Month: April 2013

Presentment Journey


by digby

Marcy Wheeler breaks down the “breakdown” in constitutional protections for people accused of terrorism on American soil. She points out that the Miranda denial may be fairly benign and possibly the least of the incursions on suspects’ rights,  one of which is the precedent set in the Undiebomber case of questioning a suspect who is under sedation and then using his words in court. (I suppose this is better than withholding pain medication as George W. Bush personally suggested, but it’s still counter to the basic tenets of the constitution.)

But I was completely unaware of this and it’s very disturbing:

But the big issue, in my opinion, is presentment, whether he is brought before a judge within 48 hours. In addition to stretching Miranda, the government has also been holding and interrogating suspects for periods — up to two weeks for American citizens and far longer for non-citizens — before they see a judge. Not only does this postpone the time when they will be given a lawyer whether they ask or not (because judges are going to assign one), but it gives the government an uninterrupted period of time to use soft coercion to get testimony and other kinds of cooperation.

In my opinion, two of the most troubling cases like this, both involving naturalized citizens accused of terrorism, are Faisal Shahzad and Manssor Arbabsiar.

Shahzad was held and questioned, reportedly with the help of the HIG, for two weeks before he first appeared before a judge. Each day during that period, he signed a waiver of his right to appear before a judge. Ultimately, he plead guilty, so no one every questioned whether his confessions were coerced or not.

But there are two details that I think raise questions about whether he freely waived his rights. First, within a day or so of his arrest, Pakistani authorities had detained a friend of his and his father-in-law in Pakistan. The day after that, authorities put Shahzad’s father, and possibly his wife and children, under “protective” house arrest. That is, even before he normally would have been permitted to see a judge, his loved ones — possibly even his kids — were in Pakistani custody. Particularly given the way our government used threats to family members with detainees being tortured, this seems like a potential way to coerce a presentment “waiver.”

Then there’s the reason the government gave for wanting uninterrupted access to Shahzad:

Federal law enforcement agents are vigorously and expeditiously pursuing leads relating to this and other information provided by the defendant, a process which has required the participation of hundreds of agents in different cities working around the clock since the defendant’s arrest. Uninterrupted access to the defendant has been, and continues to be, critical to this process, which requires, among other things, an ability to promptly verify with him the accuracy of information developed in the investigation. [my emphasis]

The government said it wanted to avoid presentment so it could have uninterrupted, around the clock, acces to him to verify information with him. Recall the technique used at Gitmo, “Frequent Flier,” where detainees would be wakened and moved, as a way to continue to use sleep deprivation without looking like they were doing so. The language of round-the-clock access seems to permit the same kind of sleep deprivation by default.

Like Shahzad, Manssor Arbabsiar (the Scary Iran Plotter) had a period of delay before seeing a lawyer, 12 days. During that period, he provided a confession that would be the cornerstone of most of the charges against him, and would also be about the only admissible evidence directly implicating the Quds Force in Iran. Without that confession, in other words, the government had almost no case, and certainly not one they could make an international incident over.

In that case, too, the government seemed to implicate his brother (who had transferred money to him) during the initial period, which raises questions about whether that helped to get him to cooperate. The government kept Arbabsiar hidden away at a military base, rather than a jail. The government never told Arbabsiar that charges against him had already been filed, so he never knew what those charges were (or what they didn’t include, which was a bunch of stuff he confessed to).

But it’s in the way the government got Arbabsiar to sign his first waiver I find most troubling. Arbasiar was detained in Mexico sometime on September 28, 2011 (the government has never publicly revealed what time). He was held there for some time, then flown to JFK, arriving at 8:40 PM on September 29, where he was arrested. He was questioned for three hours in what sounds like a bogus public safety exception form (there was absolutely no reason to believe there was a public safety risk, not least because Arbabsiar’s main co-conspirator was a DEA informant). And only then was he first asked to waive Miranda. But the government’s discussion of this timing (which was a response to an almost entirely redacted defense motion to throw out this confession) ties that waiver with Arbabsiar smoking a cigarette. It appears — though the facts on this are almost entirely secret — that the government detained a chain smoker at least three and more likely at least 24 hours (and possibly up to 48 hours, given his detention in Mexico), and then used the offer of a cigarette to get him to waive his most basic rights. There also appears to have been food involved (though Arbasbiar had the opportunity, which he didn’t use, to eat on the plane to the US), but the use of a cigarette to get someone to waive Miranda seems especially troubling (I realize rewards like cigarettes are central to non-violent interrogation, but apparently tying to basic rights is far more troubling).

Arbabsiar’s lawyer had a slew more complaints about his pre-presentment conditions (some also seem to do with food), but we don’t get to see those.

Which is part of the point. What the government did by delaying presentment in these two cases was to afford itself a 2 week period of oversight free interrogation. And there are at least hints –hints that, because both men ultimately plead out, we’ll never learn more about — that the interrogations used some of the same techniques we’re supposed to have left behind.

In only Arbabsiar’s case did the government need the confession elicited using these methods. Like Dzhokhar, Shahzad was caught in the act, with tens or hundreds of witnesses. Nevertheless, the government chose to infringe on the fundamental right to a lawyer, likely guessing it could get the accused to plead guilty and hide all this detail from the public.

Now the government no doubt would claim it needed to do this for intelligence purposes (indeed, the case of the UndieBomber, where they were never able to coerce his cooperation, even though his public defenders appear to have advised him to do so, and therefore had apparently unadmissible evidence against Anwar al-Awlaki may be why they did this), whether that purpose amounted to real intelligence or propaganda they could use internationally. But ultimately, this practice is corroding our legal system (and this approach will surely be adapted for other uses, such as hackers).

It must be noted that all of this happened under the Obama administration not the Bush administration.

Also too, innocent people.  I’m sure many of you will recall that the British law allowing long periods of interrogation without representation very famously imprisoned alleged terrorists The Guilford Four for many years for crimes they did not commit.  There is a reason why our legal system prohibits this and just because we have someone in custody who we believe committed a terrible crime it doesn’t mean that our government has the right to suspend constitutional guarantees.

And unless we need “intelligence” because we are getting ready to invade Russia to stamp out the Chechnyan threat to America (and no, I wouldn’t completely rule it out) I’m going to guess that we can keep the babies safe and still follow the constitution in this case.

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Did we learn anything from the Bush Administration’s disregard for constitutional principles?

by digby

Or were they simply normalized? We’re about to find out.

Yesterday I wrote that I hoped the American people would keep their wits about them this time and see this as an opportunity to prove to the world (and ourselves) that we are a civilized nation that lives under the rule of law. I was rather elated when I heard last night that they had captured the Boston Bombing suspect alive, thinking we might just have a chance.

But not everyone is on board, not by a long shot. Check out this video of John Bolton very casually assuming that this suspect must be designated an unlawful combatant and anything less would a dereliction of national security. This idea of treating this citizen as an enemy combatant is so prevalent on Fox News, I literally watched for hours and heard not one person raise even the slightest misgivings about stripping this person of his constitutional rights. It’s tossed off casually by Senators and pundits and ex-government officials as if it’s just a matter of common sense.

The pressure is going to be intense to deal with this suspect outside the normal boundaries of the law. Indeed, they are already treating him differently than anyone suspected of another crime by refusing to Mirandize him. This is the “new normal” in terrorism case, which Emily Bazelon describes in this excellent piece on the erosion of the Miranda ruling under both Bush and Obama. Everyone seems quite content to allow federal law enforcement to decide when these constitutional protections need to be applied and when they don’t.

The problem is that once you allow the government to carve our exceptions to our rights, there is no logical reason why they should stop at people suspected of “terrorism” however they choose to define it today. I wrote about reams about this back in the days when the Bush administration was pushing its limits. This was one satiric take on the Jose Padilla case that, unfortunately, apparently still applies:

That whole fourth and fifth amendment thing was only put there because back in the olden days we had kings who would falsely imprison people for political reasons. Needless to say, that could never happen now. Great Americans like John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney would never take advantage of the American people’s fears by saying that they have captured a dangerous terrorist soldier who was trying to kill them unless it were true. And they do not make mistakes about things like that. They are good people. There is no reason to fear the misuse of government power against its citizens so let’s take that off the table right now.

All of which makes me wonder how much better off we’d be if we didn’t have to deal with those inconvenient legal rights and due process to begin with? I know that potentially blowing up an apartment building is a heinous act of terrorism, but suppose we arrested a member of a criminal gang who was planning to blow up the very same apartment building for the insurance money? That would just be considered plain old murder so we’d have to let the guy speak to a lawyer and face a judge. But, the result would be exactly the same. A bunch of innocent people would potentially be dead and we would not have been able to stop this heinous mass murderer because our stupid constitution forced the government to allow him due process. Not to mention that we couldn’t have sufficiently leaned on him to extract a confession in the first place! I’m hard pressed to see how the families of the victims would see the distinction between a normal old “crime” and terrorism.

Why should any potential murderer or informant be allowed to use this excuse of “due process” simply because he hasn’t been to Afghanistan? Why should innocent people ever be put at risk?

If there’s one thing the Jose Padilla case is teaching us is that it’s long past time we started calling all criminal suspects what they really are — unlawful combatants. All criminals disrupt our way of life and hurt innocent people for their own gain. Is that not the very definition of terrorism?

The founders obviously just didn’t comprehend what problems they would cause when they wrote the bill of rights. Of course, they didn’t have crime and terrorism in those days to deal with, so they couldn’t have known how restrictive their naive little document was going to be on future generations. I’m just glad we finally have a government that’s willing to show some moxie for once and ignore these outdated sacred cows in our constitution. I would imagine they’d have the founders deep respect for doing so.

I’m fairly sure that John Bolton, Lindsay Graham and the rest of the Fox News gasbags who’ve been yammering about the necessity of designating the Boston suspect an “unlawful combatant” quite earnestly agree with that. Because underneath their rebel patriot poses, they are authoritarians. I’ll be curious to see how many alleged liberals hold hands with them this time. (Last time there were many …)

And as the shocking and sadly overlooked independent report on America’s torture regime released last week showed, all these constitutional erosions led to a horrible episode in our history that remains unresolved or even officially acknowledged:

The report lays the blame fully at the feet of the current administration, for covering up what happened and stifling any sort of national conversation on the topic — and the media, for splitting the difference between the facts and the plainly specious argument made by torture regime’s architects that what occurred should be defined as something other than what it so obviously was.

The report points out, as I have in the past, that neither Obama nor Congress have done a thing to make sure that, the next time a perceived emergency comes up, some other president or vice president won’t decide to torture again.

Obama’s policy of “looking forward instead of looking backward,” in this light, is exposed as a cover-up that is actually holding the country back from a crucial period of self-understanding, and growth.

In fact, President Obama unequivocally proclaimed “the United States doesn’t torture.” But it certainly does — when it wants to. Just pulling back the executive orders that excused the practice  doesn’t seen to have stopped the impulse to make new rules whenever it’s convenient, as the evolving Miranda exceptions prove.

The question will be if the Obama administration uses this opportunity to bring some sanity back to our response to terrorism or goes along with the demands of the right wing. Now is the chance for the President to make good on his promises to use our legal system to prosecute terrorism.

Unfortunately, the capitulation on Miranda warnings is not a good sign — for any of us. As Bazelon also points out, the implications for any citizen are stark:

There won’t be a public uproar. Whatever the FBI learns will be secret: We won’t know how far the interrogation went. And besides, no one is crying over the rights of the young man who is accused of killing innocent people, helping his brother set off bombs that were loaded to maim, and terrorizing Boston Thursday night and Friday. But the next time you read about an abusive interrogation, or a wrongful conviction that resulted from a false confession, think about why we have Miranda in the first place. It’s to stop law enforcement authorities from committing abuses. Because when they can make their own rules, sometime, somewhere, they inevitably will.

This is why we have a bill of rights in the first place. Nonetheless, there is no reason to believe that our legal system is incapable of delivering justice in this case or any other, as long as the checks and balances and the rule of law are applied fairly and openly. (Lord knows we have enough people in prison to prove it’s capable of finding someone guilty.) The system is imperfect, but it cannot be perfected by bypassing the constitution.  In fact, doing that makes a mockery of the whole thing.

This person is charged with committing a heinous crime on American soil which means this really is not complicated at all.  The bill of rights clearly applies along with all other protections accorded to criminal suspects under the constitution. It shouldn’t even be a question. And the fact that it is means we still have a long way to go shake off our panic and infantile retreat to authoritarian illusions of “safety” after 9/11. I’m afraid if we don’t do it soon we won’t ever be able to.

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Executing democracy, American style

by David Atkins

A view of the glorious democracy we have brought to Iraq:

With increasing regularity, Iraq’s condemned prisoners are rounded from their cells in groups. One by one, they are led down a hallway to an execution chamber where they are hanged, the sound of the trapdoor reverberating through the cells. There is no advance notice, no last meal, no goodbyes.

There were 21 people hanged on Wednesday, 8 earlier this month and 12 more in mid-March. Iraq’s justice minister said that at least 9 more had been executed this year.

There are reports that the Justice Ministry plans to execute about 150 in coming days — eclipsing the 129 prisoners executed last year, which was nearly double the 68 people hanged in 2011.

“Executing prisoners in batches like this is obscene,” Navi Pillay, the United Nations human rights chief, said in a statement released in Geneva on Friday that was the harshest yet toward an Iraqi government that has drastically increased the number of executions since the withdrawal of American forces at the end of 2011.

“It is like processing animals in a slaughterhouse,” added Ms. Pillay, who said she was “appalled” by recent reports that the Justice Ministry planned to execute a large group in the coming days.

I would say it’s barbaric and uncivilized. But then it’s worth noting this:

We slaughtered 43 prisoners in America last year, fifth highest in the world behind China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Great company we keep there. It’s good to know we’ve brought civilization to Iraq, American style.

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Your moment of zen

by digby

Because you need this:

On Wednesday, New Zealand’s Parliament voted to legalize same-sex marriage in a 77 to 44 vote. As lawmakers applauded the final vote, spectators crowded into the public galleries above burst into song, serenading the bill’s sponsor, lesbian MP Louisa Wall.

The Associated Press reports the song was “Pokarekare Ana,” a love song in the country’s indigenous Maori language.

Humans are a seriously flawed species. But sometimes we surprise ourselves.

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Certain extremists are finding good success in their homeland battlefields

by digby

Let’s just say that certain forms of terrorism seem to bring good results. This one came just today in a state that just four years ago featured a cold blooded assassination by an anti-choice extremist:

Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, condemned Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) for being the latest governor to sign a sweeping anti-choice bill into law.

The “kitchen sink” bill includes a “personhood” provision, which if allowed to go into effect, would effectively bans abortion in Kansas in almost all cases. Even worse, it would ban many common forms of contraception, stem-cell research and in-vitro fertilization. The law also narrows the exceptions under which a woman can legally obtain abortion care at any point in pregnancy– even if the pregnancy results in grave danger to the woman’s health. Finally, the law includes biased-counseling provisions which politicizes what doctors say to their patients in the privacy of their offices, and blocks medical professionals who work at facilities that provide abortion care from teaching sex education in schools.

“As politicians in states continue to race to the bottom by blocking women from accessing legally protected medical care, Gov. Brownback just reached a new low,” Hogue said. “Brownback’s signature indicates his disdain for women, by making it clear that he think politicians know better than they do about their families and their lives. This governor and his fellow anti-choice politicians in the state house have shown how out of step they are with modern American values–most Americans believe women know best how to run their lives and their families.”

I’m sure Scott Roeder is pleased with his work as well.

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Crazy talk for crazy times

by digby

Because even though dozens of police are on the scene and have engaged in firefights and dodged explosives, one good All-American gun owner could do what they couldn’t:

It’s hard to know what to say about this, but increasingly I believe that the NRA is actually a suicide cult.

Oh, did I mention that this fellow is running for office? Yes he is.

Update: it appears that someone pointed out to him that he’s a prime jackass because he’s walked back his tweet. He regrets the timing …

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Is this ok America? Really?

by digby

The horribly injured fellow in the iconic picture (warning: very graphic) of the post bombing carnage doesn’t have health insurance:

Bauman’s friends created the page “Bucks For Bauman!” on the gofundme.com crowdfunding service. The money raised through donations to the site are meant to help Jeff and his family pay the exorbitant costs of his surgeries, ongoing medical care, and physical therapy. Since Tuesday, when the site was launched, Americans from across the country have poured in $158,294 in donations — over half of the overall $300,000 goal. 

The 27-year-old’s story is particularly tragic considering that he lives in Massachusetts, the state that gave birth to Obamacare and has the lowest uninsurance rate in the country. Unfortunately, Bauman — who worked part-time at Costco and was planning on going back to school — is one of the mere 1.9 percent of Massachusetts residents without health coverage. He likely would have gained insurance under his school’s health plan had he made it there before the bombings. 

Bauman has been fortunate enough to receive an impressive number of donations to help him pay his bills, and his uncle plans to buy him his first pair of prosthetic legs. But many other victims in the Boston bombings may not be as fortunate. The cost of treating the bombing survivors’ injuries is expected to exceed $9 million. The out-of-pocket costs associated with that treatment could bury many of the victims financially, even if they do have insurance — unless hospitals, insurers, and charitable foundations swoop in to help, as they did after the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado. 

You can donate to Jeff Bauman’s recovery fund here.

I’m glad that people have rallied around and he’s probably going to be able to raise the money to pay for his care.  But, if this had been an accident would he have been able to get this money together? I doubt it.

Why should this be an issue?  If we had truly universal health care, it’s very unlikely that this fellow would have been uninsured. (I suppose there are always a few people who can’t access any system, but I doubt that a taxpaying citizen would be among them.)

Anyway, it just shows that even with a decent private health care mandate with all kinds of subsidies, people still fall through the cracks. A single payer universal plan solves that problem.

Update:  It turns out he does have coverage, but he doesn’t have enough money to cover all the rest of the costs associated with his injuries:

The original version of this story stated that Jeff Bauman does not have health insurance. This is incorrect. That claim was based on a quote from Bauman’s uncle, Dale Maybury of Westford, that was cited in The Boston Globe on Thursday. Not only does Bauman have employer-sponsored health coverage through Costco — the company “is also matching donations made by colleagues at the chain’s Nashua location,” according to a more recent Globe article from Friday. Bauman is being forced to raise funds despite this assistance due to the extraordinarily high costs associated with the amount of current and ongoing care that he requires.

“The Homeland is the Battlefield” 

by digby

Rick Perlstein has a great post up about how we respond to fear that you should definitely read in its entirety. But this part really got me:

As ghastly, evil, overwhelming, tragic, as the events this week in Boston, Texas, the Capitol mail rooms, have been, it’s easy to forget, in our oh-so-American narcissism, enveloped in the wall-to-wall coverage that makes our present catastrophe feel like the most important events in the universe, how safe and secure Americans truly are by any rational standard. Terror shatters us here precisely because ours is not a terrifying place compared to so much of the rest of the world. 

And also not really an objectively terrifying time, compared other periods in the American past: for instance, Christmastime, 1975, when an explosion equivalent to twenty-five sticks of dynamite exploded in a baggage claim area, leaving severed heads and other body parts scattered among some two dozen corpses; no one ever claimed responsibility; no one ever was caught; but pretty much, the event was forgotten, life went on, and no one anywhere said “everything changed.”

Does anyone remember that awful attack? I doubt very many people do. In fact, I don’t think it resulted in even the smallest “change” in how we do anything.

Here’s the story and it’s every bit as horrific as what happened in Boston this week:

The New York-bound shuttle bounced lightly onto a runway at LaGuardia Airport after a short, uneventful flight from Boston. Businessman Mike Schimmel got off the airplane and headed toward ground transportation, eager to board an airport shuttle to his mother’s home on Long Island.

It was four days after Christmas in 1975, and LaGuardia was teeming with holiday travelers like Schimmel who were looking forward to ringing in the New Year with loved ones.

Americans had a lot to toast as the year drew to a close. The Vietnam War, which severely divided the country, finally ended. President Gerald Ford had escaped two assassination attempts. Watergate was becoming water under the bridge and democracy, American-style, would celebrate its 200th birthday soon.

But none of that was on Schimmel’s mind as he ducked into a crowded limo in front of the Eastern Shuttle Terminal at about 6:30 p.m. on that chilly Monday night on December 29.

“We were full and ended up stopping in front of the TWA terminal,” recalled Schimmel, then 27. “A second, larger limo pulled up next to us and double-parked. We were told to get into the bigger car.”

Schimmel got inside the second car and had just slammed the door shut when it happened.

A bright blue flash. A blast of air. Deafening noise. Broken glass rained down.

Momentarily dazed, Schimmel looked around him and saw that no one inside the limo was hurt. The driver, however, had been on a pay phone outside the car. He now lay on the ground, bleeding from the neck.

The occupants of the larger shuttle got out and surveyed the smaller limo. It was destroyed, but its curbside location had provided a buffer that saved the lives of everyone in the larger, double-parked vehicle.

A plane must have crashed, Schimmel thought as he entered the darkened terminal.

Inside, water spewed from broken pipes. Electrical wire and broken sections of the ceiling that weren’t already on the floor hung precariously. The odor of gun powder filled the air.

“I walked into the terminal maybe 15 feet. It was black and full of smoke,” said Schimmel, who now lives in New Jersey. “A girl, a young lady in her 20s, popped out of the smoke. I said something like, ‘You’ll be all right’ and carried her out. Her coat was smoking and she was blackened.”

A severed foot was visible on a ledge and Schimmel immediately surmised that many people lay dead or injured somewhere beyond the smoke that filled his eyes.

He was right about that. But it was a bomb — not a plane crash — that caused the carnage in Queens, New York, that night 27 years ago.

Queens Chief of Detectives Edwin T. Dreher was investigating a drug-related murder in the neighborhood of Astoria, less than two miles from LaGuardia, when his radio crackled with a report of the explosion.

Dreher, 48, immediately directed his driver to rush to the airport. On the way, the seasoned, 24-year department veteran launched what at the time was the largest NYPD investigation in history, using his radio to summon all available detectives from New York’s five boroughs.

Ambulances were just arriving when Dreher’s car screeched to a stop at the TWA terminal.

“There was the residue of the bomb. You could smell whatever it was in the air and see the huge explosive force that had blown the floor and ceiling out,” Dreher, now 73, retired and living in South Florida, told Courttv.com. “All the windows were blown out.”

A police lieutenant had set up a makeshift morgue and triage center. Dreher ripped down some of TWA’s drapes to shield the victims from the gathering horde of television cameras. Nowadays, the dead would have been left where they were until photographs were taken and measurements made to aid in reconstructing the scene. But forensic investigations were not as sophisticated in 1975.

Dreher and his senior commanders quickly settled on a plan of action. One group of detectives was sent out to write down the plate numbers of every vehicle parked at the airport. Another group was dispatched to area hospitals to interview survivors and gather information about the dead.

Eleven dead, 74 injured was the final toll.

It was terrorism and they knew it. They suspected it was Puerto Rican nationalists who had been doing such things for quite some time. Later they thought it was a Croatian nationalist who hijacked a plane a year later. It turns out that there are many motivations for terrorism. They never found out who did it.

And yet … we didn’t completely fall apart, did we? We didn’t declare the entire planet a war zone and start agitating to suspend the constitution. We went on with life.

Granted, 9/11 was a spectacular terrorist attack and it’s natural that it would inspire terrible fear. It may not have “changed everything” but it did scare people in a very primitive way. But in reality, it was no more an existential threat than that airport bombing was in 75 or this Boston Bombing was this week. These attacks are designed to make us lose our heads. We didn’t used to do that. Now we do.

Perlstein concludes:

A less narcissistic time, perhaps. Not now. Now, we let trauma consume us. Now, our desperate longing to know—to find easy, immediate answers—confines us, makes us frantic, reduces us to our basest cognitive instincts. And ultimately that’s all I really have to say today, and all I really have to write: to record a testament that people can reflect on fifty years from now, if they want to know it felt like to live in America the week of April 15, 2013.

This is what we’re doing to ourselves:

If captured, I hope Administration will at least consider holding the Boston suspect as enemy combatant for intelligence gathering purposes.
— Lindsey Graham (@GrahamBlog) April 19, 2013

That man is not a fringe-dwelling hysteric. He is a US Senator who takes an oath to protect the constitution. And the suspect is a US citizen.

More from the King of the basket cases:

I spoke with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) by phone just a few minutes ago. He said of the Boston bombers: “They were radicalized somewhere, somehow.” Regardless of whether they are international or “homegrown,” he said, “This is Exhibit A of why the homeland is the battlefield.” Recalling Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster, Graham noted that he took to the Senate floor specifically to object to Rand’s notion that “America is not the battlefield.” Graham said to me, “It’s a battlefield because the terrorists think it is.” Referring to Boston, he observed, “Here is what we’re up against,” and added, “It sure would be nice to have a drone up there [to track the suspect.]” He also slammed the president’s policy of “leading from behind and criminalizing war.”

Again, this isn’t some talk radio gasbag. This is a US Senator talking.

I think I hear a Toby Keith song in our future called “The Homeland is the Battlefield.” (Personally, I prefer it in the original German.)

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Nuts iz nuts: Imagine what the neocons could have done with a Russian terror tie

by digby

Oh good, maybe we don’t have to invade Russia now:

Initial indications are the two suspected Boston Marathon bombers likely do not have direct links to any major al Qaeda group or affiliates, or to a new significant terrorist threat to the United States, according to a U.S. official familiar with the latest intelligence information.

These are some early assessments but far from final conclusions, the official said. The assessments are part of a full interagency review now underway by the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community, who are going back through their databases and information looking for any links to the two men.

In the last several hours, the intelligence review to a large extent has focused on regional militant connections the men have had in Russian or Central Asia. But the official also noted they simply may have been “inspired” by a militant ideology or may simply have been disgruntled persons aiming to carry out an attack, and had no connections to foreign groups. “We simply don’t know yet,” he said.

The review was ordered by James Clapper, director of National Intelligence. Initially, before the men were identified by the FBI, the review was looking at any indications of a threat emerging from overseas against the United States. Once the identities of the men became known, with their possible ethnic Chechen background, the focus shifted.

One official said some of the focus of the review is now purely regional – on any militant connections the men may have had in Russian or Central Asia. But he also noted they simply may have been “inspired” by a militant ideology or disgruntled persons aiming to carry out an attack.

I’m joking, but it pays to remember that the Wolfowitz/Cheney et al PNAC paper that launched Iraq originally targeted Russia long after the Soviet Union broke up. Don’t be so sure they wouldn’t have used this as an excuse for WWIII. They really were that crazy,:

That book “Present Dangers” was edited by Robert Kagan and cited these six “mounting threats” in the year 2000:

#1 China: The Challenge of a Rising Power
#2 Russia: The Challenge of a Failing Power
#3 Iraq: Saddam Unbound
#4 Iran: Fundamentalism and reform
#5 North Korea: Beyond Appeasement

The weren’t very tuned into the global terrorism thing, but they made good use of it once it reared its ugly head.

I’ve had plenty of criticisms of President Obama’s national security policy, but I think we can at least breathe a sigh of relief that he doesn’t have the likes of William Kristol and Robert Kagan (not to mention the thoroughly nutty Frank Gaffney and Michael Ledeen) whispering in his ear. We’d be at Defcon one at this point.

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QOTD: “… be careful because these people might try to think that it’s you”

by digby

This is pretty amazing:

Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a participant in the Boston Globe’s co-op program who knows the Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, said he couldn’t fathom that his friend was the subject of a massive manhunt.

Kanno-Youngs admitted that he saw resemblance to his friend when the FBI released photos and videos of Tsarnaev and his older brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, at a Thursday evening press briefing, but he didn’t connect the dots because it seemed too far-fetched. In fact, Kanno-Youngs said he reached out to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev out of fear that his friend might be falsely accused.

“You have something in the back of your head like, ‘Wow, like, that maybe looks like Dzhokhar,'” Kanno-Youngs said. “And you know, the crazy thing is probably my first reaction is reach out to him. And I did just to say, you know, ‘Yeah, man, be careful because these people might try to think that it’s you.'”

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