Kos has the story on the Uzbek torture memos that are being leaked to blogs in the UK (and preserved by blogs in the US.) I honestly don’t know what to say about this except reiterate futile statements about oil, the Great Game and moral clarity.
If we are in the business of invading countries to depose tyrants, there’s no good reason that we didn’t go to this one first. That it is our ally in the “War on Terror” is a cosmic joke of epic proportions.
Here’s just a small excerpt of one of the memos:
The Economist of 7 September states: “Uzbekistan, in particular, has jailed many thousands of moderate Islamists, an excellent way of converting their families and friends to extremism.” The Economist also spoke of “the growing despotism of Mr Karimov” and judged that “the past year has seen a further deterioration of an already grim human rights record”. I agree.
Between 7,000 and 10,000 political and religious prisoners are currently detained, many after trials before kangaroo courts with no representation. Terrible torture is commonplace: the EU is currently considering a demarche over the terrible case of two Muslims tortured to death in jail apparently with boiling water. Two leading dissidents, Elena Urlaeva and Larissa Vdovna, were two weeks ago committed to a lunatic asylum, where they are being drugged, for demonstrating on human rights. Opposition political parties remain banned. There is no doubt that September 11 gave the pretext to crack down still harder on dissent under the guise of counter-terrorism.
Yet on 8 September the US State Department certified that Uzbekistan was improving in both human rights and democracy, thus fulfilling a constitutional requirement and allowing the continuing disbursement of $140 million of US aid to Uzbekistan this year. Human Rights Watch immediately published a commendably sober and balanced rebuttal of the State Department claim.
Oh, and we commonly “render” suspects to Uzbekistan for interrogation. I’m sure they promise not to boil them though.
Update:
correction: “render-ed.” Via Upyernoz I see that we have, apparently, seen the light and cooled our relationship with Uzbekistan since the government there opened fire on a bunch of civilians last May. Still, people wonder why (considering that we didn’t object to the boiling and all) a little random shooting into crowds would cause our relationship to suddenly be strained. I suggest that someone look into Vladimir Putin’s soul for the answer.
I’ve been thinking about what might be the biggest cock-up of this metaphorical war on terrorism and there are so many that it’s hard to limit it to just one. Invading Iraq has to be the grandaddy, but Gitmo, abu Ghraib and letting bin Laden go at Tora Bora rank right up there. (Speaking of bin Laden at Tora Bora, I don’t know why this story by Seymour Hersh about Konduz has been flushed down the memory hole.)
Making enemies of the entire world wasn’t such a great idea. Secret prisons in Europe not so much either.
After giving it some thought, I think that it’s possible that our biggest mistake in dealing with radical islam is our failure to respond with everything we had to the Pakistani earthquake. And we should have done it in tandem with our response to Katrina and the Tsunami, with a full-on international disaster response led by the United States. If we can afford to spend a billion a week on this misbegotten war, we could have come up with a plan to help these poor people all over the world, even in our own country, who were the victims of natural disasters. Bush should have been all over the TV. He should have gone to Pakistan personally and made a pledge to every single victim there that we would do everything we could to help.
I know that sending Karen Hughes around to share her experiences as a suburban mom with poor women in Indonesia is extremely useful in changing our image overseas, but this was a tremendous opportunity lost.
Instead, we pretty much did nothing to help the people who live in the very center of militant radical islam. Husain Haqqani, Kenneth Ballen of the the Carnegie Endowment wrote last November:
The most critical location for immediate international engagement is not Iraq or Afghanistan but Pakistan.
The devastation in Pakistan from the earthquake is as devastating as Southeast Asia’s tsunami last year. But the international response has fallen short. The death toll has risen to 87,000 and the severe Himalayan winter is only weeks away. Equally horrendous is the number of people displaced – three times as many as those affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami. And yet international assistance provided following the tsunami dwarfs the aid provided to Pakistan. Eighty per cent of the aid pledged for the tsunami (more than $4-billion) was given with two weeks. Pakistan so far has only received $17-million, just 12 per cent of aid pledged. According to the United Nations, pledges to date total only 25 per cent of what is needed.
For the tsunami, 4,000 helicopters were donated to ferry life-saving aid to stricken areas, and in Pakistan just 70 – even though there are almost three times as many people who need the food and shelter to survive than after the tsunami.
International humanitarian assistance doesn’t just save lives, it helps fight the war on terror. According to post-tsunami polls conducted by the Maryland-based, non-profit group Terror Free Tomorrow, support for Osama bin Laden dropped by half as a result of international assistance to tsunami victims in the world’s largest Muslim nation.
In nuclear-armed Pakistan right now – another of the world’s largest Muslim nations, where 65 per cent of the population think favourably of Mr. bin Laden – radical Islamist parties are mobilizing and are in the vanguard of those helping in the most-stricken areas. The void left by the Pakistan government, the United States and the international community has been filled by Jamaat-ud-Dawa and the Al-Rasheed Trust, both groups linked to al-Qaeda, as well as Jammat-i-Islami, the leading radical Islamic party in Pakistan.
Even Pakistani Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao had to acknowledge that the radicals are now “the lifeline of our rescue and relief work.”
In fact, radical Islamic groups have vigorously opposed U.S. and international aid because they know this will weaken their propaganda efforts. In a speech last week, Jamaat’s leader, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, said, “The Americans are [providing relief in Pakistan] to damage the solidarity of the country, and will work for materializing their ulterior motives.”
The United States and the world community must now do nothing less than spearhead a response similar to that following the tsunami, not only for self-evident and overwhelming humanitarian needs but also for long-term national security.
I know that it would have been difficult to muster the relief effort after Katrina, but that’s what leadership is about. If the administration really wants to fight the scourge of Islamic terrorism, they need to come up with something other than torture, imprisonment and incoherent military occupations to do it. Coming to the rescue in this terrible disaster — or at least visibly mustering an international response — would have gone a long way toward helping our allies regain some faith in our good intentions and persuade the people most vulnerable to al Qaeda’s arguments that we are not the great Satan. We didn’t do it.
But maybe Karen Hughes can go over later this year and share her secret for eliminating ring around the collar, so that’s good.
So the Justice Department is going to investigate the leak of the illegal NSA spy scandal. Fine. I assume this also means that nobody from the White House will be able to comment in any way since there is an ongoing investigation.
And that means no matter what comes up, Scotty is required to stonewall. Even when he doesn’t want to. Thems the rules.
As much as I appreciate all these Republicans offering us advice about how we are endangering our political prospects by not supporting illegal NSA spying, I have to wonder if they really have our best interests at heart. I just get a teensy bit suspicious that it might not be sincere.
The truth is that I have no idea where the NSA spying scandal is going and neither do they. The Republicans would like it to go nowhere for obvious reasons and so they are trying to psych out timid Dems. What I do know is that the most important problem Democrats have is not national security; it’s that nobody can figure out what we stand for. And when we waffle and whimper about things like this we validate that impression.
In Rick Perlstein’s book, “The Stock Ticker and The Super Jumbo” he notes that many Democrats are still reeling from the repudiation of the party by the Reagan Democrats. And while they continue to worry about being too close to African Americans or being too rigid on abortion or too soft on national security, they don’t realize that the most vivid impression people have of the Democrats is this:
“I think they lost their focus” “I think they are a little disorganized right now” “They need leadership” “On the sidelines” “fumbling” “confused” “losing” “scared”
The reason people think this is because we are constantly calculating whether our principles are politically sellable (and we do it in front of god and everybody.) We’ve been having this little public encounter session for well over 20 years now and it’s added up to a conclusion that we don’t actually believe in anything at all.
Perhaps the NSA scandal is a political loser for Dems. We can’t know that now. But it is a winner for us in the long term. We believe in civil liberties and civil rights. With economic fairness, they form the heart of our political philosophy. If this particular issue doesn’t play well, that’s too bad. People who believe in things sometimes have to be unpopular. Over time, they gain the respect of the people which is something we dearly need.
A party that is described as fumbling, confused and scared is unlikely to win elections even if they endorse the wholesale round-up of hippies and the nuking of Mecca. People will listen to us if we can first convince them that we know who we are and what we believe in.
I’m of the mind to adopt “give me liberty or give me death” as my personal motto. If I have to kowtow to a bunch of childish Republican panic artists who have deluded themselves into believing that fighting radical Islam requires turning America into a police state, then it’s just not worth it.
I know this will come as a great disappointment to Republicans who have taken to saying that the NSA spy scandal boosted Bush’s approval ratings ten points, but the new CNN/USA Today poll has his job approval rating at 41%, which is down a point from the last one. In fact, his rating has been pretty steady at around 40% since last August.
(AllPolitics, December 20) — In the wake of the House of Representatives’ approval of two articles of impeachment, Bill Clinton’s approval rating has jumped 10 points to 73 percent, the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll shows.
Bush also hit a new low in “favorable opinion” down to 46%. Some might think he would be described as unpopular since they called him popular until he hit 48%. But no. He’s now “poised for a comeback.”
A little-noticed holiday week executive order from President Bush moved the Pentagon’s intelligence chief to the No. 3 spot in the succession hierarchy behind Rumsfeld. The second spot would be the deputy secretary of defense, but that position currently is vacant. The Army secretary, which long held the No. 3 spot, was dropped to sixth….
But in its current incarnation, the doomsday plan moves to near the top three undersecretaries who are Rumsfeld loyalists and who previously worked for Vice President Dick Cheney when he was defense secretary.
Under the new plan, Rumsfeld ally Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary for intelligence, moved up to the third spot. Former Ambassador Eric Edelman, the policy undersecretary, and Kenneth Krieg, the undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, hold the fourth and fifth positions.
If something happens, pray for Rumsfeld’s health because Cambone is an even wilder nutcase than Rummy is. Jesus. Three more years of this?
The National Security Agency’s internet site has been placing files on visitors’ computers that can track their web-surfing activity despite strict federal rules banning most of them.
These files, known as “cookies,” disappeared after a privacy activist complained and The Associated Press made inquiries this week, and agency officials acknowledged Wednesday they had made a mistake. Nonetheless, the issue raises questions about privacy at a spy agency already on the defensive amid reports of a secretive eavesdropping program in the United States.
They say they are strictly listening to conversations between terrorists and their American friends who are plotting to blow up weddings. They don’t need anyone looking over the shoulders, not even a rubber stamp secret Star Chamber. They are professionals who aren’t interested in tracking people for any reason but terrorism. No oversight necessary, nosirree.
Yet we are supposed to believe they don’t know they have a fucking cookie allowing them to track every visitor to their web site and we are also supposed to believe that they aren’t making any other “mistakes” in their data mining of American citizens’ communications. The alternative, of course, would be to believe that they knew very well they had a cookie on their site and were, in fact, tracking the surfing habits of those who vistited it, in which case we know for a fact that they aren’t just monitoring communications with al Qaeda. Either way, I think this little episode proves that the NSA could use a little oversight, don’t you?
Maybe not. In a debate at the WaPo yesterday on the subject, a fine Republican wrote:
An al Qaeda operative can walk into any Radio Shack, buy X number of cell phones, activate them with an American company (thereby acquiring a US phone number), then take them to another country to use.
The Fourth Amendment offers protection to Americans against UNREASONABLE searches. Is it unreasonable, after 9/11, to monitor the phone calls of foreign al Qaeda operatives to those using cell phones with American numbers when we know in hindsight that Atta — while in this country preparing for the attack — communicated with al Qaeda’s leadership abroad? Is it unreasonable for the government to do whatever it can to intercept such conversations, knowing that Able Danger had identified Atta as an al Qaeda operative before the attack? What about the civil rights and liberties of those slaughtered on 9/11 by al Qaeda?
IF these phone calls really were domestic spying, I, too, would object. But, they’re not. They are international calls with one end outside the country. The remedy is simple and involves personal responsibility: If an American citizen does not want his calls monitored, then he shouldn’t be chatting with foreign al Qaeda operatives on the phone. And to me, it is that simple.
Simple.
But just in case the NSA is making more “mistakes,” (or fibbing just a little bit) the best thing to do to be perfectly sure the government isn’t spying on you is to not make any phone calls. Or surf the internet. Or leave the house. But the very best thing to do is vote Republican and support the war and you won’t have any trouble at all. (Shhhh. Don’t tell the terrorists.)
Update
To be clear:
All I’m saying is that if the nation’s premiere surveillance agnecy can make “mistakes” about something as simple as a cookie, they can certainly make mistakes about much more complicated and serious matters.
Yglesias notes that Marshall Wittman is whining that liberal hawks get no respect. He points out that despite representing almost no actual Democrats, Democratic hawks have dominated the Democratic leadership in congress virtually forever. And that leadership has failed to win elections that would justify to liberals who were against the Iraq war that they should continue to support them.
They don’t deliver votes, they join in Republican calumny against the Democratic Party and they are wrong. Why, exactly should they have even more influence than they already do?
And what in the hell is up with these powerful conservatives of both parties who see themselves as constantly being beseiged by people who they simultaneously perceive as weak and useless? Does this make any sense at all?
