I can’t shake the feeling that it was a trap. A set-up. An ambush.

And that Obama bought it. And Joe Biden made it all possible.

There was no end to self-adulation of Barack Obama following the raid in which Osama Bin Laden was killed. In the revelry, the brainiac that is the Vice President opened his mouth and identified those who carried out the Bin Laden raid.

He can tell you more about and understands the incredible, the phenomenal, the just almost unbelievable capacity of his Navy SEALs and what they did last Sunday.

Following the Biden outing, SecDef Gates made clear that increased security was necessary to protect the SEALS and their families. He also noted that the Obama administration could not shut the hell up.

Frankly, a week ago Sunday, in the Situation Room, we all agreed that we would not release any operational details from the effort to take out bin Laden. That all fell apart on Monday, the next day.”

Gates turned out to be prophetic:

“There is an awareness that the threat of retaliation is increased because of the attacks – because of the action against bin Laden,” he said.

Obama then let everyone know where the SEAL Team was.

(Reuters) – President Barack Obama, basking in U.S. public approval for the killing of Osama bin Laden, flew to a military base in Kentucky on Friday to thank special forces who carried out the deadly raid and led a rally filled with cheering troops.

By the end of May, the Taliban was promising revenge.

Nicholas Schmidle wrote a highly detailed play by play of the raid. He’ll probably get a Pulitzer Prize for it. He also helped the Taliban devise a trap.

“One option entailed flying helicopters to a spot outside Abbottabad and letting the team sneak into the city on foot. The risk of detection was high, however, and the SEALS would be tired by a long run to the compound. The planners had contemplated tunneling in — or at least, the possibility that bin Laden might tunnel out…Eventually, the planners agreed that it made the most sense to fly directly into the compound. ‘Special operations is about doing what’s not expected, and probably the least expected thing here was that a helicopter would come in, drop guys on the roof, and land in the yard,’ the special operations officer said.”

“Forty-five minutes after the Black Hawks departed, four MH-47 Chinooks launched from the same runway in Jalalabad. Two of them flew to the border, staying on the Afghan side; the other two proceeded into Pakistan. Deploying four Chinooks was a last-minute decision made after President Barack Obama said he wanted to feel assured that the Americans could “fight their way out of Pakistan.” Twenty-five additional SEALs from DEVGRU, pulled from a squadron stationed in Afghanistan, sat in the Chinooks that remained at the border; this “quick-reaction force” would be called into action only if the mission went seriously wrong. The third and fourth Chinooks were each outfitted with a pair of M134 Miniguns. They followed the Black Hawks’ initial flight path but landed at a predetermined point on a dry riverbed in a wide, unpopulated valley in northwest Pakistan. The nearest house was half a mile away. On the ground, the copters’ rotors were kept whirring while operatives monitored the surrounding hills for encroaching Pakistani helicopters or fighter jets. One of the Chinooks was carrying fuel bladders, in case the other aircraft needed to refill their tanks.

In the detailed description, there is more prophecy

One month before the 2008 Presidential election, Obama, then a senator from Illinois, squared off in a debate against John McCain in an arena at Belmont University, in Nashville. A woman in the audience asked Obama if he would be willing to pursue Al Qaeda leaders inside Pakistan, even if that meant invading an ally nation. He replied, “If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable, or unwilling, to take them out, then I think that we have to act and we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden. We will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national-security priority.” McCain, who often criticized Obama for his naïveté on foreign-policy matters, characterized the promise as foolish, saying, “I’m not going to telegraph my punches.”

Obama did. So did Biden. And so did Schmidle.

They offered the Taliban an outline of how high value target raids are conducted. And it was another high value target they were after.

KABUL—U.S. Special Operations troops were closing in on a clandestine Taliban meeting thought to include a high-value commander in Afghanistan’s rugged Tangi Valley when they ran into an insurgent patrol that pinned them down.

Rangers just happened to “run into” an insurgent patrol that just happened to be there in a position to pin them down??

Bin Laden’s remains were necessary to provide DNA evidence of his death. The alleged “target(s)” of this disastrous raid must also have been very high value as the raid bears a striking similarity to the Bin Laden raid. This time they knew the SEALS were coming and they were prepared for them.

Bin Laden was located from threads of intelligence gathered over four years, and it all derived from a phone call.

So now thanks to the eager press the Taliban knew how Bin Laden was found, they knew who participated in the raid and they knew how it went down. All they needed to do was set bait that someone at the top could not refuse.

The Taliban could leak information about a high value target- it had to be someone high on the food chain, someone else whose DNA would be be required for a positive ID- someone like Ayman Al-Zawahiri. Then they could pin down the first team looking for the high value target and hold out for reinforcements. And they came. The Taliban KNEW SEAL Team 6 comes after high value targets and could well be involved. They KNEW the equipment that would be used. They KNEW pretty much how it would be done. They KNEW how to furnish the fake intel.

It all fits. I believe the Taliban got its revenge by playing the game and I cannot help but wonder who made the decision to send in Special Ops and then the SEALs instead of using a drone. That decision probably came from the top. Perhaps someone was looking for another trophy- someone who needs a boost at the polls.

We still don’t know who got Khalid Sheik Muhammad.

I wrote this well before the following appeared.

UPDATE: Yes, it was a trap.

The Taliban lured US forces into an elaborate trap to shoot down their helicopter, killing 30 American troops in the deadliest such incident of the war, an Afghan official said Monday.

Just a bit of happy news… there are some issues where the deeply divided parties can come to some sort of an agreement. And in this case, it’s an official slap on the wrist of the POTUS for his arrogance in ignoring the mandates of the War Powers Resolution. See also Curt’s post on Congress silent on Obama’s refusal to comply with the War Powers Resolution.

In two votes — on competing resolutions that amounted to legislative lectures of Mr. Obama — Congress escalated the brewing constitutional clash over whether he ignored the founding document’s grant of war powers by sending U.S. troops to aid in enforcing a no-fly zone and naval blockade of Libya.

The resolutions were non-binding, and only one of them passed, but taken together, roughly three-quarters of the House voted to put Mr. Obama on notice that he must explain himself or else face future consequences, possibly including having funds for the war cut off.

~~~

The Kucinich resolution failed 148-265. In a telling signal, 87 Republicans voted for Mr. Kucinich’s resolution — more than the 61 Democrats that did.

Still, taken together, 324 members of Congress voted for one resolution or both resolutions, including 91 Democrats, or nearly half the caucus. The size of the votes signals overwhelming discontent with Mr. Obama’s handling of the constitutional issues surrounding the Libya fight.

It seems that Kuchinich’s stronger resolution, demands US troops withdraw immediately, was bypassed in order to give the POTUS a chance to follow the law.

You can see which Congressional House members voted no on H Res 294 as well as the text, at the GovTrack site. No surprise that female DNC gaffe’master, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, joined Pelosi is a nay vote.

Introduced on Jun 1st, and sent to committee is FL Rep Thomas Rooney’s H Con Res 57, that simply states the POTUS is in violation of the War Powers Resolution, and is co sponsored by 16 other GOP House members.

On May 25th, Sen. Rand Paul introduced S J Res 16, stating that Obama exceeded his authority with the Libyan action. Again, sent to committee. Text is not available, and no co-sponsors at this writing.

Reuters reports that on Monday, May 23rd, a resolution in support of the Libyan action was introduced, but stopped short of officially authorizing the action. Sen Res 194 is sponsored by John McCain, and is co sponsored by Saxby Chambliss [R-GA]; Dianne Feinstein [D-CA]; Lindsey Graham [R-SC]; John Kerry [D-MA]; Carl Levin [D-MI]; and Joseph Lieberman [I-CT]

…. another lesson for the GOP to be diligent not to nominate another RINO.

In 2007, WaPo ended an article quoting a CIA officer as saying in 2005, “The larger problem here, I think is that this kind of stuff just makes people feel better, even if it doesn’t work.” in regards to the question of whether torture works or not. Now we have Gregg Bloche, a physician and a professor of law at Georgetown University, writing for WaPo, saying the reverse: That those who say “torture doesn’t work” are saying it to make themselves feel better. Finally, we have a critic of the CIA enhanced interrogation program who isn’t launching into hyperbole and distorted assumptions, but is taking an honest look at it, while remaining a critic:

The idea that waterboarding and other abuses may have been effective in getting information from detainees is repellant to many, including me. It’s contrary to the meme many have embraced: that torture doesn’t work because people being abused to the breaking point will say anything to get the brutality to stop — anything they think their accusers want to hear.

One of the memes from critics is that torture doesn’t work because the person being tortured will tell you anything you want to hear to make the pain stop, including false confessions and false information.

Two things:

1)Torture doesn’t work

John McCain claims as much; and yet, as one commenter on a WaPo article pointed out, torture did work on McCain:

McCain in his 1999 autobiography, “Faith of My Fathers,” McCain describes

“Eventually, I gave them my ship’s name and squadron number, and confirmed that my target had been the power plant.”

McCain said: “I regret very much having done so. The information was of no real use to the Vietnamese, but the Code of Conduct for American Prisoners of War orders us to refrain from providing any information beyond our names, rank and serial number.”

“I had learned what we all learned over there,” McCain said. “Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine.”

But let’s agree for now that in general, whether torture works or not, torture is morally repugnant to us and against our values. Which is why Bush, Cheney, and the CIA would all disagree with the claims that the CIA interrogation program = torture. Those who created and endorsed the program went through great lengths to make sure that they did not cross a line. If anything, the OLC memos released by the Obama Administration weren’t “torture” memos, but “How not to torture” memos. We can have an honest discussion about where that line in the sand should have been drawn; but to lay claim that Bush and company are no different than al Qaeda using power drills on its victims or that waterboarding was conducted no differently than the water torture employed by the Spanish Inquisition is to launch into exaggeration and dishonesty.

2) Those who are tortured will confess to anything and give false information to make the pain stop

This is a misunderstanding of the purpose of EITs (enhanced interrogation techniques). The 30 HVTs (high value terrorists) who were subjected to EITs under the CIA program were put through it with the goal in mind of obtaining cooperation, not information. Bloche elaborates upon the reasoning behind the use of EITs further:

But this position is at odds with some behavioral science, I’ve learned. The architects of enhanced interrogation are doctors who built on a still-classified, research-based model that suggests how abuse can indeed work.

I’ve examined the science, studied the available paper trail and interviewed key actors, including several who helped develop the enhanced interrogation program and who haven’t spoken publicly before. This inquiry has made it possible to piece together the model that undergirds enhanced interrogation.

This model holds that harsh methods can’t, by themselves, force terrorists to tell the truth. Brute force, it suggests, stiffens resistance. Rather, the role of abuse is to induce hopelessness and despair. That’s what sleep deprivation, stress positions and prolonged isolation were designed to do. Small gestures of contempt — facial slaps and frequent insults — drive home the message of futility. Even the rough stuff, such as “walling” and waterboarding, is meant to dispirit, not to coerce.

Once a sense of hopelessness is instilled, the model holds, interrogators can shape behavior through small rewards. Bathroom breaks, reprieves from foul-tasting food and even the occasional kind word can coax broken men to comply with their abusers’ expectations.

~~~

It’s been widely reported that the program was conceived by a former Air Force psychologist, James Mitchell, who had helped oversee the Pentagon’s program for training soldiers and airmen to resist torture if captured. That Mitchell became the CIA’s maestro of enhanced interrogation and personally waterboarded several prisoners was confirmed in 2009 through the release of previously classified documents. But how Mitchell got involved and why the agency embraced his methods remained a mystery.

The key player was a clinical psychologist turned CIA official, Kirk Hubbard, I learned through interviews with him and others. On the day 19 hijackers bent on mass murder made their place in history, Hubbard’s responsibilities at the agency included tracking developments in the behavioral sciences with an eye toward their tactical use. He and Mitchell knew each other through the network of psychologists who do national security work. Just retired from the Air Force, Mitchell figured he could translate what he knew about teaching resistance into a methodology for breaking it. He convinced Hubbard, who introduced him to CIA leaders and coached him through the agency’s bureaucratic rivalries.

Journalistic accounts have cast Mitchell as a rogue who won a CIA contract by dint of charisma. What’s gone unappreciated is his reliance on a research base. He had studied the medical and psychological literature on how Chinese interrogators extracted false confessions. And he was an admirer of Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist who had developed the concept of “learned helplessness” and invoked it to explain depression.

Mitchell, it appears, saw connections and seized upon them. The despair that Chinese interrogators tried to instill was akin to learned helplessness. Seligman’s induction of learned helplessness in laboratory animals, therefore, could point the way to prison regimens capable of inducing it in people. And — this was Mitchell’s biggest conceptual jump — the Chinese way of shaping behavior in prisoners who were reduced to learned helplessness held a broader lesson.

To motivate a captive to comply, a Chinese interrogator established an aura of omnipotence. For weeks or months, the interrogator was his prisoner’s sole human connection, with monopoly power to praise, punish and reward. Rapport with the interrogator offered the only escape from despair. This opened possibilities for the sculpting of behavior and belief. For propaganda purposes, the Chinese sought sham confessions. But Mitchell saw that behavioral shaping could be used to pursue other goals, including the extraction of truth.

Did the methods Mitchell devised help end the hunt for bin Laden? Have they prevented terrorist attacks? We’ll never know.

Yet we do know. Enhanced interrogations worked on the likes of Abu Zubaydah and KSM, leading to revelations of operatives and more information, which in turn led to other terrorists killed and captured along with more intell information and subsequently more plots foiled. These might not have directly involved EITs and are 7 degrees of separation; but they originally stemmed from the information gleaned from HVTs who were subjected to the CIA program. Again, EITs only were necessarily applied to the very few hardened terrorists who were resistant (and trained) to standard interrogation practices. Before this, little was known about how al Qaeda operated. By 2006, over half of what was learned came out of the CIA interrogation program.

As Michael Hayden puts it in today’s WSJ:

The recent dispute over what strains of intelligence led to the killing of Osama bin Laden highlights the phenomenon. It must appear to outside observers like a theological debate over how many angels can reside on the head of a pin. So we see carefully tailored arguments designed to discount the value of enhanced interrogations: the first mention of the courier’s name came from a detainee not in CIA custody; CIA detainees gave false and misleading information about the courier; there is no way to confirm that information obtained through enhanced interrogation was the decisive intelligence that led us directly to bin Laden.

All fair enough as far as they go. But let the record show that when I was first briefed in 2007 about the brightening prospect of pursuing bin Laden through his courier network, a crucial component of the briefing was information provided by three CIA detainees, all of whom had been subjected to some form of enhanced interrogation. One of the most alerting pieces of evidence was that two of the detainees who had routinely been cooperative and truthful (after they had undergone enhanced techniques) were atypically denying apparent factual data—a maneuver taken as a good sign that the CIA was on to something important.

So that there is no ambiguity, let me be doubly clear: It is nearly impossible for me to imagine any operation like the May 2 assault on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that would not have made substantial use of the trove of information derived from CIA detainees, including those on whom enhanced techniques had been used.

It is easy to imagine the concerns at the political level as the CIA built its case that bin Laden was in the Abbottabad compound, and it became obvious that detainee data was an important thread of intelligence. To his credit, and obviously reflecting this reality, White House spokesman Jay Carney has not denied that fact but correctly pointed out that there were multiple co-dependent threads that led to this success.

In response to a direct question on the CBS Evening News about enhanced interrogation and the bin Laden success, CIA Director Leon Panetta confirmed on May 3 that, “Obviously there was some valuable information that was derived through those kind of interrogations.” He also added that it was an “open question” whether the information could have been elicited through other means, implicitly contradicting those who claim that other means would have produced the same information.

Let me add that this is not a discussion about the merits or the appropriateness of any interrogation technique. Indeed, I personally took more than half of the techniques (including waterboarding) off the table in 2007 because American law had changed, our understanding of the threat had deepened, and we were now blessed with additional sources of information. We can debate what was appropriate then, or now, but this is a discussion about a particular historical fact: Information derived from enhanced interrogation techniques helped lead us to bin Laden.

And so those who are prone to condemn the actions of those who have gone before (while harvesting the fruits of their efforts) might take pause. I’ve been personally asked about the appropriateness of waterboarding and—recognizing the immense challenge of balancing harsh treatment with saving innocent lives—usually respond: “I thank God that I did not have to make that decision.” At the same time, I thank those who preceded me, made such decisions and thereby spared me the worst of the dilemma. Those who deny the usefulness of enhanced interrogation techniques might consider similar caution.

But if they cannot or will not, shouldn’t they be true to their faith? If they truly believe that these interrogations did not and could not yield useful intelligence, they should demand that the CIA identify all the information derived directly or indirectly from enhanced interrogation. And then they should insist the agency destroy it. They should also insist that significant portions of the 9/11 Commission Report be rescinded, as it too was based on this data. This would be perfectly consistent with the interrogation deniers’ transcendental faith that nothing of use could have come from enhanced interrogations after 9/11.

It must be remembered that Hayden came aboard as director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 2006, non-partisan to the debate. As Marc Thiessen writes in Courting Disaster, pg 116-117,

Another person who conducted an independent review of the classified evidence is Mike Hayden. When Hayden became CIA Director in 2006, he did not have a dog in the fight over the CIA program. He was not with the agency when it authorized the interrogations, and the program had been suspended before he arrived at Langley. He could easily have recommended to the president that they just leave the program dormant and move on.

Instead, he spent the summer studying the effectiveness of the interrogations. He approached it with an outsider’s objectivity. He asked agency officials for details of the intelligence the program produced, and their assessments of how valuable the intelligence had been. Hayden explains: “I said, ‘OK what have we got?’ And they showed me, and I said, ‘Whoa, that’s really a lot.’” After examining the facts, Hayden says, “I was convinced enough that I believed that we needed to keep this tool available to us.” He says his view at the time was, “I really wish this decision wasn’t mine, but given what I now know, I cannot in conscience say, ‘We can do without this.’”

Returning back to Bloche’s WaPo article, in conclusion:

So we’re left with the unsavory possibility that torture-lite works — and that it may have helped find bin Laden. It does no good to point out, as some human rights advocates have, that the detainees who yielded information about his courier did so after the abuse stopped. The model on which enhanced interrogation is based can account for this. The detainees’ cooperation could have ensued from hopelessness and despair, followed by interrogators’ adroit use of their power to punish and reward.

This possibility poses the question of torture in a more unsettling fashion, by denying us the easy out that torture is both ineffective and wrong. We must choose between its repugnance to our values and its potential efficacy. To me, the choice is almost always obvious: Contempt for the law of nations would put us on a path toward a more brutish world. Conservatives are fond of saying, on behalf of martial sacrifice, that freedom isn’t free. Neither is basic decency.

To be sure, waterboarding can be torture, depending on how it is carried out. “You can do waterboarding lots of different ways, “says former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, “you can get to the point that the person is actually drowning,” That would be torture- but that is not how the technique is carried out by the CIA.
-Pg 131, Courting Disaster

John McCain is intimately familiar with torture, having endured it at the hands of his Vietnamese captors during his years as a POW.

But he was never waterboarded. Not by the Spanish Inquisition. Not by the Japanese military. Not by the restrictive nature of the program as run by our CIA. And to be clear, he was tortured not to extract information that might save lives; he was tortured out of cruelty for torture’s sake; and he was tortured to elicit a false confession for propaganda purposes. EITs are not used to obtain either confessions or information.

Nor was McCain ever an interrogator. Not in the FBI. Not in the CIA. Not in the military.

Yet McCain, like “Matthew Alexander”, commands “authority” and respect on the topic matter because of their respective experiences.

The CIA interrogators involved in the program that used EITs on 30 out of 100 high value detainees that came into their hands (the other 2/3rds having received standard interrogation practices) are not at liberty to write books nor defend themselves from slander and distortions in the media; nor are they free to counter Alexander’s testimony that comes buttressed with credible experience as a successful military interrogator.

In Marc Thiessen’s book, Courting Disaster, the former Bush speech writer does a great job at trying to rectify the misperceptions and distortions regarding the nature of the CIA program that has been so relentlessly villified.

In one chapter (read pages 158-164), Thiessen also includes the opinions of 3 distinguished former Vietnam POWs to counteract the opinion of John McCain.

George Everett Day, Leo Thorsness, Jeremiah Denton are highly decorated war veterans and former POWs who experienced terrible torture at the hands of their captors. They scoff at the notion that what the CIA subjected their detainees to, up to and including waterboarding, even remotely amounts to their definition of torture.

Greg Sargent and Tom Ricks linked to John McCain’s opinion piece last week, which refutes Michael Mukasey’s claim that the intell information that led us to bin Laden can trace its lineage back to the CIA program that ran under the previous administration. McCain writes:

Former attorney general Michael Mukasey recently claimed that “the intelligence that led to bin Laden . . . began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information — including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.” That is false.

I asked CIA Director Leon Panetta for the facts, and he told me the following: The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — the nickname of the al-Qaeda courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden — as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaeda.

In fact, the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Khalid Sheik Mohammed produced false and misleading information. He specifically told his interrogators that Abu Ahmed had moved to Peshawar, got married and ceased his role as an al-Qaeda facilitator — none of which was true. According to the staff of the Senate intelligence committee, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee — information describing Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s real role in al-Qaeda and his true relationship to bin Laden — was obtained through standard, noncoercive means.

Thiessen was on O’Reilly and provides the counterpunch:

Transcript:

O’REILLY: Let’s zero in on the courier who was the key to finding bin Laden. I understand that the — that KSM and another guy who is subjected to enhanced interrogation mentioned…

THIESSEN: Abu Faraj al-Libi.

O’REILLY: OK, mentioned the courier, pick it up.

THIESSEN: Well, I mean, they — we had very little information about Al Qaeda’s courier networks. What happened was first — Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who were the first guys brought into the program, gave us some general information about couriers and some code names for those folks. When KSM was interrogated after he underwent waterboarding; not during it, afterwards. When he was going — when he was being questioned, he acknowledged that he — they had given us the name of this fellow al-Kuwaiti which was a nom de guerre and KSM admitted that he knew him. Then in 2004, we captured a fellow named Hassan Ghul who was a senior Al Qaeda operative. He was captured in Iraq, and he told us that this courier al-Kuwaiti was a key lieutenant of KSM’s successor Abu Faraj al-Libi…

O’REILLY: Now, did he do that under duress — let me just — did he do that under duress or did he just tell us?

THIESSEN: Well, this is the thing that people don’t understand. You’re hearing a lot of the left is trying — the deniers of this program are trying to say, well did they use — did they tell us this under waterboarding or under standard interrogation later and that misunderstands how interrogation works. Enhanced interrogation was never used to get intelligence; it was used to get cooperation. So you took a detainee like KSM, who is in the state of total resistance, and you used the enhanced interrogation techniques to bring him to a state of cooperation. And when he’s under enhanced interrogation techniques, they are asking him questions they already know the answers to in order to gauge whether he had stopped lying and made the decision to cooperate. And then, once he starts cooperating, the technique stops. In most cases with enhanced interrogation, the detainees went under them for a couple of days. And KSM — he was a really tough, tough guy. He was — he went for about a month. But once that month ended, the interrogation, the enhanced interrogations stopped and we had a — they had a conversation with him like you and I are speaking today.

O’REILLY: All right. So you are convinced then that the information provided by KSM and then the other guy Ghoul who was captured a couple of years later…

THIESSEN: Yes.

O’REILLY: …pinpointed for the CIA this courier and then they started to tail him and that led to bin Laden’s demise. Is that correct?

THIESSEN: Well, actually, yes, well, Abu Faraj, I’m sorry Hassan Ghul told us that he was a key operative of Abu Faraj al-Libi, who was KSM’s successor after he was captured. So they capture Abu Faraj in 2005 and he’s brought into the CIA interrogation program. He’s not waterboarded, but he undergoes enhanced interrogation and was resistant, brought into a state of cooperation. And then, he starts giving them information about the courier networks and he’s identifying individuals and giving them information about how the couriers operate, where the drops are and so on and so forth. And then they ask them about al-Kuwaiti, and he says I don’t know him. And you know, people say that’s proof that he, well, he lied. But we knew that he knew him because Abu — because Hassan Ghul had told us that he was his key deputy. So one — that was the red flag that told the CIA this is the guy he’s protecting. This is the guy we have to go after. So if it had not been for that process, starting with Abu Zubaydah in 2002, identifying the names; KSM confirming the name; Hassan Ghul telling us he was Faraj’s deputy and then Faraj denying that he even knew the guy, then they — the CIA would have never known this is the guy to zero in on and they went after him, found him and it took years to do it. Found him and eventually followed him to bin Laden’s lair.

So much of what we’ve learned about al Qaeda, so many of the operations that have since been carried out in killing and capturing operatives, subsequently leading to more info and more kills and captures, can all be traced back to what we began learning about the al Qaeda network from CIA interrogations of HVTs. Waterboarding Zubaydah and KSM had a cascading effect, unlocking intell information that did not require more wateboardings, but which can trace their intell lineage back to the CIA program. By 2006, over half of what we knew about al Qaeda had come out of the CIA program.

Finally, going back to McCain:

I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners sometimes produces good intelligence but often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear — true or false — if he believes it will relieve his suffering. Often, information provided to stop the torture is deliberately misleading.

And McCain, from personal experience, broke and his torturers were able to obtain a written confession from him. A lie. But again, the purpose of waterboarding and other EITs was not to gain confessions or intell but to achieve a state of cooperation from the detainees.

There’s a world of difference between “us” and “them”. Americans need not feel shame over the CIA program that included coercive interrogation techniques; that included waterboarding (only 3!). We did not trade our American values for security.

I’m not a “torture apologist”. For the most part, I stand with those who claim “torture doesn’t work” (although, there is the issue of “moral casuistry”). Call me a “torture denier” instead.

“The Fast and the Furious” was a gun-running program that allowed thousands of AK-47′s to enter Mexico from the United States ostensibly to allow tracking of their movements. At the same time it allows the AK-47′s to go into Mexico, it is the policy of this administration to arm border patrol agents with bean bags as their first line of defense against AK-47′s.

Such policy got border patrol Brian Terry agent killed in December. Terry was killed with one of the assault rifles that this administration sent into Mexico.

As I noted previously, at first this administration denied that it was policy to arm border patrol agents with bean bags to fight AK’s.

That turned out to be false.

Now Barack Obama claims that neither he nor Eric Holder authorized the operation and was quick to make sure he was free of responsibility.

Under fire for an operation that allowed smuggling of U.S. weapons across the nation’s border with Mexico, President Obama said in an interview that neither he nor Attorney General Eric Holder authorized the controversial “Operation Fast and Furious.”

This is the same Obama who called John McCain “naive and irresponsible.”

“If they want a debate about protecting the United States of America, that’s a debate I’m ready to win because George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for.” He blamed Bush for policies that enhance the strength of terrorist groups such as Hamas and “the fact that al-Qaida’s leadership is stronger than ever because we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan.”

Obama is always quick to point out the failings of others yet is lightning fast to duck responsibility.

But Eric Holder did know about it.

US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano denied having previous knowledge of the operations, while Attorney General Eric Holder admitted to knowing of the ATF’s gun-tracking tactics, but called cross-border gun-trafficking “not acceptable”.

It’s “not acceptable” but apparently he did not put an end to it. If such an operation was “not acceptable” why did Holder not find out who authorized it and do so immediately?

None of these denials seem plausible. And here is the million dollar question:

Who can authorize sending more than 2,000 assault rifles to Mexico?

Americans deserve an answer to that question. We also deserve to know when Holder learned of this operation and what he did about it. We deserve to know if and when he told Obama and how Obama responded.

Since these assault rifles have been sent to Mexico, more than 30,000 people have lost their lives in the drug cartel violence. One cannot help but wonder how many have died from wounds inflicted by these weapons. Brian Terry was murdered with one of these weapons and Jaime Zapata also may have been killed with one. The blood of these victims is on the hands of Obama, Holder and Napolitano.

Meanwhile, Holder is occupied with such endeavors as dumbing down police forces and Napolitano is assuring us that the border is safer than ever. It sure is safe for sending assault rifles into Mexico.

This is both a disaster and a disgrace. We need to know what Obama knew and when he knew it.

Journolist just keeps getting better and better. This time there is evidence that members pushed others to advocate for one party….again. Before the Obama/McCain debates:

The single biggest thing journolist can do is to lay the analytical framework within the media elite necessary for an actual Obama debate win to be viewed as such by a sufficient proportion of media elites that voters know it was a win.

Of course, this only works if Obama does as we expect (and McCain is a terrible debater, btw).

But even Gore’s uneven Debate 1 performance in 2000 was deemed a win initially by a viewership that was demographically to the right of the electorate (lower minority viewership in 2000 of debates, more male, more GOP, etc…)… but Bush was winning on several media narratives and thus got the benefit from the intense 72 hours of post-debate coverage.

~~~

In the conversation that followed Hauser’s post, not one Journolister expressed surprise or disapproval. No one rebuked Hauser for telling journalists how to carry water for a politician. Despite the group’s supposedly “very strict” ban on political operatives and explicit partisan coordination, Hauser remained a member of Journolist for almost two more years.

Hell, one staffer of Obama’s sent a message to the list telling them all to be more loyal to The One:

“Calling all Journos,” Bernstein wrote in a message relayed by Klein. “I thought we got too little love from progressive types re our tax changes targeted at businesses with overseas operations. We’re maybe going for another bite at the apple this Monday,” he wrote. Bernstein invited members of the list to join him on a conference call on the issue a few days later.

~~~

“I’ve heard that there’s some disappointment in the administration that they haven’t gotten the level of progressive love they feel they deserve for their ambitious proposals to curb abusive corporate tax loopholes,” wrote influential liberal blogger Matt Yglesias the next day. Yglesias went on to attack opponents of the plan, noting “how absurd some of the abuses the administration is trying to curb are.”

How did all this effect the narrative? Politico is a perfect example as John Nolte demonstrates:

And yet these are the same bastards “journalists” who launched a smear attack on a private citizen for asking Their One a perfectly reasonable question, obsessed over Sarah Palin’s wardrobe (and yet ranked Obama being asked about his relationships with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers as a 2008 top-ten ”media blunder“), and though they occasionally find Levi Johnston worthy of note, Department of Justice whistleblower, J. Christian Adams, remained a ghost up until and including Ben Smith’s factually challenged Nothing-To-See-Here gift to his embattled president.

Oh, and did you know that some of Politico’s “journalists” were members of Ezra Klein’s now infamous JournoList, including Mike Allen, Lisa Lerer, and Mr. Ben “I-Got-Yer-Back-Barack” Smith?

And this little juicy nugget of fact raises a troubling question…

What Politico needs to disclose is exactly when their three employees joined JournoList, because now that we know what really was going on there, this Politico article reeks of a cover up.

Written by Michael Calderon in March of 2009 and titled “JournoList: Inside the echo chamber,” even at the time it was written, the thousand-plus worder ranked as another classic example of what Politico does best: write stories about why stories they don’t want covered aren’t worth covering. In other words, like Ben Smith’s Black Panther piece, this is how Politico spikes that which might damage the Leftist narrative.

JournoList member

While reading Calderon’s JournoList expose,’ you can practically hear the staged, self conscious yawn of a man trying to put across the false front that once again those crazy, paranoid right-wing conspiracy mongers have taken him away from oh-so important work to address this nothing-ness.

Calderon’s idea of “journalism” was to interview JournoList members such as Jeffrey Toobin, Eric Alterman,and Joe Klein, who each assure us in their own wrist-flicking way, Tell those silly right-wingers that no one’s pushing an agenda. In 2009 the piece was hilariously obvious in its biased and preordained objective to smoke-and-mirror away concerns about what Ezra’s little coven of left-wingers was up to. But reading it again in hindsight, it stinks to high heaven.

Day after day we see examples of pure unadulturate activism on the part of our supposed “unbiased” journalists. A cabal of liberals who conspired to push a predetermined agenda onto the nation.

They should all be ashamed.

You know it’s bad when Obama loses Carville. Ouch:

The White House says Carville just doesn’t understand.

Meanwhile the hole is still not plugged:

BP engineers failed again to plug the gushing oil well on Saturday, a technician working on the project said, representing yet another setback in a series of unsuccessful procedures the company has tried a mile under the sea to stem the flow spreading into the Gulf of Mexico.

BP made a third attempt at what is termed the “junk shot” Friday night, a procedure that involves pumping odds and ends like plastic cubes, knotted rope, and golf balls into the blowout preventer, the five-story safety device atop the well. The maneuver is complementary to the heavily scrutinized effort known as a “top kill,”which began four days ago and involves pumping heavy mud into the well to counteract the push of the escaping oil. If the well is sealed, the company plans to then fill it with cement.

The technician working on the project said Saturday pumping has again been halted and a review of the data so far is under way.

“Right now, I would not be optimistic,” the technician, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly about the effort. But he added, that if another attempt at the junk shot were to succeed, “that would turn things around.”

And amidst this new comes more from the “What if Bush had said it” file:

New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes was skeptical: “Can you be sure these oil tar balls are from the oil spill? Because when I used to swim on the Gulf in Texas, I’d get tar balls in my bathing suit all the time.”

Allen and Randolph, the parish president, confirmed that tar balls do wash up at other times, though these, they said, were likely from the spill.

But the president was distracted. “At some point, Jackie, we’ll want to hear more about those tar balls and your bathing suit,” Obama said, as reporters laughed.

Oh, ha ha Mr. President. Go play some hoops again as the oil spill continues….

The complete hypocrisy involved by the left and the MSM is, well, not shocking, but sad. Not shocking because we all knew they carried the water for Obama and this kind of treatment would come about….but it’s sad we were right.

Hopefully more and more “good” lefty’s like Carville will come out of the closet and throw some more well deserved darts at Obama.

McCain, on the other hand, makes an excellent point:

Is the president as serious as you once thought? “There are legitimate questions as to whether he’s out of his depth or not,” McCain says.

I don’t think there really is any question. He is seriously out of his depth.

More here.

John McCain will again battle to remain a US Senator.

John McCain (the man) is a patriot and an American hero. Honored and respected by many Americans for what he endured as a prisoner of war for the USA. John McCain (the politician) is a maverick and an American icon. He knows the political machine inside-out in which he has been a part of for quite some time now. He is a knowledgeable and wise man that understands the concept of “out with the old, and in with the new”. He directly introduced to America Sarah Palin and indirectly help put Barack Obama into office. He also indirectly inspired the Tea Party movement and re-energized the conservative ideology. What an interesting person he has proven to be, even today!

My question is will this November election be his last?

Art thought to ponder:

“INSPIRED to become an American president he fell short and caused a conservative movement to become inspired!”
–Carlos Pijeira

Here is the artwork drawing that I did Ronald Reagan on Flickr. Enjoy!

North Korea warned Wednesday that any attempt to stop, board or inspect its ships would constitute a “grave violation.”

The regime also said it could no longer promise the safety of U.S. and South Korean warships and civilian vessels in the waters near the Korea’s western maritime border.

“They should bear in mind that the (North) has tremendous military muscle and its own method of strike able to conquer any targets in its vicinity at one stroke or hit the U.S. on the raw, if necessary,” it said.

The maritime border has long been a flashpoint between the two Koreas. North Korea disputes the line unilaterally drawn by the United Nations at the end of the Koreas’ three-year war in 1953, and has demanded it be redrawn further south.

The truce signed in 1953 and subsequent military agreements call for both sides to refrain from warfare, but doesn’t cover the waters off the west coast.

North Korea has used the maritime border dispute to provoke two deadly naval skirmishes – in 1999 and 2002.

On Wednesday, the regime promised “unimaginable and merciless punishment” for anyone daring to challenge its ships.

Personally, I think this is all the result of a regime change happening inside DPRK, but it could also be a military distraction similar to the cause of the 1983 Falkland Islands War. In any event, let’s HOPE Obama is ready to lead on day 130 or so ’cause he sure as hell ain’t leading on day 1, and he’s gonna have to start leading instead of blaming if he wants things to CHANGE.

Barack Obama’s campaign pledge, as written on his campaign website:

Obama will give his Secretary of Defense and military commanders a new mission in Iraq: ending the war.

George W. Bush esentially beat him to it. What he really means is, how can I bring the troops home, responsibly from Iraq?

“Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.” -President Obama, February 27, 2009

Could this be a “read my lips” moment, for President Obama? Or a “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” moment:

“And under the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government, I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011″

Notice the wiggle-room provided in the choice of a single word?

Last Friday, President Obama delivered a speech at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, declaring- not victory- but an end to combat operations in Iraq (ABC News link borrowed from Scott’s post):

President Barack Obama consigned the Iraq war to history Friday, declaring he will end combat operations within 18 months and open a new era of diplomacy in the Middle East.

“Let me say this as plainly as I can: By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end,” Obama told Marines who are about to deploy by the thousands to the other war front, Afghanistan.

Even so, Obama will leave the bulk of troops in place this year, contrary to hopes of Democratic leaders for a speedier pullout. And after combat forces withdraw, 35,000 to 50,000 will stay behind for an additional year and half of support and counterterrorism duties.

Just six weeks into office, Obama used blunt terms and a cast-in-stone promise to write the last chapter of a war that began six years ago.

The “last chapter”?!? “Cast-in-stone promise”??….? As Iraq War critic Thomas Ricks concludes in his new book, The Gamble, “the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened.”

And as Ricks writes in his post:

The more I consider it, the more I think President Obama’s Camp Lejeune speech last Friday was about how to stay in Iraq for a while, not about how to get out.

And as he writes further in regards to the Status of Forces Agreement (negotiated under Bush’s watch):

(And a memo to everyone who is counting on the SOFA to bail us out of Iraq: Guys, that was about getting Iraq through 2009, not about what happens in 2011.)

MataHarley points out:

But, of course, as the SOFA implicitly states, the US may have to re’escalate if necessary. As stated in Article 27 (1):

1. In the event of any external or internal threat or aggression against Iraq that would violate its sovereignty, political independence, or territorial integrity, waters, airspace, its democratic system or its elected institutions, and upon request by the Government of Iraq, the Parties shall immediately initiate strategic deliberations and, as may be mutually agreed, the United States shall take appropriate measures, including diplomatic, economic, or military measures, or any other measure, to deter such a threat.

Also, Kori Schake (note, a number of links I use today come from former foreign policy makers from the “loyal opposition”, blogging at Shadow Government) writes:

It leaves room for renegotiation of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) to keep a Korea-style U.S. long-term presence without requiring the Iraqi parliamentarians to agree to it concurrent with the SOFA itself. And it outlines sensible military missions and adequate forces to achieve them.

We supporters of the surge need to acknowledge that many in the military advocated this drawdown — not least the Service Chiefs, who are worried about the strain on U.S. forces from six years of continuous warfare. But we should all also be worried about committing to this timeline. The problem with establishing timelines rather than objectives is that the enemy accounts for them as well.

So, will we really be out of Iraq by 2011? Or is it all a pie-crust promise, easily made and easily broken?

2. This speech should be seen in the context of the assurance Obama reportedly made to Sen. McCain and others that he will evaluate the troop drawdown as it unfolds in light of developments on the ground. This will be an important test of Obama’s realism.

I think, like his EOs on Guantanamo and Ensuring Lawful Interrogations, President Obama’s speech is mostly window dressing to give the illusion that he is in charge here; that he is commanding a radical shift away from the policies of the Bush Administration when it comes to the War on Terror. As Thomas Ricks puts it, “Iraq will change Obama more than Obama will change it”.

The fact that President Obama is able to announce what amounts in people’s minds as a “firm” date of withdrawal and an end to the conflict in Iraq, is not due to anything President Obama has done, but in spite of; it is due to the hard decisions made under the previous Administration. President Obama is merely surfing the waves created by the previous president.

Both the COIN/Bridge strategy and SOFA were developed under Bush’s watch.

So who gets credit for the decision to implement COIN, which includes the troop surge? The buck-credit stops at George W. Bush. The Then-Senators, Obama and Biden, opposed the troop surge. (See Curt’s post for some quotes).

September 2007:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is calling for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. combat brigades from Iraq, with the pullout being completed by the end of next year.

“Let me be clear: There is no military solution in Iraq and there never was,” Obama said in excerpts of the speech provided to The Associated Press.

“The best way to protect our security and to pressure Iraq’s leaders to resolve their civil war is to immediately begin to remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year — now,” the Illinois senator says.

~~~

He introduced legislation last January calling for withdrawal to start on May 1 and for all combat brigades to be pulled out by March 31, 2008

“a surge would tell Iraqi leaders they can continue to avoid reaching a political solution.”- Senator Barack Obama, 01/06/07

Obama and Biden will press Iraq’s leaders to take responsibility for their future- Campaign website

The arguments of Democrats around this time was that Iraqis weren’t standing up because we were carrying out a welfare policy in Iraq that gave them no incentive to stand on their own two feet (nevermind that war-opponents constantly loved to cite polls saying Iraqis want us out; and nevermind that Iraqi patriots have been standing up and dying by the droves defending the fledgling government) and were sitting on an “80 billion surplus” while we spent $10 billion of our own treasure every month.

In fact, some of Obama’s statements at the time reflect the mentality of those military commanders who opposed a change (from the desire to “stand down” so that Iraqis will be forced to “stand up”) and who opposed the troop surge:

TR: But the uniform military is against the surge. The only person in the chain of command supporting the surge is General Raymond Odierno. Casey, Abizaid, the chairman of the joint chiefs, all of them are saying this is crazy, we’re doing fine, get off our backs, no problem.

HH: Did Peter Pace resist the surge?

TR: Yes.
-Hugh Hewitt interview with Thomas Ricks

However these examples [unilateral COIN implementation by a few military commanders] weren’t imitated by other commanders, probably because they were at odds with the strategy set by Gen. Casey and his boss at Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid. Working on the theory that the U.S. military presence was an irritant to Iraqi society, the generals were trying to oversee a transition to Iraqi forces and so wanted an ever-shrinking American “footprint”. By contrast, McMaster injected thousands of U.S. troops into the middle of a city, implicitly saying that they were not the problem but part of the solution, that American troops weren’t the sand irritating Iraqi society, but could be the glue that held it together.- Thomas Ricks, The Gamble, pg 60-61

Rick’s new book, pg 58, also partially cites the following:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the Iraqi government must become less reliant on the United States to handle security. He also said U.S. officials are working with the Iraqis to develop projections on when that might happen.

“It’s their country, they’re going to have to govern it, they’re going to have to provide security for it, and they’re going to have to do it sooner rather than later,” Rumsfeld said.

“The biggest mistake would be to not pass things over to the Iraqis, create a dependency on their part, instead of developing strength and capacity and competence,” he said.

Departure from this approach and the implementation of the troop surge and COIN strategy- opposed by President Obama and his ilk- got us out of the 4-year quagmire, making troop withdrawal possible under the banner of success and victory rather than under the flag of defeat and surrender.

Caving to the pressures of getting out of Iraq as soon as possible rather than investing patience to get things done right was a mistake on the part of the Bush Administration. As symbolically important as the first purple finger election was, I think it was done in haste before the country was truly ready to hold such an important election. Pressures to speed up the process of graduating Iraqi soldiers and police officers produced quantity over quality.

Will the Obama Administration learn from the experience and mistakes of the Bush Administration?

It seems to me that by vowing to get out of Iraq in 16 months, President Obama is not departing from the mistakes of George Bush, but repeating them. That is, Bush was persistently overoptimistic about Iraq. His original war plan assumed that the United States would get down to 30,000 troops in Iraq by the fall of 2003. Instead, here we are more than five years later with more than four times that number of troops mired in Iraq. I hope we can stop planning for Iraq only on best-case assumptions. I mean, it hasn’t worked, I think.

Certainly our resources are not limitless (someone tell Pelosi, Reid, and Obama) and at some point training wheels have to come off and we are not responsible for babysitting Iraq until the end of days; but exactly how useful is it to set timelines engraved in stone? Of announcing troop withdrawal to the enemy?

At this stage, I think regardless of who sits in the Oval Office- Bush, Obama, or McCain, there really isn’t that much difference on Iraq policy, other than in the rhetoric.

As Noah Feldman so whimsically puts it:

the Obama position seems to be that we should leave as soon as we’re able, and the McCain position seems to be something like we should stay as long as we must.

It’s too bad that President Obama couldn’t find it within himself to give any credit whatsoever to President Bush. If he had done so, he’d finally live up to his demagogueing about rising beyond partisan politics; but Barack Obama can’t help but be who he is: A man of the far left with the aura and mask of a pragmatic centrist.

Christian Brose writes:

At the risk of heading into la-la land, I think Obama should have tipped his hat ever so slightly today to President Bush, Sen. McCain, and other Republicans who had supported the surge strategy, naming them and thanking them. Of course, there’s no telling how Iraq would look today had the surge never happened, but it’s likely that conditions would be pretty grim and that this withdrawal plan would have the smell of defeat to it, rather than the opposite, as it does.

Obama could have caveated this to death — “I opposed Bush’s decision to begin this war, I opposed how he sold it to America, I opposed the way he prosecuted it,” etc. But he could have recognized that Bush’s decision to change strategies in 2007 is in large part why the security situation in Iraq has turned around more than anyone could have hoped, why we can now begin drawing down our forces with a good measure of confidence, and why our troops now feel more and more that their sacrifice is worth it.

Not only would this have been magnanimous, it would have been smart politics. It would have acknowledged the bipartisanship that underlies the decision to begin bringing our troops home by drawing an important line of continuity through our Iraq efforts of the past two years. It would have disarmed Obama’s more hawkish critics on Iraq by conceding their point on the surge and turning it into an argument for the drawdown, which it is. And it would have shown Republicans that Obama is committed not just to a bipartisanship of style but of substance — not just being willing to recognize when the other side has valid points, but actually incorporating them into one’s own thinking.

The fact remains, we had to leave Iraq at some point. This is as good a time as any to start. And there is bipartisan support to do so, because of the events of the past two years.

The only reality as it relates to 2 years into the future, is that a lot can happen in 2 years. And the hidden reality from those who think the “war” is ended in Iraq by bringing American troops home is that President Obama wisely maintains flexibility on that.

More from Hewitt’s interview with Ricks:

HH: Let’s talk about how it all ends.

TR: It doesn’t end, and I think this is the biggest problem that Obama’s going to have as he talks about Iraq. Obama’s going to be changed more by Iraq than he changes it. What do I mean by that? It’s what I was talking about yesterday, in that this over-optimistic approach, I can get out of Iraq quickly. No, you can’t. You’re stuck. Now I don’t think it’s Obama’s fault. I think that George Bush made a horrendous mistake in invading Iraq. The question is, how do you fix this? And my response is, and it kind of agrees with Petraeus, there is no good answer. The question is what’s the least bad answer. I think staying in Iraq is immoral. I think leaving Iraq is even more immoral.

President Obama’s speech was delivered for the sake of appearances and a photo-op, taking credit for the final two years of Bush’s presidency, as it relates to the situation on the ground in Iraq. He gives credit to the troops, because he has to; any politician that didn’t would be committing political suicide. He denies President #43 any credit because Barack Obama isn’t as magnanimous and gracious and honest as his image portrays him to be. He is realistically and pragmatically, deeply partisan to the left.

Of further interest:
Transcript to Thomas Rick’s two-part interview with Hugh Hewitt:
Part One
Part Two

Previous related posts:
Obama Abandons Commitment to Iraq Withdrawal Timetable

The Leaders Who Brought Victory to Iraq

Obama’s Iraq Speech: Never Used the Word VICTORY!