Barack Obama, Stanley McChrystal and dithering in Afghanistan

That’s the subject of this week’s Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk. You’ll probably not be surprised that I’m suggesting it’s time to ratchet down our endless war against the Taliban. You might be surprised to find out my conservative colleague seemingly agrees. He writes:

Trying to pacify the ungovernable Afghan countryside or win the support of people who are nothing if not xenophobic is a waste of time, money and precious American lives. If the goal is to secure Americans at home, we’re unlikely to accomplish it on the present course.

Point-counterpoint columns are probably less entertaining when the point and the counterpoint make the same point. But still. My take:

In his memo to President Obama, Gen. Stanley McChrystal suggested that even if America does everything right, it might still lose the war. Why? Because victory depends on having a stable, corruption-lite ― nobody expects corruption-free ― Afghan government that meets the needs of its people. Afghan President Hamid Karzai cannot provide that government, which means America cannot win. More troops won’t change that.

There have been other signs that after eight years, Afghanistan is a quagmire. We’ve now been in that country about the same amount of time as the Soviet Union was during its doomed war in the 1980s. Karzai’s brother ― long known to be dealing in the drugs that finance Taliban operations in that country ― was this week revealed to be on the CIA payroll. And an American Foreign Service officer resigned after concluding that the presence of U.S. and NATO troops has fueled the insurgency. We’re still there because they’re fighting us; they’re fighting us because we’re still there. It’s a complete mess.

And it is a mess that was mostly achieved under President George W. Bush, who let his attention wander ― disastrously ― to Iraq. Dick Cheney’s recent criticism of President Obama’s “dithering” on Afghanistan policy is thus remarkable. Having screwed it up so badly, you would think the former vice president would have the good sense and grace to simply shut up. But political bickering won’t solve Afghanistan. Probably nothing can.

America originally invaded Afghanistan because al- Qaida, which attacked us on 9/11, was headquartered there. But fighting an endless war against the Taliban is not doing much, if anything, to make Americans safer from terrorism. It might be making things worse. Time to try something new.

Dick Cheney should shut his mouth about Obama and Afghanistan

Oh, this is rich:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Barack Obama of “dithering” in failing to make a decision about escalating troops in Afghanistan. “Make no mistake, signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries. Waffling while our troops on the ground face an emboldened enemy endangers them and hurts our cause,” Cheney said in a speech Wednesday night. Unlike former President George W. Bush, Cheney has been a vocal critic of the current administration.

This is coming from a vice president who was more than willing to essentially abandon the Afghanistan War in favor of an unnecessary but costly invasion of Iraq that still constrains our options to act elsewhere in the world. It’s the fault of Cheney and Bush that the war in Afghanistan is in the straits it is in.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal implicitly criticized the Bush Administration in his recent strategy memo to the White House. Some excerpts:

Our campaign in Afghanistan has been historically under-resourced and remains so today. Almost every aspect of our collective effort and associated resourcing has lagged a growing insurgency – historically a recipe for failure in COIN.

This is an important -~ and likely decisive ~~ period of this war. Afghans are frustrated and weary after eight years without evidence of the progress they anticipated. Patience is understandably short, both in Afghanistan and in our own countries. Time matters; we must act now to reverse the negative trends and demonstrate progress.

And so on and so forth. The Afghanistan war didn’t suddenly go badly because Obama took office. If Afghanistan is in bad shape today, it’s in large part because Cheney helped take America’s eye off the ball. Remember this from 2007?

The U.S. military’s top officer acknowledged on Tuesday that for all the importance of preventing Afghanistan from again harboring al-Qaida terrorists, Washington’s first priority is Iraq.

“In Afghanistan, we do what we can,” said Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “In Iraq, we do what we must.”

It was Cheney who helped make sure the war in Afghanistan was underresourced — as officials acknowledged at the time. You’d think he’d have the graciousness to realize his error and shut up instead of behaving like an arrogant pit bull.

Prosecuting the torturers

That’s the topic of my Scripps column with Ben Boychuk this week. My take:

If Republicans like Dick Cheney had their way, there would be no law that CIA agents — or their White House bosses — couldn’t break in the name of national security.

Eric Holder isn’t going after officials, such as Cheney, who authorized the “enhanced interrogation methods” that probably broke domestic and international laws against torture. Holder isn’t even going after very many agents who participated in the interrogation program. Instead, he’s going after the agents who went way too far — the ones who broke the Bush administration’s already-expansive rules about what constituted torture.

The result? We know that some detainees died in custody, and that others suffered mightily. There will be few tears shed, of course; most of these men were terrorists. But our treatment of them is a stain on the national honor.

What Cheney is saying is that even the agents who broke Bush administration rules “deserve our gratitude” and shouldn’t be prosecuted. But if CIA agents shouldn’t be held accountable for breaking the laws, orders and legal guidance set out by Congress and the White House, how can America possibly put limits on the actions of its agents? And how can we trust our government not to misuse that awful power? We can’t.

The truth is that Holder’s investigation doesn’t go far enough. It risks scapegoating lower-level CIA employees who were carrying out orders, while Cheney and others who gave those orders face no consequences. That’s unfair and unfortunate. But Cheney and his fellow Republicans are suggesting that utter lawlessness is acceptable in the name of defeating terrorists. It’s not.

Just in case it isn’t clear, what I’m saying is this: The criticism by Cheney and other Republicans of the investigation gives lie to their assertion that all the Office of Legal Counsel memos justifying torture were actually efforts to keep the CIA within strict legal limits to avoid torture. If that were really the case, then Cheney et al would agree that agents who crossed the lines laid down by the Bush Administration should face sanction of some sort. Instead, such agents “deserve our gratitude.” It’s further proof — if any was needed — that the OLC memos were an exercise in bureaucratic ass-covering.

Torture

I’m still making my way through the CIA Inspector General’s report on torture which was released (with some redactions) yesterday. I’ll have some thoughts, I think, once I’ve given it a closer look. But for now, I think, publius sums things up nicely:

The highlights include:  (1) mock executions; (2) threatened rape of family members; (3) threatened murder of children; (4) kicking and beating a detainee with a metal flashlight to death; (5) threatening naked hooded detainees with power drills; (6) blowing cigar smoke in detainees’ faces until they got sick; (7) waterboarding with massive volumes of water far beyond what OLC authorized (to make it “poignant”); (8) stress positions that nearly caused shoulder dislocations; (9) scraping detainees with stiff brushes; (10) choking a detainee with one’s bare hands until they nearly pass out; (11) subjecting detainees to extremely cold temperatures and water dousing; (12) “hard takedowns” (sometimes in diapers); and (13) beating detainees with butts of rifles (followed by kicking them).

There will be folks who will say that all of this is justified: We’re at war! But it’s still torture. Not “enhanced techniques,” but torture. Plain and simple — let me say it again — torture. Almost certainly in the legal sense, but also (because the law can be an ass) quite certainly in the moral sense.

Go ahead and defend it. But if you try to tell me it’s not torture — that it isn’t what it plainly is — I must conclude you’re either delusional or lying.

Why didn’t they just send Jason Bourne?

It’s kind of disappointing to learn that the CIA apparently doesn’t have teams of super-secret assassins who drink coffee in Paris, check their cell phone, and go off to kill bad guys right at that very moment. It’s a little surprising, in fact, to learn the CIA doesn’t have teams of super-secret assassins hunting down terrorists around the world, but that’s what the New York Times says:

Officials at the spy agency over the years ran into myriad logistical, legal and diplomatic obstacles. How could the role of the United States be masked? Should allies be informed and might they block the access of the C.I.A. teams to their targets? What if American officers or their foreign surrogates were caught in the midst of an operation? Would such activities violate international law or American restrictions on assassinations overseas?

The reason there’s any controversy about this is because Dick Cheney apparently ordered the CIA never to tell Congress about this program. Because even when Dick Cheney’s doing something right, he still manages to do it in an evil and off-putting way.

Because, let’s be honest here, didn’t we all kind of assume and hope the United States was trying to kill Al Qaeda leaders around the world? Aren’t most Americans a little surprised — maybe even a little frustrated — to learn we haven’t been? It’s been almost eight years — !!! — since Sept. 11, and we still haven’t figured out a way to go after the bad guys unless it’s through Predator strikes over countries that have given their permission, if only implicitly?

I guess I’m shocked and kind of glad to find out the Bush Administration took international law a little bit seriously. But if the Bushies could figure out a way to legalize torture, how in the world did they not make this one happen?

Even Dick Cheney thinks the Bush Administration was wildly misguided in Iraq

OK, I’m being cute. But Cheney has emerged yet again to criticize the Obama Administration:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday said he is concerned about U.S. forces withdrawing from Iraqi cities within 24 hours.

Mr. Cheney told The Washington Times’ “America’s Morning News” radio show that he is a strong believer in Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and that the general is doing what needs to be done.

“But what he says concerns me: That there is still a continuing problem. One might speculate that insurgents are waiting as soon as they get an opportunity to launch more attacks.

“I hope Iraqis can deal with it. At some point they have to stand on their own. But I would not want to see the U.S. waste all the tremendous sacrifice that has gotten us to this point.”

Which might be understandable criticism except for this: It was the Bush Administration that signed the Status of Forces Agreement that mandated the removal of U.S. forces from Iraqi cities by June 30. This is not some wild peacenik move the Obama Administration is making. This is actually honoring the commitments made by the Bush Administration itself.

Obama: Cheneyism with a smiling face

For months now, the folks at Fox News have been warning us that President Obama is a baby tyrant, a dictator-in-the-making who secretly hates American freedoms. Like most liberals, I’ve laughed this off with a political version of the “Costanza Rule” — whatever Glenn Beck says, you’ll succeed by thinking the exact opposite.

But what if the conservatives are just a tiny bit right?

Crazy? Maybe. But Obama’s moves on national security — highlighted by last month’s dueling speeches with Dick Cheney — are making me uncomfortable. And if conservatives are right, it’s for the wrong reasons: If Obama is moving the country towards tyranny, it’s because he’s too similar to his Republican predecessors.

The same-day speeches came after Cheney launched a media tour warning that Obama was endangering the lives of Americans by ending torture and ordering the closure of the terrorist prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Obama decided to offer a rebuttal.

The stylistic gap couldn’t have been more palpable: Cheney was contemptuous of his opponents, while the president came across a bit professorial. For liberals, this was comforting: If the former vice president couldn’t defend his position without sounding like a big jerk, that meant his position was probably wrong. Right?

“BLAHBLAHBLAH!” snarled Cheney.

“Blah. Blahblahblah,” said Obama, thoughtfully.

There were big differences. Cheney loves waterboarding, Obama not so much. The problem arose, however, when Obama announced his plans for handling terror suspects now in American custody at Gitmo.

For seven years, Cheney and the Bush Administration fought tooth and nail against giving detainees a fair chance to prove they weren’t terrorists, back-tracking only when forced to by the Supreme Court. Obama’s speech made it clear that detainees will finally get their day in court — so long as their convictions are assured.

Here’s how Obama’s process will work: If the government thinks it can convict a terror suspect in federal court, it will prosecute him there. If the government thinks its evidence might not quite stand up in federal court, it will try him before a “military commission,” where the rules are stacked in the prosecution’s favor. And if the government doesn’t think it can win a conviction even under those loose standards — well, it will just keep those suspects locked behind bars anyway. Just to be safe.

It’s Cheneyism with a smiling face. But it is still Cheneyism.

“Let me repeat,” Obama said in his speech. “I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people.”

Which sounds great, but is kind of awful. If President Obama is really going to grant due process rights to terror suspects, he has to run the risk that prosecutors will sometimes lose — and that terror suspects will go free. That’s the only way the legal process has any meaning.

If a detainee can get into court only because the government is guaranteed victory, the result is what used to be called a “show trial.” Show trials don’t happen in free countries under the rule of law. They’re not supposed to happen in the United States. They did, however, happen all the time in the old Soviet Union. Draw your own conclusions.

“There is no such thing as ‘due process light,’” ACLU director Anthony Romero said in a statement when news of Obama’s military commissions leaked. “Our justice system depends upon basic principles of fairness and transparency and once they are compromised even a little, they are rendered meaningless.”

This would be no problem, perhaps, if President Obama could guarantee that every person suspected of terrorism truly is a terrorist. He can’t. It is well-documented that hundreds of original detainees were guilty only of being in the wrong place — Afghanistan, mostly — at the wrong time. Conservatives like to point to Defense Department statistics suggesting that one of every seven detainees who have been released from Gitmo ended up returning to the “battlefield” as terrorists. But that number also suggests that six of every seven detainees went home to resume peaceful lives. That’s reason enough not to let Obama stack the deck against terror suspects.

This is not easy stuff — the threat of Al Qaeda and the challenges of terrorism will not go away just because we have a cool new president. We all want to be safe. But Obama himself has told us, repeatedly, that we don’t have to choose between our values and our security in the fight against terrorism. I believed him. That’s why I voted for him, and that’s why I celebrated when he opened his presidency by ending torture and promising to close the prison camp at Gitmo.

“Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man,” Obama said in his inaugural speech. “Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”

Lovely words. I’m not sure I believe them anymore.

Dick Cheney’s “Feigned Outrage”

There’s not a lot I have to say about yesterday’s dueling national security speeches that isn’t probably better said by Spencer Ackerman, Fred Kapan and John Dickerson, to name a few. As ever, American politics is a Rorsach test: Bill Kristol looked at Dick Cheney’s speech and saw a “statesman” who offered a welcome contrast to our “preachy” president. Me? I saw a president determined to treat Americans like adults — and a snarling former vice president who treats his opponents with utter contempt.

Consider this from Cheney’s speech:

Yet for all these exacting efforts to do a hard and necessary job and to do it right, we hear from some quarters nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative. In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.

You can’t criticize Cheney in good faith apparently. In fact, as his speech wore on it became clear he was returning to classic Republican themes: If you don’t like what we’re doing — if you criticize it — you’re part of the “blame America first” crowd who kinda-sorta loves terrorists and hates the fine upstanding men and women who go to war on our behalf.

Another term out there that slipped into the discussion is the notion that American interrogation practices were a, quote, recruitment tool for the enemy. On this theory, by the tough questioning of killers, we have supposedly fallen short of our own values.

This recruitment-tool theory has become something of a mantra lately, including from the president himself. And after a familiar fashion, it excuses the violent and blames America for the evil that others do. It’s another version of that same old refrain from the left, We brought it on ourselves.

(Snip)

Those are the basic facts on enhanced interrogation. And to call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims. What’s more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness and would make the American people less safe.

As Spencer Ackerman points out, the America-hating lefties who believe that torture has helped — not hurt — our enemies includes Gen. David Petraeus and Air Force Col. Donald Bacon.

And as for Cheney’s “libel” comment: It’s misdirection, based in a solipsism that figures that because we are the good guys, we can’t do bad things. It’s similar to the idea of: “If the president does it, by definition it’s not illegal.” Which isn’t true. But Cheney apparently believes it is — or, at least, wants so badly for it to be true that he’ll act that way in any case.

Anyway, compare Cheney’s contempt for opponents with President Obama’s handling of the same:

Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions. I believe that many of these decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people. But I also believe that all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight; that all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions. Instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, too often we set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford. And during this season of fear, too many of us — Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists, and citizens — fell silent.

These are, perhaps, mere stylistic differences. But given a choice between styles, I’ll always prefer the politician who treats his opponents with respect than, well, Dick Cheney.

Even in retirement, Dick Cheney doing all he can to destroy the earth

Noticed this in the New York Times over the weekend:

On the mornings he is in town, Dick Cheney wakes up at 6, climbs into his black sport utility vehicle and drives himself to a Starbucks near his McLean, Va., home. He returns with a pair of grande skim lattes — decaf for him, regular for his wife, Lynne — and settles into work in the sun-drenched office above his garage, penning his memoir in longhand on yellow legal pads.

Now it’s one thing to get Starbucks on your way to work — everybody does it. But to drive to a Starbucks to get coffee and bring it home? In an SUV? I’ll wager he leaves the SUV idling all day, that way it’s warmed up and ready to go at a second’s notice.

You know, Cheney used to be the CEO of Haliburton. I bet he can afford one of those fancy coffee makers that actually makes a Starbucks-type latte for him at home. But that would be too … efficient. Too non-wasteful. No: For Dick Cheney, making a pointless SUV trip is part of the fun. If only he could punch a spotted owl in the face while making the trip, life would be complete.

Torturing our way to Baghdad

Here’s what I want: I’d like to stop writing about torture. It’s exhausting to contemplate, and there’s no good way to write about it without being in a perpetual state of umbrage. And I’m tired of my umbrage. Judging by the falloff in comments these last few days, I’d say you’re tired of my umbrage, too.

But then I open up my computer — like I did this morning — and I read this McClatchy report, which suggests that one reason torture was used against top Al Qaeda officials was to elicit proof of an alliance between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. There was no such alliance.

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.

“There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.

“Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”

Senior administration officials, however, “blew that off and kept insisting that we’d overlooked something, that the interrogators weren’t pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information,” he said.

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

There are moments when I’m tempted to give the Bush Administration the benefit of the doubt. It did preside over 9/11, after all, and the urge to prevent anything like that from happening again must have been powerful. That doesn’t make torture right; it would make it understandable.

But this information removes that temptation. The evidence has long been that the Bush Administration was determined to present Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a threat no matter what the evidence said or didn’t say. The failure of U.N. inspectors to find evidence of WMDs, for example, was presented as proof that Iraq had WMDs. And now we find that the lack of affirmative evidence for that case helped compel torture. And turned up nothing.

This gives lie to the assertion by torture advocates – repeated often in recent days — that the purpose of torture wasn’t to elicit confessions (which could be false) but to obtain intelligence, which could be verified through other means. I thought it a weird distinction, and I see now it’s meaningless. The Bush Administration wanted a pre-selected answer, and it was willing to abuse prisoners to get that answer.

Forgive my umbrage, but it’s difficult for me to see that as being anything other than evil.