Possible Terror Attack Disrupted, and Guess What?
ABC News reports on an FBI raid that disrupted a possible terror attack. I would like to draw your attention to one sentence, which I have bolded:
Authorities raided properties in New York City today in an effort that was intended to disrupt the plans of a terror suspect whose travels had been tracked by the FBI, according to an official briefed on the raids.
“He was being watched and concern grew as he met with a group of individuals in Queens over the weekend,” said Congressman Pete King (R-NY). “The FBI went to court late last night for an emergency warrant to conduct the raids this morning.” A resident in the neighborhood said there was police activity around 2 a.m. Monday.
Officials said the execution of search warrants came after days of surveillance, and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly characterized it as part of an “ongoing investigation.”
I don’t believe I need to say more.
The Torture Investigation Mystery Show
So there’s been a lot of speculation in blogtopia about Attorney General Eric Holder’s reportedly renewed intentions of appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the authorization and use of torture in the previous administration. The speculation — which revolves around the question of who Holder intends to prosecute, more than whether he intends to prosecute — has been fueled by these three articles:
- Daniel Klaidman’s piece, published Saturday in Newsweek, which reported that AG Holder had returned to the possibility of prosecutions.
- Carrie Johnson’s Washington Post article titled “Probe of Alleged Torture Weighed,” published on Sunday, which speculated that any investigation would be limited to CIA interrogators who had gone beyond the “guidelines” prescribed by the Bush lawyers.
- Scott Horton’s “Torture Prosecution Turnaround?” published in The Daily Beast, also yesterday. which suggested that the scope of prosecutions, if they happened, would be wider.
I certainly agree with Tim, Glenn, and Spencer that if investigations and/or prosecutions are going to be limited to low-hanging fruit, it would be better not to do anything at all. But I don’t think it’s at all clear that’s what Holder has in mind.
Keep in mind, first, that — as Glenn himself pointed out – the predictions as to what Holder will do in both articles — Johnson’s and Horton’s — are being made by anonymous sources. I’m not going to take any claims seriously that come from sources without names or identities attached to them. It’s not even that I think these people are unreliable, whoever they are. I’m sure they are high-ranking officials who know Holder well. But no matter who they are, if they are anonymous, they might as well be no one, because there’s no accountability. No other journalist can call them up and confirm what they said. So they can say whatever they want, but it has no gravitas until they are identified.
And that leads me to the other reason I don’t take these claims about Holder’s intentions seriously: They’re not meant seriously. They’re meant to test the waters. Isn’t that what corporate journalism is about these days? Anonymous sources test-driving major decisions by calling reporters at major papers and sending out trial balloons?
It can actually be entertaining sometimes to see how reporters for top national papers parse the reasons for not naming the sources. There’s a whole structure and style to presenting sources anonymously. First, there is the obligatory first mention, “…according to three sources. …” This is usually included in the opening paragraph, but sometimes it’s the second or third. Then, several paragraphs further down in the article, you get the “reason” why these sources are not being identified. And I put “reason” in quotes because, obviously, there’s only one reason. But Carrie Johnson can’t very well tell us that her sources would only agree to speak to her on background “because they don’t want to be held responsible for the information they’re leaking.” So instead, she writes that the sources “spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing process.”
Thank you to Digby for inspiring the above rant by saying exactly what I had been thinking (in the first Update to her post about the Brain Trust at This Week With George Stephanopoulos).
Count the Strawmen
I count five, stated in various ways (listed under video).
1. The Democrats still want to blame the Bush administration for the economy.
2. The Democrats want to dismantle the CIA.
3. Nancy Pelosi is looking for political cover.
4. It’s not unusual for president and vice-president to be involved.
5. The CIA is in the secrecy business and Congress wants to know everything.
(And one dodge: “I don’t have enough information.”)
Via Think Progress.
The IG Warrantless Surveillance Report
Here is a roundup of commentary about the report (h/t Glenn), which came out on Friday.
Oscar Arias to Mediate Talks Between Zelaya and Micheletti
Oscar Arias, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for helping to end years of war and political violence between the Central American nations, has agreed to facilitate a U.S.-backed effort to resolve the conflict between the ousted but democratically elected Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, and the interim government headed by Roberto Micheletti:
Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya on Tuesday accepted a U.S.-backed effort by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to mediate an end to the political crisis in Honduras and said talks with his rivals would begin on Thursday.
“Our first meeting is set for Thursday, in Costa Rica,” Zelaya, told Honduran radio from Washington.
In Honduras, Roberto Micheletti, who was appointed president by Honduran lawmakers after the June 28 coup, also said he would attend Thursday’s talks under Arias’ mediation.
Arias, a Nobel Peace Prize winner with experience in solving Central American conflicts, faces mediating between sharply opposed positions.
Zelaya said his reinstatement as president was nonnegotiable.
“What this is is not a negotiation, this is the planning of the exit of the coup leaders,” he said.
But Micheletti maintained his position that Zelaya could not return as president. “We’re not going to negotiate, we’re going to talk,” he said. “We’re going into these talks because we’re interested in having peace and tranquility in Honduras.”
Zelaya, whose ouster was sparked by his efforts to change presidential term limits and by his political shift to the left, spoke after meeting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
She urged him to negotiate rather than try to force his way back into the country.
Here is an interesting article byMiami Herald reporter Frances Robles. Robles interviewed Honduras’s top military attorney about the events of June 28, and got some eye-popping admissions:
The military officers who rushed deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya out of the country Sunday committed a crime but will be exonerated for saving the country from mob violence, the army’s top lawyer said.
In an interview with The Miami Herald and El Salvador’s elfaro.net, army attorney Col. Herberth Bayardo Inestroza acknowledged that top military brass made the call to forcibly remove Zelaya — and they circumvented laws when they did it.
It was the first time any participant in Sunday’s overthrow admitted committing an offense and the first time a Honduran authority revealed who made the decision that has been denounced worldwide.
”We know there was a crime there,” said Inestroza, the top legal advisor for the Honduran armed forces. “In the moment that we took him out of the country, in the way that he was taken out, there is a crime. Because of the circumstances of the moment this crime occurred, there is going to be a justification and cause for acquittal that will protect us.”
Inestroza also told Robles that the military would not take orders from a leftist government. And, despite his own acknowledgment that the forcible removal of Zelaya from office was not lawful, Inestroza, amazingly, said, “… [I]t’s very difficult for someone who has dedicated his whole life to a country and an institution to see, from one day to another, a person who is not normal come and want to change the way of life in the country without following the steps the law indicates.”
More on Obama’s Post-Acquittal Indefinite Detention Plans
Today, Glenn Greenwald weighs in on the Obama administration’s newly revealed plans to continue holding Guantanamo detainees indefinitely even in the cases of detainees who may be acquitted:
Obama Preparing Executive Order to Allow Preventive Detention
The Obama administration, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, is drafting an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.
[...]
White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said there is no executive order and that the administration has not decided whether to issue one. But one administration official suggested that the White House was already trying to build support.
Remember that meeting last month between civil liberties and human rights activists and Pres. Obama right before his big national security speech? The one where he was trying to get their support for his Guantanamo plans?
I’m hearing spinning noises coming from the White House:
“Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order,” the official said. Such an order could be rescinded and would not block later efforts to write legislation, but civil liberties groups generally oppose long-term detention, arguing that detainees should be prosecuted or released.
I’m not the only one wondering what’s the game here:
What? What civil liberties organization actually encouraged the administration to set up a system of “prolonged detention” — the less euphemistic term would be indefinite detention — in the first place; let alone urged the administration to do it without congressional approval?
Aha!
Update: Zach Roth at TPM reports that the Center for Constitutional Rights certainly doesn’t approve of the idea.
Update 2: CCR representatives say that in a recent White House meeting, they conveyed to administration officials that “any prolonged detention scheme was unacceptable, no matter how it was dressed.”
Regarding comparisons between the White House plan for preventive detention described by Linzer and Finn in the WaPo piece, and the one laid out by Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, see smintheus at unbossed.com and Mytwords at Corrente.
Matthew Alexander: Torture Has Cost Us American Lives
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this video is worth at least a hundred thousand:
Via The Huffington Post.
Preventive Detention Is a Non-Starter
Pres. Obama’s preventive detention idea, so far, is not going over too well, reports Glenn Greenwald:
The backlash against President Obama’s extraordinary proposal for indefinite “preventive detention” — already widespread in the immediate aftermath of his speech — continues to grow. On Friday, Sen. Russ Feingold sent a letter (.pdf) to Obama which, while praising some aspects of his speech, vowed to hold hearings on his detention proposal, and in the letter, Feingold rather emphatically highlighted the radical and dangerous aspects of Obama’s approach[.]
[...]
On Twitter on Friday, Rachel Maddow pointed to the civil liberties questionnaire from Charlie Savage which Obama answered during the Democratic primary and asked rhetorically: “This is the same guy now proposing ‘prolonged detention’ without trial?”
[...]
It’s a bit difficult to claim that what Obama is proposing is nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary, given that his own White House Counsel just last February told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that it would be “hard to imagine Barack Obama as the first President of the United States to introduce a preventive-detention law.” As acknowledged by two of the leading proponents of preventive detention — Bush OLC lawyer Jack Goldsmith and Obama’s Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal — the real purpose of preventive detention (contrary to what some are arguing) is not to classify and treat all detainees as “prisoners of war” (since some of them, by Obama’s own description, will get trials in real courts and others in military commissions), but rather, to give “the government an overwhelming incentive to use trials only when it is certain to win convictions and long sentences, and to place the rest in whatever detention system it creates” (h/t EJ). I defy anyone to re-read that description of what this “preventive detention” system does and then claim that what is being described is a “justice system” in any meaningful sense of that term.
Digby has more.
Cheney: Still Cherry-Picking After All These Years
Jonathan Landay of McClatchy goes through the long list of lies, distortions, and convenient omissions in Cheney’s “national security” speech yesterday:
Nancy Pelosi, Congress, and the American Public
Despite what Republicans in Congress, right-wing bloggers, and conservative media pundits would have us believe, Nancy Pelosi is not about to be thrown under the bus by her House colleagues — nor, it seems, has the sincere Republican effort to make Pelosi responsible for the CIA’s interrogation torture program convinced the American public that it’s all her fault that the Bush administration violated every known domestic and international law against the use of torture.
Although it’s true that the House Speaker’s job approval rating is only 39%, with 48% disapproving, the approval rating for Republicans in Congress is the same. What’s more, Americans are not strongly opinionated on the question of whether the CIA misled Pelosi or not. Neither conclusion gets 50%, and by a couple of percentage points, more Americans believe she might have been misled than believe that she was not. Those are the nationwide numbers; unsurprisingly, the results break down significantly along party lines.
Believe it or not, most Americans do not have Nancy Pelosi’s statements about the CIA foremost on their minds:
Another Connecticut Democrat, Chris Murphy, said there’s a “total disconnect” between what pundits and talk show hosts are talking about and what he hears from his constituents. Murphy said there might be some impact on the speaker’s ability to continue leading if the issue were something people were talking about in his district, but it’s not.
Here is the amen point (emphasis mine):
Conservative Indiana Democrat Baron Hill said that people who are zeroing in on the speaker are trying to move away from the broader issue of who authorized the harsh interrogation methods.
“I think a lot of people have lost focus on the people who put those torture policies in place in the first place,” Hill said. “Nancy didn’t do anything wrong, in terms of the legalities, that I’m aware of. I don’t know what she was told. I’m not here to cast judgment on her at all.”
Hill said he made a half a dozen visits in his Indiana district over the weekend, and no one raised the issue of Pelosi with him.
One… two… three: AHHHHMEN!
Frank Rich to Pres. Obama: Can’t Stand Athwart History, Yelling “Stop!”
Or, as Bonnie Raitt said, “Can’t stop a river, once it’s burst its banks. …”:
To paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.
That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.
[...]
… The White House seems to be taking its cues from the Reagan-Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan. “Sometimes I think just keep walking,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” as the torture memos surfaced. “Some of life has to be mysterious.” Imagine if she’d been at Nuremberg!The administration can’t “just keep walking” because it is losing control of the story. The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the A.C.L.U. and the president’s “left-wing base” want accountability, but that’s not the case. Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation in last month’s Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into “confirming” a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan and voluble the call for full transparency has become.
And I do mean bipartisan. Both Dick Cheney, hoping to prove that torture “worked,” and Nancy Pelosi, fending off accusations of hypocrisy on torture, have now asked for classified C.I.A. documents to be made public. When a duo this unlikely, however inadvertently, is on the same side of an issue, the wave is rising too fast for any White House to control. Court cases, including appeals by the “bad apples” made scapegoats for Abu Ghraib, will yank more secrets into the daylight and enlist more anxious past and present officials into the Cheney-Pelosi demands for disclosure.
It will soon be every man for himself. “Did President Bush know everything you knew?” Bob Schieffer asked Cheney on “Face the Nation” last Sunday. The former vice president’s uncharacteristically stumbling and qualified answer — “I certainly, yeah, have every reason to believe he knew…” — suggests that the Bush White House’s once-united front is starting to crack under pressure.
I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.
Frank Rich column, here.
Bonnie Raitt, “Storm Warning” lyrics here.
Faux News Reveals True Motivation Behind Attacks on Pelosi
Not that reality-based bloggers didn’t know this already, but it definitely should be pointed out as frequently as possible (emphasis in original):
Facts Be Damned
Charles Krauthammer got hammered (sorry, couldn’t resist!) by his readers for that column he wrote a few weeks ago on the two scenarios in which torture was justifiable. (If you don’t remember, the two scenarios were (1) the ticking time bomb scenario; and (2) any other time you think a detainee has important information and won’t give it up). His response is, if anything, worse than the original.
Obama Now Says He Will Not Release Detainee Abuse Photos
President Obama met with White House counsel Greg Craig and other members of the White House counsel team last week and told them that he had second thoughts about the decision to hand over photographs of detainee abuse to the ACLU, per a judge’s order, and had changed his mind.
The president “believes their release would endanger our troops,” a White House official says, adding that the president “believes that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court.”
Wow. Those photographs must be truly, shockingly horrendous if Obama and his advisers are so concerned their release would put U.S. soldiers’ lives in danger and threaten our national security:
A couple of points here: First, it isn’t the photos; it is the acts themselves that put US troops in danger. The abuse is widely known among Iraqis, and those inclined to act don’t need photographic evidence as justification.
Second, the White House has a tough argument to make here. The Second Circuit Court has ruled that the Bush claim of an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act was not meant to be an “all purpose damper on global controversy.” Since a controversy already exists, and photos of abuse from Abu Ghraib have previously been released, the current administration is going to have to argue that the new photos are somehow substantially more controversial.
Makes one want to ask: controversial how?
Exactly.
On the other side of the issue, Neptunus Lex thinks this was a “good call“:
Nothing new would have come of this but propaganda for the enemies of civilization. Apparently, the administration has determined that the increased risk to our troops – something he should care about both personally and politically – outweighs the delicious opportunity to further harrow his increasingly irrelevant predecessor.
I’d call that growing in the job.
I, on the other hand, would call it missing the point. How many times has Barack Obama said, both as president and during the campaign, that the previous administration’s use of harsh enhanced interrogation techniques torture has been one of Al Qaeda’s most effective recruiting tools? It’s the torture that endangers our troops’ lives and makes us less safe, as Gregg Levine wrote in that quote above. It’s the torture that the “enemies of civilization” have been using and will continue to use as propaganda until they know it’s ended and the people responsible are being held accountable. Our “enemies” are not going to see anything when those photos are released that they didn’t already know about, or that, indeed, they haven’t already seen up close and personal. It’s us — the American people — who need to see and fully know what’s been done in our names.
And that “enemies of civilization” concept — what’s that about? Is torture not uncivilized? (Not to mention, illegal.) Is it okay that we perpetrated such unimaginable cruelties against the “enemies of civilization” if we can persuade ourselves that everyone we brutalized was an enemy of civilization? Surely some of them were not uncivilized!
I’ve gotten to know Lex a wee bit as a person, and he’s a decent, smart guy with a cool sense of humor. But on this, he is wrong, wrong, wrong.
White House Poised To Release IG Report on Torture
In a Washington Post article about ongoing congressional investigation into CIA compliance (or lack thereof) with DOJ interrogation guidelines, there is big news about the May 2004 Inspector-General’s report that has been much referred to recently, but so far remains classified (emphasis in original):
Bipartisan Complicity
Yesterday, Rick Klein of ABC News announced that “a report prepared by the Director of National Intelligence’s office and obtained by ABC News” showed that the CIA did brief Nancy Pelosi and other select members of the House Intelligence Committee on the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT). Pelosi says she and other House members were only told that the White House had legal opinions that would allow them to use such techniques, not that they were being used or would be used.
Donate to CFLF
Blogroll
Pennsylvania Blogs
The Liberal Media
Blogging Liberally
Advertising
Comments From Left Field is a member of...
Memeorandum
Archives
- 2010: J F M A M J J A S O N D
- 2009: J F M A M J J A S O N D
- 2008: J F M A M J J A S O N D
- 2007: J F M A M J J A S O N D
- 2006: J F M A M J J A S O N D
- 2005: J F M A M J J A S O N D
- 2004: J F M A M J J A S O N D
- 2003: J F M A M J J A S O N D
Blog Stuff
