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Adding New Floors to the Bailout House of Cards

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

By Phil Mattera | Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke have added a few more floors to their ever-expanding bailout house of cards. Their two agencies kicked in another $800 billion in the latest frantic effort to ward off financial collapse. The Fed is putting up $600 billion to buy mortgage-backed securities and mortgages held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This seems, at least initially, to have brought down mortgage rates—assuming anyone is in a position these days to buy a house.

The plan for the other $200 billion is more dubious. Treasury and the Fed are going to use those funds to make loans to consumer finance companies, which in turn would be in a position to provide more auto loans, student loans and credit cards. Yet, as with the bailout of the banks, there seems to be no actual requirement that the finance companies use their new liquidity to open the spigots to consumers. We are apparently supposed to take it on faith that these lenders will in fact lend, even though it’s now clear that many of the banks used their federal assistance for other purposes.

Another questionable assumption in the plan is that consumers are aching to borrow more money. With unemployment soaring and the value of retirement savings dwindling, most people are opting for austerity, not seeking to add to their already heavy debt load. Creating more jobs and boosting household income are more urgent than allowing people to go further into hock.

And finally, it is worth recalling that many of the consumer finance companies have been as predatory in their lending as the unscrupulous subprime mortgage lenders. Nowhere is this truer than in the credit card business. These are the companies that, thanks to deregulation in their industry, have been gouging consumers with usurious interest rates and punishing fees.

The idea that bailing out these firms is the way to help consumers is yet another indication of the warped thinking of Paulson and Bernanke. It does not occur to them that the solution might be to lessen the hold that the card companies have on consumers—through measures such as interest rate reductions—rather than intensifying it. But what can you expect from what has become a government of the financial institutions, by the financial institutions and for the financial institutions.

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ALEXANDER COCKBURN: The Honeymoon is Looking a Bit Wan

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN |

Two years without a single leak and suddenly, last week, Obama’s operation was like a sieve. That’s what happens when you pick up the phone and call one of the Clintons. Or, to put it another way, that’s what happens when someone claims you, the president elect, picked up the phone and called Mrs Clinton to ask whether she’d like to be secretary of state.

Out the window goes the sense of purposeful strides towards a new-look Administration. In comes a dreadful feeling that somehow we’ve slipped a dimension in the space-time continuum and are heading back into the Clinton era. A couple of more weeks and the Republicans will be calling for a special prosecutor.

I’ve had people try to explain to me the political logic of Obama offering his erstwhile Democratic rival a top position in his cabinet. Better to have her inside the tent. Send her off on bouts of futile shuttle diplomacy, like Condoleezza Rice.

It still doesn’t add up. Why march back briskly into Clintontime? Besides, she’d make a lousy Secretary of State. Mrs Clinton has never displayed any talent for negotiation, nor even any conspicuous appetite to find out what is going on in the world, let alone come up with a new vision of America’s role in the 21st century. She’s an interventionist by instinct, her finger twitching over the Bomb Release lever. She voted yes on the Iraq war. She was an ardent advocate of NATO’s onslaught on Yugoslavia. If we do get Hillary at State we may get Madeleine Albright as one of her sidekicks – the woman who said in the late 1990s that starving half a million Iraqi children was “worth it”, probably the line that the 9/11 al Qaeda hijackers were muttering to themselves when they sped on their mission of revenge towards the Twin Towers. This is change?

The answer of course is that there has to be a good deal of similarity between the Clinton and Obama administrations, because Obama is a neoliberal interventionist like Bill, and because the 45 and 50-year old veterans of the two Clinton administrations who have been cooling their heels in law firms and think tanks for eight years make up a high percentage of those in the hiring line, particularly those who placed an early bet on Obama. To round off the symmetry the new White House counsel will be Greg Craig, who defended Clinton during his impeachment.

And the cabinet members Obama has announced or who are being bandied about are not inspiring. They’re dull like former Democratic senator Tom Daschle getting Health and Human Services. Howard Dean, who was a doctor and who had hands-on time grappling with health insirance when he was governor of Vermont, would have been a much better choice. Janet Napolitano, the Arizona governor slated to be head of Homeland Security, horrified labor organizers at one meeting earlier this year listening to her boasting about kicking migrant workers back into Mexico. One nominee headed towards a Republican roasting in his hearings is Eric Holder, named to be Attorney General. As number 2 in Clinton’s Justice Department, Holder played a grimy role in one of the most scandalous affairs of Clinton-time, the last minute pardon by Clinton of billionaire trader and denizen of the FBI’s most wanted list, Marc Rich. (See Jeffrey St. Clair’s account of the pardons for Holder’s central role in the affair.) Early in 2002 Holder gave CNN his views on the treatment of captured terrorists: “One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located; under the Geneva Convention . . . you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people. It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war.”

Other possible appointments are not demonstrative of a resolute change of pace. The talk is of keeping Robert Gates on as Defense Secretary, although Gates has made no significant mark on the vast pork barrel beside the Potomac. The conversion of this mucky schemer of yesteryear into revered emblem of sound governance is one of the many marvels of our age. Somewhere don the road we’ll probably end up with another slimy fellow, former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, who counts among his regular roosts CSIS and the Center for A New American Security, also decorated by the odious Robert Kaplan and Dr John Nagl.

The most significant appointment will be Treasury Secretary. On current form Obama will play it safe with the top nominees to run this Department, starting with Geithner of the New York Fed, with Larry Summers somewhere in the mix. The trouble here is that there is no safe option and the usual suspects will have the usual limited perspective.

In sum, this looks like a standard issue, business-as-usual cabinet in the making, about as exciting as looking at one of the regular network panel shows on a Sunday morning. Can’t they find anyone under 40 who looks like they might want to do things different and shake things up?

The Golden Age of Eating was….

But first a quotation.

“The Korean War ended 55 years ago, and the US still has troops in Korea.

“Germany was defeated in 1945, and the US still has troops in Germany.

“A country that must go hat in hand to its creditors must first look to where costs can be cut. Annual military spending of $700 billion is certainly a good place to start.

“But the US government has far more hubris than intelligence and is on its way to being a failed state that has to print money to pay its bills.

“It is not too late for the US to save itself and the dollar standard, but it would require a rapid transition from arrogance to humility. The rest of the world can bring America down by not lending to us, in which case neither the trade nor budget deficits could be financed.”

That’s Paul Craig Roberts, on this website Thursday. In the latest edition of our subscriber only newsletter Roberts lays out the big economic picture with bleak and compelling vigor. It’s must reading if you want to know the shape America is really in. Subscribe to read his powerful essay.

Subscribe too, and read Judy Gumbo Albert’s risposte to Sarah Palin. Judy writes a great memoir of the late Sixties, from the Yipster perspective of one who famously said, when the Weathmen blew up a lavatory in the Capitol, “We didn’t do it, but we dug it.”

You also get co-editor Cockburn writing about food in the modern age, so different from those exalted moments in the history of balanced diet which I describe in the newsletter, “with Australopithecus healthily subsisting on ‘fruits, leaves, larvae and bugs,’ along with modest gobbets of carrion. ‘His large teeth, powerful jaws and oversize gut were all adapted to coarse, fibrous plant matter … Even his small size – he stood barely four feet tall and weighed forty pounds – was ideal for harvesting fruit among the branches.’ Three million years later, we arrive at the far end of an inexorably descending arc, with 400-pound, low-income specimens of Homo sapiens swollen by excessive intake of calories, their guts compromised by lack of fiber, many of them diabetic, draped over their scooters, harvesting the aisles of Albertsons or Safeway for sugar, salt and fat-saturated snacks that will hike their blood pressure, clog their arteries, and propel them to an early grave.”

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Noam Chomsky on the election

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

There was meeting on November 7, I think of a group of couple, of a dozen advisers to deal with the financial crisis. Their careers were, records were reviewed in the business press, and Bloomberg News had an article reviewing their records and concluded that these people, most of these people shouldn’t be giving advice about the economy. They should be given subpoenas.

Why Obama should end the criminal “war on terror”

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

By Gary Kamiya | Barack Obama will confront a daunting list of priorities when he takes office on Jan. 20. Rescuing the nation’s economy — if there’s anything left to rescue by then — will obviously be at the top of the list. But it is just as important that Obama immediately declare an end to the “war on terror,” and reverse all of the policies that have been carried out in its name.

George W. Bush’s “war on terror” has been an unmitigated disaster. First, it is unwinnable. Terrorism is not an enemy. It is a tactic as old as humanity, and until the lion lies down with the lamb, it will continue to exist. Waging a war on terror is a category violation, like waging a war on violence. Second, it is self-defeating. By invading Iraq to preempt an alleged terrorist threat, the U.S. greatly increased that threat. And by elevating terrorist groups, which pose no existential threat to America, to the status of state actors, the Bush administration enhanced their prestige. The number of terror attacks around the world has risen greatly since Bush started his “war,” and hatred of the U.S. in the Arab-Muslim world has metastasized.

In a subtler way, the “war on terror” has degraded our national psyche. It encourages the U.S. to remain in a psychological state that is simultaneously fearful and aggressive — an infantile state, one that prevents us from thinking clearly about how to address our real foreign policy challenges. The U.S. is too powerful and self-confident to act like a three-year-old having a permanent tantrum. One successful terrorist attack, no matter how horrific, should never have led to a fundamental change in America’s geopolitical strategy. A good general cannot allow his battlefield moves to be dictated by emotion, any more than a boxer can allow himself to drop his guard in a futile effort to land wild haymakers.

Of course, Obama should not abandon the fight against international terrorism, but adopt more effective tactics. He should treat al-Qaida and its ilk as criminals rather than armies. Quiet intelligence work, coordination with allies and law enforcement should be used as much as possible. There may be times when military action is needed, but it should be minimized because of its negative effects. Obama should make it a top priority to address the conditions that fuel anti-American hatred. In Afghanistan, this means rebuilding the country; in Pakistan, not propping up unpopular despots like Musharraf; in Israel and the Palestinian territories, throwing the full weight of American diplomacy behind a two-state solution. When it comes to fighting terrorism, America’s most powerful weapon is not its army, it is its brain.

Fortunately, we are about to get a president who has a brain and is not afraid to use it. Obama famously said that he didn’t just want to end the war in Iraq, he wanted to end “the mind-set that led to war.” And the ultimate expression of that mind-set is the “war on terror.”

Unfortunately, Obama has given some mixed messages about whether he is going to end the “war on terror” and the wrongheaded policies that have resulted from it. His most troubling statements concern Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. In his debates with McCain, Obama consistently charged that the U.S. had “taken its eye off the ball” in Afghanistan and had failed to make capturing or killing bin Laden its top priority. These arguments, while not untrue, implicitly legitimize the “war on terror,” and simply critique Bush for fighting it in the wrong way.

Obama’s proposal to escalate the U.S. war in Afghanistan, though qualified by his greater emphasis on rebuilding the country, seems to indicate that he believes the Taliban can be defeated militarily. This is a recipe for failure: As former British Foreign Service officer Rory Stewart noted in the New York Times, the U.S. military buildup in Afghanistan has inflamed the Taliban resistance and made the situation worse. In a recent interview on “60 Minutes,” Obama said he would make capturing or killing bin Laden a top priority, and he has threatened to strike terrorist targets inside Pakistan if the Pakistan government proved unwilling or unable to do so.

Killing or capturing bin Laden is obviously desirable. But as Mideast expert and Salon contributor Juan Cole has pointed out, achieving that goal may come at too high a price. A major U.S. military campaign in the tribal agencies on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where bin Laden is thought to be hiding, would anger Pakistanis and weaken the Pakistan government. It’s not clear this is an acceptable trade-off.

Further doubts about whether Obama intends to fundamentally change Bush’s foreign policy have been raised by his choice of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. Clinton represents that sizable wing of the Democratic Party that went along with Bush’s “war on terror.” She voted to authorize force in Iraq, voted to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization — a vote widely seen as giving Bush a green light to attack Iran — and has been unswervingly “pro-Israel.” (In fact, as the progressive American Jewish organization J Street has pointed out, “pro-Israel” politicians, invariably ones who toe the Israel lobby’s line, are not actually acting in Israel’s best interests.)

Despite these developments, there is still reason to believe that Obama’s approach to fighting terrorism will be radically different from Bush’s. He has consistently called for robust Mideast diplomacy, including talking with Iran. In a Washington Post Op-Ed, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski called for Obama to make resolving the Israeli-Palestinian crisis a top priority. Scowcroft, an eminent member of the realist wing of America’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment, has advised Obama on national security issues. In general, Obama’s Mideast views seem to track closely with the realist, diplomacy-driven policies recommended by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which Bush famously ignored.

As for Obama’s hawkish remarks on Afghanistan, they were probably driven by political concerns. During the campaign, Obama needed to shore up his national-security credentials, and talking tough on Afghanistan, Pakistan and al-Qaida gave him a free chance to do so. (In one of the odder ironies of the campaign, McCain came across as more measured and diplomatic on Pakistan than Obama.)

To a lesser degree, the same thing is probably true of Clinton. Following the traditional Democratic playbook, she felt she had to lean to the right on national security issues, and some of her “pro-Israel” and anti-Iranian tilt can be explained by her perceived need to cater to her New York constituents. In any case, Obama likely realized the more hawkish Clinton will make a more effective, bulletproof emissary of change. Who better to get tough with Israel in negotiations than the woman who threatened to “obliterate” Iran if it launched a nuclear attack on the Jewish state? Nixon in China, meet Hillary in Jerusalem.

Finally, beyond political tea-leaf reading, there’s the simple matter of effectiveness. Everything we know about Obama indicates that he is driven above all by pragmatism. His nuanced approach to America’s economic crisis and his choices of highly experienced Washington insiders as his top advisors make it clear that he wants results. And the “war on terror” is simply not working.

There are dozens of reasons why it is not working, but the most important one is brutally simple: It is not in America’s interests to have U.S. troops in Arab/Muslim countries. Whatever good they do — and the U.S. troops in Iraq have done a lot of good — is outweighed by the inadvertent harm they do, the ill will they engender and the insupportable burden they place on the U.S. economy. It was none other than Donald Rumsfeld who acknowledged this problem, when he famously asked, “Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing?” It has become increasingly apparent that we are.

Declaring that the “war on terror” was over would have immediate positive effects. Our European allies would rejoice. Al-Qaida, already so worried about the PR fallout from Obama’s election that its number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, ludicrously accused him of being a “house slave,” would be further discredited in the Arab/Muslim world. It would be easier to begin negotiations with the Taliban and Iran. It would send a strong signal to both the Israelis and the Palestinians that America’s new president is unequivocally committed to a two-state solution and is breaking with Bush’s approach. It would make clear to the entire world, still reeling from the high-handed Bush years, that the real America is back — an America strong and confident enough not to feel the need to swagger through the world smashing things.

Domestically, it would reenergize Obama’s core supporters, who are growing slightly uneasy as he makes one efficient-but-Establishment move after another.

At the same time, Obama faces serious institutional and ideological obstacles to ending Bush’s approach. The powers that be are loathe to admit that there are problems for which there are no military solutions — especially with troops in the field. Patriotism, politicians’ need to appear “tough,” an unwillingness to admit that American lives were wasted and delusional hopes that victory is just around the corner make it hard for Obama to end the “war on terror” and the mind-set that led to it. In a larger sense, ending the “war on terror” means reappraising the entire vast American military empire, and the strategic and economic consequences of our role as global policeman. This is not just a change of tactics, it’s a paradigm shift.

It won’t be easy for Obama to make this fundamental change. But until he does, we will continue to thrash about — and find ourselves sinking deeper into the Middle East quicksand.

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A catalogue of NHS data breaches

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

By Leo King | The NHS has lost confidential medical records and personal details of thousands of patients it has emerged in an investigation into how the health service handles data.

Research showed that a series of losses and thefts had potentially exposed the private details of 10,000 patients around the country. The figures, obtained through a Freedom of Information request made by the Liberal Democrats, revealed incidents of data loss dating back as far as 2006.

In some cases, the patient record loss was so serious that 25 patients were visited by the police and NHS management.

In one instance, a back-up tape of an entire system was stolen from a general practice in the East of England this year. In other incidents, a laptop containing more than 5,000 patients’ details was stolen, and a memory stick containing 4,000 patients’ records was lost. A total of 135 cases have been reported since 2006, including the loss and theft of diaries, briefcases, CDs, laptops, memory sticks, and, in one case, a vehicle containing patient records.

In the last year alone, 75 NHS data breaches have been reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), according to a report released today. Jonathan Bamford, assistant information commissioner, urged the public sector and businesses to take data security more seriously.

Liberal Democrat shadow health secretary, Norman Lamb, said there must be a “fundamental re-examination of how the NHS deals with personal data”. He called for better security around mobile devices, and once again said the NHS’ National Programme for IT should be abandoned.

“We already know from the Information Commissioner that the NHS is among the worst offenders for data loss, reporting as many incidents as the entire private sector,” he added.

Speaking on the data losses on ITV’s News at Ten programme, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, IT representative at the British Medical Association, said: “A lot of this is because doctors need access to mobile information about patients. That is there to help patients, however, we do believe there need to be serious safeguards.”

The Department of Health said the NHS chief executive David Nicholson had written to all senior health managers at local NHS trusts to remind them about their responsibilities around protecting data. “The NHS locally has legal responsibility to comply with data protection rules. They are expected to take data loss extremely seriously, be open about incidents and about the action taken as a result,” a departmental spokesperson said.

In another twist, two trusts - NHS Tayside and NHS Lanarkshire - were found in breach of the Data Protection Act by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The watchdog said confidential health records were found in abandoned buildings on the site of former hospitals in Dundee and Carluke, Scotland. The ICO has demanded that both health boards sign an agreement to follow the Data Protection Act and stick to recommendations made recently by NHS Quality Improvement Scotland to make sure it does not happen again. If the trusts fail to comply, they risk further enforcement action and possible prosecution.

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Britain cannot afford ID cards

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

Telegraph | For the first time since 1952, the British government is issuing identity cards. In order to test the system and ease its introduction, there is to be a cynical requirement for foreign nationals resident in the UK to register.

To begin with, this will affect students and the foreign spouses of British citizens. The fact that they already possess an identity document - a passport and/or a visa - does not seem to enter into the Government’s thinking, principally because they are guinea pigs. Over time, residents from outside Europe will be fingerprinted and have to account for their movements. Starting in 2010, so will the rest of us.

We have many objections to this proposal, which is the latest manifestation of an intrusive state that wants to track the movements of its citizens. However, it is not necessary to have civil liberty scruples to oppose it. It is questionable on practical grounds, too.

Every argument given for requiring ID cards - they will prevent crime, stop illegal immigration, deter terrorists or eradicate fraud - has been demolished. Ministers have subsequently sought to turn this into a debate about efficacy, maintaining that the lives of British citizens will be made easier by the possession of an ID card.

But the greatest beneficiary of an ID scheme is not the ordinary individual; it is the state, since its agencies gain access to information they would not otherwise have.

Even if the Government is unwilling to heed any of these arguments, there is one that should put an end to this ill-starred and un-British venture, and that is the cost. This is estimated by the Government at £5.8 billion over 10 years - but that is just for the Home Office.

Some forecasts suggest the total cost to the public sector could be at least three times that sum. Presumably this does not matter to a Government that has plunged the country deeper into the red than any in peacetime and seems not to care about spending even more on wasteful public projects.

Instead of driving us further into penury, the Chancellor should announce he is scrapping the ID scheme because he cannot justify the expense.

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Rumsfeld’s Attempts to Rewrite Himself on the Right Side of History Are Laughable

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

By Gary Brecher |

The failed defense secretary pens a historical cover-up on Iraq and reveals more wild stupidity with his advice on Afghanistan.

I’ve been following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from Go to Oh-No, and by far the biggest surprise has been how many whopping lies you can get away with. The biggest whoppers I’ve seen lately were in a Nov. 23 op-ed piece by Donald Rumsfeld for the New York Times, “One surge Does Not Fit All.”

Rumsfeld’s main point is that the “surge” that supposedly worked so well in Iraq might not work in Afghanistan. But Rumsfeld spends most of the essay talking about what he did, or didn’t do, in Iraq. He claims he’s been “…occasionally — and incorrectly — portrayed as an opponent of the surge in Iraq.” This is a classic example of Rumsfeld in full denial mode. For proof that he was in fact opposed to the surge, here’s Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard saying outright that Rumsfeld opposed the surge:

“In September [2006], Rumsfeld had rejected the idea of a surge when retired Gen. Jack Keane, a former vice chief of staff of the Army and a member of the advisory Defense Policy Review Board, met with him and [Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter] Pace. Keane insisted the “train-and-leave” strategy, as Bush referred to it, was failing. He proposed a counterinsurgency strategy, the addition of five to eight Army brigades, and a primary focus on taking back Baghdad. Rumsfeld was unconvinced.”

You may not be surprised that Rumsfeld is changing his story to cover himself; after all, that’s what ex-cabinet types generally do in these articles. They didn’t oppose the surge because they grudged a few more troops, a few billion more taxpayer dollars. The Bush administration was never known for being either squeamish or penny-pinching. Their problem was pure denial: The people at the top, Rumsfeld among them, were too cowardly to admit that a big chunk of the Iraqi people we had “liberated” weren’t grateful but were out for our blood.

The key phrase in that quote from the Weekly Standard is the distinction between two kinds of strategy: the “train-and-leave” favored by Bush and Rumsfeld, and the “counterinsurgency strategy” the Army was desperately trying to get the administration to adopt. Letting U.S. forces in Iraq implement a counterinsurgency strategy meant admitting that there was an insurgency. That was the problem, not finding enough troops or money.

I’ve studied war all my life, but I can’t think of another example where one side refused to admit it was in a war at all. And when you won’t admit you’re in a war, you’re not likely to win. Rumsfeld was part of that chorus of denial, but the prize for most advanced case has to go to Vice President Dick Cheney, who said in May 2005 that the Iraqi insurgency was “… in the last throes, if you will.” In May 2005, 80 American soldiers died in Iraq, a rate of three dead (and dozens wounded) every day.

For the whole of 2005, American losses were horrific: 846 dead. American dead for 2004 had been almost the same number, 849. At the end of the year, President Bush summed it all up as only he could: “2005 was a fascinating year [in Iraq].” That was the official story from the Bush administration, and they gave absolute priority to maintaining it. That’s why Rumsfeld wouldn’t listen to any talk about adopting counterinsurgency tactics, rather than sticking with the fantasy that we were only there to “train” the local forces and then “leave.”

Rumsfeld purposely misses this point when he claims that there had been earlier “surges” before Gen. David Petraeus’ 2006 surge:

“In 2005, troop levels in Iraq were increased to numbers nearly equal to the 2007 surge — twice. But the effects were not as durable, because large segments of the Sunni population were still providing sanctuary to insurgents, and Iraq’s security forces were not sufficiently capable or large enough.”

It didn’t work because the problem was strategy, not troop numbers. Rumsfeld wasn’t alone in refusing to think about counterinsurgency. Most of the Army officer corps associated “counterinsurgency” with Vietnam and wanted nothing to do with it, as Lt. Col. John A. Nagl acknowledges: “It is not unfair to say that in 2003 most Army officers knew more about the U.S. Civil War than they did about counterinsurgency.” Counterinsurgency tactics are the exact opposite of the “shock-and-awe” strategy Rumsfeld had been pushing in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s notion of war involves maximum firepower; counterinsurgency warfare stresses getting to know the locals instead of firing blindly every time a patrol is ambushed. Counterinsurgency is slow, people-centered and low tech.

Naturally Rumsfeld, a lifelong advocate of high-tech, airpower-based warfare, opposed it until 2007, when the situation was so bad Petraeus finally got his chance.

When Petraeus finally took command, most of his moves were counterinsurgency basics that would have been put in place years ago by any other occupying army in history. One of the first moves was starting neighborhood census programs so troops could start sorting out who was who, who was new, who didn’t belong in the area. The worst of it is that Rumsfeld isn’t content to skew the Iraq story in his own favor. His essay in the Times shows he’s still pushing denial as a way of dealing with Afghanistan, by insisting we can’t talk to the Taliban: “The current suggestion of ‘opening negotiations’ with the Taliban may well win over some low- and midlevel supporters, but if history is any guide, offering the hand of peace to hardened fanatics is not likely to prove successful.”

I remember when I was a kid, the same argument was used to prove we can never talk to “Red China”: they’re evil fanatics! You can’t talk to them! So the United States pretended there was no China for decades, and dealt with Taiwan as if it was a little island in the middle of nowhere.

Then Nixon, a guy nobody ever accused of naïveté, changed everything by pointing out, while on his way to shake Mao’s hand, that evil or not, those “evil” Red Chinese controlled a fourth of the world’s population and weren’t going to go away.

Denial didn’t work then, didn’t work in Iraq and won’t work in Afghanistan. Whether the Taliban are “evil” or not I have no idea, but the fact is that they represent most of the Pashtun in Afghanistan. Sure, the Pashtun have some strange ideas, but if we’re going to call them “evil” I guess it’s time to wipe them out. If we’re not going to do that — and obviously we’re not — then sooner or later, we’re going to have to talk to them.

Rumsfeld’s giant blind spot about counterinsurgency warfare keeps him from seeing this. Conventional warfare, the kind he understands, is binary: either you’re at war, or you’re at peace. Counterinsurgency warfare is a lot murkier. It always comes down to negotiating with some faction of locals, but that doesn’t mean “offering the hand of peace.” It’s more about bribing the greedy, provoking the paranoid and making a deal with the rest. That’s what we’ve done in the Sunni Triangle: bribed some Sunni factions, and encouraged the hostility that other local factions had developed toward the foreign fighters in al-Qaida to flare into open war between Iraqis and foreign jihadists.

Beyond that, the surge worked, if you can say it worked at all, because the Shiites used American protection to finish the job of ethnic cleansing, especially in Baghdad. Baghdad’s a Shiite city now, with a few Sunni enclaves. The killing has declined because the boundaries have been set, at least for now. It’s not a pretty picture, close up, and it has nothing to do with the silly dreams Bush and Rumsfeld were pushing when they persuaded us to go to war.

And even the slight improvement that the surge managed came with Rumsfeld kicking and screaming, resisting the change all the way, because the man is in complete denial about counterinsurgency warfare, about the fact that we aren’t beloved liberators in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about the notion that the world doesn’t divide neatly into good people that we can talk to and bad people we pretend aren’t there. So whatever needs to be done in Afghanistan, you can be absolutely sure of one thing: It won’t have anything to do with whatever Donald Rumsfeld recommends.

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No Amnesty for Bush Administration, Say Torture Opponents

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

By Ali Gharib | Judging by the rare leaks from President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, investigations and prosecutions of high-level George W. Bush administration officials for torture and war crimes are a distant prospect. But likely or not, that won’t stop pundits from debating the question of whether those officials responsible should be held accountable.

Irrespective of whether Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, or others are dragged before juries, one glaring change seems absolutely certain: Obama stands unequivocally against torture, and the practice is likely to come to an end under his administration.

“Even though I’ve been disappointed in other presidents in the past, I do listen, and I do believe Obama when he says we won’t torture. I think that’s crucial,” said Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

But forswearing controversial and harsh interrogation methods may not be enough to permanently reestablish the moral high ground that the Obama administration has promised to bring back to the U.S.’ interactions with the rest of the world.

If Obama doesn’t take on torture that occurred, as opposed to simply discontinuing the practice, the door may be left open for future administrations to resurrect the harshest of interrogation techniques, said Ratner at a recent forum at Georgetown University Law School.

“If Obama really wants to make sure we don’t torture, he has to launch a criminal investigation,” said Ratner, the author of The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book.

He said that the targets of such an investigation would be the easily identifiable “key players” and “principals” in the Bush administration who hatched plans to allow and legally justify harsh interrogation methods that critics allege are torture, including the controversial “waterboarding” simulated drowning technique.

Those pursued, said Ratner, would include high-ranking administration officials such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, and former Central Intelligence Agency chief George Tenet, as well as the legal team that drummed up what is now regarded as a sloppy legal justification for torture.

Key Bush administration lawyers involved in providing legal cover to harsh practices, including the roundly criticized “torture memo” from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), include former attorney general and earlier White House counsel Alberto Gonzales; Cheney’s chief of staff and former legal counsel to the vice president’s office David Addington; and the University of California, Berkeley law professor and former OLC lawyer John Yoo.

If the characters behind the questionable techniques are not held accountable for violating U.S. and international laws, said Ratner, presidents after Obama may simply say “well, in the name of national security I can just redo what Obama just put in place. I can go torture again.”

Ratner also spoke to the concern that, from the view of the rest of the world, “to not do an investigation and prosecution gives the impression of impunity.”

But opposing Ratner on the dais, Stewart Taylor Jr. argued that an investigation and prosecution were not appropriate.

“The people who are called ‘war criminals’ by [Ratner] and others do not think they acted with impunity,” said Taylor, a Brookings Institution fellow and frequent contributor to Newsweek and the National Journal.

In the July 21 edition of Newsweek, Taylor called for Bush to preemptively pardon any administration official who could be held to account for torture or war crimes. Taylor’s rationale was that without fear of prosecution, a full and true account of what he called “dark deeds” could never come to light.

Furthermore, at the Georgetown Law event Taylor said investigation and eventual prosecution would “tear the country apart.”

That may be the thinking of Obama, who, in addition to hints he wouldn’t investigate Bush administration malfeasance, declared his intention to govern as a political reconciliation president in his election victory speech.

In Grant Park in Chicago on Nov. 4, Obama rehashed a quote from slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., but instead of rhetorically bending the “arc of history” toward “justice,” as King did, Obama called for it to be bent “toward the hope of a better day.”

But Ratner said that the country was already divided, and that divide is exactly what a future administration could politically exploit to reinstate torture. He said that Obama must close the divide and doing so is not rehashing the past.

“You’re making sure that in the future, we don’t torture again,” Ratner said. “This is not looking backward.”

Another potential problem with investigation and prosecution, says Taylor, is that the Bush administration officials ostensibly had sought to find out whether the methods they were about to approve were justified, and, indeed, they were told they were in the legal clear.

“There is no evidence that high-ranking officials acted with criminal intent,” he said. “They were relying in good faith on the advice of legal counsel.”

Taylor said that since the legal advice originated from the Department of Justice, it would be wrong for the same Justice Department to “turn around” and prosecute people for actions that its previous incarnation had explicitly told were legal.

But Taylor’s point misses two issues: that the crimes were allegedly given a legal green light because of collusion with the White House, and that Ratner proposes to investigate those same Justice officials who were involved in giving approval.

Despite referring to John Yoo as a “gonzo executive imperialist,” Taylor said that “those officials, like them or not, were honorably motivated” because they were “desperately afraid” of another terrorist attack.

Ratner insists that the officials, part of a “group, cabal, or conspiracy,” may be culpable because they were “aiders and abettors.”

“[OLC] was not giving independent counsel,” insisted Ratner. “They were shaping memos to fit a policy that had already been determined.”

And while Taylor was quick to point out that many U.S. administrations had been accused of war crimes by various sources, Ratner replied that it was the first time that any administration had actually “assaulted the prohibition on torture.”

That could be one reason why, if the U.S. does not take care of its own house, Bush administration officials will likely be pursued on charges in Europe and elsewhere.

In international courts, said Ratner, those officials will not be able to hide behind the legal shields of internal government memos or executive decrees.

“They have no defense in international law,” he said. “They’re finished.”

(Inter Press Service)

Have Your Say: No Amnesty for Bush Administration, Say Torture Opponents
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