Ex-Congressman charged with supporting Al Qaeda

Didn't see this one coming.

A former congressman and delegate to the United Nations was indicted Wednesday as part of a terrorist fundraising ring that allegedly sent more than $130,000 to an al-Qaida and Taliban supporter who has threatened U.S. and international troops in Afghanistan.

Mark Deli Siljander, a Michigan Republican when he was in the House, was charged with money laundering, conspiracy and obstructing justice for allegedly lying about lobbying senators on behalf of an Islamic charity that authorities said was secretly sending funds to terrorists.

Without trying to assess the strength of the charges -- there's not enough information to do that -- let me just point out a couple of thoughts:

Thank goodness it was a Republican. Can you imagine all the apoplectic aneurysms among right-wing bloggers if it had been a Democrat? With Siljander, they'll of course explain that he's just one guy, doesn't represent all Republicans and was probably a RINO anyway. Had it been a Democrat, on the other hand, he would have been a representative poster child for the Democratic Party, damning evidence of the corruption and disloyalty inherent in the Democratic character, and something that all current Democratic officeholders must answer for. Ain't blind partisanship fun?

The charges aren't all that explosive. He's essentially accused of lobbying on behalf of a charity, a charity that we declared a terrorist supporter because some of its money ended up in the hands of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Hekmatyar's a bad guy now -- a declared supporter of Osama bin Laden -- but his is a common story in the region: we were a big supporter of his when he was fighting the Soviets, walked away when the Soviets left, and then found ourselves fighting against him when we invaded Afghanistan. Sending him cash may well constitute "terrorist support", but it's not a simple thing. And Siljander's guilt will rest largely on how much he knew about the charity's activities.

The most damning charges address how his lobbying was funded: it claims he conspired with the charity to illegally use money donated by USAID. He also denied doing any lobbying for the group. If true, that's enough to sink him for corruption, and cast doubt on on his truthfulness, which in turn would suggest greater involvement and culpability for money reaching Hekmatyar.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post notes that the problem might be Siljander's district, inasmuch as his predecessor was also a Republican, and is also in hot water:

It was a shocker when David A. Stockman, the one-time congressman from the Sixth (actually the 4th back then, before redistricting) who went on to become President Reagan's White House budget director in the early 1980s, was indicted last year on charges of conspiracy and securities fraud involving a Michigan auto parts company.

Now we learn that Stockman's successor in Congress, Mark Deli Siljander, was indicted today for his role in an alleged terrorist fundraising ring.

Such an observation requires taking two data points and calling it a trend, while ignoring that the current officeholder, Fred Upton, is also a Republican and has served since 1986. But it's still interesting.

All in all, more evidence that claiming one party is inherently more patriotic, loyal or honest than the other is dumb.

Hall of Shame updated.

Siljander, politics, midtopia

We had to destroy the village in order to save it

That seems to be the logic behind spy chief Mike McConnell's breezy description of his plan to monitor every bit of communication on the Internet. This according to a wide-ranging interview (not yet online) in New Yorker magazine.

The nation's top spy, Michael McConnell, thinks the threat of cyberarmageddon! is so great that the U.S. government should have unfettered and warrantless access to U.S. citizens' Google search histories, private e-mails and file transfers, in order to spot the cyberterrorists in our midst.

It's hard to believe he would actually suggest such a thing. But it's not just an outraged Wired blogger saying it. So is the Wall Street Journal. And myriad other outlets.

Unless McConnell's own description of his plan is completely off the mark, I can't think of a meaningful debate to have over it. Even if he's right -- that massive eavesdropping is the only way to catch cyberterrorists or terrorists using the Internet to organize attacks -- the proposed solution is so violative of common notions of privacy that it is simply beyond consideration.

And what happens when the terrorists switch to snail mail -- will the government suddenly find it necessary to open and read everybody's letters?

McConnell's NSA background really comes through on issues like this. The NSA, after all, is a giant data vacuum, sucking up information a thousand different ways from a thousand classified sources. That's the hammer he's used to, and it's natural that every problem he encounters looks like a nail.

But the NSA listens in on overseas conversations, not domestic ones. What McConnell has essentially proposed is turning that capacity inward, on to our own citizens, in a surveillance society that would put the secret police of even the most tightly controlled dictatorship to shame.

Sure, there would be legal protections: no getting thrown in a dark hole simply for saying something unkind about the government. At least, not yet or not often.

But it shifts the whole balance of power between citizen and government. A limited government is prevented from knowing too much about you, and thus is powerless to misuse information it does not have. A limited citizenry surrenders the information but trusts government-enforced laws to protect it from ... the government.

Fox guarding the henhouse, anyone?

Its like the apocryphal crocodile bird, which walks into the mouths of crocodiles and picks junk off their teeth. Generally, it doesn't get eaten. But it's totally at the mercy of the croc. Is that freedom?

The government has legitimate law-enforcement and national-security needs, and surveillance is part of their toolbox. But it's a limited tool for a reason. If we cannot protect ourselves from terrorists by using warrants, then we either have to come up with a different strategy or just get used to living with a higher level of risk. Freedom isn't free, to put a different twist on an overused saying.

So, to McConnell: Not just no, but hell no.

McConnell, security, politics, midtopia

Torture is in the eye of the beholder

President Bush declares "we don't torture." But that's only true if you accept his definition of the term -- which apparently doesn't include several techniques that most other people consider torture. Dan Froomkin writes:

The bill would require U.S. intelligence agencies to follow interrogation rules adopted by the armed forces last year....

Those rules explicitly prohibit "forcing detainees to be naked, perform sexual acts, or pose in a sexual manner; placing hoods or sacks over detainees' heads or duct tape over their eyes; beating, shocking, or burning detainees; threatening them with military dogs; exposing them to extreme heat or cold; conducting mock executions; depriving them of food, water, or medical care; and waterboarding."

Okay, I'll side with Bush on the forcing to be naked and sexual posing. That's humiliating, and shouldn't be allowed, but it's not torture.

But the rest?

Bush relies on the sophistry of "not telling our enemies what methods we use" as his excuse for opposing such clear bills. But that makes little sense. Yes, you don't publish a manual of interrogation methods. But if you can't label a given technique torture, then you can't meaningfully apply a law that outlaws torture -- and thus any claims that "we don't torture" are meaningless and unenforceable.

Froomkin also covers the contempt of Congress citations issued to Karl Rove and Josh Bolten for refusing to turn over documents related to the U.S. attorney firings. Interestingly, Republican senators Arlen Specter and Charles Grassley voted in favor of the citations -- deflating to some extent accusation that the charges are purely politically motivated.

For its part, the White House repeated its meaningless offer to let Rove and Bolten be interviewed without oaths or transcripts. And it vowed that the Justice Department would not enforce the contempt citations, preventing the issue -- which, questions of right or wrong aside, boils down to a separation-of-powers spat -- from being heard in the courts.

As Froomkin writes:

The White House position, of course, exposes an amazing conundrum: That the same Justice Department whose politicization is being investigated is also in a position to hand out get-out-of-testifying-free cards.

This may be within the executive's power, but it's not right. Both sides should agree to have the matter reviewed by the judiciary, which can rule on whether Congress has the power of oversight in this matter. If so, the documents must be turned over; if not, they don't.

But the scorched earth stonewalling by the White House serves no legitimate purpose.

torture, Bolten, Rove, politics, midtopia

The terror plot that wasn't

You knew it, I knew it, now finally the government knows it: The doofuses known as the "Liberty City Seven", who were arrested last year and charged with plotting to blow up the Sears Tower, were not exacly poster children for terrorism. Their trial ended today, with one acquittal and deadlocks on the remaining six defendants.

I'm all for stopping terrorist plots before they get anywhere near the operational stage, but from the beginning it seemed obvious that these jokers not only weren't anywhere near operational, it would have taken a minor miracle for them to have gotten there -- if indeed that was their goal.

That being obvious, it was exceedingly foolish of the government -- in the personage of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, who personally announced the "foiling" of the plot -- to put its credibility on the line with this case, insisting that the group was "emblematic" of the future face of Al-Qaeda, practically Public Enemy Number One.

Even back then, the flimsiness of this case -- and the apparent incompetence of the defendants -- led many to conclude that the government's description of the terror threat was overblown. Today's verdict will simply reinforce that, and mean the government will have a harder time getting people to take real threats seriously.

To be sure, the verdicts weren't an exoneration of the defendants. The acquitted man, Lyglenson Lemorin, had left the group months before the arrests. The deadlock over the other six is neither conviction nor exoneration. Clearly, at least some jurors thought there was enough evidence to convict each of them. And the government has vowed to retry them.

If the government seriously believes they were a threat, then it should do so. But it should take a good hard look at the evidence and decide if that's truly the case. High-profile prosecutions of ineffective wannabes undermines the fight against terrorism in the long run.

Liberty City Seven, terrorism, politics, midtopia

Data-mining program dropped

The Department of Homeland Security has dropped one of its most ambitious data-mining projects after determining that it was cumbersome and had violated privacy rules.

Known as ADVISE and begun in 2003, the Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement program was developed by the department and the Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest national laboratories for use by many DHS components, including immigration, customs, border protection, biological defense and its intelligence office.

The problems: They tested it for two years with real data instead of made-up data, violating privacy rules; and analysts found it "cumbersome" to use. Translation: it didn't work as intended.

Which has always been my problem with data-mining. It's great in theory, and I have no philosophical problem with it if personally identifiable information is protected. But the privacy worries are real -- this was the second data-mining project to violate privacy rules -- and connecting the dots turns out to be far more difficult than envisioned.

We should keep working on such systems to perfect them. But there should be two caveats: a sort of "proof of concept" that data-mining actually works, and strict privacy protections so that ordinary people don't find their data being bandied about by government bureaucrats.

data-mining, politics, midtopia

Verdict reached in Padilla case

Latest story is here.

The verdict will be announced in about an hour. I'm home with a sick child, but I'll try to update after the announcement.

Padilla, politics, midtopia

Eavesdropping sound and fury

Dahlia's mad.

This past Sunday, a heap of Democrats voted to rush through changes to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law that governs electronic surveillance of anyone in this country. The new law expands the authority of the attorney general to approve the monitoring of phone calls and e-mails to suspected overseas terrorists from unknowing American citizens. Make no mistake about it. The vote to update FISA rewarded the AG for years of missteps and misstatements by giving him expanded authority to enforce the president's alarming constitutional vision. Sans oversight. Sans judicial approval.

Strong stuff. But it seems highly misdirected to me. All in all I'm unpersuaded by all the sound-and-fury about the revised eavesdropping bill.

I consider myself a civil liberties fanatic, and have been harshly critical of aspects of the NSA program. I'm all for listening in on bad guys, but a warrant should be required when "U.S. persons" (U.S. citizens or resident aliens on American soil) are the target or can reasonably be expected to be overheard -- in short, the existing FISA standard. This basically boils down to a simple rule: people overseas can be monitored freely, without warrants. People located on American soil can only be monitored after obtaining a warrant (with certain exceptions designed to allow warrantless monitoring of foreign spies).

(Being a practical sort of civil libertarian, I'm actually willing to go one step beyond FISA, and not care if a U.S. person is overheard during an eavesdropping effort aimed at an overseas target. If an Al Qaeda operative in Pakistan takes a call from someone in Detroit, there's no good reason to ignore that call -- though if the government wants to target the Detroit end, it needs to get a warrant.)

So why do I not share Dahlia's outrage? Because the bill in question was a narrowly focused and badly needed update of the FISA law. The facts at issue are these: A large percentage of foreign communications pass through data switches in the United States. Technically that meant the government needed to get a warrant to listen in on those calls, even if both ends of the conversation were in foreign countries, because the tapping was taking place on American soil.

While consistent with the letter of the FISA law, this interpretation clearly violated the spirit of it, to no good purpose. Which is why hardly anybody disagrees with the fundamental point: the law needed to be updated to clarify that such purely foreign communications can be monitored without warrants.

All the huffing and puffing is over reporting requirements and the standards for review of wiretapping decisions. While legitimate issues, they hardly constitute the total Democratic capitulation -- or for that matter, hypocritical about-face -- that Dahlia describes. The bill is still narrowly focused to address a legitimate problem, and still contains specific prohibitions against domestic spying. It lacks "judicial approval" for a very simple reason: monitoring foreign communications has never required judicial approval.

I haven't read the bill in full yet, so there might well be other technical flaws in it. But the broad outline is pretty solid. This is the sort of common-sense legislation one would hope for in such an instance: one that takes civil liberties seriously, but doesn't needlessly hamper the data collection that is so useful to our security.

civil liberties, FISA, NSA, politics, midtopia

Illegal raids, should-be-legal spying

A couple of interesting court rulings on the extent of government power.

CONGRESS OFF-LIMITS TO FBI
A federal appeals court has ruled that the FBI's raid on the legislative office of Rep. William Jefferson violated the Constitution, by allowing the executive branch to interfere with legislative business -- apparently because legislative documents were among those confiscated. It ordered the FBI to return those documents -- but not other, nonlegislative records.

That leaves unclear whether the FBI can use the remaining records in its case against Jefferson, or whether the appeals court has carved out a zone of criminal immunity inside the Capitol. Apparently that decision will be left up to the trial judge -- subject to appeal, of course.

At the time I thought that the FBI raid was legal, despite bipartisan Congressional objections, because the raid was narrowly focused and based around a properly grounded search warrant. And it seemed silly to establish a legal situation where a Congressman could safeguard incriminating documents simply by keeping them in his legislative office.

But that might be exactly what the court has established. While I recognize that Congress needs to be protected from executive-branch coercion, surely the Founders didn't envision an application that was so transparently stupid on a practical level. Nobody is above the law, not even Congressmen hiding out on Capitol Hill. This ruling gives Congress legal protections that not even the President has.

Update: The ever-dependable crew over at Stubborn Facts is assembling a legally informed view of the ruling. Here's the full text (pdf) of the ruling itself.

Update II: Pat at SF has now read the ruling, and I'm pleased to see that his opinion matches mine.

COURT RULING PROMPTS FISA REVISIONS
The Washington Post is reporting that earlier this year a FISA court judge ruled that the NSA cannot snoop on communications routing stations in the United States, even when both the sender and recipient are overseas.

This is a pretty big deal. FISA allows warrantless eavesdropping on foreign communications, but pretty much prevents it domestically. But thanks to the nature of the global telecommunications system -- and the evolution of the Internet -- a sizable chunk of foreign traffic is routed through servers in the United States. The FISA ruling placed a sizable chunk of that traffic off limits on a technicality.

While the ruling might have been technically correct -- I don't know -- it certainly violates the spirit of the original FISA law, as well as common sense. If it's legal to spy on the communications between two people, it shouldn't matter if that communication happens to be routed through American soil. The criteria should be based on the people being targeted, not the technical details of how they're communicating.

So Democrats are -- and should be -- scrambling to update the law so that such eavesdropping is legal again. And while in earlier years -- and a Republican majority -- Bush simply ignored laws he didn't like, now he is going about things the proper way, pushing Congress to make specific revisions to the law -- revisions that are much narrower than the sweeping, retroactive approval he sought from the previous Congress.

Of such small steps is respect for the rule of law made.

civil liberties, William Jefferson, eavesdropping, NSA, politics, midtopia

Gonzales the truthteller?

The New York Times (alert, "liberal media" claimants) has a go at absolving Alberto Gonzales of lying to Congress.

The question, you may recall (primer here), involves whether Gonzales lied to Congress about the amount of internal dissent over the NSA eavesdropping program. There were three possible answers:

1. Yes.

2. No, because being a misleading weasel he was referring to the later, modified version of the program rather than the earlier, controversial one.

3. No, because he was referring to a totally separate program.

Earlier stories suggested the answer was #2, but the Times story suggests that it's #3, and that Gonzales was referring to the NSA data-mining program, not the warrantless eavesdropping program.

There's some self-congratulation at work here, inasmuch as the Times first broke the story of the data-mining effort. But it's a plausible explanation.

The only problem is, if the Times is right, why did James Comey -- the man whose testimony set off this whole controversy -- suggest that the whole thing was about the eavesdropping program, not the data-mining effort? Both of them can't be right, can they?

They can -- if we accept the premise that both Comey and Gonzales were punctilious about details to the point of silliness.

Take this scenario out for a spin:

The "eavesdropping program", broadly defined, includes both data-mining and wiretapping.

When it came time to reauthorize it, the data-mining provision was far more controversial than the wiretapping provision.

So the confrontation at the hospital was mostly about the data-mining provision, but it was all part of the decision whether to reauthorize the overall eavesdropping program.

Thus Comey is right when he describes the confrontation in the context of the eavesdropping program. And Gonzales is right when he splits the program into parts in order to make a distinction between the publicly admitted wiretapping effort and the still-unadmitted data-mining effort.

But neither Comey nor Gonzales bothers to clarify their testimony -- despite it being abundantly clear that their comments have caused confusion -- because doing so would require admitting the existence of the data-mining effort.

That's a pretty tortuous path of speculation and assumption in order to show that neither man lied. And it doesn't explain why they couldn't simply explain the distinction in private briefings. So to adopt this scenario, you must further believe that the Congressmembers have been so briefed, and are posing knowingly misleading and false questions to Gonzales in public simply to embarrass him.

Even if you believe that about Democrats, why would you believe it about the Republicans on the panel? And what would keep Gonzales from making a pointed rebuttal, along the lines of "I've explained all that in private, as you well know, Senator"? So that, too, seems unlikely.

All in all, it seems difficult to reconcile Gonzales' and Comey's testimony in a way that results in outcome #3. Might the Times story be correct? Yes. But if it is, then Comey either lied or misled. Of the two, though, Gonzales is less trustworthy and had more incentive to lie. So the answer seems more likely to be #2, with #1 as a possibility.

Update: Tully over at Stubborn Facts does, indeed, assume the worst about the members of Congress. He doesn't address the inconsistencies with that theory, though.

NSA, Comey, Gonzales, politics, midtopia

Bush's "Al Qaeda" mantra

President Bush gave a speech earlier this week in which he laid out his view of Al-Qaeda's influence, presence and history in Iraq. It's a bit of a classic, both for what it admits and what it doesn't, and the most recent example of what I recently called his "rhetorical war" in Iraq.

His main point seems to be proving that AQ is in Iraq. That makes the whole speech is a bit of misdirection, inasmuch as nobody denies their presence. Critics tend to point out that AQ in Iraq accounts for a small minority of the combatants we face and that its ties to AQ Central are not that of a directly-controlled subsidiary, but of a loosely associated "affiliate."

The problem is that Bush tends to paint all of our adversaries in Iraq as being part of AQ, which simply is not true.

Some excerpts and my responses:

Al Qaeda in Iraq was founded by a Jordanian terrorist, not an Iraqi. His name was Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

Okey-doke.

In 2001, coalition forces destroyed Zarqawi's Afghan training camp, and he fled the country and he went to Iraq, where he set up operations with terrorist associates long before the arrival of coalition forces.

Uh-huh. In a part of Iraq not controlled by Saddam. Here Bush admits (despite himself) that there was no terror link with Iraq prior to our invasion.

In the violence and instability following Saddam's fall, Zarqawi was able to expand dramatically the size, scope, and lethality of his operation.

He elides over the fact that this expansion was made possible by our lack of troops, the disbanding of the Iraqi army, and myriad other missteps on our part thanks to the fatuous nature of our occupation plan.

In 2004, Zarqawi and his terrorist group formally joined al Qaida, pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden, and he promised to "follow his orders in jihad."

Again, as an affiliate, not a wholly owned subsidiary.

the Zarqawi-bin Laden merger gave al Qaida in Iraq -- quote -- "prestige among potential recruits and financiers." The merger also gave al Qaida's senior leadership -- quote -- "a foothold in Iraq to extend its geographic presence ... to plot external operations ... and to tout the centrality of the jihad in Iraq to solicit direct monetary support elsewhere."

In other words, as critics have said for years, our invasion gave AQ a huge boost in recruiting and fundraising.

The merger between al Qaida and its Iraqi affiliate is an alliance of killers -- and that is why the finest military in the world is on their trail.

Except he gets his causation exactly backwards. AQ in Iraq exists because we invaded, not the other way around. And if Zarqawi was a proximate cause of our decision to invade, why didn't we try to take him or his camp out earlier?

Zarqawi was killed by U.S. forces in June 2006. He was replaced by another foreigner -- an Egyptian named Abu Ayyub al-Masri. His ties to the al Qaida senior leadership are deep and longstanding.... Many of al-Qaida in Iraq's senior leaders are foreign terrorists.

Okay.

Many of al Qaida in Iraq's other senior leaders are also foreign terrorists.

Eliding over the fact that most of the organization is Iraqi -- and those native members were not fighting us before we invaded Iraq. But that's almost irrelevant. Once again, Bush focuses on proving details about AQ while ignoring the larger fact that AQ in Iraq is only a small part of the total resistance.

"Our intelligence community concludes that `al-Qaida and its regional node in Iraq are united in their overarching strategy' and they say they that al-Qaida's senior leaders and their operatives in Iraq `see al-Qaida in Iraq as part of al-Qaida's decentralized chain of command, not as a separate group.'"

However they see themselves, the fact remains: AQ in Iraq is a separate group that was not involved in 9/11, because it did not exist before we invaded Iraq. Even if it has now allied itself with AQ, it is still not the same group that attacked us on 9/11.

You might wonder why some in Washington insist on making this distinction about the enemy in Iraq. It's because they know that if they can convince America we're not fighting bin Laden's al Qaida there, they can paint the battle in Iraq as a distraction from the real war on terror.

Bush's favorite "some people say" strawman is on full display here. He says the distinction between AQ and AQ in Iraq isn't important, and on one level he's right: they're both groups of bad people that deserve a few 500-pound bombs dropped on their heads. But the distinction is important -- just not for the reason Bush claims. It's important because the president keeps insisting that AQ in Iraq consists of the same people who attacked us on 9/11, and that's simply untrue.

Separately, Iraq is a distraction not because AQ in Iraq is a bunch of goldfish fanciers; it's a distraction because:

1. We helped create AQ in Iraq;

2. In order to fight AQ's 10 percent of the resistance we're also having to fight the other 90 percent -- people who weren't shooting at us before we invaded;

3. It's tying up our military and costing hundreds of billions of dollars, resources that could be put to much better use elsewhere;

4. It's making AQ stronger.

al Qaida is the only jihadist group in Iraq with stated ambitions to make the country a base for attacks outside Iraq.

Ambitions are highly distinct from capabilities. The one attack they pulled off, bombing a wedding in Jordan, backfired hugely on them.

Al Qaida in Iraq shares Osama bin Laden's goal of making Iraq a base for its radical Islamic empire, and using it as a safe haven for attacks on America.

Thing is, Iraq is never going to be fertile ground for AQ, even if we leave. Especially if we leave. Iraq is not a conservative, tribal country like Afghanistan, where a significant portion of the people and leadership support AQ's atavistic brand of Sunni fundamentalism. If we leave, who is going to support them? The Shiite majority? No. Shiite Iran? No. The Kurds? No. Even the Sunnis are getting heartily sick of them and their fanaticism, tolerating them largely because of our presence. If we leave, AQ in Iraq will find themselves besieged from all sides. They may well persist, but it would be no safe haven.

Further, our withdrawal may hasten the marginalization of AQ's fanatics. Because the day AQ blows up innocent Muslim Arabs without our presence as an excuse is the day they lose.

Bush's only real strategy these days appears to be "gotta keep fighting; gotta keep fighting." While doggedness in war can be a good trait, it's not particularly helpful if we're fighting the wrong fight. Is Iraq the best way -- or even an effective way -- to combat terrorism? Bush's own words and intelligence reports suggest the answer is "no."

Iraq, terrorism, Bush, politics, midtopia

Not your typical whistleblower

The New York Times today has a nice profile of Lt. Col Stephen Abraham, the man whose testimony has cast a shadow on the legitimacy of the Guantanamo terror tribunals and seems to have led the United States Supreme Court to reverse itself and hear arguments about the legal rights of detainees.

His political and professional pedigree make it difficult to accuse him of acting out of base motivations:

A lawyer in civilian life, he had been decorated for counterespionage and counterterrorism work during 22 years as a reserve Army intelligence officer in which he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel.... A political conservative who says he cried when Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency, he says he has remained a reservist throughout his adult life to repay the country for the opportunities it offered his family. His father is a Holocaust survivor who emigrated after the Second World War.

He served at the tribunal in 2004-2005, and officially registered many misgivings at the time. But he didn't decide to step forward publicly until he was contacted in 2006 by a law firm representing detainees, who read him an affidavit describing the tribunal process as orderly and carefully considered. Knowing that wasn't true, he agreed to testify. Clearly, these were not the actions of a man seeking publicity.

When the story first came out, I mentioned that one problem with Abraham's account was that it was anecdotal: we had no way to know if his experience was typical, or what the reasons behind it were.

But it turns out he had access to a lot of information, not just his isolated experience on a single tribunal panel.

As an intelligence officer responsible for running the central computer depository of evidence for the hearings, he said, he saw many of the documents in hundreds of the 558 cases. He also worked as a liaison with intelligence agencies....

What sort of problems did he find?

It was obvious, Colonel Abraham said, that officials were under intense pressure to show quick results. Quickly, he said, he grew concerned about the quality of the reports being used as evidence. The unclassified evidence, he said, lacked the kind of solid corroboration he had relied on throughout his intelligence career. “The classified information,” he added, “was stripped down, watered down, removed of context, incomplete and missing essential information.”

To demonstrate the sometimes laughable nature of the evidence, consider this public example:

In a hearing on Oct. 26, 2004, a transcript shows, one detainee was told that another had identified him as having attended a terrorism training camp. The detainee asked that his accuser be brought to testify. “We don’t know his name,” the senior officer on the hearing panel said.

In another case, an Afghani was being held because he had associated with jihadis. He admitted to doing so -- in the 1980s, during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when "jihadi" had a whole different meaning. He asked the tribunal if that was the basis of the accusations against him. "We don't know what that time frame was, either," the tribunal's senior officer replied.

Pentagon officials say Abraham simply wasn't in a position to know the full extent of the tribunal process, despite his access to the central database. But Abraham makes his point on more direct grounds:

Colonel Abraham said that in meetings with top officials of the office, it was clear that [innocent] findings were discouraged. “Anything that resulted in a ‘not enemy combatant’ would just send ripples through the entire process,” he said. “The interpretation is, ‘You got the wrong result. Do it again.’ ”

As noted in my earlier post, when his panel decided unanimously that a detainee was not an enemy combatant, they were told to reconsider. They declined.

As it turns out, the story didn't end there -- a move that again calls into serious question the impartiality of the hearings.

Two months later, apparently after Pentagon officials rejected the first decision, the detainee’s case was heard by a second panel. The conclusion, again by a vote of 3 to 0, was quite different: “The detainee is properly classified as an enemy combatant and is a member of or associated with Al Qaeda.”

One wonders how many do-overs the Pentagon was allowed in order to get a "correct" verdict.

Damning as all of this is, caveats remain. This is largely a story that relies on one source -- Abraham himself. He seems a credible witness, and what he says is both compelling and specific. But until his account is subjected to cross-examination or attempted refutation, it should not be taken as gospel.

But it's a reason to look forward to his testimony before Congress on Thursday, and the Supreme Court hearing this fall.

Guantanamo, terrorism, Abraham, politics, midtopia

The rhetorical war in Iraq

Last week, the administration released an intelligence summary that warns Al-Qaeda is getting stronger.

The president pointed to this as proof that Iraq is central to fighting AQ. Asked if the report actually demonstrates that Bush's efforts to defeat AQ aren't working, he replied that things would be far worse if he hadn't invaded Iraq.

Mull that over for a second. It's a rhetorical get-out-of-jail-free card. You're Bush, and six years later things are getting worse, not better. No problem! Just claim that things would really be dire if not for your brilliant leadership. It's a completely unrefutable claim, because you can't rewind history and try again.

Unfortunately for Bush, such a bald assertion relies heavily on his credibility on security matters. And he has (charitably) almost none left. He's made so many blithe assertions that have turned out to be flat wrong that nobody believes him anymore.

This ties in with Bush's continuing efforts to tie our opponents in Iraq to 9/11. During a speech at the end of June, he noted that the people we're fighting in Iraq "are the people that attacked us on September the 11th."

Except that for the most part, they aren't. Al Qaeda in Iraq is a mostly local group that arose in 2003 in response to our invasion of Iraq. It has established some contacts with AQ Central and pledged it's loyalty to AQ. But they are at best a local franchisee using the AQ brand name. They are not the people, or even the same group, that attacked us in 2001. Further, they represent only a small portion of the combatants in Iraq.

No matter how you slice it, painting Iraq as a war on Al-Qaeda is a flat lie. "War on Islamic extremism" might be closer to the truth, and even that doesn't encompass the growing, unrelated sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni.

As far as AQ goes, invading Iraq did nothing but help them. Sure, we're killing a few insurgents and jihadists, and some of them are truly bad people. But we haven't hurt AQ at all. Instead, we've given them a major recruiting tool and a place for jihadists of all stripes to hone their tactics -- tactics that are starting to show up in Afghanistan. AQ itself sits fat, happy and generally safe in the tribal regions of Pakistan.

Speaking of which, it was a hopeful sign when Pakistani troops stormed the Red Mosque in Islamabad. Any government that wants to be taken seriously simply cannot allow armed groups to challenge them, and the extremists in Pakistan have simply gotten bolder and louder in the absence of government pressure. Gen. Pervez Musharraf's born-of-necessity truce with extremists bought temporary stability in Pakistan, but it gave extremists a safe haven that has helped destabilize Afghanistan.

Now tribal leaders have renounced the truce, with accompanying violence, and Musharraf is moving thousands of troops into the region to try to keep order. Sucky as it is for him, it's good for us. Fighting with Pakistani troops diverts resources the Taliban would otherwise focus on Afghanistan; the military incursion disrupts their rest and training operations; and Musharraf's survival is increasingly tied to defeating the insurgents. All these things should help -- assuming Musharraf both survives and doesn't cut another deal.

On the downside, the fighting could spur more tribal members to join the fight against either us or Musharraf. But at least we're attacking a known insurgent stronghold, not galavanting off on a distracting adventure in, say, Iraq.

A fight like this -- against known extremists in known extremist areas -- is the kind of fight I and many others can support. It may be hard, it may be bloody, but there's no doubt about who the enemy is or why we're fighting them.

Which puts the lie to one final Bush rationalization. On Thursday he referred to the American people's "war fatigue", as if we're all wrung out by four years of fighting.

Maybe he just means people are tired of the war. But the "war fatigue" locution rings strongly of a paternalistic displacement of blame. The war's fine; people are just (understandably, but wrongly) getting "fatigued" by it.

Framed as such, the idea of "war fatigue" is nonsense. The term calls to mind a society stretched by privation, the way the French were wrung out by the end of World War I -- economy in shambles, bled white by the carnage at the front. But as far as Iraq goes, what's there to be fatigued about? The war simply doesn't impact your average citizen except as headlines and images on TV. Bush has borrowed the money to fight it; the war has been accompanied by tax cuts, not tax hikes. It's being fought with a volunteer military, and most Americans don't actually know anybody who has served, much less anyone who was killed or wounded. The military death toll, while the highest since Vietnam, is still pretty small measured by population or even a percentage of soldiers in theater.

People aren't tired of the war on terror; they are tired of the war in Iraq. But it's not because of the strain it has put on society. It's because the war has been shown to be a misbegotten idea badly executed, a mind-bogglingly expensive waste of resources, lives and national prestige.

While Al-Qaeda recovered and grew stronger. Nice work, Mr. President.

Iraq, terrorism, politics, midtopia

The perils of victimhood

Over at BlogCritics, an American English teacher in Japan has an interesting post about the similar ways in which Japan and America selectively embrace their history.

Many Japanese, she says, "tend to talk as if World War II started in August 1945." By this she means they focus on the harm they suffered in the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, not what their country did to others in the years before that. "It is the rare Japanese who brings up Pearl Harbor," she notes.

But America (and most nations and people) suffers from the same myopia. In America's case its a myopia about our modern Pearl Harbor, 9/11. While we (rhetorically) ask "why do they hate us?" we apparently aren't all that interested in the answer, preferring to think (in Japanese fashion) that world history began anew on September 11.

When libertarian Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul suggested in a debate that 9/11 didn’t happen in a vacuum and that we would do well to consider the consequences of U.S. actions overseas, he was pounced on by the other candidates.... Apparently, considering the causes of terrorism is not a possibility.

This isn't a new argument, of course. But the comparison with Japanese historical amnesia is an interesting twist that may lend some clarity. That comparison is not perfect -- Japan's role in its own demise was clear and within the established understanding of a conventional war, while our role in the causes of 9/11 are more indirect, subjective and murky. But the root point is the same: A general disinterest in what came before, especially any attempt to turn the camera on ourselves.

Such self-examination does not excuse the atrocity -- nothing does. But it would help explain how those 19 hijackers came to be aboard airplanes in the United States -- as opposed to, say, France or Britain -- on that brilliant fall day. Understanding the logic is the key to combating it; we cannot be assured of preventing another 9/11 until we understand what led to the first one.

terrorism, 9-11, Japan, politics, midtopia

Did Gonzales lie to Congress again?

Let's take a look.

As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. "There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse," Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005.

Six days earlier, the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Gonzales' defense? Well, he doesn't make one personally. But Justice officials laid out two main arguments:

He might not have read the reports. Setting aside whether that reflects poorly on his management of the agency, we get to a more germaine criticism: Maybe he shouldn't be making sweeping assertions to Congress if he hasn't actually examined the data in question.

The reported violations weren't "real" violations. By this, officials mean that the violations were more technicalities than actual abuses. And in some cases, this appears to be true: a mistyped phone number in a National Security Letter, for example, which led FBI agents to eavesdrop on the wrong phone line.

Considering Gonzales talked about "abuses" to Congress at the 2005 hearing (he doesn't mention them in his opening statement (pdf), but gets into it a little bit in the full testimony) it appears that he didn't actually lie -- assuming he actually read the reports, and they didn't contain any "verified" instances of abuse. Mistakes and good-faith misjudgments don't really qualify as abuse, though they can be problematic in and of themselves: One reason not to give government sweeping powers is because of the damage such mistakes can cause, and a claim of "it was a mistake" can be used to cover up actual abuses.

Should Gonzales have acknowledged some bureaucratic mishaps? Arguably, yes. But that's not what he was being asked about, and a certain number of mistakes are to be expected in any human endeavor. So unless better evidence emerges about what Gonzales knew at the time of his testimony, accusing him of lying simply isn't supported by the known facts.

Update: A pair of senior Justice Department officials, James Baker and Kenneth Wainstein, said they routinely informed Gonzales about problems with FBI surveillance efforts. But they did not cite instances of "abuse" of the Patriot Act powers. However careful Gonzales may have been with his language, there's still no evidence he lied, or that at the time he knew about anything more than routine bureaucratic slipups that were not the kind of problems Congress was concerned about.

Patriot Act, Gonzales, politics, midtopia

Is Bush soft on terrorism?

Anyone remember "The Path to 9/11", the ABC miniseries about events leading up to the terror attacks that day?

The film was scripted by Cyrus Nowrasteh, a screenwriter with conservative political connections, leading to charges of political bias.

(Tangent: Nowrasteh has an interesting background for a conservative, having been born in Boulder, Colo., and grown up in Madison, Wis., both notable liberal outposts. And it turns out we both graduated from the same high school, though he donned the mortarboard a good 11 years before I did).

A key scene involved the Clinton administration pulling the plug on a mission to kill Osama bin Laden out of fear that kids might get hurt, a scene portrayed in the right-wing media as evidence that the Clintonites -- in this case, Sandy Berger -- didn't have the guts to properly fight terrorism.

Surprise, surprise: it turns out Bush had has own "Path to 9/11" moment in 2005.

A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.

The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.

But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.

So does this show Bush was soft on terror? Of course not. And neither did Clinton's decision to call off a similar strike.

In Clnton's case, the problem was that shaky intelligence made a risky endeavor riskier.

In his recently published memoir, George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director, said the intelligence about Mr. bin Laden’s whereabouts during the Clinton years was similarly sparse. The information was usually only at the “50-60% confidence level,” he wrote, not sufficient to justify American military action.

“As much as we all wanted Bin Ladin dead, the use of force by a superpower requires information, discipline, and time,” Mr. Tenet wrote. “We rarely had the information in sufficient quantities or the time to evaluate and act on it.”

The 2005 mission was canceled for different reasons, though the principle remains the same. It's hard to argue with Rumsfeld's logic here:

Mr. Rumsfeld decided that the operation, which had ballooned from a small number of military personnel and C.I.A. operatives to several hundred, was cumbersome and put too many American lives at risk, the current and former officials said. He was also concerned that it could cause a rift with Pakistan, an often reluctant ally that has barred the American military from operating in its tribal areas, the officials said.

Not wanting to cheese of Pakistan has less weight, in my mind, than the complexity of the operation itself. One need only look at what happened to Jimmy Carter's effort to rescue hostages in Iran to understand why special ops missions, while meticulously planned, need to be kept as small and simple as possible.

But the key point here is that military operations always take into account two sets of conditions: political and military. The whole purpose of military action, after all, is to achieve national political goals, and the political situation determines what military actions are acceptable. I'm not talking about partisan political goals, a separate and disreputable beast entirely. But political considerations always and properly set the context within which military action is contemplated.

The story goes on to describe the frustration of some special-ops commanders at the cancellation, just as some were frustrated by the cancellation of the Clinton-era strike. Contrary to what you might expect, though, that's a good thing.

Military commanders are tasked with carrying out whatever missions are required of them, and you don't get to be a special-ops leader without being very motivated and gung-ho to do your job. The best are clear-eyed realists, of course, but their realism tends to be restricted to addressing the military problem at hand.

That is what makes them such superb military tools. But that is also precisely why the final say rests with the civilian leadership. The leadership's job is to bring careful, deliberate consideration to a decision to use force, weighing the political and diplomatic factors that the ground commanders don't. It does not make the civilians weak or wrong if they decide that the mission isn't worth it.

Nor does it automatically make them right. Politicians can be quite risk-averse, especially when the problem is something as amorphous as terrorism, something that doesn't actually threaten our existence. We have a well-developed special operations capacity that is well-suited to fighting terrorists. We should be willing to both develop it further and to use it when necessary.

But now that Bush has his own example of freezing with his hand on the trigger, perhaps we can get past simplistic arguments over who is softer on terror, and acknowledge the complex realities of bringing effective fire to bear on elusive targets in remote areas of the world. And seek to find a workable balance between excessive risk and excessive timidity.

terrorism, politics, midtopia

Ellison, conspiracies and overreaction

Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison -- the Minneapolis Democrat who is the nation's first Muslim congressman -- said something stupid Sunday.

On comparing Sept. 11 to the burning of the Reichstag building in Nazi Germany: "It's almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it and it put the leader of that country [Hitler] in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted. The fact is that I'm not saying [Sept. 11] was a [U.S.] plan, or anything like that because, you know, that's how they put you in the nut-ball box -- dismiss you."

Sorry, Keith. Saying something and then trying to disclaim it is not only intellectually discreditable -- it's not enough to keep you from being labeled a nutball on this point.

And what he was saying was dumb in and of itself. The Reichstag fire is an obvious parallel if you believe 9/11 was an inside job -- even if it's a parallel that fails on some key details. But it's irresponsible to give political and intellectual comfort to 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

Ellison could argue that he wasn't saying 9/11 was an inside job, only noting that the political effect of the WTC attack was similar to the effect of the Reichstag fire. Even if you accept that explanation, his words were inexcusably unclear on that point. A casual reading would lead a reasonable observer to conclude he does, indeed, think 9/11 was an inside job.

But reaction to Ellison's words demonstrate that nutballs on the other side of the ledger can actually make their own side come off worse for the encounter, even when dealing with such an easy target as the above.

Gary Gross at Let Freedom Ring (LFR), for example -- a semi-prominent member of the conservative blogosphere, with an average of 175 hits a day or so.

Gross' post notes the "scary" similarity between Ellison's use of the Reichstag metaphor and an earlier reference by Abdul Alim Musa, an American black Muslim who supports the Iranian government and is fairly radical, albeit in a nonviolent way.

Except that the use of the Reichstag metaphor is not even remotely surprising. As I noted above, it's an obvious historical reference to make if you want to suggest that the WTC was an inside job perpetrated for political reasons. The fact that two disparate sources refer to it is no more scary than any other mention of common referents. If Alim Musa said "It's raining cats and dogs", would anyone remark on the "scary" fact that many other Americans have used the exact same words?

Gross then segues into his second logical flaw, a comparison of Musa and CAIR's views on Osama bin Laden's role in 9/11. Musa flatly denied bin Laden's role. CAIR (a Muslim advocacy group) simply said (immediately after 9/11) that "if bin Laden was behind it, we condemn him." In Gross' world, that constitutes a "denial" by CAIR that bin Laden was involved -- at least until they were "shamed" into admitting it a couple of months later.

For logical flaw #3, Gross quotes Musa defending Hamas, then quotes CAIR criticizing the closing of a Muslim charity that the administration said supported Hamas. Except that CAIR does not express support for Hamas; it disputes the allegation that the charity supports Hamas militants.

Having made three flawed comparisons, Gross then uses logical flaw #4 to tie it all together with what he apparently thinks is a political version of the transitive property in mathematics:

1. Ellison (remember Ellison? This is a post about Ellison) equals Musa;

2. Musa equals CAIR;

3. Ergo, Ellison equals CAIR.

Except that his definition of "equal to" works something like this:

1. I don't like Bush;

2. Osama bin Laden doesn't like Bush.

3. Therefore, I agree with everything OBL does and says.

That's stupid enough; but Gross takes it one ludicrous degree further, akin to this:

4. OBL speaks Arabic;

5. Lots of Arabs speak Arabic;

6. Therefore, I speak Arabic (because of my connection to them through my supposed total agreement with OBL)

I assure you, I do not speak Arabic. And Gross' post reflects a disregard for facts and logic more breathtaking than anything Ellison said.

That doesn't excuse Ellison, who has a greater responsibility to reason thanks to his seat in Congress. He should make a clear statement on his position regarding 9/11, and stop giving aid and comfort to conspiracy theorists.

Reichstag, terrorism, 9-11, Ellison, politics, midtopia

Appeals court throws out eavesdropping lawsuit

A federal appeals court has thrown out a Detroit judge's ruling that the NSA warrantless wiretapping program was unconstitutional, saying (as expected) that the ACLU and its clients don't have standing to pursue the case.

Why do they lack standing? Because they can't prove they had been subjected to surveillance under the program.

As I've noted before, this sort of logic drives me nuts. Standing is an important legal concept, which helps ensure that someone bringing suit has a relevant interest in the case. It's a key defense against frivolous lawsuits, and keeps people, organizations and the government from intruding where they don't belong.

But in a case involving secret eavesdropping, in which the government (reasonably enough) refuses to say who or what it is monitoring, how can someone ever prove standing? By this logic, the government can have every case thrown out as long as it keeps the names of its subjects secret.

That's nonsensical. To quote my earlier rant:

It seems to me, though, that in important cases like this there should be available a broader form of standing, one that allows a court opinion to be rendered without requiring proof that the plaintiff has been specifically targeted. It would be a class-action suit of sorts, following the logic that "we're all affected by this program, either directly or indirectly, so we all have standing to question it.

That's pretty much the tack the ACLU was pursuing, so maybe they'll appeal to the Supreme Court and hope for the best. Seems like a bit of a long shot, though.

Meanwhile, a companion case out of Oregon is still alive.

Update: A detailed discussion of the case -- and the whole issue of standing -- over at Althouse.

terrorism, NSA, ACLU, politics, midtopia

The roots of jihad

A former British Islamic extremist talks about what drives militants to attack civilians. The core of the article:

Though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice.

If we were interested in justice, you may ask, how did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting such a (flawed) Utopian goal?

How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion?

There isn't enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a model of the world in which you are either a believer or an infidel.

Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same.

For centuries, the reasoning of Islamic jurists has set down rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.

But what radicals and extremists do is to take this two steps further. Their first step has been to argue that, since there is no pure Islamic state, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr (The Land of Unbelief).

Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world.

Along with many of my former peers, I was taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief.

He goes on to say that mainstream, moderate Muslims respond to extremists by trying to ignore them, which is a mistake: they must be confronted, and have the religious rug underpinning their actions yanked out from beneath them.

He even suggests one way to do so:

A handful of scholars from the Middle East have tried to put radicalism back in the box by saying that the rules of war devised so long ago by Islamic jurists were always conceived with the existence of an Islamic state in mind, a state which would supposedly regulate jihad in a responsible Islamic fashion.

In other words, individual Muslims don't have the authority to go around declaring global war in the name of Islam.

It's a start, but it will run into problems because someone will point out that such an interpretation essentially prohibits jihad entirely. But through unsatisfying sleight-of-legal-hand, not straightforward reasoning.

So rather than draw torturous limitations on jihad, how about simply renouncing the whole idea of "external" jihad? Or rather, renounce its violent expression. External jihad could be pacified into missionary work, where battles are fought in the marketplace of ideas, not with guns and bombs. And "internal" jihad -- the quest to better oneself as a Muslim -- could remain intact.

In any event, what you have here is a former militant calling for -- and suggesting a path for -- an Islamic Reformation. In passing, he also admits that violent extremists are a small minority of Muslims.

All in all, an interesting read that gives some good insight into the extremist mindset.

terrorism, religion, Islam, politics, midtopia

Iran in Iraq

The U.S. military says it has more evidence of Iranian involvement in Iraq:

Iranian operatives helped plan a January raid in Karbala in which five American soldiers were killed, an American military spokesman in Iraq said today.

Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, the military spokesman, also said that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has used operatives from the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah as a “proxy” to train and arm Shiite militants in Iraq.

There are three main bits of evidence pointing to Iranian involvement:

1. The sophistication of the attack itself, using English-speaking attackers wearing stolen U.S. uniforms and armed with detailed knowledge of the base's operations. It wasn't the sort of thing you'd normally expect the Shiite militias to pull off by themselves.

2. Militant testimony. Much of the additional proof is based on what the military says captured militants revealed under interrogation. According to them, the militans all report receiving aid from Iran or working on behalf of Iran. Damning stuff, but this is the weakest link in the chain, because there's no independent confirmation of the accounts and there's always the suspicion that "interrogation" actually means "torture" and thus the resulting information is suspect.

3. The fact that one of the captured militants, Ali Mussa DaqDuq, is a senior Hezbollah bombmaker. This is direct evidence of Hezbollah's involvement. However, it is only indirect evidence of Iranian involvement. It's always possible to argue that Hezbollah was acting on its own. On the other hand, several observers note that Hezbollah had little to gain from getting involved in Iraq; angering the United States would not help its efforts in Lebanon, and meddling in Iraq would make it seem more like the Iranian puppet it has long denied being.

So this is very close to a "smoking gun" of Iranian involvement -- and certainly enough to justify some blunt measures aimed at limiting Iranian influence, such as restricting the number and movements of Iranian representatives in Iraq, pressuring Iran diplomatically and economically and stationing significant forces on the Iranian border to stop cross-border smuggling.

All three have drawbacks. The first requires cooperation from the Iraqi government, which sees Iran as more ally than enemy; the second assumes we have any meaningful diplomatic or economic leverage; and the last may be unrealistic for several reasons: A lack of troops, the length and porousness of the border, and the fact that any buildup there will be taken as a sign of possible aggression by Iran.

Which points up a maddening fact about the situation: It may be difficult to mount much meaningful pressure on Iran over this. Hezbollah, likewise, is somewhat protected from retaliation, because an aggressive move against them could cause a further deterioration of the situation in Lebanon, something nobody in the region wants. Such a move would also be opposed by those European countries that have troops in the beefed-up U.N. peacekeeping force there -- troops that would become high-value targets if we turned the Hezbollah-Israel confrontation there into a Hezbollah-versus-the-West battle.

So the situation may simply call for hard-nosed forebearance: aggressively pursuing Iranian operatives in Iraq, accumulating evidence of Iranian involvement and using targeted strikes to take out clearly identified targets supporting the effort -- like, say, a Quds staging area just inside Iran or a Hezbollah training camp in Lebanon. As long as the strikes are carefully tailored and limited -- attacking a Hezbollah location implicated in Iraq operations, for example, not launching a broad attack on Hezbollah in general -- we could send some pointed messages while avoiding a broader conflict.

One other thing is crucial: support from the Iraqi government for moves against Iran. If that's not forthcoming -- and it may not be -- then there's no point in taking many of the other steps. Iraq has to decide if it wants Iran meddling in its affairs. If it doesn't, we can take vigorous steps to combat it. If they don't mind, it's just one more reason why we should pull out sooner rather than later.

Hezbollah, Iraq, Iran, politics, midtopia

SCOTUS to examine Guantanamo case

What a difference two months makes.

After revelations that the military's Combatant Status Review Tribunals might have been, shall we say, a bit of a farce, the Supreme Court overrode administration objections (and reversed its own April decision) and agreed to decide whether Guantanamo detainees can contest their detention in U.S. courts.

How unusual is this? Very.

The move to grant a motion for re-hearing in a previously denied case is rare. Court observers pointed to a 1968 case as the closest parallel to what happened Friday.

Back in April, three justices wanted to take the case: Breyer, Ginsburg and Souter. So this decision indicates that at least two other justices changed their minds. I'll just hazard a guess that their names are Kennedy and Stevens.

The case, which is expected to be heard in the fall, will be interesting on several levels. For one thing, it will involve the judicial branch ruling on the constitutionality of a legislative move stripping the judiciary of the power to hear detainee challenges.

Assuming the tribunal revelations were a triggering event, it could also indicate the court will take a jaundiced view of the administration's key defense: the tribunals themselves.

The detainees' attorneys want the appeals court to allow a broad inquiry questioning the accuracy and completeness of the evidence the Combatant Status Review Tribunals gathered about the detainees, most of it classified.

The Justice Department has been seeking a limited review, saying that the findings of the military tribunals are "entitled to the highest level of deference."

But the demand for deference assumes the tribunals were carried out with integrity and due regard for the rights of prisoners. Kangaroo courts deserve no deference.

Couple that with the recent reversal for the "enemy combatant" designation, as well as the dropping of charges against other detainees because they have not been designated "alien unlawful enemy combatants" as required, and it appears the whole Combatant Status Review Tribunal process could be nullified. That would require the United States to start over from scratch, proving that each detainee deserves to be detained.

Maybe this time around they'll give the detainees some basic legal protections instead of railroading them.

The administration's handling of Guantanamo has always been a practical and moral disaster; now it's becoming a legal disaster as well. Add another line to this administration's towering record of hubris and incompetence.

Update: It'll be interesting to see if the court's decision is made moot by a Congressional push to shut down Guantanamo. Probably not, as the prisoners wouldn't be released; they'd simply be transferred elsewhere.

civil liberties, Guantanamo, politics, midtopia