probe, he said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “torturing harmed us.” McCain said that the interrogations were “in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the convention against torture that we ratified under President Reagan,” and that the interrogations “helped al-Qaida recruit” and harmed our ability to work with our allies. “The damage that it did to America’s image in the world is something we’re still on the way to repairing,” McCain said. And as for the effectiveness of the tactics, McCain noted that, according to the FBI and others, the information gained by torture “could have been gained through other methods.”
Attorney General Eric Holder did the right thing when, responding to a recommendation from the Justice Department’s ethics office, he appointed veteran federal prosecutor John Durham to investigate up to a dozen cases of terrorist suspects being subjected to illegal abuse during CIA interrogations between 2001 and 2004. Despite pressure within his own administration to protect the CIA, President Obama — to his credit — is leaving to Holder any decision to prosecute interrogators. Whatever the complications, or the embarrassment, of a legal accounting for past violations of U.S. torture statutes and the Geneva Conventions, a refusal to apply the law would only compound one betrayal of American values with another. — Boston Globe editorial
In 2004, the CIA’s inspector general did an investigation of those interrogations and found much that was “inconsistent with the public policy positions that the United States has taken regarding human rights.” The CIA then appeared to have acted properly. It referred the most egregious cases of prisoner abuse to the Justice Department. Those investigations resulted in a single prosecution. Attorney General Eric Holder should consider the conditions under which the agents labored in 2002-03. It was widely believed another Sept. 11-style terrorist attack was imminent. Many of the interrogators seemed poorly trained for the task, were poorly supervised and given little guidance. — Dale McFeatters, Scripps Howard News Service
If CIA interrogators engaged in torture, the blame extends to Congress, which has lacked “the courage and the energy to actually enact clear statutes on torture,” argues Salon’s Juan Cole. He calls the McCain anti-torture amendment of 2005 “watered down” and “easily interpreted away,” and noted that President Bush vetoed the most recent legislation in 2008. “The Democrats may only have a brief window through November of 2010 to get effective and unambiguous legislation on the books, and now we have a president who won’t veto it,” Cole writes.
Turns out the cynics were correct in saying that the Bush administration manipulated terrorism threat warnings for political gain. Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge’s wrote in his new memoir, “The Test of Our Times,” that the weekend before the 2004 presidential election, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft pushed him to raise the color-coded warning for political reasons. “I consider the episode to be not only a dramatic moment in Washington’s recent history, but another illustration of the intersection of politics, fear, credibility and security,” wrote Ridge, who resigned shortly after the incident. Some other claims by Ridge that don’t reflect well on the Bush administration: Ridge wasn’t invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings, was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld information from him, and tried to block Michael Brown from being named to lead FEMA.
“The country is fighting two very difficult wars. It needs a secretary of the Army, and President Obama has chosen Rep. John McHugh, a Republican, for the job. Yet Sens. Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts have selfishly put a hold on his nomination along with nine other appointments to the Pentagon and the Justice Department,” a New York Times editorial argued. It noted that the senators are trying to prevent the White House from moving Guantanamo detainees to Fort Leavenworth and accused them of stoking “hometown anxieties with the ludicrous argument that detainees present extraordinary dangers beyond the 1.2 million convicted felons in prisons across America.” The editorial concluded: “If there is any common sense in the Senate (the self-proclaimed greatest deliberative body), the honorable members from Kansas should be forced to yield to the Army’s and the nation’s overriding need. They have already gotten their parochial headlines.”
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is understandably upset that Kansas Sens. Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts are blocking the appointment of a new secretary of the Army in an effort to keep Guantanamo Bay detainees from being transferred to Leavenworth. “The secretary is very disappointed,” the Pentagon press secretary told Politico. “We are fighting two wars at once, and the service that is bearing the biggest burden is the Army. So it needs and deserves this leadership.” A senior administration official called the senators’ procedural move “simply irresponsible.”
“Kansans of yesteryear didn’t whine when the feds shipped Nazi prisoners of war their way in the 1940s,” wrote Kansas City Star columnist Mike Hendricks. “Trainloads of German soldiers and sailors came. Many were the products of Hitler youth camps and a philosophy as scary as anything hatched in a militant madrassa. That’s why it’s embarrassing to watch the state’s political leaders of today stamping their little feet on rumors that the Gitmo detainees might end up in Leavenworth.”
Quoting Alexander Hamilton’s statement that the power to protect the nation “ought to exist without limitation,” former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo vigorously defended warrantless wiretapping in a Wall Street Journal commentary, taking on last week’s critical report by the inspectors general of five national security agencies: “Gathering intelligence — including intercepting enemy communications — has long been a key aspect of war. Our military and intelligence agencies cannot attack or defend the nation unless they know where to aim. As we confront terrorists who remain intent on attacking the U.S., using weapons we cannot anticipate, we should be skeptical of those who insist that we radically change the way this country has always made war.”
President Obama wants Congress and the country to focus on the future, not the past. But that’s getting tougher to do with the new allegation that former Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to withhold information from Congress.
CIA Director Leon Panetta reportedly told the Senate and House intelligence committees that the CIA withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program for eight years on direct order from Cheney. That could be a violation of a law requiring the president to make sure the intelligence committees “are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity.”
Meanwhile, Attorney General Eric Holder is leaning toward appointing a criminal prosecutor to investigate whether the CIA tortured terrorism suspects, the Washington Post reported.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took heat for claiming in May that the Central Intelligence Agency intentionally misled her about the interrogation techniques it was using. But CIA Director Leon Panetta told the House Intelligence Committee that the CIA concealed “significant actions” from Congress from 2001 until late last month, seven Democratic committee members said. And House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, charged in a letter this week that CIA officials “affirmatively lied” to his committee.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., doesn’t fault President Obama for wanting to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, which McCain said Sunday on “Face the Nation” is now a “symbol throughout the world” of past mistreatment of prisoners there. But McCain does blame Obama for announcing that Gitmo was closing without a plan to close it. McCain said he is working with the president and other senators to resolve the issue, and thinks it still would be possible to move some detainees to the United States “if you convince the American people that you had a safe and secure place to put them, that you had an overall and comprehensive plan to do so.”
Some Americans are willing to overlook or justify the torture of terrorism detainees. But what if we torture the wrong person? President Bush said in 2002 that Abu Zubaydah was “al-Qaida’s chief of operations.” The CIA held him in a secret prison and waterboarded him 83 times. But officials eventually determined that Zubaydah, though a “fixer” for radical Muslim ideologues, was not a member of al-Qaida and not one of its leaders. According to a transcript of Zubaydah’s hearing that was released this week, he said that officials told him, “Sorry, we discover that you are not No. 3, not a partner, not even a fighter.”
In 2007, the Canadian government agreed to pay $9 million to a Canadian engineer who was seized by U.S. officials and taken to Syria, where he was tortured before officials realized they had the wrong man.
In their contest for next year’s GOP nomination for U.S. Senate, Reps. Todd Tiahrt and Jerry Moran “are trying to out-Gitmo each other” as a way to appeal to northeast Kansas voters, suggested Politico.com. They both oppose moving Guantanamo Bay detainees to Fort Leavenworth. But Tiahrt suggested to Politico that Moran vacillated on the Gitmo question during a C-SPAN interview.
Tiahrt said, “I was very clear from the very beginning: I don’t want them in Fort Leavenworth, I don’t want them anywhere in Kansas, and I don’t want them anywhere in America. So there’s a difference in how we approach this.”
Moran’s reply: “I think most Americans think detaining terrorists off our shores is better than detaining them on our shores. From my point of view, Fort Leavenworth is not any place for this to occur.”
Three top former Justice Department attorneys have received most of the criticism for providing legal cover for torturing suspected terrorists. But e-mails and additional information show that other Justice Department attorneys agreed with them that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were legal, though several objected to their use, reported the New York Times. For example, James B. Comey (in photo), the former deputy attorney general who balked at the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program, concluded that the interrogation techniques were legal, though he said in e-mails that “some of this stuff was simply awful” and warned then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that “it would come back to haunt him and the department.”
The fact that several attorneys thought the techniques were legal makes it difficult to press ethics or legal charges against former Justice Department attorneys John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury, as some have called for. Still, Brian Tamanaha, a St. John’s University law professor who has studied the interrogation memorandums, contends that concluding that waterboarding was legal required “extraordinary contortions in language and legal analysis.”
Here’s something that the CIA neglected to disclose: Former Vice President Dick Cheney personally oversaw at least four briefings about “enhanced interrogation techniques” with senior members of Congress, the Washington Post reported. One of those meetings in 2005 appears to have persuaded Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., to oppose a congressional investigation of the techniques, which Roberts previously had suggested that he supported.
When it comes to closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, the public is siding with former Vice President Dick Cheney over President Obama. By a more than 2-1 majority, Americans don’t want Gitmo closed, and by more than 3-1, they oppose moving some of the accused terrorists to U.S. prisons in their own states, according to a USA Today/Gallup survey. By 40 percent to 18 percent, the public also believes that Gitmo has strengthened national security, as Cheney contends, rather than weakened it by hurting the United States’ standing around the world and serving as a recruitment tool for terrorists, as Obama argues.
In the wake of the voters’ rejection of budget-balancing measures last week, California wants a federal loan guarantee to deal with its $24 billion deficit. Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” columnist E.J. Dionne suggested an appealing deal: “California needs a bailout. And none of the states want the Gitmo prisoners. California agrees to take all of the prisoners, and then it gets its bailout.”
On CNN on Sunday, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., was cold to the idea of California taking detainees. “We only have one max security prison in California and it’s, right now, overbooked,” Boxer said. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., also has nixed reopening Alcatraz.
If California doesn’t work out, there is always Hardin, Mont., which has an empty prison and has volunteered to take the detainees — though the state’s two senators oppose the idea.
