LFTC - Letter From The Capitol

LFTC - Index 8/31/09

5 posts: (1) The CIA's Senior Post-Waterboarding Asset--9/11, 3/11 & N/11; (2) Justice Department: "Ready, Fire, Aim!" (at CIA)--9/11, 3/11 & N/11; (3) Israel Surprise Strike on Iran Increasingly Likely?--Wobble Watch; (4) Free Speech: Federal Film Follies--The Home Front; (5) Public Diplomacy: Time to Reset--Us v. Them.

LFTC - The CIA's Senior Post-Waterboarding Asset

A Washington Post 3-pager offers rich details on how 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad became an intelligence asset--after he was deprived of sleep & forced to wear diapers & shackles for 7-1/2 days, and waterboarded 183 times.  Stephen Hayes at The Weekly Standard assesses the latest CIA revelations in a crisp article, and Thomnas Joscelyn adds more interrogation fruits detail.  In a WSJ op-ed ex-CIA office Reuel Marc Gerecht explains in a must-read why the CIA will not push the interrogation envelope unless a bigger 9/11 happens.  The folly of legalist excess--protecting detainees from nasty treatment short of torture--is perfectly illustrated.

Here once again is the pertinent section of the Code of Federal Regulations governing Implementation of the Convention Against Torture (8 CFR sec. 1208.18), that are the actual rules enacted pursuant to America's criminal torture statute, 18 U.S.C. 2340 (U.S.C. = United States Code).  The first 6 sections convey the heart of the issue: (1) torture is the intentional infliction of severe pain & suffering for such purposes as extracting confessions; (2) torture does not include lesser forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treat; (3) torture does not include pain inflicted incidental to lawful sanctions, including the death penalty; (4) torture entails threatened or actual prolonged physical or mental harm; (5) torture covers acts "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain & suffering"--the result must be actually intended; (6) torture can only be conducted upon someone in the offender's physical custody or control--battlefield combat doesn't apply.

The key here is that torture entails specific intent.to inflict severe long-term pain & suffering.  Under a general intent rule, if X throws a baseball at mortal enemy Y, intending to harm Y, but instead hits best friend Z, whom X did not intend to harm, X is liable for the tort (civil wrong) or battery (an intentional unconsented contact).  Applying general intent, to intend an act is to intend its reasonably foreseeable consequences; one foreseeable outcome of throwing a ball at one target is to miss and hit another.  But under a specific intent rule X would NOT be liable to Z, because X intended to hit & harm Y.

On to Guantanamo: In waterboarding KSM, CIA interrogators did NOT intend to inflict lasting harm upon KSM.  They intended to inflict extreme temporary discomfort in waterboarding him; parading him around in diapers and shackles is surely degrading, sleep deprivation is perhaps cruel, and both are perhaps inhumane--our Western culture makes it hard for us to find any unpleasant treatment inhumane.

The above rules are America's 1995 enactment of the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT, signed Feb. 4, 1985).  NRO's Andy McCarthy's article, Eric Holder's Hidden Agenda, which I posted recently on LFTC, I re-post today because it bears directly on what Team Obama wants to do:

I believe the explanation lies in the Obama administration’s fondness for transnationalism, a doctrine of post-sovereign globalism in which America is seen as owing its principal allegiance to the international legal order rather than to our own Constitution and national interests.

Recall that the president chose to install former Yale Law School dean Harold Koh as his State Department’s legal adviser. Koh is the country’s leading proponent of transnationalism. He is now a major player in the administration’s deliberations over international law and cooperation. Naturally, membership in the International Criminal Court, which the United States has resisted joining, is high on Koh’s agenda. The ICC claims worldwide jurisdiction, even over nations that do not ratify its enabling treaty, notwithstanding that sovereign consent to jurisdiction is a bedrock principle of international law.

As a result, there have always been serious concerns that the ICC could investigate and try to indict American political, military, and intelligence officials for actions taken in defense of our country. Here it’s crucial to bear in mind that the United States (or at least the pre-Obama United States) has not seen eye-to-eye with Europe on significant national-security matters. European nations, for example, have accepted the 1977 Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, while the United States has rejected it. Protocol I extends protections to terrorists and imposes an exacting legal regime on combat operations, relying on such concepts as “proportional” use of force and rigorous distinction between military and civilian targets. That is, Protocol I potentially converts traditional combat operations into war crimes. Similarly, though the U.S. accepted the torture provisions of the U.N. Convention Against Torture (UNCAT), our nation rejected the UNCAT’s placing of “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” on a par with torture. By contrast, Europe generally accepts the UNCAT in toto.

#pageAs long as we haven’t ratified a couple of bad human-rights treaties, why should we care that Europe considers them binding? Because of the monstrosity known as “customary international law,” of which Koh is a major proponent. This theory holds that once new legal principles gain broad acceptance among nations and international organizations, they somehow transmogrify into binding law, even for nations that haven’t agreed to them. That is, the judgment of the “international community” (meaning, the judgment of left-wing academics and human-rights activists who hold sway at the U.N. and the European Union) supersedes the standards our citizens have adopted democratically. It is standard fare among transnational progressives to claim that Protocol I is now binding on the United States and that what they define as cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment is “tantamount to torture.”

And the transnational Left has still another treat in store: its notion of “universal jurisdiction.” This theory holds that individual nations have the power to prosecute actions that occur in other countries, even when they have no impact on the prosecuting nation. The idea is that some offenses — such as torture and war crimes — so offend the purported consensus of humanity (i.e., so offend left-wing sensibilities) that they may be prosecuted by any country that cares to take the initiative. In fact, many countries (the United States included) open their justice systems to civil suits against government officials — again, even if the country where the suit is filed has nothing to do with the alleged offenses.

Consider now the Constitution of the United States.  Specifically, consider Article VI, Clause 2, the Supremacy Clause:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

When America ratifies a treaty, it often does so conditionally--with specified reservations.  This is not minor technical stuff: President Woodrow Wilson's refusal to accept any compromise on the League of Nations Treaty resulted in the Senate rejecting ratification, in 1919.  Thus, in ratifying UNCAT, the US narrowed its application.  We define torture more narrowly than does UNCAT.  Some acts that constitute torture under UNCAT do not constitute torture under American law.  The Supremacy Clause says that American law prevails--our Founders & Framers did not break away from one foreign despotism to accept in its stead another.  What Holder and Harold Koh seek--Obama too--is just such a despotism: Using "customary international law" made outside the US to override the Supremacy Clause.

Bottom Line.  Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was not tortured, under the specific, narrow rules of American law.  By fair inference, after being subjected to enhanced Interrogation Techniques, KSM provided useful information that saved countless innocent lives.  If Team Obama gets its way, we will learn less from future senior terror detainees, save fewer lives, and find ourselves subjected to rule by foreign law imposed upon us without our Constitutional consent via Senate ratification.

LFTC - Justice Department: "Ready, Fire, Aim!" (at CIA)

On "Fox News Sunday" former VP Dick Cheney gave a wide-ranging interview to Chris Wallace (transcript--6 pages; video clip-- approx. 25 min.).  The CIA investigation was the centerpiece, but Cheney covered other matters as well.  DEFINITELY either read or see this one.  Asked by Wallace, "So even these cases where they went beyond specific legal authorization, you're OK with it?", Cheney answered: "I am."  Cheney noted that the documents released last Monday by the White House show that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad & Abu Zubaydah provided most of the intelligence re al-Qaeda that we garnered after 9/11; KSM & AZ were 2 of the 3 detainees who were waterboarded (the other was the mastermind of the Oct. 2000 attack on the destroyer USS Cole).  Cheney did endorse the stepped-up use of Predators by Team Obama.

Newt Gingrich calls for 44 to fire A-G Eric Holder for siccing a special counsel upon CIA interrogators who were already cleared by career Justice Department prosecutors.  An Andy McCarthy posting I missed in July shows one example of the kind of lawyer Holder is now hiring at Justice: a lady lawyer who worried that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad's guilty plea was not genuine.  Pajama's Media editor Jennifer Rubin offers the inside scoop at Justice: how Justice thoroughly reviewed CIA interrogations during Bush 43 and how Holder has politicized Justice to burnish his own "independent" credentials.  Read the details and weep.

Then read Joseph Finder's New York Times op-ed on CIA Double Jeopardy, which begins by juxtaposing Eric Holder Geneva Convention quotes from 2002 versus 2008.  Finder's must-read 2-pager notes that defense lawyers will cite the legal principle of estoppel--a concept that runs through many areas of law, holding that having taken one legal position, a party is estopped from changing position later on in pursuit of expedient legal advantage---in making their case.   Finder also notes that violating the principle of institutional continuity in matters like this undermines the legitimacy of governmental action itself.

Bottom Line.  Even if all those probed by the special counsel are exonerated, and even if all legal fees are paid for defending anyone charged and acquitted, immense, irreparable damage has been done to our intelligence community.  No administration's assurance of protection for good faith action can retain value, because no future administration need feel bound by same.  Errors of judgment made under a complex set of rules face possible harsh judgment in future administrations even if forgiven initially.  Our enemies can rejoice, while we repent at leisure--in all likelihood, it will be a painful repentance.

LFTC - Israel Surprise Strike on Iran Increasingly Likely?

Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes in a Los Angeles Times op-ed that history suggests Israel will indeed strike Iran, without informing the US prior to the action.  MZ notes that in Suez (1956), the Six-Day War (1967), and strikes on the Iraqi (1981) & Syrian (2007) nuclear reactors Israel acted alone and did not tell us beforehand.  With Team Obama tilting heavily towards the Palestinians & twisting Israel's arm there is no doubt Israel will not ask for approval from us; besides, though MZ doesn't discuss this, our ability to keep a secret like that is effectively near zero.

Most telling in MZ's article: During the past near three months of turmoil in Iran, production of uranium hexaflouride and centrifuges has not slowed down one iota, according to Friday's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report.  Here is a summary 5-page link for the August 28, 2009 IAEA report.  It notes that: (1) the IAEA made "no substantive progress" in evaluating Iran's military program; (2) Iran could enrich enough uranium for a nuclear bomb in 3 to 6 months; and (3) Iran, which had enough material last February to make one nuclear bomb, would have enough material by February 2010 to make two bombs.

Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland, a wise voice always, compares the Libyan welcome with the status Iran's nuclear program enjoys, and finds a lesson in Libya's behavior that applies equally to Iran: Iran will never give up its nuclear program, which gives it a seat at the table with the world's major powers.  A WSJ editorial urges Team Obama to get more serious on stopping Iran, else Israel will strike.

The nuclear clock keeps ticking.

LFTC - Free Speech: Federal Film Follies

In his op-ed What's Wrong With 'Hillary: the Movie'?, former Federal Election Commission (FEC) Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky shreds the FEC's absurd rules, and calls on the Supreme Court to overturn two prior egregious decisions sanctioning federal censorship of political speech.    Since the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) passed in 1972 it has grown like Topsy. FECA now comprises 244 pages of statute, 568 pages of regulations enacted pursuant to the law, with 1,278 pages of explanations & justifications, supplemented by nearly 1,800 advisory opinions.  Everything is perfectly clear, right?

Well, not quite: Rules differ for 70 different types of entities, and there are no less than 33 forms of political speech, each with its own rules.  General Electric is unregulated, because it owns a media company (NBC).  General Motors is not so lucky.

Read the 2-pager in full.  And stay tuned for September 9, when, as a New York Times front-pager reports, the Supreme Court, in a special pre-October session, hears an appeal seeking to overturn the rules.  Supreme Sonia will sit for the first time as an Associate Justice, readying her Empathy Enveloper.  More on that come September.

LFTC - Public Diplomacy: Time to Reset

A Heritage Foundation report, Ideas Matter: Restoring the Content of Public Diplomacy (23 Pages), cogently argues for better public diplomacy vis-a-vis the world's Muslims.  The New York Times reported Friday that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen sharply criticized US diplomacy towards Muslims.  Mullen's comments say more about his attitude than anything else, but are worth a look.  The Heritage paper is excellent.  Especially focus on its first 6 or 7 pages, and the last 3.  In its beginning, our hapless efforts to date are crisply demolished; at its end, a terror detainee proves to have more intellect that the idiot library staff at Gitmo.  The middle is well-written philosophical discussion, but less interesting than the bookends.

LFTC - Index 8/28/09

6 posts: (1) 44's War By Lawyers--9/11, 3/11 & N/11; (2) Iraq Endgame?--Wobble Watch; (3) Mideast Update--Wobble Watch; (4) Tyrant Chic: The New "In Crowd"--Wobble Watch; (5) Wars of Choice?--The Home Front; (6) Libya: A Hero's Welcome--Us v. Them.

Recently Towhnall published my article, Supreme Sonia: Fear What She Will Do Outside the Court, Not Inside.  and on Tuesday, August 25, I spent an hour on the Jim Bohannon Show discussing the CIA mess, Lockerbie & war theaters.

LFTC - 44's War By Lawyers

Andy McCarthy shreds Eric Holder's legal rationale for appointing a special counsel to investigate CIA interrogation practices.  A second McCarthy NRO piece identifies Holder's long-term strategic goal: elevating a transnational legalist elite to supremacy in foreign policy and war.  Pat Buchanan gives examples of specific successes from CIA enhanced interrogations and predicts that Obama's & Holder's vendetta against CIA agents will backfire.  A New York Times front-pager details the escalating war underway between the CIA & the Justice Department.  A Washington Post front-pager reports that CIA Director Leon Panetta has said case officers will be given lawyers paid by the CIA to contest any prosecutions arising from the special counsel's probe.  WSJ pundit Kimberly Strassel calls Panetta Team Obama's "fall guy" in the probe.

WSJ pundit Dan Henninger says that the ascendancy of lawfare in Obama Land means that the war on terror is over.  DH is right.  Here are DH's money paragraphs:

This litigation nightmare, together with the chilling effect of the special prosecutor's potential indictments, has as its goal making the price of aggressive interrogation too high under any circumstance, including a one-hour-bomb scenario.

To supervise future interrogations, the administration is creating something called a High Value Detainee Interrogation Group. Interrogation techniques will be limited to those in the Army Field Manual or that are "noncoercive," which suggests more constrained than a big-city police department. Authority is being moved from the CIA to the FBI.

This means that the class of person who blows up skyscrapers, American embassies or the USS Cole would spend less time under a bare light bulb than a domestic robbery suspect. The Los Angeles Times reported in May that the goal of a proposed administration "global justice initiative" would be to get all terror suspects into a U.S. or foreign court.

Eric Holder cited the Justice Department's Office of Legal Responsibility as influencing his decision to proceed with a CIA special prosecutor. This is the legal office that is expected to release its long-awaited report on whether former Bush Justice lawyers John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury should be cited for misconduct for providing the CIA with legal opinions about these interrogations. If, as expected, the OPR cites the lawyers, legal groups will try to disbar them. After that, no lawyer will go near the war on terror.

Individually, some of this may be arguable. In toto, it's a death sentence for an effective war on terror. It makes what's left of the war—telephone wiretaps or monitoring money transfers—vulnerable to a steady stream of congressional and legal objection. That lets the Obama administration evade political responsibility by letting others wind down the war on terror.

DH's full column is, as always, well worth a read.  In essence, Bush 43's administration had a 9/12 mentality--the conviction that 9/11 marked a national security watershed that changed everything.  But Team 44 has a 9/10 mentality, as in a return to the pre-9/11 law enforcement orientation of addressing terrorism.  That led to the atrocities of 9/11 that took some 3,000 lives.  One can only shudder at what a super-9/11 might accomplish, given WMD.  That we will pay a price for this change--someday soon or far away--is a virtual given, barring a miracle.

Bottom Line.  George Orwell famously said (a line PB quotes): "Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."  If Obama & Holder get their way, fewer such men will be ready to do violence, and fewer of the rest will sleep peacefully.

LFTC - Iraq Endgame?

George Friedman of Stratfor published a recent article on Iraq, worth a read, REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM STRATFOR:

Iraq Endgame

August 18, 2009

By George Friedman

Though the Iraq war is certainly not over, it has reached a crossroads. During the course of the war, about 40 countries sent troops to fight in what was called “Multi-National Force-Iraq.” As of this summer, only one foreign country’s fighting forces remain in Iraq — those of the United States. A name change in January 2010 will reflect the new reality, when the term “Multi-National Force-Iraq” will be changed to “United States Forces-Iraq.” If there is an endgame in Iraq, we are now in it.

The plan that U.S. President Barack Obama inherited from former President George W. Bush called for coalition forces to help create a viable Iraqi national military and security force that would maintain the Baghdad government’s authority and Iraq’s territorial cohesion and integrity. In the meantime, the major factions in Iraq would devise a regime in which all factions would participate and be satisfied that their factional interests were protected. While this was going on, the United States would systematically reduce its presence in Iraq until around the summer of 2010, when the last U.S. forces would leave.

Two provisos qualified this plan. The first was that the plan depended on the reality on the ground for its timeline. The second was the possibility that some residual force would remain in Iraq to guarantee the agreements made between factions, until they matured and solidified into a self-sustaining regime. Aside from minor tinkering with the timeline, the Obama administration — guided by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, whom Bush appointed and Obama retained — has followed the Bush plan faithfully.

The moment of truth for the U.S. plan is now approaching. The United States still has substantial forces in Iraq. There is a coalition government in Baghdad dominated by Shia (a reasonable situation, since the Shia comprise the largest segment of the population of Iraq). Iraqi security forces are far from world-class, and will continue to struggle in asserting themselves in Iraq. As we move into the endgame, internal and external forces are re-examining power-sharing deals, with some trying to disrupt the entire process.

There are two foci for this disruption. The first concerns the Arab-Kurdish struggle over Kirkuk. The second concerns threats to Iran’s national security.

The Kurdish Question

Fighting continues in the Kirkuk region, where the Arabs and Kurds have a major issue to battle over: oil. The Kirkuk region is one of two major oil-producing regions in Iraq (the other is in the Shiite-dominated south). Whoever controls Kirkuk is in a position to extract a substantial amount of wealth from the surrounding region’s oil development. There are historical ethnic issues in play here, but the real issue is money. Iraqi central government laws on energy development remain unclear, precisely because there is no practical agreement on the degree to which the central government will control — and benefit — from oil development as opposed to the Kurdish Regional Government. Both Kurdish and Arab factions thus continue to jockey for control of the key city of Kirkuk.

Arab, particularly Sunni Arab, retention of control over Kirkuk opens the door for an expansion of Sunni Arab power into Iraqi Kurdistan. By contrast, Kurdish control of Kirkuk shuts down the Sunni threat to Iraqi Kurdish autonomy and cuts Sunni access to oil revenues from any route other than the Shiite-controlled central government. If the Sunnis get shut out of Kirkuk, they are on the road to marginalization by their bitter enemies — the Kurds and the Shia. Thus, from the Sunni point of view, the battle for Kirkuk is the battle for the Sunni place at the Iraqi table.

Turkey further complicates the situation in Iraq. Currently embedded in constitutional and political thinking in Iraq is the idea that the Kurds would not be independent, but could enjoy a high degree of autonomy. Couple autonomy with the financial benefits of heavy oil development and the Kurdish autonomous region of Iraq becomes a powerful entity. Add to that the peshmerga, the Kurdish independent military forces that have had U.S. patronage since the 1990s, and an autonomous Kurdistan becomes a substantial regional force. And this is not something Turkey wants to see.

The broader Kurdish region is divided among four countries, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. The Kurds have a substantial presence in southeastern Turkey, where Ankara is engaged in a low-intensity war with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), members of which have taken refuge in northern Iraq. Turkey’s current government has adopted a much more nuanced approach in dealing with the Kurdish question. This has involved coupling the traditional military threats with guarantees of political and economic security to the Iraqi Kurds as long as the Iraqi Kurdish leadership abides by Turkish demands not to press the Kirkuk issue.

Still, whatever the constitutional and political arrangements between Iraqi Kurds and Iraq’s central government, or between Iraqi Kurds and the Turkish government, the Iraqi Kurds have a nationalist imperative. The Turkish expectation is that over the long haul, a wealthy and powerful Iraqi Kurdish autonomous region could slip out of Baghdad’s control and become a center of Kurdish nationalism. Put another way, no matter what the Iraqi Kurds say now about cooperating with Turkey regarding the PKK, over the long run, they still have an interest in underwriting a broader Kurdish nationalism that will strike directly at Turkish national interests.

The degree to which Sunni activity in northern Iraq is coordinated with Turkish intelligence is unknown to us. The Sunnis are quite capable of waging this battle on their own. But the Turks are not disinterested bystanders, and already support local Turkmen in the Kirkuk region to counter the Iraqi Kurds. The Turks want to see Kurdish economic power and military power limited, and as such they are inherently in favor of the Shiite-dominated Baghdad government. The stronger Baghdad is, the weaker the Kurds will be.

Baghdad understands something critical: While the Kurds may be a significant fighting force in Iraq, they can’t possibly stand up to the Turkish army. More broadly, Iraq as a whole can’t stand up to the Turkish army. We are entering a period in which a significant strategic threat to Turkey from Iraq could potentially mean Turkish countermeasures. Iraqi memories of Turkish domination during the Ottoman Empire are not pleasant. Therefore, Iraq will be very careful not to cross any redline with the Turks.

This places the United States in a difficult position. Washington has supported the Kurds in Iraq ever since Operation Desert Storm. Through the last decade of the Saddam regime, U.S. special operations forces helped create a de facto autonomous region in Kurdistan. Washington and the Kurds have a long and bumpy history, now complicated by substantial private U.S. investment in Iraqi Kurdistan for the development of oil resources. Iraqi Kurdish and U.S. interests are strongly intertwined, and Washington would rather not see Iraqi Kurdistan swallowed up by arrangements in Baghdad that undermine current U.S. interests and past U.S. promises.

On the other hand, the U.S. relationship with Turkey is one of Washington’s most important. Whether the question at hand is Iran, the Caucasus, the Balkans, Central Asia, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Afghanistan, Russia or Iraq, the Turks have a role. Given the status of U.S. power in the region, alienating Turkey is not an option. And the United States must remember that for Turkey, Kurdish power in Iraq and Turkey’s desired role in developing Iraqi oil are issues of fundamental national importance.

Now left alone to play out this endgame, the United States must figure out a way to finesse the Kurdish issue. In one sense, it doesn’t matter. Turkey has the power ultimately to redefine whatever institutional relationships the United States leaves behind in Iraq. But for Turkey, the sooner Washington hands over this responsibility, the better. The longer the Turks wait, the stronger the Kurds might become and the more destabilizing their actions could be to Turkey. Best of all, if Turkey can assert its influence now, which it has already begun to do, it doesn’t have to be branded as the villain.

All Turkey needs to do is make sure that the United States doesn’t intervene decisively against the Iraqi Sunnis in the battle over Kirkuk in honor of Washington’s commitment to the Kurds.

In any case, the United States doesn’t want to intervene against Iraq’s Sunnis again. In protecting Sunni Arab interests, the Americans have already been sidestepping any measures to organize a census and follow through with a constitutional mandate to hold a referendum in Kirkuk. For the United States, a strong Sunni community is the necessary counterweight to the Iraqi Shia since, over the long haul, it is not clear how a Shiite-dominated government will relate to Iran.

The Shiite Question

The Shiite-dominated government led by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is no puppet of Iran, but at the same time, it is not Iran’s enemy. As matters develop in Iraq, Iran remains the ultimate guarantor of Shiite interests. And Iranian support might not flow directly to the current Iraqi government, but to al-Maliki’s opponents within the Shiite community who have closer ties to Tehran. It is not clear whether Iranian militant networks in Iraq have been broken, or are simply lying low. But it is clear that Iran still has levers in place with which it could destabilize the Shiite community or rivals of the Iraqi Shia if it so desired.

Therefore, the United States has a vested interest in building up the Iraqi Sunni community before it leaves. And from an economic point of view, that means giving the Sunnis access to oil revenue as well as a guarantee of control over that revenue after the United States leaves.

With the tempo of attacks picking up as U.S. forces draw down, Iraq’s Sunni community is evidently not satisfied with the current security and political arrangements in Iraq. Attacks are on the upswing in the northern areas — where remnants of al Qaeda in Iraq continue to operate in Mosul — as well as in central Iraq in and around Baghdad. The foreign jihadists in Iraq hope such attacks will trigger a massive response from the Shiite community, thus plunging Iraq back into civil war. But the foreign jihadists would not be able to operate without some level of support from the local Sunni community. This broader community wants to make sure that the Shia and Americans don’t forget what the Sunnis are capable of should their political, economic and security interests fall by the wayside as the Americans withdraw.

Neither the Iraqi Sunnis nor the Kurds really want the Americans to leave. Neither trust that the intentions or guarantees of the Shiite-dominated government. Iraq lacks a tradition of respect for government institutions and agreements; a piece of paper is just that. Instead, the Sunnis and Kurds see the United States as the only force that can guarantee their interests. Ironically, the United States is now seen as the only real honest broker in Iraq.

But the United States is an honest broker with severe conflicts of interest. Satisfying both Sunni and Kurdish interests is possible only under three conditions. The first is that Washington exercise a substantial degree of control over the Shiite administration of the country — and particularly over energy laws — for a long period of time. The second is that the United States give significant guarantees to Turkey that the Kurds will not extend their nationalist campaign to Turkey, even if they are permitted to extend it to Iran in a bid to destabilize the Iranian regime. The third is that success in the first two conditions not force Iran into a position where it sees its own national security at risk, and so responds by destabilizing Baghdad — and with it, the entire foundation of the national settlement in Iraq negotiated by the United States.

The American strategy in this matter has been primarily tactical. Wanting to leave, it has promised everyone everything. That is not a bad strategy in the short run, but at a certain point, everyone adds up the promises and realizes that they can’t all be kept, either because they are contradictory or because there is no force to guarantee them. Boiled down, this leaves the United States with two strategic options.

First, the United States can leave a residual force of about 20,000 troops in Iraq to guarantee Sunni and Kurdish interests, to protect Turkish interests, etc. The price of pursuing this option is that it leaves Iran facing a nightmare scenario: e.g., the potential re-emergence of a powerful Iraq and the recurrence down the road of the age-old conflict between Persia and Mesopotamia — with the added possibility of a division of American troops supporting their foes. This would pose an existential threat to Iran, forcing Tehran to use covert means to destabilize Iraq that would take advantage of a minimal, widely dispersed U.S. force vulnerable to local violence.

Second, the United States could withdraw and allow Iraq to become a cockpit for competition among neighboring countries: Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria — and ultimately major regional powers like Russia. While chaos in Iraq is not inherently inconsistent with U.S. interests, it is highly unpredictable, meaning the United States could be pulled back into Iraq at the least opportune time and place.

The first option is attractive, but its major weakness is the uncertainty created by Iran. With Iran in the picture, a residual force is as much a hostage as a guarantor of Sunni and Kurdish interests. With Iran out of the picture, the residual U.S. force could be smaller and would be more secure. Eliminate the Iran problem completely, and the picture for all players becomes safer and more secure. But eliminating Iran from the equation

LFTC - Mideast Update

Ruth King brilliantly details the refugee problem and the Palestinians.  Put simply, of 26 million refugees since World War II ended, 35.5 million have been resettled.  500,000 Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war the Arabs started, are the only ones not taken care of, courtesy of Arab evil.  Their descendants are the only ones counted by the UN as refugees, and the UN aids & abets the Arab policy of using the refugees as a weapon.  India & Pakistan settled 15 million refugees are much turmoil and a war that killed a million, but they settled them; imagine the head count if their children of two generations were added to their number!

Here is a neat economic analysis of the Palestinians' situation, which well explains why terror remains their best market, barring a cultural shift; impressive economic numbers show their potential, if ever they come around.  Hudson Institute President Herb London details the latest Fatah fakery that Team Obama ignored.  Ex-Canadian diplomat Alan Baker writes in the Jerusalem Post that Palestinian PM Salaam Fayyad's peace plan can be carried out within existing law: the 1995 Oslo Interim Agreement that defined the Palestinian Authority's powers; Baker helped negotiate the 1995 OIA.  Fayyad wants to encourage Palestinian economic development, including tax cuts.  Here is a WSJ article on Fayyad's plan, made public earlier this week.  A New York Times article adds detail--hardly edifying:

Mr. Fayyad’s plan lays out a broad outline for a democratic Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The plan states, for example, that “shelter, education and health insurance are basic rights which will be preserved and protected by the state,” which also has “an enduring obligation to care and provide for the martyrs, prisoners, orphans and all those harmed in the Palestinian struggle for independence.”

The Guardian reports that Team Obama is "on the brink of a deal" with Israel that will trade a partial freeze on Israeli settlements for a tougher line on Iran's nuclear program. 

The article discusses its terms & the diplomatic back-story:

Israel is offering a nine- to 12-month moratorium on settlement building that would exclude East Jerusalem and most of the 2,400 homes that Israel says work has already begun on....

If Iran does not respond to UN demands that it stop enriching uranium by time of the UN and G20 summits, the US, Britain and France are to lead a UN security council push to expand sanctions, expected to target Iran's dependence on imports of refined petroleum products and its reliance on foreign technology to develop its oil and gas industry.

Russia and China are expected to object to such punitive measures, and any western attempt to enforce a partial embargo threatens to breach the broad international consensus on handling Iran.

A report on the Iranian programme by the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), due to be published by the end of this week, will be crucial in setting the scene for such sanctions, and the outgoing IAEA director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, has come under intense western pressure to make the report sharply critical of Tehran.

Israel, in return for a deal on settlements, is seeking not only a tougher line over Iran but normalisation of relations with Arab states, such as overflight rights for its airline El Al, establishment of trade offices and embassies, and an end to the ban on travellers with Israeli stamps in their passports.

Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco have so far tentatively agreed. Saudi Arabia has refused, saying Israel has had enough concessions.

But the US is taking comfort from the fact that, crucially, Saudi Arabia has not tried to block other Arab states from signing up. "They may come on board last, but they will come on board," a European official said.

A coalition of Arab states, thought to include the Saudis, has been in secret contact with Israel to discuss what they see as a common threat posed by Iran.

Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu's address to Israel's National Defense College graduating class is a gem.  The PM laid down 5 foundations for Arab-Israeli peace: (a) Arab recognition of Israel's right to exist; (b) solving the Palestinian refugee problem--his answer is a short version of King's piece; (c) a peace agreement; (4) demilitarization; (e) international recognition of the above.

Re Iran, former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold, says that the UN inspectors are collaborating with Iran to hide incriminating evidence.  George Wittman discusses a mine-laying scenario for Iran in the Straits of Hormuz, a possible counter-measure to an Israeli strike at Iran.  Gold's warning claim is credible, as inspector Muhammad el-Baradei has publicly stated that if the West has nukes, why can't the rest have them?--an imbecility that did not stop the Nobel folks from giving el-Baradei a Peace Prize--given precisely to enhance his prestige and give his word more authority versus the West, an act of monumental suicidal perversity coming from the folks who also gave a PP to Yasser Arafat.  All 7 pages of Jed Babbin's interview with Gold merits a close read, but this excerpt shows how dangerous relying on a UN agency is:

JB: And you have no doubt about their goal that it is to develop nuclear weapons?

DG: Well in The Rise of Nuclear Iran I look at a lot of the public evidence that is out there, including the reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency. One of the most interesting developments that occurred a number of years ago was when CIA got control of a Iranian engineer’s laptop which had warhead designs for a nuclear device including triggers for a nuclear explosion and calculations at what height that explosion should occur. It left no doubt in the minds of those studying these diagrams that they were developing a nuclear warhead. What added even further credibility to the American intelligence material was the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency convened a special session of senior diplomats from around the world in Vienna and reported on these findings so that even the IAEA, which has dragged its feet on the Iranian file, accepted the American intelligence reports and adopted them. They validated them and adopted them.

JB: Didn’t el-Baradei  the outgoing head of the IAEA, say just a couple of months ago that he had a gut feeling that Iran was trying to acquire nuclear weapons and technology?

DG: The IAEA has a troubled history with the Iranian file. Its reports which come out every few months will give you details about the amounts of uranium hexafluoride or the amounts of low-enriched uranium that are in uranium stocks. Anyone reviewing this material will understand the gravity of the situation, but for political reasons Mohamed el-Baradei and the senior staff at IAEA refused to draw conclusions over many years that would charge Iran as being in breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And only rather late in the game did the IAEA actually refer the Iranian file to the UN Security Council.

JB: I don’t think that anyone doubts at this point that the IAEA has been an apologist for Iran  for more than a decade. But now we have this revolutionary statement by el-Baradei that he thinks they want to have some nuclear weapons technology and I can’t for the life of me think of why anyone would want nuclear weapons technology except to build nuclear weapons.

DG: Well right, and el-Baradei only made that admission when he was leaving his post. In other words, in all the years he was giving the Iranians a pass, he wouldn’t say it.

JB: We also have another situation coming up don’t we? The IAEA apparently has further intelligence information that it has gathered regarding the development of nuclear weapons in Iran. And right at this moment they are refusing to divulge that to the US, Britain and other nations.

DG: As I said the IAEA is a useful receptacle of tremendous amounts of material on the Iranian nuclear program but they are slow in reaching conclusions and many times they are willing to work with the Iranians in hiding some of the most incriminating evidence of what the Iranians are up to from the west.

Iran, meanwhile, continues to subsidize Hezbollah in Lebanon, and a WSJ op-ed warns we will face an "Imperial Iran" for some time to come.  September, the WSJ reports, will see a possible showdown between hawks & doves at the UN after Muhammad el-Baradei, the chief inspector, submits his latest report on the status of Iran's nuclear program.

Finally, consider former journalist David Ottaway's "The U.S. and Saudi Arabia Since the 1930s", a fine historical survey, if a tad too easy on the Saudis.  It has lots of interesting stuff.  Here is the most intriguing part:

The kingdom was founded in 1932 by King Abdulaziz, after he crushed his opponents throughout the area. Within less than one year, he signed a concession with Standard Oil of California, which is today Chevron, to go look for oil in the eastern part of the country. This was an extraordinary thing to do, considering that the U.S. had had hardly any involvement in that country. It was Christian missionaries based in Bahrain, an island just off the coast of Saudi Arabia, members of the Reform Church, who helped convince King Abdulaziz that he could work with Americans. They went inside Saudi Arabia to provide medical treatment to some of the king’s soldiers and made no attempt to convert anyone. It was purely a medical mission. They at one point reportedly even treated the king. The only foreigners Saudis had dealt with up until that time were the British, and so they saw Americans as entirely different.

The explanation left to us by King Abdulaziz for why he decided to work with the Americans came as a result of a memorandum by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State George McGhee, who had a meeting with the king in 1950. We only learned about the meeting in the late 1970s, when the document was declassified. It is remarkable. Abdulaziz unburdened himself of his most intimate fears for the safety of the House of Saud. His primary concern was not the one haunting Washington at the time—namely, communist expansionism. Rather, he feared an imminent attack by the forces of the Hashemite royal families ruling in Jordan and, at the time, also in Iraq. They had a grudge to settle after being driven out of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina by the al-Sauds in the 1920s. To deal with the Hashemite threat, the king wanted to enter a formal military alliance with the U.S. and obtain arms urgently on a grant basis. The British had offered such an alliance, but he didn’t trust them because they were the main backers of his Hashemite enemies. That was why, he told McGee, he had given an exclusive oil concession in the kingdom to the American companies and not allowed their British counterparts to share in the prize. He allowed the U.S. to build and use the airbase at Dammam “to show that Saudi Arabia’s security should be of vital concern to both countries.”

As World War II approached, there was little oil production or shipping after the first significant oil discovery was made in 1938 at Dammam. But in 1943, Roosevelt and his administration began to realize that oil was going to be very important in the future. A relationship started to develop. In order to provide military and economic aid to Saudi Arabia, Roosevelt declared that “the defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States,” which must have surprised the many Americans who had never even heard of Saudi Arabia.

Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Navy, William Knox, told Congress in March 1944 that the war had made the U.S. government extremely anxious about oil. He pronounced what was to become America’s postwar oil policy, namely “to provide for acquisition of oil resources outside the limits of the United States for the safety and security of the country.” That was the rationale for our becoming more and more involved with Saudi Arabia.

In 1944, the California Arabian Standard Oil Company that Chevron had set up became Arabian American Oil Company, or Aramco. Chevron brought in three other partners, the big majors of the United States: Mobil, Exxon, and Texaco. Aramco was not just an oil company. In the early years, the king kept turning to it for loans, because they weren’t earning any money from oil until much later. Aramco became something like a proxy for the U.S. government in Saudi Arabia. It was Aramco that introduced modernization to Saudi Arabia.

In February 1945, Roosevelt met Abdulaziz in person aboard the USS Quincy in Egypt’s Great Bitter Lake. The two countries date their “special relationship” to this meeting. As far as anybody knows, they did not talk about oil, but about Palestine. The king was concerned about what the U.S. was going to do regarding the establishment of a Jewish state and whether the Palestinians would have a state. This issue goes right back to the beginning of our relationship, and it continues right up until today.

In 1948, a pot of gold was discovered. Aramco discovered the Ghawar oil field, the mother lode of the world’s fields. Ghawar, which went onstream in 1951, is 170 miles long and 20 miles wide. At one point it held 170 billion barrels of proven reserves of oil. They’ve been pumping from that field half or more of their production for fifty years. Most of Saudi exports come from this field—about 5 million barrels a day. Ghawar today still has 70 bb compared to the total current U.S. proven reserves of 20 bb. That means it still holds more than three times as much as all the oil reserves in the U.S.

In 1950, to try and solve the problem of how to get the Saudi oil to American and Western markets, the U.S. company Bechtel, based in California, built a 1,000-mile pipeline directly from the Saudi oil fields across Jordan and the Golan Heights to Sidon in Lebanon in order to take the oil directly to the Mediterranean by pipeline. That went onstream the following year and continued to function up until the early 1970s. The last year of U.S. self-sufficiency in oil production was 1970—Saudi oil didn’t become important to the U.S. until the 1980s.

Bottom Line.  Think of it: Had we backed the Hashemites in their bid to retake Saudi Arabia, the Wahabbi jihadists would have been consigned to the ash-heap of history, and there would have been no September 11, 2001.

LFTC - Tyrant Chic: The New "In Crowd"

Claudia Rosett impales Western leaders and elites for fawning over tyrants like Gaddafi, Chavez, Ahmadinejad, etc.  She details how they have, in effect, become a new type of celebrity, their goings and parties fodder for the Style section.  CR is spot on.  But why stop at parties?  Think of the prospects....

Maybe we can sell FAO Schwartz on 59th & 5th to these guys, during the upcoming fall meeting of the UN General Assembly Tyrants Club.  Imagine " Tyrants 'R' Us."  Or stage a new game show: "Who Wants to be a Billionaire Tyrant?"  "The Tyrant Apprentice?"  "American Tyrant-Idol?"  Paula Abdul comes back, and watches Gaddafi, Chavez, Putin & Ahmadinejad sing barbershop quarter karaoke saluting Fidel Castro....

LFTC - Wars of Choice?

Robert Kagan writes about the fiction of wars of necessity, and why modern Western politicians need it:

The fact is, unless the nation is invaded or its very survival is imminently threatened, going to war is always a choice. So what is the point of trying to make this elusive distinction anyway? For many, including Obama, the present purpose is to distinguish Afghanistan from Iraq, Obama's "good" war from George W. Bush's "bad" war. But it won't work. As Haass correctly argues, right or wrong, they were both wars of choice.

But there is a deeper reason, as well, for Obama to claim necessity in Afghanistan. It is part of what increasingly seems to be a striving for moral purity in international affairs by this administration. Obama and his top advisers apologize for America's past sins, implicitly suggesting they will commit no new ones. And that goes for fighting wars. No one can blame you for fighting a war if it is a war of necessity, or so they may believe. All the inevitable ancillary casualties of war -- from civilian deaths to the occasional misbehavior of the troops to the errors of commanders -- are more easily forgiven if one has no choice. The claim of necessity wipes away the moral ambiguities inherent in the exercise of power. And it prevents scrutiny of one's own motives, which in nations, as in individuals, are rarely pure.

This hoped-for escape from moral burdens is, however, an illusion. Just because America declares something necessary doesn't mean that the rest of the world, and especially its victims, will believe it is just. The claim of necessity will not absolve the United States, and Obama, from responsibility for its actions.

Bottom Line.  A famous maxim of Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz is that war exists for the benefit of the defender.  In other words, upon being attacked surrender is always a theoretical option, however unpalatable.  Even our Islamist adversaries might accept our actual surrender in lieu of mass destruction (inflicted by them upon us) --if we all convert to militant Islam.  So, ask the ladies if they are prepared to wear the burqa.  On second thought, best we pass on surrender.  Recognizing that all wars are those of choice would make for a more intellectually honest debate.  But honesty about unpleasant matters is not a notable human trait.  We rationalize, temporize, improvise, etc.  Such may make us feel better, but we had better still find a way to win our wars.  Explaining away defeat is even harder than facing choice in war.

LFTC - Libya: A Hero's Welcome

The following essay on the Lockerbie Affair is reprinted with permission from Stratfor.  Notable are its case that Libya did in fact perpetrate the atrocity, but that the intelligence agents surrendered to the Scottish tribunal may well have been masking the real (Libyan) killers.   It is an extremely well-written essay.

Libya: A Hero's Welcome

By Scott Stewart & Fred Burton

August 26, 2009

On Aug. 24, Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill addressed a special session of the Scottish Parliament. The session was called so that MacAskill could explain why he had decided to release Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the former Libyan intelligence officer convicted of terrorism charges in connection with the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, and who had been expected to spend the rest of his life in prison. MacAskill said he granted al-Megrahi a compassionate release because al-Megrahi suffers from terminal prostate cancer and is expected to live only a few months.

The Aug. 20 release of al-Megrahi ignited a firestorm of outrage in both the United Kingdom and the United States. FBI Director Robert Mueller released to the press contents of an uncharacteristically blunt and critical letter he had written to MacAskill in which Mueller characterized al-Megrahi’s release as inexplicable and “detrimental to the cause of justice.” Mueller told MacAskill in the letter that the release “makes a mockery of the rule of law.”

The flames of outrage over the release of al-Megrahi were further fanned when al-Megrahi received a hero’s welcome upon his arrival in Tripoli — video of him being welcomed and embraced by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was broadcast all over the world.

For his part, Gadhafi has long lobbied for al-Megrahi’s release, even while taking steps to end Libya’s status as an international pariah. Gadhafi first renounced terrorism and his nuclear ambitions in 2003, shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In October 2008 he completed the compensation agreement with the families of the U.S. victims of the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 and of an April 1986 Libyan attack against the La Belle disco in Berlin.

Yet despite the conviction of al-Megrahi, the 2003 official admission of Libyan responsibility for the Pan Am bombing in a letter to the United Nations, and the agreement to pay compensation to the families of the Pan Am victims, Gadhafi has always maintained in public statements that al-Megrahi and Libya were not responsible for the bombing. The official admission of responsibility for the Pan Am bombing, coupled with the public denials, has resulted in a great deal of ambiguity and confusion over the authorship of the attack — which, in all likelihood, is precisely what the denials were intended to do.

The Pan Am 103 Investigation

At 7:03 p.m. on Dec. 21, 1988, an improvised explosive device (IED) detonated in one of Pan Am Flight 103’s cargo containers, causing the plane to break apart and fall from the sky. The 259 passengers and crew members aboard the flight died, as did 11 residents of Lockerbie, Scotland, the town where the remnants of the jumbo jet fell.

Immediately following the bombing, there was suspicion that the Iranians or Syrians had commissioned the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC) to conduct the bombing. This belief was based on the fact that German authorities had taken down a large PFLP-GC cell in Frankfurt in October 1988 and that one member of the cell had in his possession an IED concealed inside a Toshiba radio. Frankfurt is the city where Pan Am 103 departed before stopping in London. Indeed, even today, there are still some people who believe that the PFLP-GC was commissioned by either the Iranian or the Syrian government to conduct the Pan Am bombing.

The PFLP-GC theory might eventually have become the officially accepted theory had the bomb on Pan Am 103 detonated (as planned) while the aircraft was over the North Atlantic Ocean. However, a delay in the plane’s departure from London resulted in the timed device detonating while the aircraft was still over land, and this allowed authorities to collect a great deal of evidence that had been scattered across a wide swath of the Scottish countryside. The search effort was one of the most complex crime-scene investigations ever conducted.

Through months of painstakingly detailed effort, investigators were able to determine that the aircraft was brought down by an IED containing a main charge of Semtex, that the IED had been placed inside a Toshiba radio cassette player (in a macabre coincidence, that particular model of Toshiba, the RT-SF 16, is called the “BomBeat radio cassette player”), and that the radio had been located inside a brown Samsonite hard-side suitcase located inside the cargo container.

Investigators were also able to trace the clothing inside the suitcase containing the IED to a specific shop, Mary’s House, in Sliema, Malta. While examining one of the pieces of Maltese clothing in May 1989, investigators found a fragment of a circuit board that did not match anything found in the Toshiba radio. It is important to remember that in a bombing, the pieces of the IED do not entirely disappear. They may be shattered and scattered, but they are not usually completely vaporized. Although some pieces may be damaged beyond recognition, others are not, and this often allows investigators to reconstruct the device

In mid-1990, after an exhaustive effort to identify the circuit-board fragment, the FBI laboratory in Washington was able to determine that the circuit board was very similar to one that came from a timer that a special agent with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service had recovered from an arms cache while investigating a Libyan-sponsored coup attempt in Lome, Togo, in 1986. Further investigation determined that the company that produced the timers, the Swiss company MEBO, had sold as many as 20 of the devices to the Libyan government, and that the Libyan government was the company’s primary customer. Interestingly, in 1988, MEBO rented one of its offices in Zurich to a firm called ABH, which was run by two Libyan intelligence officers: Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Badri Hassan.

The MEBO timer, model MST-13, is very different from the ice-cube timer in the PFLP-GC device found in Frankfurt in October 1988. Additionally, the ice-cube timer in the PFLP-GC device was used in conjunction with a barometric pressure switch, and the IED used a different main charge, TNT, instead of the Semtex used in the Pan Am 103 device.

Perhaps the fact that does the most damage to the PFLP-GC conspiracy theory is that the principal bombmaker for the PFLP-GC Frankfurt cell (and the man who made the PFLP-GC Toshiba device), Marwan Khreesat, was actually an infiltrator sent into the organization by the Jordanian intelligence service. Kreesat not only assisted in providing the information that allowed the Germans to take down the cell, but he was under strict orders by his Jordanian handlers to ensure that every IED he constructed was not capable of detonating. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that one of the IEDs he created was used to destroy Pan Am 103.

One of the Libyans connected to MEBO, al-Megrahi, is an interesting figure. Not only was he an officer with Libyan intelligence, the External Security Organization, or ESO, but he also served as the chief of security for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA) and had visited Malta many times. The owner of the Mary’s House clothing shop in Sliema identified al-Megrahi as the man who purchased the clothing found in the suitcase, and Maltese immigration records indicated that al-Megrahi was in Malta on Dec. 7, 1988, the time that the clothing was purchased. Al-Megrahi left Malta on Dec. 9, 1988, but returned to the country using a false identity on Dec. 20, using a passport issued by the ESO in the name of Ahmed Khalifa Abdusamad. Al-Megrahi left Malta using the Abdusamad passport on Dec. 21, 1988, the day the suitcase was apparently sent from Malta aboard Air Malta Flight KM180 to Frankfurt and then transferred to Pan Am 103.

On Nov. 13, 1991, the British government charged al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, the LAA station manager at Luqa Airport in Malta, with the bombing. One day later, a federal grand jury in the United States returned an indictment against the same two men for the crime. In March 1995, the FBI added the two men to its most wanted list and the Diplomatic Security Service’s Rewards for Justice Program offered a $4 million reward for their capture. Al-Megrahi and Fhimah were placed under house arrest in Libya — a comfortable existence that, more than actually confining them, served to protect them from being kidnapped and spirited out of Libya to face trial.

After many years of boycotts, embargos, U.N. resolutions and diplomatic wrangling — including extensive efforts by South African President Nelson Mandela and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan — a compromise was reached and all parties agreed to a trial in a neutral country — the Netherlands — conducted under Scottish law. On April 5, 1999, al-Megrahi and Fhimah were transferred to Camp Zeist in the Netherlands to stand trial before a special panel of Scottish judges.

On Jan. 31, 2001, after a very long trial that involved an incredible amount of technical and detailed testimony, the judges reached their decision. The Scottish judges acquitted Fhimah, finding that there was not proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he was involved in the plot (the British government had charged that he had been the person who stole the luggage tags and placed the suitcase on the Air Malta flight), but they did find al-Megrahi guilty of 270 counts of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum sentence of 27 years.

Although the case against al-Megrahi was entirely circumstantial — there was no direct evidence he or Fhimah had placed the device aboard the aircraft — the Scottish judges wrote in their decision that they believed the preponderance of the evidence, including al-Megrahi’s knowledge of airline security measures and procedures, his connection to MEBO, his purchase of the clothing in the suitcase that had contained the IED and his clandestine travel to Malta on Dec. 20 to 21, 1988, convinced them beyond a reasonable doubt that al-Megrahi was guilty as charged.

In a December 2003 letter to the United Nations, Libya accepted responsibility for the Pan Am 103 bombing. (In the same letter, Libya also took responsibility for the September 1989 bombing of UTA Flight 772, a French airliner destroyed by an IED after leaving Brazzaville, Congo, and making a stop in N’Djamena, Chad. All 170 people aboard the aircraft died when it broke up over the Sahara in Niger.) Nevertheless, the Libyan government continued to maintain al-Megrahi’s innocence in the Pan Am bombing, just as al-Megrahi had done throughout the trial, insisting that he had not been involved in the bombing.

Al-Megrahi’s reluctance to admit responsibility for the bombing or to show any contrition for the attack is one of the factors singled out by those who opposed his release from prison. It is also one of the hallmarks of a professional intelligence officer. In many ways, al-Megrahi’s public stance regarding the bombing can be summed up by the unofficial motto of the CIA’s Office of Technical Services — “Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations.”

Shadows

In the shadow world of covert action it is not uncommon for the governments behind such actions to deny (or at least not claim) responsibility for them. These governments also often attempt to plan such attacks in a way that will lead to a certain level of ambiguity — and thereby provide plausible deniability. This was a characteristic seen in many Libyan attacks against U.S. interests, such as the 1986 La Belle Disco bombing in Berlin. It was only an intercept of Libyan communications that provided proof of Libyan responsibility for that attack.

Many attacks that the Libyans sponsored or subcontracted out, such as the string of attacks carried out against U.S. interests by members of the Japanese Red Army and claimed in the name of the Anti-Imperialist International Brigade, were likewise meant to provide Libya with plausible deniability. Gadhafi did not relish the possibility of another American airstrike on his home in Tripoli, like the one that occurred after the La Belle attack in April 1986. (A number of Libyan military targets also were hit in the broader U.S. military action, known as Operation El Dorado Canyon.) Pan Am 103 is considered by many to be Gadhafi’s retribution for those American airstrikes, one of which killed his adopted baby daughter. Gadhafi, who had reportedly been warned of the strike by the Italian government, was not injured in the attack.

During the 1980s, the Libyan government was locked in a heated tit-for-tat battle with the United States. One source of this friction were U.S. claims that the Libyan government supported terrorist groups such as the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO), which conducted several brutal, high-profile attacks in the 1980s, including the December 1985 Rome and Vienna airport assaults. There was also military tension between the two countries as Libya declared a “line of death” across the mouth of the Gulf of Sidra. The U.S. Navy shot down several Libyan fighter aircraft that had attempted to enforce the edict. But these two threads of tension were closely intertwined; the U.S. Navy purposefully challenged the line of death in the spring of 1986 in response to the Rome and Vienna attacks, and it is believed that the La Belle attack was retribution for the U.S. military action in the Gulf of Sidra. The Libyan ESO was also directly implicated in attacks against U.S. diplomats in Sanaa, Yemen, and Khartoum, Sudan, in 1986.

Because of the need for plausible deniability, covert operatives are instructed to stick to their cover story and maintain their innocence if they are caught. Al-Megrahi’s consistent denials and his many appeals, which often cite the PFLP-GC case in Frankfurt, have done a great deal to sow doubt and provide Libya with some deniability.

Like Osama bin Laden’s initial denial of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, al-Megrahi’s claims of innocence have served as ready fuel for conspiracy theorists, who claim he was framed by the U.S. and British governments. However, any conspiracy to frame al-Megrahi and his Libyan masters would have to be very wide ranging and, by necessity, reach much further than just London and Washington. For example, anyone considering such a conspiracy must also account for the fact that in 1999 a French court convicted six Libyans in absentia for the 1989 bombing of UTA Flight 772. The six included Abdullah al-Sanussi, Gadhafi’s brother-in-law and head of the ESO.

Getting two or more governments to cooperate on some sort of grand conspiracy to frame the Libyans and exonerate the Iranians and Syrians is hard to fathom. Such cooperation would have to involve enough people that, sooner or later, someone would spill the beans — especially considering that the Pan Am 103 saga played out over multiple U.S. administrations. As seen by the current stir over CIA interrogation programs, administrations love to make political hay by revealing the cover-ups of previous administrations. Surely, if there had been a secret ploy by the Reagan or Bush administrations to frame the Libyans, the Clinton or Obama administration would have outed it. The same principle applies to the United Kingdom, where Margaret Thatcher’s government oversaw the beginning of the Pan Am 103 investigation and Labour governments after 1997 would have had the incentive to reveal information to the contrary.

While the U.S. and British governments work closely together on a number of intelligence projects, they are frequently at odds on counterterrorism policy and foreign relations. From our personal experience, we believe that it would be very difficult to get multiple U.S. and British administrations from different political parties to work in perfect harmony to further this sort of conspiracy. Due to the UTA investigation and trial, the conspiracy would have to somehow involve the French government. While the Americans working with the British is one thing, the very idea of the Americans, British and French working in perfect harmony on any sort of project — much less a grand secret conspiracy to frame the Libyans — is simply unimaginable. It is much easier to believe that the Libyans were guilty, especially in light of the litany of other terror attacks they committed or sponsored during that era.

Had the IED in the cargo hold of Pan Am 103 exploded over the open ocean, it is very unlikely that the clothing from Malta and the fragment of the MEBO timer would have ever been recovered — think of the difficulty the French have had in locating the black box from Air France 447 in June of this year. In such a scenario, the evidence linking al-Megrahi and the Libyan government to the Pan Am bombing might never have been discovered and plausible deniability could have been maintained indefinitely.

The evidence recovered in Scotland and al-Megrahi’s eventual conviction put a dent in that deniability, but the true authors of the attack — al-Megrahi’s superiors — were never formally charged. Without al-Megrahi’s cooperation, there was no evidence to prove who ordered him to undertake the attack, though it is logical to conclude that the ESO would never undertake such a significant attack without Gadhafi’s approval.

Now that al-Megrahi has returned to Libya and is in Libyan safekeeping, there is no chance that any death-bed confession he may give will ever make it to the West. His denials will be his final words and the ambiguity and doubt those denials cast will be his legacy. In the shadowy world of clandestine operations, this is the ideal behavior for someone caught committing an operational act. He has shielded his superiors and his government to the end. From the perspective of the ESO, and Moammar Gadhafi, al-Megrahi is indeed a hero.

LFTC - Index 8/27/09

3 posts: (1) The Kennedy Clan: Camelot's Promise & Peril--The Home Front; (2) Obama: State Non-Capitalism--The Home Front; (3) Health Care: Whom Do Voters Trust?-The Home Front.

On Wednesday, August 26 I appeared for 30 minutes on the Rick Amato Show, broadcast out of San Diego.  Rick & I discussed Lockerbie Bomber & the War on Terror.  You may need to scroll down to find the title.

LFTC - The Kennedy Clan: Camelot's Promise & Peril

What some are calling "the end of Camelot" calls for added reflections beyond those I penned early yesterday morning.  As with my initial thoughts, these focus not on the person of Edward Kennedy, but on the Kennedy Clan's dynastic run, and implications for the future of American life & politics.

French novelist Honore de Balzac is quoted, perhaps apocryphally, as having said that behind every great fortune lies a great crime.  Balzac's statement came at a time when possibly it was a universal truth; early great fortunes were made by those linked closely with royalty, and thus favored by royal charter and gift.  Modern life has created private entrepreneurs whose fortunes clearly are not derived from crime--think Apple Computer titan Steven Jobs.

But Joseph P. Kennedy Senior exemplified Balzac's dictum.  The twin sources of his monster fortune were Prohibition-era bootlegging and Wall Street stock manipulation--FDR famously appointed the Kennedy patriarch to chair the newly-formed Securities & Exchange Commission because he wanted a crook who knew how to catch other crooks in the same racket.  Later appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Joe Sr. became an overt Nazi sympathizer.  To secure his second son the Presidency in 1960, Senior enlisted, via Frank Sinatra, mafiosi to fix Illinois.  Having done that, the Kennedy Clan coolly jettisoned Sinatra due to his...um, mob connections.

The Kennedy Clan made vast charitable contributions, amplifying their wealth with the leverage given equally vast political power.  They combined, as it were, the benevolent charity of John Beresford Tipton of "The Millionaire" late-1950s TV series, with the less benevolent charity of Godfather Don Vito Corleone.  Tipton gave anticipating gratitude; Don Vito demanded absolute loyalty in return.  If a recipient crossed John Beresford Tipton his benefactor would be disappointed; crossing the Kennedy Clan entailed risking more than disappointment.  Thus was the Kopechne family silenced in return for accepting a monetary payment.

The many ways in which the Kennedy Clan wielded power brings to mind the famous aphorism (not apocryphal) of the English statesman Lord Acton, in its most commonly quoted form: "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."  To believe that such imperial power can be wielded solely for the public good is the myth that lies at the heart of Camelot--the myth of the virtuous knight who slays dragons and saves the kingdom, to rule his subjects benevolently and give happiness to all ever after.

Put simply, no fallible human being or group of same can, in the end, be trusted with the vast power of Camelot--its patriarch or his descendants.  It was not for nothing that the Queen of Camelot, Jacqueline Kennedy, kept her children as far away as possible from Camelot in her widow years.

LFTC - Obama: State Non-Capitalism

George Will calls "state capitalism" what Obama is doing on economic intervention, such as with GM, sold via doses of deception:

As memories of the Cold War fade, like photographs bleached by sunlight, few remember the Brezhnev Doctrine. It was enunciated by Leonid Brezhnev in Warsaw in November 1968 as a retrospective justification for the Soviet-led invasion of Prague the previous August by Warsaw Pact forces to halt Czechoslovakia's liberalization. The doctrine was supposed to guarantee that history would be directional, controlled by a leftward-clicking ratchet. It asserted a Soviet right to intervene to protect socialism wherever it was imposed.

We are already testing whether President Obama and other statists who have given his administration and this Congress their ideological cast have a doctrine analogous to Brezhnev's. Having aggressively, even promiscuously, blurred the distinction between public and private sectors with improvised and largely unauthorized interventions in the economy, will they ever countenance a retreat of the state? Or do they have an aspiration that they dare not speak? Do they hope that state capitalism will be irreversible -- that wherever government has asserted the primacy of politics, the primacy will be permanent?

They say not, but they say many things that they probably do not believe. (That a government-run "public option" health insurance would not extinguish or even harm private insurance; that cap-and-trade carbon regulations will raise energy costs without injuring the economy; that taxing Peter to subsidize Paul's purchase of a new car is a sound basis for economic growth; that an 85 percent unspent stimulus has routed the recession, etc.)

Will cites a pair of bills from Tennessee's senators, each calling for re-privatizing publicly-owned corporations, which Democrats resolutely oppose, as they wish to make state intervention permanent.

Bottom Line.  Will is right about all this, save for one thing.  In what is a rare slip for him he chose the wrong label.  The word "capitalism" does not belong because, as Will himself notes, profit is not Team Obama's objective.  Thus, Obamanomics is neo-corporatism--forced public/private partnerships with government always the senior partner, plus lemon socialism--with, on occasion, a whiff of fascist violence when union or ACORN thugs are needed.  In effect, such hybrid entities are run for political, not economic, profit.

LFTC - Health Care: Whom Do Voters Trust?

August is usually quiet time for politics.  But the Great Health Care Debate of 2009 is heating up, driven by rising voter distrust.  The inability to convince voters can lead to gaming the Senate, as Byron York explains, using budget reconciliation votes, which only require 51 senators, to pass financial provisions of the HC bill, and filling in the blanks years later.  (If the GOP averts this, it can thank the foresight of GOP senators who prevailed a few years ago in persuading their colleagues to eschew the "nuclear option" to bypass Democratic filibusters of judicial nominees; there would be no question that Democrats would ram things through had the GOP done that.)

Columnist Kyle Smith sees health care "going postal" if ObamaCare passes.  He describes service--well, lack of same--at his local post office outlet.  It is this lack of trust in government that is at the root of the troubles ObamaCare is encountering: Voters simply do not trust the government enough to endorse wholesale recasting of a vital set of services in their lives. 

Policy maven David Frum identifies why Americans are unwilling to make a huge HC change:

Interviewer: "So how do you--how do we--deal with it?" The President: "Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance."

The raucous protesters at the town hall are not defending the liberty of the individual; they are defending the status quo, a status quo that for many means lavish government healthcare for the elderly. They (rightly) fear that government is much more concerned to hold costs down than to improve care.

Objective studies find little difference in outcomes between America's costly care and the much cheaper care in more statist systems. Canadians live longer, the Dutch have better infant mortality statistics, etc. Healthcare systems do not make much difference to health outcomes. Americans are more likely to be obese than Europeans. (One health dollar in ten is attributable to the obesity-caused type 2 diabetes.) Americans shoot each other, and give birth prematurely, more often. Healthcare can do only so much to compensate for these choices (and a severely underweight baby is more likely to survive in the US than just about anywhere on Earth).

What the US system offers to those who enjoy good coverage is much harder to measure: convenience, security, responsiveness to patients and personal attention from doctors who compete to attract customers.

Fear of the loss of American medicine at its best is what is riling the town halls. Americans like what they have. They worry that it cannot continue. And they correctly surmise that a President with other spending priorities seeks to take it away.

Barry Goldwater cites numerous government mega-failures--Medicare's Ponzi scheme financial black hole, railroads, post office, War on Drugs, Department of Energy--and ask why we would trust the government to run health care.  Karl Rove notes, with supreme irony, that President 44 is seeking to curb Medicare Advantage, the one Medicare program that actually works as advertised.

WSJ pundit Dan Henninger adds one factor no one else has fingered as a prime cause of voter distrust of government: the Bernie Madoff mega-rip-off:

I believe Madoff's massive and destructive breach of trust had an effect on the public mind that carried beyond the tragedy of its immediate victims. After Madoff, John Q. Public set the bar really high for anyone seeking a big commitment of trust with money. But that's exactly what the ambitious Obama health plan did.

President Obama in his public pleas for the plan appears to be truly upset that his benign view of it isn't obvious to all. In his op-ed Sunday for the New York Times he said, "We'll cut hundreds of billions in waste and inefficiency in federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid." Hundreds of billions? Just like that? This is nothing but an assertion by one man. It's close to Peter Pan telling the children that thinking lovely thoughts will make them fly.

Most people are aware that the big three entitlements we've got are underfunded. Medicaid is wrecking state budgets, Medicare goes broke in eight years, followed by the flatlining of Social Security.

Charles Krauthammer fixes mid-June, when trillion-dollar cost numbers came out--as the moment ObamaCare lost voter trust.  He then takes aim at the latest Obama sales pitch, what he calls "the preventive care myth."  Once again, the Congressional Budget office (CBO) punctures the balloon:

Reform proponents repeat this like a mantra. Because it seems so intuitive, it has become conventional wisdom. But like most conventional wisdom, it is wrong. Overall, preventive care increases medical costs.

This inconvenient truth comes, once again, from the CBO. In an Aug. 7 letter to Rep. Nathan Deal, CBO Director Doug Elmendorf writes: "Researchers who have examined the effects of preventive care generally find that the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illness."

CK continues, citing CBO again:

Think of it this way. Assume that a screening test for disease X costs $500 and finding it early averts $10,000 of costly treatment at a later stage. Are you saving money? Well, if one in 10 of those who are screened tests positive, society is saving $5,000. But if only one in 100 would get that disease, society is shelling out $40,000 more than it would without the preventive care.

That's a hypothetical case. What's the real-life actuality in the United States today? A study in the journal Circulation found that for cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, "if all the recommended prevention activities were applied with 100 percent success," the prevention would cost almost 10 times as much as the savings, increasing the country's total medical bill by 162 percent. Elmendorf additionally cites a definitive assessment in the New England Journal of Medicine that reviewed hundreds of studies on preventive care and found that more than 80 percent of preventive measures added to medical costs.

This, CK notes, does not mean we shun preventive care, merely the illusion that it saves money for society overall.

Polling ace Karlyn Bowman sees "sticker shock" undercutting public support for Obamanomics & ObamaCare.  Check out this running US Debt Clock for sticker shock in real-time.  AEI HC maven Robert Goldberg attends an Atlanta town meeting and finds genuine grassroots opposition, with voters very well informed about HC issues & details, and acutely aware of Medicare's gazillion trillion fiscal black hole in America's financial future.  (OK, I exaggerate: Medicare's unfunded liability is only $89TR). HC maven John Goodman, head of the National Center for Policy Analysis, reports on the 1.1 million voters who signed a protest petition at his website, and finds them well-informed indeed.  Here is NCPA's "Free our health care now!" petition.

AEI HC scholar Scott Gottlieb notes that President Obama's jaundiced view of doctors as willingly ordering surgery where medication will do influences his attitudes: 44 focuses on direct intervention in doctor decisions, instead of economic incentives.  SG notes that in 1960 patients covered 60 percent of costs for physician & clinical treatment, versus 10 percent today.  SG also explains how Congress intends to use the power of the purse to guide "death panel" HC consultations.  To be fair, as Krauthammer notes, "death panel" is not a term in the bill, and CK sees a more nuanced pressure coming from ObamaCare on end-of-life, in a column well worth a read.

Here is the VA's manual, Your Life, Your Choices, that offers counseling services to wounded veterans.  Bush 43 White House adviser Jim Towey calls it a "Death Book for Veterans" in a WSJ op-ed.

I do not wish to clutter an already long-posting with large excerpts.  I found the booklet more ambiguous than did Towey, while respecting his view.  Compare the language on two pages of the booklet: (a) on page 21, which Towey objects to, which lists factors such as a patient not wanting to be a financial burden and feeling the blues all the time as reasons to consider refusing treatment or making a living will; with (b) the language on page 50 about adjusting to new limitations and reconsidering answers given the questions on page 21.  The document, taken as a whole, reads like gobs & gobs of bureaucratic to and fro.  It is not stuff I think government should be publishing, but it is not, to my reading, directly pushing suicide.

But Towey notes that one co-author advocated assisted suicide in 1996, and that the book refers veterans to the Hemlock Society for counseling on living wills, the only organization so named.  Towey also notes that the co-author, Robet Pearlman, was an advocate before the Supreme Court in Vacco v. Quill (1997), whose case Syllabus summarizes in one page the Cort's holding: In a nutshell, the Justices ruled unanimously that the State of New York could legitimately & thus Constitutionally prohibit assisted suicide while permitting refusal of lifesaving treatment.  (The four liberal Justices dissented on the specific reasoning--read the opinions in the case if your time permits, as mine at present does not.)

But the matter does not end there, because bureaucracies can operate in all sorts of subtle ways, and therein lies the rub.  Betsy McCaughey, dragon-slayer of HillaryCare in 1994, shows in a few crisp paragraphs how ObamaCare will force doctors towards advocating termination in marginal cases, by penalizing contrary doctor advice to living will patients without explicitly making the preferred ObamaCare advice mandatory in plain language.  Medical reimbursement to doctors will be premised at least in part on how often patients follow dictates of living wills.  At TAS, Quin Hillyer calls this "death by proxy" and gives details.  Betsy McCaughey gives more details on rationing under ObamaCare, looking at the views of top White House HC adviser Ezekiel Emanuel (brother of chief of staff Rahm).

On Fox News Sunday, Tammy Duckworth, Assistant Secretary of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs at the Department of Veterans Affairs (herself a disabled veteran), said that the VA manual had not been used since 2007, but in fact it was reinstated July 2, 2009; VA was referring veterans to the manual.  Only this week, after the Towey WSJ article attacking the manual was published on August 20, was the disclaimer about the book being under revision re-posted on the website.  (It was posted there between July 2 & August 20).

Here is a Fox interview with Scott Gottlieb (5:44) on HC.  Here is an 8/15/09  CNBC doctors' debate (9:29) between SG & Howard Dean.  GOP Congressman Mike Rogers (MI) slams ObamaCare's curtailment of free choice brilliantly (3:49).  SG also explains how Team Obama aims to implement a federal takeover of the private insurance market:

Having chosen insurers as its designated villains, how will the administration craft a plan that "just happens" to wind up producing a form of nationalized health care?

Simple: Call for supplanting state regulation of existing insurance plans in favor of federal regulation--which will extend even to the employer-provided coverage that's now free from most regulation.

Specifically, the White House plan will force insurers to cover all applicants, regardless of lifestyle or prior health conditions (known in industry jargon as "guaranteed issue") and to charge everyone the same general price regardless of their health factors ("community rating"). The Obama team will also call for federal formulas to limit insurers' profits and a Washington regulator to set minimum plan benefits.

The package will also aim to supplant federal ERISA law, which now lets large employers offer uniform health plans across state lines, free from costly federal and state regulation. (The White House has already endorsed the House bill that would gut ERISA after a five-year grace period.)

In short order, this regulatory regime would bring a federal takeover of the private-insurance market. Remaining insurers would operate as utilities at the behest of new regulatory agencies and a White House-anointed "health choices commissioner."

In the long run, most insurers will simply fold--limiting the choices people have and leaving a government-run plan the only option. Private insurance will exist only as wrap-around policies available to the well-to-do.

Here is another take on how public co-ops are not needed for quality care:

Democrats' health insurance proposals already require private insurers to accept all applicants with no pre-existing condition exclusions, at premium rates that do not reflect health status and vary only within a narrow range based on age. These changes guarantee people access to health insurance at rates that would not price the ill or near-elderly out of the market—without creating government-authorized co-ops.

Democrats' proposals expand eligibility for Medicaid and provide significant premium subsidies to buyers with incomes up to 300% or even 400% of the poverty level. These provisions would make insurance substantially more affordable for people with low-to-moderate income—without creating government-authorized co-ops.

Government-authorized co-ops also are not necessary to provide consumers with nonprofit alternatives. Nonprofit mutual insurance companies, most notably many Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans, already offer health insurance in many states. They are dominant players in some states.

Absent taxpayer subsidies or special rules, co-ops would not have any inherent advantage over private health insurers in establishing provider networks, negotiating with providers, and monitoring health-care utilization and fraud. Proposed co-ops instead would require billions of dollars of "start-up" subsidies.

The WSJ editors see ObamaCare's public option in retreat.  In fact, as Thomas Sowell points out, it is quality care that costs too much, in the eyes of WH adviser Ezekiel Emanuel (brother of Rahm).  Here is the June 18, 2008 JAMA article co-authored by Emanuel that Sowell discusses; I declined to pay $15 to read it.)  (Emanuel says outcomes are no better, but this has more to do with lifestyles in the USA--guns, obesity, drug babies, saving preemies, prolonging end of life--than with the quality of medical practice given.)  See this NRO chart on life expectancy, to see how increased HC spending has lengthened lifespans over previous decades.

Now read this Sunday New York Times front-pager on Tom Daschle's insider role in HC lobbying.  Daschle was the President's first pick to head Health & Human Services, but his candidacy imploded over non-payment of taxes.  So now he gets to "submarine" and plant hidden legislative sea mines set to explode years later.  Here is a nugget from the NYT piece, which is laudatory (in a way no GOP lobbyist can expect to get) about a Beltway Bandit Extraordinaire:

To address doctors’ fears of lawsuits, Mr. Daschle and his collaborators proposed a “safe harbor” from legal liability for doctors who follow certain rules. Mr. Obama took up the idea in a mid-June speech to the American Medical Association.

Here is 44's June 15, 2009 speech to the AMA, and here is the passage the NYT referenced:

Now, I recognize that it will be hard to make some of these changes if doctors feel like they're constantly looking over their shoulders for fear of lawsuits. I recognize that. (Applause.) Don't get too excited yet. Now, I understand some doctors may feel the need to order more tests and treatments to avoid being legally vulnerable. That's a real issue. (Applause.) Now, just hold on to your horses here, guys. (Laughter.) I want to be honest with you. I'm not advocating caps on malpractice awards -- (boos from some in audience) -- (laughter) -- which I personally believe can be unfair to people who've been wrongfully harmed.

But I do think we need to explore a range of ideas about how to put patient safety first; how to let doctors focus on practicing medicine; how to encourage broader use of evidence-based guidelines. I want to work with the AMA so we can scale back the excessive defensive medicine that reinforces our current system, and shift to a system where we are providing better care, simply -- rather than simply more treatment.

So this is going to be a priority for me. And I know, based on your responses, it's a priority for you. (Laughter.) And I look forward to working with you. And it's going to be difficult. But all this stuff is going to be difficult. All of it's going to be important.

Economist Martin Feldstein details how ObamaCare rations, and how tax rules could--but won't--be fixed to promote better care.  Here is how ObamaCare will ration:

The president has emphasized the importance of limiting services to "health care that works." To identify such care, he provided more than $1 billion in the fiscal stimulus package to jump-start Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) and to finance a federal CER advisory council to implement that idea. That could morph over time into a cost-control mechanism of the sort proposed by former Sen. Tom Daschle, Mr. Obama's original choice for White House health czar. Comparative effectiveness could become the vehicle for deciding whether each method of treatment provides enough of an improvement in health care to justify its cost.

In the British national health service, a government agency approves only those expensive treatments that add at least one Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) per £30,000 (about $49,685) of additional health-care spending. If a treatment costs more per QALY, the health service will not pay for it. The existence of such a program in the United States would not only deny lifesaving care but would also cast a pall over medical researchers who would fear that government experts might reject their discoveries as "too expensive."

And here is the tax hurdle--the politically sacrosanct employer-paid HC deduction:

But budget considerations aside, health-economics experts agree that private health spending is too high because our tax rules lead to the wrong kind of insurance. Under existing law, employer payments for health insurance are deductible by the employer but are not included in the taxable income of the employee. While an extra $100 paid to someone who earns $45,000 a year will provide only about $60 of after-tax spendable cash, the employer could instead use that $100 to pay $100 of health-insurance premiums for that same individual. It is therefore not surprising that employers and employees have opted for very generous health insurance with very low copayment rates.

Since a typical 20% copayment rate means that an extra dollar of health services costs the patient only 20 cents at the time of care, patients and their doctors opt for excessive tests and other inappropriately expensive forms of care. The evidence on health-care demand implies that the current tax rules raise private health-care spending by as much as 35%.

The best solution to this problem of private overconsumption of health services would be to eliminate the tax rule that is causing the excessive insurance and the resulting rise in health spending. Alternatively, Congress could strengthen the incentives in the existing law for health savings accounts with high insurance copayments. Either way, the result would be more cost-conscious behavior that would lower health-care spending.

Hudson Institute President Herb London details further how ObamaCare rations care, and why "appropriate" is not a synonym for "best":

With ObamaCare, a council or a bureaucrat relying on a computer program will determine the appropriate level of care. If an 80-year-old, for example, needs a hip replacement, the bureaucrat is likely to argue that a tin joint, as opposed to a titanium joint, is appropriate since the person only has a few years left based on actuarial expectations. Or if an 80-year-old has cancer an advisory council might suggest that aggressive and expensive radiation treatment doesn’t make sense since that person doesn’t have long to live whatever the treatment.

 

This is ostensibly a rationing and triage system that determines who is treated and what kind of treatment is appropriate. The word “appropriate” is what is critical. Rather than the best care, the word appropriate is widely employed by members of the administration.

This hilarious HC coverage video on Medicaid on Oregon (1:30) (Medicaid is HC insurance for the poor) captures perfectly how political influence determines who gets insurance coverage and who does not.

Legal eagles David Rivkin & KLee Casey argue that requiring everyone to buy health insurance is beyond the power given Congress under the Constitution.  Perhaps so, but do not count on five Supremes to agree--bet your bottom HC dollar that "Super-Empathy Sonia" Sotomayor sides with ruling that Congress does possess such power.  Hudson scholar Diana Furchtgott-Roth notes another issue: the privacy-invading provisions of the House bill would open everyone'w bank accounts to health snoops.  Another problem is what New Gingrich calls "Sopranos-style tactics" behind ObamaCare.

Finally, two HC mavens see "Big Care, Small Solutions" in current proposals, and note that trade-offs--denied by what the WSJ editors call ObamaCare's contradictions--are inevitable:

If we have to choose between spending less and getting less or spending more and getting more, how should we think about the choice?

In our view, it is not self-evident that American society should want to ultimately spend less on health care, or even less per capita. Indeed, we might wish to spend more. There is no way to assign a priori an optimal level of spending on health, for health is not a binary outcome. It defines a wide range of factors, around which one can imagine a wide range of cooperative behaviors between patients and caregivers. A society that chooses to increase the share of its income devoted to health would not be making an irrational decision. Economists have convincingly argued that the benefits of much of what is achievable from today's health technologies far exceed their cost, and this may prove even more the case as technologies in medical science further improve. As long as there is a social consensus on how higher spending should be financed, it is difficult to argue that there is such a thing as "too much" health spending.

That's the problem. We do not agree on how to finance what we desire, and we sense that the way we do it now is neither efficient nor fair. And as long we lack a consensus on that simple question, vested interests within the system will have a much easier time getting their way and preventing major change. And one of the reasons we have not had that key debate is the illusion that achieving efficiencies will make basic tradeoffs unnecessary.

Bottom Line.  Ultimately, the HC debate comes down to this: WHO DECIDES?  If patients & doctors decide, more money will be spent on care.  If insurers decide, cost-containment will trump marginal care requests.  If the insurer is a government, private parties contesting an adverse ruling are at a legal disadvantage that private insurers cannot wield: the presumption of correctness as to insurance decisions.  Government insurers get this; private insurers are at parity with claimants.  This is a second way in which the government ultimately would decide outcomes as a practical matter, by making decisions on doctor practices, patient choice and insurance coverage that will gather power in the government.

The health care debate brings to mind the 1964 GOP Presidential nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater Senior, and one of his most famous sayings: "A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."

LFTC - Index 8/26/09

3 posts: (1) CIA: Cheney Returns--The Home Front; (2) Lockerbie: Roots & Consequences--Wobble Watch; (3) Edward Kennedy: The Politics of Royalty--The Home Front.

LFTC - CIA: Cheney Returns

NRO's "The Corner" posted Dick Cheney's response to Team Obama's decision to appoint a special counsel to investigate CIA interrogations.  As I am unsure if the link will last, here is the full Cheney paragraph:

The documents released Monday clearly demonstrate that the individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda. This intelligence saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks. These detainees also, according to the documents, played a role in nearly every capture of al Qaeda members and associates since 2002.  The activities of the CIA in carrying out the policies of the Bush Administration were directly responsible for defeating all efforts by al Qaeda to launch further mass casualty attacks against the United States. The people involved deserve our gratitude. They do not deserve to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions.  President Obama’s decision to allow the Justice Department to investigate and possibly prosecute CIA personnel, and his decision to remove authority for interrogation from the CIA to the White House, serves as a reminder, if any were needed, of why so many Americans have doubts about this Administration’s ability to be responsible for our nation’s security.

An ex-Bush 43 speechwriter puts CIA practices in perspective by noting the contrast with a New York State youth facility that tolerated these abuses:

On Monday the Obama administration released a 2004 CIA inspector general's report on the agency's detention and interrogation program. Yesterday, the New York Times reported some gruesome abuses on its front page, above the fold: "Excessive physical force was routinely used, resulting in broken bones, shattered teeth, concussions, and dozens of other serious injuries over a period of less than two years, a federal investigation has found. . . . [D]espite rules allowing force only as a last resort. 'Staff at the facilities routinely used uncontrolled, unsafe applications of force, departing from generally accepted standards,' said the report."

Actually, these abuses were not committed by the CIA. They were committed by officials at four juvenile residential detention centers in New York state. The details came from a Justice Department report that recounted how "workers forced one boy, who had glared at a staff member, into a sitting position and secured his arms behind his back with such force that his collarbone was broken."

Compare that to how the CIA policed its program:

While officials at the New York state detention facilities failed to report the abuses ("the ombudsman's office charged with overseeing the youth prison centers had virtually ceased to function," the Times reported), the CIA inspector general's report describes a well-run, highly disciplined CIA interrogation program, where clear guidelines were established and abuses or deviations from approved techniques were stopped, reported and addressed.

Indeed, the CIA report makes clear from its first paragraphs that it was those who ran the program who brought abuses to the IG's attention: "In November 2002, the Deputy Director of Operations (DDO) informed the Office of Inspector General (OIG) that . . . he had just learned of and had dispatched a team to investigate [REDACTED]. In January 2003, the DDO informed OIG that he had received allegations that Agency personnel had used unauthorized techniques with a detainee, Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri . . . and requested that OIG investigate."

Once the IG report was completed, the agency referred it to the Justice Department for review for possible criminal prosecutions. This review was conducted not by Bush political appointees. It was conducted by career prosecutors from the Eastern District of Virginia. They recommended against prosecutions in all but one case—that of a CIA contractor, not in the official interrogation program, who had beaten a detainee in Afghanistan. (The detainee later died and the contractor was subsequently convicted of assault.)

The New York Times reports today that the new evidence shows tight control was exercised over CIA practices, and not a runaway Agency.  Thus these paragraphs from the NYT story:

Two 17-watt fluorescent-tube bulbs — no more, no less — illuminated each cell, 24 hours a day. White noise played constantly but was never to exceed 79 decibels. A prisoner could be doused with 41-degree water but for only 20 minutes at a stretch....

Managers, doctors and lawyers not only set the program’s parameters but dictated every facet of a detainee’s daily routine, monitoring interrogations on an hour-by-hour basis. From their Washington offices, they obsessed over the smallest details: the number of calories a prisoner consumed daily (1,500); the number of hours he could be kept in a box (eight hours for the large box, two hours for the small one); the proper time when his enforced nudity should be ended and his clothes returned....

“The interrogators’ objective,” the background paper says, “is to transition the HVD to a point where he is participating in a predictable, reliable and sustainable manner.” The policy was to use the “least coercive measure” to achieve the goal. The harsh treatment began with the “attention slap,” and for three prisoners of the nearly 100 who passed through the program, the endpoint was waterboarding.  (Boldface added.)

Here is the guideline for waterboarding; here is a note on medical research into induced hypothermia.  The article notes that critics see this as grotesque, while defenders see it as evidence of extreme care taken to minimize harm.

The Washington Post reports on how the CIA refined methods of breaking a detainee's will to resist.  Yet detainees also got remarkably lenient treatment as well:

The facilities were constantly illuminated, and the agency used closed-circuit surveillance to monitor the prisoners at all times, suggesting that hidden cameras were placed inside cells.

"The detainee is isolated from most human contact, confined to his cell for much of each day, under constant surveillance, and is never permitted a moment to rest in the darkness and privacy that most people seek during sleep," the memo said.

But, to combat mental problems, each detainee was given quarterly psychological examinations "to assess how well he is adapting to his confinement," the memo said. Detainees also had regular access to gym equipment and physical exercise.

"The CIA also counteracts the psychological effects of isolation by providing detainees with a wide variety of books, puzzles, paper and 'safe' writing utensils, chess and checker sets, a personal journal, and access to DVD and VCR videotapes," the document said.

Here is another NRO link that crisply enumerates the moral foolishness in Team Obama's position.  Here is what the ACLU says is  the full CIA I-G May 7, 2004 report on interrogations (41 pages--about half fully redacted), but it does not include what are in NRO's 5 page of report highlights.  NRO excerpted 20 notable passages from the report (5 pages) to focus on evidence that interrogations yielded valuable information, evidence that Congressional leaders were kept informed, and evidence that interrogators feared being hounded later on.  Stephen Hayes offers a parallel take on the Weekly Standard blog.  His brief posting is excellent, and here is one major paragraph of his summarizing what worked:

Let’s review. Abu Zubaydah gave up some information before the use of EITs. But “since the use of the waterboard…Abu Zubaydah has appeared to be cooperative,” and gave up even more intelligence. Al Nashiri provided mostly historical information in the short time before EITs were employed. “However, following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning…” And “accomplished resistor” Khalid Shaykh Muhammad provided mostly useless information before the application of EITs. Afterwards, he “provided information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists” – so much information, in fact, that he was regarded as the “most prolific” intelligence source.

Perhaps most poignant (from NRO's posting) is this nugget from one CIA interrogator: "Ten years later we're going to be sorry we're doing this...[but] it has to be done."

Bottom Line.  Those who interrogated terror detainees were realists, keenly aware of what had happened to the CIA and its personnel in decades past.  For their extraordinary dedication in pressing forward in an effort to glean information that would save American lives, they anticipated that they might well pay for it later.  They did not realize that it would be less than ten years when they faced legal peril in a new administration.

LFTC - Lockerbie: Roots & Consequences

In 2001 a leading international lawyer named Allan Gerson co-authored (with Newsweek editor Jerry Adler) The Price of Terror, a riveting account of how after the December 21, 1988 terror bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, the families, against all odds and despite numerous internecine wars, managed in a 12-year struggle to win three huge victories against Libya: (1) a large negligence verdict returned (deservedly) against PanAm; (2) win the legal right to sue for a civil judgment against Libya, establishing a new exception to centuries-old precedent conferring nearly absolute sovereign immunity on governments; (3) get the US & Britain to pressure via severe sanctions (plus UN weaker sanctions) Libyan terror-sponsor & dictator Muammar Gaddafi to turn over two Libyan intelligence agents for trial under Scottish law before Scottish judges, on a US Army base in the Netherlands, on of whom was convicted in 2000.  (The convicted defendant was held in jail until last week's release.)

The book recounts countless creative legal maneuvers, many first time events, and gives a vivid picture of how the families proceeded, though far from unified, often bitterly feuding, in the legislative & executive branches as well.  Beginning with next to zero political savvy, with rare exceptions, the families within a few years became a formidable political force in Washington, and skilled at rallying support via the media when their efforts stalled.  Frequently they were able to play one branch off against another.

We learn other facts of interest.  Notably, of the 16 F-111 bombers sent in April 1986 by President Reagan to bomb Libya, only 2--yes, two--actually dropped bombs, because the rules of engagement were so stringent that the others had to pass.  Not in the account, but discussed in Michael Ledeen's brilliant 2007 book, The Iranian Time Bomb, is that the reason French President Francois Mitterand refused to give our pilots overflight rights, thus greatly lengthening their round-trip from bases in England to Libya & back, was because President Reagan refused to commit to overthrowing the regime.  Had Reagan done so, Mitterand would have joined forces, but he regarded a pin-prick raid as too small potatoes to risk any French political capital with Libya.  To be fair to Reagan, one bomb landed near Gaddafi's tent but failed to detonate, thus sparing Gaddafi's miserable hide.

Gerson, who served as legal adviser to Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick during her tenure at the UN, serves up enough on the wishy-washy diplomacy & evasive behavior of State and Justice Department bureaucrats to make the reader gag.  But the book also adds something else of interest: the simple desire of many families for a second attack on Gaddafi put them ahead of Washington's political sophisticates.

We learn painful facts, too.  From 6 miles up it takes 2 to 3 minutes for a human body to fall to Earth; it hits 160 mph top speed, but as the atmosphere thickens it slows to 120 mph by time of impact.  Passengers may well be conscious for much--possibly, in some cases, all--of the descent.  This is so despite hypoxia, despite hitting the air at 400 or 500 mph and suffering excruciating whiplash, despite being tossed into minus-50 degree cold.  Many mercifully lose consciousness from shock.

For reader shock, Gerson treats us to the legal system at its worst when, in the civil case against PanAm, the United States Aviation Underwriters (USAU), the defendant insurance company, succeeded in getting damages for pain & suffering during those few terrifying & agonizing minutes tossed out by the judge.  Income differentials, and thus earnings potential throughout a working lifetime, could be calculated for passengers one by one (and were) in determining compensatory damages.  But it was impossible to arrive at a single figure for all passengers as to an amount payable to each for the pain of descent, because passengers took unknown specific times to fall, and even given known seat positions, had no doubt been flying around the cabin and thus the seat location could not be used for calculation.  The Court could not bring itself to fix an averaging number and give to every family even a modest sum to cover this loss.  So the USAU avoided a few millions in added liability.  Gerson introduces readers to the soulless attorneys who made such arguments for USAU.  It is enough to make one long for members of the criminal defense bar.

Bottom Line.  The price of terror turned on the high price of legalism.  Ronald Reagan had a month to go in office when PanAm 103 was destroyed.  That was time enough to stage a second raid on Libya, and this time use 60 planes and have most of them drop their ordnance.  Gaddafi would then have gotten the message about what happens if you order the mass murder of Americans.  By treating such acts of war as matters for the law courts, we helped set the stage for September 11, 2001.  President Bush conducted the Gulf War under legalist rules, and spared Saddam at the war's end, lest possibly he step beyond the bounds of UN resolutions.  And President Clinton turned down Sudanese dictator Hassan al-Turabi's 1996 offer of one Osama bin Laden because our legal eagles judged we could not build a legal case against him.  So Osama skipped off to Afghanistan, and in 1998 al-Qaeda bombed two American embassies in Africa, killing some 500 & wounding 4,000.  And then 19 al-Qaeda terrorists paid us a visit one warm, sunny September day in 2001.

LFTC: Edward Kennedy: The Politics of Royalty

Edward Moore Kennedy lived a double life, one marked by royal prerogative, and another as a supremely skilled senator who combined ruthless partisanship with a remarkable ability to engineer bipartisan cooperation in legislation that involved his opponents making most of the compromises.  He was a passionate believer in growing government, because royalty runs governments and rules by diktat, whereas private enterprise requires accepting marketplace discipline.

Public tastes change, and it remains to be seen if any of the younger Kennedy kids can ascend to royal status.  If not, and no heir of stature is evident, his death will end what has been a fifty-year dynastic run for the world's most famous political family.  Royalty's privileges he and his family claimed to the full: His father literally bought the 1960 Presidential election for older brother John, who appointed one brother to the Cabinet and another to the Senate.  Yet royalty carries its own tragic vulnerability: his three older brothers were all martyred, Joe on a World War II combat mission, JFK as a fallen President, Bobby seeking same.

But the sympathy thus garnered was squandered, most pointedly by his leaving a young woman to die underwater while he frantically searched for not the emergency responder who could save her, but for the lawyers who could save his own skin.  Those who stood in the Kennedy family's way found out how wealth and power coupled with ruthlessness and an ability to suborn fawning media could run them over.

Royalty trumped hypocrisy, because royalty has superior entitlement, and thus living by different rules is not, from the king's view, hypocrisy.  Thus, Senator Kennedy could simultaneously secure for himself aggressive cancer treatment to give him an extra year of life, while championing ObamaCare, which would create bureaucratic panels that would apply a "comparative effectiveness" yardstick to deny less privileged elderly patients with terminal illness the insurance coverage needed to pay for a high-tech power cocktail of treatments to prolong life a year.

Not for this senator, ensconced for life in America's Upper Chamber, the safeguard James Madison laid down for the House of Representatives in Federalist 57:

I will add, as a fifth circumstance in the situation of the House of Representatives, restraining them from oppressive measures, that they can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society. This has always been deemed one of the strongest bonds by which human policy can connect the rulers and the people together. It creates between them that communion of interests and sympathy of sentiments, of which few governments have furnished examples; but without which every government degenerates into tyranny. If it be asked, what is to restrain the House of Representatives from making legal discriminations in favor of themselves and a particular class of the society? I answer: the genius of the whole system; the nature of just and constitutional laws; and above all, the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America -- a spirit which nourishes freedom, and in return is nourished by it.

Two other recent dynastic families, those of Bush and Clinton, have not yet achieved the royal status of the Kennedy Clan; nor did the Adams & Roosevelt clans in their heyday.  For the sake of America, may no political family ever again achieve such exalted status--may no other royal family emerge.  America freed itself from distant royal embrace in 1776.  Americans have no need to replace foreign royalty with domestic royalty.  Domestic royalty makes the governed wards of the state, rather than truly independent citizens.

Mr. Jefferson put it first, and best:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

LFTC - Index 8/25/09

5 posts: (1) Brother Can You Spare $9 Trillion?--The Home Front; (2) CIA: Panetta's CYA; Obama/Holder's 3rd Degree--The Home Front; (3) Lockerbie Perp: Guilty or Fall Guy?--Wobble Watch; (4) Fed Follies, Big Gov't Bogus--The Home Front; (4) Arms Control: Theology Versus Defense--The Home Front.

LFTC - Brother Can You Spare $9 Trillion?

Fox News did some arithmetic, and found that spending $100 per second it would take 2,853 years to spend the $9 TR that 44 proposes to add to the public debt.  (My calculator computes 2,853.88 years, which rounds up to 2,854 under the rules I learned in school.)  Look at it this way: There are 31,536,000 seconds in one year.  To spend $9 TR in 10 years--the period over which 44's $9 TR budget binge is to run--would take spending nearly $30,000 per second!  (To be precise, $28,538.80 per second.)

In 1931, lyricist E. Y. (Yip) Harburg penned this deathless verse as the Great Depression deepened:

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;
Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

It is time to update this, with apologies to Yip (a died-in-the-wool Democrat all his days):

VOTER, CAN YOU SPARE A TRIL?

Once I owned some big banks, pumped in dough, told them "Empty the till!"

Ordered pseudo-stim'lus, little done; Voter, can you spare a TRIL?

Once I bought up GM, Chrysler too, made 'em pay union bills.

Then I Rx'd health care for each one; Voter, can you spare 9 TRILS?

Copyright  John C. Wohlstetter 2009

LFTC - CIA: Panetta's CYA; Obama/Holder's 3rd Degree

Panetta.  Author Joseph Finder details in the Daily Beast how CIA Director Leon Panetta blundered into the CIA assassination mess by running to the Hill before checking with his predecessors, and then discovered the program was perfectly legal, but too late to reverse the damage.  Here are Finder's money paragraphs:

To veteran CIA-watchers, something about this whole story didn’t track. How could such a risky and serious program be concealed from the new CIA director for four months? Had the CIA really gone rogue, as some headlines in newspapers and on cable news shows blared? That was, for a time, the popular narrative: the honorable but naïve new CIA director being played by shadowy rogue elements right out of a 1970s Hollywood conspiracy thriller.

Alas, the sad truth is that the CIA, despite its Bourne Identity reputation, has become a timorous, risk-averse bureaucracy. Any program as fraught as the one he disclosed to Congress would have been revealed to him on the day he moved into his seventh-floor office. The fact it took four months for him to learn about it, during a routine briefing, should have told him something. There was no there there.

Panetta’s big mistake has only emboldened those Democrats in Congress who have been pushing to have all CIA debriefings, even the most classified, videotaped, to avoid future ambiguity. As one very former, very senior Bush administration official said to me in annoyance, “You know what? Let’s videotape them all. And when some important covert action gets torpedoed by the those guys on the intelligence committees and then we get hit again, let’s put those tapes up on YouTube for everyone to see who disarmed us. See what they think. It cuts both ways.”

Were it not for Panetta’s gaffe, there’d likely be no congressional hearings into “possible” violations of laws by the intelligence community. A staffer on the oversight committee told me that, although Panetta’s disclosure will be the main event, there are two other areas of “concern,” including an incident that occurred in 2001. The Panetta hearings, however, were “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

More seriously, this controversy has given ammunition to congressional efforts to broaden CIA briefings. Instead of allowing the CIA to limit disclosure of the most sensitive, most highly classified stuff to just the “Gang of Eight”—the leaders of those committees and of the House and Senate—they want to require the CIA to brief the full membership of the intelligence committees.

At that point, the risks of leaks may become a serious issue (as the leaks in this incident prove). The CIA will then be faced with a choice: hold back as much as they can get away with legally—a risky game these days—or avoid any kind of covert action that might be jeopardized by congressional leaks, likely including the most high-risk attempts to target terrorist groups like al Qaeda.

As Jane Mayer illustrated in her excellent New Yorker profile, Leon Panetta faces a near-impossible job. He has to rally the troops while forcing them to confront their recent history. President Obama, reasonably, wanted an outsider to run the CIA, someone whose hands, by definition, were clean.
Unfortunately, what made sense in theory hasn’t worked out in reality. The job called for someone who knew where all the hidden levers were. Not only has Panetta become deeply unpopular within the agency, but, as these recent events demonstrate, Panetta—honorable, decent, savvy—probably wasn’t the best choice after all.

Latest is an ABC News report that last month Panetta got into a "profanity-laced screaming match" with a WH aide over Holder's planned push.  Such are the wages of CYA at the CIA.

Obama/Holder.  And there is more on tap: The Washington Post reports that Attorney-General Eric Holder will appoint career Justice Department prosecutor John Dunham to probe selected CIA interrogation cases; what makes this all stink is that the probe is based upon a CIA inspector General's report from, get this...2004--YES: 2004.  A Clinton-era CIA general counsel enumerates the reasons why this is a terrible idea in a Washington Post op-ed.  It seems that the suspected mastermind of the USS Cole 2000 bombing plot--that killed 17 sailors and nearly sunk a billion-dollar destroyer--was bluff-threatened with a gun and power drill, and that other detainees were made to watch mock executions.  To Holder & Co. and the ACLU, this is abuse.  Al-Qaeda actually uses power drills on captives.  No special counsel will investigate this anytime soon.

Jed Babbin at Human Events captures the dangers inherent in chasing past ghosts, and offers details on information gleaned from enhanced interrogations.  These details come from the very May 7, 2004 CIA I-G report that forms the basis for the new moves by Team Obama, but were redacted from what was released yesterday.

Meanwhile, WSJ pundit Bret Stephens likens the outing of targeted CIA interrogators to a real Plame-scandal, in that these were genuine clandestine operatives whom the Agency tried to protect.  Stephens notes, accurately, that such outings, contrary to ACLU dogma, violate the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.  From the IIPA, here is Section 601(c):

c) Whoever, in the course of a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents and with reason to believe that such activities would impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States, discloses any information that identifies an individual as a covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such individual and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such individual’s classified intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18, United States Code, or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.  (Boldface emphasis added.)

Now read the boldfaced language above and ask: Do the ACLU & other lawyers who expose the identities of agents who interrogated terror detainees fit within that language's knowledge requirement?  Judge for yourself.

A WSJ editorial adds detail, and notes that special counsels, once unleashed, cannot be controlled, and thus the extent of the investigation cannot be predicted today.  (Technically, the President retains the authority to fire special counsels, who operate within the Justice Department; but politically, as Richard Nixon found out in 1973 when he fired special counsel Archibald Cox over Watergate, such action can prove lethal, and thus the weapon of supervisory authority will remain sheathed.)

A Washington Post front-pager reports that today Team Obama will announce formation of a new High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) to direct interrogation of senior al-Qaeda operatives.  Centered in the FBI with National Security Council supervision to ensure White House control, it will ban sleep deprivation and (horrors!) playing loud music.  Getting a confession with Pearl Jam will be verboten.

Bottom Line.  President Obama's decision to move senior interrogation from CIA to FBI-NSC is a logical way to implement what is atrocious substantive policy.  CIA types will surely be happy, at this juncture, to be rid of what can only be a career-ender when mistakes are made.  Put simply, 44 should have made clear to A-G Holder at the outset that there were to be no--repeat, none--inquiries into past practices, period.  He did not do so, Holder went ahead, and our ability to operate our intelligence agencies has been already severely, irreparably, once again damaged for a generation.

LFTC - Lockerbie Perp: Guilty or Fall Guy?

Ace diplomat John Bolton gives his view that reliance on law enforcement rather than war-making lies at the root of the Lockerbie mess.   David Frum sees two possibilities in the early release: a deal or doubts about the defendant's guilt.  What Frum calls "the wrong man" thesis is held by folks who think Iran/Syria & not Libya was behind the PanAm 103 bombing.

Frum is a sharp analyst, but he misses one thing: Even if the defendant did not commit the crime, for Gaddafi to have turned him over to Scotland for trial indicates a willing sacrificial lamb doing Gaddafi's bidding, to defuse diplomatic & economic pressure on Libya itself.  An unwilling plant would have found a way to show innocence and thus win freedom, trading intelligence as well.  Gaddafi could not have risked such a turn of events.  Thus, if innocent of the bombing itself defendant nonetheless may fairly presumed to be an agent loyal to Libya, aiding in a cover-up.  Hence he should not have been released, period.  It would have been easier to hold him in either event as an unlawful combatant, with fewer rights of review, etc.

Bottom Line.  Once again, legalism is shown to be the real culprit in a major war fiasco.  A war frame of mind can easily grasp the prospect that the defendant, if innocent of the act itself,, then was a loyal fall guy, and thus complicit in covering up the identities of the true perp(s)--and, even, possibly, the true identity of the state sponsor(s).

LFTC - Fed Follies, Big Gov't Bogus

Hudson Institute scholar Irwin Stelzer has two great articles on the Federal Reserve: Obama and the Fed: Trouble Ahead and Jackson Hole and Digging Out of One.  The former focuses on whether Bernanke will be reappointed--he will, it was announced yesterday--and also, still relevant, discusses possible Fed steps good for the economy but bad for politics--tightening money to prevent inflation.  The latter focuses on how hard it is to balance economic growth and avoiding inflation, with a public rebuilding household balance sheets.  Both articles are excellent.

Now, get this: The new chairman of the New York Fed is a labor leader, and the vice-chairman is the former Columbia University academic who invited Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to talk to students there.  The New York Fed is primus inter pares among the twelve Federal Reserve regional banks, and having anyone at the top who is less than deeply expert in finance & banking is horrific.  Score another for Team Obama's Chicago-style politicization of economic policy.

Meanwhile, a federal judge has ruled that the Fed must release records of its emergency lending and cash infusions, under the Freedom of Information Act, because taxpayers were made involuntary investors to the tune of $2 trillion.

CATO Institute scholar Alan Reynolds shows that historically, big government has been bad for the economy, while smaller government has worked better; AR notes also that in all, less than $1 billion of February's pseudo-stimulus package has been spent on highway & energy projects--so much for "shovel ready"--ready to shovel indeed, but what they are shoveling is not printable in a family blog.

LFTC - Arms Control: Theology Versus Defense

This story details how the theology of arms control led Joe Biden, a devout worshiper, to kill SecDef Gates's proposal to modernize nuclear warheads to ensure safety & reliability of our aging arsenal.  Score one for ideology over good sense.  A second article details changes in missile defense by Team Obama that may increase American vulnerability to strategic missile strikes.  The Airborne Laser hit a new milestone, successfully tracking an instrumented missile after launch.

Two national security mavens write in today's WSJ that for Team Obama ideology trumps full-fledged missile defense, and that a limited missile defense system invites proliferation of offensive missiles.  A comprehensive layered system would far better protect America & also deter investment in offensive systems, because a strong defensive would make such investments likely futile.  They are right.

This WSJ interview shows Hillary Clinton's faith in engagement to bring the bad guys into the fold of peace.  WSJ pundit Bret Stephens says the logic of talking to everyone includes talking to...al-Qaeda.  A WSJ article says Russia may reconsider sending advanced missile defense systems to Iran.  A second WSJ piece reports Iran says it will give inspectors greater access to its nuclear facilities.  But one Iran maven sees a nuclear dilemma inside the Iranian regime: meet Obama's September negotiation deadline & avoid stronger sanctions, or risk sanctions and push the nuclear program.

Hudson Institute scholar Gabriel Schoenfeld sees America indirectly underwriting Russian missile modernization, via its Nunn-Lugar subsidies for dismantling old systems; money being fungible, GS may have a point.  But only half: Subsidizing de-naturing of Russian nuclear material is essential; the old missiles are not.  Team Obama does not get this distinction, alas.

Bottom Line.  Team Obama is taking yesterday's arms control doctrines into today's vastly different arms world, and is likely to stumble repeatedly.  What is has not learned from history it will have to learn from unhappy experience.

LFTC - Index 8/24/09

4 posts: (1) Lockerbie, Leniency & Legalism--Wobble Watch; (2) Robert Novak & Press Absolutism--MSM Murders; (3) 44 Wastes Energy, "Mad Max" Takes Energy, Leno Drills Energy--"It's the Earth Stupid!"; (4) Bolt in Berlin--Cyber-Serendip.

LFTC - Lockerbie, Leniency & Legalism

The two most salient facts as to Scotland's decision to repatriate on avowed humanitarian grounds the sole terrorist convicted of participation in the December 21, 1988 Lockerbie bombing that destroyed PanAm Flight 103 and took 270 innocent lives (including 189 Americans) are these: (1) Under a 1999 devolution law pushed through by former British PM Tony Blair, the decision was solely the Scottish government's to make (made by one Kenny MacAskill, Scotland's Cabinet Secretary for Justice)--England could not veto it; (2) the prisoner stood a good chance of prevailing on appeal, as the case made against him was not judged a strong one.  The latter point suggests that the Scottish justice minster who made the call may not be entirely truthful in stating purely humanitarian reasons for allowing the terrorist to spend his estimated final three months at home in Libya with his wife and children.  Incredibly, Scotland's First Minister, Alex Salmond, defended the decision and assailed American condemnation of same.  FYI, here is the Scottish Government's "About" webpage with information on Scotland's government organization & powers.  Click on this devolved link and more useful information appears.

Yes, the Brits could have lobbied harder--and yes, one apparent reason they did not is a big deal British Petroleum has going in Libya.  But Scottish nationalist politics are such that Brit pressure could easily have backfired.  Yet the Brits gave assurances at the time of the Lockerbie trial that if anyone were convicted therein there would be no early release, and apparently failed to condition devolution of power to Scotland on excepting the Lockerbie case, for which Britain could have reserved a veto, and thus avoided the mess it now finds itself in.  Worse, it turns out that none other than British PM Gordon Brown discussed the perp's case when negotiating with Libya.

As the DT reports, this is what Brown said at the time:

Downing Street confirmed last night that Gordon Brown had discussed the possible release of Megrahi with Colonel Gaddafi when the two men met on the fringes of the G8 summit in Italy last month. A letter the Prime Minister sent to the Libyans, dated last Thursday, the day of the release, said: “When we met I stressed that, should the Scottish Executive decide that Megrahi can return to Libya, this should be a purely private, family occasion.”

The DT reports more juicy stuff, as to Business Secretary Lord Peter Mandelson, a future PM aspirant:

Libya’s talk of trade deals has shone the spotlight on Lord Mandelson, who is facing mounting questions over his links with Mr Gaddafi, 37, the man widely tipped as his country’s next leader.

An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has disclosed that the Business Secretary’s controversial businessmen friends, Oleg Deripaska and Nat Rothschild, have a closer relationship with Mr Gaddafi than has so far been publicly known:

Earlier this summer Mr Gaddafi hosted a birthday party where the guests included Mr Deripaska, a billionaire Russian oligarch, and Mr Rothschild, a wealthy British financier.

The 37th birthday celebrations took place in Montenegro, a tiny country whose interests have been championed by Lord Mandelson and where Mr Deripaska and Mr Rothschild have substantial business interests.

Late last year Mr Rothschild hosted a party in honour of Mr Gaddafi in New York.

Lord Mandelson has met the Libyan at least twice in the past four months. Last week he admitted to a “fleeting” discussion with Mr Gaddafi about the convicted Lockerbie bomber at the Rothschilds’ family estate in Corfu. It came just days before it emerged that preparations were being made for Megrahi’s release and raised questions from opposition politicians.

The DT has this on Tony Blair, re BP, the perp & Libya:

BP signed a £545 million deal to search for oil and gas in Libya in 2007 following a visit by Tony Blair.
The former prime minister broke his own silence yesterday on the release of Megrahi, claiming that the decision had been taken solely by the Scottish authorities on compassionate grounds.

“It’s absolutely right the Libyans were always raising this issue, but we made it clear that the only way this could be dealt with was through the proper procedures,” he said.

Finally, the DT gives us a nugget about the Foreign Office contribution to the mess:

It also emerged that a Foreign Office minister had written to the Scottish government in what critics claimed was an attempt to put pressure on Scotland to set Megrahi free.

Ivan Lewis, the minister responsible for Libya, wrote to Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice secretary, less than three weeks before Megrahi was freed.

He is said to have explained that there was no legal reason not to accede to Libya’s request to transfer him into its custody under the terms of a treaty agreed between Tony Blair and Colonel Gadaffi in 2007.

Whilst confirming the letter, the Foreign Office last night insisted that it was only an explanation of the legal position, which Mr Lewis had given in response to a letter requesting clarification of the Treaty from Mr MacAskill.

“Ivan Lewis reiterated our understanding of the legal situation. It is absolute rubbish to suggest that this letter provided any encouragement to transfer Megrahi to Libya.”

DT columnist Alan Cochrane sheds further light on Blair's role, and on the complex mechanics of devolution, that both tied Britain's hands in this case and bid fair to push Britain & Scotland further apart, contrary to Blair's stated intent.  Michael Portillo, who was the responsible senior official in Lady Thatcher's government when the Lockerbie atrocity was perpetrated, and who served many years as a high-ranking Member of PArliament, recounts events of 1988 & eloquently condemns the Scottish decision.

This Daily Mail photo of Gaddafi embracing the perp upon arrival will not hang in PM Brown's office, but may hang his chances for re-election next spring.  The Daily Mail story & other photos accompanying this one is a real corker.  Speaking of "my friend" Gordon Brown & the Scots, Libya's Loon-Tyrant said this:

'To my friends in Scotland, the Scottish National Party, and Scottish prime minister, and the foreign secretary, I praise their courage for having proved their independence in decision making despite the unacceptable and unreasonable measures that they faced. Nevertheless they took this courageously right and humanitarian decision.

"And I say to my friend Brown, the Prime Minister of Britain, his Government, the Queen of Britain, Elizabeth, and Prince Andrew, who all contributed to encouraging the Scottish government to take this historic and courageous decision, despite the obstacles."

Scroll through the Daily Mail article and see all the revolting pictures that follow the airport hug.  And there is more still.  The DM reports that MacAskill is known as "Calamity Kenny" for his soft attitudes on crime.  Read the "Face in the News" box for details of how he furloughed murderers, and how violent crime has soared under his maladministration.

Oh, and Prince Andrew, it seems, is reconsidering his planned visit to Libya to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Gaddafi's seizure of power (September 1).  (Wonder where Andy was on the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing, this past July 20?)

Now, read FBI Director Robert Mueller's August 21 letter to MacAskill, and see in a single page a stinging rebuke to a contemptible action.  Mueller, who was a senior official at Bush 41 Justice when the Lockerbie indictment was returned in 1991, demolishes the purely humanitarian compassion argument, in that the terrorist perp gets kindness he denied his victims, and ditto for his family, versus the victims' families.

Lawfare Wins Again.  The real crux of the matter is the law: Once again, the price of treating terrorists like criminals, and using the law courts to prosecute them, is revealed: We allow those at war with the West to claim all the privileges we give to wayward citizens who commit common crimes.  In this instance, the Scots could easily have finessed the appeal by delaying until cancer claimed the perp, and the world would scarcely have noticed.  Instead, manic legalism ruled the roost.

Team Obama protests.  But it seems to be lost on Team Obama that its own efforts to treat terror detainees more like common criminals, and confer upon them more rights than Team Bush 43 did, evinces the identical flawed frame of mind for dealing with those at war with us.  And as Andy McCarthy reminds us on NRO, if Team Obama sets a bad example in is first months, why be surprised when allies follow?

Bottom Line.  Expect more outrages like the Lockerbie case in the future, until--if and when (may it not happen, needless to say)--the West suffers a catastrophic WMD attack that definitively discredits legalism as a prime weapon in fighting Islamist terror.

Postscript.  I wonder how carefully the Scots investigated whether the perp's illness is in fact terminal.  Should his ailment go into miraculous (or not so miraculous) remission, I would not want to be a Scottish or English official in any way associated with this.

LFTC - Robert Novak & Press Absolutism

The Wall Street Journal editors salute Robert Novak, a titan of political journalism for over 50 years, upon his passing last week.  Of Novak's substantial caliber there is no doubt.  I found him, in a few encounters, honest and gracious, always with something useful to say.  His major issue blind spot was antipathy to Israel.  But he also exhibited a common deformation professionelle for reporters: an abiding belief in the absolute--no exceptions--sanctity of press privilege to guard sources.

It was this faith that led Novak to remain silent after he published a column outing CIA desk jockey Valerie Plame and triggering an investigation into who disclosed her name to Novak.  He said nothing, while the Bush administration was nearly destroyed during wartime--with many senior officials devoting countless hours to dealing with this sideshow, hours better devoted to figuring out how best to fight several wars.  He stayed silent as Scooter Libby was indicted, convicted and disbarred for allegedly perjuring himself about having knowledge of the leaker (he did not).  He stayed silent all through this, knowing that former Colin Powell deputy at State, inveterate gossip Richard Armitage, had accidentally leaked Plame's name to Novak.

To be sure, there are serious arguments supporting a broad press privilege, but no privilege should be absolute.  At minimum, obstructing a criminal investigation is hard to countenance.  Will sources refuse to talk to the Robert Novaks of the world?  Some, surely; others, perhaps less frequently and more guardedly.  But this seems to me an acceptable price to pay for preventing abuse of an absolute power, leading in the Pale case to the destruction of one man's reputation and loss of professional livelihood.

Novak, a staunch conservative Republican, did not do this out of malice, but out of loyalty above all to professional duty as he understood it.  Purism comes at a high price, and it was not Novak who paid it.  That said, he was a formidable force in Washington journalism, one of the very finest of his craft in the postwar period.

LFTC - 44 Wastes Energy, "Mad Max" Takes Energy, Leno Drills Energy

Manhattan scholar Max Schulz writes on how Team Obama nearly forced scrapping of the new-technology nuclear reactor nearing completion, until howls of Ohio lawmakers postponed the matter; some compromise likely will be worked out.  But is shows that 44's instincts are anti-nuclear, despite commercial nuclear power adding zero to atmospheric carbon emissions, far more reliable than Green "renewables" and far safer now than a generation ago.

Meanwhile, check out this Maxine Waters 2008 video clip (1:43) in which "Mad Max" lets slip that she would happily "socializing" (her exact word) the oil companies.  The fun part is when, upon letting the "S" word slip out, she stops & tries to plumb what passes for her brain ISO a less toxic substitute term.

And finally, Jay Leno sums up perfectly in 17 seconds the Democrats' policy on new domestic oil exploration.

LFTC - Bolt In Berlin

Jamaican super-sprinter Usain Bolt lowered his 100m & 200m world records set in Beijing, 9.69 & 19:30, by an identical 0.11 seconds, to 9.58 & 19.19 respectively, in last week's world championships in Berlin.  Watch these 100m Berlin and 200m Berlin videos, plus this astonishing 150m video (an earlier special race, not in Berlin) in which Bolt timed at 14.36--faster than his 14.47 in Beijing for the first 150m of his Olympic 200m, and far faster than the 14.75 previous WR mark in this rare event--and done under wet conditions without a full warm-up!  Note also his 5.64 50m & 9.90 100m rocket splits in the 150m race.

BTW, Bolt's 200m Berlin race was run into a slight headwind (0.3/m.sec.); his 100m WR was aided by a slight tailwind of 0.9m/sec., well under the maximum allowable 2.0/sec.  His 0.11 jump in WR time for the 100m was the largest jump since electronic timing, permitting 100ths of a second to be tallied, was introduced in 1977.  This Sydney Morning Herald column adds a neat 100m race nugget: Bolt looked over his shoulder.

All 3 races show beyond cavil that Bolt simply has an extra racing gear his rivals lack.  He beat the second-place Berlin finisher, American Tyson Gay, by 0.13 sec. (Gay's time is a new US 100m record).  Only injury or disqualification or extreme fatigue can beat him so long as he is at this level, unless someone new shows up.  What is Bolt's potential?  A generation ago I was a major track buff, so let me try to sort this out.  A faster start could lead to a sub-9.50 100m--Bolt's reaction time in the 100m Berlin race was 0.146 sec  This sounds fast until you realize that typical sprinter reaction time is 0.12 sec, & that 1960 Rome Olympic 100m gold medalist Armin Hary's reaction time was 0.04 sec.  (Both figures come from author David Maraniss's fine Rome 1960 book.)  Take Bolt's 9.58 & give him a Hary start & Bolt's time drops .106, to 9.484!  Now: someone tell Bolt not to look over his shoulder.  Makes for 9.40, I say.

In the 200m, take Bolt's 150M flat race of 14.36, 0.39 faster than his 19.30 Beijing race.  Bolt covered the last 50m of his 150m WR in 4.46 seconds.  With his smooth stride he could match that for another 50m, and would hit 18.86 on a straightaway, with wet conditions.  Running a curve adds 0.2 - 0.5 sec.  Bolt runs curves very well, so figure 0.2, and makes for 19.06 on wet conditions.  On a dry surface, perhaps he goes under the magic 19.0 mark.  Also give him an allowable tailwind, instead of his Berlin headwind, and sub-19.0 seems very doable.

Is there a 400m in Bolt's running future?  9.5 & 19.0 would make for 28.5 sec. for 300m.  Say he does 10.5 for the first 100m & 20.5 for the 200m segment, each leg a full second slower than his estimated (by me) potential best, an eternity in running sprints, and he goes into the final 100m of a 400m race at 31.0.  Michael Johnson's 400m WR is 43.18.  You make the call.  Mine?  I say Bolt comes in under 43.  Will this happen?  How long before Bolt gets bored burying 100m & 200m fields, and looks for new running worlds to conquer?

Instead, Bolt was quoted this weekend as saying he would like to try the long jump, in which the WR is 30 feet 2-1/4 inches.  On pure speed & with his stride, figure Bolt tops 28 feet without training.  But there is elevated risk: the kinetic kicking movements of top long jump form carry high risk of injury.  Bolt should take another year to put his mark on the perfect sprints, then move on to aerials.

LFTC - Eve 8/11/09 - 8/21/09

Vacation Post: Eve August 11 - August 21, 2009.  While I am away on holiday, enjoy daily entries in Discovery Blog, The American Spectator Blog, & The Rosett Report.   All are highest quality.

Now, proceed to FIVE special posts: (1) Taliban attacks on Pakistani nuclear sites; (2) investigating the CIA yet again; (3) a startling domestic economic number; (4) the global economic story; (5) a foreign policy triangle.  All are well worth pondering for the next 10 days.

Taliban Attacked Pakistani Nuclear Sites.  The Times of India reports that there have been several--at least three--Taliban attacks on Pakistani sites where nuclear bombs are stored.  Incredibly, even top experts were unaware of these attacks:

The incidents, tracked by Shaun Gregory, a professor at Bradford University in UK, include an attack on the nuclear missile storage facility at Sargodha on November 1, 2007, an attack on Pakistan's nuclear airbase at Kamra by a suicide bomber on December 10, 2007, and perhaps most significantly the August 20, 2008 attack when Pakistani Taliban suicide bombers blew up several entry points to one of the armament complexes at the Wah cantonment, considered one of Pakistan's main nuclear weapons assembly.

These attacks have occurred even as Pakistan has taken several steps to secure and fortify its nuclear weapons against potential attacks, particularly by the United States and India, says Gregory.

In fact, the attacks have received so little attention that Peter Bergen, the eminent terrorism expert who reviewed Gregory's paper first published in West Point's Counter Terrorism Center Sentinel, said "he (Gregory) points out something that was news to me (and shouldn't have been) which is that a series of attacks on Pakistan's nuclear weapons facilities have already happened."

One major problem is physical location of the sites, chosen with keeping them far away from the reach of Indian forces.  Thus the northwest corner of Pakistan, close to al-Qaeda & Taliban areas, is where many sites are located.  But Pakistan has implemented multi-layer security measures, making diversion probably achievable only with substantial inside help or via a change of regime bringing Islamists to power.

The procedures are described in detail in the article:

Detailing the actions taken by Islamabad to safeguard its nuclear assets from external attacks, Gregory writes that Pakistan has established a "robust set of measures to assure the security of its nuclear weapons." These have been based on copying US practices, procedures and technologies, and comprise: a) physical security; b) personnel reliability programs; c) technical and procedural safeguards; and d) deception and secrecy.

In terms of physical security, Pakistan operates a layered concept of concentric tiers of armed forces personnel to guard nuclear weapons facilities, the use of physical barriers and intrusion detectors to secure nuclear weapons facilities, the physical separation of warhead cores from their detonation components, and the storage of the components in protected underground sites.

With respect to personnel reliability, Gregory says the Pakistan Army conducts a tight selection process drawing almost exclusively on officers from Punjab Province who are considered to have fewer links with religious extremism (now increasingly a questionable premise) or with the Pashtun areas of Pakistan from which groups such as the Pakistani Taliban mainly garner their support.

Pakistan operates an analog to the US Personnel Reliability Program (PRP) that screens individuals for Islamist sympathies, personality problems, drug use, inappropriate external affiliations, and sexual deviancy.

The army uses staff rotation and also operates a "two-person" rule under which no action, decision, or
activity involving a nuclear weapon can be undertaken by fewer than two persons. In total, between 8,000 and 10,000 individuals from the SPD's security division and from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Military Intelligence and Intelligence Bureau agencies are involved in the security clearance and monitoring of those with nuclear weapons duties.

Gregory says despite formal command authority structures that cede a role to Pakistan’s civilian leadership, in practice the Pakistan Army has complete control over the country's nuclear weapons.

It imposes its executive authority over the weapons through the use of an authenticating code system down through the command chains that is deployment sites, aspects of the nuclear command and control arrangements, and many aspects of the arrangements for nuclear safety and security (such as the numbers of those removed under personnel reliability programs, the reasons for their removal, and how often authenticating and enabling (PAL-type) codes are changed).

In addition, Pakistan uses deception - such as dummy missiles - to complicate the calculus of adversaries and is likely to have extended this practice to its nuclear weapons infrastructure.

Detention for Dummies: Justice Department Investigates CIA Interrogators.  Andy McCarthy examines A-G Eric Holder's plan to investigate CIA interrogations of detainees and finds it wanting, to put it mildly.  He notes that Holder's exercises of prosecutorial discretion have led him to decline to prosecute Black Panthers who intimidated voters last November, and to free a terrorist detainee rather than risk prosecution and risk the courts publicly examining the government's "rendition" policy (sending detainees to foreign countries where interrogation is conducted using methods we dislike).

McCarthy notes that a number of CIA officers are staying on with the Agency in order to preserve access to classified information they may need for their legal defense.  What makes this even worse is that Holder has admitted in Congressional testimony that torture is hard to prove under American law.  McCarthy recounts a key exchange with a GOP Congressman:

Rep. Lungren pointed out that if the attorney general truly believes “waterboarding is torture,” he must also think we torture our own Navy SEALs and other special-operations personnel when we waterboard them as part of their training. “No . . . not in the legal sense,” countered Holder. You see, said he, it’s “a fundamentally different thing,” because we’re doing something for training purposes to try to equip them with the tools to, perhaps, resist torture techniques that might be used on them. There is not the intent to do that which is defined as torture — which is to inflict serious bodily or mental harm. It’s for training. It’s different.

"But it’s not different because “it’s for training.” Look at the torture statute (Sections 2340 and 2340A of the federal penal code) and try to find a “training” exception. There isn’t one. What removes an act from the ambit of torture (besides lack of severe pain) is intent. Lungren pressed this point, and Holder admitted that the training was “not torture in the legal sense because we’re not doing it with the intention of harming these people physically or mentally.” Intent, he acknowledged, was the key question.

Then, Lungren pounced. The CIA interrogators who questioned top al-Qaeda captives like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah intended no more harm to them than Navy instructors intended to their SEAL trainees. In fact, we know that the CIA went to great lengths, under Justice Department guidance, precisely to avoid severe harm. Their purpose, Rep. Lungren observed, was to “solicit information,” not to inflict torture.

McCarthy noted in another earlier column that the Justice Department--under Holder, no less--took the identical legal position on torture as advocated by Bush administration lawyers, when filing in a case involving extradition of an adjudicated Nazi war criminal (ignore case, statute & regulation legalese citations; CAT refers to the Convention Against Torture):

The case involves John Demjanjuk, a Nazi collaborator who has been fighting his removal from the United States for years. In a last gasp, Demjanjuk now claims, under the CAT, that his extradition would violate U.S. and international torture law. Given his advanced age, failing health, and expectations of abuse, he contends that extradition to Germany for trial and incarceration will cause him severe pain and suffering.

This claim may seem frivolous, but the government nevertheless undertook to respond to it. In so doing, prosecutors argued to the court that even if Demjanjuk were put in severe pain, there could be no torture unless he could establish that government officials had an evil motive to inflict severe pain and suffering on him. As the Holder Justice Department puts it on pp. 20–21 of the elusive DOJ brief:

[T]orture is defined as “an extreme form of cruel and inhuman treatment and does not include lesser forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. . . . ” 8 C.F.R. § 1208.18(a)(2). Moreover, as has been explained by the Third Circuit, CAT requires “a showing of specific intent before the Court can make a finding that a petitioner will be tortured.”  Pierre v. Attorney General, 528 F.3d 180, 189 (3d Cir. 2008) (en banc); see 8 C.F.R. § 1208.18(a)(5) (requiring that the act “be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering”); Auguste v. Ridge, 395 F.3d 123, 139 (3d Cir. 2005) (“This is a ‘specific intent’ requirement and not a ‘general intent’ requirement” [citations omitted.] An applicant for CAT protection therefore must establish that “his prospective torturer will have the motive or purpose” to torture him. Pierre, 528 F.3d at 189; Auguste, 395 F.3d at 153-54 (“The mere fact that the Haitian authorities have knowledge that severe pain and suffering may result by placing detainees in these conditions does not support a finding that the Haitian authorities intend to inflict severe pain and suffering. The difference goes to the heart of the distinction between general and specific intent.”) [my bold italics and brackets]. . . .  

The Justice Department brief goes on to elaborate that, even accepting for argument’s sake all his claims of anticipated physical abuse, Demjanjuk had failed to state a legal torture claim because he had not shown that German officials had deliberately created and maintained conditions that were specifically intended to cause severe pain and suffering: “To the extent that German authorities may inadvertently cause Petitioner to experience any degree of discomfort during the course of a criminal prosecution or incarceration, this is not cognizable under CAT. See 8 C.F.R. § 1208.18(a)(5) (act causing unintended or unanticipated severity of pain and suffering not torture).”

This is precisely the theory that Bybee and Yoo outlined in the memos that the Justice Department is now citing as a premise for subjecting them to ethical rebuke — and that Obama and Holder have intimated may be grounds for prosecution. Bybee and Yoo reasoned that unless CIA interrogators specifically meant to inflict severe pain and suffering on the high-level al Qaeda detainees they were interrogating, there could be no legally viable claim of torture.

Read McCarthy's three columns in full for great legal analysis and snappy writing accessible to non-lawyers.  Put another way, the law distinguishes between general intent & specific intent statutes.  Under a general intent law, if you intend the act, you are held to intend its reasonably foreseeable consequences, and can be held liable for same.  Under a specific intent statute, you must intend not only the act itself, but intend as well a specific result.

Thus, suppose X flicks a whip at Y, causing Y to feel pain.  Under a general intent law X is liable, because the result--pain felt by Y--was an entirely foreseeable result of hitting Y with a whip.  A general intent law carries this principle even further.  Suppose X aims his whip at Y, but misses Y and strikes his best friend, Z, standing near Y.  X still is liable, because one foreseeable outcome of aiming a whip is that one's aim can go awry.   (The law calls this "transferred intent"--X aims at Y but misses and strikes Z, it is as if X intended to aim at Z.)

But as McCarthy explains--and Holder, in honest moments, concedes--the Convention Against Torture is a specific intent statute.  An interrogator must intend both act and result.  His intent must thus be to cause long-term extreme physical or psychological pain.  Temporary suffering does not suffice to trigger CAT liability.  Merely knowing that long-term suffering will result from one's action--see the Haiti example quoted above--does not suffice for CAT liability, because the specific result, though known to be probable, is not the result intended.  Waterboarding as practiced by the CIA is a technique that intends to cause temporary extreme discomfort, for the specific purpose of getting the detainee to yield intelligence that can help hunt down terrorists and/or prevent future attacks.  (None of the three al-Qaeda leaders show obvious, visible signs of permanent physical or psychological damage--they have been seen joking in the Gitmo courtroom.)

A Startling Domestic Economic Number.  In a Forbes article last February on how government housing policies were a key factor in the ensuing global financial partial meltdown, one finds this number: Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, the twin monster Government-sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) that carried $1.6 TR in subprime loans to subpar borrowers, were leveraged--meaning the ratio of loans made to assets held to back them--at 75:1.  Yes, NOT a misprint: SEVENTY-FIVE TO ONE RATIO OF LIABILITIES TO ASSETS.  At such an extreme leverage ratio, a decline of more than 1-1/3 percent makes the leveraged entity insolvent.

Now, compare these numbers to the Wall Street firms like Merrill Lynch, Lehman, etc.  They were considered over-leveraged at...30:10 or 40:1.  Why then did Fannie & Freddie leverage so highly?  MORAL HAZARD: America's Financial Fric & Frac knew the taxpayers--yep, that means You 'n' ME--would pick up the tab if they went financially kaput.

Why Did the Global Financial Model Break and Nearly Melt Down the Entire World Economy?  A few weeks ago I posted in the midst of a long article on economic matters an article so important and insightful that I am re-posting it, lest it have been buried too deeply to catch the attention of some LFTC readers.  The article, "Now What? How We Got Into Today's Mess and Where We Go From Here", was written by finance super-maven David Smick, author of a brilliant book entitled The World is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy (2008).  The article runs 10 full pages of printed single-space text, but is well worth an extended, careful read.  It explains better than any piece of comparable compactness why the global financial system partially melted down, and identifies many formidable obstacles confronting attempts to restore a long-term path of stable global economic growth.

Iran + Russia + US = Triple Play.  Now, in addition, here is an intriguing article from Stratfor chief George Friedman, analyzing permutations--some scary--of the Iran-Russia-US geopolitical triangle.  The article is well worth a careful read, and prints at 7 pages.

Hypothesizing on the Iran-Russia-U.S. Triangle

By George Friedman

August 10, 2009

For the past several weeks, STRATFOR has focused on the relationship between Russia and Iran. As our readers will recall, a pro-Rafsanjani demonstration that saw chants of “Death to Russia,” uncommon in Iran since the 1979 revolution, triggered our discussion. It caused us to rethink Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Russia just four days after Iran’s disputed June 12 presidential election, with large-scale demonstrations occurring in Tehran. At the time, we ascribed Ahmadinejad’s trip as an attempt to signal his lack of concern at the postelection unrest. But why did a pro-Rafsanjani crowd chant “Death to Russia?” What had the Russians done to trigger the bitter reaction from the anti-Ahmadinejad faction? Was the Iranian president’s trip as innocent as it first looked?

A Net Assessment Re-examined

At STRATFOR, we proceed with what we call a “net assessment,” a broad model intended to explain the behavior of all players in a game. Our net assessment of Iran had the following three components:

1. Despite the rhetoric, the Iranian nuclear program was far from producing a deliverable weapon, although a test explosion within a few years was a distinct possibility.
2. Iran essentially was isolated in the international community, with major powers’ feelings toward Tehran ranging from hostile to indifferent. Again, rhetoric aside, this led Iran to a cautious foreign policy designed to avoid triggering hostility.
3. Russia was the most likely supporter of Iran, but Moscow would avoid becoming overly involved out of fears of the U.S. reaction, of uniting a fractious Europe with the United States and of being drawn into a literally explosive situation. The Russians, we felt, would fish in troubled waters, but would not change the regional calculus.

This view — in short, that Iran was contained — remained our view for about three years. It served us well in predicting, for example, that neither the United States nor Israel would strike Iran, and that the Russians would not transfer strategically significant weapons to Iran.

A net assessment is a hypothesis that must be continually tested against intelligence, however. The “Death to Russia” chant could not be ignored, nor could Ahmadinejad’s trip to Moscow.

As we probed deeper, we found that Iran was swirling with rumors concerning Moscow’s relationship with both Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Little could be drawn from the rumors. Iran today is a hothouse for growing rumors, and all our searches ended in dead ends. But then, if Ahmadinejad and Khamenei were engaging the Russians in this atmosphere, we would expect rumors and dead ends.

Interestingly, the rumors were consistent that Ahmadinejad and Khamenei wanted a closer relationship to Russia, but diverged on the Russian response. Some said the Russians already had assisted the Iranians by providing intelligence ranging from Israeli networks in Lebanon to details of U.S. and British plans to destabilize Iran through a “Green Revolution” like the color revolutions that had ripped through the former Soviet Union (FSU).

Equally interesting were our Russian sources’ responses. Normally, they are happy to talk, if only to try to mislead us. (Our Russian sources are nothing if not voluble.) But when approached about Moscow’s thinking on Iran, they went silent; this silence stood out. Normally, our sources would happily speculate — but on this subject, there was no speculation. And the disciplined silence was universal. This indicated that those who didn’t know didn’t want to touch the subject, and that those who did know were keeping secrets. None of this proved anything, but taken together, it caused us to put our net assessment for Iran on hold. We could no longer take any theory for granted.

All of the foregoing must be considered in the context of the current geopolitical system. And that is a matter of understanding what is in plain sight.

Potential Russian Responses to Washington

The U.S.-Russian summit that took place after the Iranian elections did not go well. U.S. President Barack Obama’s attempt to divide Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Russian Prime Minister Putin did not bear fruit. The Russians were far more interested in whether Obama would change the FSU policy of former U.S. President George W. Bush. At the very least, the Russians wanted the Americans to stop supporting Ukraine’s and Georgia’s pro-Western tendencies.

But not only did Obama stick with the Bush policy, he dispatched U.S. Vice President Joe Biden to visit Ukraine and Georgia to drive home the continuity. This was followed by Biden’s interview with The Wall Street Journal, in which he essentially said the United States does not have to worry about Russia in the long run because Russia’s economic and demographic problems will undermine its power. Biden’s statements were completely consistent with the decision to send him to Georgia and Ukraine, so the Obama administration’s attempts to back away from the statement were not convincing. Certainly, the Russians were not convinced. The only conclusion the Russians could draw was that the United States regards them as a geopolitical cripple of little consequence.

If the Russians allow the Americans to poach in what Moscow regards as its sphere of influence without responding, the Russian position throughout the FSU would begin to unravel — the precise outcome the Americans hope for. So Moscow took two steps. First, Moscow heated up the military situation near Georgia on the anniversary of the first war, shifting its posture and rhetoric and causing the Georgians to warn of impending conflict. Second, Moscow increased its strategic assertiveness, escalating the tempo of Russian air operations near the United Kingdom and Alaska, and more important, deploying two Akula-class hunter-killer submarines along the East Coast of the United States. The latter is interesting, but ultimately unimportant. Increased tensions in Georgia are indeed significant, however, since the Russians have decisive power in that arena — and can act if they wish against the country, one Biden just visited to express American support.

But even a Russian move against Georgia would not be decisive. The Americans have stated that Russia is not a country to be taken seriously, and that Washington will therefore continue to disregard Russian interests in the FSU. In other words, the Americans were threatening fundamental Russian interests. The Russians must respond, or by default, they would be accepting the American analysis of the situation — and by extension, so would the rest of the world. Obama had backed the Russians into a corner.

When we look at the geopolitical chessboard, there are two places where the Russians could really hurt the Americans.

One is Germany. If Moscow could leverage Germany out of the Western alliance, this would be a geopolitical shift of the first order. Moscow has leverage with Berlin, as the Germans depend on Russian natural gas, and the two have recently been working on linking their economies even further. Moreover, the Germans are as uneasy with Obama as they were with Bush. German and American interests no longer mesh neatly. The Russians have been courting the Germans, but a strategic shift in Germany’s position is simply not likely in any time frame that matters to the Russians at this juncture — though the leaders of the two countries are meeting once again this week in Sochi, Russia, their second meeting in as many months.

The second point where the Russians could hurt the Americans is in Iran. An isolated Iran is not a concern. An Iran with a strong relationship to Russia is a very different matter. Not only would sanctions be rendered completely meaningless, but Iran could pose profound strategic problems for the United States, potentially closing off airstrike options on Iranian nuclear facilities.

The Strait of Hormuz: Iran’s Real Nuclear Option

The real nuclear option for Iran does not involve nuclear weapons. It would involve mining the Strait of Hormuz and the narrow navigational channels that make up the Persian Gulf. During the 1980s, when Iran and Iraq were at war, both sides attacked oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. This raised havoc on oil prices and insurance rates.

If the Iranians were to successfully mine these waters, the disruption to 40 percent of the world’s oil flow would be immediate and dramatic. The nastiest part of the equation would be that in mine warfare, it is very hard to know when all the mines have been cleared. It is the risk, not the explosions, which causes insurance companies to withdraw insurance on vastly expensive tankers and their loads. It is insurance that allows the oil to flow.

Just how many mines Iran might lay before being detected and bringing an American military response could vary by a great deal, but there is certainly the chance that Iran could lay a significant number of mines, including more modern influence mines that can take longer to clear. The estimates and calculations of minesweepers — much less of the insurers — would depend on a number of factors not available to us here. But there is the possibility that the strait could be effectively closed to supertankers for a considerable period. The effect on oil prices would be severe; it is not difficult to imagine this aborting the global recovery.

Iran would not want this outcome. Tehran, too, would be greatly affected by the economic fallout (while Iran is a net exporter of crude, it is a net importer of gasoline), and the mining would drive the Europeans and Americans together. The economic and military consequences of this would be severe. But it is this threat that has given pause to American and Israeli military planners gaming out scenarios to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. There are thousands of small watercraft along Iran’s coast, and Iran’s response to such raids might well be to use these vessels to strew mines in the Persian Gulf — or for swarming and perhaps even suicide attacks.

Notably, any decision to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities would have to be preceded by (among other things) an attempt to neutralize Iran’s mine-laying capability — along with its many anti-ship missile batteries — in the Persian Gulf. The sequence is fixed, since the moment the nuclear sites are bombed, it would have to be assumed that the minelayers would go to work, and they would work as quickly as they could. Were anything else attacked first, taking out the Iranian mine capability would be difficult, as Iran’s naval assets would scatter and lay mines wherever and however they could — including by swarms of speedboats capable of carrying a mine or two apiece and almost impossible to engage with airpower. This, incidentally, is a leading reason why Israel cannot unilaterally attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. They would be held responsible for a potentially disastrous oil shortage. Only the Americans have the resources to even consider dealing with the potential Iranian response, because only the Americans have the possibility of keeping Persian Gulf shipping open once the shooting starts. It also indicates that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be much more complex than a sudden strike completed in one day.

The United States cannot permit the Iranians to lay the mines. The Iranians in turn cannot permit the United States to destroy their mine-laying capability. This is the balance of power that limits both sides. If Iran were to act, the U.S. response would be severe. If the United States moves to neutralize Iran, the Iranians would have to push the mines out fast. For both sides, the risks of threatening the fundamental interests of the other side are too high. Both Iran and the United States have worked to avoid this real “nuclear” option.

The Russian Existential Counter

The Russians see themselves facing an existential threat from the Americans. Whether Washington agrees with Biden or not, this is the stated American view of Russia, and by itself it poses an existential threat to Russia. The Russians need an existential counterthreat — and for the United States, that threat relates to oil. If the Russians could seriously threaten the supply of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the United States would lose its relatively risk-free position in the FSU.

It follows from this that strengthening Iran’s ability to threaten the flow of oil, while retaining a degree of Russian control over Iran’s ability to pull the trigger, would give Russia the counter it needs to American actions in the FSU. The transfer of more advanced mines and mining systems to Iran — such as mines that can be planted now and activated remotely (though most such mines can only lay, planted and unarmed, for a limited period) to more discriminating and difficult-to-sweep types of mines — would create a situation the Americans could neither suppress nor live with. As long as the Russians could maintain covert control of the trigger, Moscow could place the United States, and the West’s economies, in check.

Significantly, while this would wreak havoc on Persian Gulf producers and global oil consumers at a time when they are highly vulnerable to economic fluctuations, a spike in the price of oil would not hurt Russia. On the contrary, Russia is an energy exporter, making it one of the few winners under this scenario. That means the Russians can afford much greater risks in this game.

We do not know that the Russians have all this in mind. This is speculation, not a net assessment. We note that if Russo-Iranian contacts are real, they would have begun well before the Iranian elections and the summit. But the American view on Russia is not new and was no secret. Therefore, the Russians could have been preparing their counter for a while.

We also do not know that the Iranians support this Russian move. Iranian distrust of Russia runs deep, and so far only the faction supporting Ahmadinejad appears to be playing this game. But the more the United States endorses what it calls Iranian reformists, and supports Rafsanjani’s position, the more Ahmadinejad needs the Russian counter. And whatever hesitations the Russians might have had in moving closer to the Iranians, recent events have clearly created a sense in Moscow of being under attack. The Russians think politically. The Russians play chess, and the U.S. move to create pressure in the FSU must be countered somewhere.

In intelligence, you must take bits and pieces and analyze them in the context of the pressures and constraints the various actors face. You know what you don’t know, but you still must build a picture of the world based on incomplete data. At a certain point, you become confident in your intelligence and analysis and you lock it into what STRATFOR calls its net assessment. We have not arrived at a new net assessment by any means. Endless facts could overthrow our hypothesis. But at a certain point, on important matters we feel compelled to reveal our hypothesis not because we are convinced, but simply because it is sufficiently plausible to us — and the situation sufficiently important — that we feel we should share it with the appropriate caveats. In this case, the stakes are very high, and the hypothesis sufficiently plausible that it is worth sharing.

The geopolitical chessboard is shifting, though many of the pieces are invisible. The end may look very different than this, but if it winds up looking this way, it is certainly worth noting.

LFTC - Index AM 8/11/09

6 posts: (1) Afghanistan: Crunch Time Meets Budget Crunch--Wobble Watch; (2) Iran: Islamic Revolution Implodes--Us v. Them; (3) Mideast: Images of War--The Home Front; (4) F-22 Shutdown: Ending 57-Year Security Streak?--The Home Front; (5) Health Insurance: The REAL Numbers--The Home Front; (6) Hillary in Charge!--The Home Front.

My Article.  Health Care: Obama, Democrats Versus The Federalists 57 & 63 was posted late yesterday at The Fenton Report.

Bonus: WSJ 8/10/09 Pepper & Salt takes on America's Scariest Sharks!

LFTC - Afghanistan: Crunch Time Meets Budget Crunch

Today's WSJ reports that we are trying to enlist more tribal fighters from hostile regions.  In essence, we seek a parallel to Iraq's late-2006 Anbar Awakening that paved the way for the 2007 troop surge and change in tactics to focus on securing areas via "clear, build & hold."  An earlier WSJ report sees the Taliban now winning in Afghanistan.  In an interview with the WSJ, Afghan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal sys his strategy must produce positive results within one year to maintain public support; the Afghan War now costs America $4B per month.  A top military adviser to the US command, Anthony Cordesman, says 45,000 additional troops are needed.  When 44 took office the US had 36,000 troops in Afghanistan; additions of first 17,000 & then 4,000 make for 57,000 now, a 58 percent jump in 7 months.  The Financial Times puts the total at 68,000 in theater.  Total US combat deaths are now 699.  The New York Times reports that 50 top Afghan drug lords--part of a list that totals 367 targets--are now on the high-value target list.  Stephen Hayes writes in The Weekly Standard that the Afghan War is "worse than a disaster" and that much more must be done to turn the tide in a war that President 44 now owns.

Bottom Line.  What now is "Obama's Good War" is running into the rock of Taliban resurgence and the hard place of budgetary parsimony.  With our troops stretched to the limit, after multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no great reserve to draw upon.  Both the Bush and Obama administrations--and both Democratic & Republican Congresses--failed to budget enough to attract more troops and deploy the necessary equipment.  Efforts to win a lightning victory have run into the harsh reality of land wars in Asia: there are, it appears, no truly short ones. The reluctance of Team Bush to engage protracted commitments of resources after initially routing the Taliban enabled the Taliban to regroup.  The reluctance of Team Obama to devote the resources needed to drive the Taliban back may be laying the groundwork for the defeat America narrowly avoided in Iraq.

LFTC - Iran: Islamic Revolution Implodes

Washington Post reporter Robin Wright, widely experienced in the Mideast, recounts how one of the original hostage takers of US personnel in 1979 is now on trial himself, for protesting the June 12 election fraud.  Wright sees peril in widening polarization that continue to split the country, making it unlikely that President Ahmadinutjob can rule effectively.  Anne Applebaum, listing August crises simmering that may bubble over, says that the Iranian Islamists are now devouring their own.  (Shades of Saturn!)

Meanwhile the Christian Science Monitor reports that last February 12 Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told a Senate panel in closed session that our intelligence agencies believe Iran cannot make a nuclear bomb until 2013.  One doubts Israel believes this.

LFTC - Mideast: Images of War

Blogger Michael Totten offers images of Mideast War and a solid supporting narrative.

LFTC - F-22 Shutdown: Ending 57-Year Security Streak?

Former Air Force chief of staff Gen. Merrill McPeak argues cogently that we need the F-22 to preserve dominance in the skies, which in turn is essential to success on the ground.  It has been 57 years since an American fighter jet has been downed in air-to-air combat, the last instance being in 1952 during the Korean War.  A Michael Goldfarb Weekly Standard article fingers the F-35 as the chief winner in the F-22 shutdown., because as sole-source supplier of future 5th generation fighter jets to the services it will have a captive customer, the Pentagon.

The latter article is chock full of intriguing stuff: (1) if 70 more F-22s were purchased, the unit cost would halve, from $138M today to $70M; (2) the unit cost today of the F-35 is already $122M, with costs up 45 percent  since 2001; (3) unlike the F-22, the F-35 is not stealthy enough to penetrate big power air defenses--e.g., China; (4) three top non-European US allies, Japan, Israel & Australia, wish to buy F-22s, for which the current export embargo must be lifted--the Japanese were willing to pay $290M per F-22 for 40, which is twice the current per copy cost; (5) a study by Air Power Australia concluded that the F-35 is not a true stealth aircraft at all, whereas the F-22 is.  Here is a spectacular Air Power Australia F-22 home page with great arguments & links on why the F-22 is essential.

Bottom Line.  Save the F-22!  Let closely trusted allies buy it and drive costs down while giving the Pentagon options to re-enter procurement if the F-35 continues to slip in time and rise in cost.

LFTC - Health Insurance: The REAL Numbers

Hudson scholar Betsy McCaughey gives us five numbers that matter Big Time in the health insurance debate: Private insurance pays $1.32 reimbursement per dollar of care, versus 93 cents for Medicare & 86 cents for Medicaid.  In other words, private insurers subsidize government health insurance programs.  Each year care of the uninsured costs $28B.  Under ObamaCare 10 million more patients will be shifted to Medicaid.  Public options thus will increasingly undercut private insurance--as Michael Barone notes, Obama is on record stating his preference for a single=payer public system.

Here is the Obama health care video clip (1:52) which juxtaposes Obama's 2003 "single payer" sound bite with his 2007 candidate and 2009 Presidential remarks, showing increased shading of the truth.  The clip also includes two Members of Congress (one, naturally, is the ubiquitous Barney the Dinosaur) openly stating that they want single-payer to win.

And when private insurers are pushed off the scene, what do you think will happen to reimbursement rates?  They will plummet.  ObamaCare will also, she writes, shove more patients toward primary care rather than specialists.  You had better hope your primary care doctor guesses right.

LFTC - Hillary in Charge!

Hillary lost it in the Congo yesterday, when asked a question--mistranslated, it turns out--that implied her husband was running foreign policy.  Replied she: "I am not going to be channeling my husband!"  (Be sure to watch the video clip provided along with the article, which runs maybe 20 seconds, as her body language and tone are priceless.)  Meanwhile, Bill was channeling Las Vegas yesterday, celebrating Birthday 63.

LFTC - Index 8/10/09

5 posts: (1) Pakistan Taliban's Osama Nailed?--Us v. Them; (2) North Korea: Hostage Diplomacy & Nuclear Risks--Us v. Them; (3) ObamaCare Wars: Astroturf v. Grassroots--The Home Front; (4) Cyberwar Escalation: Trashing Twitter, Berlin Wall Firewalls--Us v. Them; (5) More Palestinian "Green Shoots"?--Us v. Them.

LFTC Special Today: My review of "The Israel Test" (2009) by George Gilder.  Published in The American Spectator, it is a brilliant & important book by one of America's intellectual titans.  Gilder details the economic transformation of Israel, the roots of Palestinian anti-Semitism and how Israel's new economy makes possible a new model for Mideast peace.  It was published today in The American Spectator Online.

LFTC - Pakistan Taliban's Osama Nailed?

Pakistani intelligence said Friday that the Pakistan Taliban's top leader, their Osama bin Laden, Baitullah Meshud, was killed by a Predator air-strike.  If 100 percent confirmed it is a true biggie--one of the top kills in the CIA's high-value target assassination program, which targets the terror top 20 + other possible special targets.  Meshud was apparently an especially skilled strategist; a WSJ editorial argues that Meshud will be very hard to replace, and also praises (rightly) Team Obama for stepping up efforts in Pakistan & Afghanistan.  The WSJ also reported that a Pakistan Taliban commander confirmed the killing.  Pakistani troops have gone into Taliban country in South Waziristan ISO physical evidence to definitively confirm the kill.  Meshud was, among other atrocities, responsible for the assassination of former Pakistani PM Benazir Bhutto.  A Saturday NY Times front-pager captures in a nutshell the kind of pressure the CIA targeting program puts on targets: In an effort to evade detection Meshud was changing location every 30 minutes.

In a related posting, blogger Michael Yon offers gorgeous, informative scenes from our operation in Afghanistan.

LFTC - North Korea: Hostage Diplomacy & Nuclear Risks

Henry Kissinger frames perfectly the dilemmas and risks of hostage taking, diplomacy and nuclear proliferation.  He stresses the difference between surface atmospherics and underlying geo-strategic realities.  Of hostage taking HK writes:

It is inherent in hostage situations that potentially heartbreaking human conditions are used to overwhelm policy judgments. Therein lies the bargaining strength of the hostage-taker. On the other hand, at any given moment, several million Americans reside or travel abroad. How are they best protected? Is the lesson of this episode that any ruthless group or government can demand a symbolic meeting with a senior American by seizing hostages or threatening inhuman treatment for prisoners in their hand? If it should be said that North Korea is a special case because of its nuclear capability, does that create new incentives for proliferation?

Diplomacy is thus tilted:

Already, speculation is rife that the Clinton visit inaugurates the prospect of a change of course of American policy and of a bilateral U.S.-North Korea solution. But two-party talks outside the six-party framework never made any sense. North Korean nuclear weapons threaten the North's neighbors more than they do the United States. The other members of the six-party talks are needed to help enforce any agreement that may be made or to sustain sanctions on the way to it. These countries should not be made to feel that the United States uses them as pawns for its global designs. To be sure, the Obama administration has disavowed any intentions for separate, two-power talks. But the other parties will be tempted to hedge against the prospect that these assurances may be modified. That feeling is likely to be particularly strong in Japan, where a national election campaign is underway and where Tokyo already feels it has secured inadequate support on behalf of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea.

And thus come the dangers:

The root cause of our decade-old controversy with Pyongyang is that there is no middle ground between North Korea being a nuclear-weapons state and a state without nuclear weapons. At the end of a negotiation, North Korea will either destroy its nuclear arsenal or it will become a de facto nuclear state. So far, Pyongyang has used the negotiating forums available to it in a skillful campaign of procrastination, alternating leaps in technological progress with negotiating phases to consolidate it.

We seem to be approaching such a consolidating phase. North Korea may return to its well-established tactic of diverting us with the prospect of imminent breakthroughs. This is exactly what happened after the Korean nuclear weapons test in 2006. Pyongyang undoubtedly will continue seeking to achieve de facto acceptance as a nuclear weapons state by endlessly protracted diplomacy. The benign atmosphere by which it culminated its latest blackmail must not tempt us or our partners into bypaths that confuse atmosphere with substance. Any outcome other than the elimination of the North Korean nuclear military capability in a fixed time frame is a blow to nonproliferation prospects worldwide and to peace and stability globally.

But there is ore: One report suggests that the two journalists were Valley Girl hippie-dippies playing around in bigger leagues, ignoring North Korean orders to stop filming at the border, with one imbecile journalist on the North side of the border.

Bottom Line.  The ball is in Obama Court, to prevent the North from reaping the intended nuclear and status benefits of hostage taking.  A future question is this: If dipstick hostages get themselves into trouble, why rescue them?  Lucky the kids were working for Al Gore, and not Sarah Palin.

LFTC - ObamaCare Wars: Astroturf v. Grassroots

Two WSJ pieces capture the true war between ObamaCare supporters and opponents.  Team Obama has bought off Beltway lobbyists to silence them into accepting ObamaCare, with the dubious promise that the costs will be limited.  Grassroots opponents have shown up at town meetings in large numbers; this portrait of an Eastern Shore, MD town hall meeting belies Nancy Pelosi's "Astroturf" dismissal (meaning artificial rather than genuine protest).  Check out this union thug video clip (5:50--scroll down in article) and see Democratic Astroturf activism at work.

You make the call.

LFTC - Cyberwar Escalates: Trashing Twitter, Berlin Wall Firewalls

Thursday and Friday saw Twitter hit with a massive cyber-attack.  A New York Times front-pager pinpoints the cause: Russian hackers targeting the web pages of a Georgian professor.  Also hit were Facebook and LiveJournal.  Details of the type of attack are in the article, plus in this F-Secure web page posting.  Detail on how Twitter's bandwidth (capacity) was affected are presented in this Arbor Networks web page posting.  The professor was posting remembrances of Russia's 2008 invasion and rape of Georgia, which began August 7, 2008.  ABC News Online reports that the professor believes the hackers were serving the Kremlin.

Arbor Networks also shows how Iran stifled Internet traffic during the post-June 12 election fraud protests last month.  Usage fell at least 30 percent.  See the Iran traffic chart for June 7 - July 12 2009 and you can correlate drops with intensity of protest; firewall filtering--in plain English, censorship--has spiked up in recent days as protests spiked around President Ahmadinutjob's inauguration.

Total 5 Gb/s traffic daily for Iran (5 gigabits--billions of bits--per second) for Iran seems like a big number.  But consider this: Iran's annual total is thus 1,875 Gb/s, in a world in which annual global Internet traffic totals 75 petaabytes of data per year.   (Petabytes are explained in the next paragraph.)  It is a small sliver of Internet traffic, and thus it is plausible that authorities, given savvy and the necessary tools, can suppress or degrade traffic flow.

Here is how such arithmetic translates, to yield useful data for the lay reader.  First, traffic bandwidth is measured in bits per second, while data storage is measured in bytes, with no time denomination.  So how then can we compare gigabits to petabytes?  Begin with this: "peta" is a quadrillion, or a billion billion, and a "byte" is 8 bits.  First we take the 5 gigabit number for Iran and divide--not multiply--by 8, to get bytes per second; we get 625 megabytes (millions of bytes).  Now we multiply that 625 megabytes number by 365 days to get bytes per year, and we get 228,125 megabytes, which becomes 228.125 terabytes (trillions of bytes) for Iran.  Now we divide Iran's total into the world total of 75 petabytes (quadrillion is 1,000 trillion) and we get, in round figures, for Iran a fractional share of 1/329th of global Internet traffic.

Bottom Line.  Iran's tiny fraction of total global Internet traffic means that the authorities have a far easier time suppressing anti-government traffic than the US government would have, or governments in other countries with huge volumes of Internet traffic.

LFTC - More Palestinian "Green Shoots"?

Thomas Friedman observes progress in Ramallah and divines more "green shoots" sprouting on the West Bank.  His piece is cheery, if one ignores the usual references to Israeli "occupation" that TF never resists.  Two signs in his article care potentially bright: (1) incrementalism, instead of the all-in-one peace agreement; (2) Palestinians taking responsibility for their own lives, instead of blaming Israel, America, Jewry and various detested deities.  Making peace with Israel is the easy part--Israel is the easiest country on the planet to make peace with.  All it needs is a partner.  That is the hard part.  Incremental steps, taking more responsibility for self-governance, are the keys to creating a peace partner for Israel.

Please, though, do not tell Barack obama, George Mitchell or Hillary, but it is OK to tell this tale to Bibi Netanyahu.

LFTC - Index 8/7/09

8 posts: (1) "Cash for Clunkers" = Computers for Uncle Sam--The Home Front; (2) Justice-To-Be Sotomayor's Injudicious Judicial Fib--The Home Front; (3) Health Care: Numbing Numbers--The Home Front; (4) "East" Jerusalem: More Euro/UN Fakery--Wobble Watch; (5) Sudan: Another Legalist Disaster--Us v. Them; (6) Taser 2.0--The Home Front; (7) Democratic Party "Birthers"--The Home Front; (8) Protecting Hillary, Sarah Should Be So Lucky--MSM Murders.

LFTC - "Cash for Clunkers" = Computers for Uncle Sam

Watch this astonishing Glenn Beck "Cash for Clunkers" video (5:35) in which he shows what happens when you go to the government's Cash for Clunkers website--I dare not post the link on LFTC, and you had better watch the video before you consider accessing the website.  (I have since heard that the government apparently has deleted the warning shown in the Beck clip; so now those going there may not even realize what access they are granting to the government.)  Also, a pair of Heritage Foundation scholars detail just how much of a mess C-for-Cs really is.  Another Heritage piece adds more on how perverse the program is in real life application.  Yesterday, just prior to adjourning for the August recess, the Senate voted 60-37 to extend C-for-C with a $2B injection, twice the original program size; the WP reports that the average per gallon mileage gain from over 184,000 trade-ins is from 15.3 to 25.8.

LFTC - Justice-To-Be Sotomayor's Injudicious Judicial Fib

Tomorrow Sonia Sotomayor will be sworn in by President Obama, and will become an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, having been confirmed yesterday by a 68-31 vote, with all Democrats present (Teddy Kennedy is ill) plus 9 Republicans voting to confirm her.  In a telephone interview with Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, Judge Robert Bork (rejected by the Senate, 58-42, in 1987) said that Senator Jefferson Sessions (R-AL) did the best job of questioning Sotomayor.  Here is Senator Sessions explaining his "no" vote yesterday (8:42).

National Journal legal eagle Stuart Taylor dissects Sotomayor's claim that in ruling against the New Haven firefighters she merely followed binding legal precedent.  Taylor walks readers through the precedent and shows that in fact Sotomayor did not face binding precedent.  Taylor writes lucidly enough for non-lawyers to track through his 3-pager and learn how disingenuous, at minimum, Sotomayor was.

LFTC - Health Care: Numbing Numbers

Three solid pieces flesh out the insane numbers of ObamaCare.  Hudson scholar Diana Furchtgott-Roth informs us that medical malpractice premiums represent 10 percent of annual HC costs.  With HC now a $2.5TR annual tab in America, that means "med-mal" costs $1/4-trillion annually!  Here is a short post, with a link to a Joint Economic Committee GOP staff mini-study (4 pages), explaining why ObamaCare costs are bound to be understated.  A former McCain 2008 HC adviser writes on why cost projections for ObamaCare may well be understated by $1 trillion.

Peggy Noonan sees scary numbers behind much of the town hall agitation Democrats are running into, with people not ready in hard times to toss trillions around on HC.  Ex-Bush 43 speechwriter Michael Gerson sees trillions ending 44's honeymoon with voters.  Charles Krauthammer sees in two numbers the seeds of simpler HC reform, modeled along the 1986 Ronald Reagan-Bill Bradley tax reform that traded closing loopholes for lower tax rates: (1) end tor suits, replacing the tort system with socialized compensation for wronged patients, under a board of medical experts (ending jury caprice); (2) tax employer-provided HC benefits & return the money with a check to the taxpayer to purchase HC insurance, ending the artifact of WW-II labor agreements that created third-party payments and thus skewed HC insurance incentives.  Both numbers are around $250B annually (I take Furchtgott-Roth's higher malpractice number as more likely to be dead on than CK's--she's an economist).

Financial & budget maven Stephen Moor argues for a new spendiing cap to limit deficits.  He offers numbers showing how farcical the Democrats' "pay-go" principle is--when they are in charge versus under a GOP president:

Congressional Democrats do talk about “pay-as-you-go” budgeting—which requires higher taxes or entitlement spending cuts to pay for any new spending or new tax cuts—to enforce discipline. This is laughable.

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi first implemented pay-as-you-go in 2007, the deficit was $160 billion. Today it’s 12 times higher. Congressional Democrats violated their own rules to the tune of $420 billion in their first two years in office. This year’s $786 billion fiscal stimulus bill was also outside the pay-go rules, as is the current $1 trillion health-care bill.