Sunday Long Read: The Forever War

After three years of fighting with the Trump regime over FOIA requests, Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock has put together an indispensable (and Pulitzer-worthy) series on America's massive 18-year failure in Afghanistan.

In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.

With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”

Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.

The interviews, through an extensive array of voices, bring into sharp relief the core failings of the war that persist to this day. They underscore how three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.

With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.

The interviews also highlight the U.S. government’s botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.

The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.

Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

“What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?” Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. He added, “After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.”

The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting. 

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

Part 2 of the series is here, taking a look at the fundamental flaws in America's warfighting strategy from day one.

Afghanistan has been the pervasive American military disaster for my generation and younger.  I know several people who went out into the Sandbox over the years and while all of them came back, they were far from being all there when they returned.  And this entire mess was one huge lie.

It always was, but now we know everyone knew, including and especially our own government, a trillion dollar puppet show that destroyed our credibility and is still ongoing.

Doctors Without Borders, Hospitals Without Walls

Well, we really screwed up in Afghanistan this time, folks.

A U.S. gunship bombed a hospital run by Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF), early Saturday morning, killing at least 16 people. The Americans had been flying close air support as Afghan government troops continue their effort to re-take the city of Kunduz, which fell to the Taliban last week almost without a shot.

Muhammad Ajami, 35, tells The Daily Beast that he was talking to his 17-year-old brother Jamil on the phone at the time of the airstrike. Earlier in the evening Jamil had been injured during the fighting and admitted to the MSF clinic, the only operational hospital-type facility in the city.

“This was about 2:00 a.m.,” said Muhammad. “Jamil was telling me he wanted me to get him and take him home, there was a lot of bombing and shelling in the city. Then there was a big bang, and my brother dropped his phone. The last words I heard were ‘Move to the basement! Move to the basement! And crying and crying.”

MSF issued a statement “condemning in the strongest possible terms the horrific bombing of its hospital in Kunduz, which was full of staff and patients.” Three MSF staff were confirmed dead and more than 30 unaccounted for after the trauma center “was hit several time during sustained bombing and was every badly damaged.”

MSF has decades of experience working in war zones and had notified “all parties to the conflict, including in Kabul and Washington,” of the precise GPS coordinates of its facilities, including the hospital, guest house, office and an outreach unit in a village northwest of Kunduz. Those coordinates had been communicated repeatedly most recently on September 29, after the Taliban took the city, according to another MSF statement.

A U.S. senior defense official told The Daily Beast in Washington that a U.S.-manned AC-130 gunship “was called in to return fire against a Taliban position that was firing on U.S. Special Forces advising Afghan Special Forces” when the attack began somewhere near the hospital.

But the official could not say how close that fighting position was to the hospital or whether the United States did indeed know the hospital coordinates beforehand. Defense officials also could not say how long the attack took place.  

Let's go over the fact that bombing a hospital is in fact a war crime, not to mention that 14 years after 9/11 we're still bombing goddamn Afghanistan.

Ya'll aren't going to want to hear this, but Obama is responsible for this mess.  We need to get out of Afghanistan fully, no more "support", no more "advisory capacity" no more Special Forces, just out.  Period.

Fourteen friggin years, guys.

And Obama, you screwed this up big time.  You need to answer for it.  Now.

Climate Of Distrust

Well, make it two for two this morning in the President Odubya category, because the continued US failure to get anything done in climate change talks in Durban, South Africa this week means we're almost out of time to do anything at this point.

President Barack Obama’s position that dangerous global warming can be averted without deeper cuts in fossil fuel emissions before 2020 is stirring backlash in nations from Norway to Barbados.

“Multiple pathways” exist to prevent temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) without countries strengthening pledges to reduce greenhouse gases by 2020, U.S. climate envoy Jonathan Pershing said at United Nations climate talks last week.

“It’s a very risky assumption, too risky,” Norway’s top climate change envoy, Henrik Harboe, said in an interview. “We know we are far below the recommendations of science.”

The question of when the world acts to contain global warming is at the heart of the talks in Durban, South Africa, where delegates from more than 190 nations are working on how to take the next steps in curbing emissions after the limits outlined in the Kyoto Protocol expire next year.

The UN says pledges to cut greenhouse gases need to double by 2020 to contain warming to 2 degrees above preindustrial levels. While scientists say a rise of 1.5 degrees may lead to “dangerous” climate shifts, countries have agreed to take steps to ensure warming doesn’t exceed the 2-degree mark.

“There are no credible scientific scenarios that will allow temperatures to be held under 2 degrees if action is taken after 2020,” Selwin Hart, an envoy from Barbados, said in an interview in Durban. 

Basically the US is punting until 2020 to do anything about climate change, and the rest of the world is rightfully going "Um, seriously?" 

But the blame cannot be all placed on the Obama administration.  Let's not forget we have a Republican party that has been hostile to the idea of climate change for years and has done everything they can to block every piece of climate legislation presented by this administration.

Most of all, the blame goes on the shoulders of the energy companies that control our politicians.  Without them, we'd have a global climate policy in place already.

Back To The Drawing Board For Plan B

I support the Obama administration when they make policy decisions I agree with.  This is not one of them, and I'm calling them out on it.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the Food and Drug Administration’s decision Wednesday that emergency contraceptives be sold freely over the counter, including to teenagers 16 years old and younger.

The pill, called Plan B One-Step, has been available without a prescription to women 17 and older, but those 16 and younger have needed a prescription — and still will because of Ms. Sibelius’s decision.  In some states, pharmacists can write the prescription on the spot for teenagers. But the restrictions have meant the pills were only dispensed from behind the counter — making them more difficult for everyone to get. The pill, if taken after unprotected sex, halves the risk of a pregnancy.

Under the law, Ms. Sebelius has the authority to overrule the agency, but no health secretary has ever done so, according to an F.D.A. spokeswoman. Her decision on an emotional issue that touches on parental involvement in birth control for teenaged children is likely to have powerful political reverberations in a presidential election season. 

If this was a political decision (and there's zero doubt about that, frankly, because the science supported making this medication available) then it's a completely moronic one.  There's no benefit politically for doing this.  It overrules the available science.  It's frankly a stupid move you would expect from a red state governor.  The FDA said: "Hey, we see no scientific reason this should be done."  Kathleen Sebelius and President Obama disagreed.

In a statement, Ms. Sebelius said that the drug’s manufacturer had failed to study whether girls as young as 11 years old could use Plan B safely. And since about 10 percent of girls are capable of bearing children as early as 11, those girls need to be studied as well, she wrote.

“After careful consideration of the F.D.A. summary review, I have concluded that the data submitted by Teva do not conclusively establish that Plan B One-Step should be made available over the counter for all girls of reproductive age,” Ms. Sebelius wrote. 

It's an election-year punt, period.  It's insulting, it's wrong, and it's cowardly.

Bad, bad call.

President Odubya Crashes And Burns On Gitmo

President Obama's first major promise upon taking office was to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  Two years later his failure to close Gitmo is now complete.

President Barack Obama will allow new military terror trials of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, the White House announced Monday. But Obama's statement said that the U.S. "will continue to draw on all aspects of our justice system" -- including federal courts -- to handle terrorism cases.

The announcement comes more than two years after Obama signed an executive order order Guantanamo Bay to close by January 2010. A White House fact sheet acknowledged that in recent months, "some in Congress have sought to undermine" the process developed by the Departments of Justice and Defense to "determine which system - military or civilian - is most appropriate based on the nature of the evidence and traditional principles of prosecution."

The White House said it would continue to "vigorously defend the authority of the Executive to make these well- informed prosecution decisions, both with respect to those detainees in our custody at Guantanamo and those we may apprehend in the future."

"A one-size-fits-all policy for the prosecution of suspected terrorists, whether for past or future cases, undermines our Nation's counterterrorism efforts and harms our national security," the White House fact sheet said.

Granted, a fair amount of blame for this goes straight to Democrats in Congress who not only abandoned the President on closing Gitmo, bt did everything they could to undermine and reverse the promise out of abject fear of "escaped prisoners blowing up nursery schools" even though America continues to safely house terrorists in US prisons on US soil.

Congress was even more afraid of the world finding out more about Bush-era abuses of power after 9/11 too.  But that included President Obama, who soon found himself not only emulating President Bush on civil liberties failures, but expanding them into national permanence.

So two years later, here we are, right back where we were in 2008:  prisoners held without due process or hope of due process, detained indefinitely without trial at the whim of the President, and kangaroo court military tribunals used to "process" the rest.  We have learned precisely nothing, other than President Obama has completely reversed his first promise upon taking office.

I like President Obama personally.  I like many of his policies.  But on this he has utterly and completely failed the American people, and that's something I'm not going to forget...or forgive.  At some point in the future Gitmo will have to be closed, but the President who does it will never be Barack Obama.

Obama's Lock Down Smackdown

It's the return of President Odubya.

The White House is preparing an Executive Order on indefinite detention that will provide periodic reviews of evidence against dozens of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, according to several administration officials.

The draft order, a version of which was first considered nearly 18 months ago, is expected to be signed by President Obama early in the New Year. The order allows for the possibility that detainees from countries like Yemen might be released if circumstances there change.

But the order establishes indefinite detention as a long-term Obama administration policy and makes clear that the White House alone will manage a review process for those it chooses to hold without charge or trial.

Nearly two years after Obama's pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo, more inmates there are formally facing the prospect of lifelong detention and fewer are facing charges than the day Obama was elected.

That is in part because Congress has made it difficult to move detainees to the United States for trial. But it also stems from the president's embrace of indefinite detention and his assertion that the congressional authorization for military force, passed after the 2001 terrorist attacks, allows for such detention.

After taking office, the Obama administration reviewed the detainee population at Guantanamo Bay and chose 48 prisoners for indefinite detention. Officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that number will likely increase in coming months as some detainees are moved from a transfer category to a continued detention category.

If signed by President Obama, the new order will provide added review for detainees designated for long-term detention. The order, which is being drafted jointly by White House staff in the National Security council and the White House counsel, will offer detainees in this category a minimal review every six months and then a more lengthy annual review. Detainees will have access to an attorney, to some evidence against them and the ability to challenge their continued detention.

Good luck with that.  You imagine a single indefinite detention detainee will ever go free?  Of course not.   This policy?  This one right here is enough to make me seriously question Obama on civil liberties.  As I've said before, civil liberties and Warren Terrah is the area where Obama has failed completely.  He has surpassed Bush in the depths of his contempt for rule of law, and even fulfilled all my dire predictions of a McCain presidency here.

Obama has done a lot of really good things for this country, but this is the subject where he gets a completely failing grade from me.  An executive order allowing indefinite detention of prisoners without due process or trial, under the pathetic fig leaf of six month reviews?   Completely unacceptable and un-American.  Obama deserves every single bit of criticism, scorn, and anger here.

This is absolutely unacceptable.  No President should have power like this.  Try these men or let them go.

What's to stop Obama from indefinitely holding whomever he deems a threat, or god help us, the next Republican President we have from doing the same thing?

Think about that.

Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch

Yippie kai-yai yippie kai-yay, it's the same old stuff from yesterday for Dubya.  Biking, brush clearing, admitting to war crimes, walking the dog...

Human rights experts have long pressed the administration of former president George W. Bush for details of who bore ultimate responsibility for approving the simulated drownings of CIA detainees, a practice that many international legal experts say was illicit torture.

In a memoir due out Tuesday, Bush makes clear that he personally approved the use of that coercive technique against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an admission the human rights experts say could one day have legal consequences for him.

In his book, titled "Decision Points," Bush recounts being asked by the CIA whether it could proceed with waterboarding Mohammed, who Bush said was suspected of knowing about still-pending terrorist plots against the United States. Bush writes that his reply was "Damn right" and states that he would make the same decision again to save lives, according to a someone close to Bush who has read the book. 

Not only does Bush admit he authorized a war crime, but he's proud of it, and he'd do it again.  It's a good thing that the Democrats didn't look into the Bush administration's action on this, otherwise the American people might have turned on the Democrats they might have suffered heavy midterm losses, you know?

Of course, the reason that's not happening is because Obama is busy authorizing the assassination of American citizens on suspicion that they are terrorists.

A Pair Of President Odubya Failures On Civil Liberties

Two stories this morning should send up massive alarms as the Obama administration continues its dismal Bushian record on civil liberties and terrorism.

First, the Obama administration wants to expand its National Security Letter system to acquire wiretaps on the internet by compelling internet service providers to comply as easily as it can obtain them by forcing phone companies to do the same.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally.

James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had “huge implications” and challenged “fundamental elements of the Internet revolution” — including its decentralized design.

“They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet,” he said. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.” 

The second item involves banks and money transfers and is nearly as pervasive in its depth:  requiring every single international money transfer, no matter how small, to be reported to the Feds.

The Obama administration wants to require U.S. banks to report all electronic money transfers into and out of the country, a dramatic expansion in efforts to counter terrorist financing and money laundering.

Officials say the information would help them spot the sort of transfers that helped finance the al-Qaeda hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They say the expanded financial data would allow anti-terrorist agencies to better understand normal money-flow patterns so they can spot abnormal activity.

Financial institutions are now required to report to the Treasury Department transactions in excess of $10,000 and others they deem suspicious. The new rule would require banks to disclose even the smallest transfers. 

The vast, vast majority of people who will be caught up in these two policies will be ordinary Americans with no terrorist connections whatsoever.  Considering the failure of the Obama administration to stop massive abuse of national security letters to compel phone wiretaps, nobody in the country should feel confident that they can trust the executive branch with this level of additional power.

The Obama administration essentially wants to make the entire internet available to wiretap capability, meaning encrypted internet communications would become effectively useless.  The Obama administration could simply demand anyone's internet communications, encryption free, if they so choose to, for no other reason than they say so.

In the same way, the vast majority of people who transfer money internationally are just people sending money home to their families in places like Mexico, India, Central America, South America and Europe.  Every single one of those transfers would be recorded under this new policy, and all it would do is be used to harass immigrants and working Americans.  Can you imagine what Republicans would do with this ability?

This is the one area where Obama told us he would be better than McCain, better than Bush, and better than Hillary Clinton.  Apparently that was a lie on all three accounts, and this is the one area where Obama is truly worse than Bush.

Can't Find Out

Double G takes on the notion that details about President Obama's "terrorist assassination program" is a state secret as the administration says, rendering attempts to stop it or even talk about it as moot.

At this point, I didn't believe it was possible, but the Obama administration has just reached an all-new low in its abysmal civil liberties record.  In response to the lawsuit filed by Anwar Awlaki's father asking a court to enjoin the President from assassinating his son, a U.S. citizen, without any due process, the administration last late night, according to The Washington Post, filed a brief asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the claims.  That's not surprising:  both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly insisted that their secret conduct is legal but nonetheless urge courts not to even rule on its legality.  But what's most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is "state secrets":  in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are "state secrets," and thus no court may adjudicate its legality.

Even I have to agree with Greenwald's attack on Obama here. This is the kind of power that no President of America should possess under any circumstances.

The same Post article quotes a DOJ spokesman as saying that Awlaki "should surrender to American authorities and return to the United States, where he will be held accountable for his actions."  But he's not been charged with any crimes, let alone indicted for any.  The President has been trying to kill him for the entire year without any of that due process.  And now the President refuses even to account to an American court for those efforts to kill this American citizen on the ground that the President's unilateral imposition of the death penalty is a "state secret."  And, indeed, American courts -- at Obama's urging -- have been upholding that sort of a "state secrecy" claim even when it comes to war crimes such as torture and rendition.  Does that sound like a political system to which any sane, rational person would "surrender"?

Does the President have the authority to declare an American citizen as a terrorist and then bring the might of our military against that person for the express purposes of assassinating that American citizen?  President Obama indeed claims that right now, and claims that it is inalienable because of state secrets.  This is further than even Bush/Cheney went.

If I do have a problem with Obama, it is on terrorism and civil liberties.  In this narrow but vital respect he really is worse than Bush is.  This President is saying that an American citizen can be killed on sight without due process, and that even discussing why is forbidden.

That is not something America should ever do, and yet we're doing it right now.

More on this from BooMan, Marcy Wheeler, and Digby.

Keep The Home Fires Burning

President Obama dedicated his weekly address today to the fact he's brought 90,000 troops home from Iraq since he took office.  That's true...

Three days before the official end of the US combat mission in Iraq, US President Barack Obama said on Saturday that the war in the country was "ending" and called Iraq a "sovereign" nation free to determine its own destiny.

"On Tuesday, after more than seven years, the United States of America will end its combat mission in Iraq and take an important step forward in responsibly ending the Iraq war," Obama said in his weekly radio address.

The president, who spends Saturday his last full vacation day at on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, will cover the issue of Iraq in a nationally-televised address from the Oval Office on Tuesday.

"As a candidate for this office, I pledged I would end this war," Obama recalled in the address. "As president, that is what I am doing. We have brought home more than 90,000 troops since I took office."

US troop numbers in Iraq fell below 50,000 last Tuesday in line with Obama's instructions as part of a "responsible drawdown" of troops, seven years on from the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.

...but how many of those 90,000 troops are now in Afghanistan as part of the "surge" there to fight that particular losing war?  Obama really, really should avoid making "Mission Accomplished!" type statements like this until he's brought all of our troops home from the Middle East...

...which of course will never happen.

Pay No Attention To Iraq Please

"The last combat brigade has left Iraq" will join "Read my lips, no new taxes", "Mission accomplished" and "The fundamentals of our economy are sound" in the annals of infamy.

The US military and the Obama administration loudly trumpeted the withdrawal of the "last combat brigade" from Iraq last week, but news reports suggest the move is purely semantic: The combat brigades are still there, but under a different name.

The Army Times reported on Saturday that the US still has seven combat brigades inside Iraq, but they have been renamed "advise and assist brigades." The name change will reportedly change little in terms of the duties the brigades carry out:

The Army selected brigade combat teams as the unit upon which to build advisory brigades partly because they would be able to retain their inherent capability to conduct offensive and defensive operations, according to the Army’s security force assistance field manual, which came out in May 2009. This way, the brigade can shift the bulk of its operational focus from security force assistance to combat operations if necessary.

In Sunday's Washington Post, Kenneth M. Pollack argues that the claim there are no more US combat troops in Iraq is "not even close."

50,000 combat troops still remain, they're just not called combat troops.  And the actual combat troops could be headed back into Iraq at any given moment:

The commander of US forces in Iraq doesn't foresee the need for US to resume combat missions in Iraq but isn't entirely ruling it out either.

"We have several different contingency plans for support, but it would have to be something that would change the strategic dynamic here for us to move back to combat operations," Gen. Ray Odierno told CNN's Candy Crowley Sunday.

"Can you define that for me?" asked Crowley. "What is a strategic dynamic that could change?"
"Well, if, for example, you had a complete failure of the security forces. If you had some political divisions within the political forces that caused them to fracture," Odierno replied.

Gosh, what are the odds of a complete crack-up of Iraqi forces?

We're not leaving Iraq or Afghanistan anytime soon, folks.  We'll be there until our economy collapses and we need troops on the ground keeping order here rather than over there.  That may come sooner rather than later...

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

As it stands right now, President Obama still opposes gay marriage...

...and Glenn Beck does not.

Appearing on The O'Reilly Factor Thursday, Fox News' Glenn Beck took time out of his daily habit of railing against progressives to calmly explain that the country wasn't going to be destroyed by giving marriage rights to gays and lesbians.

Beck told Fox News host Bill O'Reilly why he didn't devote airtime to the issue. "Honestly I think we have bigger fish to fry," said Beck. "You can argue about abortion or gay marriage or whatever all you want. The country is burning down."

"But isn't that one of the reasons, because we are getting away from the traditional way we used to live into this progressive [agenda]?" prompted O'Reilly.

"Your country is burning down," repeated Beck. "I don't think marriage, that the government actually has anything to do with what is a religious right."

"Do you believe that gay marriage is a threat to the country in any way?" asked O'Reilly.
"No, I don't," said Beck. "Will the gays come and get us?"

"I believe what Thomas Jefferson said," Beck continued. "If it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket, what difference is it to me?"

I may have to take up drinking on a more professional basis after this.  Glenn Beck, the voice of effing reason on gay marriage.  This is one of those times folks where criticism of Obama is entirely and completely justified.

The Return Of President Odubya

Obama's real, lasting failing has been on civil liberties post-Bush, and the administration is at it again, this time on eliminating probable cause on email and electronic communication in the name of "stopping terrorism".   WaPo's Ellen Nakishima:

The administration wants to add just four words -- "electronic communication transactional records" -- to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the "content" of e-mail or other Internet communication.

But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records.

Stewart A. Baker, a former senior Bush administration Homeland Security official, said the proposed change would broaden the bureau's authority. "It'll be faster and easier to get the data," said Baker, who practices national security and surveillance law. "And for some Internet providers, it'll mean giving a lot more information to the FBI in response to an NSL." 

Right, so the FBI may not be able to read your email or your web pages, but they can at any time declare you a "person of interest" and find our who you are sending emails to and which web pages you've been to, and force your ISP to give them that info, if the Obama administration has their way, all with the added benefit of bypassing any judicial oversight.

That seems like a great idea that will never, ever be abused at all, right?

Obama has repeatedly dropped the ball on civil liberties in a post-9/11 world, at every opportunity expanding on Bush's many power grabs and overreaches.  it's not like Hillary Clinton or John McCain would have been any better, either...but it's depressing as hell to see Obama go down this same path without blinking.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

A grim milestone indeed this time as June set a record number of military coalition troop deaths in Afghanistan.

As the Afghan war's bloodiest month for Western forces drew to a close Wednesday, the widening scope and relentless tempo of battlefield casualties pointed to a formidable challenge for U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the incoming commander.

At least 102 coalition troops were killed in June in Afghanistan, according to the independent website icasualties.org, far surpassing the previous highest monthly total of 76 military fatalities in August 2009.

In a reflection of the increasingly American face of the war as the summer's troop buildup presses ahead, at least 60 of those killed were U.S. service members, including a soldier killed by small-arms fire Wednesday in eastern Afghanistan. The previous highest monthly death toll for American forces was in October 2009, when 59 were killed.

Buried roadside bombs continued to cause the majority of fatalities, despite what the military has described as some success using electronic surveillance to spot insurgents planting explosives and to stage raids on bomb-making rings.

But a plethora of other hazards have pushed to the fore as Petraeus, who was confirmed Wednesday by the Senate, 99-0, takes command in Afghanistan. Firefights, helicopter crashes, ambushes, sniper fire and complex coordinated assaults — such as Wednesday's attempt by insurgents to fight their way onto NATO's largest airbase in eastern Afghanistan — have also exacted a significant toll in deaths and injuries.

As the pattern of fatalities shows, it is a war with a widening geographical reach. The country's east and south, the traditional Taliban strongholds, predictably saw the heaviest fighting, but a swath of the north became increasingly restive as well.

A day in which a Western military death does not occur somewhere in Afghanistan has become rare. And fatalities in clusters of four or more in a single incident have become increasingly common. On two days in June, the daily tallies reached nine and 10.

And of course this isn't counting the civilian deaths in Afghanistan either.  Those are orders of magnitude worse.

How's that whole surge thing working out for you there, Mr. President?  And why the hell are we still in this hellhole?

A Tortured Explanation

Double G latches on to a new Harvard study that strongly suggests the Village media redefined torture away from waterboarding once it became clear we were doing it to terror suspects.

As always, the American establishment media is simply following in the path of the U.S. Government (which is why it's the "establishment media"): the U.S. itself long condemned waterboarding as "torture" and even prosecuted it as such, only to suddenly turn around and declare it not to be so once it began using the tactic.  That's exactly when there occurred, as the study puts it, "a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboading."  As the U.S. Government goes, so goes our establishment media.

None of this is a surprise, of course.  I and others many times have anecdotally documented that the U.S. media completely changes how it talks about something (or how often) based on who is doing it ("torture" when the Bad Countries do it but some soothing euphemism when the U.S. does it; continuous focus when something bad is done to Americans but a virtual news blackout when done by the U.S., etc.).  Nor is this an accident, but is quite deliberate:  media outlets such as the NYT, The Washington Post and NPR explicitly adopted policies to ban the use of the word "torture" for techniques the U.S. Government had authorized once government officials announced it should not be called "torture."

We don't need a state-run media because our media outlets volunteer for the task:  once the U.S. Government decrees that a technique is no longer torture, U.S. media outlets dutifully cease using the term.  That compliant behavior makes overtly state-controlled media unnecessary. 

And thus torture became just waterboarding which became "enhanced interrogation techniques" instead because the Bushies said so, and the Village followed right along.  It made it even easier for Obama and Eric Holder to say "Hey let's not look backwards at this" and swept the whole thing under the rug, despite the fact we tortured suspects.

That would not have been possible without a compliant media, and this study more or less proves it.

StupidiNews Focus: General Disarray Edition

HuffPo's Sam Stein has one of the most notable pieces on the McChrystal aftermath:  apparently being involved in the Pat Tillman cover-up or in torture allegations in Iraq wasn't enough to get McChrystal fired...but making fun of VP Joe Biden was completely unacceptable.

McChrystal was the head of Special Operations command in Afghanistan when Army Ranger and former football star Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire. He approved the paperwork awarding Tillman a Silver Star for dying in the line "of enemy fire" -- and he was "accountable for the inaccurate and misleading assertions" contained therein, according to an investigation -- despite knowing (or at least suspecting) that Tillman had died in an episode of fratricide. That episode barely registered with the public or, for that matter, Congress, when McChrystal went before the Senate Armed Services Committee waiting to take over control in Afghanistan. The one person who questioned whether more answers were needed was journalist Jon Krakauer who had just penned a book on Tillman's death and thought the general's explanations were "preposterous" and "unbelievable."

The second episode was even less well-known. Years after the Tillman death, McChrystal was mentioned several times in a report by Human Rights Watch which documented the abuse and torture of detained prisoners at Camp Nama in Iraq. A soldier, quoted anonymously in the findings, recalled seeing McChrystal at the facility "a couple of times." It was also reported that the general himself said there was no way that the Red Cross would ever be allowed through the door at Nama -- where treatment of detainees was so bad, it earned the nickname Nasty Ass Military Area.

"It is not easy to say what his role was accurately because the entire program of detention and interrogation going on there remains highly classified," said John Siston, an author of the Human Rights Watch report. "But HRW was able to learn enough to say that he was in the chain of command that oversaw the operations of that special task force and the interrogation unit that took care of the detainees that that special task force detained."

Nama, like Tillman, never played a role in McChrystal's quick ascendancy through the military ranks. Indeed, one of the most ignored nuggets in the Rolling Stone piece involved the general and his staff prepping for tough questioning on both of these topics, only to discover that Congress didn't care.

In May 2009, as McChrystal prepared for his confirmation hearings, his staff prepared him for hard questions about Camp Nama and the Tillman cover-up. But the scandals barely made a ripple in Congress, and McChrystal was soon on his way back to Kabul to run the war in Afghanistan.

Congress it seemed was more invested in moving forward than looking back. And so it was that McChrystal became embroiled in a career-threatening controversy only after the Rolling Stone piece raised questions as to whether his shaky relationship with civilian leadership would compromise the Afghan mission.

It wasn't an unworthy basis for the general's dismissal though it may have fallen a bit short of the official definition of insubordination (but not by much). But it was telling for some that after dodging several other bullets, it was an article in a music magazine (and not even a cover article at that) that did the trick.  

The reality is McChystal never should have been promoted and never kept in his position by Obama, either.  He should have been gone after the whole Tillman affair.  Instead he got promoted.  It was overlooked by both Obama and Congress...but not dissing the Veep!

The even larger problem is that with Petraeus running the business as usual flag up the pole in Afghanistan, it signals that Obama has no intention of changing our strategy there or wrapping things up.  We'll stay in Afghanistan as long as Obama's president...and his successor's term as well.

Jaw-Jaw Is Better Than War-War, But Obama Wants Both

It's really disheartening to see Obama giving a speech to graduates at West Point talking up America's "new" diplomacy strategy while we're still stuck in the middle of two endless wars and trying to start a third one with either Pakistan or Iran, take your pick.  There are differences between Bush and Obama and Obama does need to get some credit for not making the situation too much worse, but the wars remain exactly the same:  unwinnable quagmires that we will be involved in for the rest our our lifetimes.

The contrasts between Mr. Bush’s address here in 2002 and Mr. Obama’s in 2010 underscored all the ways a wartime America has changed and all the ways it has not. This was the ninth class to graduate from West Point since hijacked passenger jets destroyed the World Trade Center and smashed into the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside. Most of those graduating on Saturday were 12 at the time.

When Mr. Bush addressed their predecessors, he had succeeded in toppling the Taliban government in Afghanistan and victory of sorts appeared at hand, even as he was turning his attention to a new front in Iraq. Forecasting a new generation of threats, Mr. Bush vowed not to stand by as they gathered. “If we wait for threats to fully materialize,” he said then, “we will have waited too long.”

As Mr. Obama took the stage on a mild, overcast day, the American war in Iraq was finally beginning to wind down as combat forces prepare to withdraw by August, but Afghanistan has flared out of control and tens of thousands of reinforcements are flowing there. Terrorists have made a fresh effort to strike on American soil as a new president tries to reformulate the nation’s approach to countering them.

“This war has changed over the last nine years, but it’s no less important than it was in those days after 9/11,” Mr. Obama said. Recalling his announcement here six months ago to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, he forecast difficult days ahead, but said, “I have no doubt that together with our Afghan and international partners, we will succeed in Afghanistan.”

Mr. Obama all but declared victory in Iraq, crediting the military but not Mr. Bush, who sent more troops in 2007. “A lesser Army might have seen its spirit broken,” Mr. Obama said. “But the American military is more resilient than that. Our troops adapted, they persisted, they partnered with coalition and Iraqi counterparts, and through their competence and creativity and courage, we are poised to end our combat mission in Iraq this summer.” 

And begin the occupation stage where we still keep tens of thousands of troops in country forever.  Afghanistan on the other hand is getting worse by the month.  The Marjah offensive failed miserably, Pakistan is still on the verge of collapse, Iran continues its course unabated, and oh yeah, we can't afford the trillions in war costs anymore.

It's not fair to say Obama has dropped the ball in just 16 months on these two wars.  We are drawing troops down in Iraq.  But Afghanistan will only get worse...and we'll never leave Baghdad unless we're forced to, let's be honest.

The new boss isn't the same as the old boss, but the problems in the Middle East and the wars we're stuck in certainly are.

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

To anyone naive enough to still be acting surprised at Joe F'ckin Lieberman's upcoming bill that will allow the State Department to strip the U.S. citizenship of anyone suspected of belonging to a "foreign terrorist group", you do of course realize that President Obama has given the go ahead to assassinate U.S. citizens in foreign countries suspected of being with "foreign terrorist groups", right?

Anyone outraged over Lieberman and kvetching about the Democrats supporting this bill (and they will) really does need to pay attention to what the President is already doing on destroying civil liberties.  No offense.

Yet Another President Odubya Moment

Apparently Obama has chosen to enshrine Bush-era warrantless wiretapping as standard operating procedure.  There can be no other logical conclusion from the withdrawal of Dawn Johnsen as head of the DoJ's Office of Legal Counsel.  Marcy Wheeler:

So, it was not Ben Nelson who killed the nomination of Dawn Johnsen, nor was it Arlen Specter or Senate Republicans. No, the sole reason Dawn Johnsen is not leading the OLC is that Barack Obama and his coterie of advisors did not want Dawn Johnsen leading the OLC. The Obama Administration cravenly hung their own nominee out to dry, and the reason is almost certainly that she was not compatible with the Administration’s determination to maintain, if not expand, the Bush/Cheney positions on unbridled executive power, indefinite detention without due process as well as warrantless wiretapping and other Fourth Amendment invasions.

Obama could have made Johnsen as a recess appointment.  He chose not to after 15 months.  That was Obama's choice.  If he was serious about ending torture and warrantless wiretapping, Johnsen would have been appointed.  She was not.  Obama chose not to do so.  It really is that simple.  Glenn Greenwald:

What Johnsen insists must not be done reads like a manual of what Barack Obama ended up doing and continues to do -- from supporting retroactive immunity to terminate FISA litigations to endless assertions of "state secrecy" in order to block courts from adjudicating Bush crimes to suppressing torture photos on the ground that "opennees will empower terrorists" to the overarching Obama dictate that we "simply move on."  Could she have described any more perfectly what Obama would end up doing when she wrote, in March, 2008, what the next President "must not do"?

It is a toss-up to see which is a larger failure so far in this administration:  the failure to fix Bush's legal excesses, or the failure to fix Bush's financial catastrophe.  Both will have far-reaching, long-lasting consequences that will haunt us for decades.  President Obama has done a lot of good as leader of the free world.  But in this respect, he has absolutely failed us as a country.

The Republicans of course would have chosen the same path on warrantless wiretapping and financial regulation.  The difference is we would have gotten virtually none of the accomplishments Obama has done.  It is however a steep, steep price to pay for real benefits to America like health care reform and nuclear reduction.  Serious students of history will be asking if that price was worth it for quite some time to come.

Obama will go down as a conflicted President.  He will go down as one who made accomplishments.  But these decisions will also haunt him.  He will not be remembered as a great President, merely one that came out on the positive side of the balance.

The galling part is after Bush, we needed better.  Obama can do some real good with his Supreme Court nomination here to replace Justice Stevens.  It is possible he let Johnsen go in order to marshal his capital for a truly liberal nominee.  It is possible that's the price he had to pay.  I don't know.  Republicans will attack whomever he nominates and demonize them as an unconscionable liberal ideologue that must be stopped to save humanity.  But he could have appointed Johnsen in recess.  He chose not to.  He chose to cut Johnsen out.  Why was she appointed in the first place?

It is possible that Johnsen had some sort of problem that we aren't aware of.  I don't know the full story.  I'm merely going with Occam's Razor based on the previous decisions Obama has made.  But I will be questioning the cost of this decision in every other action Obama makes now.  Do not make the mistake of forgetting that in the end, Barack Obama is a politician.  He is better than Bush.  He is better than McCain/Palin by an order of magnitude, easily.  That is still a shamefully low standard to meet.  We need better alternatives than "hideous" and "is not hideous".

Unless you think America is perfectly fine with "is not hideous" in its leadership.

[UPDATE 11:32 AM]  Senators like Joe Lieberman are already saying Obama has the opportunity to make the Supreme Court "less liberal".  Take that as you will.

President Odubya Gets Slapped Down

A federal judge has indeed found the Bush warrantless wiretapping program, continued under President Obama, as patently illegal.

In a 45-page opinion, Judge Vaughn R. Walker ruled that the government had violated a 1978 federal statute requiring court approval for domestic surveillance when it intercepted phone calls of Al Haramain, a now-defunct Islamic charity in Oregon, and of two lawyers representing it in 2004. Declaring that the plaintiffs had been “subjected to unlawful surveillance,” the judge said the government was liable to pay them damages.

The ruling delivered a blow to the Bush administration’s claims that its surveillance program, which Mr. Bush secretly authorized shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was lawful. Under the program, the National Security Agency monitored Americans’ international e-mail messages and phone calls without court approval, even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, required warrants.

The Justice Department said it was reviewing the decision and had made no decision about whether to appeal.

The ruling by Judge Walker, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, rejected the Justice Department’s claim — first asserted by the Bush administration and continued under President Obama — that the charity’s lawsuit should be dismissed without a ruling on the merits because allowing it to go forward could reveal state secrets.

The judge characterized that expansive use of the so-called state-secrets privilege as amounting to “unfettered executive-branch discretion” that had “obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching.”

That position, he said, would enable government officials to flout the warrant law, even though Congress had enacted it “specifically to rein in and create a judicial check for executive-branch abuses of surveillance authority.”

I've said time and time again that this program needed to end immediately.  It was patently illegal when Bush ran it, it was patently illegal when Obama continued to run it, and it was the worse abuse of Presidential power in decades.  It's also the one thing I agreed with both the Jane Hamshers and Teabaggers on:  it is a massive violation of the rights of American citizens.

Having said that, it's far past the time this program needs to be utterly dismantled, and immediately.  Both people on the left and the right should be overjoyed at this ruling:  the Left because it's a clear violation of civil liberties, and the Right because a Democratic President has control over the apparatus now.  They should be thrilled to see a blow struck against Obama's "tyranny", yes?

So no, the Eric Holder DoJ should not choose to appeal this, and they should as a result make a detailed effort to take this dark machine apart for good.