Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gets a New York trial

And Jonah Goldberg laments:

KSM thought he’d get a lawyer and a civilian trial, and at the end of the day he was right.

Putting aside, for the moment, the fact that the system is still plenty rigged — well, what’s so wrong with that? Assuming the government can make its case, this is a process that will almost certainly end with KSM’s execution. (And though I’m generally against the death penalty, it’s going to be a touch more difficult for me to object this time around.) How does the United States suffer from offering a fair and open trial — one that reveals a man’s craven willingness to inflict ghastly death upon innocents while hiding across an ocean — discredit us? Why is this not an opportunity to further discredit KSM’s radical ideology before the world? Why is this not an opportunity to both deliver justice and compete in the realm of ideas?

KSM looked at the American system of justice and thought he saw weakness. The shame of it is that Jonah Goldberg apparently agrees with him.

“Modern Warfare 2″: Slaughtering civilians is fun!

Hey, maybe there’s a “create your own character” mode where you can make yourself into Nidal Hasan! The New York Times review:

Basically, the player, in the guise of an American commando, can participate in a massacre of unarmed civilians.

The commando has been given the task of infiltrating the inner circle of a terrorist named Makarov. “It will cost you a piece of yourself,” your commander says of the mission. “It will cost nothing compared to everything you’ll save.”

Makarov and his band of killers, including you, are sent to an airport terminal in Moscow. Makarov and the others open fire with heavy-duty machine guns, tearing into a crowd that flees in panic. The terrorists wade through the security checkpoint, driving the screaming civilians before them. Soon the floor is covered with bodies.

It must be pointed out that the entire level is wholly optional. At the very beginning the game asks if you want to skip a potentially offensive scene. Perhaps more interesting, the player does not actually have to kill any civilians; you can watch as your comrades do all the shooting. The player is not forced into combat until all of the civilians are dead and you go up against the police and military forces now surrounding the terminal.

But even though you don’t have to kill any civilians, you can’t save them either. If you go through the scene at all, you will watch them mown down, then crawling for their lives before finally being dispatched.

Even though my politics are decidedly on the dovish side, I’ve been a fan of well-made war movies: Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now. (But not Saving Private Ryan: Good lord, was that movie awful.) Though brutal, at times, in their depiction of battle, I thought that very brutality was in the service of a profound artistic mission: Depicting the awful truth of war, instead of depicting it as  some kind of John Wayne romance. I was disabused of that notion while reading Jarhead, and realizing that Marines see these movies as kind of awesome. It made me a little uncomfortable.

First-person video games, I think, are different. I’m not going to claim moral purity here: I’ve played earlier iterations of the Call of Duty franchise. It’s one thing to be told a story; it’s another to be placed in the position of directly making deeply immoral choices. And I grant you that it’s a virtual world. But still.

A few months back, Jonah Lehrer wrote about how porn works in the brain, and I wonder if these cognitive processes aren’t similar to gaming:

Porn does not cause us to think about sex. Rather, porn causes to think we are having sex. From the perspective of the brain, the act of arousal is not preceded by a separate idea, which we absorb via the television or computer screen. The act itself is the idea. In other words, porn works by convincing us that we are not watching porn. We think we are inside the screen, doing the deed.

If that is how the brain works when gaming, the implications for Modern Warfare 2 are deeply troubling. I’m not the kind of guy to call for a ban. But I won’t be playing the game.

Maybe Fort Hood couldn’t have been prevented

My friend and nemesis Jim Lakely wants to pin at least some of the blame for the Fort Hood massacre … on the ACLU and its intimidation of the Army into “politically correct” modes of thought.  The glib answer is to suggest that civil rights groups don’t kill people — people kill people. And if the ACLU were so powerful in the ranks of the armed forces, I imagine we would’ve seen gays serving openly by now. It’s kind of a problematic theory.

Less glibly, it sounds like Maj. Nidal Hasan was raising red flags all over the place, essentially rooting on suicide bombers before an audience of Army doctors. But if he wasn’t drummed out of the service after that incident, it seems to me that political correctness isn’t really the Army’s problem — or, at least, not the only one.

As with 9/11, though, the question looms: Why wasn’t this prevented? There will be Congressional hearings, investigations and perhaps some new legislation that will supposedly seal the cracks in our national security infrastructure. But somewhere along the way, it should maybe be considered that large parts of the system worked the way they should’ve — and it still wasn’t enough. Sometimes bad things happen.

I mention this because of today’s Wall Street Journal report on pre-massacre communications between the FBI and the military about Hasan’s calls to a radical cleric:

The content of the pair’s communications didn’t raise red flags because terrorism task-force members checked with the military and found that Maj. Hasan was an Army psychiatrist who conducted research and was working on a master’s degree, FBI officials said.

The FBI checked on Maj. Hasan’s record with the military, but the Pentagon says it wasn’t given information about why those checks were being made. Typically, the FBI isn’t keen to raise suspicions about individuals without solid indications of possible wrongdoing. And in this case, it appears sharing more information would have been up to the FBI’s discretion.

It also isn’t clear whether military officials on those FBI task forces raised concerns to the counterterrorism supervisors they were assigned to serve, or whether the military members sought permission to report directly to the Army on Maj. Hasan — as they would have been required to do under post-9/11 rules on information-sharing. The bureau declined to answer whether such permission was sought.

There is also no way to know whether a tip to the Pentagon would have made a difference.

Notwithstanding the shortcomings, it appears some crucial information was shared in ways it wouldn’t have been before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Maj. Hasan’s communications with Mr. Awlaki were most likely intercepted by the National Security Agency. In either case, that means U.S. foreign-intelligence officials sent the communications to their domestic counterparts at the FBI.

Again: It’s early. We might find that FBI agents were cowed by notions of political correctness. But we might find that they simply didn’t have enough to go on. And that a bad thing happened despite the vigilance of critical parts of our national security infrastructure. It’s happened before. It will most certainly happen again. We can’t stop every bad thing from happening.

Fort Hood: Why Christians can’t be trusted

This is certainly shocking:

“Of course, most U.S. Christians don’t shoot up abortion doctors. Fine. As soon as Christians give us a foolproof way to identify their doctor-killers from their moderates, we’ll go back to allowing them to carry guns. You tell us who the ones are that we have to worry about, prove you’re right, and Christians can once again carry guns. Until that day comes, we simply cannot afford the risk. You invent a doctor-killing-detector that works every time it’s used, and we’ll welcome you back with open arms. This is not Christian-phobia, it is Christian-realism,” – Director of Issues Analysis, Bryan Fischer, at the American Family Association.

Oh wait. Sorry. The quote got a little screwed up. Here’s the real one:

“Of course, most U.S. Muslims don’t shoot up their fellow soldiers. Fine. As soon as Muslims give us a foolproof way to identify their jihadis from their moderates, we’ll go back to allowing them to serve. You tell us who the ones are that we have to worry about, prove you’re right, and Muslims can once again serve. Until that day comes, we simply cannot afford the risk. You invent a jihadi-detector that works every time it’s used, and we’ll welcome you back with open arms. This is not Islamophobia, it is Islamo-realism,” – Director of Issues Analysis, Bryan Fischer, at the American Family Association.

You know what? We absolutely need to be careful when Army officers go around rooting for suicide bombers. It seems increasingly clear the armed forces dropped the ball when it came to the proclivities of Maj. Nidal Hasan. There are fundamentalist extremists Muslims out there — we all lived through September 11 — and we clearly need to be on guard. But there are extremists and fundamentalists in many religions. I doubt Bryan Fischer would appreciate being lumped in with doctor killers. And it wouldn’t be fair to do so. Too bad he doesn’t understand that.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

Are there 400,000 terrorists plotting the destruction of America?

Call me skeptical, but the Washington Post reports that’s how many people are on the FBI’s terrorist watch list.

During a 12-month period ended in March this year, for example, the U.S. intelligence community suggested on a daily basis that 1,600 people qualified for the list because they presented a “reasonable suspicion,” according to data provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee by the FBI in September and made public last week.

The ever-churning list is said to contain more than 400,000 unique names and over 1 million entries. The committee was told that over that same period, officials asked each day that 600 names be removed and 4,800 records be modified. Fewer than 5 percent of the people on the list are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. Nine percent of those on the terrorism list, the FBI said, are also on the government’s “no fly” list.

One wants the government to be vigilant about protecting the country from terrorists, of course, but there’s a danger opposite to that of not investigating enough people and that’s investigating too many people. Leave aside, for the moment, the dangers to civil liberties; I’m willing to be a substantial portion — maybe even most — of the names on that list have nothing at all to do with terrorism. But they’re still consuming some of the FBI’s investigative resources. And time spent investigating the innocents might well cause the FBI to overlook the next Mohammed Atta.

In any case, it’s possible that the FBI will do everything as well as can be done — and that a terrorist will still slip through anyway. But the job might be easier if investigators weren’t flooded with so many (probably) false ledes.

Goodbye, civil liberties: The FBI can investigate you for terrorism just because it feels like it

Charlie Savage uncovers the FBI guidelines for beginning terrorism investigations. (Read the document here.) Word to the wise: Never give an FBI agent a funny look.

The manual authorizes agents to open an “assessment” to “proactively” seek information about whether people or organizations are involved in national security threats.

Agents may begin such assessments against a target without a particular factual justification. The basis for such an inquiry “cannot be arbitrary or groundless speculation,” the manual says, but the standard is “difficult to define.”

Assessments permit agents to use potentially intrusive techniques, like sending confidential informants to infiltrate organizations and following and photographing targets in public.

If you cannot define the standard, you cannot violate the standard. Basically, this is a blank check to the FBI to investigate whomever it pleases for any reason — or no reason — at all. But the FBI denies that will happen:

But Valerie Caproni, the F.B.I.’s general counsel, said the bureau has adequate safeguards to protect civil liberties as it looks for people who could pose a threat.

“Those who say the F.B.I. should not collect information on a person or group unless there is a specific reason to suspect that the target is up to no good seriously miss the mark,” Ms. Caproni said. “The F.B.I. has been told that we need to determine who poses a threat to the national security — not simply to investigate persons who have come onto our radar screen.”

I take seriously the need to prevent terror attacks. But: The FBI ought to have specific reasons to start delving into the lives of its citizens. Terrorism prevention by hunch will absolutely have bad results.

She also said that the F.B.I. takes seriously its duty to protect freedom while preventing terrorist attacks. “I don’t like to think of us as a spy agency because that makes me really nervous,” she said. “We don’t want to live in an environment where people in the United States think the government is spying on them. That’s an oppressive environment to live in and we don’t want to live that way.”

Indeed.

Fidel Castro is a dick

Slatest:

In an interview with El Nuevo Heraldo, two former government officials said that in the six months following 9/11, Cuban spies set the intelligence community off on a “wild goose chase” by walking into U.S. embassies around the world and providing employees with false information about terrorist threats. These decoy spies, who are known as “walk-ins,” generally take about 20 hours to train and 100 hours to investigate, making them a cheap and easy way to drain U.S. intelligence resources.

This is the first — and hopefully — last time I will ever use this phrase unironically:

Commie bastards.

Afghanistan: No to the troop increase

Frank Rich is a bad mammajamma in today’s New York Times, making a pretty compelling case that the crowd calling for deeper entrenchment in Afghanistan pretty much has no credibility. It deserves to be quoted at length, and read in full.

Let’s be clear: Those who demanded that America divert its troops and treasure from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 — when there was no Qaeda presence in Iraq — bear responsibility for the chaos in Afghanistan that ensued. Now they have the nerve to imperiously and tardily demand that America increase its 68,000-strong presence in Afghanistan to clean up their mess — even though the number of Qaeda insurgents there has dwindled to fewer than 100, according to the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones.

But why let facts get in the way? Just as these hawks insisted that Iraq was “the central front in the war on terror” when the central front was Afghanistan, so they insist that Afghanistan is the central front now that it has migrated to Pakistan. When the day comes for them to anoint Pakistan as the central front, it will be proof positive that Al Qaeda has consolidated its hold on Somalia and Yemen.

(Snip)

Along with his tribunes in Congress and the punditocracy, Wrong-Way McCain still presumes to give America its marching orders. With his Senate brethren in the Three Amigos, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, he took to The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page to assert that “we have no choice” but to go all-in on Afghanistan — rightly or wrongly, presumably — just as we had in Iraq. Why? “The U.S. walked away from Afghanistan once before, following the Soviet collapse,” they wrote. “The result was 9/11. We must not make that mistake again.”

This shameless argument assumes — perhaps correctly — that no one in this country remembers anything. So let me provide a reminder: We already did make that mistake again when we walked away from Afghanistan to invade Iraq in 2003 — and we did so at the Three Amigos’ urging. Then, too, they promoted their strategy as a way of preventing another 9/11 — even though no one culpable for 9/11 was in Iraq. Now we’re being asked to pay for their mistake by squandering stretched American resources in yet another country where Al Qaeda has largely vanished.

To make the case, the Amigos and their fellow travelers conflate the Taliban with Al Qaeda much as they long conflated Saddam’s regime with Al Qaeda. But as Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post reported on Thursday, American intelligence officials now say that “there are few, if any, links between Taliban commanders in Afghanistan today and senior Al Qaeda members” — a far cry from the tight Taliban-bin Laden alliance of 2001.

The rhetorical sleights of hand in the hawks’ arguments don’t end there. If you listen carefully to McCain and his neocon echo chamber, you’ll notice certain tics. President Obama better make his decision by tomorrow, or Armageddon (if not mushroom clouds) will arrive. We must “win” in Afghanistan — but victory is left vaguely defined. That’s because we will never build a functioning state in a country where there has never been one. Nor can we score a victory against the world’s dispersed, stateless terrorists by getting bogged down in a hellish landscape that contains few of them.

Most tellingly, perhaps, those clamoring for an escalation in Afghanistan avoid mentioning the name of the country’s president, Hamid Karzai, or the fraud-filled August election that conclusively delegitimized his government. To do so would require explaining why America should place its troops in alliance with a corrupt partner knee-deep in the narcotics trade. As long as Karzai and the election are airbrushed out of history, it can be disingenuously argued that nothing has changed on the ground since Obama’s inauguration and that he has no right to revise his earlier judgment that Afghanistan is a “war of necessity.”

Those demanding more combat troops for Afghanistan also avoid defining the real costs. The Congressional Research Service estimates that the war was running $2.6 billion a month in Pentagon expenses alone even before Obama added 20,000 troops this year. Surely fiscal conservatives like McCain and Graham who rant about deficits being “generational theft” have an obligation to explain what the added bill will be on an Afghanistan escalation and where the additional money will come from. But that would require them to use the dread words “sacrifice” and “higher taxes” when they want us to believe that this war, like Iraq, would be cost-free.

For the last week or so, I’ve also been pondering a short op-ed by David Kilcullen, who was one of Gen. Petraeus’ key counterinsurgency advisers in Iraq. Kilcullen bona fides — and, incidentally, his personal bravery — are well-established: He doesn’t run away from fights because he lacks the stomach for them.

His advice to the president:

COUNTERINSURGENCY is only as good as the government it supports. NATO could do everything right — it isn’t — but will still fail unless Afghans trust their government. Without essential reform, merely making the government more efficient or extending its reach will just make things worse.

Only a legitimately elected Afghan president can enact reforms, so at the very least we need to see a genuine run-off election or an emergency national council, called a loya jirga, before winter. Once a legitimate president emerges, we need to see immediate action from him on a publicly announced reform program, developed in consultation with Afghan society and enforced by international monitors. Reforms should include firing human rights abusers and drug traffickers, establishing an independent authority to investigate citizen complaints and requiring officials to live in the districts they are responsible for (fewer than half do).

If we see no genuine progress on such steps toward government responsibility, the United States should “Afghanize,” draw down troops and prepare to mitigate the inevitable humanitarian disaster that will come when the Kabul government falls to the Taliban — which, in the absence of reform, it eventually and deservedly will.

This of course echoes Gen. McChrystal’s own memorandum on Afghanistan strategy. He does ask for more troops, yes, but like Kilcullen he suggests that military efforts won’t work unless the Afghanistan government reforms itself into a (relatively) uncorrupt and effective organization. We can assist the Afghans in doing that, of course, but we can’t do it for them. And I’ve seen no signs that they really will. We must continue to try to capture and kill people who pose a threat to the United States – and the president, after his initial bump up of troops in Afghanistan — must clearly explain a new strategy and also be committed to it, or he’ll be undone by a reputation for fecklessness; this is a one-time do-over, and as a political matter it is very risky. But doubling down in Afghanistan has costs that far outweigh the likely benefits. The president should reject McChrystal’s troop request.

Afghanistan, again

After my dithering the other day, I decided to actually go read Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s memo about the situation in Afghanistan. While the media reports have focused largely on his request for more troops, that’s not really what the memo is about about.

There are two big takeaways from this memo, as far as I’m concerned:

• America and its NATO allies have so far fought the war in Afghanistan horribly, committing too few resources and soldiers – thanks again for Iraq, President Bush! — and not using the resources and soldiers it has in an effective manner: Not bothering, really, to learn the local culture or take the steps to attract the support and assistance of common Afghanis. These are things that America can change and fix — and if it were simply a matter of making these changes, I’d be more enthusiastically rooting for the continuation of the war.

• But there’s a problem that America, really, can’t so easily fix: The Afghan government. It’s ineffective and corrupt. Period. And while the Taliban is hardly popular among Afghanis, its ability to offer effective, corruption-free — though certainly brutal — governance in the areas it holds make it, for many Afghanis, a tolerable alternative to the current government and its Western allies. This is not my liberal whiny projection: This is McChrystal’s analysis.

Winning the war, McChrystal says, will require remaking the Afghan government into an effective, relatively uncorrupt institution that can win the support of its own people. But where he’s fairly specific about what the U.S. can do to improve its efforts in Afghanistan, he’s rather less so when it comes to improving Afghani governance. There’s stuff the U.S. can to do assist that process, but it will have to be done by the Afghanis themselves.

Given what we know of Afghanistan’s history, do we really want to commit the lives of more American soldiers to fighting there on the hope the country’s native government will get its act together?

McChrystal is, from what I can tell, honorable and smart. He wants to win the war he’s been given, and that’s his job. But his analysis about how to win the war has a gaping hole that I’m not sure can be filled. Perhaps it’s time for the U.S. to give up the nation-building mission, leave Afghanis to make or unmake their own culture, and focus solely on military actions that bloody Al Qaeda’s nose. This is far from a perfect solution; there probably are no perfect solutions.

Afghanistan

I don’t write about the war in Afghanistan very much because I’m not certain what opinion to have about it. On one hand, I think the initial invasion way back in 2001 very much made sense — Al Qaeda had a haven there, and Al Qaeda was clearly behind the attacks on America.

But eight years have passed, and we seem to be digging in deeper. And though I’ve continued to support the war in Afghanistan as “the good war” — Iraq never was — I’m now not entirely certain that the war is actually keeping America safer — which is what the war is supposed to be about, right?

Don’t get me wrong: If we leave,  Afghanistan will probably be a failed state that serves as a breeding ground for terrorists. But here’s a problem: We’re there, and Afghanistan is a failed state that serves as a breeding ground for terrorists. That’s what Afghanistan does.

I’m still not certain what opinion to have. But I’m increasingly ready to lean toward withdrawal. We shouldn’t kid ourselves: Bad things will happen in Afghanistan if we leave. But bad things are always happening in Afghanistan; the United States’ job isn’t to make Afghanistan awesome — it’s to make this country reasonably safe. I’m ready to be convinced that staying in Afghanistan actually does that job. Right now, though, this war is losing the benefit of my doubt.