Ex-Bush official confirms innocents at Gitmo

If it wasn't obvious by now, it should be: most of the people rounded up and jailed without charge at Guantanamo Bay were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Retired Army colonel and former chief of staff to the then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence B. Wilkerson, told The Associated Press last Thursday that many of the detainees were innocent men, and that there was no meaningful attempt by US forces to distinguish actual terrorists from civilians.

Not only were they unable to separate civilians from fighters, but they had no desire to. Wilkerson revealed that he learned from military commanders that they had determined early on that the men were innocent, but decided to keep them imprisoned regardless: "It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance." [Emphasis added.]

Wilkerson wrote, "U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released." Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney prevented the situation from being addressed, because "to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership."

Wilkerson also confirmed that many detainees had no connection to either the Taliban or to al-Qaida, and had been turned in for the $5,000 per head reward money.

Of the 800-odd prisoners at Guantanamo, of which 240 remain, Wilkerson claimed that two dozen are actual terrorists. (That's a ratio of over 32 innocents per terrorist.) He also revealed that the US government couldn't try them even if they wanted to, "because we tortured them and didn't keep an evidence trail."

More here.

This is a good time to remember that while President Obama has promised to close Guantanamo Bay, he has so far refused to do the same for the even more secret Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Not only has Obama refused to close Bagram, or open it to oversight, or at least to trials, but there are plans to increase the number of people disappeared into the secret prison.

Whatever happened to Osama bin Laden?

Osama bin Laden seems to have gone from Most Wanted Man Alive to Care Factor Zero. President Bush, after swearing to bring bin Laden to justice, admitted some years ago that bin Laden was not a priority. But this interview with the late Benazir Bhutto is very interesting...

On 2nd November 2007, less than two months before she was assassinated, Benito gave an interview with David Frost where she talked about the people wanting to stop the democratic process in Pakistan, and her fear that they were involved in the previous assassination attempt against her and would try again. Six minutes into the video, Bhutto claims that bin Laden has been murdered. Frost didn't bother to question her about this: either he considers the murder of bin Laden old news, unimportant, or he's simply losing his mojo as an interviewer.



Bhutto clearly felt that she was at risk of assassination from Pakistani government forces. It's not clear why al Qaeda would have assassinated the opposition leader, if indeed it was al Qaeda: arguably they could have been motivated by pure misogamy, or perhaps they prefer having an anti-democratic military strong man in power.

Of course, this assumes that al Qaeda really was behind her assassination. It's not clear that al Qaeda is anything more than a convenient bogey-man for the US and Pakistani governments. It wouldn't be the first or the last time that a supposed revolutionary or terrorist group had been infiltrated by so many government agents that in fact there were no revolutionaries left in it. Once a government, or even part of a government, starts defining itself in terms of opposition to shadowy criminal figures, the temptation is very large to create such convenient scapegoats.

Striking at the terrorists

Remember when the "War On Terror" was supposed to make us safer? Well, somebody forgot to mention to the US military that their supposed to be stopping terrorists, not sheltering them while they attack one of the US's NATO allies.

Turkey, fed up with Kurdish terrorists launching attacks while under the protection of the US military, has invaded northern Iraq. While this isn't a full-blown invasion, nor is it a border incursion with a handful of troops: it apparently involves thousands of soldiers. Turkey has publicly denied the invasion, a denial which is looking less and less credible every day. Why isn't this big news?

And a reminder that it's not just "Islamo-fascists" who are terrorists, like racists and conservatives would have us believe. Christian terrorists in Serbian have attacked and burned the US embassy in Belgrade, angry at Kosovo gaining independence.

Refuse to be terrorized

As the clock ticks over to 2008, now is the moment to say enough is enough. It is time to refuse to be terrorized any longer. Repeat after me:

I am not afraid.

Watch this video:



or see it directly on YouTube.

(While I like the video's message very much, I fear that the dry recitation of statistics and facts will not grab people's emotions in the same way that fear-mongering does. But I am encouraged by the fact that there are people who are refusing to be terrorized.)

And from here:

I am not afraid of terrorism, and I want you to stop being afraid on my behalf. Please start scaling back the official government war on terror. Please replace it with a smaller, more focused anti-terrorist police effort in keeping with the rule of law. Please stop overreacting. I understand that it will not be possible to stop all terrorist acts. I accept that. I am not afraid.

Thanks to Bruce Schneier and Bex from the Argonist. See also what the terrorists want.

The war on the unexpected

Bruce Schneier has a good name for the faux-war on terror the cowardly Chicken Littles have created: the War on the Unexpected. Anything different or unexpected must be a threat:

We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.

This isn't the way counterterrorism is supposed to work, but it's happening everywhere. It's a result of our relentless campaign to convince ordinary citizens that they're the front line of terrorism defense. ...

The problem is that ordinary citizens don't know what a real terrorist threat looks like. They can't tell the difference between a bomb and a tape dispenser, electronic name badge, CD player, bat detector, or trash sculpture; or the difference between terrorist plotters and imams, musicians, or architects. All they know is that something makes them uneasy, usually based on fear, media hype, or just something being different.

The full article is well worth reading, and contains many links to actual cases of the most awe-inspiring stupid security "threats". None of the examples quoted above are made up.

In recent weeks:

• Concert-goers to an open-air concert in Perth were told that picnic blankets and rugs were prohibited as they were a security risk. Adding a note of the surreal, the tickets warned patrons not to bring "crocodiles or spears" to the concert.


• A blind calypso musician and his band thrown off a plane after another passenger complained they had been in high spirits earlier but were now sitting quietly.


• An orthodox Jew on a train was arrested after passengers panicked on seeing him praying while sitting next to a man wearing a turban.


• A Florida bomb squad called in to blow up a typewriter.


• Police evacuate everyone within a mile radius of some fake dynamite taped to the side of a house.
  
  (The comments on that story are interesting: in summary, it seems that the cops simply followed the Department of Transportation's guidelines, which seem to be massively over-cautious compared to the guidelines offered by the Department of Defense and usual practice for disarming known high-explosive bombs.

Earlier incidents in the war on the unexpected:

• An Australian pub patron thrown out by bouncers for reading a book called The Unknown Terrorist.


• A Canadian firetruck racing to a fire in New York was stopped at the US border for eight minutes while border officials checked the firefighters' IDs and the truck's licence plates.


• In 2005, a man in the UK who fell into a diabetic coma on a bus was shot twice with a Taser gun by police who feared he may have been a terrorist.

Are we feeling safer yet?

If Rudy Giuliani is Ras Al Ghul, is John Edwards Batman?

Ezra Klein suggests that Rudy Giuliani is really Ras Al Ghul:

Our society has reached its peak of decadence, imperialism, and corruption. By appealing to those worst excesses of the American psyche, Giuliani will get elected, and blow up the world, thus wiping our unsalvageable civilization from the map, and bringing the global order into balance. In other words, Rudy Giuliani is really Ra's Al Ghul. Discuss.

Over at Making Light, Teresa Hayden writes a long post about Giuliani. If you thought he was the hero of September 11, "America's Mayor", you couldn't be more wrong: Giuliani is the classic example of the incompetent, selfish, arrogant politician gaining political rewards for dealing -- badly -- with the problems that he himself caused in part.

Most people don't realise just how much of the disaster that was 9/11 was caused by Giuliani's decisions, starting with his decision -- against the advice of anti-terrorism experts -- to site the Emergency Command Centre in the World Trade Building, in a building that had already been attacked, so it would be convenient to City Hall. A nice short walk for Rudy.

There's more, much more. No wonder the New York firemen blame Giuliani personally for the deaths of so many of their fellows:

On 9/11 New York was left without an emergency command center because Giuliani, going against the advice of both the police and fire departments, decided to locate the center conveniently near City Hall in World Trade Center building 7, along with tanks containing tens of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel—in direct violation of New York City fire laws. This was despite the 1993 WTC bombing that proved it to be the number one terrorism target. It was this decision that put him on the street on 9/11 instead of inside a command center coordinating operations. Ironically, this also put him in front of hundreds of media cameras, sparking his image transformation into a “hero.”

While our “hero” was posing for the cameras, however, there was no communication possible between the police department and the fire department, whose REAL heroes were rushing to their deaths inside the towers. And there was likewise no communication between the police officers who identified an open stairway for escape from above the fire zone and the 911 phone operators who were telling soon-to-be-dead office workers to stay put and wait for the firefighters. Giuliani had been aware of the inadequacy of the emergency services’ communications equipment for many years, but did absolutely nothing about it. This criminal negligence also doomed hundreds of firefighters that were unable to hear orders to evacuate the north tower prior to collapse.

Whatever possibility existed for communication between the police and fire departments, whose radios operated on different frequencies, evaporated when Giuliani visited a makeshift fire/police command center that had formed in his absence. There he ORDERED THE POLICE BRASS TO LEAVE and accompany him uptown. This “heroic leadership” effectively put the fire department and police department commanders in different physical locations with no communication possible between them.

Present Police Commissioner Ray Kelly stated that he doesn’t have any idea who was in charge on 9/11 because Bernie Kerik and all the top chiefs in the police department basically acted as bodyguards to Giuliani and no one was running the shop.

[Source: The Myth of Giuliani and 9/11]

Making Communist Yugoslavia look good

It's certainly very special when the Home of the Free makes Communist Yugoslavia under a despotic totalitarian government look good, but the experience of photographers in the USA is doing that.

Avram Grumer explains:

Back in the ’80s, my parents (who are Balkan folk dance enthusiasts) visited what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a Communist nation. While there, my father photographed a picturesque lake. He snapped off a shot or two, and was interrupted by a government official who told him that photographing that lake was forbidden, due to the presence of some militarily sensitive facility (I forget what; a power plant or something). My father put the camera away, and that was it. They didn’t confiscate the camera or the film, didn’t make him expose the roll to the light, didn’t haul my parents off for an interrogation. A print of the photo hung on my parents’ wall for years; no sort of industrial facility is visible in it. It’s just a photo of a pretty lake.

Compare that with the treatment this Japanese tourist got at the hands of Amtrak and the New Haven police:

The Japanese tourist was ordered by a conductor on an Amtrak train from New York to Boston to stop taking photos of the scenery "in the interests of national security", and threatened to confiscate his camera. The tourist, who spoke little English, complied with the order and put the camera away in his bag. Nevertheless, at the next stop, the train was bordered by police, who threatened to remove him with force:

The police speak through the interpreter, with the impatience of authority. [...] The officers explain, “After we remove him from the train, when we are through our investigation, we will put him on the next train.” The woman translates. The passenger replies, “I’m meeting relatives in Boston. They cannot be reached by phone. They expect me and will be worried when I do not arrive on schedule.” “Our task,” the police repeat, "is to remove you from this train. If necessary, we will do so by force. After we have finished the investigation, we’ll put you on another train.” The woman translates. The traveler gathers his belongings and departs.

To add insult to injury, it turns out that Amtrak has no such policy prohibiting photography on their trains.

The witness to these events wrote:

It doesn't take more than five minutes, in any airport in this country, before I hear the loudspeaker, "The current terror threat is elevated." We hear “terror” endlessly – traveling, at home, on television, in the news. Recent political campaigns have reminded – no, badgered – us, to be very afraid. What did Franklin Roosevelt say, that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Terror. Paranoia. We can no longer differentiate between terrors. Is this our generation’s enlightened contribution to American culture?

Watching police escort a visitor off the train, I felt anger, not comfort. This action was beyond irritating. It is intolerable, unacceptable. If it bothered me, it paled in comparison to the way it inconvenienced, and will long trouble, this visitor to our country. We disrupted his travel plans and family reunion. Even greater than the psychological damage we inflicted is the harm we’ve done to ourselves. We missed an opportunity to show kindness, to be ambassadors of goodwill. The visitor will return home. He will indeed impress many people – not with pleasant memories and pictures of a quiet morning trip along the New England coast, but with a story of being removed and detained by American police for taking pictures. Do we imagine we’ve gained anything because a single visitor returns home with stories of mistreatment?

Such blatant attempts to intimidate photographers aren't limited to tourists or Arabs. Avram Grumer links to a number of sites documenting these incidents. At one of these sites, "C.E." explains that he's been a professional photographer for thirty years, been taking photos all over the world, during martial law, before and after military coups and terrorist bombings, and even once accidentally inside a military base, and he's never been subject to as much harassment as he receives in the USA. And he is an American.

I think the best, or at least the most amusing, comment explaining why these events are becoming more common came from Chris Waller, talking about the similar situation in the UK:

Increasingly in Britain a lot of overweight young men of low intelligence who are otherwise unemployable are being stuffed into ill-fitting uniforms and given the idea that they are saving the Western world from sinking into chaos as a result of terrorism.

The Chaser security prank success

Have you ever wondered what sort of security AUD$250,000,000 buys? (Early reports suggested the cost of the security for APEC was $165 million; later figures suggested it actually cost $250 million. Either way, it is a lot of money.)

Apparently very little.

People are talking about The Chaser's wonderful prank where they drove a car with a fake Osama bin Laden right up to the highest security section of last week's APEC conference without being stopped. PZ Myers thought it was pure entertainment; Bruce Schneier is also a fan.

All the stupid security theatre and money wasted -- Australian taxpayers' money -- and it was only when Chas Licciardello, dressed as Osama bin Laden, stepped out of the car shouting "Where is my friend Bush? It has all been a misunderstanding!" that the security realised that something was wrong.

[Sarcasm alert] It's hard to blame the security guys. They're doing a simple job for lots of money: keep out people who don't belong. If they got fooled by The Chaser's cunning plan to put a Canadian flag on their cars, well, ask yourself: who wouldn't have been fooled? Just because "Osama bin Laden" was sitting in the back seat of a supposedly Canadian vehicle, well, that's hardly suspicious. And tell me that you too wouldn't have been fooled by this inauthentic-looking insecurity pass:

(Click image for full view.)

The Australian media, especially the Herald-Sun, loves to throw around the word "hero" to describe any Australian who basically isn't a total and complete waste of space. Saved thirty-seven children from a burning building? Hero. Rescued a cat stuck in a tree? Hero. Got hit by lightning and didn't die? Hero. Fell down drunk and chipped a tooth but didn't cry? Hero. But I think they really missed an opportunity to use the term appropriately. The Chaser guys might have been doing television comedy, but they were also making vitally important social commentary. As taxpayers and members of society, we are entitled -- no, not an entitlement, we have a duty -- to ask if our money is being put to good use. Spending a quarter of a million dollars, or even half that, for security which can be breached so easily is worse than a joke. The entire country should be thanking The Chaser for revealing that the Emperor has no clothes. Not only are they risking jail, but they actually risked their lives to make a point: all it needed was one trigger-happy government sniper on the rooftop and they could have been killed.

What we've learnt is that actual terrorists could have strolled right up to the restricted zone with no difficulty at all. Anybody could have done it. While the police were busy shutting down the entire city of Sydney (at who knows what economic cost) and keeping democratic protesters at least ten kilometres away from the conference, Osama bin Laden himself could have strolled right up to George Bush and given him a wedgie.

Or detonated a bomb.

If the clowns running this nation had really cared about security, instead of just the security opera of 24/7 helicopter fly-bys, snipers on rooftops and stopping tourists from taking photos, they would have held the conference somewhere inaccessible, like Canada did in 2002 when they held the G8 Conference in Kananaskis, population 429.

[Aside: I like these people.]

There's a certain level of tension between the needs of democracy -- the right of people to protest where they will be heard by those making the decisions -- and of security. Personally I think that the needs of democracy should outweigh those of security. Presidents and prime ministers might come and go, but democracy needs to survive. Protesters should be allowed to protest right outside George Bush's bedroom window, at least from 9am to 5pm. But if you want to put security first, then don't hold your conference in Sydney. Hold it miles away from any population centre, where you have more control over who comes in. That's good security and good economics.

Instead, what we got was bad security and bad economics, but lots of security opera. Good security should be as close to invisible as you can afford -- just visible enough so you know it's there, but not so much that it disrupts normal activity. Instead Sydney was completely disrupted, money was wasted, and for no good effect.

Naturally, the con artists who have wasted our money aren't happy about being exposed. NSW police minister David Campbell threw a hissy-fit at the tricksters:

An angry David Campbell denied he was embarrassed by the comedians' ability to penetrate APEC's restricted zone - rather, he was pleased the "multi-layered" security had worked.

He said the prank was inappropriate and he "did not see the funny side at all".

The Chaser's production team had been specifically warned by police to behave responsibly during the APEC security lockdown, he said.

"[Police] said 'we understand that parody and satire are entertaining and fun, many people watch the program and enjoy it, but please understand the seriousness of this matter and please take caution as you go about making your program.

"That seems to have been thrown out the window and that, I think, is inappropriate."

What's inappropriate is that Campbell hasn't been laughed out of town. Humourless, pretentious gits like him have no clue and should have no place in positions of power. Alas, the way of the world is that those who shouldn't have power so often do. The skills needed to become powerful so rarely include the skills needed to govern wisely.

The reality is that tricksters like The Chaser don't just make us laugh. Satire and parody are not just fun entertainments; they have a vital role in society. It has been said that medieval Fools, alone in the court, were permitted to make fun of the king and thus keep him from becoming too egotistical. (I doubt this was true in general, but it makes a nice story.) By puncturing the undeserved egos of the incompetent, tricksters help reduce the harm they can do. Far from being irresponsible, puncturing the illusion of security theatre is a fine example of civic responsibility.

Campbell had two possible responses to The Chaser's actions: he could admit to being embarrassed by the security failure and promise to do better, or he could bluster and blame the messengers. He choose to bluster and blame the messengers, and for that he should be out of government so fast it leaves his head spinning.

Unfortunately, for all of Australia's reputation as a nation of larrikins with a healthy disrespect for authority, we're becoming a nation of sheep who only do as we're told. (But that's a topic for another day.) Australians seem to have taken The Chaser team to heart, but not enough for them to demand real changes to the political system which allows the government to engage in this expensive security opera with no genuine benefit. While I would like to think that next time NSW voters go to the polls they will remember this and vote accordingly, the cynic in me expects that by this time next week it will all be forgotten.

This prank has punctured another myth. By showing just how easy it is for anyone to get through the loudest security money can buy, it puts a whole different perspective on terrorism. It doesn't take a devious master criminal to get through security. So where are all the terrorist attacks? If Chas Licciardello can get so close to the President of the USA, why hasn't a real terrorist managed it?

It isn't because the terrorists are afraid of our security, or because they're less competent than The Chaser. It's because they're few and far between. Despite the constant cries that the sky is falling, terrorists are thin on the ground. Unless you live in one of a few high-risk places, terrorism is a rare risk. The dangers of over-reaction are far greater than the danger we're trying to protect from.

The Chaser's press release can be read here; over here we have a long thread of comments where one angry right-winger (claims to be an ex-soldier; reads more like a scared little boy) gets angry at The Chaser for exposing the Emperor's New Clothes and says they should have been shot to punish them for discovering just how lousy the security really was. Oh my.

Thanks to Hasimir, who first brought The Chaser's cunning stunt to my attention (via Mrs Impala).

Bin Laden rants again

Compared to previous time Osama bin Laden has made threats against the US and West, there's been little attention paid to his latest rant. Apart from the general silence, those few commentators who have talked about him have been mostly saying he made no threats against the US. Juan Cole wonders why they are denying he made threats.

Nevertheless, I think bin Laden is essentially irrelevant in the big picture. Not because he can't cause trouble, but he's essentially a murderer and trouble-maker, not a genuine threat against democracy and the West. He could kill some people, but he can't overthrown Western civilization and install a global Islamic theocracy. Not that he ever could, despite the Chicken Little cry-babies on the conservative-right of politics. (No, the only ones who are destroying the Western virtues of freedom, democracy, tolerance and liberty are our own leaders.)

Bin Laden is especially irrelevant in Iraq. Despite propaganda from the US government, al Qaeda In Iraq doesn't take orders from bin Laden, and even if they did, they're a tiny player in the civil war. As Juan Cole puts it:

Bin Laden, however, is not now and perhaps never has been a credible actor in Iraq. Most Iraqis are nationalists and would not want a Saudi telling them what to do. He made a big but perhaps unavoidable error in attacking the Shiites, and so denying his movement a nationalist platform. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is a small cult of hyper-Sunni bigots and serial murderers. Instead of playing Abdul Nasser, who attracted the allegiance even of many Shiite Arabs in his day, Bin Laden long ago chose to play the role of a cultist, a David Koreish with better explosives.

[...]

Bin Laden is like a venomous snake, always dangerous, and you never want to underestimate a cobra if it is in striking distance. But Iraq isn't the Afghanistan of the 1980s and 1990s, and if Bin Laden thinks it is, he is very out of touch.

Watching the last six years of stupidity unfolding has just made me more sure than ever that the right response to 9/11 was to treat it as a crime, not an act of war. Maybe the Taliban would have needed some sabre-rattling to cooperate, maybe we'd even need to send in troops to force the issue, but the fundamental strategy would be to treat bin Laden as a mass-murderer, capture him, put him on trial in the Hague, and lock him up to rot forever. No martyrdom for Osama!

Instead, we had the stupid games of the Bush administration threatening war if Afghanistan didn't hand bin Laden over for trial. When the Taliban offered to comply (see also here for another offer), the US invaded. Then, with bin Laden trapped like a rat, US forces were told to stand-down and watch as he escaped into the wilderness. Having sworn that nothing would stand in his way of catching bin Laden, Bush soon lost interest, and apart from occasionally remembering to mention the bogey-man, there has been no serious attempts to catch or kill bin Laden for years now.

A cynic would suggest that having bin Laden free to make threats suited the US government's purposes better than having him in jail or dead. A trial wouldn't have given them the excuse to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

Torture, part 1

Over at The Atlantic, Matthew Yglesias points out something that should have been obvious to even the dimmest among us: torture simply doesn't work for gathering intelligence except in fantasy land. 350 years ago, Hobbes pointed out that when you torture people, they tell you lies that might make you stop torturing them.

The myth of tortures effectiveness is understandable: the angry ape inside all of us might very well like the idea of ripping terrorists' fingernails out, and if you can save lives by stopping crimes before they happen by indulging in your sadistic fantasies, all the better.

But who do you want fighting the war on terror -- an angry ape, or an intelligent, sensible, calm and collected human being? I'll even go further: when it comes to a choice between having interrogators who know how to perform "waterboarding" and interrogators who actually speak the prisoners' language, my choice is the diametric opposite of that of the Bush administration.

Yglesias explains:

So in summary, what they've hit upon is a protocol based on the best practices developed by Soviet and medieval torturers alike to accomplish torture's traditional goal -- the extraction of false confessions -- and seem to have wound up with a bunch of false confessions. Which, of course, is precisely what you'd expect to wind up with if you thought for a minute about why governments have, historically, resorted to the systemic deployment of torture.

Another Coincidence Theory

Patrick Nielsen Hayden notes that the chairman of the investigation into the events of 9-11 was yet another oilman with close ties to Osama bin Laden:

I realize that only unreasonable people would make anything of the above. Why would anyone possibly worry about the fact that every time we turn around another prominent Administration member turns out to be up to his ass in business connections with shadowy Al-Qaeda supporters? Certainly I’m not worried. That would be tinfoil hat stuff. Not for me! I dismiss my misgivings with a stern flick of my Rational Mind! Also, monkeys fly out of my butt.

"I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist." -- Teresa Nielsen Hayden

(Thanks to Three-Toed Sloth.)

I'm fully aware of the six degrees of separation thing -- given a motivated enough search, we can find a connection between virtually any two people on the planet. This especially holds for people in Big Business and politics, and double for the incestuous Boys Own Club of the oil barons. But it speaks volumes that the Bush administration doesn't give a rat's figgin for even the appearance of propriety. It's like they just don't care if people think of them as crooks and liars, almost as if the more suspiciously they behave, the better.

Hey, it's worked for seven years. Why stop now?

How did I miss this anniversary?

Six years and three days ago exactly, the President of the United States of America spent the day at his Texas ranch, and spoke to then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice about Macedonia.

Oh yes, he also received a Presidential Daily Brief warning that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike in the USA itself, was preparing to hijack aircraft, and that the FBI had detected "suspicious activity". Bush, who was in the middle of a 32-day holiday (at the time the longest presidential vacation since 1969), was too busy building a new trail to do anything about it, but fortunately the then Attorney-General John Ashcroft had earlier been given a warning about al Qaeda's plans to hijack airplanes. He did the only thing a man in his position (head of all law enforcement in the USA) could do.

He stopped travelling on commercial airlines and started travelling exclusively on chartered planes. Hang the expense, nothing's too good to save the Attorney-General and his staff.

Gay Marriage and the War on Terror

Thanks to that reasonable conservative, Jon Swift, two articles of the utmost importance:

1. How the scourge of gay marriage has caused New York Mayor and Republican presidential hopeful Rudolph Giuliani to cheat on his wife, and Louisiana Senator David Vitter to seek the services of "DC Madam" Deborah Jeane Palfrey:
   

   Rated 100% by the Christian Coalition for his pro-family voting record and his support of such issues as abstinence-only sex education, Vitter first went to Congress in 1999 when he was elected to fill the seat vacated by Speaker of the House Robert Livingston after it was revealed that Livingston, who had attacked Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky affair, had himself had extramarital affairs.



2. According to conservative pundits, what the USA needs, more than anything else, is a really big, successful terrorist attack:
   

   According to Fumento all of those liberal New Yorkers who screamed when the World Trade Center collapsed were actually screaming with laughter. Who knew?
   
   In contrast to liberals' glee over the prospect of terrorist attacks in their hometowns, conservatives are all torn up about it, the way we are about wars that kill a lot of civilians and torture and other regrettable necessities. Unfortunately, there seems to be no other way of convincing people how wrong they were to vote for the Democrats and what a disaster it would be to leave Iraq.

Al Qaeda regrouping while clowns sing and dance

Some people simply don't care about the harm and suffering inflicted on the Iraqi people in the name of "helping them". Fair enough -- there are overlapping circles of care, and some people's circles don't extend out that far.

But even ignoring the harm to Iraq, one thing is absolutely certain: President Bush's unprovoked war on Iraq has harmed the West, directly, by allowing our real enemies the time and space to regroup, to recruit, to train, to learn new ways of attacking us.

While we're busy in Iraq, stuck in a completely unnecessary quagmire of our own making, the clowns supposed to be in charge of Homeland Security are trying to distract us from their incompetence with "gut feelings" of terrorist attacks.

As Les writes:

Could it be that we’re still vulnerable because we’re wasting time and money confiscating any bottle of liquid larger than 3oz at the airport while letting the bomb sitting next to it slip right on through? Could it be that we’re spread too thin fighting an illegitimate war in Iraq that we’ve allowed Al Qaeda to recuperate to almost full strength? You know, the group of people who are directly responsible for the destruction of the Twin Towers? How many of you remember how on December 14th of 2001 our so-called Commander and Chief vowed to bring in Bin Laden, dead or alive? It’s been almost 6 years since that vow, he only has about a year and a half left before he’s out on his ass. When does he plan to honor that vow? It’s the one promise he’s made that I’d really love to see him keep.

Sorry Les, didn't you get the news? Dubyah no longer cares about bin Laden, and hasn't for years.

"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority." -- G.W. Bush, 13/03/2002

The Peace Wager

What was the prison guard with a pyschology degree doing negotiating with the murderous head of an army of abducted children, the Lord’s Resistance Army? What do American Christian Fundamentalists, including the son of the American tele-evangalist Billy Graham, have to do with the civil wars in the Sudan and Uganda? How is this connected to the genocide in Darfur? And what does any of this have to do with the guinea-worm?

For the answers to these questions and more, see The Peace Wager in The Walrus.

The War on Terror and homosexuality

According to the Christian Right, the West is in a fight for survival against the forces of darkness: Islamofascists who want to introduce a Caliphate across the entire world, starting with Iraq and ending with Washington D.C., London and Paris.

Against this dire threat, no act is too extreme:

• Spend $408 billion (and climbing) on invading and occupying Iraq? Sure.


• Hand Afghanistan over to a bunch of corrupt, drug-dealing, woman-hating Fundamentalist warlords? Why ever not?


• "Extraordinary rendition"? Of course.


• Torture innocents? We can't afford the niceties.


• Cozy up to murderous Third World dictators? Absolutely.


• Cut civil liberties and introduce sedition laws? Don't blame us, blame the terrorists.


• Widespread, illegal spying on citizens? A necessary evil.



• Hire Arabic and Farsi translators who happen to be gay? Um... perhaps not.

Despite a chronic shortage of fluent Arabic and Persian linguists, the U.S. military and government continues to fire any linguist they discover is gay. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has only six fluent Arabic speakers. Six. And despite the need to interrogate all those dangerous terrorists, the U.S. military has recently fired twenty-six Arab and Persian speakers for being gay.

"SusanUnPC" from the No Quarter blog quotes a lovely exchange between an anti-homosexual activist and The Daily Show's Jason Jones:

The Daily Show's Jason Jones sat down with Paul Cameron, one of the nation's leading anti-gay activists, said, "I think the country, on the aggregate, is safer without Bleu in the military." Asked why, Cameron explained, "Guys don't want to think about other guys, other fellas, ogling them in the shower or whatever."

Jones responded, "I know I'd rather die in a terrorist attack than suffer through an uncomfortable shower with a gay." Cameron grudgingly responded, "Yes."

Never let it be said that the Christian Fundamentalists don't have their priorities in order.

Israel to Saddam: come back, all is forgiven!

Too late now, but the head of Israel's Shin Bet (the domestic security agency), Yuval Diskin, has admitted that chaos left by the forceful removal of Saddam Hussein is a danger to Israel: Israel may rue the day the USA invaded Iraq:

When you dismantle a system in which there is a despot who controls his people by force, you have chaos. I'm not sure we won't miss Saddam.

Diskin also admitted that that Israeli judiciary treats Jewish terrorists differently from Arab terrorists, and while he opposed the withdrawal of Israeli security from Palestinian areas with no effective or lawful security forces, he also criticised Israeli militants who opposed further withdrawals from the West Bank.

Dominance rituals, the President and the Terrorist

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has published a review of "Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait" by Israeli journalist Uri Dan. Dan was the former adviser, close confidant and friend of the late Israeli Prime Minister Arial Sharon.

In the book, Uri Dan discusses a meeting between Sharon and US President Bush, and Bush's fantasy for what he would do to Osama bin Laden if he every got his hands on him. Because I'm trying to keep this blog nannyware-safe, I'll just point you here for the description of what Bush would do if he caught bin Laden. But here's a couple of hints:

The President used to be a frat boy.

There's some serious analysis as well, not just cheap gags. Dominance and sexuality are intimately linked in our species.

(An interesting aside: in the book, Dan also hints obliquely that Palestinian President Yassar Arafat may not have died of natural causes, and that Sharon may have been involved.)

Kafka would be proud

I haven't written much about the use of torture because it is such a huge topic to deal with. But this is too absurd to let pass. Mark Kleiman of the Reality Based Community writes:

Can you imagine a government so absurdly tyrannical, so brutally insane, that it forbids "enemies of the state" to complain about being tortured on the grounds that interrogation techniques are state secrets?

Well, you don't have to imagine it. There is such a government.

Outsmarting the torturers

One of the often-repeated arguments in favour of torture is that, without it, We[1] can't convince Them[2] to tell us what they are planning to do. Without torture, how can we gather information to fight those who would harm us?

The assumption is that information we gather via torture is trustworthy information, useful to know. But is that the case?

A report in the Guardian shows that not only is the information gathered through torture suspect, but it can actually be counter-productive. A dedicated, self-sacrificing individual can out-smart the torturers and actually game the system -- and terrorist groups have no difficulty recruiting dedicated, self-sacrificing individuals.

According to "Omar Nasiri" (a pseudonym), a double-agent who has been secretly spying on al Qaeda for seven years, the al Qaeda operative Ibn Sheikh al-Libi successfully planted false information to US interrogators, telling them that al Qaeda had been training Iraqis.

Libi was captured in November 2001 and taken to Egypt where he was allegedly tortured. Asked on BBC2's Newsnight whether Libi or other jihadists would have told the truth if they were tortured, Nasiri replies: "Never".

Asked whether he thought Libi had deliberately planted information to get the US to fight Iraq, Nasiri said: "Exactly".

Nasiri said Libi "needed the conflict in Iraq because months before I heard him telling us when a question was asked in the mosque after the prayer in the evening, where is the best country to fight the jihad?" Libi said Iraq was chosen because it was the "weakest" Muslim country.

It is common sense that, whatever your enemy wants most, you should try the hardest to deny to them. But common sense is obviously not very common amongst the chicken-hawks of the American neo-con movement. Osama bin Laden was desperate for a war of civilizations between the West and Islam, and instead of denying him that war, the US has virtually handed it to him on a platter by invading Iraq. And let's not forget that Iraq, with its secular government, legal protection of non-Muslims, and women's relative freedom, was one of the few examples of an Arab nation that wasn't ruled (implicitly or explicitly) by the mullahs, and hence one of the targets of bin Laden's hatred.

Five years after Sept 11, Osama bin Laden has fooled the Americans into overthrowing Iraq's secular leader. Anger and hatred against the West is greater than ever. Bin Laden might have sacrificed a few thousand men in Afghanistan, but he's gained something far more important: a war between cultures and one of the most significant nations in the Arab world under the sway of the Mullahs. Even if they aren't necessarily bin Laden's Mullahs, the US has destroyed a secular nation that kept church and state separate and replaced it with one that has the two intimately connected.

I don't mean to exaggerate al Qaeda's victory -- the war certainly isn't going all their way. In the chaos of Iraq, there are many armed parties, and according to credible information from the CIA, less than 4% of the fighters owe allegiance to bin Laden.

But instead of opposing bin Laden's wishes, the Bush administration has spent the last few years handing him just what he wanted. The incident with Libi shows the sort of judo al Qaeda uses: use your enemy's strength against them.

But the tactical significance is that information gathered under torture is not only immoral (more for what it does to us than out of any goody-goody concern for the health and well-being of any specific man who would cheerfully stick a knife in us in a second) but it is also useless. It is untrustworthy information. If the Libi incident was not evidence enough, the evidence from past witch-trials is significant. Under torture, innocent people will lie and condemn themselves and others; and guilty people can game the system, plant false information, and sucker us into doing their wishes.

Faking actual physical evidence of al Qaeda training Iraqis would have been very difficult, probably far too difficult for al Qaeda to do convincingly. But they can lie. Lying is easy, and lying is even easier when you are being tortured, because the more you tell the torturers what they want to hear, the less you will be tortured.

But had Libi told the truth, that al Qaeda was not training Iraqis, that Saddam Hussein was doing his best to arrest or kill al Qaeda operatives, he would have just been tortured even more.





[1] "The Good Guys": people who like kittens and love their kids and never torture their enemies. Back

[2] "The Bad Guys", people who eat kittens and stomp on their kids' heads and ... torture their enemies... um... Back