AMERICAN FUTURE

Based on this voter profile from Pew, the “typical” American voter’s ideology is much closer to McCain’s than to either Clinton’s or Obama’s:

NBC just declared Hillary the winner. Pity the poor pundits and pollsters. An epidemic of foot in mouth disease.

An NBC reporter’s confession:

People line up to hear Obama in Lebanon, NH.

The last time I saw anything like this was when Bobby Kennedy was running for the Democratic nomination in 1968.

It’s hard to tell from this editorial:

All of the Republicans want to continue President Bush’s disaster of a war in Iraq, including Mr. McCain.

[ . . . ]

The Democrats are united in their opposition to the war, but none have spelled out a persuasive plan for getting American troops home without setting off a wider conflagration.

What course would the NYT follow? The editorial doesn’t say.

Patriots 38, Giants 35

It was a great, nail-biting game. As a transplanted Bostonian old enough to remember viewing the Miami Dolphins’ perfect 1972 season, I’m elated.

I love sports. There are good guys. There are bad guys. You always know who’s ahead and who wins. There’s a definitive ending. There’s no gray area—partisanship without qualms. It’s tribalism without the nasty consequences (except, perhaps, in the case of soccer fans—especially British soccer fans). It’s all so simple. If only the rest of life were like sports.

Here’s my tribute to quarterback Tom Brady—the sixth-round draft choice (!) made good great:

If you’re going to read just one opinion on the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, read this one by Dennis Ross. Because it should be read in its entirity, I’m not summarizing it, except to cite his final paragraph:

Sadly, it’s now easier for Iran to proceed unimpeded with its nuclear plans. It is far less likely to face the economic (or potentially military) pressures that in 2003 might have persuaded those in the Iranian leadership that the costs of developing their nuclear capabilities were too high. Who in the Iranian elite will argue that or oppose Ahmadinejad’s approach to nukes now? No doubt, that is not what the authors of the NIE sought, but here poor statecraft has trumped our improved efforts at spycraft.

Friedman has just returned from the Bahrain security conference, at which “all the buzz” was about the latest NIE on Iran. Friedman says that it left every Arab and European expert he spoke to “baffled” — “not in its conclusions, but by why those conclusions were framed in a way that is sure to reduce America’s leverage to negotiate with Tehran.”

In his New York Times op-ed, Friedman presents an interesting analogy:

The Gulf Arabs feel like they have this neighbor who has been a drug dealer for 18 years. Recently, this neighbor has been very visibly growing poppies for heroin in his backyard in violation of the law. He’s also been buying bigger and better trucks to deliver drugs. You can see them parked in his driveway.

In the past year, though, because of increased police patrols and all the neighbors threatening to do something, this suspicious character has shut down the laboratory in his basement to convert poppies into heroin. In the wake of that, the police declared that he is no longer a drug dealer.

“But wait,” say the Gulf Arabs, “he’s still growing poppies. He was using them for heroin right up to 2003. Now he says he’s in the flower business. He’s not in the flower business. He’s dealing drugs. And he’s still expanding the truck fleet to deliver them. How can you say he’s no longer a drug dealer?”

Sorry, say the police. We have a very technical, legal definition of drug-dealing, and your neighbor no longer fits it.

Well put.

I understand and respect the views of those who argue that torture—more specifically, waterboarding—is immoral and should never, under any circumstances whatsoever, be employed. Yes, torture is a form of immorality. But it is not the only form of immorality, and there are instances in which the forms conflict with each other.

Before dealing with the current issue—which has been brought into sharp focus by John Kiriakou’s interview on ABC News, let us look back some seventy years. As the war clouds gathered over Europe, pacifists were as devoted to avoiding war—or perhaps better said, to peace at any price—as are those who today affirm that torture should never be employed. While never representing the majority opinion in either the United States or England, pacifism was a force to be reckoned with in both countries.

Among the most prominent pacifists on this side of the Atlantic was Oswald Garrison Villard, who for many years wrote a weekly column for The Nation. Among the numerous columns in which he set forth his pacifist sentiments is the one (dated November 6, 1937) from which the following excerpt is drawn:

I have not lost faith in the power of moral indignation to limit and control international wrongdoing if it is properly directed and adequately expressed . . . The world’s situation can be put in a few words: We know that force heals and corrects nothing; that war leaves only worse evils in its train than those it sought to eradicate. We know that the victors in a war pay as high a price as the vanquished . . . Those cynics who believe only in force or who think that international disaster is inevitable are for placing all their faith in more weapons and more wars . . . Lose faith in the the weapons of the spirit? Not I. Having seen the utter failure of mass murder to right wrong or advance the human race one iota, I am more than ever a believer in passive resistance, in spiritual revolt, in the castigation of offenders by the most immoderate language and by non-intercourse . . . On what side do you wish to fight, friends? With those who worship might and barbarism or those who stand with the angels and have an abiding faith in human nature and a better world?

From the other side of the pond, Kingsley Martin, in the April 1938 issue of The Political Quarterly, described, in “The Pacifists Dilemma To-Day,” the mindset of “Liberals” and “Social Democrats”:

For the mass of Liberals and Social Democrats the real menace of Hitler was that he confronted them with a choice of extermination or of behaving as he did himself. That is the real root of his success and of the confusion of his enemies. Social Democrats are not necessarily cowards because they compromise and do not fight when Fascism attacks; they fail to meet the challenge because civil and international war, which seem to be the alternatives to surrender, are themselves a betrayal of the democratic creed and, quite possibly, merely another and even bloodier route to the Fascism they are called upon to defeat.

This quote from Martin’s article, to a greater extent than Villard’s column, resonates today. It is often said that Americans are not “that kind” of people and that any use of torture, regardless of the circumstances, reduces the moral distance between us and our terrorist enemies. By adopting the methods of our foes in our effort to defeat them, we become more like them. They are immoral; so are we.

Nobody now believes that Hitler could have been defeated without the use of force—an immoral act, in the pacifists’ view. It takes no great effort to imagine what would have become of the world had the resort to military action against Nazi Germany not been taken. Democracy survived because we did not follow the pacifists’ advice. By abandoning one precept of morality—thou shalt not kill, we sustained another—freedom. It was worth it.

In my post on John Kiriakou’s interview, I highlighted these words from the former CIA operative:

The threat information [Zubaydah] provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

Any condemnation of the waterboarding of Zubaydah as an immoral act must also consider whether, given his lofty position in al-Qaeda, it would have been a greater immorality to have not done everything possible to prevent the loss of additional American lives, which could have numbered in the thousands or tens of thousands. Where is the morality in that? Could the families of the victims been told that it could not be helped, that we had in our possession a senior terrorist leader who, because of his position, would have knowledge of planned future attacks, but that our unwillingness to descend to his level and our morality forbade us to employ “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Would the mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers of the victims have understood?

My view, then, in light of the circumstances that prevailed at the time, a lesser morality was violated to preserve a greater morality. More succinctly, in this instance, the end justified the means, as did the willingness at an earlier time to confront Nazi Germany.

From ABC News, with my emphases [the complete transcript is here and here]:

A leader of the CIA team that captured the first major al Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah, says subjecting him to waterboarding was torture but necessary.

In the first public comment by any CIA officer involved in handling high-value al Qaeda targets, John Kiriakou, now retired, said the technique broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds.

“The next day, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate,” said Kiriakou in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News’ “World News With Charles Gibson” and “Nightline.”

“From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said.

“The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

Kiriakou said the feeling in the months after the 9/11 attacks was that interrogators did not have the time to delve into the agency’s bag of other interrogation tricks.

“Those tricks of the trade require a great deal of time—much of the time—and we didn’t have that luxury. We were afraid that there was another major attack coming,” he said.

Kiriakou says he did not know that the interrogation of Zubaydah was being secretly recorded by the CIA and had no idea the tapes had been destroyed.

Now retired, Kiriakou, who declined to use the enhanced interrogation techniques, says he has come to believe that water boarding is torture but that perhaps the circumstances warranted it.

“Like a lot of Americans, I’m involved in this internal, intellectual battle with myself weighing the idea that waterboarding may be torture versus the quality of information that we often get after using the waterboarding technique,” Kiriakou told ABC News. “And I struggle with it.”

But he says the urgency in the wake of 9/ll led to a desire to do everything possible to get actionable intelligence.

That began with Abu Zubaydah’s capture following a series of raids in which Kiriakou co-led a team of CIA officers, FBI agents, a Port Authority police officer named Tom McHale and Pakistani police, including a SWAT team.

And, in the case of Abu Zubayda, it ended with waterboarding.

“What happens if we don’t waterboard a person, and we don’t get that nugget of information, and there’s an attack,” Kiriakou said. “I would have trouble forgiving myself.“

The former intelligence officer says the interrogators’ activities were carefully directed from Langley, Va., each step of the way.

“It wasn’t up to individual interrogators to decide, ‘Well, I’m gonna slap him.’ Or, ‘I’m going to shake him.’ Or, ‘I’m gonna make him stay up for 48 hours.’

“Each one of these steps, even though they’re minor steps, like the intention shake, or the open-handed belly slap, each one of these had to have the approval of the deputy director for operations,” Kiriakou told ABC News.

“The cable traffic back and forth was extremely specific,” he said. “And the bottom line was these were very unusual authorities that the agency got after 9/11. No one wanted to mess them up. No one wanted to get in trouble by going overboard. So it was extremely deliberate.”

And it was always a last resort.

“That’s why so few people were waterboarded. I think the agency has said that two people were waterboarded, Abu Zubaydah being one, and it’s because you really wanted it to be a last resort because we didn’t want these false confessions. We didn’t want wild goose chases,” Kiriakou said.

And they were faced with men like Abu Zubaydah, Kiriakou says, who held critical and timely intelligence.

“A former colleague of mine asked him during the conversation one day, ‘What would you do if we decided to let you go one day?’ And he said, ‘I would kill every American and Jew I could get my hands on…It’s nothing personal. You’re a nice guy. But this is who I am.’”

In that context, at that time, Kiriakou says he felt waterboarding was something the United States needed to do.

“At the time, I felt that waterboarding was something that we needed to do. And as time has passed, and as September 11th has, you know, has moved farther and farther back into history, I think I’ve changed my mind,” he told ABC News.

Part of his decision appears to be an ethical one; another part, perhaps, simply pragmatic.

“I think we’re chasing them all over the world. I think we’ve had a great deal of success chasing them…and, as a result, waterboarding, at least right now, is unnecessary,” Kirikou said.

Brian Ross: “Did it compromise American principles? Or did it save American lives? Or both?”

John Kiriakou: “I think both. It may have compromised our principles at least in the short term. And I think it’s good that we’re having a national debate about this. We should be debating this, and Congress should be talking about it because, I think, as a country, we have to decide if this is something that we want to do as a matter of policy. I’m not saying now that we should, but, at the very least, we should be talking about it. It shouldn’t be secret. It should be out there as part of the national debate.”

A CIA spokesperson declined to specifically address Kiriakou’s comments.

In a statement, the CIA reiterated its long standing position that “the United States does not conduct or condone torture. The CIA’s terrorist interrogation effort has always been small, carefully run, lawful and highly productive.”

“A disastrous possible policy – military attack on Iran – has been headed off by a misguided, misinterpreted intelligence report.”

“report or no report, the danger that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons is real, and may even have increased.”

In the Guardian’s “Comment Is Free,” Jonathan Schell provides one of the most insightful perspectives on the NIE that I’ve run across. You’ll profit from reading it in its entirity.

His views are all the more interesting as he is a long-time contributor to the left-wing Nation.

Investors—especially bond investors—don’t like uncertainty. When the perceived level of risk increases, bond prices drop to compensate for the greater chance that the issuer won’t be around to repay the principal when the bonds mature.

It works in the other direction, too. If confidence in the entity that issued the bonds—be it a company or a country— increases, the prices of its bonds will rise.

As Bloomberg recently noted, Iraqi bonds have been doing very well:

Holders of Iraqi bonds are giving President George W. Bush a vote of confidence. The country’s $2.7 billion of 5.8 percent bonds due in 2028 returned 15.2 percent since July, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. index data. Only Ecuador’s debt gained more, rising 18 percent . . . “We’ve had a shift in sentiment,’’ said Gorky Urquieta, who oversees $14 billion of emerging-market debt at ING Investment Management in The Hague. ING started buying the securities last month, and is now among the biggest holders along with San Mateo, California-based Franklin Templeton Investments and Baltimore-based T. Rowe Price Group Inc., data compiled by Bloomberg show. “There’s optimism the surge is starting to pay off,’’ he said.

Consider the following:

• The CIA’s erased tapes date from 2002 and show “enhanced interrogation techniques”—presumably waterboarding—being applied to Abu Zabaida, among others.

• Also in 2002, four members of Congress—including now Speaker of the House Pelosi—attended a secret meeting at which they were shown “a CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects.” Among the techniques was waterboarding, and among the detainees that received such treatment was Abu Zabaida.
  

Same year (2002), same interrogation technique (waterboarding), same detainee (Abu Zabaida). Could it be that the erased tapes are of the secret meeting that Pelosi and other members of Congress attended? If so, what a scandal it would make.

The sources for my speculation are two articles in today’s Washington Post.

In “Justice, CIA Begin Videotape Inquiry,” the Post reports that

Officials and sources have identified the two terrorist suspects on the [erased]tapes [from 2002] as Zayn Abidin Muhammed Hussein Abu Zubaida, a close associate of Osama bin Laden, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was captured in the United Arab Emirates in 2002.

It is not clear which aggressive tactics are shown. Intelligence officials have identified Abu Zubaida as one of three detainees subjected to waterboarding . . .

In “Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002,” the Post reports that

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding . . . on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

[ . . . ]

U.S. officials knowledgeable about the CIA’s use of the technique say it was used on three individuals—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; Zayn Abidin Muhammed Hussein Abu Zubaida, a senior al-Qaeda member and Osama bin Laden associate captured in Pakistan in March 2002; and a third detainee who has not been publicly identified.

“She” is House leader Nancy Pelosi; “It” is waterboarding.

From today’s Washington Post:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

“The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough,” said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

[ . . . ]

Yet long before “waterboarding” entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.

With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).

Individual lawmakers’ recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. “Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing,” said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. “And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.”

“In fairness, the environment was different then because we were closer to Sept. 11 and people were still in a panic,” said one U.S. official present during the early briefings. “But there was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The attitude was, ‘We don’t care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.’ ”

By the time objections were raised, the practice had stopped. Only the cynics among us would conclude that political—not moral—considerations were behind the change. Count me a cynic.

From Rasmussen Reports:

Do you believe Iran has stopped its nuclear weapons program?

Yes: 18%
No: 66%

From Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s New York Times op-ed:

The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication, flog each of them with 100 stripes: Let no compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by Allah, if you believe in Allah and the Last Day. (Koran 24:2)

In the last few weeks, in three widely publicized episodes [in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Bangladesh], we have seen Islamic justice enacted in ways that should make Muslim moderates rise up in horror . . .

It is often said that Islam has been “hijacked” by a small extremist group of radical fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are said to be moderates.

But where are the moderates? Where are the Muslim voices raised over the terrible injustice of incidents like these? How many Muslims are willing to stand up and say, in the case of the girl from Qatif [Saudi Arabia], that this manner of justice is appalling, brutal and bigoted — and that no matter who said it was the right thing to do, and how long ago it was said, this should no longer be done?

Usually, Muslim groups like the Organization of the Islamic Conference are quick to defend any affront to the image of Islam. The organization, which represents 57 Muslim states, sent four ambassadors to the leader of my political party in the Netherlands asking him to expel me from Parliament after I gave a newspaper interview in 2003 noting that by Western standards some of the Prophet Muhammad’s behavior would be unconscionable. A few years later, Muslim ambassadors to Denmark protested the cartoons of Muhammad and demanded that their perpetrators be prosecuted.

But while the incidents in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and India have done more to damage the image of Islamic justice than a dozen cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, the organizations that lined up to protest the hideous Danish offense to Islam are quiet now.

I wish there were more Islamic moderates. For example, I would welcome some guidance from that famous Muslim theologian of moderation, Tariq Ramadan. But when there is true suffering, real cruelty in the name of Islam, we hear, first, denial from all these organizations that are so concerned about Islam’s image. We hear that violence is not in the Koran, that Islam means peace, that this is a hijacking by extremists and a smear campaign and so on. But the evidence mounts up.

Islamic justice is a proud institution, one to which more than a billion people subscribe, at least in theory, and in the heart of the Islamic world it is the law of the land. But take a look at the verse above: more compelling even than the order to flog adulterers is the command that the believer show no compassion. It is this order to choose Allah above his sense of conscience and compassion that imprisons the Muslim in a mindset that is archaic and extreme.

If moderate Muslims believe there should be no compassion shown to the girl from Qatif, then what exactly makes them so moderate?

When a “moderate” Muslim’s sense of compassion and conscience collides with matters prescribed by Allah, he should choose compassion. Unless that happens much more widely, a moderate Islam will remain wishful thinking.

Good questions.

I thought “changed everything” was a phrase reserved for 9/11. I was wrong.

From Variety:

The latest National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran discontinued its nuclear weapons program four years ago has claimed one casualty: CNN has postponed speculative documentary “We Were Warned—Iran Goes Nuclear.”

The two-hour spec, which was slated for Dec. 12 under the “CNN Presents” banner, was “set partially in the future,” featuring a what-if scenario as former government officials—playing fictional cabinet members—debate how to deal with the Iranian threat.

That special was “based on a different set of rules and a different set of conditions,” said CNN veep-senior exec producer Mark Nelson, noting that the surprising NIE report “changed everything.”

Some Americans—Republicans and, even more so, Independents—have become more optimistic in the past month. But not Democrats.

Democratic bloggers like to refer to themselves as the “reality-based” community. A better moniker for a community whose perceptions are so deeply entrenched that they can’t be altered by changing facts is “reality-denial.”

The complete Gallup report is here.

The New York Times reports that, according to senior intelligence and government officials, “American intelligence agencies reversed their view about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program after they obtained notes last summer from the deliberations of Iranian military officials involved in the weapons development program.”

Read the complete article here.

I don’t always agree with him (or anybody else, for that matter), but this post hits the nail on the head.