History > 2007 > USA > Terrorism (VI)

Illustration: Raymond Verdaguer

Guantánamo by the Numbers        NYT        10.11.2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/opinion/10kayeintro.html 

 

Bin Laden:

Europeans Should End US Help

November 29, 2007
Filed at 1:53 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden called on the Europeans to stop helping the United States in the war in Afghanistan, according to excerpts of a new audiotape broadcast Thursday on Al-Jazeera television.

Bin Laden said he was the ''only one responsible'' for the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, saying it was unjust for the United States to have invaded Afghanistan.

''The events of Manhattan were retaliation against the American-Israeli alliance's aggression against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, and I am the only one responsible for it. The Afghan people and government knew nothing about it. America knows that,'' he said.

''Europe went along with it (the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan) because they had no other alternative, only to be a follower,'' he said.

Bin Laden urged Europeans to pull away from the fight in Afghanistan.

''It is better for you to stand against your leaders who are dropping in on the White House, and to work seriously to lift the injustice against the believers,'' he said, accusing U.S. forces and their allies of intentionally killing women and children in Afghanistan.

Al-Jazeera aired two brief excerpts of a few seconds each of the audiotape, titled ''Message to the European Peoples,'' which al-Qaida had announced Monday that it would release soon.

Bin Laden issued four public statements earlier this year -- on Sept. 7, Sept. 11, Sept. 20 and Oct. 22. The Sept. 7 video was the al-Qaida leader's first in three years and was issued to mark the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The U.S.-led coalition invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks because the Taliban regime was sheltering bin Laden -- who eluded coalition troops and is believed to be hiding along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier.

Bin Laden: Europeans Should End US Help, NYT, 29.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Bin-Laden-Tape.html

U.S. Hopes

to Use Pakistani Tribes

Against Al Qaeda

November 19, 2007
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT,

MARK MAZZETTI and CARLOTTA GALL

This article was reported and written by Eric Schmitt, Mark Mazzetti and Carlotta Gall.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 18 — A new and classified American military proposal outlines an intensified effort to enlist tribal leaders in the frontier areas of Pakistan in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as part of a broader effort to bolster Pakistani forces against an expanding militancy, American military officials said.

If adopted, the proposal would join elements of a shift in strategy that would also be likely to expand the presence of American military trainers in Pakistan, directly finance a separate tribal paramilitary force that until now has proved largely ineffective and pay militias that agreed to fight Al Qaeda and foreign extremists, officials said. The United States now has only about 50 troops in Pakistan, a Pentagon spokesman said, a force that could grow by dozens under the new approach.

The proposal is modeled in part on a similar effort by American forces in Anbar Province in Iraq that has been hailed as a great success in fighting foreign insurgents there. But it raises the question of whether such partnerships, to be forged in this case by Pakistani troops backed by the United States, can be made without a significant American military presence in Pakistan. And it is unclear whether enough support can be found among the tribes, some of which are working with Pakistan's intelligence agency.

Altogether, the broader strategic move toward more local support is being accelerated because of concern about instability in Pakistan and the weakness of the Pakistani government, as well as fears that extremists with havens in the tribal areas could escalate their attacks on allied troops in Afghanistan. Just in recent weeks, Islamic militants sympathetic to Al Qaeda and the Taliban have already extended their reach beyond the frontier areas into more settled areas, most notably the mountainous region of Swat.

[The Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, recommended late Sunday that the Election Commission call for parliamentary elections on Jan. 8, but he did not say whether emergency rule would be revoked beforehand, Reuters reported early Monday.

“Inshallah, the general elections in the country would be held on Jan. 8,” the official Associated Press of Pakistan news agency quoted Musharraf as saying late Sunday.]

The tribal proposal, a strategy paper prepared by staff members of the United States Special Operations Command, has been circulated to counterterrorism experts but has not yet been formally approved by the command’s headquarters in Tampa, Fla. Some other elements of the campaign have been approved in principle by the Americans and Pakistanis and await financing, like $350 million over several years to help train and equip the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force that has about 85,000 members and is recruited from border tribes.

Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration has used billions of dollars of aid and heavy political pressure to encourage Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, to carry out more aggressive military operations against militants in the tribal areas. But the sporadic military campaigns Pakistan has conducted there have had little success, resulting instead in heavy losses among Pakistani Army units and anger among local residents who have for decades been mostly independent from Islamabad’s control.

American officials acknowledge those failures, but say that the renewed emphasis on recruiting allies among the tribal militias and investing more heavily in the Frontier Corps reflect the depth of American concern about the need to address Islamic extremism in Pakistan. The new counterinsurgency campaign is also a vivid example of the American military’s asserting a bigger role in a part of Pakistan that the Central Intelligence Agency has overseen almost exclusively since Sept. 11.

Small numbers of United States military personnel have served as advisers to the Pakistani Army in the tribal areas, giving planning advice and helping to integrate American intelligence, said one senior American officer with long service in the region.

Historically, American Special Forces have gone into foreign countries to work with local militaries to improve the security of those countries in ways that help American interests. Under this new approach, the number of advisers would increase, officials said.

American officials said these security improvements complemented a package of assistance from the Agency for International Development and the State Department for the seven districts of the tribal areas that amounted to $750 million over five years, and would involve work in education, health and other sectors. The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs is also assisting the Frontier Corps with financing for counternarcotics work.

Some details of the security improvements have been reported by The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. But the classified proposal to enlist tribal leaders is new.

“The D.O.D. is about to start funding the Frontier Corps,” one military official said, referring to the Department of Defense. “We have only got a portion of that requested but it is enough to start.”

Until now, the Frontier Corps has not received American military financing because the corps technically falls under the Pakistani Interior Ministry, a nonmilitary agency that the Pentagon ordinarily does not deal with. But American officials say the Frontier Corps is in the long term the most suitable force to combat an insurgency. The force, which since 2001 has increasingly been under the day-to-day command of Pakistani Army units, is now being expanded and trained by American advisers, diplomats said.

The training of the Frontier Corps remains a concern for some. NATO and American soldiers in Afghanistan have often blamed the Frontier Corps for aiding and abetting Taliban insurgents mounting cross-border attacks. “It’s going to take years to turn them into a professional force,” said one Western military official. “Is it worth it now?”

At the same time, military officials fear the assistance to develop a counterinsurgency force is too little, too late. “The advantage is already in the enemy hands,” one Western military official said. Local Taliban and foreign fighters in Waziristan have managed to regroup since negotiating peace deals with the government in 2005 and 2006, and last year they were able to fight all through the winter, he said. Militants have now emerged in force in the Swat area, a scenic tourist region that is a considerable distance inland from the tribal areas on the border.

The planning at the Special Operations Command intensified after Adm. Eric T. Olson, a member of the Navy Seals who is the new head of the command, met with General Musharraf and Pakistani military leaders in August to discuss how the military could increase cooperation in Pakistan’s fight against the extremists.

A spokesman for the command, Kenneth McGraw, would not comment on any briefing paper that had been circulated for review. He said Friday that after Admiral Olson returned from his trip, he “energized the staff to look for ways to develop opportunities for future cooperation.”

A senior Defense Department official said that Admiral Olson had prepared a memorandum on how Special Operations forces could assist the Pakistani military in the counterinsurgency, and shared that document with several senior Pentagon officials.

Four senior defense or counterterrorism officials confirmed that planning was under way at the command headquarters.

One person who was briefed on the proposal prepared by the Special Operations Command staff members, and who spoke on condition of anonymity because the briefing had not yet been approved, said it was in the form of about two dozen slides. The slides described a strategy using both military and nonmilitary measures to fight the militants.

One slide included a chart that categorized one to two dozen tribes by location — North Waziristan and South Waziristan, for example — and then gave a brief description of their location, their known or suspected links to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and their size and military abilities.

The briefing said United States forces would not be involved in any conventional combat in Pakistan. But several senior military and Pentagon officials said elements of the Joint Special Operations Command, an elite counterterrorism unit, might be involved in strikes against senior militant leaders under specific conditions.

Two people briefed on elements of the approach said it was modeled in part on efforts in Iraq, where American commanders have worked with Sunni sheiks in Anbar Province to turn locals against the militant group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni extremist group that American intelligence agencies say is led by foreigners.

The success of these efforts, together with the consensus in military and intelligence circles that the grip of the original Al Qaeda in the tribal areas continues to tighten at a time when the Pakistani government is in crisis, led planners at the Special Operations Command to develop the strategy for the tribal areas.

A group of Pakistan experts convened in March by the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that empowering tribal leaders could be an effective strategy to counter the rising influence of Islamic religious leaders and to weaken Al Qaeda. But a report on the session found that such successes “would be difficult to achieve, particularly in the north (Bajaur) and south (North and South Waziristan).”

One person who had been brief on the proposal cautioned that whether a significant number of tribal leaders would join an American-backed effort carried out by Pakistani forces was “the $64,000 question.”
 

Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington,
and Carlotta Gall from Islamabad, Pakistan.

    U.S. Hopes to Use Pakistani Tribes Against Al Qaeda, NYT, 19.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/washington/19policy.html

McCain Finds Sympathy

on Torture Issue

November 16, 2007
The New York Times
By MARC SANTORA

On a bitterly cold morning last week, diners at the Whistle Stop Cafe in Boone, Iowa, were just sitting down for their morning coffee when Senator John McCain entered. Within minutes, Mr. McCain turned to a hot-button topic for which he literally serves as the living embodiment: the subject of torture.

“One of the things that kept us going when I was in prison in North Vietnam was that we knew that if the situation were reversed, that we would not be doing to our captors what they were doing to us,” he said.

When Mr. McCain brings up the issue of torture, he is often met by a complex response. Many of the Republican voters he courts do not agree with his opposition to aggressive interrogation techniques that many have condemned as torture. But they are often captivated by his discussion of the issue, in some cases even moved to tears, as was the case in Boone.

On the campaign trail, Mr. McCain does not dwell on the personal details of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war, the “torture ropes” in which he was bound day and night, or the beatings he endured. But as he speaks, the physical reminders of his wounds are there for all to see, from the stiffness of his arms, which to this day he can only painfully raise above his head, to the shortness of his stride, a result of injury and subsequent beatings.

Mr. McCain has been speaking out more forcefully about the issue as it has bubbled up recently on the campaign trail and in debates.

Democrats are largely opposed to torture, and while the Bush administration has said it does not engage in torture, it had previously reserved the right to use aggressive interrogation techniques in questioning terrorism suspects. And the leading Republican candidates, with the exception of Mr. McCain, are refusing to rule out certain techniques that others would deem as torture.

“I want to tell you. Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney all think it is O.K.,” Mr. McCain told the diners in Boone. “They have one thing in common. They don’t understand the military and the culture of this nation. If they did, they could never condone such behavior.”

The issue has taken on particular resonance over the last few weeks as lawmakers argued over the nomination of Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general, with Democrats angered over his refusal to call waterboarding torture and therefore illegal. And it has led to some of the most pointed exchanges of the Republican campaign so far. When Mr. McCain faulted his Republican opponents’ lack of wartime experience, Mr. Giuliani shot back against his old political ally, Mr. McCain, saying he “has never run a city, never run a state, never run a government.”

From public forums in Iowa to the living rooms of New Hampshire and the military towns in South Carolina, Mr. McCain’s message is simple: what America does to its enemies defines America itself.

Sometimes, he does not even have to say anything himself, leaving the task to those who introduce him.

At a Veterans Day ceremony at Beaufort National Cemetery in South Carolina, Mayor William Rauch of Beaufort introduced Mr. McCain by recalling how as a prisoner, Mr. McCain had once refused to be filmed for propaganda purposes, “uplifting his center finger” when the guard entered his cell and uttering “the oath that is commonly associated with that gesture.”

The act of defiance, Mr. Rauch said, led to another month or so of beatings.

At many events, the campaign often shows grainy black-and-white film of a young Mr. McCain soon after his capture in North Vietnam, obviously in pain and confined to a bed, telling his captors his name and rank as he smokes a cigarette.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, will often point to Mr. McCain’s opposition to torture to support her own stance. All of the leading Democratic candidates have made it clear that if the Republican nominee is not Mr. McCain, they will make torture a subject of any general election campaign.

While Mr. McCain refrains from discussing his own experiences, he lets others address the issue. At a celebration Saturday of the 232nd birthday of the Marine Corps, in Bedford, N.H., as veterans from five wars over the last century looked on, Mr. McCain said that any candidate who joked about sleep deprivation, as Mr. Giuliani had done several days earlier, should talk to his fellow prisoner of war and supporter, Orson G. Swindle.

Mr. McCain described how Mr. Swindle was “chained to a stool for 10 days, then let off that stool for one day, and then chained to that stool again for 10 more days.”

Mr. McCain believes that the United States’ war on terrorism has been defined for much of the world by its failure to forthrightly reject torture, as well as its continuing the practice of rendition, in which terrorism suspects are spirited off to countries that may engage in torture, and the continued detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, without trials. He portrays his Republican opponents’ position on the torture issue as reflective of “macho” or “tough-guy” poses.

After a public forum at a restaurant in Allison, Iowa, where he once again took on his Republican opponents by name, Mr. McCain told reporters that, because of his efforts in the Senate, he was confident that the United States was no longer engaging in cruel and inhumane treatment.

“After we passed the Detainee Treatment Act, the Military Commissions Act, then obviously anybody who violated any law of the United States would have to be held responsible,” he said.

A few days later, in New Hampshire, Mr. McCain was asked about reports that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, was made to give up vital information only after being waterboarded.

Mr. McCain said he did not believe that to be the case. While the C.I.A. might have left that impression, he said, the F.B.I. disagreed.

It has also been reported that Mr. Mohammed “confessed” to plotting to kill former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter as well as Pope John Paul II, leading interrogators to believe he was telling them whatever he thought they wanted to hear.

Mr. McCain said he had no idea how the issue of torture would affect the primaries and caucuses. As he traveled across Iowa one day last week, he reviewed a new CNN poll that found 69 percent of Americans believed waterboarding was torture. But only 58 percent thought it should not be used on terrorism suspects.

Aware that many people might not even know what the technique involves, Mr. McCain often outlines its details.

“You incline someone’s head and stuff a rag in their mouth and pour water and give one the total sensation of drowning,” he told the breakfast diners in Boone. “It was invented in the Spanish inquisition and was used by Pol Pot. It is now being used on Burmese monks by this military junta in Burma.”

“I know how evil this enemy is,” Mr. McCain told the Boone audience. But the issue is about more than one technique, he said. “This is really fundamentally about what kind of nation the United States of America is.”

But Milt Mattson, standing outside the cafe after Mr. McCain left, said he thought the United States needed to take any measure it deemed necessary.

“This is a war for our life,” Mr. Mattson said. “These are people that chop heads off. I don’t care what we have to do to stop them.”

    McCain Finds Sympathy on Torture Issue, NYT, 16.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/us/politics/16mccain.html

Red Cross Monitors

Barred From Guantánamo

November 16, 2007
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GLABERSON

A confidential 2003 manual for operating the Guantánamo detention center shows that military officials had a policy of denying detainees access to independent monitors from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The manual said one goal was to “exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee,” by denying access to the Koran and by preventing visits with Red Cross representatives, who have a long history of monitoring the conditions under which prisoners in international conflicts are held. The document said that even after their initial weeks at Guantánamo, some detainees would not be permitted to see representatives of the International Red Cross, known as the I.C.R.C.

It was permissible, the document said, for some long-term detainees to have “No access. No contact of any kind with the I.C.R.C.”

Some legal experts and advocates for detainees said yesterday that the policy might have violated international law, which provides for such monitoring to assure humanitarian treatment and to limit the ability of governments to hold detainees secretly.

The document, a two-inch-thick operations manual, was first posted on Wikileaks, a Web site that encourages posting of leaked materials. Military officials said that the manual appeared genuine but described outdated policies and that all Guantánamo detainees could now see Red Cross monitors. In response to critics’ assertions that the detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, may have violated international law, a spokesman, Lt. Col. Edward M. Bush III, said, “I am in no position to speculate about what happened in 2003.”

Simon Schorno, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said the organization was aware that it was not seeing all Guantánamo detainees from 2002, when the detention camp was opened, to 2004. He said the policies outlined in the manual “run counter to the manner in which the I.C.R.C. conducts its detention visits at Guantánamo Bay and around the world.”

He added that Red Cross officials worked with American officials “to resolve this issue confidentially, since gaining access to all detainees in full accordance with its standard practice was paramount.”

The Red Cross has been critical of Guantánamo, saying publicly in 2003 that keeping detainees indefinitely without allowing them to know their fate was unacceptable and, in confidential reports, that the physical and psychological treatment of detainees amounted to torture.

The manual is a detailed directive of standard operating procedures at Guantánamo intended for use by the hundreds of people involved in running the detention camp. It provides one of the most complete portraits of the rules of the camp in its early days, when it was a largely closed place where detainees were not publicly identified.

In some instances, the manual echoed the arguments then being advanced by Washington officials as they fended off criticism of Guantánamo. The manual described point-by-point instructions for many camp procedures, including feeding and restraining detainees, and forced extraction of inmates from their cells by military troops. It said a major goal was to foster detainees’ dependence on their interrogators, in part by isolating them. In a section labeled “psychological deterrence,” the manual said military working dogs should be walked in the camp “to demonstrate physical presence to detainees.”

The spokesman, Colonel Bush, said yesterday that dogs were no longer used at the detention camp.

Some international law experts said yesterday that they were startled that military officials had put in writing a policy of denying the Red Cross access to prisoners.

“The world recognizes that the I.C.R.C. should get access” to prison camps, said Richard J. Wilson, a law professor at American University who was until recently a lawyer for a Guantánamo detainee.

Deborah N. Pearlstein, a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, said international principles were aimed at preventing governments from “disappearing” opponents. “I.C.R.C. access and the obligation to record and account for detainees is very clear under international law,” Ms. Pearlstein said.

The military spokesman, Colonel Bush, said: “All I can tell you is what we do today. And the absolute policy now, today, is that the I.C.R.C. is granted access to everything.”

    Red Cross Monitors Barred From Guantánamo, NYT, 16.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/washington/16gitmo.html

Letters

Our Precious Liberties, Endangered

November 14, 2007
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “The Coup at Home” (column, Nov. 11):

Frank Rich got it exactly right when he wrote that “we are a people in clinical depression” regarding the continuing deterioration of our democracy and the spineless performance of the Democrats in Congress in standing up for our Constitution and against President Bush.

What the Democratic Party fails to factor in when considering its craven, politically motivated lack of principle is that come the 2008 elections, the public may feel so helpless and hopeless that we just don’t bother to show up to vote as we did in 2006.

I believe that there was a current running through this country in the elections last November that allowed us to believe that we had a voice and that we could overturn this imperial presidency by electing those who wouldn’t let President Bush continue to get away with the assaults on our country and our Constitution. We had hope and belief.

Tragically though, one year later, we discover that the message we sent was worthless and that those we elected were about as corrupt and morally complacent as our president.

The Democrats take for granted a big voter turnout, especially from independent voters like me, at their peril. They can count on us in ’08, the way we’ve counted on them. Kate Schweizer

Harriman, N.Y., Nov. 11, 2007

•

To the Editor:

As a defender of civil liberties, I take issue with Frank Rich’s dire contention that the erosion of our freedoms is the “new normal.” As far as I can tell, we still have a right to free speech. Now is the time for freedom-loving Americans to speak up louder than ever in order to support the democratic principles that have made America great, and not vote for anyone who seeks to perpetuate the fear that that has been fueled by the Bush administration.

Judge Michael B. Mukasey was wrong not to take an unequivocal stand against waterboarding. But now that he is the country’s chief law enforcer, he should not be afraid to ensure that the constitutional protections that were enacted to guard against tyranny are firmly in place.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf suspended the Constitution in Pakistan. Are we next?

Diane Goldstein Temkin

New York, Nov. 11, 2007

The writer is a civil rights lawyer.

•

To the Editor:

Frank Rich condemns the Democrats (especially Senators Charles E. Schumer and Dianne Feinstein) for approving the appointment of Michael B. Mukasey as attorney general despite the fact that he would not condemn “waterboarding.” Mr. Rich goes on to say that “this is a signal difference from the Vietnam era” when “disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions.”

But the difference between now and then was the military draft during the Vietnam War! Also, confirming Mr. Mukasey is small potatoes compared with the Democratic approval of the unwarranted war against Iraq in 2003.

Warner B. Huck

Hilton Head Island, S.C., Nov. 11, 2007

•

To the Editor:

Many thanks to Frank Rich for reminding people that after 9/11 Rudolph W. Giuliani tried to destroy democracy in New York City by urging that our elections be postponed so that he could overstay his term. In my experience, many people here have forgotten this shameful attempt at a power grab.

Whenever Mr. Giuliani the candidate says that “they” attacked us because they hate our freedoms and our rights, people should be reminded that his first response to this hatred was to try to strip away our most precious right: the right to vote.

The rest of America needs to know that the person they call “America’s mayor” desperately tried to become “New York’s autocrat.” Mayor Giuliani responded to an emergency by attacking the right of the people to vote. How would a President Giuliani react to an emergency?

Eliot Camaren

New York, Nov. 11, 2007

    Our Precious Liberties, Endangered, NYT, 14.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/opinion/l14rich.html

Op-Ed Columnist

The Coup at Home

November 11, 2007
The New York Times
By FRANK RICH

AS Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America’s two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general.

So what if America’s chief law enforcement official won’t say that waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. You’re either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you’re with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad.

In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally condemned as the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the epitome of White House hypocrisy and incompetence. But that’s not exactly news. It’s been apparent for years that America was suicidal to go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while showering billions of dollars on Pakistan, where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection of a con man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden.

General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still does, with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White House on Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda” and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country harboring terrorists will be “regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

A memorable highlight of our special relationship with this prized “ally” came in September 2006, when the general turned up in Washington to kick off his book tour. Asked about the book by a reporter at a White House press conference, he said he was contractually “honor bound” to remain mum until it hit the stores — thus demonstrating that Simon & Schuster had more clout with him than the president. This didn’t stop Mr. Bush from praising General Musharraf for his recently negotiated “truce” to prevent further Taliban inroads in northwestern Pakistan. When the Pakistani strongman “looks me in the eye” and says “there won’t be a Taliban and won’t be Al Qaeda,” the president said, “I believe him.”

Sooner than you could say “Putin,” The Daily Telegraph of London reported that Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, had signed off on this “truce.” Since then, the Pakistan frontier has become a more thriving terrorist haven than ever.

Now The Los Angeles Times reports that much of America’s $10 billion-plus in aid to Pakistan has gone to buy conventional weaponry more suitable for striking India than capturing terrorists. To rub it in last week, General Musharraf released 25 pro-Taliban fighters in a prisoner exchange with a tribal commander the day after he suspended the constitution.

But there’s another moral to draw from the Musharraf story, and it has to do with domestic policy, not foreign. The Pakistan mess, as The New York Times editorial page aptly named it, is not just another blot on our image abroad and another instance of our mismanagement of the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It also casts a harsh light on the mess we have at home in America, a stain that will not be so easily eradicated.

In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We’ve become inured to democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.

This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf’s.

More Machiavellian still, Mr. Bush has constantly told the world he’s championing democracy even as he strangles it. Mr. Bush repeated the word “freedom” 27 times in roughly 20 minutes at his 2005 inauguration, and even presided over a “Celebration of Freedom” concert on the Ellipse hosted by Ryan Seacrest. It was an Orwellian exercise in branding, nothing more. The sole point was to give cover to our habitual practice of cozying up to despots (especially those who control the oil spigots) and to our own government’s embrace of warrantless wiretapping and torture, among other policies that invert our values.

Even if Mr. Bush had the guts to condemn General Musharraf, there is no longer any moral high ground left for him to stand on. Quite the contrary. Rather than set a democratic example, our president has instead served as a model of unconstitutional behavior, eagerly emulated by his Pakistani acolyte.

Take the Musharraf assault on human-rights lawyers. Our president would not be so unsubtle as to jail them en masse. But earlier this year a senior Pentagon official, since departed, threatened America’s major white-shoe law firms by implying that corporate clients should fire any firm whose partners volunteer to defend detainees in Guantánamo and elsewhere. For its part, Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department did not round up independent-minded United States attorneys and toss them in prison. It merely purged them without cause to serve Karl Rove’s political agenda.

Tipping his hat in appreciation of Mr. Bush’s example, General Musharraf justified his dismantling of Pakistan’s Supreme Court with language mimicking the president’s diatribes against activist judges. The Pakistani leader further echoed Mr. Bush by expressing a kinship with Abraham Lincoln, citing Lincoln’s Civil War suspension of a prisoner’s fundamental legal right to a hearing in court, habeas corpus, as a precedent for his own excesses. (That’s like praising F.D.R. for setting up internment camps.) Actually, the Bush administration has outdone both Lincoln and Musharraf on this score: Last January, Mr. Gonzales testified before Congress that “there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.”

To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.

This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it. They’re falling over each other to expand Gitmo, see who can promise the most torture and abridge the largest number of constitutional rights. The front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, boasts a proven record in extralegal executive power grabs, Musharraf-style: After 9/11 he tried to mount a coup, floating the idea that he stay on as mayor in defiance of New York’s term-limits law.

What makes the Democrats’ Mukasey cave-in so depressing is that it shows how far even exemplary sticklers for the law like Senators Feinstein and Schumer have lowered democracy’s bar. When they argued that Mr. Mukasey should be confirmed because he’s not as horrifying as Mr. Gonzales or as the acting attorney general who might get the job otherwise, they sounded whipped. After all these years of Bush-Cheney torture, they’ll say things they know are false just to move on.

In a Times OpEd article justifying his reluctant vote to confirm a man Dick Cheney promised would make “an outstanding attorney general,” Mr. Schumer observed that waterboarding is already “illegal under current laws and conventions.” But then he vowed to support a new bill “explicitly” making waterboarding illegal because Mr. Mukasey pledged to enforce it. Whatever. Even if Congress were to pass such legislation, Mr. Bush would veto it, and even if the veto were by some miracle overturned, Mr. Bush would void the law with a “signing statement.” That’s what he effectively did in 2005 when he signed a bill that its authors thought outlawed the torture of detainees.

That Mr. Schumer is willing to employ blatant Catch-22 illogic to pretend that Mr. Mukasey’s pledge on waterboarding has any force shows what pathetic crumbs the Democrats will settle for after all these years of being beaten down. The judges and lawyers challenging General Musharraf have more fight left in them than this.

Last weekend a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that the Democratic-controlled Congress and Mr. Bush are both roundly despised throughout the land, and that only 24 percent of Americans believe their country is on the right track. That’s almost as low as the United States’ rock-bottom approval ratings in the latest Pew surveys of Pakistan (15 percent) and Turkey (9 percent).

Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.

    The Coup at Home, NYT, 11.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/opinion/11rich.html?ref=opinion

Op-Ed Contributors

Guantánamo by the Numbers

November 10, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID BOWKER and DAVID KAYE

SIX years ago this Tuesday, President Bush granted American armed forces sweeping authority to detain and interrogate foreign members of Al Qaeda and their supporters and to use military commissions to try them. By doing so, the president set in motion the creation of military commissions and the detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The Bush administration may legitimately claim certain benefits from the Guantánamo system. Some dangerous men are held there, and valuable intelligence has probably been gathered, perhaps even some that has enabled the government to disrupt terrorist activities.

But the costs have been high. Guantánamo has come to be seen worldwide as a stain on America’s reputation. The military commissions have failed to deliver justice, stymied by the federal courts’ refusal to permit the president to create a system at odds with United States courts-martial and the international law of war.

Meanwhile, the number of detainees at Guantánamo has steadily dropped to a little over 300, from its peak of more than 700, no more than 80 of whom are likely to face any kind of American prosecution. Not a single defendant has gone to trial, and only one has pleaded guilty.

Today, most American leaders acknowledge the need for a new approach. The president himself has expressed a desire to see the detention camp closed. But he has only a little more than a year to do so before the next president takes office. It’s time to take a close look at this system of detention and prosecution and move quickly to establish viable alternatives. With apologies to the Harper’s Index, the following data provide a historical snapshot.

A Denim Jacket for Your Time

Number of “high-value detainees” now at Guantánamo: 15

Approximate percentage of detainees found to have committed “hostile acts” against the United States or coalition forces before detention: 53

Approximate number of countries of which detainees are citizens: 40

Most represented countries at Guantánamo: Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Yemen

Cost of building Guantánamo high-security detention facilities: about $54 million

Estimated annual cost of operating Guantánamo: $90 million to $118 million

Cost of “expeditionary legal complex” for the military commission (under construction): $10 million to $12 million

Number of books in the Guantánamo detention library: 5,143

Number of Korans issued to detainees from January 2002 to June 2005: more than 1,600

Number of daily calories per detainee: Up to 4,200, including halal meat

Average weight gain per detainee: 20 pounds

Number of pills dispensed per day: 1,000, to 200-300 detainees

Number of apparent suicides: 4

Number of apparent suicide attempts: 41, by 25 detainees (as of May 2006)

Number of detainee assaults on guards using “bodily fluids”: more than 400

Date of first visit to Guantánamo by the International Committee of the Red Cross: Jan. 18, 2002

Approximate number of visits by lawyers to Guantánamo detainees so far this year: 1,100

Month of first habeas corpus petition filed to challenge detention at Guantánamo: January 2002

Number of habeas corpus petitions filed in federal courts on behalf of detainees: roughly 300

Number of detainees designated by the president as “eligible” for trial by military commission: 14

Number actually charged with crimes (for example, murder and material support for terrorism): 10

Number of pending cases: 3

Number of convictions: 1 (an Australian who pleaded guilty to material support of terrorism and was sentenced to nine months of confinement in his home country)

Estimated number of detainees who may be charged in the future: 80

Month of first release of a detainee: May 2002 (one detainee repatriated to Afghanistan because of an “emotional breakdown”)

Approximate number of detainees released: 445

Approximate number of current detainees found eligible for transfer or release: 70

Countries to which Guantánamo detainees have been transferred: Albania, Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Maldives, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uganda, Yemen

Most recent announced transfer of detainees from Guantánamo: Nov. 4 (eight to Afghanistan, three to Jordan)

Personal items provided to detainees upon departure: a Koran, a denim jacket, a white T-shirt, a pair of blue jeans, high-top sneakers, a gym bag of toiletries and a pillow and blanket for the flight home

Number of detainees said by Pentagon to have resumed hostile activities against the United States after release: at least 30

Number of United States senators who voted in favor of a nonbinding resolution that Guantánamo detainees “should not be released into American society, nor should they be transferred stateside into facilities in American communities and neighborhoods”: 94

Number of bills in Congress calling for the closing of Guantánamo: 3

Number of members of the House of Representatives who signed a letter to President Bush in June 2007 urging him to close Guantánamo and move the detainees to military prisons in the United States: 145

Number of Republicans who signed the letter: 1

Democratic presidential candidates who are on record supporting closing Guantánamo: 8

Republican presidential candidates who are: 2 (John McCain and Ron Paul)

Closest American allies that have called for Guantánamo’s closing: Britain, France, Germany

Next scheduled legal test of the Guantánamo system: Boumediene v. Bush, a challenge to the denial of habeas corpus, set for argument before the Supreme Court on Dec. 5



David Bowker, a lawyer in New York, and David Kaye, the acting director of the Program on International Human Rights Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, were staff lawyers at the State Department during the Clinton and Bush administrations.

    Guantánamo by the Numbers, NYT, 10.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/opinion/10kayeintro.html

Illustration: Mirko Ilic
 Uncle Sam on the Line        NYT        5.11.2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/opinion/05ashcroft.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Uncle Sam on the Line

November 5, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN ASHCROFT

Washington

FOR almost two years, the country has debated whether the Bush administration acted properly and lawfully in undertaking emergency surveillance operations of suspected foreign terrorists on presidential authorization in the wake of 9/11. For several months, we have been debating bills that seek to modernize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court statute.

There are many complex and difficult issues associated with these debates, but whether to terminate the huge lawsuits that have been filed against the nation’s major telecommunications carriers accused of cooperating with classified counterterrorism programs is not one of them. Whatever one feels about the underlying intelligence activities or the legal basis on which they were initially established, it would be unfair and contrary to the interests of the United States to allow litigation that tries to hold private telecommunications companies liable for them.

At the outset, it is critical to understand what the immunity provisions the administration and Congress have negotiated actually do. This is not “blanket immunity,” as it is sometimes caricatured by its opponents. The Senate bill would confer immunity in only two limited circumstances: if the carrier did not do what the plaintiffs claim; or if the carrier did do what the plaintiffs claim but based on explicit assurances from the highest levels of the government that the activities in question were authorized by the president and determined to be lawful.

Longstanding principles of law hold that an American corporation is entitled to rely on assurances of legality from officials responsible for government activities. The public officials in question might be right or wrong about the advisability or legality of what they are doing, but it is their responsibility, not the company’s, to deal with the consequences if they are wrong.

To deny immunity under these circumstances would be extraordinarily unfair to any cooperating carriers. By what principle of justice should anyone face potentially ruinous liability for cooperating with intelligence activities that are authorized by the president and whose legality has been reviewed and approved by our most senior legal officials?

As a practical matter, in circumstances involving classified intelligence activities, a corporation will typically not know enough about the underlying circumstances and operations to make informed judgments about legality. Moreover, for an initiative like the terrorist surveillance program — which the Office of Legal Counsel made clear was based on the Congressional authorization for the use of military force and the president’s war powers under the Constitution — a telephone company simply has no expertise in the relevant legal issues.

If the attorney general of the United States says that an intelligence-gathering operation has been determined to be lawful, a company should be able to rely on that determination. Indeed, contrary to the assertion of Senator Russell Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, no company can realistically be expected to contradict such judgments by the attorney general, as they will simply not have the facts at hand to do so.

Even more important than the inherent unfairness of requiring companies to second-guess executive-branch legal judgments are the acute dangers to which it would expose the country. One of our nation’s most important comparative advantages over our adversaries is the creativity and robustness of the private sector. To cut ourselves off from that advantage would amount to a form of unilateral disarmament.

Yet if we allow the litigation to continue, that is precisely what we will do. The message that will be sent to American companies is that they can be exposed to crippling lawsuits for helping the government with national security activities that they are explicitly assured are legal. The only rational response would be for companies to adopt an attitude of extreme wariness, even in the most urgent or clear-cut situations. To put the matter plainly, this puts American lives at risk.

The lawsuits also risk the disclosure of national security secrets that must be kept from public view if our intelligence agencies are to be able to protect us effectively. When critics of immunity are being honest, they will admit that the main reason they want the litigation to continue is the hope that it will force disclosure of information about the underlying programs — information they hope will advance their own political or ideological disputes with the administration. But that is a bad consequence, not a good one.

Although the lawsuits are couched in the language of accountability and the public’s right to know, they would really have the effect of showing the world and our enemies sensitive secrets about how our national security agencies do their work. For domestic purposes, proper accountability already exists — through the people’s elected representatives on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. It is through the legislature, not lawsuits, that we as a nation have tried to balance the need to let our intelligence agencies operate in secret, as they must if they are to be effective, and the need to ensure that they do so lawfully.

Members of both political parties in both houses of Congress have already been briefed extensively about the activities underlying the current lawsuits. Obviously, not all 535 members of Congress can have equal access to such sensitive information; the risk that the information will be compromised is simply too high. But the intelligence committees are recognized authorities on these issues and proper repositories of these secrets.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has voted 13-2 to grant immunity to telecommunication carriers that have been sued for helping the country after 9/11. Unlike most everyone else, this committee had the necessary and relevant facts when it rendered judgment. Members of both parties came together in a rare consensus on the proposition that the lawsuits against the telecommunications carriers must stop.

Assuming that the country’s communications companies helped the National Security Agency track Qaeda operatives and other terrorists after being assured that their conduct was lawful, they acted as patriots, not privacy violators. The Senate Intelligence Committee acted wisely. The full Congress should follow its lead.

John Ashcroft was the United States attorney general from 2001 to 2005. He now heads a consulting firm that has telecommunications companies as clients.

    Uncle Sam on the Line, NYT, 5.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/opinion/05ashcroft.html

New Detainee Rights Weighed

in Plans to Close Guantánamo

November 4, 2007
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GLABERSON

WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 — Administration officials are considering granting Guantánamo detainees substantially greater rights as part of an effort to close the detention center and possibly move much of its population to the United States, according to officials involved in the discussions.

One proposal that is being widely discussed in the administration would overhaul the procedure for determining whether detainees are properly held by granting them legal representation at detention hearings and by giving federal judges, not military officers, the power to decide whether suspects should be held.

Although the Bush administration has long defended the legal protections afforded detainees at Guantánamo against strenuous criticism, some officials now say that moving them to American soil would require giving them enhanced protections.

“If you were to bring them to the United States, there is a recognition that for policy reasons you would need even more robust procedures than those currently at Guantánamo,” one senior official involved in the discussions said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because no decisions have been made.

The administration has insisted for more than five years that a legal pillar of the war on terror is that the military alone has the power to decide which foreign terrorism suspects should be held and for how long, and backing away from that would be a sharp change of course.

Yet some officials say that enhancing detainees’ rights could also help the administration strategically, by undercutting a case brought by suspects at Guantánamo that is now before the Supreme Court, which could wind up winning them even more power to challenge their detention.

Under current procedures at Guantánamo, military officers decide whether detainees are properly held as enemy combatants, and the suspects are not permitted lawyers in the detention hearings, known as Combatant Status Review Tribunals.

Facing international criticism for holding hundreds of men without charge for years, officials from President Bush on down have said they would like to close Guantánamo. In recent interviews, officials said the discussion of detainee rights was not an acknowledgment that past policies were flawed, but rather was an indication that the administration was engaged in trying to assess the legal and practical consequences of shutting the detention center and moving detainees to the United States.

Even so, some officials are arguing against major policy shifts, and similar proposals have failed to gain steam within the administration in the past. In addition, any administration proposal would probably face intense scrutiny in Congress.

Before any detainees can be moved, officials have said that they would need to find or build a secure site in the United States and that they would need legislation allowing detainees deemed to be a threat to be held “until the end of hostilities” in the war on terror, even if they were not charged with war crimes. Under current proposals, scores of detainees might continue to be held indefinitely without facing criminal charges.

“These are dangerous men,” said Sandra L. Hodgkinson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs. “There has to be an appropriate way of handling that.”

The administration has fought for years in court and in Congress against granting the detainees more rights. In the latest instance, the Supreme Court is to consider a case brought by Guantánamo detainees who are seeking to challenge their confinement in habeas corpus suits in federal court.

If the administration loses that case, it could give the detainees even more legal rights and create a precedent limiting the president’s and the military’s power. Lawyers inside and outside of government said a detailed proposal from the administration to give detainees fuller legal protections could convince the justices that they need not resolve the case, Boumediene v. Bush.

The discussions now under way in the administration show the complexities of the internal debate over whether to close Guantánamo, with some officials convinced they are facing unattractive choices: keeping the detention camp open and continuing to draw worldwide criticism or transferring the most dangerous detainees to the United States, where American courts would probably grant them increased legal protections.

Officials have said that to close Guantánamo, perhaps 200 of the 330 detainees there could be transferred to the United States. The remainder would be sent back to their home countries or to other countries, a painstaking process of reducing the number of detainees that has been going on for several years.

But the officials have said that about 200 of the detainees are considered too dangerous to repatriate. Of those, 80 or more, officials say, would be tried for war crimes in military commissions, with the remaining 120 or fewer held indefinitely because of military assertions that they are a threat to American security.

The officials said the current discussions about ways of closing Guantánamo had become more concrete in recent weeks, with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates directing his advisers to come up with a proposal for closing the detention center.

Although Mr. Gates had urged the closing of Guantánamo shortly after he became defense secretary last December, he has said he quickly encountered resistance in the administration. But on Sept. 26 he told Congress in testimony that he had directed his deputies “to put together our own proposal inside the Department of Defense that we could then perhaps use as a basis for discussion” in the administration on how to close the center.

Some people outside the administration who are involved in Guantánamo issues said the political and international pressure on the detention center had now combined with concerns about the impending Supreme Court case in accelerating consideration of potential options.

Matthew Waxman, a former detainee affairs official at the Defense Department who now teaches at Columbia Law School, said the proposal to involve federal judges and detainees’ lawyers in hearings on detainees’ status had been discussed previously in the administration.

But, Mr. Waxman said, the proposal now “is gaining currency because you have greater recognition of the strategic costs of maintaining Guantánamo, combined with the legal risks of leaving it to the Supreme Court to decide what legal rights exist at Guantánamo.”

Under the current proposal, a specially created federal court with strict rules to protect classified information would hear detainee challenges to their detention. Judges who usually sit in regular federal courts would preside and would hear arguments from detainees’ lawyers.

Few details of the proposal are known, but such proceedings would be unlikely to give the federal judges the latitude they would have in the habeas corpus cases the detainees are seeking in the Supreme Court, lawyers said.

Other proposals to give detainees increased rights are also part of the discussions, people knowledgeable about the talks said. The administration could simply agree that detainees held in the United States were entitled to have their cases reviewed in habeas corpus cases, which would undercut several years of legal and Congressional arguments.

Another proposal would improve on the Pentagon’s current detention hearings, now conducted by officers, by adding military judges, for example, one person who has been briefed on the discussions said.

The discussions involve fierce competition between agencies and, at times, within agencies, which sometimes have sharply differing views on Guantánamo. Under Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, the Justice Department was often perceived in the administration as resisting proposals to close Guantánamo.

If Mr. Bush’s nominee, Michael B. Mukasey, is approved as attorney general, he has signaled he might shift the course of the department. In testimony at his confirmation hearings he said he would seek ideas “with the goal of closing it down because it’s hurting us,” and said Guantánamo had “given us a black eye.”

But he added that there was “no easy solution” to the question of what to do with current detainees.

Ms. Hodgkinson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, said there were many practical concerns with proposals to increase the legal rights of detainees if they were moved to the United States. She said Pentagon officials continued to insist that enemy combatants held outside the country could be held by the military until they were no longer a threat.

She said the proposal to provide lawyers to detainees for their detention hearings and have their cases heard by judges would need to be clearly limited to detainees held inside the United States. Military officials said this summer that they were holding 24,500 detainees in Iraq alone.

“How would we provide 25,000 lawyers in Iraq?” Ms. Hodgkinson said. “We couldn’t do it if we tried.”

Critics of the Bush administration have accused the government on several occasions of shifting legal tactics on detainee issues when it anticipated losses in court.

That perception could hurt the administration’s credibility with the Supreme Court justices if there is a new shift while the court is considering the case that is to be argued in December, said Barry Friedman, a professor at New York University School of Law who is an expert on the Supreme Court.

Still, Professor Friedman said, if the administration were to propose giving detainees new legal rights, the justices might conclude they did not need to answer the complicated question the case presents of defining the rights of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo.

“It is a tough question,” Professor Friedman said. “As a general matter the court doesn’t answer tough constitutional questions if it doesn’t need to.”

New Detainee Rights Weighed in Plans to Close Guantánamo, NYT, 4.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/us/nationalspecial3/04gitmo.html