‘To The Gates Of Hell’ — Just Not Into Pakistan»

Taking a break from this week’s main project of expelling great volumes of sanctimonious gas over whether John McCain falsely shared the “cross in the dirt” story as his own — or only just happened to remember this totally true anecdote right around the time he needed to ingratiate himself with the religious right — McCainblogger Mike Goldfarb falsely attributes some comments to Barack Obama.

Goldfarb writes that last August, Obama “threatened to send troops across the Afghan border,” and now Obama is “criticiz[ing] McCain for not echoing his own ill-advised comments on Pakistan.”

Goldfarb is probably referring to this speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center, in which Obama declared:

If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets, and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.

“Threatened to send troops across the Afghan border”? Looks like Goldfarb just made that part up.

Of course, John McCain had already signaled back in February that we could expect this sort of dishonesty from his campaign when he attacked that speech by claiming that Obama had “suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan.”

Unfortunately for Straighttalk McSurge, that very same week the Washington Post ran a story detailing how, weeks earlier, the CIA had had actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets in Pakistan, and President Musharraf wouldn’t act, so the CIA did. On Jan. 29, a CIA Predator aircraft killed Abu Laith al-Libi, “a senior al-Qaeda commander and a man who had repeatedly eluded the CIA’s dragnet.” The Post described the operation as “the first successful strike against al-Qaeda’s core leadership in two years”:

Having requested the Pakistani government’s official permission for such strikes on previous occasions, only to be put off or turned down, this time the U.S. spy agency did not seek approval. The government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was notified only as the operation was underway, according to the officials, who insisted on anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities.

Officials say the incident was a model of how Washington often scores its rare victories these days in the fight against al-Qaeda inside Pakistan’s national borders: It acts with assistance from well-paid sympathizers inside the country, but without getting the government’s formal permission beforehand.

To sum up, the United States scored this victory against Al Qaeda by following precisely the policy that McCain derided, and which, according to Goldfarb, McCain still considers “ill-advised.” (I guess McCain will follow Osama bin Laden “to the gates of hell” — just not into Pakistan?)

It’s clear that it was McCain who was confused here — after all, he was for Musharraf before he was against him — so it’s unsurprising that his campaign is now trying to muddy the record.

U.S. Strategy In Somalia: ‘Whac-A-Mole’»

Our guest blogger is Colin Thomas-Jensen, a policy adviser for the ENOUGH Project.

Thursday, August 7, is the ten-year anniversary of the al-Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. For the better part of ten years, the U.S. government has worked closely with intelligence agencies in Ethiopia and Kenya to track the movements of three al-Qaeda operatives alleged to be responsible for planning the operation, which killed more than 250 people and wounded thousands more. The suspects have frequently taken refuge in Somalia, exploiting the porous borders and ungoverned spaces of the world’s number one failed state. One of those suspects, the alleged leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, has reportedly entered Kenya, where Kenyan authorities are currently on a manhunt.

Mr. Mohammed is believed to have masterminded the embassy bombings, and capturing or killing him should be a top priority for the United States and its allies. But a ten-year manhunt is not a strategy to deal with the root of violent extremism in the region — the 18 years of political unrest and bloodshed in southern Somalia. The U.S. supported Ethiopia’s December 2006 invasion of Somalia to oust Islamists from power and install a transitional government in the capital Mogadishu. Yet as in Iraq, the invaders had no post-war political strategy, and Ethiopia — Somalia’s historic enemy — was quickly bogged down in a brutal counter-insurgency against Islamist and clan-based militia groups.

The insurgent attacks and Ethiopia’s scorched-earth response have driven two-thirds of Mogadishu’s residents — some 700,000 people — into the harsh Somali countryside. With rising food prices and failed crops, aid agencies are warning of famine. Meanwhile, the Bush administration supports Ethiopia’s presence in Somalia and, with help from Ethiopian intelligence, U.S. forces have launched at least four airstrikes targeting al-Qaeda suspects and Islamist leaders inside Somalia. Only one airstrike killed its intended target, and U.S. attacks have resulted in civilian casualties. Behind closed doors, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies refer to the U.S. strategy as ‘whac-a-mole.’ Read the rest of this entry »

McCain’s Victory Dividend»

Given that national security is John McCain’s only real issue, it’s understandable why he tries to subordinate every other issue to it. For example, asked by Fortune magazine last month what he sees as “the gravest long-term threat to the U.S. economy,” McCain responded (after staring into space for eleven seconds) “the struggle…against radical Islamic extremism.” Got that? Not the housing crisis, not the price of oil, but radical Islamic extremism.

Today this tendency reached a new level of ridiculousness, as McCain promised that “victory” in Iraq and Afghanistan will enable him to balance the budget:

“The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.”

This could be an attempt by McCain to cover for his admission that he doesn’t know much about economics by suggesting that that doesn’t matter, because once we achieve victory against terrorism, every American will be a millionaire! We’re gonna be rolling in the dough! Victory dividend!

Sadly, however, back in the reality based community there are some problems with this. Here are two. In McCain’s view, “victory” in Iraq means we get to stay in Iraq for 100 more years. How, exactly, does this save us money? Also, McCain has promised us more wars and a bigger military to fight them. Where does he think the money for this is coming from? (Atrios has an idea.)

Hilzoy has a detailed examination of McCain’s economic plan. It’s not pretty.

NYT: Iraq War Allowed Al Qaeda To Regroup In Pakistan»

This New York Times article’s description of the Bush administration’s confused attempts to deal with the Al Qaeda threat emanating from Pakistan’s tribal areas is yet more evidence against conservatives’ claims that they can more effectively manage anti-terrorism:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush committed the nation to a “war on terrorism” and made the destruction of Mr. bin Laden’s network the top priority of his presidency. But it is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.[…]

The White House shifted its sights, beginning in 2002, from counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to preparations for the war in Iraq.[…]

Current and former military and intelligence officials said that the war in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas. When American military and intelligence officials requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq.

The Center for America Progress’s Brian Katulis wrote last week that “Pakistan is most likely to create the biggest headache for the next U.S. president.”

[Pakistan] is the country that U.S. intelligence officials have repeatedly cited as the most important haven and training ground for global terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. It is also the place that is the best guess among intelligence agencies for where top Al Qaeda leaders like Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri currently reside. Military and intelligence officials have warned that the next terrorist attack will most likely come from Pakistan.

In order to invade and occupy country where Al Qaeda wasn’t, President Bush diverted resources away from where Al Qaeda was, allowing Al Qaeda to regroup and reorganize and continue to plot against America. Many of the most prominent people responsible for this brilliant plan are now advising John McCain. Read the rest of this entry »

Would McCain Really Benefit From A Terrorist Attack?»

McCain strategist Charlie Black recently made the mistake of saying what was on his mind, suggesting that another terrorist attack on U.S. soil “Certainly…would be a big advantage to him [McCain].”

The elite commentariat have coalesced around the idea that this represents a gaffe in the Kinsleyan sense, “when a politician tells the truth.” That is, that Charlie Black’s words, while inartful, were essentially true, and that another attack would indeed advantage McCain.

This is all based upon the assumption that, if attacked, Americans would run to the arms of conservatives. So it’s worth asking: What would McCain do if another attack occurred? What would he do that makes us “stronger”? The best predictor of how McCain would handle a future attack is how he handled the past one. Given that he’s already told us that he’s “totally in agreement” George W. Bush’s anti-terrorism policy, McCain’s response to a terrorist attack would probably go something like this: After attacking, but not capturing, the people responsible, McCain would divert troops to another, unrelated front.

As early as December 2001, McCain was calling for war with Iraq. He continues to believe that an appropriate response to the 9/11 attacks was to invade and occupy a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

- Like Bush, McCain justified the Iraq war with the theory that ‘we’re fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here.’ Former anti-terrorism czar Richard Clarke pointed out that “the evidence is overwhelming that our presence [in Iraq] provides motivation for people throughout the Arab world to become anti-American terrorists.”

- Further demolishing the Bush/McCain “flypaper theory,” a new article in Democracy describes the phenomenon of foreign fighters returning from Iraq to apply their terrorist training in their home countries, another negative consequence of the Iraq war.

McCain seems blissfully unaware of any of the consequences of the policies that he has supported over the past seven years, and continues to advocate an anti-terror strategy that has shown disastrous results. Given all this, it’s a bit frustrating to have to contend with the idea that, were one of those results to take the form of an attack on the American homeland, McCain would benefit.

There are signs that this conventional wisdom is breaking down, however. The Raw Story reports on pundits who have questioned “the assumption that a terrorist attack would play to McCain’s advantage.”

It’s also interesting to note that, after Osama bin Laden’s video release right before the 2004 election, the CIA determined that bin Laden had been trying to help, not hinder, Bush’s reelection. Conservatives, including John McCain, should probably ask themselves why Osama bin Laden prefers their anti-terrorism policies to the progressive alternative.

Not Ft. Leavenworth?»

Our guest blogger is Ken Gude, Associate Director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

How to close Guantanamo is a very challenging and emotive issue that draws on the memories of 9/11 and justifiable anxieties about future terrorist attacks. One aspect of this saga that deserves to be addressed with rational analysis is the concern that locating some of the Guantanamo detainees within the territorial boundaries of the United States for incarceration is a dangerous risk that could pave the way for terrorist attacks on the homeland.

In my report released yesterday, I recommend that the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, among a few other possible locations, could imprison a small number of the Guantanamo detainees. Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS), reacted swiftly and harshly to that prospect, describing my analysis as “misleading and inaccurate” and asserting that “Fort Leavenworth has neither the space nor the security arrangements to handle detainees from Guantanamo Bay.”

This statement seems at odds with Ft. Leavenworth’s mission and “Can Do” motto. The Disciplinary Barracks is the only maximum security facility in the entire military prison system. While the old prison at Ft. Leavenworth was commonly referred to as “the Castle,” that stone and brick facility was replaced in 2002 by a “new state-of-the-art, 515-bed” detention center complete with a special housing unit for maximum security prisoners. The maximum security wing is isolated from the rest of the facility, three guards are assigned to each inmate, and every inch of the prison is covered by video surveillance.

Another possible location I identify is the brig at the Naval Base in Charleston, South Carolina. Although it is only a medium security facility, it has already been the home of designated enemy combatants Jose Padilla and Yasser Hamdi, and currently holds Ali Al-Marri. If Charleston, a lower security level facility, can accomplish that mission, it seems logical that Ft. Leavenworth could safely and securely imprison some of the Guantanamo detainees.

The number of detainees at issue here is relatively small, in the neighborhood of 50 detainees with the majority of those ending up at the “supermax” penitentiary in Florence, Colorado. Sen. Brownback clearly believes that Ft. Leavenworth can not handle even a small number of Guantanamo detainees. He should know then, that the candidate he enthusiastically endorsed for president of the United States, Senator John McCain, has repeatedly pledged that he would close Guantanamo and move all of the approximately 270 remaining detainees to Ft. Leavenworth. Read the rest of this entry »

Does John McCain Know What Habeas Corpus Is?»

Our guest blogger is Ken Gude, Associate Director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Yesterday, I posted on John McCain’s confusion about the consequences of his proposal to close Guantanamo and move the detainees to Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. I thought then that perhaps he just didn’t grasp the full implication of that action – that the detainees would be guaranteed habeas corpus because they would be within the boundaries of the United States. But after his latest baffling statement, I am now more inclined to think that he simply has no idea what habeas corpus is, how it’s applied in the legal system, or really any understanding of the most significant war crimes trials in history.

This latest flap occurred after Barack Obama said that if Osama bin Laden survived the operation that results in his capture, an appropriate model for a trial would be something like the Nuremburg war crimes tribunals. John McCain clearly has something else in mind. In a written statement, he first pledged that he would kill or execute bin Laden, then he launched into a bewildering series of supposed attacks that only demonstrated his own ignorance. McCain said it was Obama who was “confused about what the United States Supreme Court decided,” that he is “running away from the consequences of that decision,” and that “it is clear Senator Obama does not understand what happened at the Nuremburg trials.”

So what happened at the Nuremburg trials? A lot of Nazis were convicted and a dozen were executed. The tribunals, established under the joint jurisdiction of the Allied powers—the U.S., the U.K., France, and the U.S.S.R.—were a model for “all subsequent trials holding individuals accountable for their roles in criminal atrocities.” Read the rest of this entry »

McCain’s One Note Campaign»

Today, Team McCain continued to try to make an issue out of Barack Obama’s wild suggestion that America can fight terrorism without discarding the U.S. Constitution. It’s now exceedingly clear that, whatever else candidate McCain has going on, every day is a national security day.

Exhibiting the sort of message discipline for which McCain’s campaign is becoming known, today’s conference call attacking Obama’s anti-terrorism policy began with a statement attacking Obama’s withdrawal from public financing. Then Randy Scheunemann turned it over to D.A. Arthur Branch former Senator Fred Thompson, who first attacked the Supreme Court’s decision in Boumediene — claiming that the Court had created a “new right,” when in fact habeas corpus is one of the oldest rights there is — and then suggested that Obama had “extrapolated” his entire anti-terrorism policy from the prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspirators.

The truth, of course, is that the ones who have extrapolated a position here are Team McCain and their surrogates. On Tuesday, Team McCain held a conference call with, among others, former CIA director and noted conspiracy theorist James Woolsey. Yesterday, batting for McCain was Rudy Giuliani, of whom John McCain previously said “I know of nothing in his background that indicates that he has any [national security] experience.” And then today we had Fred Thompson, who said last fall that McCain was “clearly moving away from what I consider to be the sound constitutional, traditional principles that the Reagan coalition was founded upon,” slamming Obama’s adherence to constitutional principles. In the space of three conference calls over three days, Team McCain has proffered these surrogates to construct an elaborate alternate reality version of Obama’s policy, I suppose because it’s easier for them to argue with.

And it’s easy to understand why: Like George W. Bush, John McCain thinks that the conflict with Islamic extremism is best understood as a war, a war can be won by the steady and relentless application of military force. Like George W. Bush, McCain continues to insist that an appropriate response to the 9/11 attacks was to redirect America’s attention and resources away from those responsible for the 9/11 attacks in order to invade and occupy a country that had no connection to the 9/11 attacks. And like George W. Bush, McCain believes that the effective prosecution of this war requires freeing the executive branch from such pointless legal mumbo jumbo as the Magna Carta. The fact that each of these policies have, in the years since 9/11, produced disastrous results for America’s security, its interests, and its reputation is what’s known in political lingo as a “problem” for the candidate.

McCain Doesn’t Understand McCain’s Position on Guantanamo»

Our guest blogger is Ken Gude, Associate Director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling affirming the Guantanamo detainees’ constitutional right to habeas corpus further narrowed the legal distinction between holding them in Cuba and in the United States. The Bush administration picked Guantanamo precisely because it believed the American military base on the eastern tip of Cuba was beyond the reach of any court. With that notion rightly put to rest, supporters of closing Guantanamo like John McCain should be encouraged, as there is now much less of an argument against moving some of the detainees to the military prison at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, as he proposes.

That’s why I find his reaction to the Boumediene decision so odd. McCain unleashed a full broadside at the court the day after the ruling, calling it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country… Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation, and the men and women who defend it. This decision will harm our ability to do that.”

At issue in Boumediene is whether habeas rights extended to Guantanamo. There has never been any doubt that any individual in the United States possesses habeas rights. McCain is on the record saying, as president, he “would immediately close Guantanamo Bay, [and] move all the prisoners to Fort Leavenworth.” That action would have exactly the same effect as the Court’s decision in Boumediene.

McCain goes on to claim that his plan to close Guantanamo the Supreme Court’s ruling is “going to have the courts flooded with so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material.” This would be silly if it wasn’t so tragic. Garden variety habeas petitions from inmates in American prisons may more often deal with diet than detention, but the detainees at Guantanamo are not asking for better food, many believe that they are wrongly imprisoned and are contesting the lawfulness of their confinement. Read the rest of this entry »

McCain’s Endless War Mindset»

This morning’s Washington Post helpfully corrects the record on one of Team McCain’s more bizarre assertions from yesterday’s conference call. McCain adviser John Lehman had claimed that dealing with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspirators through the American legal system was “a material cause” of the 2001 attacks, because, he claimed, sealed evidence was not shared among intelligence agencies.

The Post wrote today that “the report of the 9/11 Commission…disagreed with Lehman’s version of history” :

The commission’s final report, which Lehman endorsed as a member of the panel, gives no indication that any failure to share information on the bombing with the intelligence community had “significance for the story of 9/11.”

Instead, the report cites political and intelligence failures to understand the scope of the terrorist threat after the 1993 attack, as well as a failure to fully analyze the implications of the available information. It also blames the FBI and the CIA for failing to effectively communicate with each other, problems that were later addressed in the USA Patriot Act and the reorganization of the intelligence community.

Despite Team McCain’s frantic strawmanning, Obama is precisely right about the prosecutions of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspirators being a model of how a democracy should deal with a terrorist attack. The investigation of that crime produced a huge amount of background information that formed much of the basis for our understanding of Al Qaeda. The problem was that this information was not understood in the correct context of a global terrorist threat, until too late. The fault for this is bipartisan.

In addition to the wealth of information about Al Qaeda, by granting the conspirators due process, the prosecutions demonstrated to the world the strength of American ideals. On the other hand, the Bush administration’s lawless treatment of alleged terrorist detainees represent a betrayal of those ideals. By treating the attackers as mere criminals, rather than as righteous warriors in an apocalyptic showdown between Islam and the West, the 1994 prosecutions prevented the convicts from becoming martyr-superstars. Bush’s policy of Endless War on Terror has done precisely the opposite: By treating Al Qaeda as the standard bearer in a transcendental struggle for the future of mankind, Bush confirms bin Laden’s own propaganda, and effectively does Al Qaeda’s pr for them. McCain proposes to continue this policy.

This gets at the real difference between the Obama’s and McCain’s approach to anti-terrorism. As I wrote yesterday, Obama’s approach — as demonstrated by, among other things, his advocating strikes against Al Qaeda hideouts in Pakistan — involves intelligently analyzing and appraising the nature of the threat, breaking up terror networks, and going after terrorist leaders where they are. John McCain’s approach, on the other hand, is simply more of what we’ve already seen from George W. Bush: A lot of reckless talk, followed by reckless wars that get tens of thousands of people killed, and that divert resources and attention from actual threats while creating completely new threats that require ever new troop surges to deal with.

McCain Adviser: Don’t Talk Publicly About Effective Anti-Terrorism Policies»

A few months ago, the McCain campaign took a serious credibility hit on their only real issue, national security. McCain criticized Barack Obama for Obama’s assertion that “if we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets [in Pakistan] and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.” McCain misrepresented Obama’s statement as a threat to “bomb our ally, Pakistan,” claiming it represented “confused leadership.”

Unfortunately for McCain, the very day he made that charge the Washington Post revealed that, having obtained actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets in Pakistan, the United States acted, launching two Hellfire missiles and killing Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda commander. In other words, the U.S. government was actually following to the Obama model of anti-terrorism (which involves actually breaking up terror networks and capturing and, when necessary, killing terrorist leaders where they are) not the McCain model (which involves making a lot of tough-sounding speeches about terrorism, and then going off and invading countries that pose no terrorist threat to the United States, leaving the actual terrorists to roam free in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area.)

On a press call today, in which Team McCain tried desperately to make an issue of Barack Obama’s recent comments on fighting terrorism within constitutional constraints, McCain’s foreign policy/national security director Randy Scheunemann was asked about the Obama-McCain disagreement over Pakistan strikes. Scheunemann actually had to walk back McCain’s previous criticisms quite a bit. Scheunemann claimed that, in criticizing Obama’s statements about Pakistan, McCain had only meant that it was “reckless…to talk in public” about striking inside Pakistan in order to demonstrate his national security “bonafides,” because this “complicates our ability to cooperate with Pakistani authorities.”

It’s pretty clear that the McCain campaign understands that their candidate has nothing to offer the American people except his national security “bonafides” — a notion driven home by the campaign’s willingness to abandon their “energy day” schedule to try and score a weak hit on their only issue — but it’s really hard to take the “reckless” charge seriously from the campaign of a guy who likes to sing in public about bombing Iran, or who casually suggests that the U.S. should stay in Iraq for a hundred years. These sorts of reckless comments don’t just complicate America’s ability to cooperate with one particular government, they complicate our ability to work with all of them.

Bush Tries To Distract From The Conservative Record On Terrorism»

Our guest blogger is Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Ambassador Ryan Crocker meets with Iranian Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qumi in Baghdad, May 2007.

Reaching into the same old bag of tricks of politicizing national security, President Bush used a speech on the floor of the Israeli Knesset to divert attention from his administration’s record on terrorism and attack his political opponents in the United States.

It’s a little jarring to see an American president use a speech while visiting a major ally to engage in politics at home, but there’s nothing new in this approach -– President Bush has used national security as a domestic wedge issue unlike any president in the history of the United States. It was a winning formula politically for conservatives for a while in 2002 and 2004, but by 2005 the approach ran out of steam, collapsing under the weight of the Bush administration’s steady stream of failures around the globe, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this speech is that President Bush seems not only disconnected from the harsh realities of today’s Middle East -– he also seems disconnected from his own policies and their impacts on three counts:

1. Bush forgets that his own administration and other countries have engaged Iran. A focus of Bush’s speech was Iran and the very real threat it poses to stability in the Middle East. Ironically, the Bush administration itself has sent key officials on numerous occasions to meet with Iranian officials –- whether it was most recently sending U.S. diplomats to meetings on numerous occasions with Iranian officials to discuss Iraq, or coordinating closely with Iran in the early years of the Afghanistan war. Moreover, key U.S. allies like Britain, Germany, and France all engage Iran on a regular basis and in fact have embassies in Tehran. Did President Bush really mean to call these allies appeasers too? For example, should the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who met recently with Iranian officials, ask for an apology from Bush? What about most of the leaders of the Iraqi government, which is closely aligned with Iran? Should they be offended too?

2. Bush tries to avoid the fact that his policies have strengthened the hands of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas and undermined Middle East security. A second irony in Bush’s speech is linked directly with today’s headlines –- that the Lebanese government was forced to reverse itself in the face of a violent takeover last week by the terrorist group Hezbollah. This comes less than a year after Hamas took over the Gaza Strip violently. These events are directly related to numerous policy failures by the Bush administration – including the failure to deliver support to pragmatic allies in the Palestinian Authority and Lebanon. As a result, the Lebanese and Palestinian people have suffered from violence, instability, and economic stagnation. And as a result, Israel’s security has been weakened -– another irony given that Bush was speaking on the floor of the Israeli parliament.

3. Bush ignores the 2002-2008 conservative record on terrorism. A broader blind spot that comes crystal clear from Bush’s speech today –- he is incapable of acknowledging that his administration’s policies have been ineffective in responding to the threats posed by global terrorist groups. This blind spot is perhaps understandable, because Bush has invested so much of his legacy in a strategy that has led to a more than four-fold increase in global terrorist attacks by 2005, a trend that has only increased in the three years since.

It might have been easier for President Bush to point the finger at his domestic critics in the early years of his administration and get away with it. But in the last nine months of a lame duck administration, it is time that President Bush stopped running away from his own record and face the reality of his own dismal record on terrorism. Al Qaeda remains a threat, its top leadership like Ayman Zawahiri regularly taunts the United States, and Iran has seen historic expansion of its influence throughout the Middle East –- all national embarrassments that no number of speeches by President Bush can cover up.

Jeffrey Goldberg Still Fighting The Last War»

Only six posts into his new blog, and Jeffrey Goldberg is back up to his old tricks, pushing bad intel on Iraq:

The energetic Reihan Salam has an interesting, and sane, post about the widely-ignored Institute for Defense Analyses study on possible connections between Saddam’s regime and Islamist terror organizations. Among other things, the report disproves the orthodox CIA view that ideological and theological differences between Ba’athists and Islamists kept them from cooperating. You can read Eli Lake’s story about the report here.

Goldberg is referring to this study, “Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights From Captured Iraqi Documents,” which examined “more than 600,000 Iraqi documents, audio and video records” captured by U.S. forces after the 2003 invasion.

A more accurate rendering of the study’s findings is that, despite the many assertions to the contrary by the Bush administration and its media spear-carriers like Jeffrey Goldberg, an exhaustive review revealed no evidence of a meaningful relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The report’s abstract states that the “documents do not reveal direct coordination and assistance between the Saddam regime and the al Qaeda network,” though they did indicate some contacts between members of Saddam’s regime and groups affiliated with Al Qaeda.

A Google search reveals Goldberg’s contention that the IDA study “was widely ignored” to be nonsense. In fact, the study was widely discussed and interrogated both in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere, including on this blog. What has been ignored, and rightly, are the rather pathetic attempts by neoconservatives to spin the report into a vindication of their views, which is where Eli Lake’s article comes in.

Lake’s article in the NY Sun, which has been relentlessly and repeatedly referenced by the right-wing blogosphere (a phenomenon which, while certainly revealing of how low conservatives’ standards of evidence fall when they get desperate, neither lends the article credibility nor accuracy) provides a classic example of attempting to derive capabilities from intentions.

No one denied, then or now, that Saddam Hussein wanted to hurt America; what the IDA report confirmed, however, was that, as of 2003, Saddam Hussein had neither the competence nor the capability to do so. This was cause for vigilance, but certainly not for an American invasion and occupation which continues to this day. Goldberg’s continuing effort to carve out a small island of vindication on the point of “Baathist-Islamist cooperation” while deflecting blame for his own role in getting up the Iraq invasion by acting as a conduit for pro-war propaganda, indicates that he still doesn’t get this.

State Department: ‘The Internet Is A Virtual Safe Haven’ For Terrorism»

In a briefing yesterday on the State Department’s 2007 Country Reports on Terrorism, Coordinator of the Office for Counter-terrorism Dell L. Dailey stated that “terrorists consider information operations a principle part of their effort, use the Internet for propaganda, recruiting, fundraising, and increasingly for training. It has made the Internet a virtual safe haven.”

Two other new reports confirm this trend, highlighting the great extent to which Al Qaeda has perfected its use of new media technology to attract, indoctrinate, and share tactics and technology with new recruits. In addition to offering a look into the 21st century jihad, both of these reports underscore the fact that the war in Iraq has been both a propaganda and training bonanza for Al Qaeda.

The first report, The Al Qaeda Media Nexus (pdf) published in March by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, explores the global internet media network which used to disseminate and reinforce Al Qaeda’s message. The report notes that “the ‘original’ Al Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden accounts for a mere fraction of jihadist media production,” and that the vast majority (78%) of global jihadist media is focused on the war in Iraq.

The second, The Al Qaeda Media Machine (pdf), which is published in the May-June issue of Military Review, says that “Al Qaeda has established itself as a virtual state that communicates with it’s ‘citizens’ and cultivates an even larger audience through masterful use of the media, with heavy reliance on the Internet.”

For every conventional video performance by Bin Laden that appears on Al Jazeera and other major television outlets, there are hundreds of online videos that proselytize, recruit, and train the Al Qaeda constituency.

One of the recruiting videos reportedly included a “Top 20″ IED attacks by AQI on U.S. troops in Iraq. In addition to using the internet to send propaganda to exhort potential fighters to jihad, the report also noted that “the online training curriculum has expanded to include small unit infantry tactics and intelligence operations.” Read the rest of this entry »