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So Much For Humint

Unmasking of Qaeda Mole a U.S. Security Blunder-Experts

The revelation that a mole within al Qaeda was exposed after Washington launched its “orange alert” this month has shocked security experts, who say the outing of the source may have set back the war on terror.

[…]

“The whole thing smacks of either incompetence or worse,” said Tim Ripley, a security expert who writes for Jane’s Defense publications. “You have to ask: what are they doing compromising a deep mole within al Qaeda, when it’s so difficult to get these guys in there in the first place?

“It goes against all the rules of counter-espionage, counter-terrorism, running agents and so forth. It’s not exactly cloak and dagger undercover work if it’s on the front pages every time there’s a development, is it?”

A source such as Khan — cooperating with the authorities while staying in active contact with trusting al Qaeda agents — would be among the most prized assets imaginable, he said.

“Running agents within a terrorist organization is the Holy Grail of intelligence agencies. And to have it blown is a major setback which negates months and years of work, which may be difficult to recover.”

Rolf Tophoven, head of the Institute for Terrorism Research and Security Policy in Essen, Germany, said allowing Khan’s name to become public was “very unclever.”

“If it is correct, then I would say its another debacle of the American intelligence community. Maybe other serious sources could have been detected or guys could have been captured in the future” if Khan’s identity had been protected, he said.

Britain, which has dealt with Irish bombing campaigns for decades, has a policy of announcing security alerts only under narrow circumstances, when authorities have specific advice they can give the public to take action that will make them safer.

Home Secretary David Blunkett, responsible for Britain’s anti-terrorism policy, said in a statement on Friday there was “a difference between alerting the public to a specific threat and alarming people unnecessarily by passing on information indiscriminately.”

Kevin Rosser, security expert at the London-based consultancy Control Risks Group, said an inherent risk in public alerts is that secret sources will be compromised.

“When these public announcements are made they have to be supported with some evidence, and in addition to creating public anxiety and fatigue you can risk revealing sources and methods of sensitive operations,” he said.

This alert was such obvious bullshit. Laura Bush going to sit amongst the targets on Monday is really all you need to know. Scaring the hell out of everybody is bad enough. But, now it turns out they blew a chance to infiltrate an actual al Qaeda cell and figure out what current plots might be going on.

I do have to take issue with one comment that Kevin Drum made in this post. I don’t think there’s any excuse for this, least of all that the critics of the administration “panicked” them into making a mistake. This is national security during a hotly contested presidential race. It’s part of the job description. If Bill Clinton could deal with the “wag the dog” nonsense while he was being impeached, I think these guys should be able to keep their fucking mouths shut when Howard Dean gives them a hard time on CNN. They are supposed to be able to handle the pressure. If they can’t, that’s a big problem that has nothing to do with the critics and everything to do with them.

Update: If this is true, then this was a major blunder:

A Pakistani man whose arrest led the authorities to uncover the terrorist reconnaissance of financial institutions in the United States was also communicating with people believed to be behind a potential plot to disrupt the fall elections, a senior intelligence official said on Saturday.

The arrest last month of the man, Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, has prompted an investigation in the United States, Britain and other countries to locate those behind the surveillance operations. Now the authorities say they believe his arrest is helping unravel the earlier threat to carry out an attack this year inside the United States.

[…]

Still frustrating investigators is the uncertainty about whether the surveillance in 2000 and 2001 was part of ongoing plot. So far, the officials said, no clear evidence has been obtained that indicates whether the plot was ever abandoned.

Increasingly however, the authorities suspect that the Qaeda figures known to be involved in the surveillance were active members of the terrorist network and operated in a clandestine manner suggesting that they wanted to carry out attacks inside the United States.

Investigators are counting on people already in custody, or others whom they hope to apprehend, to help solve the mystery of whether the plot is still active.

It might have been nice to keep Khan working as a mole for a while so they could catch the guys who were planning more terrorist attacks, don’t you think?

Why, you’d almost think they didn’t want to stop terorist attacks from disrupting the election.

Gitmo Horror Part II

Last week I wrote about the first person accounts of torture and other inhumane treatment in Guantanamo contained in a report(pdf) by the Center for Constitutional Rights. More information is coming to light and it squares with what the three freed British citizens said.

First, it’s quite clear that prisoners are routinely beaten and abused when captured in Afghanistan. Often these prisoners have been sold by various tribes and factions (reportedly for $5,000) to US forces. From that point on, these prisoners are considered terrorists with no human rights. The prisoners who are then sent to Guantanamo are subjected to harsh mental torture, much of it specifically tailored to each prisoner by way of psychiatric medical evaluations. There is evidence that this mental torture results in more false confessions than any useable intelligence. In fact, some people allege that there has been next to no useable intelligence drawn from the prisoners in Gitmo. Instead, according to the three Britons, it seems to have become something of a training camp for new interrogators who use the prisoners there to practice their craft. An article called “Guantanamo Bay on Trial” in the January edition of Vanity Fair (no link) bears these claims out.

“…from a military standpoint, intelligence officials with extensive experience in counterterrorism claim that Gitmo’s intelligence value is relatively low, and much of the information obtained there unreliable. Vanity Fair has established that none of the al-Qaeda leaders captured since September 11, 2001, has ever been held at GuantAnamo Bay. Sixty-four detainees innocent of any terrorist connection have already been released, and officials admit there may be many more to come. The method of interrogation now in use at Gitmo-a formal system of escalating bribes in return for confessions-is almost certain to produce bogus testimony, experts say, and the camp’s interrogators are mostly young and inexperienced.

[…]

General Miller makes it clear that he does not have access to staff of this caliber. Seven out of 10 of the interrogators working in his “joint interrogation group” are reservists, and they come to Camp Delta straight from a 25-day course at Fort Huachuca. “They’re all young people, but they’re really committed to winning the mission,” Miller says. “Intelligence is a young person’s game-you’ve got to be flexible.”

Some seasoned intelligence officials disagree. “Generally, the new hires apprentice in the booths with more experienced guys,” says one. “I certainly know of no one at Gitmo having the opportunity or the luxury to be able to prepare an interview for three months.” Another had met some of Miller’s interrogators. “They were rookies, and none were too keen on the process down there,” he says. They knew that any seemingly insignificant tidbit might later turn out to be important, but in general “they just didn’t feel that the process was going anywhere fast.

This article in the Seattle Post Intelligencer reveals the details of yet another prisoner’s experience in Guantanamo from papers recently unsealed by a Seattle Federal Court:

Recently declassified documents in a Seattle federal court describe the extreme isolation of an alleged al-Qaida member at a U.S. military prison that experts say constitutes torture and war crimes.

The documents, unsealed yesterday at the request of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and others, include U.S. Navy lawyer Charles Swift’s firsthand observation at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison of the conditions of solitary confinement of his client, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a 34-year-old Yemeni who acknowledges chauffeuring Osama bin Laden at his Afghan farm.

The court documents describing the alleged mistreatment of Hamdan are part of a lawsuit challenging his detention, the conditions of detention and his prolonged isolation in solitary confinement.

[…]

In 2001, as U.S. forces were fighting in Afghanistan, Hamdan says Afghan fighters captured him, hogtied him with electrical wire and sold him to American forces for $5,000. Once in U.S. custody, Hamdan maintains that American officials in Afghanistan:

Beat him with fists and feet.

Forced him to sit motionless on benches for days.

Dressed him only in overalls in subfreezing temperatures.

Showed him a gun and threaten him with death, torture and imprisonment.

After six months, he was flown to Guantanamo. There, his life got worse.

Hamdan told Lt. Cmdr. Swift that the eight months of solitary confinement at Guantanamo “was worse than anything he had experienced in Afghanistan … and that he was going crazy.”

“I have not been permitted to see the sun or hear other people outside …. or talk with other people. I am alone except for a guard,” Hamdan said last February in a court affidavit that was first sealed, then made classified in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

“One month is like a year here, and I have considered pleading guilty in order to get out of here,” Hamdan said after two months in solitary.

Now — six months later — even the guard is gone. A video camera mounted on a wall now monitors Hamdan, according to Swift’s statement.

Experts on torture and international law said yesterday that — if true — the death threats and solitary confinement described in court documents constitute war crimes, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. They say the allegations also represent violations of the U.N. Convention Against Torture as well as U.S. law.

And several international legal scholars said that criminal responsibility is not limited to those who committed the torture and can implicate the entire chain of command up to the president of the United States if they knew or should have known about the violations.

The stories coming out of Gitmo are remarkably consistent. This is not an unusual case. Indeed, the attempted suicide rate down there is astronomical, but after this was publicized, in a typical Bushian move, they have decided to simply give attempted suicidee another, less disturbing, name. From the Vanity Fair article:

In the camp’s acute ward, a young man lies chained to his bed, being fed protein-and-vitamin mush through a stomach tube inserted via a nostril. “He’s refused to eat 148 consecutive meals,” says Dr. Louis Louk, a naval surgeon from Florida. “In my opinion, he’s a spoiled brat, like a small child who stomps his feet when he doesn’t get his way.” Why is he shackled? “I don’t want any of my guys to be assaulted or hurt,” he says.

By the end of September 2003, the official number of suicide attempts by inmates was 32, but the rate has declined recently-not because the detainees have stopped trying to hang themselves but because their attempts have been reclassified. Gitmo has apparently spawned numerous cases of a rare condition: “manipulative self-injurious behavior,” or S.I.B. That, says chief surgeon Captain Stephen Edmondson, means “the individual’s state of mind is such that they did not sincerely want to end their own life.” Instead, they supposedly thought they could get better treatment, perhaps even obtain release. In the last six months, there have been 40 such incidents.

Daryl Matthews, professor of forensic psychiatry at the University of Hawaii, was asked by the Pentagon to spend a week at GuantAnamo investigating detainees’ mental health and the treatments available. Unlike reporters-who must agree in writing not to speak to prisoners-Professor Matthews spoke with the inmates for many hours.

Manipulative self-injurious behavior “is not a psychiatric classification,” he says, and the Pentagon should not be using it. “It is dangerous to try to divide ‘serious’ attempts at suicide from mere gestures, and a psychiatrist needs to make a proper diagnosis in each and every case.” At Gitmo, Dr. Matthews says, the “huge cultural gulf” between camp staff and prisoners makes this difficult, if not impossible.

There is a lot of evidence in the three Briton’s testimony that this is a huge problem. Being English, they were much more able to deal with guards and interrogators and yet they were driven to a false confessions. But,in addition to the torture, there is a huge shortage of adequate translators and many different languages being spoken (Apparently, there has even been a contingent of Chinese from the northern border who were handed over to the Chinese government, their fate unknown. One can only imagine.) Many of these guys are living an isolated, Kafkaesque nightmare.

Here’s the nut. Prisoners in Guantanamo were taken into custody under extremely questionable circumstances and assumed to be terrorists with no further recourse. This was done (again via VF) because:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says Gitmo plays not one but three vital roles in what the Pentagon calls the gwot, or global war on terror. First, it keeps terrorists “off the streets,” until death if necessary. Second, it turns them into sources of intelligence. Finally, with the first special “military commission” tribunals set to begin at Gitmo early in 2004, it lets America bring the perpetrators of terrible crimes to justice-in accordance, says Rumsfeld, “with the traditions of fairness and justice under law, on which this nation was founded, the very principles that the terrorists seek to attack and destroy.”

We know that in the first case, many of these people were not terrorists yet they are being subjected to horrifyingly inhumane treatment indefinitely. The three Britons being the ones most able to tell their stories to westerners, confirm this. There have been more than 60 others released back to their home countries after having been through this. We don’t know how many more are still inside.

In the second case, there has been little intelligence value in their interogations, not just because they aren’t actually terrorists, but because even if they were, they’ve been out of the loop now for years. In fact, we know that there have been no high value terrorists ever held in Guantanamo. They are being water-boarded at discreet facilities elsewhere in the gulag.

In the third case, these sham military tribunals, the nature of which military lawyers themselves are appalled at, really mean that hundreds of innocent men are going to spend the rest of their lives in prison and for the forseeable future undergo mental torture that can only be described as criminal. At the least, the administration is intent upon dragging its feet for years, if necessary, to keep them from ever seeing the light of a real courtroom.

I don’t know what the Kerry admnistration will do about this, but I think it’s fair to say that they are going to be under tremendous pressure to appear “tough” on terrorism by the enraged firebreathers on the right who are already gearing up to engage in their own special form of political torture should they lose. Counter pressure is going to be needed.

Hypocrite, Thy Name Is Shelby

With all the noise surrounding the Marc Rich pardon at the end of Clinton’s term, there was another pardon that the Republicans were extremely exercised about. It was surrounding Clinton’s pardon, at the behest of civil libertarians, of a man named Samuel L. Morison, who had been convicted of leaking a classified picture of a soviet ship to Janes Weekly in 1984. Certain Republicans in congress were appalled by this pardon, one of the most vocal of which was Richard Shelby.

Pardoning the only government official ever convicted of leaking classified information, the intelligence chairmen [Porter Goss and Richard Shelby] said, would do nothing to stop a torrent of media leaks in Washington. Indeed, Shelby said the pardon only underscores the need for new legislation explicitly criminalizing leaks.

In fact, he used it as an excuse to reintroduce the “Shelby Amendment” which Clinton had vetoed the year before. Richard Shelby, you see, has had an ongoing obsession about leaks and has been trying to pass laws for years that would make leaking all classified information, whether knowingly or unknowingly, a criminal offense with serious jail time.

According to the St Petersburg Times:

Shelby’s bill would make it a felony punishable by a fine or up to three years in prison for a current or retired government employee to disclose “properly classified information” to unauthorized people. Under current law, a government employee could not be convicted unless the information related directly to national defense and the leaker knew that disclosure would hurt the interests of the United States.

When he vetoed the bill, Clinton said it would impede the normal activities of government. His advisers argued that current law is sufficient but is not always enforced. The news organizations fear the tougher law would result in subpoenas being issued to journalists who published leaked information.

It should be noted that this bill was not universally supported by Republicans. There were quite a few in the libertarian camp who opposed it.

“This legislation contains a provision that will create–make no mistake about it, with not one day of hearings, without one moment of public debate, without one witness–an official secrets act,” Rep. Robert L. Barr Jr. (R-Ga).

[…]

“It has profound First Amendment implications, and goes to the very heart of the ability of the public to remain informed about matters of critical public interest, which often relate to governmental misdeeds,” they [Henry Hyde and John Conyers] wrote. “Moreover, since the Executive Branch asserts unilateral authority to define what information should be classified, this extension would grant the administration a blank check to criminalize any leaking they do not like.”

Shelby, however, was adamant that the amendment was not designed to prosecute the press, but rather government officials who leak information:

“I can assure this body that in passing [the anti-leak provision], no member of the Select Committee on Intelligence intended that it be used as an excuse for investigating the press,” Shelby said in Senate debate.

Clinton vetoed the bill and then pardoned Morison leaving Shelby frothing at the mouth and ready to reintroduce it upon Bush’s inauguration. Strangely, however, just days before 9/11 when he was to convene hearings on the matter, Ashcroft evidently asked him to shelve them until the Justice Department could evaluate the legislation. Like a good soldier, he did. Then came 9/11. Nothing more was heard until the summer of 2002, when Newsmax published this article on July 27, 2002, which they then deleted on August 1st. The Memory Hole retrieved it from the ether:

Whether the classified information is National Security Agency encrypted message intercepts of pre-Sept. 11 chatter, war plans for the invasion of Iraq, or the fact that U.S. intelligence was tracking Osama bin Laden’s wireless phone calls, leaks have more than Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney in an uproar.

[…]

“I hope we get a test case, soon, that will pit the government’s need to prosecute those who leak its classified documents against the guarantees of free speech. I’m betting the government will win,” Bruce said to an audience this week at Washington’s Institute of World Politics

[…]

“I helped pushed legislation for years to make it easier to prosecute people who willfully and knowingly leak classified information,” Shelby recently told CBS News.

“President Clinton vetoed that bill several years ago. It might be the time to try to bring it back. I’ve talked to the White House before about this. The attorney general, John Ashcroft, is working — now he’s got a task force working with some of us in the Senate to try to come up with some acceptable legislation. Maybe this fall …”

The Newsmax article above was published on July 27, 2002 and removed on August 1st. There was never any formal explanation. It may be a coincidence, but it’s noteworthy that on June 19th, 2002 someone leaked some extremely sensitive classified information about NSA encrypted intercepts to the media. This information was so sensitive that it caused Dick Cheney and George W. Bush to get very angry and call for members of the intelligence committee to cooperate with a Justice Department investigation into the matter. At the time, Democrats controlled the Senate and Bob Graham was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Richard Shelby was the leaker. But, he didn’t exactly step forward and take responsibility. By September, he began to find himself at odds with both Porter Goss and Bob Graham over how they were conducting the investigation into the 9/11 attacks. In light of what we now know he did, his behavior at that time looks quite suspicious. One might even think he was obstructing the investigation:

Shelby accused Graham and Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, of overstepping their authority in keeping information provided by the FBI from other lawmakers and the two committees’ permanent staff. The information has been given to key staffers hired to conduct the joint committees’ inquiry.

“I must insist that we end this policy of withholding crucial information from members and our staff,” Shelby said. “We must not conduct investigations out of the full view of our members.”

[…]

While Shelby supported Graham’s and Goss’ call for an FBI probe into leaks which may have come from the joint committee, he has differed with them over the FBI’s methods. Shelby has protested the possibility that lawmakers might be subjected to lie detector tests to determine if they were the source of the reports.

Although the FBI has not asked for such tests, Graham has said he thinks lawmakers should voluntarily comply.

From what Graham said, the information being offered by the FBI was not necessarily connected to Shelby, but Shelby certainly did seem nervous that he wasn’t privy to what it was. And it was a big turnaround for him to suddenly decry the use of polygraphs:

“I don’t know who among us would take a lie detector test,” says Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.). “They’re not even admissible in court.” Shelby’s reticence was an about-face from his stance two years ago, when he spearheaded the expansion of the Department of Energy’s polygraph program as the only effective way of tracking down moles.

CBS reported:

Shelby said leaders of the inquiry realize they made a mistake in asking the FBI to investigate the leaks.

“Here we are investigating the FBI for huge failures and now we’re asking them to investigate us,” he said.

He said it also violates the government’s separation of powers.

“You know the Senate and, I assume the House, has always investigated their own,” he said.

The FBI eventually decided not to prosecute but rather turn it over to the Republican controlled ethics committee. Shelby defends himself by saying:

“My position on this issue is clear and well-known: At no time during my career as a United States Senator and, more particularly, at no time during my service as Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have I ever knowingly compromised classified information.

If that’s his reasoning, then he owes his current freedom to none other than the hated Bill Clinton. If the Shelby Amendment had been signed into law, it wouldn’t matter if he “knowingly” leaked the information or not, he’d be looking at a possible three year stint in a federal prison. (And, if he were a Democrat, he’d already have been forced to resign.)

He is no longer on the Intelligence Committee (they are rotated after eight years) and now serves as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee where his commitment to principle and accountability are once again being tested as he finds himself implicated in the Tom Delay Westar Scandal.

Richard Shelby is neither ashamed or embarrassed by his blatant hypocrisy and lack of candor. Indeed, when the leak story broke, he got right back on his favorite hobby horse and began railing against unauthorized leaks as if this never happened. Just today, a Boston Globe headline says Senator blasts investigators for naming him as leak:

Shelby’s office said, in a statement released yesterday by his spokeswoman, Virginia Davis, “It bears noting that this story represents a grotesque abuse of a public trust on the part of law enforcement.

“For someone in law enforcement to express one-sided, personal views anonymously to the media while the investigation itself is still underway and while the matter is pending before the Senate Ethics Committee is unprofessional and grossly unfair,” Shelby’s statement said.

Sometimes, you just have to step back and admire the sheer audacity of these guys.

It Must Be Habit Forming

Some people might consider this to be a serious breach of national security, but since nobody will get to say the words, “in his pants” or “in his socks” 7,432 times an hour it’s not likely to be much of a story. Besides, he’s an al Qaeda double agent which means that Republicans got all confused thinking he was a Democrat. You can’t blame them for that.

U.S. officials providing justification for anti-terrorism alerts revealed details about a Pakistani secret agent, and confirmed his name while he was working under cover in a sting operation, Pakistani sources said on Friday.

A Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, who was arrested in Lahore secretly last month, had been actively cooperating with intelligence agents to help catch al Qaeda operatives when his name appeared in U.S. newspapers.

“After his capture he admitted being an al Qaeda member and agreed to send e-mails to his contacts,” a Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters. “He sent encoded e-mails and received encoded replies. He’s a great hacker and even the U.S. agents said he was a computer whiz.”

“He was cooperating with interrogators on Sunday and Monday and sent e-mails on both days,” the source said.

The New York Times published a story on Monday saying U.S. officials had disclosed that a man arrested secretly in Pakistan was the source of the bulk of information leading to the security alerts.

The newspaper named him as Khan, although it did not say how it had learned his name. U.S. officials subsequently confirmed the name to other news organizations on Monday morning. None of the reports mentioned that Khan was working under cover at the time, helping to catch al Qaeda suspects.

Hey, the polls are tanking, it was obvious by Monday morning that Ridge was pumping up the volume for politcal reasons, so you can’t blame the administration for blowing the cover of an active al Qaeda double agent. If that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes. They have an election to win, people.

Bizarro World Dick

Has anyone ever been as consistently wrong as Dick Morris? From uggabugga:

In the New York Post, Dick Morris writes about why Kerry didn’t get a bounce (or much of one) out of the convention. Here, is the last paragraph in his essay: (emphasis added)

Voters want a president with brains, not just guts, and all they saw was a warrior telling his old tales on Thursday night. And it wasn’t enough.

What can you say to this? I honestly believe that Clinton got the best of him by simply doing the opposite of whatever he recomended. It’s pretty much foolproof.

FlipFlopping Away

Sommerby must be happy. The Kerry campaign has adopted his fine riff on the $87 billion bullshit.

For Immediate Release

August 5, 2004

BUSH THREATENED TO VETO THE $87 BILLION BEFORE HE USED IT AS A POLITICAL CUDGEL

Kerry spokesman Phil Singer said: George Bush can’t be straight about his own record, let alone anyone else’s. The fact is that George Bush twice threatened to veto this bill over the fact that it provided funding to veterans and reservists. As a combat veteran, John Kerry knows that you don’t give a President a blank check to continue a failed policy, especially when our security and the lives of our men and women in uniform are at stake.

BUSH THREATENED TO VETO $87 BILLION SUPPLEMENTAL OVER ADDITIONAL FUNDING FOR RESERVISTS AND VETERANS. As part of the $87 billion emergency supplemental appropriations for security and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003, the Senate passed an amendment that provided an additional $1.3 billion for improved medical benefits for reservists and veterans. OMB Director Josh Bolten wrote to the Congressional Appropriations’ Committees, stating, “The Administration strongly opposes these provisions, including Senate provisions that would allocate an additional $1.3 billion for VA medical care and the provision that would expand benefits under the TRICARE Program. …If this provision is not removed, the President’s senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.” [Foxnews.com, 10/21/03, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,100777,00.html; BVA legislative bulletin, http://www.bva.org/aut03bulletin/l_update.html; CQ, 10/20/03]

BUSH THREATENED TO VETO $87 BILLION PACKAGE ON ISSUE OF ALLOCATING GRANTS OR LOANS TO IRAQIS. “Key senators reversed course yesterday and voted to make an $18.4 billion reconstruction package for Iraq entirely in the form of grants rather than loans, as House-Senate negotiators worked their way through President Bush’s $87 billion request for military and rebuilding operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The 16 to 13 vote represented a significant victory for Bush, who had threatened to veto the bill if Congress insisted on making Iraq repay some of the money.” [Wash Post, 10/30/03]

I’d love to see this in an ad. No mention of the lies and spin the Bush campaign has been telling about Kerry on this $87 bil, just this. In fact, I wonder if it might not be an effective campaign tactic overall to simply start calling Bush a flip-flopper as Atrios has been doing. We stole “help is on the way”, why not this? Freak ’em out.

Be Careful What You Ask For

So, according to Media Matters, Limbaugh is back to his line (helped along by one of the witnesses in the Lynndie England court martial) that the torture of prisoners was “sort of like hazing, a fraternity prank. Sort of like that kind of fun.” He even goes on to describe how he was pulled over by police recently and “was halfway hoping that one of the cops would be Lynndie England, but no such luck.”

It’s funny, that’s the first time I’ve ever agreed with Limbaugh on anything. I too have been hoping that Rush would get taken into custody by a Lynndie England (or maybe one of her little friends like Sgt. Graner or Cpl Joyner.) Oh, how I’d love to see them “haze” him just a little bit — have some “fun” with him.

He’s gonna love prison.

Counterpunch

For all you Dems who might be thinking that Kerry needs to challenge John O’Neill to a duel or something to counter that ad, it really would be the wrong thing for him to do. Especially when he has John McCain out there duelling for him.

Here, you have the Republican Party’s most beloved Vietnam veteran saying publicly, with no holds barred and within the same news cycle that this is a dirty trick and that they president should disavaow any knowledge of it. He even said, “it’s the same deal they did to me.” This is a very effective counter to the ad and the publicity surrounding it, one that carries far more weight with the media than anything Kerry or anyone else could have said.

As Dave Johnson notes over at See The Forest, this toxic smear was entirely predictable. And, as a result, I think that some of those meetings in which Kerry was supposedly trying to convince McCain to be his VP, McCain agreed to cover Kerry’s back on smears against his war record. This was very well coordinated and McCain knew exactly what he needed to say. (The Kerry campaign had his comment blastfaxed instantly.) The media have had to include McCain’s comments all day, diluting the impact of the ad and putting it into perspective.(It is only a $500,000 buy — the point was the free media coverage of it.) Even the neanderthal Limbaugh crowd have some respect for McCain and although they will undoubtedly tout the party line, it won’t have quite the same resonance. The independents and moderate Republicans love the guy. They’ll listen to him. And that is the group of voters Kerry is going after.

McCain is a good Republican, but he isn’t a Stepford Wife. This genuinely pisses him off. Getting him to serve as a spokeman for Kerry against these pricks looks like good politics to me.

Media Matters has the full debunking.

Update:

Here’s Judy Botox’s framing of the issue. I think it’s exactly the Kerry campaign wanted it framed. You can’t silence these people, but you can spin them for all but the most partisan mouth breathers. Short of taking Limbaugh off the air (and into jail, which I’m totally in favor of) there’s nothing we can do about them. But, manipulating the mainstream press is something we must do if we are going to win.

JUDY WOODRUFF, HOST: Thank you for joining us.

Well, anyone who follows the presidential race knows that John Kerry’s Vietnam military service is a key pillar of his campaign. Kerry often refers to his combat experiences, and veterans who have served with him had staring roles at the Democratic convention.

Now, a group of veterans who oppose Kerry’s White House bid is taking aim at Kerry’s war record. They’ve launched a harsh new TV ad in three battleground states, and it is already drawing fire from members of both parties.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Kerry lied…

WOODRUFF (voice-over): Vet versus vet, as the ghosts of Vietnam invade another wartime election.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: John Kerry lied to get his Bronze Star. I know. I was there. I saw what happened.

WOODRUFF: A new ad from a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth trashing John Kerry’s much heralded military service. They say Kerry lied about his heroics, lied about his injuries, and betrayed his comrades by agitating against the war upon his return to the states.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When the chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry.

WOODRUFF: Tough ad, and it’s facing some tough criticism. For one thing, none of the 13 vets featured in the spot were actually aboard Kerry’s swift boats, though some were on nearby boats. And though it’s not a Bush campaign ad, it is largely funded by top Republican contributors.

All but one of the Democrat’s surviving crewmates, some of whom starred in a pro-Kerry commercial…

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When he pulled me out of the river, he risked his life to save mine.

WOODRUFF: … have rushed to his defense. And so, has one of the nation’s most admired vets, GOP Senator John McCain, who has endorsed the president. McCain denounced the commercial as dishonest and dishonorable, adding, “I think the Bush campaign should specifically denounce the ad.”

A Bush-Cheney spokesman responds that the campaign has never and will never question John Kerry’s service in Vietnam, insisting there’s no connection whatsoever between the reelection effort and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WOODRUFF: Well, as part of his comments criticizing the TV ad, Senator John McCain also mentioned his own experience running against then Governor Bush back in 2000. During that primary season, McCain faced a whisper campaign against his own military service in Vietnam. Referring to the new ad against Kerry, McCain says, “It was the same kind of deal that was pulled on me.”

We’re going to have a debate in just a moment between two Vietnam veterans, one who has endorsed John Kerry, who was with him on his swift boat, another who was part of that anti-Kerry ad we saw just a moment ago.

Then the two guys engaged in a he said/ she said, but the ad had already been discredited as a partisan smear — and McCain quite helpfully reminded everyone that Bush did the same thing in 2000, so the campaign’s protestations of innocence are pretty unbelivable. I think the strategy worked well. (And it worked a lot better than the Berger counterspin which was non-existent.)

I’ll have to watch Tweety and the networks, but I have a feeling that the story will stall out. They fed their slavering beast, but it won’t stick with the swing voters. And we partisans should shove it down Bush’s throat every chance we get.

Why does he hate veterans and war heroes so much?

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Crusader Codpiece:

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

Journalistic Malfeasance

American Journalism Review has a very interesting analysis of the media’s coverage of the Abu Ghraib story.

There were stories out there before the pictures, but nobody seemed very interested. The images are what finally woke up the press and even then they were terribly sluggish and slow off the mark. They offer a number of different reasons: intimidation by the administration, lack of resources and access, misplaced post 9/11 “patriotism”, physical danger in Iraq, complaints by conservative readers and others.

One of the things it touches upon but doesn’t really expound on is the fact that most of the sources for these stories, until Joseph Darby’s name became known, were all Iraqis. And, I believe that because of that it was assumed that they were lying. I wrote yesterday about the Center for Constitutional Rights report by the three British prisoners who were released from Guantanamo. I thought for a bit if I should put in some qualifiers about their story because, after all, we only have their word for it. Normally, I would have written something like “even if only half of what they say is true it’s…” I didn’t do that because after a few moments reflection I realized that there was already so much information out there confirming that the US had legally justified torture, had developed systematic torture schemes and had actually perpetrated torture (we’ve all seen the pictures) that the burden of proof was now on the US, not these prisoners. I believed them.

Journalism, however, in its fetish to provide “balance” even when common sense tells you there is no balance, will continue to present these stories with a built in skew to the administration’s side of the story. If it’s covered at all, you have the word of a trio of muslim ex-prisoners against the pentagon. You have the word of petty criminals against the CIA and the Army. Without visual proof, many reporters and many people will simply not take the word of “the enemy” over Americans. Indeed, even with visual proof they find themselves scrambling to excuse behavior that can only be seen as disgusting and sadistic.

And, one cannot ignore the outrageous excess of the news media after 9/11, wallowing in jingoism and signing on to the US “war” effort, no questions asked. In the AJR article I still don’t hear a lot of remorse for having missed the big picture on the torture story. This, despite the fact that the discussion of whether torture should be used was right out and in the open since 9/11. The press was reporting actual incidents of it since December 26, 2002 when Dana Priest and Barton Gellman wrote a story in the Washington Post detailing torture allegations, replete with MP’s “softening up” prisoners beating them and throwing them against walls. When asked why they didn’t follow up, editor Len Downie says,” in part, obviously, because information was not made readily available, and in part because we didn’t always see the tip of the iceberg as clearly as we should have.”

The press not only misses the tips of icebergs these days, they are actively helping to steer the ship into them, cheering and clapping along the way.

This problem with journalism is not simply a problem for the Democratic party. It is a serious national issue that goes beyond politics. The world is more and more fast paced and complicated and we must be able to depend upon at least some parts of the news media to resist the temptation to jump on the entertainment or propaganda bandwagon and see the forest for the trees. These last few years have been a disaster for journalism. And, aside from the predictable mea culpas after the fact, this article and all the others suggest there is little reason to hope that it will change.