The Wonk Room

The Administration’s Middling On Missile Defense

Don't play Star Wars

The Ballistic Missile Review talks importantly about not investing in exotic unproven programs designed to protect against threats that may never materialize, which is a direct swipe at missile defense programs focused on stopping long-range inter-continental ballistic missiles. This in many ways builds off the Obama administration’s previous actions on missile defense such as: focusing on more proven theater based systems that protect against short and medium range missiles (such as those held by Iran); abandoning a strategically useless ground-based missile system in Europe, cutting futuristic programs such as the Airborne Laser and the Multiple Kill Vehicles, as well as reducing funds for the fanciful ground based program in the US. All of these are definitely steps in the right direction, and have consequentially irked missile-defense-hugging neoconservatives.

However, despite the nice talk in the recently released review and all the talk of fiscal discipline, the Administration has failed to follow through in its current budget. Fred Kaplan of Slate notes:

There’s a mismatch, however, between Gates’ words and his actions. His proposed missile defense budget for fiscal year 2011 amounts to a staggering $10.4 billion. This is $2 billion less than George W. Bush requested (and received) for missile defense—his most cherished military program—in his last year as president. But it’s $700 million more than Gates himself received in FY 2010. The program is getting more expensive and, in some respects, more exotic—not less.

Kaplan also points out the strategic dissonance of the Administration’s middling approach. By killing off programs that focus on shooting down a missile in its initial boost-phase, such as the Airborne Laser, Gates is essentially cutting off one of the major conceptual legs of Bush’s multi-phased missile defense system. Not only is this a kin to the Administration acknowledging that the whole concept behind the program is deeply unsound, but by removing one of the system’s legs, Kaplan explains, the system simply can’t stand.

But if boost-phase intercept is a vital part of a missile-defense system, if all the ideas for boost-phase intercept have washed out, and if the only thing going for it is a laser-research project that’s not likely to bear fruit for decades, if ever—then the whole vision of a multi-phased missile-defense system is in deep trouble. If that’s the case, and if there’s no way around it, the idea of spending $10.4 billion on a dream system begins to sound like a fool’s errand.

In other words, Gates has effectively determined that the concept behind Bush’s multi-phase system is bunk, yet the Administration is still funding the rest of the system as if it were strategically sound and nothing had changed. Instead of putting the long-range missile program out of its misery and diverting that money to more essential programs – such as paying for the wars we are fighting – the Administration is just middling around the edges on long-range missile defense.

Thiessen Still Defending A Failed Strategy

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

Mark Thiessen, a former Bush administration speechwriter, has been waging a non-stop partisan political campaign to destroy Americans’ faith that their government can keep them safe. His latest gambit is to question the integrity of a career public servant, John Brennan, a 25-year veteran of the CIA and President Barack Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser. The tragic consequences of his efforts will be to undermine the effectiveness of America’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies that are protecting all of us, Republicans and Democrats, from future terrorist attacks.

On Meet the Press Sunday, Brennan responded to criticisms from key Congressional Republicans over the administration’s handling of Umar Faroul Abdulmuttalab, the failed Christmas bomber, by pointing out that he had kept them informed:

On Christmas night, I called a number of senior members of Congress. I spoke to Senators McConnell and Bond, I spoke to Representative Boehner and Hoekstra. I explained to them that he was in FBI custody, that Mr. Abdulmutallab was, in fact, talking, that he was cooperating at that point. They knew that “in FBI custody” means that there’s a process then you follow as far as Mirandizing and presenting him in front of a magistrate. None of those individuals raised any concerns with me at that point.

For that statement, Mark Thiessen, who has either been a speechwriter or a press spokesperson his entire career, called Brennan a liar.

Thiessen’s not claiming that Brennan didn’t call them, or that these four Republicans actually did raise concerns. Thiessen calls Brennan a liar because, according to Thiessen, these four Republicans didn’t know that the FBI Mirandizes people in it detains in the United States. Thiessen bases his theory of Republican confusion about Miranda on a Washington Post story on the Obama administration’s plan to form a High-Value Interrogation Group (HIG) which wouldn’t automatically Mirandize those detainees it interrogated.

Sounds great, except the problem is that the FBI does not have a choice whether to Mirandize people detained in the United States. There is a public emergency exception that allows for questioning without Miranda warnings, which the FBI used to question Abdulmuttalab prior to his entering surgery. The HIG, in contrast, was designed specifically to make sure the CIA stays out of the torture business and is directed at detainees captured outside the United States who may never face the prospect of trial in a U.S. court. It would be bizarre to automatically Mirandize detainees in those circumstances.

None of this matters to Thiessen, though, because this is about politics not policy, and in politics ignorance is strength.

Never mind that because the Obama administration publicly rejected the Bush administration’s use of torture, which Thiessen still defends as necessary, Abdulmutallab’s family agreed to work with the FBI to secure his cooperation. And it’s producing results. Never mind that when the Bush administration tried to do detention the way Thiessen still thinks it should be done, holding Jose Padilla in military custody without access to his family or lawyers, Padilla was still not cooperating after seven months, and never supplied much useful information.

In the Author’s Note of his book, Courting Disaster, Thiessen complains that he shouldn’t really have to write the book at all but irresponsible people have twisted information “to paint our intelligence community as a band of rogue operators who abandoned our ideals in the fight against terror.” Maybe he should check the mirror before he twists information in order to call a career public servant and senior national security official like John Brennan a liar.

We’ve tried detention and interrogation the way Thiessen wants to do it, and it was a spectacular failure. It undercut our international reputation as a defender of human rights. It helped recruit terrorists to Al Qaeda’s cause. It made us less safe. The Obama administration has chosen a path that is working but is facing unrelenting criticism from people like Mark Thiessen. One really gets the sense that Thiessen wants the Obama administration to fail.

Maybe he does. After all, this is the guy who took to the pages on the Washington Post just two days after Obama took office to warn, “if Obama weakens any of the defenses Bush put in place and terrorists strike our country again, Americans will hold Obama responsible — and the Democratic Party could find itself unelectable for a generation.” It doesn’t sound like that’s something that would disappoint him.

Pence: U.S. MidEast Policy Should Be Dictated By Israelis

In a Christian Broadcasting Network interview Rep, Mike Pence (R-IN) (who appears to be doing a very good Michael Scott impression) shares his view that the U.S. shouldn’t decide its own policy toward Israel, but rather simply do what Israeli voters want:

PENCE: I have grown increasingly troubled at the mixed signals that this administration is sending to the various parties in the [Middle East] region. It feels for all the world that we are sliding back to the era of the Clinton administration where it was the ambition of the United States to be an honest broker in the region. I take issue with that.

I think President George W. Bush got it right. The United States certainly wants to be honest, but we don’t want to be a broker. A broker doesn’t take sides. A broker negotiates between parties of equals… America’s on the side of Israel. And to send any other message than our unwavering support, that we will stand with what the sovereign government and the people of Israel decide is in their interest, I think represents a departure from where the heart of the American people are at.

Watch it:

Given that Pence is said to have a fairly weak grasp of policy, it’s unsurprising that his recollection of U.S.-Israel relations during the Clinton administration is shaky. The idea that the Clinton era represented some sort of dark age of U.S. pressure on Israel is ridiculous. A number of commentators have suggested that the problem was precisely that Clinton was not acting as an honest broker in negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis, but rather, in the words of Clinton’s Middle East adviser Aaron David Miller, as “Israel’s lawyer.” As it turned out, that was bad for Israel. (And horrible for the Palestinians.) More importantly, however, it was bad for the U.S. As Miller noted, it’s only “When we have used our diplomacy wisely and functioned as advocates and lawyers for both sides, we have succeeded.”

It’s interesting that Pence thinks George W. Bush “got it right,” given that the Bush’s and Obama’s policies on Israel are nearly identical. Both presidents have used almost the exact same language in describing the contours of a just resolution to the conflict. The main difference is that Obama, unlike Bush, has actually shown an interest in holding Israel to its commitments and obligations, which some conservative groups have tried, dishonestly, to interpret as Obama being “anti-Israel.”

But what’s most amazing is Pence’s insistence that it’s somehow inappropriate for the United States “to send any other message than our unwavering support” for whatever “the sovereign government and the people of Israel decide is in their interest.” That’s just crazy. There’s no other country in the world of which a politician could say something like this and be taken seriously. The U.S.-Israel “special relationship” means that the U.S. has a special commitment to Israel’s continued existence and security, and that our two governments consult closely in regard to shared concerns. It doesn’t mean that the U.S. has to acquiesce to every Israeli policy decision, even when those policies negatively impact the U.S.’s own security and credibility, as does, for example, Israel’s ongoing attempt to engineer the Jewish ethnic control of East Jerusalem.

But, of course, there’s a rather large lobbying infrastructure in place to make sure that this is exactly how the U.S. interprets the “special relationship,” and which will relentlessly attack and fund-raise against politicians who suggest that certain Israeli policies are bad for the U.S., or that the U.S. actually has interests in the region that might not accord with whatever the current Israeli government wants. And it’s pretty effective.

START Exposing Divide Among Conservatives

Are there any Powell conservatives left in the Senate?

The neocon war on START has heated up. John Bolton has been on the war path as usual. The Washington Times has published three opinion pieces in the past week disparaging START. The Heritage Foundation has produced multiple pieces attacking the treaty. Finally, Keith Payne – “Donald Rumsfeld’s Dr. Strangelove” – essentially argued in the Pittsburgh Tribune that the Senate should only support a treaty if it doesn’t really cut nuclear weapons, which is sort of the entire point of the treaty.

But at the very same time that these forces have mobilized, so has the traditional and more established realist wing of the conservative foreign policy establishment – not just in support of START, but in support of the overall global effort to eliminate nuclear weapons. While the opponents of a START treaty have been on the fringes of past Republican administration’s, these figures contain many of the most prominent conservative foreign policy figures, including Secretaries of State and Defense Colin Powell, George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, Frank Carlucci, as well as Reagan National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and Condoleezza Rice’s State Department consigliere Philip Zelikow.

At issue here are two competing world views. On the one hand, there are the neocons like Bolton, that insist that the US should actually begin engaging in a new nuclear arms race to stop countries from thinking we are weak, as well as out of a bizarre notion that the Cold War never ended. This warped and hyper-paranoid perspective is the very vision that pushed the US to invade Iraq over fears of that a Saddam-initiated mushroom cloud was imminent. On the other hand, there are the realist conservatives like Powell and Kissinger, that argue that nuclear weapons have become militarily useless and that if nothing is done to eliminate nuclear weapons, the world will move quickly in the opposite direction toward a nuclear tipping point, in which proliferation cascades and which the threat of nuclear terrorism becomes ever more likely.

Hence, the ratification fight over START is not really one between progressives and conservatives. Progressives are in agreement with Republicans like Powell, Kissinger, and Schultz. Instead, the ratification fight is between conservatives. The ratification debate will expose the extent to which conservative politicians have become “neoconized,” as it will clarify where Senate conservatives stand – are they with John Bolton or are they with Colin Powell?

Beck: Drunk Driving The Express Bus To Clown Town

Yesterday on Glenn Beck’s Wild-Eyed Hysteria Hour, the Tearful One managed to pack an unusually impressive amount of incoherent stupidity into one rant about Iran. “This week Iran successfully launched a rocket into space,” Beck informed us. “The media yawned. The only thing they found interesting about the launch was that the rocket had a rat, two turtles and a worm on board. But they don’t look any further than that“:

But technically, if Iran can send a missile up into space and have it explode, it could shut down our electronics; that would do more damage to us than any conventional bomb ever could. Imagine the chaos if an EMP [electro-magnetic pulse] bomb took all of our computers, phones, TVs, lights and flipped them off? America would be out of business.

“Imagining” the effects of an Iranian EMP attack is exactly what you’re going to have to do, because there’s not a credible national security expert alive who thinks that this sort of attack is even remotely feasible. You have to love how Beck throws “technically” in there, as if to indicate that he has some idea what he’s talking about, but there’s a rather enormous “technical” chasm between “send a missile up into space and have it explode” and “shut down our electronics.” It’s like saying “technically, if Iran has lasers, they can blow us up with their Iranian Death Star.” Well, yes, maybe, someday, theoretically. Not any time soon. Certainly not before Glenn Beck has scared himself into a stroke.

Turning to a video clip of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad praying to God to “hasten the arrival of Imam al-Mahdi,” Beck asks “‘Hasten the return of Imam al-Mahdi’ — what’s he talking about?” Glenn Beck is going to tell us!

He’s talking about the 12th Imam. He’s a “Twelver.” What is that? If journalists weren’t so busy trying to land jobs with the Obama administration (14 to be exact), they’d look into that.

The “Twelvers” believe that the Mahdi, or 12th Imam, will soon return. This is end times, stuff. They are different than most Muslims because they believe that the return needs to be hastened. It’s not a good idea to hasten the return of the Chosen One, because to do that, the world has to be in chaos, carnage and even genocide — so the Messiah comes and brings peace.

“Twelvers” are so dangerous that at one point the Ayatollah Khomeini banned them.

While it’s true that Twelver eschatology describes the return of the Mahdi, most Twelvers (like most Christians who believe similar things about a returning Messiah and an End of Days) do not believe that it is their duty to trigger it. It’s also true that Ahmadinejad, a pious conservative Shia Muslim, lards his speeches with references to the return of the Hidden Imam, so much so that he was chastised by several Iranian clerics, who told him he “would be better off concentrating on Iran’s social problems…than indulging in such mystical rhetoric.” There is, of course, no evidence whatsoever that Iranian policy is guided by a strategy to hasten the Twelfth Imam’s return.

The idea that “Twelvers” are some sort of secretive, extreme apocalyptic sect is patent nonsense. If Beck, or anyone at Fox, would bother to Google “Twelvers,” they’d learn very quickly that Twelvers are, in fact, the largest sect of Shi’ism. The idea that “Ayatollah Khomeini banned them” is rather confounding, given that Ayatollah Khomeini was a Twelver, as are all the leading ayatollahs in the world, including those serving as religious guides for the Iranian pro-democracy movement.

This isn’t the first time Beck has authoritatively delivered these complete, and easily disprovable, non-facts about Twelver Shi’ism to his audience. The last time, to my knowledge, was last September. What this tells us, as if we didn’t know already, is that neither Beck nor anyone who works at Fox News really gives a damn whether it’s true or not. The point is it’s scary.

Skilled entertainer that his, Beck saves the very best for last:

By the way, do you know what “Iran” means in Farsi? Aryan.

Actually, the Farsi word for Iran is “Iran.” But still, it’s derived from “Aryan,” so… whoa dude. Now that I think about it, it’s actually pretty crazy how Ahmadinejad caused historians in the 1700’s to adapt the Sanskrit word arya to denote a subset of Indo-European languages and peoples, and then caused French racialist Arthur de Gobineau to steal the term in the 1850’s for his goofy theory of a master “white” race, and then caused the Nazis to weave that nonsense into their ideology, and then caused Reza Shah Pahlavi to decide as part of his modernization program that he wanted people to use the term “Iran” instead of “Persia” so that later, decades after the Pahlavi dynasty had been overthrown by the Islamic revolution, Ahmadinejad would get to run a country whose name really means “Hitlerland.”

This is what can happen when you treat Jonah Goldberg as a serious historian.

Tweets And Strawmen: A Response To Michael Rubin

Our guest blogger is Brian Katulis, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

My tweet the other day in response to Michael Rubin’s article hailing Iraqi democracy — in which I wrote “Michael Rubin still defines democracy as ‘elections’” — has apparently made Rubin upset. He writes “Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, appears to believe that democracy can exist without elections.”

While I’ve always maintained that democracy is about more than elections, I will open a challenge to Mr. Katulis. Perhaps he will explain how democracy can exist without an opportunity for people both to select and, at regular times, oust their government peacefully? Perhaps he will explain why the Obama administration should not be more proactive to ensure that the Iraqi elections go smoothly and are not marred by fraud? I hope Mr. Katulis is not taking his animus toward the Bush administration out upon the Iraqi people.

Tweets are, obviously, a form of shorthand. Of course I don’t believe that “democracy can exist without elections” — nor do I think it would “appear” that way to any reasonable person. My point was simply that elections alone don’t make democracy. It’s pretty clear that Michael chose to wildly misinterpret my comment, impute a number of straw arguments to me, and then bravely issue me a “challenge” to defend those arguments. Since Michael doesn’t seem to have bothered to actually figure out what my views on Iraq’s elections and democracy are (easily found under my CAP bio) I don’t really feel the need to respond to his inventions.

This isn’t the first time Michael has responded in this way. As my colleague Matt Yglesias has noted, Michael is “extraordinarily thin-skinned” about criticism of his work — especially when that criticism hits close to the mark.

As Michael knows, I have worked on a number of democracy-building projects around the Middle East — including, like Michael, in post-invasion Iraq. Like Michael, I hope for the best for Iraq as it continues to grapple with the various consequences of the Bush administration’s incompetence. But unlike him, I’m not interested in putting the best possible face on what is still an incredibly violent and unstable reality.

We shouldn’t forget that Iraq still ranks poorly on democracy and human rights indicators provided by respected NGOs and the U.S. government. Freedom House, a democracy promotion NGO widely respected by both conservatives and progressives, continues to rank Iraq as “not free” in its latest annual survey of freedom around the globe. Human Rights Watch’s 2010 annual report characterized the human rights situation in Iraq as “extremely poor.” Even last year’s State Department Country Report on Human Rights contains a list of 23 “significant human rights problems” in Iraq.

These reports come prior to the recent de-Baathification shenanigans that threaten to cast a shadow over the upcoming March parliamentary election. Thankfully, an appeals court has overturned the blacklisting of over 500 Iraqi politicians and it seems like these candidates will be able to participate, though their ultimate status remains to be determined. What this episode has revealed, however, is that Iraqi democracy remains dysfunctional and is still very much in its infancy. It will take more than another election to change this.

As for my “animus” toward the Iraqi people, that’s just pathetic. I know Michael is better than that remark.

I respect Michael Rubin’s perspectives, although I may not always agree with them. He has solid experience in Iraq and knowledge of the complicated situation there. I welcome the opportunity to continue the conversation, just without the strawmen.

Queen Noor To Senate: We Are At A Nuclear Tipping Point

This week in Paris hundreds of world leaders and prominent global figures are attending the Global Zero summit to push for the elimination of nuclear weapons within the next 20 years. Conservatives frequently describe Obama’s vision of eliminating nuclear weapons as impractical and a byproduct of some absurd liberal utopianism. The Global Zero Summit has shown this defeatist narrative not just to be false but dangerous as well.

Queen Noor, a leading figure in the global zero effort, spoke with ThinkProgress about the summit. She noted that Global Zero “was launched in response to the growing threats of nuclear terrorism” and that “our commission has developed a 20 year end-to-end plan to eliminate nuclear weapons and to show how it could be done in 20 years.” Global Zero has put out a detailed plan (pdf) that lays out a step-by-step approach that includes “phased and verified reductions beginning with de-alerting (taking weapons off high alert) and making deep cuts to U.S. and Russian arsenals.” The plan also calls for a robust and universal verification and enforcement regime to prevent countries from cheating and to give countries confidence that other are upholding their end of the bargain.

Her Majesty notes that achieving this ambitious goal has become possible in recent years, due to “the fact that there seems to be an expanding consensus of public opinion and expert opinion around the world that zero is the only safe sustainable path and secure path for the future for our children and our children’s children.” Indeed, the summit has demonstrated that there is real and tangible support across the global political spectrum for the elimination nuclear weapons. For instance, Global Zero signatories include stalwart Republican national security officials from both the Reagan and Bush administration’s, including Reagan’s former Secretaries of State and Defense, George Schultz and Frank Carlucci and his National Security Adviser, Robert MacFarlane. These officials are certainly no wild-eyed idealists.

In response to what she would say to U.S. Senators that are contemplating opposing the President’s efforts to ratify a new START treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Queen Noor warned that such an approach would put the world on a dangerous path.

NOOR: We feel we are reaching a nuclear tipping point a point, beyond which the proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials can fall in to the hands of terrorists can not be reigned back in. I would say that you’re choosing between building together with the other nuclear states an environment of trust and confidence for a secure world without nuclear weapons or you are heading down the path of increased proliferation and the exponentionally increasing danger that nuclear materials will end up in the hands of non-state actors and terrorists, as well as the increasing danger of accidents taking place or miscalculations of which there have been many in the past.

Listen to it:

Torture Advocate Thiessen Refuted By Own Book

Desperate to deny the Obama administration any credit for the news that the failed Christmas bomber, Umar Farouq Abdulmuttalab, has been cooperating with investigators and providing intelligence, former Bush administration speechwriter and leading pro-torture advocate Marc Thiessen exclaims “That anyone can consider five weeks of utter silence from this high-value terrorist as a success is stunning.”

Abudulmutallab was supposed to be vaporized along with Northwest Flight 253. The moment al-Qaida learned that he had survived and was in U.S. government custody, they began taking countermeasures to cover his tracks.

Every hour, every day, every week that went by gave them precious time to close bank accounts, e-mail addresses, phone numbers he knew about, and shut down training camps, safe houses, and other intelligence leads he could have given us. Terrorists he knew about have been put into hiding, and other leads that were hot in the days immediately following his capture have since gone cold. The intelligence he possessed was perishable. Each moment that passed that he was not speaking meant lost counterterrorism opportunities.

For contrast, Thiessen offers up what he believes is the appropriate way to get intelligence from detainees, the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah:

Before enhanced interrogations, Abu Zubaydah provided what he thought was nominal information; after enhanced interrogations, Zubaydah “increased production” and provided intelligence that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh just as he was completing plans for the attack on Heathrow airport. In each of these cases, high value detainees were holding back vital intelligence until they underwent enhanced interrogations—after which they stopped resisting and told us what they knew.

That’s not entirely true. The CIA report (pdf) on detainee reporting that Thiessen relies on (and includes in the Appendix of his book, Courting Disaster) states on page 9: “We assess that each detainee very likely has information that he will not reveal,” even after the application of “enhanced” techniques that Thiessen favors. And, as Marcy Wheeler has documented, there exists no hard evidence that any intelligence gleaned from Zubaydah — through any methods — actually stopped imminent terrorist attacks.

But more significantly, what Thiessen leaves out of his article is that Abu Zubaydah — whose interrogation, remember, Thiessen claims as a triumph of intelligence-gathering — spent several weeks in the hospital before being interrogated. Abdulmuttalab, in contrast, was initially questioned by authorities before receiving medical care.

Thiessen didn’t leave it out of his book, though. On page 82 of Courting Disaster, he writes “When taken into custody, Zubaydah was in intense pain from life-threatening injuries he suffered during his capture.”

The CIA flew in a specialist from Johns Hopkins University who saved Zubaydah’s life. The agency then put off questioning for several weeks while he recovered.

So, understand: Every hour, every day, every week that went by gave Al Qaeda precious time to close bank accounts, e-mail addresses, phone numbers Zubaydah knew about, and shut down training camps, safe houses, and other intelligence leads Zubaydah could have given us. Terrorists he knew about have been put into hiding, and other leads that were hot in the days immediately following his capture have since gone cold. The intelligence he possessed was perishable. Yet Thiessen hails Zubaydah’s eventual interrogation as an intelligence bonanza, a textbook example of how to do it right.

Abdulmuttalab, on the other hand? Lost counterterrorism opportunity.

Facts Get In The Way Of Conservatives’ Abdulmuttalab Scare Story »

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

The revelation that Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab, the failed Christmas Day underwear bomber, has been cooperating with authorities and providing valuable information “for days” demonstrates how irresponsible and ill-informed many conservatives have been in attacking President Obama’s handling of the incident. Using the tough and proven criminal system is producing results, while the Bush administration experiment with these conservatives’ preferred alternative -– the incommunicado detention of Jose Padilla — failed utterly to deliver reliable intelligence.

Conservatives have attacked the decision to charge Abdulmutallab in federal criminal court and give him access to an attorney. Critics like Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) and Rudy Giuliani went on the attack from the get go, but they were recently joined by former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME).

Gen. Hayden took to the pages of the Washington Post on January 31 to claim “We got it wrong in Detroit on Christmas Day. We allowed an enemy combatant the protections of our Constitution before we had adequately interrogated him.” Sen. Collins delivered the Republican weekly address the day before and castigated “the irresponsible, indeed dangerous, decision on Abdulmutallab’s interrogation.”

It’s terrible when the facts get in the way of a good story.

As we now know, far from being wrong, irresponsible, or dangerous, the path the Obama administration chose for the interrogation of Abdulmutallab is directly responsible for him cooperating with intelligence officials and giving up fresh and actionable intelligence. Abdulmutallab’s family worked with U.S. government officials to encourage him to cooperate, and so, according to them, “because they had complete trust in the US system of justice and believed that Umar Farouq would be treated fairly and appropriately.”

The intelligence gained from Abdulmutallab has been shared widely throughout the intelligence community — and has already produced results. On January 21, Malaysian counterterrorism authorities arrested 10 suspected terrorists tied to Abdulmutallab. The suspected cell was made up of mostly non-Malaysians including two Nigerians who were thought to be part of an international terrorist network.

So by the time Collins and Hayden attacked the Obama administration’s handling of Abdulmutallab’s interrogation it had already produced not just cooperation, but actionable intelligence that allowed an allied government to break up a suspected terrorist cell.

But that’s not all that’s wrong with their argument. More »« Less

QDR’s Nuclear Tea Leaves

Whenever the Quadrennial Defense Review – or any big government document is released – there is a search to read the tea leaves of what the new report means for US policy. These government strategy reports are often more important for what they do or do not mention – ie what will or won’t be a funding priority – than for laying out a new groundbreaking strategic doctrine.

This QDR contains some useful changes. For instance, Robert Farley has a great take on the shift away from the “long war” or GWOT formulation toward a more sensible strategic outlook and the elevation in priority of disaster response is definitely overdue. There are also a couple of interesting tidbits from the QDR related to nuclear policy.

First, this Administration is really concerned with stopping nuclear terrorism and proliferation. This isn’t really news, but the new QDR confirms the priority the Administration has given to these issues and lays out some very important tangible steps, such as investing in nuclear forensics. This is of key importance to deterring proliferation, since ensuring that the US can identify the source of nuclear materials that were used in a bomb, provides an added disincentive to countries contemplating proliferate to third party groups. As Travis Sharp notes, “There is a big, big role for the nuclear weapons laboratories in the new QDR. In order to prevent WMD terrorism.”

Second, the new QDR gives a cold shoulder to a favorite program of the neocon right – the potentially highly dangerous and destabilizing program called “Prompt Global Strike.” Prompt Global Strike is a program that calls for replacing some of our nuclear tipped Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) with conventional warheads, in order to be able to strike at “fleeting targets” of opportunity across the globe. While that may sound like an important tool, the fact is that it provides few advantages over existing capabilities and has some major downsides.

The primary problem is one of “nuclear ambiguity.” Russia and China for instance would have no idea whether an ICBM had a conventional or nuclear warhead. The launching of such a missile would also be inherently destabilizing. Remember that the Russians believed that a launch of a Norwegian weather rocket in the mid-90s was actually the West launching a nuclear weapon at them. A nuclear war was only averted because Yeltsin, a man who loved to drink, had the wits about him to contradict his military advisers’ itchy trigger fingers and halted a nuclear response – yes we were that close. Thus a policy that calls for speculatively firing ICBMs, would have significant blow back in our relations with, Russia and China, could escalate the proliferation and development of ballistic missiles, upset the nuclear balance, and in a worst case result in an accidental or mistaken nuclear launch in response. Finally, there is that whole problem of having perfect actionable intelligence.

Not surprisingly the Bush administration’s 2006 QDR was all about (pdf) Prompt Global Strike. Their QDR mentioned it six times, pledged to develop this capability, and called on Congress to grant the “broader authorities” to the executive that this capability would need. However, this 2010 QDR is much more circumspect about the system. It references “prompt global strike” just once, saying only that the “The Department also plans to experiment with conventional prompt global strike prototypes.” It seems clear that unlike the Bush administration, this is not going to be critical to the Obama administration’s defense posture.

Once Again, Pipes Says What Conservatives Are Thinking

Right-wing scholar-activist Daniel Pipes often functions as the conservative id, saying and writing things that many conservatives also believe but have the good sense not to say outright. A good example is when Pipes admitted before the Iranian presidential elections that, were he a registered voter in Iran, he would “vote for Ahmadinejad, [because] I would prefer to have an enemy who is forthright and blatant and obvious.” Given how much the neocons had invested in promoting Ahmadinejad as a symbol of Iranian menace, his replacement with the more moderate Mir Hossein Mousavi would have been disastrous for their strategy of getting America into more wars.

The latest example is Pipes’ new article in National Review Online, which he suggests that President Obama can “save” his presidency… by bombing Iran.

Writing that “Obama’s attempts to ‘reset’ his presidency will likely fail if he focuses on economics, where he is just one of many players,” Pipes claims that the president “needs a dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him… preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge, and where he can trump expectations”:

Such an opportunity does exist: Obama can give orders for the U.S. military to destroy the Iranian nuclear weapon capacity. [...]

Just as 9/11 caused voters to forget George W. Bush’s meandering early months, a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama’s feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene. It would sideline health care, prompt Republicans to work with Democrats, make netroots squeal, independents reconsider, and conservatives swoon.

Obviously Pipes has no real interest in Obama having a successful presidency. He’s simply trying to nudge the ball a few yards toward the war with Iran that many neoconservatives have been dreaming of for years. But it’s rare for one of them to be this explicit about their cynical view of foreign wars as an instrument of American domestic politics. Let’s remember, this is the man who George W. Bush nominated in 2003 to the board of the United States Institute of Peace, something which even born-again hawk Christopher Hitchens found to be a joke.

Pipes makes a number of other highly questionable claims in the piece. He insists that “No one (other than the Iranian rulers and their agents) denies that the regime is rushing headlong to build a large nuclear arsenal.” Apparently, this would include Lieutenant General Ronald Burgess, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), who said in a January 12 interview that “The bottom line assessments of the NIE still hold true,” that “we have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the program. But the fact still remains that we don’t know what we don’t know.”

In one of the funniest bits, Pipes claims that “the apocalyptic-minded leaders in Tehran” could eventually “launch an electro-magnetic pulse attack on the United States, utterly devastating the country.” There’s not an actual, credible Iran expert who believes that Iran’s leaders are interested in triggering the apocalypse. In a report for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Mehdi Khalaji, an Iran analyst who spent over a dozen years studying Shia theology in Qom, wrote that “Not one of [Khamenei's] speeches refers to any apocalyptic sign or reveals any special eagerness for the return of the Hidden Imam… The most significant task of the Supreme Leader is to safeguard the regime.” Combine this with the comical-even-for-Pipes EMP-alarmism and you’ve got the rhetorical equivalent of Pipes donning a bright red clown nose and big floppy shoes.

Assuring us that attacking Iran would be a cakewalk, Pipes claims that “were the U.S. strike limited to taking out the Iranian nuclear facilities, and not aspire to regime change, it would require few ‘boots on the ground’ and entail relatively few casualties, making an attack politically more palatable.” The definitive refutation of this delusion was delivered by Gen. Anthony Zinni back in September. “After you’ve dropped those bombs on those hardened facilities, what happens next?” Zinni asked. “Because, eventually, if you follow this all the way down, eventually I’m putting boots on the ground somewhere. And like I tell my friends, if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.” Needless to say, I’m inclined to go with Gen. Zinni on this one, and not with the the guy insisting that we can do war clean and on the cheap.

It’s important to understand that, even as many on the right have attempted to embrace Iran’s Green movement as a means of attacking President Obama’s engagement policy, there’s no doubt that an attack on Iran of the sort that Pipes advocates is the surest way to snuff out that movement. As in the past, I’m sure I’ll receive private assurances that Pipes doesn’t speak for all conservatives. I’m also sure that, as in the past, no one on the right will have the decency to step forward and condemn him.

‘More Middle East Arms Deals’ Is Not A Sustainable Regional Strategy

Last Thursday, I wrote about the need for the Obama administration to come up with a regional security strategy for the Persian Gulf as it withdraws its troops from Iraq, and link its arms sales to the region to this strategy. This weekend, both the New York Times and Washington Post led with stories on the future of U.S. security policy in the Gulf.

The most concrete information coming out of these stories is that the United States is deploying eight Patriot anti-missile missile batteries to Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia in addition to stationing Aegis ballistic missile defense ships in the Gulf. In addition, they also reveal that the United States is supporting an expansion of the Saudi facilities protection force to 30,000 personnel.

On arms sales, an anonymous administration official made grandiose claims to the Post about “developing a truly regional defensive capability, with missile systems, air defense and a hardening up of critical infrastructure.” These claims are difficult to substantiate given the lack of new information provided by this anonymous official, and the relative slowness it’s taking the U.S. to fulfill arms requests already in the pipeline.

In fact, what these announcements reveal, if anything, is that the region is becoming more — not less — dependent on the United States for its security. The U.S. military is sending a significant number of its own missile defense capabilities to the Gulf while requests by local states for missile defense equipment have only begun to be fulfilled in the last month. U.S. efforts still seem to be concentrated on bilateral relationships rather than working to create a “truly regional” security system.

Taken together, these stories indicate that while the United States is preparing to withdraw from Iraq, it’s not preparing to substantially shift from or even rethink the role it’s had for the last 30 years as the security guarantor of the Gulf.

JSOC-ing Al Qaeda Around The World

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

As indicated by a Washington Post story earlier in the week on the U.S. military’s clandestine involvement in operations in Yemen and the news that more special forces are headed there, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has been playing an increasingly central role in U.S. national security in many corners of the globe.

The clandestine nature of JSOC’s activities mean public information on its work is scant. But if you carefully look into press accounts from the world’s conflict zones — Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia — you will find JSOC there, among other places.

Conservatives who prattle on about President Obama’s being weak on terrorist groups fail to recognize that the Obama administration has used JSOC forces with increasing frequency around the world. The Obama administration may no longer use the phrase “global war on terror,” but one year into office, it’s clear that it hasn’t let up on aggressively pursuing terrorist networks around the world. Whether these efforts are making America safer in the overall is simply unknown — more than eight years after the 9/11 attacks, America still lacks empirical metrics to determine whether any of our global efforts are reducing these threats.

JSOC falls under the umbrella of the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), which has about 60,000 personnel. A Congressional Research Service report from last year offers a few useful facts about USSOCOM. The 2004 Unified Command Plan gave USSOCOM responsibility for synchronizing Pentagon plans against global terror networks and conducting global operations. It plays an important role in countering terrorist finance. In 2008, USSOCOM was assigned the role of synchronizing the Pentagon’s security force assistance programs around the world, and this is what David Ignatius was referring to in his column earlier this week. These security force assistance programs are a central national security policy tool, though one with real downsides if not managed properly. As my colleague Peter Juul noted in this post on Pakistan, if America’s bilateral military relationship is not handled properly, it could cancel out efforts to change the “transactional” nature of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship.

Relatively little public information is available on USSOCOM, but two recent speeches — one by Admiral Eric T. Olson, the USSOCOM’s top military commander last year and another in 2008 by Michael Vickers, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict — present an informative picture of just how wide-ranging the activities of USSOCOM are, including things that fall into categories that civilian agencies are charged with, too.

JSOC is just one component of the Special Operations Command efforts. Given its increasingly central role, however, it deserves more oversight from Congress and more attention in our national security discussions.

Biden Throws Down The Gauntlet And Sets Stage For Test Ban Ratification Push

Vice President Biden has an important op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal. In it, Biden firmly addresses one of the main arguments used by conservatives to oppose arms-control efforts, namely that the US nuclear stockpile is too unreliable to make further reductions. In response, Biden says the Administration is committed to reverse the previous decade of funding shortfalls in nuclear stockpile maintenance and will dramatically increase the budget for these programs:

Among the many challenges our administration inherited was the slow but steady decline in support for our nuclear stockpile and infrastructure, and for our highly trained nuclear work force. … For almost a decade, our laboratories and facilities have been underfunded and undervalued. … The budget we will submit to Congress on Monday both reverses this decline and enables us to implement the president’s nuclear-security agenda. To achieve these goals, our budget devotes $7 billion for maintaining our nuclear-weapons stockpile and complex, and for related efforts. This commitment is $600 million more than Congress approved last year. And over the next five years we intend to boost funding for these important activities by more than $5 billion.

This should address the stated concerns of conservative GOP Senators who wrote a letter last month worrying about the state of the nuclear stockpile in the face of future cuts in the nuclear arsenal. In other words, conservatives argue, reasonably enough, that if you have fewer nukes then we have to be sure that the remaining nuclear weapons are good to go. The problem however, is that instead of focusing on expanding resources to programs that maintain the reliability of our remaining nuclear weapons, prominent conservatives in the Senate stamp their feet demanding that we start building new nuclear weapons. This is like instead of taking your perfectly fine car to get a tune-up, you just decide to buy an entirely new one. It’s wasteful and unnecessary.

Numerous studies have pointed out that there is no need to build a new nuclear warhead or test nuclear weapons as long as there is adequate funding to maintain the nuclear stockpile. Biden’s increase in funding will ensure that, as the Arms Control Association notes, “the United States can continue maintain a reliable arsenal without resuming nuclear testing or building newly-designed nuclear warheads.”

Yet many conservatives prefer just to pretend these studies don’t exist. Senators like Jon Kyl (R-AZ), want to build new nuclear weapons and want to conduct new nuclear tests and pledge to fight tooth and nail against ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Many are predicting that because of this opposition, CTBT will go nowhere in the Senate, as it needs 67 votes. But with still 59 Democrats, and with Republican non-proliferation advocates like Senator Dick Lugar, not to mention the Senators from Utah and Nevada that have a strong opposition to ever testing nukes again, there is a fighting chance that this treaty could get passed. Importantly, Biden didn’t walk away from it and included CTBT ratification as part of the Administration’s core nuclear security agenda in his op-ed:

Our budget request is just one of several closely related and equally important initiatives giving life to the president’s Prague agenda. Others include…and pursuing ratification and entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Instead of shirking from the fight, the Administration should plow forward and push the CTBT, because as former Republican Senator from Utah, Jake Garn, wrote today in the Deseret News, “Ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty will make our country safer.”

Are We Willing To Sink Venezuelan Ships?

Last night the U.S. Senate showed that, as opposed to the gridlock that prevents the passing of needed reforms that would actually benefit the American people, when it comes to ill-conceived, poorly designed measures that provide legislators an easy way feel like they’re “getting tough” on something or other, it can move with a quickness.

In a voice vote, the Senate passed a new sanctions passage targeting “gasoline imports in a bid to force Tehran to bow to global pressure to freeze its suspect nuclear program.”

The sweeping measure, which passed by voice vote, must now be blended with a similar bill in the House of Representatives to forge a compromise measure for both sides to approve and send to President Barack Obama.

The Senate bill aims to punish non-Iranian firms that do business in Iran’s energy sector or help the Islamic republic produce or import refined petroleum products like gasoline by blocking them from doing business in the US market.

Indicating that they intend to keep up the pressure on the administration to immediately adopt these sanctions once passed, on Wednesday a group of senators — Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IL), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), David Vitter (R-LA), John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Robert Casey (D-PA), and Sen, Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — sent President Obama a letter “urging” him “to make full use of them.” This despite clear past signals from the administration that the indiscriminate sanctions in the bill actually works against the goal of targeted sanctions and tightening pre-existing sanctions. (Gregg Carlstrom notes that administration figures have recently stepped up their talk of sanctions, but I don’t think qualifies as an “endorsement” of this package as much as an acceptance that it was going through, and of the need to work with Congress over its implementation.)

As I have noted in previous posts, there’s not a single analyst in Washington — or anywhere — who has credibly described how these particular sanctions stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon — let alone advance “the human rights and peaceful aspirations of the Iranian people,” as the senators’ letter claims.

Recently, two leading Iran experts, Patrick Clawson of the conservative-leaning Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations, came out against new sanctions. Speaking at an event at the Washington Institute, Takeyh called sanctions “a fallback policy for the United States often when the situation becomes complicated,” and that he was “not comfortable with the idea of sanctions as a solution to the Iran problem, whether it’s the domestic problem, or the nuclear problem.”

Clawson reminded the audience that there are a number of sanctions on the books that have effectively slowed Iran’s nuclear program, and said that he was interested in “more vigorous enforcement of tough dual-use sanctions than I am necessarily about extending the list of sanctions.”

The United Nations sanctions are often dismissed as being “token.” That seems to me to be a profound misreading. It is very important to have dual-use sanctions, it is very important to have sanctions targeted at the nuclear and missile programs, because anything we can do to slow down their programs helps us. There are two clocks ticking — that’s an old cliche, but it’s true, the democracy clock seems to be ticking a lot faster than it used to be at the moment. So anything we can do to slow down the nuclear clock is, therefore, in fact, an accomplishment. Iran has been at this nuclear business for twenty years. Twenty years and they’re still not there, and the reason is, in no small part, because we have forced them to reinvent the wheel repeatedly. And recently some of the things they’ve been able to acquire from abroad don’t seem to work quite as designed, and malfunction on a remarkably consistent basis. That is good, and there’s much more that we can do.

On the specific question of gasoline sanctions such as those contained in the package just passed, Clawson warned “There are a lot of implementation challenges to gasoline sanctions, and I don’t like adopting a sanction which, in fact, we’re not prepared to implement.”

So I would not adopt a sanction on gasoline imports into Iran unless we are prepared to sink Venezuelan ships carrying that gasoline. Now, if we are prepared to do that, then let’s talk. But if you’re not prepared to sink those Venezuelan ships carrying that gasoline to Iran, don’t adopt the measures just to make you feel good, because it’s going to make you look impotent.

This gets at the inherently escalatory nature of sanctions. When the first round doesn’t work well enough, there’s the impulse to add more and more, and eventually you need to do dumb things like sink oil tankers to show you “mean business.” Casting a vote for more Iran sanctions may give legislators a warm feeling, but they will do little to solve the problem of the Iranian nuclear program, and make the U.S. look impotent in the process.

Despite Numerous High-Profile Foreign Policy Addresses, Feaver Attacks Obama For Avoiding Topic In SOTU

Peter Feaver has a piece at Shadow Government where he attacks the President for not focusing his State of the Union on foreign policy. This is a weak attack. Feaver, a former Bush administration official and currently a professor at Duke, writes:

The foreign policy headline of the State of the Union speech is how far the president went to avoid generating a national security headline. In one of the longest of recent SOTU’s, the president’s speechwriters devoted some of the shortest space and least consequential language to national security… This will be a very consequential year for U.S. foreign policy, but little of that is foreshadowed in this speech.

Feaver is right that foreign policy was not the focus of the speech, but the implication that the President is desperate to avoid a foreign policy “headline” is just bizarre and the idea that he needed to devote more time to foreign policy speech is wrong for a few reasons.

First, the President has very recently given many many prominent speeches about foreign policy. It is simply absurd to accuse the President of not focusing on, or talking enough about, foreign policy. Did Feaver not see last month when the President was in Oslo giving a lengthy speech solely on his vision of foreign affairs and national security when he received the Nobel Prize? And did he not see a month before when the President went to West Point to give a prime time address on his Afghanistan strategy. And finally, in the first few weeks of January the President talked at length about the failed underpants bomber and responding to terrorism. He hasn’t given a major domestic policy address, since his September speech to Congress.

Second, the country is going through a tremendous economic crisis. This is what the country really really cares about. This also happens to be what the political debate is focused on. Should the President have flipped the speech and talked for 2/3rds of the time about foreign policy, it would have been seen as politically tone-deaf for not addressing the concerns of the country.

Third, it is not like he didn’t talk about foreign policy. He hit on Afghanistan, terrorism, and Haiti. The President reconfirmed his commitment to withdraw troops from Iraq and indicated a new START treaty with Russia is imminent. He also highlighted the upcoming April Nuclear Security Summit that will seek to control loose nuclear materials. Finally, he expressed a commitment to human rights in Iran and warned Iran that they were facing sanctions. The President was no doubt checking the boxes in the foreign policy section, but that is to a large degree what the State of the Union is about – informing the public about what is going on.

As a foreign policy person, I would always like the President and the political class to focus more on my issue areas, but the fact is the President has spoken prominently and at length about foreign policy to the country. Feaver really seems to be complaining just to complain.

Looking Toward A Future Gulf Security Architecture

As the United States prepares to withdraw its combat troops from Iraq this summer and the diplomatic confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program continues, it’s important to think about what the security structure of the Persian Gulf region will look like in the near future. By the end of 2011, the United States will have no military presence in Iraq for the first time in eight and half years. Even if the U.S. and Iraqi governments negotiate a new arrangement for some U.S. troops to stay and provide technical support and training, the number of American troops remaining will not be very large.

In the Gulf, the United States will probably maintain a significant naval presence. Right now, the U.S. Navy maintains one aircraft carrier strike group and one expeditionary strike group in the Gulf and Arabian Sea area. This naval posture has been relatively constant since the First Gulf War in 1991, and is unlikely to change after U.S. troops withdraw from Iraq in 2011. In addition, there will likely be about 140,000 U.S. and NATO troops still in Afghanistan that a carrier strike group could support. With the war in Afghanistan likely to continue, long-range U.S. Air Force strike and support aircraft will probably remain based at undisclosed locations in the Gulf region.

As a result of the withdrawal of its land forces from the region, security assistance to Gulf states will become a major component of U.S. strategy for the Gulf. President Bush laid the first groundwork for this evolution when his administration announced a $20 billion arms package for Gulf allies like Saudi Arabia in July 2007. Since that time, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency has notified Congress of some $35.5 billion in potential arms sales to Gulf Arab states.

Among the items requested by these states, primarily Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, are attack and utility helicopters, antitank missiles, and precision-guided bombs. But the most expensive possible purchases were those of anti-aircraft and anti-missile missile systems such as the Patriot PAC-3 and THAAD missile systems.

These potential sales go through the Foreign Military Sales program, a process by which the United States contracts for weapons systems on behalf of a foreign government and that foreign government then pays the United States for the weapons in question. However, the Defense Department has not awarded contracts for many of the major arms sales since the Bush administration’s July 2007 announcement. Only the UAE’s orders for 14 UH-60M Black Hawk utility helicopters and Patriot PAC-3 missile systems have been awarded, and these awards only came over the last month.

So far the Obama administration hasn’t promulgated an idea of what it expects Gulf security to look like once U.S. troops leave Iraq. Though the Bush administration originally had no intention of leaving Iraq, their solution to the problem of a rising Iran — empowered by the removal of its rival Saddam Hussein — was to dump weapons on friendly local states, while leaving the process by which these states obtained weapons largely dormant, apart from official notifications of possible arms sales.

As the Obama administration thinks about how the United States should manage the security transition in the Gulf, they should move beyond the Bush administration’s arms bazaar policy and toward an integrated security system for the Gulf. Rather than, say, selling as many anti-missile systems like THAAD or the Patriot PAC-3 to as many local states as possible, the goal should be to establish a cooperative anti-missile system that links friendly Gulf states together in a collective security arrangement.

Time is running out for the Obama administration to set forth its vision of the Gulf’s future security architecture. Withdrawing from Iraq and leaving the future security of the region up to a group of disorganized and competitive states is the worst option it can pursue.

Did Torture Apologist Thiessen Get Played By The CIA?

Yesterday, Jeff Stein reported that “John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about.”

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.[...]

Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up. [...]

“I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”[...]

“Now we know,” Kiriakou goes on, “that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied.”

Kiriakou also claims in his book “that the disinformation he helped spread was a CIA dirty trick: ‘In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own.’”

Kiriakou’s disavowal of his claims drew a frantic response from Bush administration speechwriter and leading torture apologist Marc Thiessen, who has cited the Abu Zubaydah stories repeatedly in his work. Thiessen insisted “I have spoken to the people who — unlike Kirakou — were in the room for the interrogations of Zubaydah, KSM and other terrorists held by the CIA.”

Thiessen admits, then, that he, like Kiriakou, wasn’t actually there for any of these interrogations, and that he, like Kiriakou, got all of his information second-hand. This raises the interesting question of whether Thiessen got played by his CIA sources, who saw Thiessen as a willing dupe in their effort to cover their behinds, as Kiriakou now claims to have been.

Meanwhile, Tom Ricks shares his account of a recent lecture given by intelligence and interrogation expert Army Col. Stuart Herrington. According to Ricks, “was one of the first people to blow the whistle on Abu Ghraib and on the broader abuse of prisoners that was occurring in many locations in Iraq back then.”

One of the most striking aspects of [Herrington's] talk is the cold professional contempt he has for Cheney, Rumsfeld and others who not only encouraged a brutal approach, but were amateurish in doing so.

Herrington began his talk by looking back to Vietnam, where he insisted on providing his prisoners(and intelligence targets) with “unconditional decent treatment-food, medical care and clothing.” He showed his Vietnamese colleagues, fond of using “water torture and electrocution,” that “One can employ legions of effective stratagems to achieve control over a potential recruit, but brutality, abuse and torture have no place.”

His bottom line:

“There was no room on our team for charlatans who believed in sleep deprivation, inducing hypothermia, stress positions, face slapping, forced nudity, water boarding, blaring heavy metal music, or other amateurish, ineffective and ethically flawed tricks.”

As of January 20, 2009, that’s America’s bottom line too.

Colin Powell: ‘Nuclear Weapons Are Useless’

General Colin Powell in an introduction to a new film called the Nuclear Tipping Point didn’t mince words. In a forceful and direct presentation, the former Cold Warrior talked about his experience in dealing with nuclear weapons throughout his military career. Powell discussed the nuclear planning that he conducted against the Soviets in Europe and the responsibility of having oversight of 28,000 nuclear weapons as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Through these experiences, Powell concluded that nuclear weapons are “useless” and ought to be eliminated.

POWELL: The more I got into nuclear weapons. The more I realized that these weapons must never be used. And then I became Chairman of the Joint chiefs of staff in 1989 and I had 28,000 nuclear weapons under my supervision. And every morning I looked to see where the Russian submarines were off the coast of Virginia and how far away those missions were from Washington. I kept track where the Russian missiles were in Europe and in the Soviet Union. The one thing that I convinced myself after all these years of exposure to the use of nuclear weapons is that they were useless. They could not be used. If you can have deterence with an even lower number of weapons, well then why stop there, why not continue on, why not get rid of them altogether…This is the moment when we have to move forward and all of us come together to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and eliminate them from the face of the earth.

Watch it:

Powell’s call for the elimination of nuclear weapons comes at a critical time. With President Obama in need of 67 votes in the Senate to ratify two treaties critical to the nuclear non-proliferation agenda, he must convince 8 GOP Senators to abandon the politics of obstruction and support these efforts that serve to enhance America’s security and reduce the likelihood for nuclear attack. Powell could certainly be a powerful force in that effort.

Furthermore, Powell’s statements just further expose a growing divide among the right. Nuclear Tipping Point was put together by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and is part of the robust efforts of former Secretaries George Schultz, Bill Perry, Henry Kissinger and Senator Sam Nunn to warn of the dangers of nuclear terrorism and to work for the elimination of nuclear weapons. While former senior Republican national security officials like Powell, Kissinger, Schultz, and Brent Scowcroft call for reductions in nuclear weapons, neoconservatives like Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) actually favor building new nuclear weapons.

U.S. Foreign Policy Is Not A Craps Game »

Before getting to Robert Kagan’s call for President Obama to just go ahead already and roll the dice on Iranian regime change, a little background.

One of the most interesting articles written during the 2008 presidential campaign was Michael Scherer’s and Michael Weisskopf’s July 2008 analysis of Barack Obama and John McCain approach to gambling. “For both men,” Scherer and Weisskopf wrote, “games of chance have been not just a hobby but also a fundamental feature in their development as people and politicians“:

For Obama, weekly poker games with lobbyists and fellow state senators helped cement his position as a rising star in Illinois politics. For McCain, jaunts to the craps table helped burnish his image as a political hot dog who relished the thrill of a good fight, even if the risk of failure was high. [...]

In the past decade, [McCain] has played on Mississippi riverboats, on Indian land, in Caribbean craps pits and along the length of the Las Vegas Strip. Back in 2005 he joined a group of journalists at a magazine-industry conference in Puerto Rico, offering betting strategy on request. “Enjoying craps opens up a window on a central thread constant in John’s life,” says John Weaver, McCain’s former chief strategist, who followed him to many a casino. “Taking a chance, playing against the odds.”

When you look at candidates’ waged the rest of their campaigns, I think this turns out to have been impressively predictive. McCain the crazy craps player repeatedly went for broke with questionable risky moves, declaring himself a Georgian in response to the August 2008 Georgia-Russia conflict, selecting the unknown (and, as we now know, un-vetted) Sarah Palin as his vice-president, suspending his campaign and rushing back to Washington in an attempt to signal that he “got” the economic crisis, and trying to delay the candidates’ first debate, to which Obama the methodical poker player responded with a successful raise.

In addition to his status as a war-hero, this audacious approach to politics, particularly foreign policy, also speaks to why neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan originally identified McCain in the late 1990’s as an ideal salesman for their “national greatness conservatism,” which John Judis described in his 2006 profile of McCain’s neocon conversion as “a philosophy that linked the development of American character to the exercise of power overseas” and an “emphasis on America’s responsibility to transform the world.”

What this approach essentially boils down to is enshrining the adage “history favors the bold” as a foreign policy imperative, while ignoring its somewhat lesser-known corollary, “history frowns upon the recklessly boneheaded.” (Which one are you? You’ll find out soon!)

All of these tendencies are on display in Robert Kagan’s op-ed today, in which he gushes “President Obama has a once-in-a-generation opportunity over the next few months to help make the world a dramatically safer place… by helping the Iranian people achieve a new form of government.” More »« Less