Good reads

A roundup of links worth clicking on:

1. A New York Times story on an Army platoon dealing with a Baquba neighborhood that is one big booby trap. They get through without a scratch.

2. The former chief judge of the FISA court, Royce C. Lambeth, reveals some details of the court's workings. His anecdotes are interesting, and provide yet another rebuke to the White House's contention that the court functions too slowly to combat modern terrorists.

3. The CIA continues to release once-secret documents detailing their most controversial activities from 1959 to the mid-1970s, including assassination plots and domestic surveillance. They serve as a reminder of why civil liberties and governmental openness are such crucial foundations of democracy. You can dig through the documents themselves at the CIA's Freedom of Information page.

4. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank writes a somewhat sardonic column about everything Cheney.

5. A few Democrats, going a bridge too far, aren't satisfied with leaving Iraq; they want us out of Afghanistan, too. They're wrong. Afghanistan has its problems, and the conflict is fueled by the Taliban safe haven in Pakistan. But our invasion was justified, the government legitimate, the enemy beatable, and we're not stuck in the middle of an ethnic and regional cauldron. As well, the troop demands and casualty rates are much lower, so our presence there is far more sustainable. And most importantly, Afghanistan is far more likely than Iraq to return to being a terror haven if we withdraw.


FISA, Cheney, CIA, Iraq, Afghanistan, politics, midtopia

Separate but unequal justice

Raise your hand if you're surprised by this. Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

An Army officer who played a key role in the "enemy combatant" hearings at Guantanamo Bay says tribunal members relied on vague and incomplete intelligence while being pressured to rule against detainees, often without any specific evidence.

His affidavit, submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and released Friday, is the first criticism by a member of the military panels that determine whether detainees will continue to be held.

Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a 26-year veteran of military intelligence who is an Army reserve officer and a California lawyer, said military prosecutors were provided with only "generic" material that didn't hold up to the most basic legal challenges.

As generally suspected, the panels were a crock. But that's not the best part.

Abraham was asked to serve on one of the panels, and he said its members felt strong pressure to find against the detainee, saying there was "intensive scrutiny" when they declared a prisoner not to be an enemy combatant. When his panel decided the detainee wasn't an "enemy combatant," they were ordered to reconvene to hear more evidence, he said.

When the panel didn't reach the "correct" conclusion, they were ordered to try again. But that's not the best part.

Ultimately, his panel held its ground, and he was never asked to participate in another tribunal, he said.

If you're a panel member and you still insist on delivering the wrong answer, you aren't invited back!

Employ such a filtering technique two or three times, and you could end up with panels that would reach the "right" conclusion nearly every time.

To be fair, this is one man's testimony. We don't know if what happened to him was typical, or whether the decision not to let him sit on any more panels was related to the verdict rendered. More data is needed before firm conclusions can be drawn.

But this is yet another example of why legal shortcuts are a bad idea that almost guarantee miscarriages of justice.

, Guantanamo, Gitmo, terrorism, politics, midtopia

Cheney's destruction of executive power

The Washington Post is publishing an excellent four-part series examining Dick Cheney's role in the current administration, from terrorism to the economy to the environment. The first two installments are already out, with the next two coming tomorrow and Wednesday.

The series' name, "Angler", seems pretty odd until you realize it's Cheney's Secret Service codename. Though relying heavily on anonymous sources, the breadth, depth and carefulness of the reporting is impressive: More than 200 interviews with administration insiders with direct experience working with or against Cheney, who gave the reporters access to notes, calendars and other records to bolster their words. This isn't a careless, anonymously sourced hatchet job, and the story names so many names that if its claims are not accurate they would be easily demolished. This appears to be "best-practice" use of anonymous sources.

In Sunday's piece, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker detail how Cheney operates: behind the scenes, in secret, depending on his extraordinarily close relationship with President Bush to bypass other agencies and the normal review mechanisms and essentially upend the traditional model of the vice-president's role.

There's nothing particularly wrong with that; A VP who is the president's chief adviser or doppleganger could be very useful, and at a minimum is a way to squeeze extra value out of what has long been a mostly ceremonial post. Sure, one can always paint Cheney as some sort of Rasputin (or, in the current parlance, Lord Voldemort), but there's little evidence to back that up: it's not like he is blackmailing or hypnotizing Bush. It's what Cheney has done with that influence -- not the influence itself -- that deserves criticism.

(If anyone should be blamed for that influence, it's Bush -- who continues to listen to Cheney even though the veep has unhesitatingly led him down losing path after losing path in the last six years.)

The influence goes beyond Bush, though. In the early days of the Bush administration, at the height of his influence, Cheney filled the administration with allies, loyalists and former aides. That gave him huge influence at lower levels of government, allowing him to strongly influence other departments and Congress. It also reinforced his advice to the president, because the president would hear the same advice echoed by Cheney allies elsewhere in the executive branch.

Then there's his legendary penchant for secrecy:

Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped "Treated As: Top Secret/SCI." Experts in and out of government said Cheney's office appears to have invented that designation, which alludes to "sensitive compartmented information," the most closely guarded category of government secrets. By adding the words "treated as," they said, Cheney seeks to protect unclassified work as though its disclosure would cause "exceptionally grave damage to national security."

Across the board, the vice president's office goes to unusual lengths to avoid transparency. Cheney declines to disclose the names or even the size of his staff, generally releases no public calendar and ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs.

As well, there's his recent assertion that his office isn't part of the executive branch when it comes to having to obey Executive Orders. As the story says, information flows into the VP's office -- but nothing comes out. It's a Roach Motel for information.

After 9/11 his priority became fighting terrorism without any restrictions whatsoever, be they constitutional, legal or moral. He directed the legal team that sought so many spurious rationales for ignoring plain readings of law or any meaningful limits on executive power in wartime -- regardless of whether that war were actually declared or not, or even meaningfully defined.

That disregard helped him bull through opposition in the short term, but over time has dealt him the usual punishment for overreaching:

The way he did it -- adhering steadfastly to principle, freezing out dissent and discounting the risks of blow-back -- turned tactical victory into strategic defeat. By late last year, the Supreme Court had dealt three consecutive rebuffs to his claim of nearly unchecked authority for the commander in chief, setting precedents that will bind Bush's successors.

One of the main themes of the series is that Cheney, while harshly rebuked, has in practice been far less leashed than most people think, thanks largely to his willingness to build and exploit legal loopholes and questionable claims to get around adverse rulings. But the fact remains that he has weakened the White House for future occupants, especially ones with more respect for legal precedent, logic and intent.

Cheney and his legal team knew their assertions would never withstand scrutiny, which is why they went to such lengths to avoid scrutiny -- even if it meant bypassing Congress, the courts, and administration officials with direct responsibility for the matter at hand.

Cheney's office couldn't be bothered to join administration discussions about what to do with captured Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters, preferring instead to simply ignore all the discussion about legalities and nuances and do what he wanted by going directly to the president. One of the most interesting sections of the first article explains how this practice went directly against a lifetime of Cheney's own advice.

When James A. Baker III was tapped to be White House chief of staff in 1980, he interviewed most of his living predecessors. Advice from Cheney filled four pages of a yellow legal pad. Only once, to signify Cheney's greatest emphasis, did Baker write in all capital letters:

BE AN HONEST BROKER

DON'T USE THE PROCESS TO IMPOSE YOUR POLICY VIEWS ON PRES.

Cheney told Baker, according to the notes, that an "orderly paper flow is way you protect the Pres.," ensuring that any proposal has been tested against other views. Cheney added: "It's not in anyone's interest to get an 'oh by the way decision' -- & all have to understand that. Can hurt the Pres. Bring it up at a Cab. mtg. Make sure everyone understands this."

In 1999, not long before he became Bush's running mate, Cheney warned again about "'oh, by the way' decisions" at a conference of White House historians. According to a transcript, he added: "The process of moving paper in and out of the Oval Office, who gets involved in the meetings, who does the president listen to, who gets a chance to talk to him before he makes a decision, is absolutely critical. It has to be managed in such a way that it has integrity."

Two years later, at his Nov. 13 lunch with Bush, Cheney brought the president the ultimate "oh, by the way" choice -- a far-reaching military order that most of Bush's top advisers had not seen.

He should have listened to his old self.

The story contains repeated examples of how Bush delegated extraordinary authority on terrorism and intelligence to Cheney -- so much so that when officials went to the White House to complain about Cheney's policy moves, they found themselves meeting with... Cheney.

His reach was long. Supposedly confidential memos from White House officials to the national security advisor -- at the time, Condoleeza Rice -- were secretly routed to Cheney, too; Cheney was reading Rice's mail. In another sign that Alberto Gonzales is an empty shirt, Cheney's staff would prepare memos for Gonzales -- then the White House counsel -- to sign, hiding Cheney's role and putting Gonzales' name to words he never wrote. thus Bush would sometimes hear identical advice from Gonzales and Cheney -- because Cheney had written Gonzales' memo.

Monday's article delves deeper into Cheney's destructive efforts to expand presidential power -- including Cheney's nonstop efforts to allow torture, to exclude the CIA from legal restrictions on torture and to set up the President as the sole authority for deciding what is torture and what isn't (even though abuses by the executive branch are what such laws and conventions are designed to protect against). All this while ignoring, undermining and punishing anyone who dared argue differently.

Once again, the story describes repeated examples of Cheney hiding from the light -- making breathtaking assertions of executive power, then hiding those assertions from anyone who might question or oppose them.

In secret memos, Cheney's chief lawyer, David Addington, pushed some of the most extreme interpretations of presidential power:

The vice president's lawyer advocated what was considered the memo's most radical claim: that the president may authorize any interrogation method, even if it crosses the line of torture. U.S. and treaty laws forbidding any person to "commit torture," that passage stated, "do not apply" to the commander in chief, because Congress "may no more regulate the President's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield."

According to that logic, the president could "accidentally" strangle a prisoner with his own hands in the course of an interrogation, and there is no authority on Earth that could outlaw it. That assertion is so bizarre, so contemptuous of any limit on presidential power, that it's easy to understand why the administration kept it secret. They changed the rules to their own satisfaction, then didn't tell any of the other players.

Cheney refused to step back from even his most outrageous claims, even as they were clearly headed for defeat in the courts. In this he had the continued help of the spineless Gonzales, who often sided with Cheney and Addington over the objections of the Justice Department and even his own staff.

Even when, as predicted, Cheney's views were repudiated in court, he refused to accept reality. For example:

When a U.S. District Court ruled several months later that Padilla had a right to counsel, Cheney's office insisted on sending [solicitor general Ted] Olson's deputy, Paul Clement, on what Justice Department lawyers called "a suicide mission": to tell Judge Michael B. Mukasey that he had erred so grossly that he should retract his decision. Mukasey derided the government's "pinched legalism" and added acidly that his order was "not a suggestion or request."

Even after Cheney's views had been soundly rejected by the Supreme Court -- a defeat that probably helped prompt Olson to resign -- Cheney exercised veto power over the choice of Olson's successor.

Later, Cheney overrode the Defense Department when it tried to formulate rules for the treatment of prisoners after Abu Ghraib.

In late August 2005, [Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon] England called a meeting of nearly three dozen Pentagon officials, including the vice chief and top uniformed lawyer for each military branch. Matthew Waxman, the deputy assistant secretary for detainee affairs, set the agenda.

Waxman said that the president's broadly stated order of Feb. 7, 2002 -- which called for humane treatment [of prisoners], "subject to military necessity" -- had left U.S. forces unsure about how to behave. The Defense Department, he said, should clarify its bedrock legal requirements with a directive incorporating the language of Geneva's Common Article 3. That was exactly the language -- prohibiting cruel, violent, humiliating and degrading treatment -- that Cheney had spent three years expunging from U.S. policy.

"Every vice chief came out strongly in favor, as did every JAG," or judge advocate general, recalled Mora, who was Navy general counsel at the time.

But Cheney objected. Guess who won?

In the following year, Congress and the courts imposed most of those restrictions, and Waxman's successor pushed through the directive Cheney had derailed. But Cheney still found loopholes. Restrictions on torture applied to the Pentagon, not the CIA; and while Bush publicly promised to close down secret CIA prisons, he didn't promise not to open new ones -- and so he did.

For all Cheney's bluster about the supremacy of national security concerns, he has shown a willingness to subordinate those to political concerns. The article describes the case of Australian David Hicks. In plea negotiations with Hicks, they offered to jail him for "only" 20 years in exchange for a guilty plea and an affidavit that he hadn't been tortured as his lawyers claimed.

But then Cheney visited Australia, where he was told that the Hicks case threatened the re-election of Prime Minister John Howard.

Shortly after Cheney returned from Australia, the Hicks case died with a whimper. The U.S. government abruptly shifted its stance in plea negotiations, dropping the sentence it offered from 20 years in prison to nine months if Hicks would say that he was guilty. ... The deal, negotiated without the knowledge of the chief prosecutor, Air Force Col. Morris Davis, was supervised by Susan J. Crawford, the senior authority over military commissions. Crawford received her three previous government jobs from then-Defense Secretary Cheney.

Thus Hicks -- up until that time portrayed as a dangerous terrorist who deserved to be locked up for a long time -- was returned to Australia with a short sentence in order to bolster Howard's re-election bid.

There's a lot more in the stories themselves. And one of the reporters, Barton Gellman, will be online in a couple of minutes answering questions about the series. Meanwhile, stay tuned for Parts III and IV.

Cheney, politics, midtopia

The death of "enemy combatant" status?

This happened on Monday while I was on vacation, but it was important enough I want to mention it: a three-judge panel ruling that a legal resident of the United States is entitled to habeas corpus protections and cannot simply be detained without charge on the president's say-so.

A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that President Bush cannot indefinitely imprison a U.S. resident on suspicion alone, ordering the government either to charge Qatari national Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri with his alleged terrorist crimes in a civilian court or release him.

The opinion is a blow to the Bush administration's assertion that the president has exceptionally broad powers to combat terrorism, including the authority to detain without charges foreign citizens living legally in the United States....

"The President cannot eliminate constitutional protections with the stroke of a pen by proclaiming a civilian, even a criminal civilian, an enemy combatant subject to indefinite military detention," the panel found.

You'd think that would be obvious, wouldn't you? Especially when you consider the circumstances of al-Marri's case: he was indicted, and then the day before his trial was to start -- and when it was clear that defense lawyers would challenge the admission of evidence obtained under torture -- the government dropped the charges, designated him an "enemy combatant", and moved him to a Navy brig. It was a transparent effort to avoid having to subject the basis of his detention to legal scrutiny.

I'm not defending al-Maari, by the way, or arguing that he is innocent; only that he deserves due process just like any other suspect.

The dissenting judge, a Bush appointee, makes the same mistake as all people who advocate indefinite detention for suspected terrorists:

"Although al-Marri was not personally engaged in armed conflict with U.S. forces, he is the type of stealth warrior used by al Qaeda to perpetrate terrorist acts against the United States," Hudson wrote. "There is little doubt," the judge maintained, that al-Marri was in the country to aid in hostile attacks on the United States.

If there is "little doubt", then put him on trial, convict him and throw away the key. But simply jailing him without a trial is a legal and constitutional travesty.

The opinion is being appealed to the full court, one of the most conservative in the country. Meanwhile, al-Marri remains uncharged and in prison. But the story makes clear the inglorious and failed history of the "enemy combatant" designation. Of the three people it has been used on, one was released rather than given a court trial, one was charged with crimes completely unrelated to the claims that prompted the designation, and the third is al-Marri.

The full text of the ruling is here (pdf). I'll end with some choice quotes and comments.

This does not mean that al-Marri must be set free. Like others accused of terrorist activity in this country, from the Oklahoma City bombers to the surviving conspirator of the September 11th attacks, al-Marri can be returned to civilian prosecutors, tried on criminal charges, and, if convicted, punished severely. But the Government cannot subject al-Marri to indefinite military detention. For in the United States, the military cannot seize and imprison civilians -- let alone imprison them indefinitely....

Exactly. Further, the government has repeatedly acted in bad faith in the case:

Furthermore, the Government’s treatment of al-Marri suggests that, despite its litigation posture, it does not actually believe that the Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) process ... applies to al-Marri. In the four years since the President ordered al-Marri detained as an enemy combatant, the Government has completed CSRTs for each of the more than five hundred detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. Yet it was not until November 13, 2006, the very day the Government filed its motion to dismiss the case at hand, that the Government even suggested that al-Marri might be given a CSRT. At that time the Government proffered a memorandum from Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England directing that al-Marri be provided a CSRT “upon dismissal” of this case. This memorandum is too little too late....

The Government’s argument that the phrase “awaiting [a CSRT] determination” covers persons confined within the United States yields a strange result. It would mean that Congress assured that Guantanamo Bay detainees were provided with an administrative factfinding process (the CSRT) followed by judicial review in the D.C. Circuit when eliminating habeas jurisdiction over their cases -- but that Congress provided neither any substitute administrative procedure nor any form of judicial review when eliminating the habeas rights of those captured and detained within the United States. The Government offers nothing to indicate that Congress embarked on this strange course, and the legislative history of the MCA renders that theory untenable.

Perhaps because the Government knows that Congress did not intend the CSRT process to apply to persons like al-Marri, the England memorandum neither convenes nor even schedules a CSRT for al-Marri. Indeed, in its motion to dismiss, the Government acknowledges that the England memorandum only indicates “how the government plans to handle al-Marri in the event the courts agree that the MCA divested the courts of jurisdiction.” Thus, the England memorandum makes al-Marri’s CSRT at best conditional -- triggered only “in the event” that we dismiss this litigation. In other words, the memorandum says only that al-Marri might receive a CSRT if this court dismisses his petition because he is awaiting a CSRT, but al-Marri will be awaiting a CSRT only if we dismiss his petition.

This is the sort of tortured and cynical legal posturing that Alberto Gonzales became famous for.

The core assumption underlying the Government’s position, notwithstanding Hamdi, Padilla, Quirin, Milligan, and Hamdan, seems to be that persons lawfully within this country, entitled to the protections of our Constitution, lose their civilian status and become “enemy combatants” if they have allegedly engaged in criminal conduct on behalf of an organization seeking to harm the United States. Of course, a person who commits a crime should be punished, but when a civilian protected by the Due Process Clause commits a crime he is subject to charge, trial, and punishment in a civilian court, not to seizure and confinement by military authorities.

We recognize the understandable instincts of those who wish to treat domestic terrorists as “combatants” in a “global war on terror.” Allegations of criminal activity in association with a terrorist organization, however, do not permit the Government to transform a civilian into an enemy combatant subject to indefinite
military detention....

Amen.

Finally, I urge you to read the section (starting on page 63) that deals with the president's claim of "inherent authority". After laying out the precedents, the ruling efficiently demolishes the claim starting on page 69. A taste:

In sum, al-Marri is not a subject of a country with which the United States is at war, and he did not illegally enter the United States nor is he alleged to have committed any other immigration violation.... The President’s constitutional powers do not allow him to order the military to seize and detain indefinitely al-Marri without criminal process any more than they permit the President to order the military to seize and detain, without criminal process, other terrorists within the United States, like the Unabomber or the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing.... we can only conclude that ... the President claims power that far exceeds that granted to him by the Constitution.

The dissent by Judge Hudson begins on page 78. It relies heavily on the Rapp Declaration (pdf) to justify al-Maari's enemy combatant status. He makes much of the fact that Rapp remains unrebutted -- even though the basis of al-Maari's appeal is that the onus of proof is on the government to justify the detention in the first place. In that context, the Rapp declaration is simply the unexamined assertions of a government intelligence official.

The case doesn't spell the end of "enemy combatant" status -- even if upheld by the full appeals court. The opinion notes (starting on page 38) that there are cases where the enemy combatant status may be used -- essentially, when a defendant is shown to have been associated with the military arm of a foreign government and been present in a war zone where U.S. forces were engaged. Indeed, the court argues (though I disagree) that the designation of Jose Padilla as an enemy combatant was justified because of this. In my view, Padilla never took up arms against the United States on a battlefield; thus he wasn't a soldier, and thus not a "combatant." He deserves a vigorous criminal prosecution, but not military detention.

What it does do, however (assuming the ruling is upheld) is spell the end of the arbitrary use of that designation based solely on the president's say-so.

On a more general level, the ruling provides a clear and legal argument structure for why terrorism is largely a criminal problem, not a military one. At base, it says that someone associated with a terrorist organization should be treated as a criminal, not a combatant -- with all the rights and limitations that entails. Indeed, it argues that such a person cannot be subjected to military justice. I've long argued the same, and I'm confident that eventually jurisprudence will reach the same conclusion.

And finally, Bush appears to be doing for presidential power what he has already done for neo-conservatism -- that is, set back by 20 years a cause he claims to champion. In the case of neo-conservatism, his execution of the Iraq invasion and occupation has discredited the entire idea to the point that "neo-con" is an insult. In the case of presidential power, his constant and aggressive pushing of the envelope has triggered a series of Congressional actions and court rulings that have put firmer limits on executive power than existed before. I'm all for clear lines, but I would be very wary about having Bush on my side in any sort of political or legal argument. The man is poison, be it through incompetence or sheer hubris.

al-Maari, civil liberties, terrorism, politics, midtopia

9/11 bullies

Coyote Angry has a wonderful post on the abuse of the victim card being perpetrated by Ed Root, president of the Families of Flight 93, which is trying to build a memorial at the crash site in Pennsylvania.

Some excerpts:

[Root is] whining because a landowner doesn't want to give away 273 acres of his land to the National Park Service to build a memorial.

I'm truly sorry that innocent people died on that flight and I'm sorry for the pain that has caused their friends and families but I have to tell you: innocent people die every single day and we do not confiscate private property from people in order to build them shrines.

What caught my eye is that Root is trying to assemble 1,300 acres for the memorial.

Excuse me? 1,300 acres? What the heck for? The impact site is the size of a couple of football fields. The memorial design looks nice and all, but it includes a huge amount of space that has nothing to do with the crash except that it lies under the plane's flight path. And a huge amount of land that doesn't even have that much relevance.

I have no problem with him wanting to assemble a big memorial. And I fully understand the Park Service taking the opportunity to create more parkland. But 1,300 acres is a want, not a need.

That said, the land in question is the actual site of the crash. So it's "must-have" land. Because of that, Root claims the landowner is "holding the American people hostage" by refusing to sell. Coyote Angry's response:

No he is not "holding the American people hostage". You are trying to hold him hostage. It's his land, he can jolly well tell you to jump off a cliff if it suits him. Why on earth would he want to try and negotiate any sort of deal with a whiny windbag like you. You'd probably turn right around and look for some reason to sue him as soon as the deal was closed.

Meanwhile, the families have criticized a donation box the landowner has placed near the site, saying it "degrades the memories" of their loved ones. The landowner says he's trying to recoup some of the $200,000 in lost mining income and $10,000 a month in site security costs that being a neighbor to history has saddled him with.

Now, there's plenty of reason to think the landowner isn't exactly an angel. He knows his land is crucial. A memorial negotiator says he wants $10 million for it, not the $500,000 or so they say is market value; his donation box is apparently misleadingly marked, so people think they're donating to the memorial when they put money in it; and the Park Service says the security he's paying for is unnecessary.

Still, the landowner allows people on to his property to visit the site and isn't demanding compensation for lost income and increased security costs. His major crime appears to be that he won't simply sell his land to the family group, preferring instead to deal with the Park Service.

Further, I'm not sure how it's degrading to the memory of the dead to put out a donation box, but it's not degrading to their memory to use them as a club in an effort to strongarm said landowner.

First the $1 billion memorial at Ground Zero, now this. Stuff like this is going to hasten the onset of 9/11 Victim Fatigue.

Flight 93, 9-11, politics, midtopia

Senate bill targets habeas corpus

Excellent news out of the Senate today.

A bill that would allow terrorism suspects access to federal courts to challenge their imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

The committee, on an 11-8 vote, advanced a bill that would allow prisoners to protest their detentions through a writ of habeas corpus, considered by many to be the cornerstone of the U.S. judicial system.

Nice as this is, it's sad that in 2007 I find myself writing about a decision to restore a fundamental principle of American jurisprudence.

Ten years ago, if you had asked me whether the United States government would ever imprison people -- citizen or not -- indefinitely without charge and with no right to challenge their detention, I would have laughed out loud. That went against so many laws, Constitutional principles, simple fairness and basic American values that it would have seemed inconceivable.

Today I marvel at the naive hubris of my younger self -- and the unprincipled cowardice that led our elected representatives to so readily abandon such a basic precept of justice.

I look forward to the debate on this. Democrats will try to attach it to the defense spending bill, which if they succeed should make the measure veto proof: Bush is unlikely to veto the defense authorization simply to derail the habeas corpus provision. The biggest question is whether Senate Republicans have the desire and the unity to tie it up.

Let me point out two passages from the link, one illustrative and one simply amusing.

Administration officials and most Republicans say they do not think dangerous terror suspects should have access to U.S. federal courts or other rights guaranteed to Americans under the Constitution.

The fatal flaw in this reasoning is, of course, that the defendants in question are suspects, not proven bad guys. The whole point of habeas corpus is to make sure we separate the guilty from the wrongly held. Bush and "most Republicans" apparently feel they can skip that step. We can't. Any argument predicated on "they're terrorists!" fails, because that case has not been proven.

Second, there was this:

"The great history of our nation is built on having judicial review, on having openness, and we should not out of fear or indifference or whatever turn our back on that great history," the committee's Democratic chairman, Patrick Leahy, said.

"Or whatever"? Way to kill what started out as a pretty good flight of soaring rhetoric, Patrick. Something tells me that 50 years from now, law students won't be quoting that particular utterance.

The bill is expected to hit the Senate floor later this month.

habeas corpus, terrorism, civil liberties, politics, midtopia

Al-Qaeda fed up with pace of Freedom Tower construction

This is hilarious in a sick, Onion-type way.

terrorism, humor, politics, midtopia

Judge tosses detainee case

A military judge threw out charges against a Guantanamo detainee today, on a major technicality that could potentially delay or derail dozens of cases.

Canadian detainee Omar Khadr, who was 15 when he was captured after a deadly firefight in Afghanistan and who is now 20, will remain at the remote U.S. military base along with some 380 other men suspected of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

The judge, Army Col. Peter Brownback, said he had no choice but to throw out the Khadr case because he had been classified as an "enemy combatant" by a military panel years earlier — and not as an "alien unlawful enemy combatant."

This may seem like a minor technicality, but it's not. "Alien" means U.S. citizens cannot be subjected to the commissions. And "unlawful" means neither can someone who merely took up arms against the United States. Unlike "enemy combatant", which just means somebody who shoots at American soldiers.

So now the United States will have to re-examine all the existing detainee cases and certify that the defendants are unlawful enemy combatants. That could take months.

And here's an irony for you: The military says it will appeal the ruling. Trouble is, the court that is supposed to hear such appeals -- something called the "Court of Military Commissions Review" -- doesn't exist. Constituting it could also take months.

The drawbacks of trying to build a court system from scratch aside, this case has even more interesting things going for it. In fact, I meant to write about this several days ago but never found the time.

Thus far, only three detainees have been charged under the commission system: Accused bin Laden driver and bodyguard Salim Ahmed Hamdan; Australian David Hicks; and Omar Khadr.

These three are the ones we, in our infinite wisdom, decided to put on trial first. The two most notable things they have in common are being fairly small potatoes and not really fitting the popular description of "terrorist". All three, in fact, were captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, all but Hamdan nothing more than footsoldiers for Al-Qaeda's conventional forces and Hamdan seeming to be little more than that.

But Khadr is unique in one respect: he was 15 when he was captured.

Someone please tell me why, in our infinite wisdom, we decided that the third person charged should be a child soldier? Can anyone think of anything more politically explosive than that? International law (despite a definitional gray area as to what constitutes a child) generally considers child soldiers to be victims, not criminals; it focuses its opprobation on the commanders who recruit, train and lead children, not the children themselves.

The kids themselves are handled more carefully by the international community, through programs designed to ease them out of killing and back into "normal" life. They aren't thrown in prison to rot or tried for crimes. Kids that young simply aren't considered fully responsible for their actions.

I'm not a fan of the tribunal system, but I cannot even begin to plumb the stupidity of throwing such red meat to the tribunal's critics. "Hi! We're the United States! Not only do we detain people for years without charge; when we finally do charge them, we do it in a military court with limited rights for the accused, and we put kids on trial!"

Lordy, we're dumb.

civil liberties, terrorism, Omar Khadr, Gitmo, politics, midtopia

Strategically stupid

The irrational pursuit of gays in the military continues to lead to the dismissal of some of our most valuable assets in the war on terror.

Lawmakers who say the military has kicked out 58 Arabic linguists because they were gay want the Pentagon to explain how it can afford to let the valuable language specialists go.

Seizing on the latest discharges, involving three specialists, members of the House of Representatives wrote the House Armed Services Committee chairman that the continued loss of such "capable, highly skilled Arabic linguists continues to compromise our national security during time of war."

One sailor discharged in the latest incident, former Petty Officer 2nd Class Stephen Benjamin, said his supervisor tried to keep him on the job, urging him to sign a statement denying that he was gay. He said his lawyer advised him not to sign it, because it could be used against him later if other evidence ever surfaced.

There are some inconsistencies in Benjamin's story. First he says he was "always out" since the day he started working there, and it didn't cause problems. Then later he says he was "discreet" and was surprised when the military investigated him. But that could simply be the difference between not hiding his sexual orientation and openly telling the military he was gay (the "tell" portion of "don't ask, don't tell").

But that's pretty much beside the point. This sort of thing is just plain stupid. The need for trained Arabic speakers vastly outweighs the outdated "morals" concerns about gay soldiers. It is pure bureaucratic bloodymindedness to actively hunt these guys down and discharge them.

Stuff like this only further illustrates the asinine nature of the antigay policy. End it now, before we let it further damage our national security.

gay rights, politics, midtopia

Surge update

As the Iraq war-funding bill comes to the floor of Congress today, a report from Baghdad sheds some gloom on the debate.

More than three months into a U.S.-Iraqi security offensive designed to curtail sectarian violence in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, Health Ministry statistics show that such killings are rising again.

From the beginning of May until Tuesday, 321 unidentified corpses, many dumped and showing signs of torture and execution, have been found across the Iraqi capital, according to morgue data provided by a Health Ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information. The data showed that the same number of bodies were found in all of January, the month before the launch of the Baghdad security plan.

So they're not just rising -- they're back to where they were before the surge.

They're still below the peak levels hit last year, and a key question is where the killings are occurring. If they're happening in places outside the current "surge" footprint, it has little bearing on whether the surge is working or not. And anyway one isolated datum isn't proof of anything. But it does seem to show that Shiite death squads are still not being meaningfully hindered by either the surge or the Iraqi government.

Iraq, politics, midtopia

Exploding the myth of Muslim silence

That's the purpose of an interesting piece by Stephen Schwartz, author of "The Two Faces of Islam."

In it he argues that the media ignores moderate Muslims while covering the radicals in lavish, horrific detail, painting a distorted picture of the faith. The centerpiece of the article is a deconstruction of coverage of the plot to attack Fort Dix. He notes that the plotters weren't, as first assumed, Kosovo Albanian Muslims. They were, instead, ethnic Albanians from Macedonia who came here as children and were radicalized in Arab-dominated Wahhabi mosques. His point is that the media misses distinctions between different kinds of Muslims, lumping peaceful, moderate Albanians in with violent Wahhabis.

He then cites several examples of Muslim commentary on the case -- all of it condemning the plot -- that he says got scant coverage.

I didn't follow the Fort Dix story closely enough to judge whether he's right on that score, but the piece once again points up the intellectual bankruptcy of those who demand that Muslims "speak out" against terror. Continuing to make that argument ignores several relevant facts:

1. They do. All the time. I've cited multiple examples in the past year.

2. Demands that Muslims take the lead assume that moderate Muslims have some sort of connection to (or influence over) the extremists. What are (for example) American Muslims supposed to do: Call up Al-Qaeda and yell at them? They don't have AQ's number any more than you or I do, nor will their words be heeded any more than yours or mine.

3. Few groups spend a lot of time flagellating themselves for the extremists in their midst.

Let's expand on that last point for a moment because it's an important one, tied in with assumptions about group identity that simply are not true.

The underlying logic of the "Muslims must denounce terrorism" goes as follows: The terrorists are Islamic, and therefore Muslims have a particular duty to denounce Islamic terror.

This is reasonable to an extent: disavowing the nutjobs operating under your banner is sometimes necessary.

But where it goes off the rails is when people demand that every Muslim denounce every act of Islamic terror every time one occurs.

This is ridiculous. Every time a Christian commits murder, are Christians obligated to go on television and state the obvious -- that murder is wrong and the offender doesn't represent Christian views?

Of course not. They can simply state once (or occasionally) that murder is wrong and unChristian. Actually, they don't even have to do that; it's considered obvious that murder is wrong, so they aren't required to say anything. Silence is not assent in such cases.

So why are Muslims treated differently? Because groups are always good at pointing out the mote in other groups' eyes, even while giving their own members the benefit of the doubt. Do conservatives regularly call out nutjob conservatives? No. Liberals do that, and conservatives disavow them if necessary. Do liberals regularly call out liberal nutjobs? No; conservatives do that, and then liberals disavow them if necessary.

In this country, who spends time identifying atheist/agnostic misbehavior? Believers. Who are most likely to point out believer wrongdoing? Atheists/agnostics.

Simply put, groups are horrible at policing their own, because doing so requires admitting some kinship between your own beliefs and those of the nutjobs -- admitting that your beliefs can be twisted to bad ends. No one likes doing that.

Beyond that, when you're in the group you know that the extremists are just that -- extremists, a tiny minority that do not represent the group as a whole. They are shunned, dismissed; psychologically, the majority separates themselves from the whackjobs to the point they no longer feel kinship with them -- and thus no particular responsibility to account for their actions. Hence Christians feel no particular need to respond every time a Christian misbehaves, and Muslims feel no particular need to respond every time a member of some fundamentalist sect detonates a car bomb.

This is especially true when the actions cross national and sectarian boundaries. Demanding that a mainstream American Muslim denounce fundamentalist terrorism is like demanding that Lutherans denounce the actions of Baptists -- or, more aptly, Christian Identity adherents. It's actually even sillier than that, because at least in the example above everyone involved is American. In the case of Islamic terror, we're demanding that American Muslims feel responsibility not just for another sect, but for another country and culture. So it's more like demanding that Lutherans apologize for the atrocities committed by the Lord's Resistance Army.

Now, political reality is a different matter, and not always fair; in this day and age, there is more political need for Muslims to speak out than there is for Christians. But that doesn't make demands that they do so any less illogical. Nor does it justify the assumptions made about them when they fail to speak up in any given instance.

terrorism, religion, politics, midtopia

Busy day tomorrow

Wednesday should have a lot of fireworks, thanks to several big items all landing at the same time:

Looking for Ms. Goodling
An immunized Monica Goodling testifies before the Senate about the prosecutor firings. Source have indicated her testimony won't implicate Alberto Gonzales, but then that's what they said about Kyle Sampson -- and his testimony turned out to be another body blow for the embattled AG.

The problem is that, based on what we already know, Gonzales is either mendacious or incompetent. Goodling's testimony can only show one of three things: that Gonzales was more involved than he has admitted, which means he lied to Congress; that Gonzales was totally uninvolved, which indicts his management ability; and/or that the firings were indeed heavily political, which discredits both his judgement and his truthfulness.

War funding
The newest version of the war-funding bill could hit the floor of Congress, with the possibility that the most antiwar Democrats ultimately will vote against it now that the timetables have been stripped out. There still should be enough votes to pass it (with Republican support), but it raises all sorts of tantalizing possibilities.

One is merely theoretical: contemplate what would happen if the war funding didn't have enough Democratic votes to pass without timetables, and didn't have enough Republican votes to pass with them. What would happen?

The other is more concrete: in order to govern, will Pelosi and Reid find themselves increasingly making common cause with Republicans against the more extreme elements of their own party? And will that work, or simply lead to a fracture in the Democratic ranks?

And consider what a Democratic fracture might mean. With the Republicans themselves fractured (united only by the need to stay relevant by thwarting Democratic moves), Congress could find itself in an unstable situation, where each party's leadership is less relevant and instead ad hoc groups of legislators coalesce around individual issues.

That's not going to happen, of course, at least not to a large degree. Party connections are too ingrained, too convenient, too powerful. And the leadership controls the movement of legislation, so they'll never get too irrelevant (though there was a time when committee chairmen were highly independent and arguably more powerful than the Speaker and her deputies). Still, if two fractured parties mean more individual initiative by Congress members, that would be all to the good in my book.

Anyway, tomorrow should be a fascinating day.

Iraq, Goodling, politics, midtopia

Generals say "no" to torture

If you haven't read this yet, you should. It's written by a pair of retired generals: Charles Krulak (former Marine Corps commandant) and Joseph Hoar (former head of U.S. Central Command).

Fear can be a strong motivator. It led Franklin Roosevelt to intern tens of thousands of innocent U.S. citizens during World War II; it led to Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt, which ruined the lives of hundreds of Americans. And it led the United States to adopt a policy at the highest levels that condoned and even authorized torture of prisoners in our custody.

The observed effect on military morals:

As has happened with every other nation that has tried to engage in a little bit of torture -- only for the toughest cases, only when nothing else works -- the abuse spread like wildfire, and every captured prisoner became the key to defusing a potential ticking time bomb. Our soldiers in Iraq confront real "ticking time bomb" situations every day, in the form of improvised explosive devices, and any degree of "flexibility" about torture at the top drops down the chain of command like a stone -- the rare exception fast becoming the rule.

To understand the impact this has had on the ground, look at the military's mental health assessment report released earlier this month. The study shows a disturbing level of tolerance for abuse of prisoners in some situations. This underscores what we know as military professionals: Complex situational ethics cannot be applied during the stress of combat. The rules must be firm and absolute; if torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a reality.

But even if the use of torture could be strictly controlled, it would hurt our cause:

The torture methods that Tenet defends have nurtured the recuperative power of the enemy. This war will be won or lost not on the battlefield but in the minds of potential supporters who have not yet thrown in their lot with the enemy. If we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable in situations of grave or imminent danger, we drive those undecideds into the arms of the enemy. This way lies defeat, and we are well down the road to it.

It also hurts our soldiers.

This is not just a lesson for history. Right now, White House lawyers are working up new rules that will govern what CIA interrogators can do to prisoners in secret. Those rules will set the standard not only for the CIA but also for what kind of treatment captured American soldiers can expect from their captors, now and in future wars. Before the president once again approves a policy of official cruelty, he should reflect on that.

These are not new sentiments. But they are increasingly being expressed by people such as Krulak and Hoar, military professionals who understand the repercussions of such policies. Let us hope that at last the message gets through.

torture, politics, midtopia

Meet the new war czar

After a month of searching, a "war czar" has been found.

President Bush on Tuesday chose Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the
Pentagon's director of operations and a former leader of U.S. military forces in the Middle East, to oversee the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan as a war czar.

Lute seems like a fine soldier, but he's way down the administration's wish list for the position. The authority and doability of the job aside, it's unclear whether such a relative unknown will have the personal force and charisma necessary to break logjams and keep everybody moving in the same direction.

There's also the question of whether we should put much trust in anyone who helped oversee combat in Iraq between 2004 and 2006, years in which the situation there spiraled out of control. There's always the question of whether to blame the generals or their political overseers, and Lute wasn't the overall commander in the theater. But at first blush it's not a great recommendation.

Here's what some military folks think of the pick. They think Lute's a fine officer, but wonder how a three-star general is going to order around four-star generals and Cabinet members.

And here's an interview (pdf) Lute did with Charlie Rose in January 2006, when he was director of operations for Centcom.

In it he says Al-Qaeda is weakening and losing support as a result of the war. But the example he gives has nothing to do with Iraq; he cites the bombing of a wedding in Amman, Jordan, and the collapse in AQ support afterward. Is anyone surprised that when AQ attacks Muslim targets, those Muslims don't like it?

He also discusses -- in a sort of premonition of his new job -- the need to fight networks of terrorists with networks of agencies and governments:

The other thing I would point to, Charlie, is the importance of taking this on, not simply as a military fight, but as a multi-agency fight where different arms of the government, the intelligence arm, the military arm for sure, the State Department, diplomatic arm, economic arm, those who bring law and order systems into a post-conflict scenario, that all these arms come together in an integrated networked way.

That's what he's been hired to do. Let's hope he is able -- and allowed -- to do a good job.

Update: Here's the video of part II of Charlie Rose's interview of Lute, conducted a few days after the interview I link to above. The segment with Lute starts around the 38-minute mark.

This time he discusses the strain on the military from our deployment in Iraq, in which he argues that while the soldiers' private lives are strained, most of them want to return to Iraq and, as a long-term upside, we're developing a large core of combat veterans. The first argument is a little bit of "happy talk." Our troops tend to be motivated, but dedication to the mission starts to wane after the third or fourth tour. The second part, while true as far as it goes, assumes those veterans stay in the service.

He also talks up the Iraqi army, a confidence that was proven to be a bit misplaced in the year that followed. He heaped praise on Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad -- a charter member of the neocon club who departed a year later (amid mounting chaos) to become our ambassador to the United Nations, a post about as important to this administration as the embassy in Liechtenstein (which is actually handled by the ambassador to Switzerland). He also discusses the military and political changes needed to succeed in Iraq.

He comes across as smart, but his role as spokesman and obvious cheerleader damages his credibility and doesn't give a true sense of the man.

Iraq, politics, midtopia

Hezbollah opens South American branch

In yet another example of how Iraq isn't helping stop the spread of terrorism, Hezbollah (who we're not fighting at the moment) now has a cell in South America.

From its Western base in a remote region divided by the borders of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina known as the Tri-border, or the Triple Frontier, Hezbollah has mined the frustrations of many Muslims among about 25,000 Arab residents whose families immigrated mainly from Lebanon in two waves, after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and after the 1985 Lebanese civil war.

An investigation by Telemundo and NBC News has uncovered details of an extensive smuggling network run by Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim group founded in Lebanon in 1982 that the United States has labeled an international terrorist organization. The operation funnels large sums of money to militia leaders in the Middle East and finances training camps, propaganda operations and bomb attacks in South America, according to U.S. and South American officials.

There's a lot of reliance on anonymous sources in this report, and it's a big step from operating in a lawless region of South America to being able to mount attacks on the United States. So the warnings and predictions should be taken with large grains of salt. Plus there simply aren't that many radical Muslims (or Muslims, period) in the region. Hezbollah's presence seems to be more of a smuggling and finance operation than a serious military effort.

But such spin-off operations are exactly what we should be confronting in our war on terror, and demonstrate why Iraq is an expensive drain on resources better used elsewhere. We should go where the terrorists are and confront them there, not invade an unrelated country and then find ourselves battling a smattering of jihadists amid a much larger native insurgency and a brewing civil war. All the latter approach does is waste mind-blowing amounts of money and create unnecessary enemies.

terrorism, South America, Hezbollah, politics, midtopia

Bombs built into girl's school in Iraq

If true, you're talking about a premediated massacre of kids.

The plot at the Huda Girls' school in Tarmiya was a "sophisticated and premeditated attempt to inflict massive casualties on our most innocent victims," military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said....

The plot was uncovered Saturday, when troopers in the Salaheddin province found detonating wire across the street from the school. They picked up the wire and followed its trail, which led to the school. Once inside, they found an explosive-filled propane tank buried beneath the floor. There were artillery shells built into the ceiling and floor, and another propane tank was found, the military said.

It's our military, not the Iraqis, saying it, so it has some credibility. And it's not like Al-Qaeda isn't capable of something like this.

But there are some real inconsistencies. For instance, the bombers were sophisticated enough to build the bombs in during construction, but then dumb enough to leave the det cord trailing across the street so it could be found easily?

We'll see if there are follow up reports, especially the results from questioning the Iraqi contractors that were building the place.

terrorism, Iraq, politics, midtopia

Senate doubles over laughing at wiretap proposal

Well, okay, they didn't. But I wish they would.

At least they were skeptical.

Citing FBI abuses and the attorney general's troubles, senators peppered top Justice and intelligence officials Tuesday with skeptical questions about their proposal to revise the rules for spying on Americans.

Senate Intelligence Committee members said the Bush administration must provide more information about its earlier domestic spying before it can hope to gain additional powers for the future.

Man, I love divided government. Rubber stamps suck.

The debate revolved largely around NSA wiretapping authority. By way of confirming everyone's worst fear, the administration witnesses admitted that Bush would submit to warrants only as long as it was convenient:

"There is nothing in this bill that confines the president to work within" the surveillance act in the future, said Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif. The same issue was raised by Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Russell Feingold, D-Wis., and Bill Nelson, D-Fla.

McConnell said the administration wants to work under the surveillance law now, but acknowledged "that does not mean the president would not use ... (constitutional powers) in a crisis."

I'd be interested to see how the administration defines the word "crisis." And why they think the court would be a problem in such a situation, given that in 2006 it rejected exactly one eavesdropping request -- while approving 2,176.

Congress should not let politics and suspicion get in the way of adapting legitimate surveillance methods to modern technology. But neither should they simply trust the administration, because it has proven itself manifestly unworthy of such trust. The administration bill should be a starting point, but Congress should decide for itself how to adapt to modern times -- and what restrictions to place on so doing.

Meanwhile, a court report gives a sense of the scope of non-NSA wiretapping. It's at record levels, but still pretty small: 1,839 taps were authorized in 2006. And that's entirely due to a big jump in state-authorized taps. Federal wiretaps actually have been falling since 2004, and there were fewer in 2006 than there were in 1996.

Two caveats:

1. A given wiretap can cover more than one person, and of course a wiretap subject typically talks to multiple people. The average number of people monitored under a wiretap order was 122. So a grand total of 225,000 or so Americans had police listening in on all or some of their conversations. That's a lot, but it's still just 0.07 percent of the population. NSA aside, 99.93 percent of us were not monitored.

2. The Justice Department says the drop in federal wiretaps is entirely due to several large, ongoing investigations that could not be reported in the 2006 figures. Had those taps been counted, Justice claims, there would have been no decrease in wiretaps.

Also of interest: Not a single wiretap request was denied -- and not one had anything to do with terrorism.

Fun party trivia: On average it costs $52,551 to install a wiretap.

civil liberties, terrorism, politics, midtopia

Iraq, Gitmo and terrorism

Two stories out today.

One, simply an updater on the ongoing human rights disaster known as Gitmo.

More than a fifth of the approximately 385 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been cleared for release but may have to wait months or years for their freedom because U.S. officials are finding it increasingly difficult to line up places to send them, according to Bush administration officials and defense lawyers.

Since February, the Pentagon has notified about 85 inmates or their attorneys that they are eligible to leave after being cleared by military review panels. But only a handful have gone home, including a Moroccan and an Afghan who were released Tuesday. Eighty-two remain at Guantanamo and face indefinite waits as U.S. officials struggle to figure out when and where to deport them, and under what conditions.

Jail innocents for five years, and then continue jailing them because nobody wants to take Gitmo detainees for various political reasons. And we won't grant them asylum to make up for the ongoing mistake that is robbing them of their lives. Wonderful.

The other bit of news was the annual State Department report on terrorism, which shows a 25 percent increase in attacks last year, with a 40 percent increase in deaths and 54 percent increase in injuries. That's right, more and deadlier attacks.

Some of the increase involves countries and events that have little or no bearing on us -- the various brutal conflicts in Africa, for instance. But the largest number of attacks and deaths by far occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So let's see. After four years and hundreds of billions of dollars, our war on terror is succeeding in increasing terror attacks. We respond by ignoring human rights and basic justice in our zeal to capture and imprison real and imagined terrorists.

Anyone think there's a relationship? At a minimum, it seems safe to say our current strategy isn't working if reducing terrorism was the goal.

Update: Here's the full report.

Guantanamo, Gitmo, terrorism, politics, midtopia

Moderate Muslims, Part III

In two previous posts (here and here), I've highlighted words and deeds by moderate Muslims as a favor for people who claim they don't exist.

Here's another: Author Irshad Manji, a Muslim (and lesbian) who writes about the intersection of faith and freedom. She participated in an online chat where she answered questions about Islam. Notable excerpts:

Simply put, we don't need to change Islam. That's because Islam itself contains the raw materials to be both humane and reasonable. What we need to do is change the Muslim mindset to bust out of tribalism (strict hierarchies that equating debate with division and division with crime), and recognize that Islam's own scripture, the Quran, contains 3 times as many verses calling on us to think/reflect/analyze than verses telling us what's forbidden/acceptable. In short, re-interpretation is not just permitted; it's encouraged.

Yep -- an Islamic Reformation.

As to the imams, why are they the arbiters? I wish that non-Muslims would stop investing these guys with the authority to approve or disapprove of other Muslims. They're not the only creatures who count. Especially before the eyes of God.

This, too, goes back to tribalism, not Islam itself.

The Quran vigorously defends religious pluralism, including those who convert or choose not to believe AT ALL. When some Muslims wage war on converts - as many of many mullahs in Afghanistan recenty did - they are following a SELECTED and REPORTED saying of the Prophet Muhammad (known as the hadiths). Problem is, the Prophet reportedly said many things that contradict each other.

Which is why Islam needs the equivalent of a Council of Trent or the like, where they separate the "true" Hadiths from the suspect ones. Or else the Hadiths need to be demoted in importance.

The Quran contains plenty of pro-women passages. One could argue that women have many more rights according to the Quran than according to any other scripture before it. But the reason for such anti-women interpretations is tribal culture; in the case of Islam, ARAB tribal culture. (I know that's politically incorrect to point out in the age of multiculturalism; so be it.) In particular, the tribal tradition of honor requires women to give up their individuality in order to maintain the reputation of the men in their lives. This turns women into communal property. The way in which Islam has been propagated for the past several hundred years, the code of honor has become enmeshed in religous practices. Bottom line: Although this problem didn't come FROM Islam, it has become a problem FOR Islam.

From the point of view of the nonMuslim world, we need to learn to separate the Quran from the Hadiths, and Islam from the tribal cultures that dominate its membership in the public consciousness. Only then can we come up with realistic strategies to engage moderate Muslims, isolate the extremists and help the Islamic Reformation along.

religion, Islam, politics, midtopia

Iran supporting the Taliban?

Take this one with a grain of salt at least as large as that used when the U.S. made similar accusations about Iranian involvement in Iraq.

U.S. military officials raised worries of a wider Iranian role in Afghanistan on Tuesday when Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in Washington that U.S. forces had intercepted Iranian-made mortars and plastic explosives intended for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

Counterterrorism officials in Washington have said a handful of senior al Qaeda operatives who fled to Iran after the war in Afghanistan in 2001 may have developed a working relationship with a secretive military unit linked to Iran's religious hard-liners.

U.S. officials caution, however, that any Iranian link to fighting in Afghanistan, notably in providing weapons to Taliban fighters, remains cloudy.

As with suspected Iranian involvement in Iraq, it's a reasonable possibility. But as with Iraq, there are certain uncomfortable facts that need explaining, such as whether any such activity is condoned or controlled by the government, and why Shiite Persian Iran would go out of its way to arm Sunni Arab and Pashtun fundamentalists.

Especially considering how some of the earlier allegations turned out. Remember the Austrian sniper rifles? Supposedly 100 .50-caliber weapons sold to Iran were found in Iraq -- 100 literal smoking guns.

Except that turned out not to be true. The rifles' maker, Steyr-Mannlicher, called attention to an article in an Austrian daily, Wiener Zeitung, specifically debunking the story, then followed that up with a press release Tuesday driving the point home.

So while I can readily believe Iran is stirring the pot in both Iraq and Afghanistan, I require some decent proof before we take drastic action. CIA, get cracking. Or heck, just capture some insurgents or Iranians in the act of bringing weaponry across the border.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, politics, midtopia