Applying law enforcement to criminality as a primary tool. What a concept.

Though the initiative is a work in progress, some senior counter-terrorism officials and administration policy-makers envision it as key to the national security strategy President Obama laid out last week — one that presumes most accused terrorists have the right to contest the charges against them in a “legitimate” setting.

The approach effectively reverses a mainstay of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism, in which global counter-terrorism was treated primarily as an intelligence and military problem, not a law enforcement one. That policy led to the establishment of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; harsh interrogations; and detentions without trials. Source

Jury is still out on the robustness (if any) of oversight and accountability measures to be included, as well as strictures applied or unapplied to such activities as wiretapping, warrantless searches, etc.

Awful bookends for this month of May.

End of the month — Maj. Gen. (ret.) Anthony Taguba (Source):

“The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it.”

Start of the month — Gen. (ret.) Barry McCaffrey (Source):

“We should never, as a policy, maltreat people under our control, detainees. We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.”

The following seemed to get lost or glossed over during the long holiday break, but is much too clear-eyed and sane not to merit attention.

Washington is in the throes of an increasingly self-indulgent debate about whether the promotion of human rights and democracy should play a central role in U.S. foreign policy.…

… the United States is apt to be tempted by realist “grand bargains” in which we would in effect trade our commitment to democracy and human rights for security.

[snip]

There are other reasons for our hesitancy to push democracy and human rights. The financial crisis, the debate over Guantánamo, and now the corruption scandal in Britain, have some asking: Who are we to export liberal values when our own house is not in order?

This misses the point. Obviously, we in the West are no more virtuous than anybody in any other country. But our system of democracy is. It’s things like independent courts, free media and the verdict of the ballot box that help to sort our deficiencies. What’s more, history shows that opportunistic deals with dictators not only betray our values; they seldom deliver over time on those very interests we claim to be pursuing.

What to do? First, let’s not tire of affirming that individual liberty is a universal value and that democracy is the best way to protect freedom and human rights. […] We need to insist, though, that our support for free media and independent NGOs and our respect for human rights be an essential part of our dialogue with their countries. Source

Level-headed layout.

President Barack Obama’s support for preventively detaining terrorism suspects undoubtedly surprised some of his longtime backers.…

But the possibility had been percolating for months. With his pledge in January to close the Guantanamo prison within a year, Obama set off a fierce, mostly under-the-radar debate among legal experts about whether it will be possible to meet the goal he announced yesterday: to build “a legitimate legal framework” for imprisoning terrorism suspects indefinitely.

The question affects more than Guantanamo. The fates of 169 detainees there remain undecided, according to Obama’s numbers yesterday, and administration officials have suggested that they will be unable to prosecute as many as 100. But the legal status of thousands more held by the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas also hangs in limbo, and any detention policy will have ongoing effects as the fight against al-Qaida continues.

Here are some of the key issues facing the architects of a new preventive detention system, or, as it’s sometimes called, a “national security court”… Source

…yet remain too widely unlearned or willfully ignored.

Officials use torture when they have already dehumanized their victims —- a witch is not a normal person, a “terrorist” is a beast —- when a government puts revenge before other goals, and when a sense of helplessness rules.

Promoting fear of the unknown enemy who must be exposed through torture gives officials a great sense of their own importance; and, because they can waterboard a suspect like Abu Zubaydah 83 times, they do have considerable power —- to inflict pain, not to obtain useful information. In the process, the torturers dehumanize themselves.

Leaving all moral qualms aside, are we to learn nothing from the experience of keen observers who have understood torture’s uselessness over the centuries? Source

Why and how is there still any public deliberation deeming any approving torture as a tool of the state even marginally credible?

And for those armchair Torquemadas who would still smugly or vengefully (and absent any record of proof, particularly of any sole or unique and testable, replicable value) tout that “torture worked” — well, slavery worked. Quite efficaciously for many centuries too, but the weight of its innate and central immorality, bigotry and wretched, corruptive maleficence properly cast it into obliteration as accepted practice.

As for Mr. Cheney, ye old scribe turns once more to Churchill:

The dangers and consequences of validating leadership, fomenting policy or upending and twisting universal, civilized illegalities into mandated practice under the banner of fanaticism are historically self-evident.

Update May 21: After listening to both speeches today, some quick thoughts.

Cheney: PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) is real, and giving a wide banner labeled ‘credibility’ to an obvious untreated long-term PTSD sufferer to spout rabid, repetitive and one-dimensional points, many spun out of the flimsiest of data(if indeed any at all) does not serve to bolster nor advance any cogent argument. Indoctrination by fear is no less offesnive and repugnant than is indoctrination by force.

Obama: Quicker and more sure-footed progress is always made when standing on solid ground than when balancing on a high wire. The latter position is where he chose to perch too frequently. Splitting the difference on inalienable human rights affords no rights at all, merely a facade of same. Compromise on basic tenets of justice gives succor and viability to the unjustified.

Waziristan bloodbath (emphasis added) next?

Or a semi-shrouded message to specific or ancillary factions to lay low or pull back?

Or a showpiece, transitory operation which will peter out as before?

And little to no mention anywhere of bustling Quetta (see again here and additional citations), where criminally-geared and terror-affiliated segments (that is to say, directly relevant to and revolving around operations in Afghanistan rather than the more local sovereignty movement or breakaway factions) yet plainly exist and operate visibly and with near impunity.

The high-profile convention of clerics in the Pakistani capital was the second in three days to condemn suicide attacks and beheadings, two of the Taliban’s favored tactics, as “haram,” or contrary to Islam.

Both conventions also supported the Pakistani military offensive against Taliban in Swat and two adjoining districts, although almost all the clerics share the militants’ goal of establishing Islamic law in Pakistan.

[snip]

The shift, coupled with intense pressure from Washington and a more sober assessment of the threat posed by the militants, appears to have roused the government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

Zardari has said that Pakistan would extend its military offensive to Waziristan, the area along the Afghan border that’s a base for Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, and also for al Qaida. That would trigger a major conflict, in which the support of the clergy could be vital.

[snip]

A deeply religious people, Pakistanis tend to take guidance from senior clerics, and their previous ambivalence and confusion about Islamic extremism rose in part from the clergy’s silence or from denials that Muslims could have perpetrated acts of violence against civilians.

At the two religious conventions, however, there was even criticism of the Pakistani military’s past patronage of jihadist groups.

“We are now harvesting the crop we sowed three decades ago,” Mufti Muneeb-ur-Rehman told a lively convention of some 4,000 clerics on Sunday, referring to the policy of backing Afghan “mujahedeen” guerrillas in the 1980s under U.S.-backed dictator Gen. Zia-ul-Haq.

[snip]

Sunday’s meeting was organized by clerics from the Barelvi sect, the dominant Islamic school in South Asia, a Sunni creed that preaches a tolerant brand of religion but whose voice is often drowned out by firebrands from more radical sects.

Tuesday’s conference was sponsored by the government and involved broader participation, including from Shiites, Pakistan’s other main Islamic denomination, and even some clerics from the Deobandi school, a branch of the Taliban that preaches a purist Islam akin to the Wahabi [sic] faith of Osama bin Laden.

While the majority of Pakistanis are Barelvi, the Deobandis run most of the madrassas — Islamic schools — that churn out religious scholars and foot soldiers for the Taliban and other extreme religious groups. Source

One meanwhile fervently hopes that there is strong and constant backchannel pressure coming from the U.S., the U.K., Russia and China, directed at India to put all and any moves regarding Kashmir, with the exception of negotiations, totally on ice for the duration.

Top-notch critique of today’s “let’s slap a coat of paint on and maybe it’ll sell” announcement and backpedaling regarding military commissions:

Let’s concede that if the U.S. is going to continue to try accused terrorists in newly-created military commissions — rather than under our normal, long-standing system of justice — then it is better to have more safeguards than fewer. That’s just true by definition. Let’s further concede that many of the past criticisms voiced about Bush’s military commissions, including some of Obama’s criticisms, focused on the specific rules of those commissions, some of which (though far from all) are addressed by Obama’s modifications, including the most important change that coerced statements are no longer admissible. Nonetheless, the overwhelming bulk of the objections to what the Bush administration did was to the very idea of military commission themselves. The controversy — one of the most intense of the Bush era — was grounded in the argument that there was absolutely no reason, other than to pervert justice and enable easy and due-process-free convictions, to create a separate tribunal rather than use our extant judicial processes.

[snip]

…if the state is willing to accord due process only when it is guaranteed that it can win, but then creates a new system of diminished due process whenever it believes it cannot win, the guarantee of due process, for rather obvious reasons, becomes completely illusory (”we’ll give due process as long as we’re sure we can win, and if we can’t, we’ll give you something less”). Source

Painting broadly now, but consider this:

Iraq, a country under martial occupation, while an economic and societal basket case, while riven by ongoing and constant political, partisan and sectarian chaos, allowed Saddam Hussein trial in a newly nascent and still unsteady judicial system under a fledgling, subservient government barely operational and in crisis, mostly in public proceedings and venue.

Can the U.S., a country of relative plenty, a country of social and civil calm, under no immediate widespread lethal or destructive threat and suffering no ongoing programs of internal violence, do no less than channel a few handfuls of alleged criminals through its own longstanding, primarily respected and proven, long evolved, publicly accountable judicial branch — as established by its founding document — for trial?

And under circumstances of justice and of incarceration which do not deliberately institute and replicate individually a curriculum of some of the most brutal and repugnant tactics of repressive power and abuse of authority often ascribed to regimes incontrovertibly engaged in and sutained by thuggery, barbarity and fear.

Wanting to portray ourselves as a collective portrait of liberty and to be held up as a standard of freedom requires much, much more than just talking the talk.

The high ground holds no place, no corner, no nook or cranny, no refuge for the dark side.

Thank you, Mr. Sorenson. Thank you.

“Intellectually and morally dishonest lawyers (in the Department of Justice) disgraced not only their country but their profession” in claiming that waterboarding and other forms of torture were legal, he said.

“In a country based on the rule of law, in which no man is above the law, whatever his rank or title, no man can undertake, authorize or immunize unlawful conduct,” Sorensen said.

[snip]

“…the moral authority of the United States, its traditional ability to occupy the moral high ground in an international conflict, is an important part of our security,” he said.

“More important than the worthless statements extracted from torture’s victims who will cry out anything to halt it.” Source

A bit more:

Virtually every lawyer worth his diploma knows that the United States is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions on War Crimes and the 1984 Convention Against Torture; that waterboarding is torture and that torture is illegal, regardless of pieces of paper from Justice Department lawyers who disgraced not only their country but their profession, a fact of which their respective Bar Associations should take note. Those lawyers apparently thought in 2003-04 that their client was the President and later his Attorney General. Wrong. Their client was the American people who had a right to expect that their lawyers would know the law and uphold it, not attempt to redefine it or interpret it away… Source

Not good. Not good at all. And odd too, isn’t it, how any mention of the purported use of such banned materiel or similar munitions on civilians during the devastation of Fallujah escapes mention in the article.

Taleban fighters have been using deadly white phosphorus munitions, some of them manufactured in Britain, to attack Western forces in Afghanistan, according to previously classified United States documents released yesterday.

[snip]

Although a full investigation is under way, it is not yet clear how the Taleban and other insurgent forces using them had acquired the white phosphorus munitions from Britain. However, Major Willis said that Afghanistan was littered with ordnance of every kind and it was not a surprise that the insurgents had got their hands on white phosphorus.

[snip]

Major Willis said that the use of white phosphorus in IEDs was a relatively new development. The earliest report of the insurgents using white phosphorus was in February 2003, but the eight known IED cases, including one in the south, have all occurred since March 2007. Source

It should be noted that some previous reports of announcements of identified ordnance markings have been credibly disputed or entirely retracted. That is not to deny this report, but to qualify it within the context of both the Iraq and Afghanistan mayhem.

The fog of war is dense indeed, but not totally impenetrable if there exists the will and the drive to thoroughly investigate, and by that not meaning only an institutional or in-service investigation, such as have been accomplished before.

…a March 14, 2009, incident in which an 8-year-old girl in Kapisa province was burned by white phosphorus munitions, Human Rights Watch said…. A NATO spokesperson has denied allegations from the girl’s father that NATO forces had fired the rounds that caused her injuries.

[snip]

NATO officials have said that according to their records, no rounds were found to have landed near the house, though have not denied using white phosphorus during this engagement.… Source

Noting the last egress of British forces in Iraq now underway.

“The role of British ground forces is finished,” a defence official said, having completed their mission of mentoring and training two Iraqi army divisions. [The] ceremonies were in many ways symbolic. British forces had been winding down their presence in Basra for many weeks and had already handed over responsibility for Basra’s security to the Iraqis at the start of the year.

It was significant that UK forces handed over their base not to the Iraqis but the Americans. US forces will remain in Basra protecting the important supply route from Kuwait, and helping the Iraqi army and police force. Source