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I’m sure Marc Thiessen was a good speechwriter, but if this is representative of his tv skills, it’s a shame the Bush administration didn’t use him more publicly.
Apollo posted this at 10:22 AM EST on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 as George Bush Sucks!, Global War on Terror
It seems that TSA’s Standard Operating Procedures manual (or, at least a version of the SOP dated May 2008) got released online. Some years ago when I was a member of the national security apparatus (either as a James Bond-like secret agent whose job was to win poker games and bang models in Monaco, or as a schlub in northern Virginia who wrote training manuals for airport baggage screeners; my memory’s hazy on some of the details) I had access to that document and probably read most of it. I’m anxiously waiting to find out which contractor posted it – it may well be someone I know. How exciting!
Anyhow, reading the now-released details that are supposedly the most revealing, I have the exact same reaction that I had back when I worked on such matters: 1. It’s hard to think of a concrete way how someone could use specific details of screening techniques to defeat the screening process; but 2. the most important information in the book is how un thorough the screening actually is.
One of our great advantages in battling terrorists is that terrorists aren’t very bright and don’t seem capable of solid analytical reasoning. Anyone who flies a half dozen times a year knows exactly how spotty the screening can be. Immediately after I quit my job working on airport security issues, the wife and I went to France for a month. When we got to Paris I got to looking for something in the backpack I’d used as a carryon, and I found but a box cutter we’d used while packing. Ask anyone who flies regularly, and they’ll have a half dozen of those stories. I was disappointed that I’d made it onto an international flight with a box cutter, but I wasn’t surprised (well, I was surprised that it was in my backpack, but I wasn’t surprised I made it through security).
I’m not saying the screening process is a completely wasted effort. Nor am I saying that we need a significantly more complete screening process – a nation of frequent fliers like America would not tolerate El Al levels of scrutiny on every Des Moines to Chicago flight. But I am saying that a big part of why we’ve spent eight years without an act of air terrorism is because the baddies aren’t very good at calculating their odds of success. To the degree that releasing the SOP allows them to precisely calculate those odds, we’re less safe today than we were last week. However, I just don’t think many terrorists are smart enough to figure that out. Three cheers for ignorance and irrationality in the Muslim world!
Apollo posted this at 9:45 PM EST on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 as Global War on Terror, Liberty and/or Security, Ourselves
What an interesting poll result:
However, 53% of voters believe the president places higher importance on ending the war. Just 28% say Obama thinks winning the war is more important. Another 19% are not sure.
Certainly the speech the president gave last week was not meant to communicate his desire to win. I think most of that 28% is composed of people giving the president a presumption of good faith – that surely he would not escalate a war, sending tens of thousands more Americans into combat, simply to provide political cover for when he cuts and runs. Given the content of his speech, I’m not sure it’s fair to make that presumption. He had an opportunity to lay out the ingenious plan for victory that he’s spent months crafting, but instead he mostly just groused about how much it sucks that we’re having to spend money fighting one of those war thingies.
War is, everywhere and always, a competition of wills. The American people don’t think our commander-in-chief has the will to win this war. Let’s hope our enemies in Afghanistan come to a different conclusion.
Apollo posted this at 11:22 AM EST on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 as Barack Obama Couldn't Persuade a Bear to Crap in the Woods, CHANGE!, Global War on Terror, Running with the antelope
I hope Krauthammer is wrong, but I can’t think of a single reason why that would be the case:
Despite my personal misgivings about the possibility of lasting success against Taliban insurgencies in both Afghanistan and the borderlands of Pakistan, I have deep confidence that Petraeus and McChrystal would not recommend a strategy that will be costly in lives, without their having a firm belief in the possibility of success.
I would therefore defer to their judgment and support their recommended policy. But the fate of this war depends not just on them. It depends on the president. We cannot prevail without a commander-in-chief committed to success. And this commander-in-chief defended his exit date (versus the straw-man alternative of “open-ended” nation-building) thusly: “because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”
Remarkable. Go and fight, he tells his cadets — some of whom may not return alive — but I may have to cut your mission short because my real priorities are domestic.
Has there ever been a call to arms more dispiriting, a trumpet more uncertain?
I confess I feel conflicted about Afghanistan myself: given its history, I’m ambivalent about whether establishing a reasonably competent government with a manageable level of corruption is either possible or worth it. Unfortunately, it’s too late for second guessing on this and — as Krauthammer says elsewhere in the article — if Petraeus and McChrystal believe it’s doable, I’ll for it.
I do have one retrospective question: given the extraordinarily complicated nature of the GWOT — from defining victory to detainee status — would we have been better served in 2001 by acknowledging the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan and then declaring war on them (the declaration could have defined al Qaeda as an irregular co-combatant, or something) ?
It seems to me that this was have solved the tremendous legal and strategic ambiguities that have been so troubling over the past eight years.
Tom posted this at 1:03 PM EST on Friday, December 4th, 2009 as Barack Obama Couldn't Persuade a Bear to Crap in the Woods, Global War on Terror
James Fallows has made something of an ass of himself in a pair of posts arguing that Vice President Cheney’s criticisms on President Obama are uniquely vile.
Certainly, Cheney has been attacking Obama strongly and I frankly find it rather unseemly. But, as NRO’s Peter Wehner points out, Cheney’s attacks are surpassed only by President Obama’s relentless blaming of the prior administration for all his problems. Obama is the aggressor here and — though I wish Cheney would remain stoically quiet as President Bush has been this last year, as does Fallows — I can’t fault him.
Fallows also made a different and very dangerous mistake that that, to my knowledge, no one else has pointed out. He wrote:
I am not aware of another former President or Vice President behaving as despicably as Cheney has done in the ten months since leaving power, most recently but not exclusively with his comments to Politico about Obama’s decisions on Afghanistan. (Aaron Burr might win the title, for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, but Burr was a sitting Vice President at the time.) [emphasis added]
Let the historical record show that Colonel Burr does not take kindly being called “despicable” in print. Were I Mr. Fallows, I should avoid Princeton Cemetery at all costs, lest a spry zombie accost him and demand satisfaction.
Tom posted this at 9:51 AM EST on Friday, December 4th, 2009 as Global War on Terror, Politics
The typically oblique Andrew Ferguson explains what was so unusual about last night’s speech:
Obama’s critics to his right should remember the president’s critics to his left. The poor gentle souls must be gobsmacked. Obama is the first Democratic president in forty years to call for a significant deployment of American troops in the national security interest of his country. This is very big news. His predecessor, President Clinton, could give a stirring address dispatching bombers over Bosnia and be confident of the support of his fellow Democrats, because the show of power was purely humanitarian and had nothing to do with keeping us safe from our enemies. With great courage, Obama is trying something that hasn’t been tried within the living memory of most of the members of his party. He may even recall the era when liberal Democratic presidents — Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson — could lead a fight because it was in the interest of the country to fight.
This is a historical moment, and one we should be grateful for.
Republicans seem to be lining up to support Obama’s surge, which means that they’re behaving as the loyal opposition ought to. They might be bitterly opposed to the president on many domestic matters, but they’re with him when he’s trying to do right. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in Congress.
Hubbard posted this at 11:18 AM EST on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 as CHANGE!, Global War on Terror
Like any good conservative, I oscillate between loving and hating Lindsey Graham. Like his bff John McCain, there are moments when Graham’s departures from reason and principle are so inexplicable and indefensible that I would gladly see him rode of the party on a rail.
But exactly like McCain, there are moments when he stands taller than all the rest, calling down lightning bolts from a conservative god, and raining destruction and common sense on his enemies. Here he is, ensuring that Eric Holder has a backup anus in case his first one fails:
Holder imagines that he can hide inside that “thoughtful” routine that Obama so often relies on, but it is utterly pathetic here. Either he knows damned well what he’s doing and he’s lying or he’s outrageously unqualified for his job. His evasive style is so similar to Obama’s that he makes Obama look worse.
I’ll add that Graham is correct about the perverse incentive structure set up by our current Justice Department. If you kill American soldiers overseas, you get a military court; if you kill civilians in America, you get a civilian trial.
I’ll rephrase that, as a terrorist might see it: If you do combat with the greatest military force in the history of the world and happen to temporarily come out on top, your reward when captured will be a military tribunal held out of the public eye, followed by execution or an extended stay in a military facility; if you spend a while living in the wealthiest country in the history of the world and kill a few unsuspecting and unarmed civilians, your reward when caught will be a media circus trial with worldwide publicity, followed by decades of appeal and a lifetime spent in the world’s cushiest prison system where you are free to convert others to your murderous religion.
Graham is correct and Holder is wrong, but unfortunately Holder is the one who gets to make the policy that gives jihadists an incentive to come and kill American civilians. To every Republican who couldn’t hold his nose and vote for McCain, to every independent who fell for the hope and change shtick: Thanks!
Apollo posted this at 2:25 AM EST on Friday, November 20th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Global War on Terror, The Law Is An Ass--An Idiot
Isn’t it awful how liberals treat the Constitution like dirt? As if it’s a living, breathing document that means whatever they want it to mean?
Yes, it is, and it’s even worse when conservatives do it:
I’m not quite certain if Napolitano is entirely correct, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that the decision to not declare war after 9/11 (as well as before the Iraq War) was a tremendous mistake and the progenitor of all the legal/detainee problems we’ve been dealing with so badly these past eight years. Certainly, the circumstances presented a extra few difficulties — one would have to word the declaration carefully — but it would be quite doable.
But to return where this post started, did O’Reily seriously just say “I don’t care about the Constitution”? Yes. Indeed, he did.
Tom posted this at 5:06 PM EST on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 as Buffoon Watch, Global War on Terror, Liberty and/or Security, The Law Is An Ass--An Idiot
…officials denied reports that any gambling had taken place in Casablanca.
Abdelbaset al Megrahi, the man convicted of carrying out the Lockerbie bombing, has left the Tripoli hospital where he was receiving treatment for cancer.
Officials in Libya on Monday reported that Megrahi had been discharged from Tripoli Medical Centre, the country’s most advanced public clinic, where he had received treatment since late August.
In August, doctors gave Megrahi just three months to live in a judgement that secured his release from a Glasgow prison. But he entered the Tripoli hospital to undergo an aggressive chemotherapy programme just days after Libyans celebrated his triumphal return.
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime publicly declared its hope that “a miracle from God” would preserve his life.
Tom posted this at 2:12 PM EST on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 as Global War on Terror, Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!
VDH is spot on:
[G]iven that George Bush made a far more difficult choice that saved Iraq, it is hard to figure out why Obama cannot make a simple decision to send the troops requested by his commanders on the ground.
It is rapidly becoming obvious that the last 6 1/2 years of Democrats kvetching about focusing on Afghanistan instead of Iraq has been complete bull shit. They had no more intention of fighting in Afghanistan than they had of fighting in Iraq.
Some of us have understood this for years; the rest of the country is about to have a very rude awakening. And, I suppose it is worth mentioning in passing, millions of Afghanis will suffer because of it.
Apollo posted this at 11:56 PM EDT on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 as CHANGE!, Global War on Terror
David Frum outlines the cynicism behind candidate Obama’s strategy that President Obama is now trying to weasel around:
There is very little that Barack Obama knows about Afghanistan today that he did not know in the summer of 2008. Obama paid a visit to Afghanistan in July of the election year. In-country, he received briefings on both the deteriorating security situation and the corruption and incompetence of the Karzai government. I know this because I visited Afghanistan just a few months later, and talked to many of the military and civilian figures who had briefed the candidate. They presented my group with an unrelievedly bleak assessment—capped by a call for tens of thousands of additional American troops. When asked, “Did you deliver this same message to candidate Obama,” they responded discreetly, but clearly: Yes they had.
In particular, everybody acknowledged the failings of the Karzai government—and the likelihood that it would tamper with the 2009 Afghan elections. That topic was so widely discussed that one has to wonder about the Obama administration’s decision to stand back as the government ran the election in exactly the corrupt way so many had predicted the year before.
I don’t blame the Obama administration for being reluctant to commit to Afghanistan. The war there has always been unpromising. That’s exactly why the Bush administration refrained from making the grand commitment demanded by candidates Kerry and Obama.
But here’s what Obama should be blamed for, and severely: Virtually every fact about Afghanistan that is discouraging him now was known to him (or anyway, told to him) 15 months ago. He extended the commitment anyway, repeatedly and emphatically. And now it seems he did so first for electioneering purposes, and again, once in office, for equally political ends—to position himself as “tough on terrorism.”
More than 60,000 Americans are fighting and dying in Afghanistan at this moment. Can it really be that they remain there not to win a war, but because pretending to support their mission was necessary to win Barack Obama the Democratic nomination and the presidency? And can it be that Obama is now preparing to reverse course on this unfinished war because, from his new point of view in the Oval Office, it’s already “mission accomplished”?
Questions for hawks regarding Afghanistan:
Hubbard posted this at 12:38 PM EDT on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 as CHANGE!, Global War on Terror
and changing your beliefs when you find out you were drastically wrong.
Jamie posted this at 4:14 PM EDT on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 as Global War on Terror
As a general rule, I’ve got no beef with the Patriot Act, but perhaps the fact that they put this guy in juvenile lockup should be a sign that he’s not really the sort of terrorist the law was designed to be used against.
Though he is being held several hundred miles away from his home. Perhaps it’s the juvi equivalent of Gitmo?
Apollo posted this at 5:11 PM EDT on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 as Global War on Terror, The Law Is An Ass--An Idiot
Charles Krauthammer’s column last week arguing in favor of torture under limited circumstances is far better than most on the subject. Not only is it well-reasoned, it’s actually willing to state clearly what it wishes to argue: that torture, without the quotation marks, can be justified under two circumstances:
The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent’s life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy. Even John McCain, the most admirable and estimable torture opponent, says openly that in such circumstances, “You do what you have to do.” And then take the responsibility.
Some people, however, believe you never torture. Ever. They are akin to conscientious objectors who will never fight in any war under any circumstances, and for whom we correctly show respect by exempting them from war duty. But we would never make one of them Centcom commander. Private principles are fine, but you don’t entrust such a person with the military decisions upon which hinges the safety of the nation. It is similarly imprudent to have a person who would abjure torture in all circumstances making national security decisions upon which depends the protection of 300 million countrymen.
The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. This case lacks the black-and-white clarity of the ticking time bomb scenario. We know less about the length of the fuse or the nature of the next attack. But we do know the danger is great. (One of the “torture memos” noted that the CIA had warned that terrorist “chatter” had reached pre-9/11 levels.) We know we must act but have no idea where or how — and we can’t know that until we have information. Catch-22.
I whole-heartedly agree with his first argument and — for the same Krauthammer offers — would question the fitness of anyone who refused to waterboard or do worse under when confronted with a genuine ticking time bomb. As I have stated elsewhere, I am not aware of this situation ever taking place during the War on Terror.
I do not agree with his second conclusion that torture is (legally? morally? Krauthammer never quite says) permissible to torture or waterboard “a high-value enemy” simply by his virtue of being one. Why, for instance, should we not waterboard a medium-value prisoner, when his information could likely lead to the capture of his superiors? It’s too slippery, and it’s only going to got down hill. When it comes to torture, I think we should insist on the kind of black-and-white certainty Krauthammer mentioned earlier.
Tom posted this at 8:48 PM EDT on Monday, May 4th, 2009 as Global War on Terror, Kraut-hammered, Liberty and/or Security
The most distressing aspect of the torture issue — worse, to my mind, than either the harm done to detainees or the intelligence that may have been compromised — has been our inability to debate the subject seriously and rationally. This is not a back-door way of criticizing those who disagree with me: 99% of the arguments put forward by both sides rely on the kind of circular logic that admits no honest disagreement. In short, the debated has been poisoned.
That we’ve been unable to discuss a subject this important — though for entirely different reasons, depending on whom you ask — for more than five years speaks very, very poorly for us; after 200 years of practice with republicanism, one would think our citizens could have an intelligent public debate about a controversial subject.
Jim Manzi’s post on the Corner is a genuine exception and something of an antidote: it frames the debate rationally, weighs arguments for and against, and then makes a reasoned judgment. It’s by no means a definitive statement, but it’s the kind of argument we need.
My thoughts are below the fold, but they’re less important than what Manzi wrote. Go read the whole thing.
Tom posted this at 10:37 PM EDT on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 as George Bush Sucks!, Global War on Terror, That's Not Change!, We're all DOOMED