Anthony Cordesman: A chance to avoid defeat in Afghanistan.

Ross Douthat: What if Ted Kennedy shared his sister's pro-life liberalism?

National media oddly more interested in Republican's gubernatorial candidate's 20 year-old thesis than Democratic President's missing 20 year-old thesis.

Palin to deliver speech in Hong Kong.

Massachusetts Senate special election set for January 19.

At the White House press briefing today, Robert Gibbs gave the impression that there's a good chance that Obama will send more troops to Afghanistan:

I think there's broad agreement that for many years our effort in Afghanistan has been under-resourced politically, militarily, economically. [...]

You can't under-resource the most important part of our war on terror, you can't under-resource that for five or six or seven years -- whether it's under-resourced with troops, whether it's under-resourced with civilian manpower, whether it's under-resourced with economic development funding -- and hope to snap your fingers and have that turn around in just a few months.

I think that what the President enunciated throughout the campaign and actualized as part of this administration was to change our direction in Afghanistan, to understand it was the central focus; that in Afghanistan and in the hills separating Afghanistan and Pakistan were those again plotting to do us harm, and that for far too long we've ignored that with the resources that were necessary to deal with the size and the scope of the problem that existed there. [...]

this was under-resourced, under-funded, under-manned and ignored for years and that's not going to change overnight.

Gibbs could have stuck with a general statement that Afghanistan was "under-resourced", but by specifically saying that it was "undermanned" and "under-resourced with troops" he seemed to give the impression that the White House is preparing the left for an increase in the troop levels there. Gibbs was so passionate in his defense of the administration's policy that he used the verboten phrase "war on terror" instead of the preferred "overseas contingency operation."

Gibbs went on to say that the war in Afghanistan is "winnable" --"based on some initial reporting that I've seen of General McChrystal's report, he says the situation is quite serious but the war is indeed winnable."

I can't find an instance of Obama using the word "win" in reference to Afghanistan since last summer, when he said that Afghanistan is "a war that we must win, and we must incapacitate those who would do America harm."

President Obama has said of late that he doesn't like to use the word "victory" to describe our goal in Afghanistan, saying instead, as he did before the VFW on August 17, that our goal is to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda and its extremist allies." How "victory" differs from the defeat of one's enemy has never been quite clear. But the White House nevertheless seems to be giving indications that Obama intends to be in Afghanistan for the long haul.

Gibbs continued to expand on what a win in Afghanistan would look like: In addition to "disrupting, dismantling, and destroying al Qaeda and its extremist allies," Gibbs said, it's important that "we have a government in Afghanistan that is self-sufficient, that we have a security force in that country that's able to deal with the challenges that are presented to it."

Gibbs said, "I don't think it will take close to forever" to achieve these goals, "but I don't know what year that would be."

The Start Over caucus is growing:

Rep. Mike Pence: I have seen in town hall meetings across Indiana, and I have three more scheduled, Republicans and some Democrats who had them have heard tremendous public concern about health care legislation that has been drafted in the House of Representatives. It really is time, as Bob Dole says in the Washington Post today, to start over. They ought to scrap the bill that has been moving through the House of Representatives, that is nothing more than a government takeover of health care, paid for with $800 billion in higher taxes, and we ought to demand the President of the United States to bring forward his own bill.

I talked to Bob Dole this morning personally and he told me that when Ronald Reagan had a major legislative priority, the Reagan Administration wrote a bill, sent it to the Hill, and then started the process of negotiation. Here, Nancy Pelosi and Democrats have written this bill with liberal priorities and shut Republicans out of the consideration entirely, and the White House has been on the sidelines.

Today the AFSCME and AFL-CIO co-hosted a block party to celebrate the end of their “Highway to Health Care” summer tour, in which they sent an RV to 19 cities in 10 states to spread the good news of the Democrats' health care plan.

One of my first impressions of the event in Washington, D.C. was, appropriately enough, a man on a cell phone trying to rustle up more attendees. “We need some more bodies down here,” he said, standing on the fringe of the crowd. “Can you holler around the office a little?”

In case workplace coercion was not enough, the unions also provided a wide array of free t-shirts, signs and temporary tattoos. You know, to get that spontaneous, grassroots feel. The unions apparently didn’t want their party to look lame in front of the photographers and television cameras milling about, which for some reason included Al Jazeera.

The two main speakers were AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and AFSCME president Gerald McEntee. Both spoke about the “evil insurance companies” (McEntee's words) spreading misinformation and using the “teabaggers” as a front for their machinations.

After talking about such horrors, Sweeney went on to announce, without a trace of irony, “This past month, 18,000 union members attended nearly 400 town hall meetings across the country, [and] this coming Labor Day weekend, we expect tens of thousands of union members to call for health care reform through celebrations across the country.”

Ted Kennedy was invoked more times that Jesus at a tent-revival. “We can’t let Ted down,” said McEntee. “We can’t let America down.”

But despite the chants of “health care now!” Richard Kirsch, executive director of Health Care for America Now, seemed to rather favor health care sometime in the near future, telling the crowd they “were going to get this done in the next three and a half months at the utmost.”

This would usually be the part in the article where I would put in some quotes from the “average citizen,” but I couldn’t seem to find anyone at the block party who wasn’t a member of a union or a Democrat organization -– AFL-CIO, AFSCME, United Steelworkers, Work for America, Young Democrats for America, etc.

In fact, not many people were willing to talk on the record. If one can imagine, being a WEEKLY STANDARD blogger in the midst of a crowd of union members tends to put a damper on the block party, even with the free hamburgers and hot dogs.

As the Chicago Sun-Times reports today, President Obama was involved in a very similar fight over health-care reform in 2004, when he was still a state senator in Illinois. Then, as now, Obama accused Republicans of "fear-mongering" and unfairly branding his proposal a form of "socialized medicine." But Obama did allow that his critics had some legitimate concerns. "The only thing that has happened here," Obama said, "and this is essentially what happened in this bill, the original bill on the House side, I think, would have legitimately raised some concerns with respect to some industry who might have been fearful that it was a mandate to introduce a single-payer plan. I modified this."

So Obama took credit for modifying the bill in response to concerns about a single-payer system. But Obama still pilloried the insurance industry, as he and his proxies have done in this latest effort at health care reform. The quote goes on,

And I have to say by the way, just to pick up on something that was raised earlier, that this is a different bill number than the original bill, it has gone through a complete restructuring from the original bill, but that initial concern that Senator Ryder said, that original cloud continued over it, because industry, and industry lobbyists, insurance lobbyists here in Springfield had been engaging in such fear-mongering among its agents, suggesting that this was a single-payer bill that in fact a lot of concerns were raised that had nothing to do with the bill that was before the body today. And what I was, what I would strongly suggest is people take the time to look at the three-page bill that is before them as opposed to some of the mischaracterizations (of) this legislation that have been raised by others.

In 2004, Obama encouraged his critics to read the legislation before commenting on it. Five years later, as Obama pushed a far more costly and far more consequential reform at the federal level, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs refuses to offer a straight answer about whether Obama will even read the legislation before advocating for it to the American people or signing it into law. You can listen to Obama's speech from 2004 here:

Another audio recording from the same debate between Obama and now-Rep. Peter Roskam can found here. Obama says again that his critics should read the bill. "Every time I've debated one of the bills over on that side of the aisle, I've gone to the bill," Obama said, "and if I had serious questions about it, I would at least read the bill and talk about what's in the bill, not what's not in the bill."

J Street, the pro-peace, pro-Palestinian lobbying group, is having a conference this October that will feature a wide range of speakers -- from Salam Al-Marayati, the executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council to Bernard Avishai, author of The Tragedy of Zionism and The Hebrew Republic and Eli Pariser the former director of MoveOn.org. It's going to be super "pro-Israel," I'm sure. But the appearance of Salam Al-Marayati ought to raise a few eyebrows. Not only is he an apologist for Palestinian terrorism, but he pointed the finger at Israel for the murder of 3,000 Americans on 9/11 just hours after the Twin Towers fell. His quote, as it was reported in the New York Times:

''If we're going to look at suspects, we should look to the groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list because I think this diverts attention from what's happening in the Palestinian territories so that they can go on with their aggression and occupation and apartheid policies.''

You can read more egregious comments from Al-Marayati here, courtesy of the ZOA. Looking down the list of speakers, I'm pleased to note that J Street failed to secure a single Republican for their conference. A few Democratic reps will speak, including the anti-Israel Donna Edwards, "His Royal Highness Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid Al-Hussein," know to most Americans as the Jordanian Ambassador, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation. But not one single Republican. And compare this to the broad bipartisan showing at AIPAC events. There's a reason AIPAC gets members of both parties to attend their conferences: 1) they don't invite speakers who blame Israel or America for 9/11; and 2) AIPAC is actually pro-Israel.

Israel’s education minister, Gideon Sa’ar, yesterday announced that when third-graders file into their classrooms for the first day of school tomorrow and open their Arabic-language textbooks, they will no longer find “al-naqba” in their pages. The phrase, which roughly translates as “devastation on a par with the Holocaust,” and is invoked by Arabs throughout the Middle East to describe the establishment in 1948 of the “Zionist entity,” was inexplicably approved for use in the textbooks a couple of years ago (another Israeli government, another education minister) but has now been un-approved. “The creation of the State of Israel cannot be taught about as a catastrophe inside the country's schools,” said a ministry spokeswoman.

Israeli Arabs are “dismayed and outraged.” Atef Moaddi, head of the Follow-up Committee on Arab Education in Israel, told the Jerusalem Post: “For Israeli Arabs, who consider themselves a part of the Palestinian people, the Nakba is not up for debate, it is a historical fact.” Added Sawsan Zaher, of the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel,

Prohibiting Arab students from studying about the Nakba is illegal and violates international law, which obliges states to enable national minorities to learn and study about their own history, culture and tradition.

Of course, no one -- not even the “naqba”-averse Netanyahu government -- is advocating excising the story of what happened at the founding of the State of Israel, which was disastrous indeed for the Arabs expelled from their homes and forced into exile in the aftermath of a war launched by their leaders against the Jews. On the contrary, “What Israeli Arabs experienced during the [1948 War of Independence] was certainly a tragedy,” Sa’ar said. “But the word ‘Nakba,’ whose meaning is similar to ‘Holocaust’ in this context, will no longer be used.”

Even so, perhaps Israeli Arabs would be happier leaving their students to the tender mercies of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), as the Palestinian Authority has done in the Arab territories of Judea and Samaria and Hamas has done in Gaza. UNRWA’s history books -- in accord with the 1982 doctoral thesis of PA president Mahmoud Abbas, which asserted that the Holocaust was a Zionist-Nazi plot that eliminated only a few hundred thousand Jews, and the beliefs of a whopping 40.5 percent of Israeli Arabs, who deny the Holocaust ever happened at all -- include no mention whatsoever of the extermination of European Jewry.

True, Hamas has long been in angry contention with UNRWA, most recently charging it with trying to corrupt Arab children by offering folk dancing at summer camps and now accusing it of plotting to insert the “so-called Holocaust” into the curriculum. According to the AP,

Three teachers at U.N. schools said that . . . basic information about the Holocaust was expected to be taught to eighth grade students as part of human rights classes. . . . They requested anonymity because they are not allowed to speak to reporters.

“I do not exaggerate when I say this issue is a war crime, because of how it serves the Zionist colonizers and deals with their hypocrisy and lies,” declaimed Hamas “spiritual leader” Younis al-Astal, and spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri concurred: “We think it's more important to teach Palestinians the crimes of the Israeli occupation.”

But methinks they needn’t worry overmuch: “Such reports are totally untrue," said Adnan Abu Hasna, UNRWA's Gaza spokesman. “The current curricula taught to pupils at UNRWA schools do not contain anything on the subject of the Holocaust.”

Update: A friend writes: "Now I see the Arabs are threatening 'civil disobedience' if the Nakba is removed. Hmmm. Might they refuse to take that portion of their salaries that comes via Israel, in the taxes it collects for the PA? Might they refuse the right they now have to not serve in the IDF, and demand to serve?"

Washington Post Style writer Robin Givhan has a reputation for occasionally channeling her political predilections in petty fashion critiques of certain Washington actors. George Bush's hair is a "dull gray thatch," but Kerry should "gloat" over his "silver" mop, and John Edwards' mane "demands to be nuzzled."

Katherine Harris' make-up precipitated a famous reverie upon how mascara application might affect her application of the law:

"At this moment that so desperately needs diplomacy, understatement and calm, one wonders how this Republican woman, who can't even use restraint when she's wielding a mascara wand, will manage to use it and make sound decisions in this game of partisan one-upmanship."

This week, the Pulitzer-winning critic waxes predictably poetic about the be-Dockered and deck-shoed style of the Kennedys, obviously nostalgic for the "look of rich tradition" and refinement embodied by the kids from Hyannisport. She bemoans the inability of the modern American politician to wear it without apology (or, rather, the American people's alleged inability to countenance a look of easy affluence).

She wasn't nearly as nostalgic in her pettiest of attacks, in 2005's "An image a little too carefully coordinated," which took aim at John Roberts, his wife, and his two knee-high children. What was their sin, you might ask? Flip-flops at the White House? Tony Hawk t-shirts and Ninja Turtle shorts? No, their transgression was apparently trying to achieve "refinement" without being Democrats. What was the look of rich tradition on the Kennedys became "syrupy nostalgia" on Roberts' family:

When President Bush announced his choice for the next associate justice of the Supreme Court, it was hard not to marvel at the 1950s-style tableau vivant that was John Roberts and his family.

On the Kennedys, such fashion was a "style of dress that might best be described as both aristocratic and democratic," a mix Givhan regrets is "virtually impossible today, at least on the political stage."

But when Roberts' son Jack wore an "ensemble that calls to mind John F. "John-John" Kennedy Jr.," Givhan declared it "not classic" but "old-fashioned. These clothes are Old World, old money and a cut above the light-up/shoe-buying hoi polloi."

The verdict, on the Kennedys: "The modern fashion industry has argued that clothes can make a man look rich. Those images of the Kennedys recall the days when it was assumed that a man did that for his clothes."

Sigh.

The verdict, on the Roberts family: "In their attire, there was nothing too informal; there was nothing immodest. There was only the feeling that, in the desire to be appropriate and respectful of history, the children had been costumed in it."

In bemoaning the loss of Kennedy style, Givhan stumbled upon the double standard, but ignored her part in perpetuating it:

But the Kennedys were mostly grandfathered in. Bad behavior was incorporated into the myth. It's hard to think of any political family that so publicly lived a life of luxury with little comment. The Bushes of Kennebunkport certainly revealed their patrician background, but it was met with plenty of comment . . . and criticism and derision.

Indeed, the "comment, criticism, and derision" for that look and lifestyle extended even to the patent-leather shoes of Bush nominees' pre-school children. Gee, I wonder why we don't see more of it, Robin?

Only 4 percent of Israelis believe President Obama is pro-Israel according to a poll done last week by the Jerusalem Post. (The poll's margin of error was larger than that at 4.5 percent.) Part of the reason Obama might be having trouble convincing even a few Israelis that he is a true friend is reporting like this, from Haaretz, on the victory of opposition leader Yukio Hatoyama in Japan's elections this weekend:

Withdrawing from American guardianship could also change Japanese policy toward Israel. Until now, Japan limited its support for the Palestinians to aiding economic projects, in keeping with American requests. The Hatoyama government is likely to take a more pro-Arab stance, such as by recognizing Hamas and making tougher demands of Israel, such as calling for an end to construction in the settlements. Such a position would be similar to the line taken by some European governments, and will not necessarily lead to a confrontation with the United States. The Obama administration may actually be pleased.

I'd love to see the left argue against that conclusion, but they can't really -- they want to recognize Hamas and it would please them if Japan did. Obama has not recognized Hamas, but no one has ever offered a plausible explanation for his reluctance to do so other than political calculus. Obama espouses no principle that would prevent him from recognizing and negotiating with a terrorist group -- and Obama is already engaging and negotiating with terrorist groups in Iraq.

The Obama administration has also given the impression that Israel, and not Hamas or Iran or Israel's Arab neighbors, is the primary impediment to peace in the Middle East. By making very public demands of Israel while putting no public pressure on the other parties to the conflict, the administration sought and succeeded in creating the appearance of "daylight" between Washington and Jerusalem. The question is what did they hope to accomplish other than convincing Israelis that the Obama administration is not on their side?

Laura Rozen has broken a lot of news over the last six months from her perch at the Cable blog on the website of Foreign Policy magazine. Last week it was announced that she'd been hired by Politico. Her replacement at Foreign Policy was announced this morning, and it's a name that will be very familiar to regular readers of this blog -- Josh Rogin. Rogin is one of the best national security reporters in town, and he turned out a bunch of major scoops at CQ over the past few years. If you didn't already have the Cable bookmarked, you'll want to do so now.

The announcement FP sent to their own staff and contributors this morning:

We're very pleased to announce that Josh Rogin will join Foreign Policy as our new columnist for The Cable, ForeignPolicy.com's signature blog covering the making of American foreign policy in the age of Obama. Josh brings a zeal for scoops and a proven record of getting them as a defense and national security reporter for Congressional Quarterly, not to mention infectious energy and enthusiasm for the job and an extensive background on these subjects. We expect Josh to continue expanding The Cable and offering readers new regular features that will take them even deeper inside the people and institutions - as well as the ideas - that are shaping the national security debate. In just a few months since its launch under Laura Rozen's great leadership, The Cable has become a daily must-read for FP's influential audience in Washington and internationally (and, we should note, it's still a fast-growing audience with ForeignPolicy.com on its way toward finishing August with a record count of around 5 million pageviews), and Josh is filled with exciting ideas for how to serve those readers even more original news and ahead-of-the-curve insight. Over the last few years at CQ, he's been out front on everything from missile defense to the Pentagon's budget wars to discovering that the predictive market Intrade was being manipulated to boost John McCain's presidential prospects. A former defense reporter for Federal Computer Week magazine, Josh also worked as a Pentagon staff reporter in the Washington bureau of Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading daily newspaper. An international affairs graduate of GW, Josh speaks Japanese, "some" Korean and hails from outside Philadelphia. He'll be working out of our offices here and planning to start filing starting Monday, September 14, so please join us in welcoming him.

The economics of health care, in four sentences.

NYT finds insurance folks are "human beings, too."

The Buffalo News: Rangel should resign.

Obama administration rebukes Cheney rebuke.

Photo of the week?

Jenna Bush has a new gig: Education correspondent for the Today Show

Harry Reid working hard on re-election: "I hope you go out of business.”

Creigh Deeds: Because Virginia Deserves a 20-Year-Old Master's Thesis It Can Count On

The polling data:

A poll by The Israel Project of 800 registered voters, jointly conducted by Republican Public Opinion Strategies and Democratic Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, found that 81 percent of those surveyed believe Iran poses a "very" or "somewhat" serious threat to the United States, and 84 percent agreed with the statement: "Even with all the problems that America faces at home now, we must still work hard to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons."

The poll showed that 76 percent support the initiation of "direct talks between the U.S. and Iran to negotiate its nuclear program," when given "a series of actions that can be taken with regard to Iran if they do not stop their nuclear program." Eighty-one percent backed expansion of U.N. economic and diplomatic sanctions, 69 percent wanted an end to "all taxpayer funded government contracts with companies that do business with Iran" and 66 percent of respondents said they want to "prevent any company from doing business in the United States if that company provides Iran with refined petroleum."

The same people who wanted Obama to help the Iranian protesters by saying and doing nothing (that strategy worked out great, by the way) will tout the 76 percent figure in this poll as evidence of widespread support for their approach of direct talks. Fine, but ask that same 76 percent what they think will be accomplished with direct talks and I'd bet at least half have little to no hope that such talks will be successful. Which might be why even more respondents support new sanctions from the UN, and two-thirds support more robust US sanctions of the kind that Lieberman has pushed through the Senate.

Nobody opposes talking, but we can't be delusional about the prospects for success. The Iranians have already stalled Obama for nine months while they murdered democracy activists in the street, continued enriching uranium, and offered the Obama administration no concessions at all -- not even an offer for talks at some undetermined point in the future. Eighty-one percent of Americans understand it's time to increase the pressure on Tehran.

The Wall Street Journal pans Charlie Crist's cronyism:

Democrats have embarrassed themselves by naming political buddies to replace Joe Biden and Barack Obama in the Senate, and now a Republican is showing he can do the same. On Friday, Florida Governor Charlie Crist picked a long-time aide and political consultant to fill his state's soon-to-be-vacant U.S. Senate seat, presumably as a placeholder until Mr. Crist can win the job himself in November 2010.

The Florida vacancy is due to the strange decision by Republican Mel Martinez to abandon his post early for no other reason than that he seems sick of the job. His departure couldn't come at a worst time given that Republicans have only 40 seats and need every one of them to stop the most radical expansion of government in two generations.

That makes it all the more puzzling that Mr. Crist bypassed well known Republicans in favor of selecting his former campaign manager and chief of staff George LeMieux. The 40-year-old Mr. LeMieux ran Mr. Crist's campaign for governor in 2006 and is famous for saying about Mr. Crist that "we make decisions together," adding that "he's the senior partner and I'm the junior partner." He quickly said he has no plans to run for Senate in his own right and has declared that "the Charlie Crist way" is "the way we need to address things in Washington."

Bob Dole and the Cincinnati Enquirer join the Start Over caucus--founded by Bill Kristol six weeks ago.

In the latest TWS, Fred Barnes writes on the need for tort reform in health-care reform:

tort reform remains a key to paring costs. The president can make a stab at directly cutting back spending on health care, but that's bound to add to the political unpopularity of Obamacare and is unlikely to pass even an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress. In particular, shrinking Medicare spending is a nonstarter, given the furious opposition of seniors.

Tort reform, in contrast, has the advantage of being popular. It would put sensible limits on medical malpractice lawsuits that have flooded the courts and forced doctors to practice "defensive" medicine. Studies of the effects of such medicine put its price tag at a minimum of $100 billion a year and probably more than $200 billion.

In today's New York Times, former Democratic senator and progressive stalwart Bill Bradley writes that tort reform is a sensible bipartisan compromise:

Since the days of Harry Truman, Democrats have wanted universal health coverage, believing that if other industrialized countries can achieve it, surely the United States can. For Democrats, universal coverage speaks to America’s sense of decency and compassion. Democrats also believe that it will lead to a healthier and more productive country.

Since the days of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have wanted legal reform, believing that our economic competitiveness is being shackled by the billions we spend annually on tort costs; an estimated 10 cents of every health care dollar paid by individuals and companies goes for litigation and defensive medicine. For Republicans, tort reform and its health care analogue, malpractice reform, speak to the goal of stronger economic growth and lower costs.

The bipartisan trade-off in a viable health care bill is obvious: Combine universal coverage with malpractice tort reform in health care.

Is the mainstream media coming around?

The Washington Post has an important front-page story this morning, with matter-of-fact reporting on the importance of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad as an intelligence source and the enhanced interrogation techniques that made him talk. The piece is headlined: "How a Detainee Became an Asset: September 11 Plotter Cooperated After Waterboarding."

One key source is former CIA Inspector General John Helgerson, who acknowledged that two of the CIA’s “most powerful” enhanced interrogation techniques “elicited a lot of information."

"Certain of the techniques seemed to have little effect, whereas waterboarding and sleep deprivation were the two most powerful techniques and elicited a lot of information," he said in an interview with the Post.

Helgerson authored the 2004 IG report that the Department of Justice released on Monday. The evidence presented in the IG report made clear that EITs had been effective, but Helgerson, well-known inside the CIA as an opponent of the program, stopped short of making that claim in a declarative fashion.

In his interview with the Post there seems to be a subtle shift in his argument. In the IG report Helgerson had written that “measuring the overall effectiveness of EITs” is challenging and a “subjective process.”

In his interview with the Post, Helgerson narrowed the reasons he gave for his reluctance to draw conclusions. Count the qualifiers. Helgerson said he was not in "a position to reach definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of particular interrogation methods" and that “we didn't have the time or resources to do a careful, systematic analysis of the use of particular techniques with particular individuals and independently confirm the quality of the information that came out."

But that kind of analysis misses the point. The fact Helgerson didn’t perform such a study hardly prevents us from concluding that EITs were effective. It is not the effectiveness of “particular interrogation methods” that matters. It’s whether the EITs were effective used together, sometimes simultaneously and sometimes sequentially. And they were.

“The huge reason the program was successful was because the detainees did not know what to expect,” says one intelligence official with detailed knowledge of the program. “Sleep deprivation, forced nudity, dietary manipulation, the waterboard – all of these together created a feeling of utter helplessness and cluelessness.”

Helgerson says something else important. He acknowledges that EITs, particularly sleep deprivation and waterboarding, “elicited a lot of information” but he laments his inability to assess the quality of that intelligence. And the quality does matter. If EITs simply elicited lots of bad information nobody would consider them effective. They didn’t.

He provided information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists including Sayfullah Paracha and his son Uzair Paracha, businessmen who Khalid Shaykh Muhammad planned to use to smuggle explosives into the United States; Saleh Almari, a sleeper operative in New York; and Majid Khan, an operative who could enter the United States easily and was tasked to research attacks [redacted]. Khalid Shaykh Muhammad’s information also led to the investigation and prosecution of Iyman Faris, the truck driver arrested in early 2003 in Ohio.

The Post article describes “the transformation of the man known to U.S. officials as KSM from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its "preeminent source" on al-Qaeda. This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques.”

In a must-read in the new issue of TWS, Tom Joscelyn offers more details about KSM and his interrogation:

On March 1, 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the principal planner of the September 11 attacks, was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. U.S. interrogators quickly went about the business of getting him to talk, and for good reasons. KSM's operatives were already here, inside America, planning attacks.

Shortly after KSM was detained, an Ohio-based truck driver named Iyman Faris was arrested by the FBI. Faris had reportedly been under suspicion beforehand, but U.S. authorities suddenly determined that they had to arrest him. It turned out that Faris, an al Qaeda-trained sleeper agent, had been dispatched to the United States by KSM to plot attacks on landmarks in the New York area, including the Brooklyn Bridge.

Then, in late March, a young Pakistani man named Uzair Paracha was arrested. He had been working out of an office in Manhattan's Garment District for a company owned by his father, Saifullah Paracha. KSM wanted Uzair to facilitate the entry of al Qaeda operatives and use the Parachas' import-export business to smuggle explosives into the United States.

Until this past week, it was not clear how U.S. authorities pieced together the details of this plotting so soon after KSM was captured. But the inspector general's report on the CIA's detainee interrogation program and two other CIA analytical papers--all three of which were released on August 24--fill in the blanks. It is clear now, if it wasn't before, that the CIA's questioning of KSM saved numerous lives, both here and abroad.

So will the United States again be able to elicit this kind of information from detainees? Reuel Marc Gerecht, writing in the Wall Street Journal, thinks it unlikely.

The appointment of a prosecutor guarantees that unless the United States is again devastated by a terrorist attack—on a scale greater than 9/11—CIA operatives will certainly decline any future order by a Republican president to interrogate roughly a jihadist. Langley's junior officers may still receive survival and escape training, which is the baptismal font for the agency's enhanced interrogation techniques. But members of al Qaeda will not similarly get to enjoy the experience.

Constrained by new rules and hostile lawyers, can the CIA in the future successfully interrogate uncooperative jihadists, like self-described 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who remained as close-mouthed as a clam when questioned without physical coercion? The Obama White House has been enamored of the possibilities of soft power; jihadists, too, are now supposed to yield to the psychological prowess of interrogators who play by the rules of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Will Langley be able to develop and retain interrogators culturally and linguistically qualified under the administration's new plans, which will have the White House and the FBI overseeing all counterterrorist interrogations? Such outside control is, among other things, meant to ensure that the CIA, which originally generated the idea of enhanced interrogation, will never again be a font of such unpleasant creativity.

Regardless of whether one believes CIA-inflicted waterboarding, sleep deprivation or severe psychological coercion (suggesting that harm could come to a family member of a taciturn al Qaeda detainee) constitute torture, such actions may have produced an intelligence bonanza and saved thousands of lives.

There may soon be more information made public that will demonstrate the effectiveness of EITs. Current and former CIA officials supportive of the program are pushing to have other reports declassified -– including a “rebuttal” document to the IG report written by senior officials in the directorate of operations; two internal CIA reviews of the program; and, perhaps most important, the interrogation logs written by interrogators to share the information they elicited with other interrogators and others at the CIA.

In 2004, the Massachusetts legislature passed a law to fill Senate vacancies through special election rather than gubernatorial appointment in order to prevent Mitt Romney from picking John Kerry's successor should Kerry have won the presidential election. Now Massachusetts Democrats are working to change the law again and allow Democratic governor Deval Patrick to appoint an interim replacement to fill Ted Kennedy's seat.

When Massachusetts Democrats passed the 2004 law, they were fully aware that a vacant Senate seat would remain unfilled for five months until a special election was held. On June 30, 2004 a Republican-sponsored amendment that would have allowed interim gubernatorial appointments was defeated 104 to 44. (See the roll call here.) House Speaker DeLeo, who now supports allowing Gov. Patrick to appoint a senator to serve until the January special election, was among those who voted against interim appointments in 2004.

Democrats argued in 2004 that interim appointments would corrupt the democratic process. According to StateHouseNews.com's rough transcript of the floor debate,

[Democratic] Rep. [Bill] Straus said he hopes the amendment is rejected. The argument I make on this is in two respects. In terms of the integrity of the conduct of the special election itself, it requires that the voters be the one, unaided by outside influences, who they want to represent them. What happens otherwise with a temporary appointment is the person chosen for largely political reasons by any governor of any party, that person would be invested with a leg up. If you will, the governor would have put his thumb on the scale.

Democratic Rep. Robert Koczera, the sponsor of the current measure to allow interim appointments, opposed the amendment in 2004, saying:

Any vacancy in the US House was filled by a special election over the past 215 years. Why should we treat vacancies in the Senate any differently? Any interim appointment skewers the process by giving that person an advantage. The equity principle is at play with respect to both houses of Congress. They are co-equal.

Democratic Rep. Kathi-Ann agreed that the governor "should not create an incumbent and we should let the people have that choice."

As the Boston Globe editorialized today, "Some state lawmakers fear they will look like hypocrites if they change the law to allow for such an [interim] appointment. In fact, they will."

It’s Ramadan, and 90,000—got that? 90,000—Muslims worshipped today at the Al Aksa mosque in Jerusalem. Will we hear all about it from Human Rights Watch? Will they find a minute to stop fronting for Hamas over there to acknowledge this fact? Will the Israel-bashing Amnesty International take note? What of the horrified UN? Will it answer for having remained silent about the amassing of Hezbollah weapons caches in Southern Lebanon by speaking up to congratulate the Israelis on their heroic efforts to protect religious freedom, even for those who would exterminate them? And speaking of exterminating, having been treated to Nobellist Tutu’s conflating most vilely the Nazi annihilation of the Jews with the situation of Israeli Arabs, will we now be privileged to hear him—or for that matter any of the other outraged “Elders” with whom he has been travelling freely throughout Israel this week—mention that remarkable gathering on the Temple Mount?

St. Petersburg Times: Crist should just have appointed himself, not LeMieux.

Editor of The New York Times Magazine and Ted Kennedy biographer Ed Klein: "one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself."

Charles Krauthammer: The Obamacare exit strategy.

Irwin Stelzer: Seven lessons of Cash-for-Clunkers' failure.

Michelle Malkin: Race-baiter Democrat Rep. Diane Watson praises Cuban health system, Castro & Guevara who “kicked out the wealthy."

A statement from Marco Rubio on Charlie Crist's appointment of his former chief of staff and campaign manager to the U.S. Senate:

"This is a disappointing appointment for Florida. George LeMieux is a talented political operative and the governor's best friend, but that doesn't make him the right choice to represent Florida in the Senate. Governor Crist had a wealth of consistent and principled conservative candidates to choose from, all of whom would have been a reliable check and balance on the excesses of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda."

Cheney will be on Fox News Sunday this weekend. Should be very entertaining television for those who would rather hear about Barack Obama's war on the intelligence community instead of syrupy tributes to Ted Kennedy:

I've been saying for months now that Pakistan has no desire to move into South Waziristan, the Taliban and al Qaeda stronghold in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. According to Time magazine, a Pakistani official with close ties to the military said that no such operation would occur, and in fact the military would resume the disastrous policy of signing peace agreements with the Taliban:

A top Pakistani general, Nadeem Ahmed, recently said preparation for such an operation could take up to two months. Now, there will be no ground assault at all, according to a senior Pakistani politician known to have strong military ties; instead, the politician tells TIME, the military will try and buy off some TTP [Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan] factions through peace deals.

Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institute thinks the Pakistani military is seeking to keep its policy of strategic depth — keeping the Taliban in reserve as a chip against India and hedging against a US withdraw from Afghanistan — in place, and thus threatening President Obama's AfPak strategy to defeat al Qaeda and the Taliban:

But the experts — like some U.S. officials — suspect the Pakistani military lacks the desire to eliminate the TTP entirely. Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institute, who conducted the Obama administration's review of Afghanistan and Pakistan policy, says the military may simply want "to get the TTP back to where it was two years ago — a malleable force that doesn't attack the Pakistani state, and particularly not the Army." A somewhat tame TTP is a useful boogeyman, "to keep civilians appreciative of the need for the Army to be getting resources and priority attention," Riedel adds.

For the Obama administration, the Pakistani military's reluctance to take on the TTP doesn't bode well for the pursuit of U.S. interests. Washington would like Islamabad to confront the groups that pose a direct threat to NATO forces across the border in Afghanistan — the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network. But "its not clear that the Pakistanis are prepared to pay more than lip service to that," says Riedel.

"I would far prefer American health care than I would health care in the UK any day of the week," Minnesota Republican Michelle Bachmann said at townhall meeting yesterday, citing this Daily Mail report about 4,000 mothers who have been forced to give birth in bathrooms, offices, hallways, waiting rooms, and elevators due to an NHS bed shortage.

When a member of the fearful left-wing mob began shouting and interrupting Bachmann, the mother of five (and foster-mother of 23) shot back: “I’ve given birth here probably more times than you, sir.”

Watch the video (via Michelle Malkin):

I didn't think it was possible to go lower than 6 percent, but Barack Obama's done it. Just 4 percent of Israelis believe Barack Obama is pro-Israel according to the latest poll from the Jerusalem Post. A majority of Israelis think that Barack Obama is pro-Palestinian (51 percent). Could 96 percent of Israelis being wrong? I doubt it, but the impact will be the same regardless of whether it's true or not. As Ben Smith says, "This is a substantive obstacle to peace, as it means that Israeli leaders — already disinclined to deal — could pay a price at home for working too closely with the American president."

Obama's treatment of Israel has considerably undermined his ability to push the peace process forward. Rather than focus on achieving results, the left wanted, and Obama delivered, a process that would make a big show of creating "daylight" between Washington and Jerusalem. They got daylight, but they only made a bad situation worse. Bibi still can't thumb his nose at the president, but Obama's made it much easier for him to stall, delay, and even defy American demands.

Update: A reader emails:

Perhaps President Obama should have heeded the advice Tom Daschle gave President Bush in 2002 when he noted in a speech to AIPAC that "engagement for the sake of engagement will not work."

A friend emails:

After a summer of dithering, this is the month of Iran. The Admin faces a real test. Now is the time they have ordained for decision and action. SO: NU? What comes next? When are the decisions being made? Who will be in the room? What will be done to sqeeze Iran with "crippling sanctions"?

Indeed, here are the important dates on the calendar this coming month:

August 28-29: New IAEA report will be issued on Today or in the next couple days
September 1: The U.S. will take over the UNSC Presidency for the month
September 2: Reports indicate negotiators from the P5 +1 are going to meet to discuss Iran's nuclear program.
September 7-11: IAEA Board of Governors meeting; Vienna, Austria
September 15: Opening of UNGA, NYC
September 14-18: IAEA General Conference; Vienna, Austria
September 22: IAEA Board of Governors meeting; Vienna, Austria
September 23-26: General UNGA Debate
September 23: Obama addresses the GA (first Obama Presidential speech on his foreign policy)
September 24: Obama will chair a special session of the UNSC on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament.
September 24: UNGA - High-level meeting to commemorate the 60th anniversary of UNRWA
September 24-25: G20, Pittsburgh
September 28-30: General UNGA Debate

Via NRO, the AP reports:

A state lawmaker says Gov. Charlie Crist is picking his former chief of staff George LeMieux (leh-'MEW) to replace Republican Sen. Mel Martinez, who is resigning.

State Rep. Jennifer Carroll, who was considered for the position, said Crist told her he is choosing LeMieux. Crist planned to make the announcement later Friday.

By choosing LeMieux, Crist picked the candidate he trusts most to fill out the term that expires in January 2011. Crist is running for the seat in next year's election.

LeMieux ran Crist's 2006 campaign for governor. Crist then picked LeMieux as chief of staff. He left for a Tallahassee law firm in December 2007.

I don't really know what to make of this transparently self-serving move by Crist. He always appeared to be a much smarter politician than this. Good news for Marco Rubio.

Yukio Hatoyama, the man who would be sworn in as Japan's next prime minister should his Democratic party overcome the country's long-ruling Liberal Democratic party in elections this Sunday, penned an extremely provocative, borderline anti-American, and just plain creepy op-ed in the New York Times earlier this week. Perhaps the only mitigating factor is that, per the byline, the article was originally published, in a somewhat longer form, in the Japanese journal Voice. Otherwise, for a politician on the precipice of becoming the leader of a major world power and close American ally to so arrogantly criticize American policy and America's prospects in the pages of an American newspaper is inexplicable.

Hatoyama writes that we must recognize globalization as a failure and "return to the idea of fraternity":

The financial crisis has suggested to many that the era of U.S. unilateralism may come to an end. It has also raised doubts about the permanence of the dollar as the key global currency.

I also feel that as a result of the failure of the Iraq war and the financial crisis, the era of U.S.-led globalism is coming to an end and that we are moving toward an era of multipolarity. But at present no one country is ready to replace the United States as the dominant country. Nor is there a currency ready to replace the dollar as the world’s key currency. Although the influence of the U.S. is declining, it will remain the world’s leading military and economic power for the next two to three decades.

For Hatoyama to raise doubts about the dollar as a global currency -- as legitimate as those doubts may be -- in an American paper can only antagonize the Obama administration. It's diplomatically irresponsible and does not bode well for relations between a Hatoyama administration and Obama's. On the other hand, Hatoyama's blame America views will surely warm the hearts of many in the White House, and talking about a post-American world shows Hatoyama is at least on the same page as Obama.

Perhaps the most galling line, however, is Hatoyama's assertion that the Iraq war has been a failure. By what right does a Japanese politician presume to judge for American readers the success or failure of U.S. military operations? It's offensive. The American left doesn't even call the Iraq war a failure anymore, but even if they did -- a Japanese PM ought to focus his energies on apologizing for Japan's own history of military failure, not castigating other nations for imaginary defeats.

Hatoyama also says that "another national goal that emerges from the concept of fraternity is the creation of an East Asian community." To have a Japanese leader state that one of his country's national goals is the creation of an East Asian community, co-prosperity sphere, or any other type of union grates on my ear. We can be glad Obama sent one of his top donors over there as ambassador to keep an eye on things though.

The Huffington Post has major news -- with maps and everything -- on which parts of the country will be hardest hit by climate change just 100 years from now. Ryan Grim reports "Small Midwestern States To Be Hit Hardest By Climate Change" per a study from the Nature Conservancy (it's the ignorant, anti-science, climate deniers in flyover country who are in such grave danger, you see, and our noble, liberal, coastal elite is just trying to save these backwards gun-clingers from the hellfire that awaits). The headline and accompanying graphic from the front page at HuffPo:

Skeptic that I am, I decided to rerun the numbers. HuffPo may be significantly downplaying the danger:

Greg Sargent once again reacts to my critique of his argument without responding to its substance. And, after some throatclearing, accuses me of cherrypicking.

Sargent claims that I cherrypicked the IG report "in a comically dishonest way." His evidence? I quoted part of the IG report on Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, but, according to him, didn't include this sentence: "Because of the litany of techniques used by different interrogators over a relatively short period of time, it is difficult to identify why exactly al Nashiri became more willing to provide information."

Sargent calls this a "pretty clever omission." It was not omitted.

Apparently Sargent did not read my posts or the IG report very carefully. In my original post about his work I not only quoted the passage he accuses me of omitting, I quoted it twice. After quoting it the first time, I wrote:

Let's examine those last two sentences again. "Because of the litany of techniques used by different interrogators over a relatively short period of time, it is difficult to identify why exactly al Nashiri became more willing to provide information." The context makes the meaning clear: We cannot specify which EIT made al Nashiri more willing to provide more information. And in case there were any doubt, the final sentence is categorical. "Following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning and [redacted] as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of EITs."

I'll let his correction be the last word.

Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and Kirsten Powers on Ted Kennedy.

Obama approval rating hits new lows in Economist poll and Gallup poll.

Hopefully he won't be chairing the death panels: liberal congressman Pete Stark calls Blue Dog Democrats "brain dead."

Michelle Malkin: Fake hate crime in Denver: Dems stand by smear, vandal’s story gets weirder.

Allahpundit: Hospital bed shortage shuts 4,000 pregnant British women out of maternity wards.

James Piereson reviews Sam Tanenhaus's The Death of Conservatism.

Time's Michael Scherer did some good reporting this week on abortion coverage in the proposed health-care bills:

The Commander in Chief has, of late, become something of a fact checker in chief. In town halls, interviews and meetings with interest groups, President Barack Obama repeatedly harps on what he calls the "myths" and "fabrications" about health-care reform.

The list runs from "death panels," which have not been proposed by Congress, to illegal immigrants, who would not get coverage under the current proposals, even though 55% of Americans believe otherwise, according to a recent poll. The President also routinely mentions the issue of abortion. "You've heard that this is all going to mean government funding of abortion," Obama said recently in a call to religious leaders. "Not true."

But this last statement, while technically correct, does not tell the whole story. The health-care reform proposed by House Democrats, if enacted, would in fact mark a significant change in the Federal Government's role in the financing of abortions. "It would be a dramatic shift," says Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat who has vowed to oppose the bill because of how it would affect abortion. Stupak says dozens of House Democrats may join him in opposing a final health-care compromise unless the abortion language is changed, presenting a clear challenge to Democratic vote counters that could imperil a party-line vote. [...]

"We are going to do everything we can to stop the rule, or the bill, from coming to the floor," [Democratic Congressman Bart] Stupak says, adding that as many as 39 Democratic members of Congress may join him in the effort. It remains unclear how the Senate will deal with the abortion issue. There is also no consensus within the Democratic Party about whether a public option should be included in final health-care-reform legislation.

In the meantime, Stupak says that Obama's statements during recent public events signal one of two things: either he does not fully understand the current House bill, which Stupak maintains has the effect of publicly funding abortion, or "if he is aware of it, and he is making these statements, then he is misleading people."

FactCheck.org called out the president's misleading statements here, and you can see my take on the Capps Amendment here.

Obama has tried valiantly to keep discussion of cutting Medicare focused on the idea of cutting waste and waste alone, but the fact that the CBO (and Obama himself) concede that the bill on the table is not adequately funded in the first 10 years or beyond, has some folks worried.

Democratic Rep. Betsy Markey gave credence to seniors' worries with this comment at a Colorado town hall Wednesday:

"There's going to be some people who are going to have to give up some things, honestly, for all of this to work," Markey said at a Congress on Your Corner event at CSU. "But we have to do this because we're Americans."

While reminiscent of Joe Biden's famously politically astute "higher taxes are patriotic" line, I'm not sure how well this is going to go over with Obamacare skeptics, particularly of the senior variety.

It will make them wonder how much of the idea of cutting Medicare benefits is really a "myth," as the president says:

THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, another myth that we've been hearing about is this notion that somehow we're going to be cutting your Medicare benefits. We are not. AARP would not be endorsing a bill if it was undermining Medicare, okay? So I just want seniors to be clear about this, because if you look at the polling, it turns out seniors are the ones who are most worried about health care reform. And that's understandable, because they use a lot of care, they've got Medicare, and it's already hard for a lot of people even on Medicare because of the supplements and all the other costs out of pocket that they're still paying.

So I just want to assure we're not talking about cutting Medicare benefits. We are talking about making Medicare more efficient, eliminating the insurance subsidies, working with hospitals so that they are changing some of the reimbursement practices.

Can Obama really blame seniors for being suspicious about whether cutting waste in Medicare (which I'm in favor of) means cutting benefits? After all, Democrats have been dedicated to the demagoguery of just that equation whenever cutting costs has come up in the past.

It has put Obama in the strange position of saying, Well, all cuts to social programs were evil and harmful until I came along, but now they're to serve a greater good, so get on board, oldsters!

In another ironic Medicare twist, Obama's quest to cut Medicare waste may undercut another selling point of the left's beloved "public" government-run insurance option. Obama has argued repeatedly that Medicare's low administrative costs are proof of government's efficiency, but the level of the administrative costs is due to a combination of fuzzy government accounting and the very lack of oversight Obama claims to want to eliminate to save money. By employing more people to oversee Medicare to cut waste and fraud, Obama will eliminate the administrative savings he's been touting to sell yet another government health program.

Even the New York Times conceded as much in a 1997 story about the fraud and waste that has long plagued Medicare:

The Federal agency that oversees Medicare points to the program's tiny overhead as proof it is well administered. But recent reports suggest that Medicare's administrative costs are shockingly low, below 2 percent of costs, because Medicare is shockingly unsupervised. The amount of fraud and waste is huge, and supervision of the quality of medical care provided recipients is largely nonexistent.

Just keep squeezing that balloon. Welcome to government efficiency and truth in accounting. But if you give into your skeptic side, you're just succumbing to "myths" and "fear-mongering."

Update: Ed Morrissey says flag that Democratic congresswoman, stat!

Seven months of importuning Arab dictators and “monarchs” to toss something passing for a bone to Israel -- an overflight right or a couple of visas, maybe -- in exchange for “positive Israeli steps” such as freezing all settlement activity even where no Arab has ever lived or ever expects to live, has brought the shuttling George Mitchell and the rest of the impressive Obamic foreign policy line-up all the humiliation appeasement inevitably provides: the Arabic la may fall softer upon the ear than the Soviet nyet we got used to hearing back in the day, but it still translates as “drop dead, American fools! Israeli planes will fly over Arab states when the Palestinian flag -- and only the Palestinian flag -- is flying over Jerusalem. And by the way, you can forget about that ‘Jewish state’ stuff. ‘Israeli state’ maybe, if we decide it’s in our interest to countenance the idea.”

Palestinian “leader” Mahmoud Abbas echoed these sentiments -- again -- when he suggested “that there may be talks but not any negotiations, adding that he is ‘determined to establish an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital,’ without letting Israel exercise sovereignty over any land that was restored to the Jewish State in 1967.”

Meanwhile, the pressure on Israel continues apace, and so does the tragic ludicrousness of the never-ending "peace process." Four hours of discussions yesterday in London between Mitchell and Binyamin Netanyahu resulted in “‘progress’ towards a resumption of direct PA-Israeli negotiations,” whereupon Netanyahu flew off to Germany, and listened politely as Angela Merkel said, apparently without embarrassment: “We feel a ban on future settlements is an important building block to making the prelaunch of the peace process possible.”

Some great reporting from the Danger Room's Noah Shachtman. Marine snipers taking heavy fire and killing bad guys -- it's the best thing I've read all day. A sample:

They reached the intersection, and saw one man in the distance to their left. Luckily, he didn’t see them in the alleyway. Then, a second man, wearing brown tunic and a black hat, turned the corner. He was maybe five feet from the snipers. His eyes widened with surprise.

“I gave him half a second. He swung around his AK,” said Worth, who was carrying a Benelli 1014 shotgun. “Then I put four buckshot rounds in his chest.” Rue added a few more shots. The man crumpled to the ground.

A third man in a white robe was in the distance, about 150 feet to the north. He raised his AK-47 and fired at the snipers. Steinbacker dropped to one knee and shot the man with his M4. He dropped.

Almost immediately, a barrage of bullets came flying in directly at the snipers, from the cornfields in the west and from the trees to the east. Clearly, there were more than four militants on the area. Many, many more. And some of them could shoot.

Read the whole thing.

The reputable Small Wars Journal is, interestingly enough, one of the leading sources on the current plight in Zimbabwe. That expertise, originating in their aggressive study of the Rhodesian Bush War, has matured into pragmatic policy on statecraft and diplomacy -- evident in the following excerpt (emphasis mine).

Dealing with the Crisis in Zimbabwe:

Ultimately, only when the government of Zimbabwe transfers power from the ruling elite to the people, and effects democratic reforms in a true multi-party state, will Zimbabwe be accepted back into the international community and reap the economic benefits of integration. The [Southern Africa Development Community] must fully assume its role as a forum for regional stability and economic reform and abandon its deference to the old leaders of the liberation struggles of the 1970's, especially an autocratic kleptocrat like Robert Mugabe. The SADC must apply the necessary pressure to force Mugabe to abandon his position in the Zimbabwe government. Only with each member country improving its economy and pushing for the end of rule by the old revolutionary leaders, will the SADC become a viable organization capable of promoting regional development and become capable of reversing the disastrous situation facing Zimbabwe.

That's a bullseye -- and it's a 180 degree turnaround from Foggy Bottom's current, myopic southern Africa policy. Instead of pressuring the SADC to clean out Mugabe and his ilk, the Obama administration is putting its faith in the dictator's willingness to adhere to democratic process. Naturally, it's going terribly.

The small, landlocked nation is the lynchpin of the entire region. An economically viable Zimbabwe, with its railways restored to their former glory, would connect sub-Saharan Africa's two top earners -- Botswana and South Africa -- with two potential top earners (Zambia and Kenya). Mugabe, with policies that make North Korea look like a model for effective economic stewardship, stands in the way of the region realizing that potential prosperity. So does President Obama, in his refusals to take a hard line against Zimbabwe's thuggish leadership.

The FEC has ruled that the Club for Growth can contact Specter donors with a "preprinted form letter and envelope addressed to the Senator's campaign."

When Specter switched parties in April, he said, "Upon request, I will return campaign contributions contributed during this cycle," and the Club is looking to make sure donors are reminded of the promise.

Specter's already had at least one high-profile taker:

According to disclosure reports filed with the Federal Election Commission, ORRINPAC donated the maximum allowable amount under the law to Sen. Specter. Two $5,000 donations were made (one for the primary, one for the general election) on March 19, 2009.

In an interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell on Friday, Sen. Hatch made clear that he wants the Sen. Specter to return the contribution. "I would think he would send it back," said Hatch. "I think that he would. And I hope that he will," he added.

The Club for Growth—formerly headed by Pat Toomey, Specter's former opponent in the 2004 Republican primary and likely future opponent in the 2010 general—hopes its friendly reminder will spur other Pennsylvanians to collect what's coming to them.

Atlantic reporter Matthew Cooper, formerly of Time and Talking Points Memo:

It feels a bit like 9/11 on Martha's Vineyard. End-of-summer weather is achingly beautiful but the mood is melancholy because of Teddy.

Via Exurban League

Since Obama's own great-uncle is confused about what's in the health-care bill, maybe the president should put down Tom Friedman's book, and read through the health-care bill instead.

A few weeks ago, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs wouldn't say whether or not Obama will read the entire bill before he signs it.

McDonald’s doesn’t mess around. It’s not enough to be the biggest fast-food giant in the world. It’s got to keep fighting. Keep expanding. Keep moving, like a shark. Hence, McD’s introduction of specialty coffees (McCafé) giving Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts a run for their money. And now, the Angus burger.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, the rollout of the McDonald’s Angus burger is posing a serious challenge to Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr (both owned by CKE Restaurants, Inc.), which have touted large burgers for quite some time. There’s the Big Carl Burger and Hardee’s Monster Thickburger, which, as the Journal’s Julie Jargon notes, has 1,420 calories and 108 grams of fat. (She compares this with McDonald’s Bacon and Cheese Angus Burger, which has 790 calories and 39 grams of fat.) Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. will be pointing out that their equivalents of a Big Mac are cheaper and better. So much so that if you do end up preferring a Big Mac to, say, a Big Carl, you can mail-in your Big Carl receipt for a refund.

In other words, CKE chief executive Andrew Puzder is going to the mattresses. “One day next month, the company will park a Carl's Jr. mobile diner outside McDonald's restaurants in Los Angeles and offer to swap McDonald's customers' Big Macs for Big Carls,” reports Jargon, who quotes Puzder as saying, “After they so blatantly copied our burgers, we felt it was fair play.”

And then there’s this: “CKE also plans to communicate its message to consumers via Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.”

Meaning there are people who follow Hardee’s on Twitter.

While looking for an apartment in D.C. on craigslist, I stumbled upon one advertisement for an opening in a "progressive group house" in Adams Morgan. It's not a parody, but it is beyond parody. If you're "a woman of color who is vegetarian friendly" you just might be lucky enough to live with housemates whose "opinions about the issues of the day – as well as spirituality, religion, vegetarianism – are diverse, which leads to wonderfully thoughtful conversations" -- if they do say so themselves. If that didn't already have you sold:

We have a communal kitchen. This means that all food is available for anyone, unless it is marked for a special occasion (reserved food is rare). We share meals together every Sunday and sometimes during the week, but people have different schedules and there is no required meal time on weekdays or anything like that. There are consensus based house meetings, held twice a month, where we make sure that everyone is comfortable with the way that the house is going. Every voice matters in the house meetings.

Quoth a fellow member of the freedom-loving community in search of housing: "Sounds like hell." The full ad:

$930 Room in progressive group house (Adams Morgan) ...

THE ATMOSPHERE
The house is vibrant, with people coming and going throughout the day. We regularly host people who are in town for social justice-type activities

Our opinions about the issues of the day – as well as spirituality, religion, vegetarianism – are diverse, which leads to wonderfully thoughtful conversations about what is going on around us and what we can do about it. Everyone in the house is in one way or another working towards our visions for a more just world.

We have a communal kitchen. This means that all food is available for anyone, unless it is marked for a special occasion (reserved food is rare). We share meals together every Sunday and sometimes during the week, but people have different schedules and there is no required meal time on weekdays or anything like that. There are consensus based house meetings, held twice a month, where we make sure that everyone is comfortable with the way that the house is going. Every voice matters in the house meetings.

THE CURRENT HOUSEMATES
There are four males and one female currently living in the house. Two of the people in the house are people of color. There is one couple. We are two vegetarians, three omnivores. We rotate Sunday night cook nights where we make a vegetarian dinner for everyone in the house. We like hanging out with each other occasionally but also do our own thing. We come from all different backgrounds, both culturally and geographically, and are interesting in maintaining and expanding that diversity with the new roommate.

FUTURE HOUSEMATE
Preferred roommate is a woman of color who is vegetarian friendly (but meat eaters are OK; veg friendly just means respectful of vegetarians). However, people of all walks of life will be considered if they seem like a good fit. We are especially seeking someone who has experienced and understands the pitfalls of group house life, and has ideas for making it a great place for themselves and others. More than anything else we want clear healthy communicators - keeping each other in touch with what's going on in our lives and our heads, and general upkeep of the house. We'd like to keep it a clean house but sometimes succeed at that more than other times.

I imagine the more contentious consensus-based house meetings look something like this protest from February at NYU:

They seem kind of hostile to the president. First there was Uncle Charlie, who Obama claimed had liberated Auschwitz (he'd helped liberate Buchenwald). And when Charlie was asked, months later, about Obama's visit to Buchenwald, he took a rather cynical view of the president's motives:

SPIEGEL: Mr. Payne, early in June your great-nephew, President Barack Obama, will visit the former concentration camp Buchenwald, which you helped liberate at the end of the war. Will he be travelling in your footsteps?

Charles Payne: I don't buy that. I was quite surprised when the whole thing came up and Barack talked about my war experiences in Nazi Germany. We had never talked about that before. This is a trip that he chose, not because of me I'm sure, but for political reasons.

Obama's own uncle thinks he is a craven and calculating politician. Now Ben Smith posts the transcript of a Dana Bash interview with another Obama uncle, this one his great uncle Ralph Dunham, who was mingling freely with the right-wing mob at a town hall meeting in Northern Virginia this week:

DANA BASH, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Do you feel like you have a good grasp of what's in the plans for overhauling health care?

RALPH DUNHAM, PRESIDENT OBAMA'S GREAT-UNCLE: No, I don't, because the thing is over a 1,000 pages long, and the House and the Senate are going straighten out the two bills. And nobody knows what's going to be in it, I don't think.

BASH: Do you feel confused by it?

DUNHAM: I don't really know very much about it. I don't know whether to be confused or not. I'm hoping we get some information just like everyone else.

BROWN: Now, Dunham tells Dana his great nephew, the president, needs to do a better job of reassuring the public about all this.

The fact that Obama's own great uncle is unwilling to give the president the benefit of the doubt on his health care reform, and that he feels that the White House has done a lousy job of explaining what's in the bill (mostly because they spent the last month accusing anyone who questioned health care reform of being a Nazi), may help explain why support for health care reform has completely collapsed over the last month. Just 25 percent of the country supports the president's plans, and if you polled the president's own family, it's not obvious he'd do any better.

She was speaking at an open luncheon with limited seating (not a town hall), and was greeted by a small group of protesters. Her line on health care and cap and trade cannot be music to the administration's ears:

Landrieu, D-La., who spoke during a chamber luncheon today, also met with local doctors earlier and briefly addressed about 15 demonstrators opposing a public insurance option and Cap and Trade.

When asked after her speech if the senator would support a public option under any circumstances, she said, “Very few, if any. I’d prefer a private market-based approach to any health care reform that would extend coverage.”

“I’d like to cover everyone — that would be the moral thing to do — but it would be immoral to bankrupt the country while doing so,” Landrieu said.

That last sentence is where most of America stands these days, and a blue senator in a red state knows that full well.

"How many thousands of federal employees will have access to your (tax) records?"

"A federal court rejected an attempt by two Ohio residents to use the so-called TurboTax defense that Timothy Geithner relied on to help win Senate confirmation as U.S. Treasury Secretary."

New York's teachers' union looking out for passed-out drunk teachers.

Obama's first rendition.

"The evidence suggests that continental Europe--which generally adopted smaller stimulus programs--is recovering faster that the U.S. or the U.K."

Losing the WaPo: "Wanted: An Obama plan for fiscal sustainability."

Here is Greg Sargent pretending to respond to my post from Tuesday. It’s five paragraphs with almost zero substance. And that turns out to be an improvement on his previous commentary about the CIA and interrogations.

But we’re left without answers to basic questions. What about Sargent’s central claim, that the EITs did not work? How does he explain this finding about Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, the mastermind of the USS Cole attack: “Following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning and [redacted] as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of EITs.” Or the fact that KSM “provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard,” – reports that were largely “outdated, inaccurate or incomplete” – but later became “the most prolific” and “preeminent” source of intelligence on al Qaeda, revealing names and locations of al Qaeda leaders and details of coming plots?

Sargent has argued that these techniques, specifically designed to elicit information from uncooperative detainees, did not work. Does he believe that KSM, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and a man who dedicated his life to killing Americans, simply had a change of heart? If not, then what, exactly, transformed KSM from “an accomplished resister” to the “preeminent” source of information on al Qaeda? Sargent does not tell us. It’s a revealing omission.

In another post, Sargent had scolded Cheney for coming up with policies that put CIA interrogators in legal jeopardy. Sargent calls them “Bush/Cheney torture policies.” So I pointed out that the CIA Inspector General’s report make clear that senior CIA officials, not Dick Cheney, conceived and executed the controversial interrogation techniques. I quoted directly from the IG report. “The Agency was under pressure to do everything possible to prevent additional terrorist attacks. Senior Agency officials believe Abu Zubaydah was withholding information that could not be obtained through then-authorized interrogation techniques. Agency officials believed that a more robust approach was necessary to elicit threat information from Abu Zubaydah and possibly from other senior al Qaeda high value detainees.”

It’s a simple question: Why call the EITs “Bush/Cheney torture policies” when they were conceived and executed by senior CIA officals? Did Sargent fail to read the report or simply choose to ignore its findings?

Sargent later criticizes Cheney for defending the interrogators and suggests (without evidence) that he is doing so for political reasons. Here Sargent is just plain incoherent, arguing at one point that no one but TWS and Dick Cheney support EITs and elsewhere that Cheney’s defense of the interrogators will be politically advantageous.

Where Sargent isn’t confused, he’s dishonest. In one post, he leads his readers to believe that the interrogators would not welcome Cheney’s backing and did not support the policies. In Sargent’s view, they were victims who saw the use of EITs as he does. But this is a hard case to make for anyone who has read the report. At several different points in the report, the IG makes clear that senior Agency officials were enthusiastic about the program.

What’s more, they worried that they would be targeted by human rights groups – that is, people who make the kinds of arguments about EITs that Sargent does.

So how did Sargent deal with these basic facts? He chose not to report them. Here is his version:

During the course of this Review, a number of Agency officers expressed unsolicited concern about the possibility of recrimination or legal action resulting from their participation in the CTC program….One officer expressed concern that one day, Agency officers will wind up on some “wanted list” to appear before the World Court for war crimes…

And here is the actual text:

During the course of this Review, a number of Agency officers expressed unsolicited concern about the possibility of recrimination or legal action resulting from their participation in the CTC program. A number of officers expressed concern that a human rights group might pursue them for activities [redacted]. Additionally, they feared that the Agency would not stand behind them if this occurred.

One officer expressed concern that one day, Agency officers will wind up on some “wanted list” to appear before the World Court for war crimes. Another said, "Ten years from now we're going to be sorry we're doing this...[but] it has to be done."

So why leave out the fact that Agency officials were concerned about being targeted by human rights groups and why elide the views of the officer who said, without qualification, “it has to be done?”

Sargent doesn’t try to answer any of these substantive questions.

For months before the IG report was released on Monday the left touted it as the instrument that would finally shed light on the horrific and ineffective CIA interrogation program -- Sargent took to calling it the "holy grail" per Dem staffers who assured him it would "detail torture in unprecedented detail and to cast doubt on the claim that torture works." Instead, it did the opposite. Despite the fact that IG John Helgerson was known inside the CIA as a critic of the program, his report makes clear that abuses were rare and that the enhanced interrogation techniques were effective.

It's no wonder the left is compelled to distort its contents.

Despite the fantasy propagated by the left that missile defense does not work and that it creates instability by undermining deterrence, even countries critical of some aspects of the U.S. missile defense system, such as Russia, see the utility in deploying their own missile defense systems. As Reuters reports, “Russia has deployed a missile defence system near its border with North Korea and is studying other measures to protect its population from stray missiles.”

The Russian Far East is within striking distance of Pyongyang’s missiles, and given the North Korean missile program’s less than stellar record of success, Moscow’s concern about North Korean missiles raining down on Russian territory is understandable.

Despite Russian belligerence about U.S. plans to place a missile defense radar in the Czech Republic and ten interceptors in Poland, since the mid-90s, it has used a missile defense system to defend Moscow. Russian leaders understand that missile defenses are necessary, they just don’t like the extension of the U.S. system to its doorstep.

The Bush administration made repeated attempts to pursue U.S.-Russian cooperation on missile defense to counter the threat from Iran. But the Obama administration now seems to believe that it will have more success than President Bush did because relations have been “reset” with Moscow. This is the audacity of hope; Moscow has shown no indication it shares the U.S. concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

That said, perhaps cooperation in Asia, through a jointly manned radar and increased information sharing on North Korea’s missile program, offers a more rational start to a cooperative U.S.-Russian relationship on missile defense. This doesn’t mean giving up on the proposed European missile defense sites; rather, the administration should proceed with European missile defense but attempt to build confidence with Moscow by attempting to cooperate elsewhere, where there is more consensus regarding the threat.

This would require President Obama to rethink his proposed cuts to the missile defense budget and put some distance between himself and his cohorts on the left who continue to insist that missile defense is a colossal waste of money. The likelihood that the president will follow this path is admittedly small, but so are the odds that the administration’s chosen approach to Russia on missile defense will succeed.

SCOTUSblog reports that the Supreme Court will consider hearing two cases challenging Chicago’s handgun ban when it meets at its first Conference for the new term on Sept. 29.

At issue is whether the Second Amendment applies to state and local laws or only federal laws. After D.C.’s handgun ban was struck down by the Supreme Court, it seemed that Chicago’s days were numbered, yet since D.C. is under federal control, cities and appellate courts wiggled around the ruling by claiming the Second Amendment didn’t apply to states. From SCOTUSblog:

Both petitions challenge a Seventh Circuit Court ruling that the Amendment does not restrict gun control laws adopted by state, county or city government, but applies only to federal laws. The cases are National Rifle Association v. Chicago (08-1497) and McDonald v. Chicago (08-1521).

The so-called “incorporation” issue is the most significant sequel issue raised in the wake of the Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, recognizing for the first time a personal right to have a gun for self-defense, at least in one’s home.

Newly appointed justice Sotomayor sat on a similar case back in her circuit court days (Maloney v. Cuomo) and ruled that the Second Amendment did not, in fact, apply to states.

If accepted, the outcome of the cases will be significant, perhaps more so than Heller, for if the Court affirms the lower court’s ruling, it could render the Second Amendment impotent.

Hat tip to Reason, which has a good analysis of why the Seventh Circuit Court and Justice Sotomayor are wrong.

Maybe it was the fact the latest revelation that the deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East division, Joe Stork, had praised the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics that finally forced some introspection at the organization, but two members of the Human Rights Watch board have now broken ranks with their own organization to criticize the obvious bias in its handling of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Allison Hoffman buries the lede in her article for Tablet, but it doesn't matter -- she's got the goods:

At a time when Jews are anxious about how Israel will fare in negotiations with the Obama administration over a peace deal with the Palestinians, the Stork and Whitson affairs present an unfamiliar problem to HRW: how to reassure liberal Jews, including HRW’s founder and one of its current board members, worried that the organization is playing into the hands of anti-Israel activists from New York to Riyadh. Whether or not its staff actively seek out ways to target Israel, as Netanyahu’s office claims, by appearing to focus so many of its resources on Israel—five reports have been issued already since the Gaza War, three of them criticizing the IDF’s conduct, and another report about Israel’s “wanton destruction” is forthcoming—and by hiring people like Stork and Whitson, HRW, under executive director Ken Roth, leaves those doubts unanswered. “Ken feels their facts are right, and the critics are wrong, next case,” said Sid Sheinberg, the former Hollywood mogul and vice-chair of HRW’s board. “I don’t believe that’s the way the Israelis should be treated.”...

“They frequently say, ‘We’re trying to be evenhanded,’” said Robert Bernstein, the founder of Helsinki Watch and now a board member emeritus at HRW. “I don’t understand trying to be evenhanded, because to me Israel is interested and a believer in human rights and it stands out in the Middle East as practicing it in their country.” At its inception, he said, Helsinki Watch planned only to operate in closed societies—undemocratic, illiberal countries without freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and other basic rights. Operating in open, democratic societies like Israel is complicated because, as Bernstein noted, there are domestic organizations, like B’tselem in Israel, that do “a beautiful job” of holding their own governments accountable. “If you could cover every human rights act, it would be fine,” Bernstein said. “But you can’t, so you have to make choices about what you cover, and once you make choices, you’re political, whether you want to be or not.” The overall result of HRW’s current work, he added, “is to say we’re being evenhanded in a way that makes it come out that both sides are equal abusers of human rights—I don’t agree with that.”

Until Joe Stork and his boss, Sarah Leah Whitson, are fired from Human Rights Watch -- her for pandering to anti-Semitism in Saudi Arabia and him for being a flat-out terrorist sympathizer -- the organization will have no credibility to weigh in on the most important conflict in the Middle East. Supporters of Israel will dismiss its reporting out of hand, which should be cause for concern even among those who somehow believe it is the democratic government of Israel rather than the militant terrorist organization Hamas that represents the greater threat to human rights. Stork was caught praising the Munich Massacre and didn't even deny it in his response!

If HRW really cares about the civilians caught in the crossfire in Israel -- and it's not at all obvious that they do -- then they will drop these two and try to recapture some of the credibility that they so badly squandered. Then Stork and Whitson can move on to getting Freedom Medals from Obama, and all the other great career opportunities for anti-Semites in Washington.

Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball says the Inspector General’s report and other recently-released documents pertaining to Bush-era interrogations of top al Qaeda operatives do not show that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) “actually worked.” Hosenball concedes that the detainees gave up a treasure trove of valuable intelligence, but the documents do not “convincingly demonstrate” that the EITs “produced this useful information.”

This is likely to be the new conventional wisdom on the documents. It’s wrong, so let’s take it apart.

First, here are the four key paragraphs from the Inspector General’s Report that deal specifically with waterboarding – the harshest of the enhanced interrogation techniques – and its effect on intelligence production. They are reproduced below, with redactions noted, because you have to read them together to understand as much of the story as possible. The paragraphs can all be found on pages 90 and 91 of the Inspector General’s Report.

The waterboard has been used on three detainees: Abu Zubaydah, Al-Nashiri, and Khalid Shaykh Muhammad. [REDACTED]…with the belief that each of the three detainees possessed perishable information about imminent threats against the United States.

Prior to the use of EITs, Abu Zubaydah provided information for [REDACTED] intelligence reports. Interrogators applied the waterboard to Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times during August 2002. During the period between the end of the use of the waterboard and 30 April 2003, he provided information for approximately [REDACTED] additional reports. It is not possible to say definitively that the waterboard is the reason for Abu Zubaydah’s increased production, or if another factor, such as the length of detention, was the catalyst. Since the use of the waterboard, however, Abu Zubaydah has appeared to be cooperative, [REDACTED]

With respect to Al-Nashiri, [REDACTED] reported two waterboard sessions in November 2002, after which the psychologist/interrogators determined that Al-Nashiri was compliant. However, after being moved [REDACTED] Al-Nashiri was thought to be withholding information. Al-Nashiri subsequently received additional EITs, [REDACTED] but not the waterboard. The Agency then determined Al-Nashiri to be “compliant.” Because of the litany of techniques used by different interrogators over a relatively short period of time, it is difficult to identify exactly why Al-Nashiri became more willing to provide information. However, following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning and [REDACTED] as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of EITs.

On the other hand, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate, or incomplete. As a means of less active resistance, at the beginning of their interrogation, detainees routinely provide information that they know is already known. Khalid Shakyh Muhammad received 183 applications of the waterboard in March 2003 [REDACTED]

Admittedly, the redactions make it difficult to get the whole story. But here is what we can tell.

The IG says he couldn’t tell whether it was the waterboard or some other factor that led to the increase in intelligence production coming out of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogations. It seems highly unlikely on its face that Zubaydah’s time in custody alone (the only other possible explanation specifically offered by the IG) could have led to this increase in output. The waterboarding began in August 2002, and the increase in Zubaydah’s intelligence reporting that is cited ended in April of 2003. That’s a period of just nine months, which is hardly a prolonged period of time for a master terrorist such as a Zubaydah.

Moreover, even the IG concedes that since Zubaydah was waterboarded he “has appeared to be cooperative.”

Next came Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, the mastermind of the USS Cole bombing. Nashiri was waterboarded twice before the Agency determined he had become compliant. Nashiri was then apparently moved and stopped giving up intelligence, so the Agency employed a variety of EITs, but not the waterboard, in a short period of time. After the EITs were employed, Nashiri became compliant once again. Nashiri now “provided information about his most current operational planning…as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of EITs.”

So, the use of EITs on Nashiri led him to give up actionable intelligence on his operations. Previously, he was giving up “historical information,” which had presumably significantly less value.

Finally, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the principal planner of the September 11 attacks, was taken into custody and interrogated. Note that the final paragraph of the block quote reproduced above begins with “On the other hand…” The author appears to be drawing a comparison to the previous paragraph, which dealt with Nashiri’s interrogations. One possible reading is that while EITs other than waterboarding worked on Nashiri, they didn’t work on KSM, who was an “accomplished resistor.”

The IG found that before KSM was waterboarded he gave up only a few intelligence reports and “much” of that scant intelligence was bogus. However, we know from other declassified reports released on Monday that KSM became a font of intelligence on al Qaeda, giving up his fellow terrorists and specific plots. That’s why the CIA’s June 3, 2005, report calls KSM the Agency’s “preeminent source” on al Qaeda in the title.

What made KSM talk? Taken at face value, the IG’s report suggests that it was the waterboard, and the waterboard alone, that led to this gusher of intelligence. The un-redacted portions of the IG’s report do not mention any other possible reason for KSM’s change of heart when it came to dealing with his debriefers. And he wasn’t in custody very long before KSM started naming names – some of the terrorists he gave up were captured within a matter of weeks.

So, there you have it. Zubaydah gave up more intelligence after being waterboarded. The waterboard made Nashiri compliant. When Nashiri stopped cooperating, other EITs were used to make him talk. And talk he did, giving up the “operational” details of his plotting. And, finally, KSM gave up little of value prior to being waterboarded. Afterwards, he became the CIA’s most important source on al Qaeda.

Someone's making the "tough choices" Obama always talks about, but never makes:

Rhode Island will shut down its state government for 12 days and hopes to trim millions of dollars in funding for local governments under a plan Gov. Don Carcieri outlined Monday to balance a budget hammered by surging unemployment and plummeting tax revenue.

The shutdown will force 81 percent of the roughly 13,550-member state work force, excluding its college system, to stay home a dozen days without pay before the start of the new fiscal year in July.

There will be "inconveniences for the public, and there are going to be sacrifices," said Gov. don Carcieri, but you ever notice how most government shut-downs aren't nearly as apocalyptic as big-government advocates claim they'll be. Here's a telling sentence in the tale of a government shut-down:

Critical workers such as state police, prison guards and child abuse investigators still will report to work during the shutdown, Carcieri said. He ruled out raising taxes to balance the budget and said the state cannot lay off more workers since it deeply trimmed its work force last year.

Kind of makes you wonder why Rhode Island is employing fully 81 percent of its work force if it's "non-critical" by the governor's standards.

Liberals will be quick to say I'm oversimplifying, and people are hurting, and the state simply must have every single dog catcher and child psychologist on its payroll. But that's nonsense. You show me a state government that runs at perfect efficiency, and I'll agree to vote for Barack Obama in 2012.

The fact is there's always a group that will make a lot of noise to keep any given segment of government pumping out money. But the fact that "critical" workers of R.I. will be the only ones on the clock for 12 days is an admission that most of them aren't "necessary," in the strictest sense of the word. Normal American families understand this concept in their own lives, when they're eliminating some of the family cell phones, premium cable channels, or meals at Ruby Tuesday in favor of keeping water, electricity and shelter. Indeed, many families are having to make much more drastic decisions.

It is not unreasonable to think the government should sometimes show the same ability to prioritize. If good economic times are an excuse for government to spend more money, and bad economic times are an excuse to spend even more (to stimulate the suffering, of course) there is no limit in sight. It's "unsustainable," as our liberal friends might say. The latest $9 trillion projected budget deficits, which the White House's own budget director called unsustainable just five months ago, are just the latest illustration of what can happen when there are no restraints in good times or in bad.

Obama's public approval has, according to Pollster.com's Poll of Polls, for the first time slipped across that magical 50 percent line (see the graph below). It's not a good sign for the president, and it's not a good sign for Democrats looking at midterm elections last year. Presumably Dem numbers will rebound this fall from where they are now (Rasmussen has Republicans up 5 in the generic ballot and as noted below, Obamacare is at a pathetic 25 percent approval according to POS), but if they don't, this PPP poll out of Arkansas could be the shape of things to come:

The wind is blowing against Democrats nationally right now and Public Policy Polling’s newest survey finds that’s having a pretty significant impact on Blanche Lincoln’s prospects for reelection in Arkansas. Lincoln’s approval rating is now just 36%, with 44% of voters in the state disapproving of the job she’s doing.

When PPP surveyed the state in March it was a positive 45/40 spread for the second term Senator. 62% of Democrats, 27% of independents, and 14% of Republicans give her good marks. The Republicans eyeing a run against her are not very well known. Gilbert Baker is viewed favorably by 7% of voters in the state, Curtis Coleman by 6%, and Tom Cotton by just 4%.

That doesn’t stop them from polling within the margin of error against Lincoln though. Baker leads her 42-40, Coleman has a 41-40 advantage, and Cotton trails the incumbent 40-39. “You couldn’t get a clearer indication that the national momentum is with Republicans right now than a poll showing some guys with single digit name recognition running even with an incumbent Senator,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling.

The boss offered some warm words for Republican hopeful Tom Cotton on the Bill Bennett show last night, prompting this exchange with Arkansas blogger Jason Tolbert.

The feel-good story of the day:

The IDF published on Tuesday a video depicting an altercation that took place this week in the southern Lebanese village of Marwakhin between local residents and Hezbollah operatives.

Taken by a unit of the IDF's Field Intelligence Corps, the video shows a group of Hezbollah members arriving at the village and attempting, according to the army's estimates, to take over residents' houses and store weapons and rockets inside.

However, the village resident did not remain quiet, and tried to forcefully resist the attempt. At some point the Hezbollah men fired their guns in the air, and the locals did the same in response.

After hours of clashes Lebanese Army forces arrived at the village in a bid to prevent a violent clash from erupting. There were apparently no injuries in the altercation.

Two days later the members of the Shiite organization finally left the mostly Sunni village under Lebanese Army protection.

The only things missing were the torches and pitchforks. Video here.

It's no secret that Air Force Special Operations Command has been shopping around for a cheap, exportable close-air-support platform -- preferably a bird that can swiftly approach a fight, then slowly loiter above the fray for protracted periods of time. Everything I've heard on AFSOC's acquisition plan pointed to either the T-6 Texan (already used as a trainer) or the Brazilian made Super Tucano as the platform of choice. Now, it seems, there's a dark horse candidate moving up the ranks, one that purportedly out performs the legendary A-10 Warthog.

Of all the planes that might meet the Air Force’s requirement, the SM-27 Machete from Hawaii-based start-up Stavatti is seemingly the least viable. But appearances can be deceiving. If and when the Machete takes flight, it might surprise a lot of people — even besting the tried-and-true, tank-busting A-10 Thunderbolt II close air support jet in some performance specs

The Texan has a couple of key advantages over both the ST and the SM-27, not the least of which being domestic assembly lines and a long, stable relationship with the Air Force. Plus, the Machete's first prototype isn't scheduled to fly until next year, indicating an even longer procurement schedule. However, that doesn't mean it's out of the fight.

The $10-million Machete, by contrast, could be a real performer, “with a balance between weaponry, weight, and fuel consumption,” Peeler wrote. While today’s A-10 jet easily out-performs the T-6 in most ways, the Machete can actually beat the A-1o in all but one category. The A-10 carries three times as much weaponry, but the Machete is faster in some profiles, climbs better, travels farther and loiters longer. That allows the Machete to fly some traditional attack missions, in addition to counter-insurgency patrols, whereas the T-6 is mostly limited to counter-insurgency. Not to mention, the Machete with its pointy nose looks like a fighter, which might endear it more to the Air Force’s fast-jet crowd.

The Machete does have a wicked looking form, like a CAS platform that actually belongs in the 21st century. But second and third world allied nations -- and their limited defense budgets -- have to be taken into consideration when procuring any COIN-dedicated fighter. Though the Machete would no doubt be a real workhorse, I doubt we see the USAF buy anything that exceeds 5 million a pop.

Aside: if you think the SM-27 looks sweet, check out designs for the SM-47.

Elliott Abrams writes at National Review Online:

At the height of the Cold War, when Ronald Reagan was president, the Soviets and their allies and satellites did not shirk human-rights debates with the West. They had their arguments ready. When American officials denounced the lack of freedom of speech or press or religion, or the absence of free elections, they did not whimper. Their replies went something like this: “It’s important to look at human rights more broadly than it has been defined. Human rights are also the right to a good job and shelter over your head and a chance to send your kids to school and get health care when your wife is pregnant. It’s a much broader agenda. Too often it has gotten narrowed to our detriment.”

No one would be surprised to hear that such words were spoken by Mikhail Suslov, the long-time ideological chief of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, or by Khrushchev or Brezhnev, or by Castro or Ceaucescu, or by any other chieftain from the “socialist countries.” But that quote actually comes from Secretary of State Clinton, in an interview this month with the Wall Street Journal. It is an astonishing revival of the old Soviet line, now taken up by an American official.

Why is Mrs. Clinton repeating these old Soviet bromides? In all probability she has little idea what she is doing; she might even fire a few underlings if she found out whose old lines are being put in her mouth (one sure hopes so!). She is probably ignorant of the long effort the West undertook to undermine such positions. Back in the 1980s, when I served in the Reagan State Department, we spent a good deal of time countering such nonsense. For one thing, even taken on its own terms, the argument was ridiculous: The “socialist camp” did a wretched job of providing “social goods” such as jobs and housing and medical care. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the poor living conditions in the East became even more evident, and the Russian situation remains catastrophic to this day.

Continued here.

David Ignatius’s Washington Post column on the release of the Inspector General’s Report and other documents strikes some of the right notes, but his conclusion is far off the mark. Ignatius writes:

One of the most chilling documents released this week was one that Vice President Cheney had requested to show how well the interrogation program worked. It calculated that in 2004, 3,800 of the total 6,600 human intelligence reports on al-Qaeda came from "detainee reporting."

That kind of metric sends a message: It's a numbers game, fellas. No wonder the CIA is glad to be out of the interrogation business.

The document in question, "Detainee Reporting Pivotal for the War Against al Qaeda," is not the document Cheney requested. Instead, it is a later version (by two days) of the document Cheney asked to have declassified. But that’s not the main reason I think Ignatius’s conclusion needs to be revised.

He is right that the “Detainee Reporting Pivotal…” document says that, in 2004, 3,800 of the total 6,600 human intelligence reports (HUMINT) were generated from detainees. He is wrong that this means it was just a “numbers game.” The same report, which was authored in 2005, gives numerous reasons why those detainee-generated reports were incredibly valuable. In fact, intelligence from detainees played a role “in nearly every capture of al Qaeda members and associates since 2002.” The report’s authors concluded:

Since 11 September 2001, detainee reporting has become a crucial pillar of US counterterrorism efforts, aiding intelligence and law enforcement operations to capture additional terrorists, helping to thwart terrorist plots, and advancing our analysis of the al Qaeda target. In addition, detainees have been able to clarify and provide context for information collected from other sources; they also have provided unique insights into different aspects of the terrorist organization, including its leadership, attack strategy and tactics, and CBRN capabilities and ambitions.

And think about the “numbers” aspect of this again. The CIA says that fully 57.6% (3800/6600) of HUMINT reports came from detainees. That is staggering. It means that all of the CIA’s other HUMINT spy efforts accounted for significantly less intelligence, in terms of volume, than that gained from the detainees. We’ve known for a while that the CIA’s spying capability had dwindled in the years leading up to September 11. But here we see evidence of just how much it had been depleted.

Given that the CIA’s detainee interrogation program filled in many gaps in our knowledge of al Qaeda, you would expect that the CIA would want to continue conducting interrogations in some form. Not so.

As Ignatius reports, the CIA is glad the FBI –- Langley’s traditional bureaucratic rival –- is taking over the interrogation work. One anonymous senior CIA official told Ignatius that “the agency is glad to be out of it.” And a White House official told Ignatius that Stephen Kappes, the CIA’s deputy director, “doesn't want to have anything to do with interrogation.” Kappes “wants to let this go.”

It is reasonable to assume the CIA wants out of the interrogation game because of the controversy surrounding the use of enhanced interrogation techniques and other practices. It’s not that the interrogation program, as a whole, wasn’t effective or didn’t save lives. The documents released on Monday make it clear that the program worked. Regardless, the CIA wants no part of it. That’s because national security concerns have been trumped by all of the gnashing of teeth over how senior al Qaeda terrorists were treated.

Watch perfectly good cars get destroyed in Cash for Clunkers...for the environment, or something.

Obama should have known better on Obamacare. (From last week, but a goody.)

The babies of the NHS: Born in elevators, offices, bathrooms, thanks to bed shortages.

S.C. Lt. Gov Andre Bauer to ask Sanford to resign.

Rush vs. Jay-Z?

The totally authentic, grassroots organizing arm of the DNC planning 500 health care rallies between now and when Congress gets back.

Honest mistake: Rangel forgets to report more than $600K in assets.

After nearly eight years of war with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other Islamist extremist groups, some reporters still can't understand that these groups commit acts of violence with the goal of driving foreigners out of Muslim countries and that they feel free to kill anyone they deem to be infidels. Take this report from the Associated Press on a bombing in Kandahar that killed 41 people yesterday.

Afghan officials said the blast appeared to target a Japanese construction company that mostly employs Pakistani engineers. The blast collapsed the company headquarters and destroyed part of a nearby wedding hall, an Associated Press reporter at the scene said.

It wasn't clear why the construction company was targeted.

Sure it is clear: the company was Japanese owned, and the Taliban hopes the Japanese firm will leave after determining the price to pay to stay in Afghanistan is too steep. And if the AP is questioning why the Taliban would target a firm staffed by Pakistanis, the answer is that the Taliban will call them agents of the West. The Taliban and al Qaeda don't give one whit about killing Muslims to achieve their goals. In fact, the overwhelming majority killed in terror attacks are Muslims, not Westerners.

Via Geraghty, the numbers from the very credible polling firm Public Opinion Strategies:

Latest poll on how the public feels about health care, from Public Opinion Strategies, finds... well, more skepticism: 15 percent strongly favor Obama's proposed health care plan, 10 percent somewhat favor, 5 percent somewhat oppose, 32 percent strongly oppose, 37 percent no opinion yet. (That comes out to 25 total favor, 37 percent total oppose.)

The pollsters found that 38 percent said the more they hear about the plan, the more they like it; 49 percent said the more they hear, the less they like it. Ten percent said they didn't know.

I struggle with complex math, but that looks to me like Americans who have an opinion on health care oppose the president's plan by a 3 to 2 margin. Meanwhile, more than a third of Americans have no opinion, which I continue to believe is more a product of the Democrats' strategy than some failure on the part of the media or the people themselves. With the nation focused almost exclusively on health care over the last month, Democrats chose to use all the bandwidth they had to paint the opposition as Nazis. Perhaps if they'd used that time to explain the bill and address the concerns of opponents, these numbers wouldn't be quite so catastrophic.

Further evidence that America is moving in a conservative direction: Bob Dylan puts out a Christmas album.

The Guardian reports on a possible deal to restart peace talks between Israel and the Arabs:

Obama has pencilled in the announcement of his breakthrough for either a meeting of world leaders at the UN general assembly in New York in the week beginning 23 September or the G20 summit in Pittsburgh on 24-25 September.

The president, who plans to make his announcement flanked by Netanyahu and the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas – plus the leaders of as many Arab states as he can muster – hopes that a final peace agreement can be negotiated within two years, a timetable viewed as unrealistic by Middle East analysts.

Obama had hoped to unveil his plans before the start of Ramadan last weekend but failed to complete the deal with the Israelis or the Arab states in time.

Perhaps Obama has imposed a Yom Kippur deadline for some kind of movement in his diplomatic outreach to Iran? Bilateral negotiations with the North Koreans in time to mark the Juche New Year? Or are all of Obama's foreign policy initiatives pegged to the Islamic calendar? Meanwhile, the date on our calendar that has more recently been marked by commemorations in honor of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon will be approriated by the Obama administration as a national day of service.

From Amanda Terkel at Think Progress:

Colorado Democratic headquarters vandalized.

A “vandalism spree” hit the Colorado Democratic Party headquarters in Denver today, where the “vandal allegedly used a hammer to smash” 11 windows. Party Chairwoman Pat Waak attributed the violence to the intensity surrounding the health care debate, saying, “Clearly there’s been an effort on the other side to stir up hate. I think this is the consequence of it.” Waak estimated the damage at approximately $11,000. The Denver Police Department reportedly has a man in custody regarding the incident. ThinkProgress obtained some pictures of the damage:

It turns out that the vandalism was designed to "stir up hate" -- not against Democrats but Obamacare opponents. The Denver Post updates its article:

A 24-year-old arrested this morning on suspicion of smashing 11 windows at Colorado Democratic Party headquarters tried to conceal his identity while allegedly committing the crime, according to police descriptions.

Maurice Schwenkler wore a shirt over his face, a hooded sweat shirt and latex gloves before he and another man fled the scene on bicycles, police said. Schwenkler was apprehended after a short chase. The other suspect remains at large.

While Schwenkler does not appear in the state’s voter registration database, a person by that name in November 2008 received $500 from a political 527 committee called Colorado Citizens Coalition for “communications,” according to campaign finance disclosures.

The accountant for the 527 appears to be the same woman who handles the books for many other Democratic-leaning political committees.

A Maurice Schwenkler also signed an online 2005 petition to free anti-war Christian protesters who were captured in Iraq.

State Democratic Party Chairwoman Pat Waak initially blamed the vandalism on animosity surrounding the health care debate, though Denver police declined to comment on possible motives.

As noted earlier this month, there have been a surprising number of prominent self-inflicted "hate crimes" committed by those on the left and the right.

The Washington Post's Greg Sargent is worked up about the fact that "big news orgs" have not declared Dick Cheney a liar for claiming that EITs were effective. (For the record, many people still consider the Washington Post a big news org.) Sargent argues that "the docs themselves don't actually prove Cheney's claims" that the EITs were effective, he suggests that those who believe otherwise don't live in "the real world," and he calls the coverage "embarrassing."

So why the reluctance? Maybe it's because of the mainstream media's well-known pro-Cheney bias. We all remember the endless stream of flattering pieces about Cheney's ability to keep secrets, his willingness to listen quietly in meetings, and his eagerness to sacrifice his own personal popularity to defend unpopular policies that he believed kept the nation safe.

Or maybe it's because the documents -- including the much-ballyhooed Inspector General report -- actually do demonstrate that EITs were effective. Consider the IG report's section on Abd al Rahim al Nashiri.

With respect to al Nashiri [redacted] reported two waterboard sessions in November 2002, after which the psychologist/interrogations determined that al Nashiri was compliant. However, after being moved [redacted] al Nashiri was thought to be withholding information. Al Nashiri subsequently received additional EITs, [redacted] but not the waterboard. The Agency then determined al Nashiri to be “compliant.” Because of the litany of techniques used by different interrogators over a relatively short period of time, it is difficult to identify why exactly al Nashiri became more willing to provide information. However, following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning and [redacted] as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of EITs.

Let's examine those last two sentences again. "Because of the litany of techniques used by different interrogators over a relatively short period of time, it is difficult to identify why exactly al Nashiri became more willing to provide information." The context makes the meaning clear: We cannot specify which EIT made al Nashiri more willing to provide more information. And in case there were any doubt, the final sentence is categorical. "Following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning and [redacted] as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of EITs."

Similarly, on page 91, the IG report notes that Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, "an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete." But four pages earlier, we learn from the IG about the valuable information that KSM did give up. KSM

provided information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists including Sayfullah Paracha and his son Uzair Paracha, businessmen who Khalid Shaykh Muhammad planned to use to smuggle explosives into the United States; Saleh Almari, a sleeper operative in New York; and Majid Khan, an operative who could enter the United States easily and was tasked to research attacks [redacted]. Khalid Shaykh Muhammad’s information also led to the investigation and prosecution of Iyman Faris, the truck driver arrested in early 2003 in Ohio.

So, we know that before KSM was waterboarded, he gave up virtually nothing and what little intelligence he did provide was mostly "outdated, inaccurate or incomplete." And we also know that some of KSM's interrogations provided detailed, valuable information that led to the detention of sleeper agents in the United States plotting attacks. Despite this, Sargent wants to believe -- and wants big news orgs to report -- that this second batch of intelligence reports from KSM -- the highly-valuable ones -- came from the pre-waterboarding interrogations.

In another post, Sargent chastises Cheney for defending the interrogators and "claiming to speak for them and positioning himself as their brave and lonely defender." Sargent notes that some interrogators were worried that their participation in the program put them in legal jeopardy and cites a passage on page 94 of the IG report. Here is how Sargent reported it:

During the course of this Review, a number of Agency officers expressed unsolicited concern about the possibility of recrimination or legal action resulting from their participation in the CTC program….One officer expressed concern that one day, Agency officers will wind up on some “wanted list” to appear before the World Court for war crimes…

He concludes: "That Cheney is now claiming to speak for, and defend, the same class of officers who worried his policies were putting them at risk is only the latest sign of how absurd Cheney’s stance has been throughout."

Why the ellipses? What did Sargent cut out? Here is the passage in full:

During the course of this Review, a number of Agency officers expressed unsolicited concern about the possibility of recrimination or legal action resulting from their participation in the CTC program. A number of officers expressed concern that a human rights group might pursue them for activities [redacted]. Additionally, they feared that the Agency would not stand behind them if this occured.

One officer expressed concern that one day, Agency officers will wind up on some “wanted list” to appear before the World Court for war crimes. Another said, "Ten years from now we're going to be sorry we're doing this...[but] it has to be done."

So Sargent cut out two important passages to make his point. The first had to do with concerns among interrogators that they would not be supported if they were later targeted for their work -- exactly the kind of support Sargent scolds Cheney for providing. And second, in his effort to portray CIA officers as victims, Sargent deliberately omits the view of the Agency officer who told the IG, "it has to be done."

And whose policies were these? Sargent calls them the "Bush/Cheney torture policies." Did he read the IG report? The EITs were conceived and developed by senior intelligence officers who wanted to find additional ways to extract information from terrorists. From page 3: "The Agency was under pressure to do everything possible to prevent additional terrorist attacks. Senior Agency officials believe Abu Zubaydah was withholding information that could not be obtained through then-authorized interrogation techniques. Agency officials believed that a more robust approach was necessary to elicit threat information from Abu Zubaydah and possibly from other senior al Qaeda high value detainees." [Emphasis added]

So set aside the so-called Cheney memos. Any honest analysis of the IG report alone shows that these three high-value detainees were largely uncooperative before the use of the enhanced interrogation techniques and produced critical information after the use of the enhanced interrogation techniques.

Late yesterday afternoon, the CIA public affairs office sent reporters an email with two documents attached. CIA spokesman George Little wrote: "For your information, the attached files are part of today’s document release on the CIA interrogation program. Former Vice President Cheney asked that these documents be released earlier this year.”

Those documents offer detailed evidence of the effectiveness of detainee interrogation, including the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. So most news accounts have concluded that these are, in fact, the so-called Cheney documents. But that's only half right.

One document, entitled "Khalid Shaykh Muhammad: Preeminent Source on al Qaida," is the precise document Cheney requested. The other, entitled, "Detainee Reporting Pivotal for the War Against al Qaeda," is not. The document declassified and released by the CIA is dated June 3, 2003. The version of the document requested by Cheney was dated June 1, 2003.

Are there substantive differences, too? One intelligence source with knowledge of the memos says that the second report, the June 3 document releasing by the CIA, does not include the same level of detail as the June 1 document, the one requested by Cheney. So what aren't we seeing? It's hard to say. The explanation could be simple and innocent. Perhaps someone just conveyed the wrong request and the differences between the two versions of the "pivotal" report are not significant. But given that the purpose of the document is to describe the effectiveness of the interrogations, it's also possible that information supporting Cheney's position -- and contradicting that of the Obama administration -- was not released to the public.

So will the most transparent administration in history release the June 1 version that Cheney requested?

Adding to the intrigue is the timing of the release. On May 7, the CIA's Delores Nelson wrote to Cheney to deny his initial request to have the two documents declassified. Cheney appealed on June 8. On July 30, the CIA once again denied Cheney's request for declassification. The letter, also from Delores Nelson, reads, in relevant part:

"The Agency Release Panel (ARP) considered your appeals and determined that the material denied in its entirety must continue to be protected from release on the basis of section 3.5A3 of the order as the information information remains the subject of pending litigation. Therefore, in accordance with Agency regulations, the ARP denied your appeals in full."

Cheney received the CIA's denial letter from his Washington office yesterday -- the same day the so-called Cheney memos were released.

So in the period of three weeks, the CIA denied Cheney's request for declassification of the material and the Obama administration, with the approval of the CIA, declassified one of the Cheney memos and a less-detailed version of the other.

What's the deal? I have contacted George Little at the CIA for a comment, but have not yet received a response. TWS also contacted Susan Cooper, director of public affairs at the National Archives, the institution that conveyed Cheney's declassification request to the CIA. Cooper has not yet responded either. We will post responses when we get them.

The irony, of course, is that while the Cheney documents demonstrate the effectiveness of EITs, they were not necessary to make that point. The CIA's IG report, written by John Helgerson, who was plainly opposed to the use of EITs and considered them "torture," made that case, too.

Just kidding. You saw all that over the very loud yelling and impolitic signage at health care town halls, but when it comes to angry left-wing activists being arrested with Molotov cocktails outside the Republican National Convention, there's surprisingly little national interest.

This story begins at the RNC, where two Austin, Texas liberal activists were arrested for possession of unregistered firearms (Molotov cocktails). They were sentenced in May of 2009. Here's a look at the plan for political violence you likely never heard about:

A 23-year-old man from Austin, Texas, who was connected to a group that planned to disrupt the Republican National Convention (RNC) in September 2008, was sentenced today in federal court to possessing destructive devices. On May 14, in Minneapolis, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Michael Davis sentenced Bradley Neal Crowder to 24 months in prison and three years of supervised release on one count of possession of a destructive device. Crowder was indicted on Sept. 22, 2008,
and pleaded guilty on Jan. 8, 2009...

On Aug. 28, 2008, Crowder and other members of the Austin Affinity Group traveled from Austin, Texas, to Minnesota. The group brought a rental trailer with them that contained 35 riot shields, made from stolen traffic barrels. The intended use of the shields was to help demonstrators block streets near
the Xcel Energy Center in order to prevent convention delegates from safely reaching the convention. St. Paul Police seized these shields on Aug. 31.

According to trial testimony, McKay and Crowder, angered by the loss of the shields, purchased supplies for constructing Molotov cocktails at a St. Paul Wal-Mart on Aug. 31, including a gas can, motor oil and tampons. They also purchased gasoline at a gas station. They then manufactured the eight Molotov cocktails at an apartment on Dayton Avenue where they were staying.

During a FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation, authorities learned through an informant that McKay and Crowder had manufactured the Molotov cocktails. Crowder was arrested on Sept. 1 for disorderly conduct during an RNC demonstration.

During a conversation overheard by law enforcement through electronic surveillance on Sept. 2, McKay told an informant that he intended to throw the Molotov cocktails at police vehicles parked in a lot near the Dayton Avenue apartment. The parking lot was used as a checkpoint area for vehicles entering the security perimeter around the convention site. It was visibly patrolled by the U.S. Secret Service, various police agencies and the military.

This week, another member of the left-wing Austin activist group is facing charges for threatening the activist-turned-informant who told officials about Crowder's and McKay's plans for violence. Because there must be a price for workin' for The Man, I guess:

A Texas woman faces trial this month in Austin on charges she threatened to kill a government informant who infiltrated an Austin-based group that planned to bomb the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., last fall.

Katyanne Marie Kibby, 25, was indicted in June by a federal grand jury in Austin. She is accused of retaliating against Brandon Darby, the community activist-turned-informant who helped federal prosecutors win convictions against Bradley Neal Crowder, 24, and David Guy McKay, 23.

Prosecutors say the e-mail threat was made Jan. 10.

I look forward to an in-depth MSNBC report on this violent threat to the Republic right after they're done producing dishonest exposes on how Obama critics carrying legally registered firearms are fomenting a race war.

Just so we're clear: two left-wingers planned to bomb police cars outside the RNC, and their allies rallied behind them by threatening informants with violence, and we hear nary a word about it. Where is the widespread condemnation and discouragement of such violence in the name of anti-war, Bush-hating beliefs by our friends on the left? Where is the requisite orgy of self-examination and brow-furrowing about the future of a country populated by such people?

I am not one who thinks right-wing protesters are faultless and left-wing protesters are all violent and dangerous (though I do think the preponderance of nastiness and actual violent activism has occurred on the left lately, and their criticism of health care protesters is more than disingenuous). But is it so much to ask for a modicum of balance in the reporting of some of the unsavory elements of American political life? As it is, a handful of Nazi images on town hall posters (mostly held by single-payer advocating LaRouche activists and attributed to Republicans) warrant national soul-searching while Crowder and McKay warrant nada.

In other leftists-blowing-up-stuff news, Gateway Pundit points us to a Democratic strategist in Missouri who's being investigated in connection with a bombing in St. Louis that severely injured a 70-year-old attorney:

A federal search warrant obtained by the Post-Dispatch connects a former Democratic campaign strategist to a Clayton bombing last year that seriously injured an attorney.

About two months after the October bombing, federal law enforcement officials searched the downtown loft of Milton H. "Skip" Ohlsen III, seeking "evidence related to the planning, execution, and/or cover-up of the bombing in Clayton, Missouri, on October 16, 2008." Ohlsen in recent weeks has been at the center of a swirling political scandal that is threatening the political careers of at least two Missouri Democratic legislators.

The Clayton bombing injured attorney John L. Gillis of the Armstrong Teasdale firm. But investigators now believe Gillis was not the intended target of the bomb that exploded next to his car in the parking garage at 190 Carondelet Plaza.

Instead, as the Post-Dispatch first reported Monday evening on STLtoday.com, authorities suspect the bomb was intended for Richard J. Eisen, a former Husch Blackwell Sanders attorney. Eisen has led legal battles against Ohlsen and had an office in the Clayton building that was bombed...

Just a few things to keep in mind when you next hear about how right-wing town hall protesters are sure to bring about the ruin of this once-great country. Crowder and Ohlsen will have professorships long before that ever happens.

Yesterday, the Times of London had a troubling article titled, "Heart patients missing out on life-saving care after surgery." Today, the Financial Times has a piece on the troubles of getting the NHS's national online database of medical records up and running.

As Fraser Nelson and Irwin M. Stelzer wrote in the July 27 issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, "No NHS, Please, We're American."

Finally, after weeks of speculation about whether Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud is dead or alive, the Pakistani Taliban has confirmed he was indeed killed. Two Taliban leaders named Hakeemullah Mehsud and Waliur Rehman Mehsud phoned the AP and other news services to state Baitullah died from wounds suffered in the Predator attack.

Hakeemullah and Waliur phoned the press from the same room, and both also confirmed that Hakeemullah was the new leader of the Pakistani Taliban. This put a dent in authoritative reports from the Pakistani government, which insisted the Taliban were openly battling each other and that the two commanders killed each other in a shootout at a meeting to choose Baitullah's successor. Now that the dead have spoken and professed mutual admiration for each other, the Pakistani government is taking a page straight from the X-files and is claiming Hakeemullah's twin brother is pretending to be the new leader.

Baitullah's death is a victory for the Pakistani government as well as the U.S. Predator campaign, which has been much maligned as being incapable of effectively killing senior Taliban and al Qaeda leaders. Baitullah is about as big as it gets, and his death will be held up as a reason to keep the program in operation.

Don't expect much to change from the Pakistani Taliban under Hakeemullah. He has maintained that he will continue to conduct attacks inside Pakistan as well as in Afghanistan. He's an effective military commander but it remains to be seen if he can keep the patchwork Taliban groups throughout Pakistan's northwest united. Given that Hakeemullah's chief rival openly endorsed his leadership, it shouldn't be a problem in the short term. And al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban have a vested interest in seeing the Pakistani Taliban remain united.

The real thing to watch over the short term is the Pakistani government and military's reaction. They've signaled they have no intention of meaningfully going into South Waziristan to take on the Taliban head on until sometime next year. If the Taliban was in such disarray, the military should have taken advantage of the confusion in the Taliban ranks and moved in for the kill. That the military never did so indicates the Taliban wasn't as divided as we've been told.

Glenn Thrush quotes freshman Rep. Parker Griffith (D-Ala.):

Freshman Rep. Parker Griffith (D-Ala.) — who has bucked Dem leadership on the stimulus and climate change — told a town hall back in north Alabama that he doesn't plan to back Nancy Pelosi as speaker again, saying she's too divisive.

"I would not vote for her. Someone that divisive and that polarizing cannot bring us together," he said, according to the Huntsville (Ala.) Times.

"If she doesn't like it, I've got a gift certificate to the mental health center," he added.

Via Ben Smith, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) calls it like he sees it:

"Nobody is going to bring a bill before Christmas, and maybe not even then, if this ever happens," Feingold said. "The divisions are so deep. I never seen anything like that."

From Ha’aretz, the top foreign policy Democrat in the House of Representatives acknowledges what, privately, many inside the administration are themselves increasingly admitting: namely, their approach to the peace process over the past several months has been a train wreck:

The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee said last week that the Obama administration is making a mistake in demanding Israel completely freeze construction in the settlements. Congressman Howard Berman, a Democrat from California, made these comments during a closed meeting with Jewish leaders in Los Angeles.

Berman said Israel and the U.S. are close to reaching an agreement that will "be face-saving for everyone." ...

However, Berman was highly critical of the conduct of the Obama administration, saying the demand for absolute cessation of construction in the settlements was "mistaken."

Berman blamed the stance of the administration on the settlements for having hardened the Palestinian position unjustifiably. "Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is waiting for the U.S. to present him Israel on a platter," Berman told the Jewish leaders. The Congressional leader said that this was a mistake, adding that the PA has responsibilities too, such as countering incitement against Israel.

"Dead silence about human rights, smiles at dictators. That's the norm."
-- An interview with Elliott Abrams.

So shady:

Hassan Nemazee, chairman of Nemazee Capital Corp. and a fundraiser for President Obama and Hillary Clinton, was arrested on charges that he tricked Citigroup Inc. into lending him as much as $74 million using phony documents.

Ben Smith adds:

Nemazee was central to a large portion of the Democratic money operation. The Nation reported, in a little-noticed examination of his business, that he quietly hired Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe at one of his companies.

House Republicans circulate this statement from freshman Rep. John Adler, (D-N.J):

"The bill that's coming through the House, with or without the public option, isn't good for America," Adler said matter-of-factly. "We have Congressional Budget Office projections of a trillion-dollar increase in costs that will have to be borne by taxpayers or insurance purchasers; meaning businesses and households. Either way, that's a cost we can't afford."

Naturally, Republican objections to the current health care reform effort spring from cynical partisanship and the desire to deny the president a political victory, but how do Democrats explain statements like this from one of their own? Is Adler a brown-shirted, right-wing extremist? Was Adler placating a mob of angry constituents? Was he under duress, afraid that some some gun-toting, astroturfed protester would do some unspeakable violence to him if he said otherwise? No, he was at a roundtable discussion.

Yesterday, the Obama administration’s Special Task Force on Interrogations and Transfer Policies announced that future interrogations would be conducted in accordance with the Army Field Manual, and only the Army Field Manual. From the Task Force (emphasis added):

“After extensively consulting with representatives of the Armed Forces, the relevant agencies in the Intelligence Community, and some of the nation’s most experienced and skilled interrogators, the Task Force concluded that the Army Field Manual provides appropriate guidance on interrogation for military interrogators and that no additional or different guidance was necessary for other agencies. These conclusions rested on the Task Force’s unanimous assessment, including that of the Intelligence Community, that the practices and techniques identified by the Army Field Manual or currently used by law enforcement provide adequate and effective means of conducting interrogations.”

Question: Did the task force determine that the techniques specified in the Army Field Manual were sufficient for the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? Here is the Inspector General’s Report, also released yesterday, on KSM’s interrogations:

“On the other hand, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate, or incomplete. As a means of less active resistance, at the beginning of their interrogation, detainees routinely provide information that they know is already known.”

The task force says that the Intelligence Community was “unanimous” in the value of the techniques in the Army Field Manual. But, how can that be? The CIA determined previously that it did not think such techniques were sufficient, otherwise it would not have requested to use techniques such as those on the list of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs).

Does the CIA now think that it could have gotten all of the valuable intel out of KSM, as documented in the OIG’s report and the two other reports released yesterday, using the Army Field Manual? That’s hard to believe.

Glenn Beck blows this thing wide open:

Update: A former Bush White House official tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD, "this guy couldn't even have gotten a tour at the Bush White House with that arrest record."

Ben Smith gets some great quotes from Rep. Peter King:

"furious" Rep. Peter King, the hawkish, maverick Long Island Republican, blasted a "disgraceful" Eric Holder for opening an investigation of CIA interrogators and chided his own party for what he described as a weak response to the move in an interview just now with POLITICO.

"It’s bulls***. It’s disgraceful. You wonder which side they’re on," he said of the Attorney General's move, which he described as a "declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense."

"It’s a total breach of faith, and either the president is intentionally caving to the left wing of his party or he’s lost control of his administration," said King, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Homeland Security and a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence....

"You're talking about threatening to kill a guy, threatening to attack his family, threatening to use an electric drill on him – but never doing it," King said. "You have that on the one hand – and on the other you have the [interrogator's] attempt to prevent thousands of Americans from being killed."

"When Holder was talking about being 'shocked' [before the report's release], I thought they were going to have cutting guys' fingers off or something – or that they actually used the power drill," he said.

Exactly. And it's difficult to believe that the vast majority of Americans will respond any differently. We're talking about the worst of the worst -- terrorists who hoped and plotted to murder thousands of Americans. So they got a little roughed up, they were subjected to various threats that no one had any intention of carrying out. Boo hoo. If Eric Holder can find 12 Americans who would vote to convict an American citizen for threatening the life of Khalid Sheihk Mohammed, I'll be a monkey's uncle.

After all, his entire approach to foreign policy is premised on his ability to negotiate directly with -- and extract concessions from -- the heads of terrorist regimes. Maybe direct, presidential diplomacy can be used to extract confessions, too. The Obama administration has already stripped the interrogation of high value detainees from the CIA's portfolio and moved to create a new team of interrogators that will answer directly to NSC officials at the White House. (Weren't Democrats outraged to discover that interrogation policy was being made in the White House during the Bush administration?)

This new task force will apparently be constrained by both the Army Field Manual, which prevents the military from extracting much more than "name, rank, and serial number" from prisoners, and the Miranda-first interrogation limits practiced by the FBI. The FBI will take the lead here -- and will answer directly to the White House -- but the FBI has consistently opposed the coercive interrogation techniques that produced so much intelligence from the few high value detainees that were subjected to them. They opposed these methods because the FBI is charged with collecting evidence of crimes through methods suitable for use in American courts. The FBI is not an agency whose culture or mission is directed at collecting intelligence about future terrorist plots, much less taking all measures necessary and appropriate to fighting a war.

This isn't going to work, and the outcome is entirely predictable: more renditions, or as the Obama administration likes to call them, "prisoner transfers." The rendition program will be expanded and an increasing number of detainees will be shipped to countries like Egypt and Jordan -- of course the president will be given the utmost assurances that no one will be tortured -- where unreliable, third-world intelligence services will try and get the answers necessary to save American lives.

I think Obama should personally interrogate these guys instead. Think about the rapport he would have, what with his ability to quote the "Holy Koran," his smattering of Arabic and Indonesian, his fond memories of summers in Pakistan. Really, who better to do this job than the president himself?

So it’s to be more Bernanke -- assuming the Senate goes along, as it almost certainly will. That’s one thing economists got right -- the consensus was that he had a 70+ percent chance of being reappointed. What does it all mean?

For one thing, Larry Summers stays at the White House. Not a bad thing for policy-making. Summers is a formidable intellect, and the president will need all the advice he can get now that the administration has conceded that the budget is out of control, and the deficit is rising and will continue to do so for as far ahead as the eye can see.

More important, the markets will avoid the turmoil that inevitably would have followed a change in the leadership of the Fed. That turmoil would have come in part because any other Obama appointee would be seen as a presidential lap dog, and in part because the devil we know...

The real question is what the Bernanke reappointment means for policy. The chairman deserves praise for the variety of measures he concocted to fight the current recession, and for his courage in ignoring critics from the right (too much use of the printing press) and left (too sympathetic to big banks). Bernanke’s fame as a student of depression-fighting is well deserved.

And perhaps irrelevant. Because in his new term the chairman will have to decide when to convert from depression-avoider, recession-fighter, to inflation-fighter. True, prices are now tame, and the excess capacity in the economy should hold them down for a while. But sooner or later Bernanke will have to decide to pull out some of the cash he has pumped into the economy. Deciding when to do that won’t be easy, especially for a chairman obsessed with the error the Fed made in the 1930s, when it aborted a recovery by tightening too much, too soon. And the chore will be made even more difficult by pressure from the White House to avoid tightening in advance of the president’s re-election bid in 2012. It would be wonderful if the conversation between Bernanke and Summers could be YouTubed or Tweeted or whatever the then-fashionable means of communication turns out to be -- the White House chief economist, confident in his ability to help manage an economy with a debt; GDP ratio at historic highs, the Fed Chairman staring at a possible takeoff of inflation.

All in all, the reappointment is good news: it avoids upset; it leaves in charge a man who has been bloodied in the recent recession, and is a scholar of past cycles; and it avoids what might have been some horrible alternative dreamed up by Rahm Emanuel and the Chicago mafia.

Rasmussen takes a look at the ever-diminishing support for closing Gitmo:

Seventy-five percent (75%) of U.S. voters are at least somewhat concerned that dangerous terrorists will be set free if the Guantanamo prison camp is closed and some prisoners are transferred to other countries. Fifty-six percent (56%) are very concerned.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 24% are not concerned about the potential danger.
Support for the president’ s plan to close the prison camp for suspected terrorists at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba continues to erode. It’s been steadily dropping since Obama announced the camp closure just after taking office in January. Only 32% of voters now favor closing the prison camp, down six points from May and down 12 points since the President announced his decision in January.

Fifty-five percent (55%) now oppose closing the prison, with 13% not sure. In January, just after the president announced his decision, just 42% were opposed.

The Obama administration has shifted the conversation from health care, which had suddenly become shaky ground for Democrats, to the treatment of detainees, which is even shakier ground. Per Rasmussen, "Forty-one percent (41%) of voters now rate the president’s handling of national security matters as good or excellent, the lowest finding in this area since he took office." It seems unlikely that the administration's decision to start investigating and prosecuting members of the intelligence community while simultaneously releasing known terrorists from Gitmo will help stabilize those numbers.

I'm pretty sure Obama "consistently said" the deficit might be $2 trillion more than his administration originally estimated, right?

The White House now expects the 10-year budget deficit to reach $9.05 trillion, roughly $2 trillion more than it estimated earlier in the year, according to a report released Tuesday by the Office of Management and Budget.

Budget office director Peter Orszag pointed to a number of measures put in place to stem the pain of the economic downturn.

The increase in the estimate comes, according to Orszag, as a result of, "a deeper-than-expected recession, certain spending programs (such as unemployment insurance and food stamps) are projected to automatically increase and revenues are projected to automatically decline, compared to our previous projection."

Well, keep in mind the recession, which is now "deeper than expected," would have been much, much worse if not for Obama. There's a selling point.

As an addendum to that bit of marketing genius, the Obama administration can now add Paul Krugman's argument that, "Hey, $9 trillion ain't really that bad," which is based on the idea that the deeper-than-expected recession, which would have been deeper if not for Obama, will still produce plenty of growth to handle the deficit:

There’s been some hysteria about the administration’s new estimate that the cumulative deficit will be $9 trillion over the next decade. Don’t get me wrong: this is bad. But it’s being treated as an inconceivable sum, far beyond anything that could possibly be handled. And it isn’t.

What you have to bear in mind is that the economy — and hence the federal tax base — is enormous, too. Right now GDP is around $14 trillion. If economic growth averages 2.5% a year, which has been the norm, and inflation is 2% a year, which is the target (and which the bond market seems to believe), GDP will be around $22 trillion a decade from now. So we’re talking about adding debt that’s equal to around 40% of GDP.

Christina Romer forecasts that growth will return to normal between 2011 and 2016, despite revising GDP numbers downward this year and unemployment numbers up for this year and next.

Most importantly, we advised downward our estimates of GDP growth in both 2009 and 2010. Our year-over-year numbers are now -2.8 percent for 2009 and +2.0 percent in 2010. These, as Peter suggested, are very consistent with the consensus forecast.

This downward revision reflects new information that we -- and all forecasters -- received earlier this year about the severity of the crisis in the United States and in our trading partners...

I should also say that we do still expect positive GDP growth by the end of this year -- that is, we expect that the turning point, the economy on a better trajectory, but of course, full recovery and a return to employment growth will take longer.

We do predict a period of sustained above-normal growth in the period 2011 through 2016; then settling down to normal long-run growth of 2.5 to 2.6 percent... It is slightly higher than the Congressional Budget Office, but we think very accurate.

We also, in our economic assumptions, tend to have a significant upward provision in the unemployment rate. We are now predicting, again for an annual average, the unemployment rate of 9.3 percent in 2009, and 9.8 percent in 2010. We do predict that unemployment will reach 10 percent at least for some months or some quarters in this period.

Hasn't the entire argument of the Obama administration been that this deeper-than -expected recession (which would of course be deeper if not for Obama) is not the "norm," and that is the reason for any negative estimates or bad forecasts, not Obama's policy failures? And, yet Krugman, arguing as an Obama ally, and Romer predict that everything's going to be fine as soon as GDP growth gets back to normal, right on schedule to deliver Obama from another deficit readjustment. I'll believe it when I see it. And, if I don't see it, I look forward to Krugman explaining why $11 trillion really isn't all that bad, anyway.

Flashback: Orszag called CBO's March deficit estimate of $9.3 trillion pessimistic and unsustainable.

Update: Matthias Shapiro, who is more of a numbers guy than I will ever be, explains the problems with Krugman's argument (and suspects Krugman knows exactly what they are):

If you look at the 1945 budget with the single question “How are we going to reduce our debt?” you can identify the major problem. It’s the defense budget, which is almost 90% of the budget. Interestingly, reducing the defense budget is exactly what we did in order to reduce the debt, cutting it over 80% in 3 years (it helped that we won the war).

As a contrast, President Obama’s solution to reducing overall spending is… well, I don’t think he really has a plan. His projected budget in 2016 has reduced the defense budget as a percentage of the overall budget from 20% to 14%, but military spending isn’t what is killing us. The president has no plans to reduce mandatory spending whatsoever. In fact, his only change to entitlement spending is to increase it.

My problem with Mr. Krugman’s “How big is $9 trillion?” is that he is aware of all the problems I pointed out. He didn’t explain how much $9 trillion is; he obfuscated it.

As I discussed in my piece, The Zubaydah Dossier, there is no question that Abu Zubaydah was a top al Qaeda terrorist with detailed knowledge of al Qaeda’s plotting. Despite a wealth of evidence in this regard, however, some still insist that Zubaydah was not really all that important. This is nonsense, but the Washington Post keeps repeating it over and over again.

One of the reports declassified and released yesterday by the Obama administration provides still more evidence of Abu Zubaydah’s significance. The report, which was authored by the CIA in June of 2005 and is titled “Detainee Reporting Pivotal for the War Against Al Qaeda,” notes:

Abu Zubaydah was the first of several detainees to reveal a significant quantity of general threat information against targets abroad and in the United States – including the White House and other US symbols.

In addition, the report’s authors explained:

“Reporting from Abu Zubaydah has been used as a baseline for debriefing other senior detainees…[redacted]”

Then there is this:

Since 11 September, the capture and debriefing of [High Value Detainees] has significantly advanced our understanding of al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups. Before the capture of Abu Zubaydah in March 2002, we had significant gaps in knowledge about al Qaeda’s organizational structure, key members and associates, capabilities, [redacted] and its presence around the globe. Within months of his arrest, Abu Zubaydah provided details about al Qaeda’s organizational structure, key operatives, and modus operandi. Early in his detention, his information on al Qaeda’s Shura Council and its various committees added to what we were learning [redacted]

Among the al Qaeda terrorists Zubaydah gave up intelligence on, the report’s authors explain, were two senior al Qaeda terrorists who were then plotting attacks against America, both here at home and abroad.

In addition, Abu Zubaydah’s identification early in his detention of [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] as the mastermind of 11 September and al Qaeda’s premier terrorist planner and of ‘Abd al Rahim al Nashiri as another key al Qaeda operational planner corroborated information [redacted]

Thus ends the idea that Abu Zubaydah wasn’t all that important within al Qaeda. It was a ridiculous notion in the first place. Will the Washington Post run a front-page retraction of its earlier front-page "reporting"?

The new party of protecting...Medicare spending?

David Paterson doubles down on the race card.

Young people need a bailout, too!

Enjoy your new meme, President Obama. The troops will thank you if you can fight the NYT on this as hard as you fight Fox News in every speech.

"This will be another thing dumped on us."

Are you ready for the reconciliation health care bill?

"Lawmakers must start to govern like adults and be honest about the limits we face."

That question has been among the most hotly disputed issues at the center of the continuing controversy over the CIA’s interrogation of suspected terrorists. The report released Monday from the former CIA Inspector General John Helgerson should end the debate.

Throughout his report, Helgerson goes out of his way to avoid expressing an opinion about the effectiveness of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs). On page 85, for instance, he writes generally about the CIA’s detention and interrogation program:

The detention of terrorists has prevented them from engaging in further terrorist activity, and their interrogation has provided intelligence that has enabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists, warned of terrorist plots planned for the United States and around the world, and supported articles frequently used in the finished intelligence publications for senior policymakers and war fighters. In this regard, there is no doubt that the Program has been effective.

Then he adds this caveat about EITs:

Measuring the effectiveness of EITs, however, is a more subjective process and not without some concern.

On page 89 he writes:

Inasmuch as EITs have been used only since August 2002, and they have not all been used with every high value detainee, there is limited data on which to assess their individual effectiveness.

And later, on the same page, he argues:

Measuring the overall effectiveness of EITs is challenging for a number of reasons including: (1) the Agency cannot determine with any certainty the totality of the intelligence the detainee actually possesses; (2) each detainee has different fears of and tolerance for EITs; (3) the application of the same EITs by different interrogators may have produced different results.

I’m not sure what he means that such judgments are “not without some concern.” But is it really the case that it is difficult to judge the effectiveness of EITs because of different fear thresholds among the detainees and differences in the application of the techniques by interrogators? And does it really matter, in judging whether the techniques were effective, if the CIA doesn’t know exactly how much information each detainee possesses?

A hypothetical. One detainee, we’ll call him Detainee #1, has a low tolerance for EITs. So his interrogator, we’ll call him Interrogator #1, uses four of the ten approved EIT techniques and does not use the waterboard. Still, Detainee #1 shares 70 percent of the totality of the intelligence he possesses, including information that leads to the detention of other high-ranking al Qaeda terrorists. Detainee #2 has a higher fear threshold. So Interrogator #2 uses all of the approved EITs, including the waterboard, and manages to extract, say, 80 of the totality of the intelligence the detainee possesses, including details about organizational structure and specific information about al Qaeda operatives planning attacks in the United States.

So we have 1) the inability of interrogators to extract 100 percent of the information held by the detainees; 2) different fear thresholds among detainees; and, 3) different application of EITs by interrogators.

Would anyone suggest that the use of EITs in these cases was not effective?

Consider the details in the IG report. On page 90, we learn about EITs and Abu Zubaydah. Although the report redacts the specific number of intelligence reports generated before the use of EITs and after they were employed, we do know that his cooperation increased.

It is not possible to say definitively that the waterboard is the reason for Abu Zubaydah’s increased production, or if another factor, such as the length of detention, was the catalyst. Since the use of the waterboard, however, Abu Zubaydah has appeared to be cooperative.

If it was a mere coincidence, the same thing happened after EITs were used on Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, the al Qaeda operative behind the attack on the USS Cole.

With respect to al Nashiri [redacted] reported two waterboard sessions in November 2002, after which the psychologist/interrogations determined that al Nashiri was compliant. However, after being moved [redacted] al Nashiri was thought to be withholding information. Al Nashiri subsequently received additional EITs, [redacted] but not the waterboard. The Agency then determined al Nashiri to be “compliant.” Because of the litany of technique used by different interrogators over a relatively short period of time, it is difficult to identify why exactly al Nashiri became more willing to provide information. However, following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning and [redacted] as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of EITs.

And what about 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Shaykh Mohammad? More coincidence? From page 91:

On the other hand, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete. As a means of less active resistance, at the beginning of their interrogation, detainees routinely provide information that they know is already known. Khalid Shaykh Muhammad received 183 applications of the waterboard in March 2003.

The section immediately following this overview of KSM’s pre-waterboard disclosures is redacted. But flip back a few pages in the IG report, to page 87, and we learn the details of KSM’s post-waterboard intelligence. KSM provided so many leads to other terrorists and plots that the IG described him as “the most prolific” source of information among the detainees. So, what did he tell us?

He provided information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists including Sayfullah Paracha and his son Uzair Paracha, businessmen who Khalid Shaykh Muhammad planned to use to smuggle explosives into the United States; Saleh Almari, a sleeper operative in New York; and Majid Khan, an operative who could enter the United States easily and was tasked to research attacks [redacted]. Khalid Shaykh Muhammad’s information also led to the investigation and prosecution of Iyman Faris, the truck driver arrested in early 2003 in Ohio.

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.

Reasonable people can – and do – disagree about the morality of using EITs. But only the most accomplished resister could continue to claim that they were not effective.

There's one point of overlap in today's statement by Attorney General Eric Holder and tonight's by former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Holder: "The men and women in our intelligence community ... deserve our respect and gratitude for the work they do."

Cheney: "The people involved deserve our gratitude."

Cheney goes on to say, "They do not deserve to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions."

Holder, by contrast, goes on to say that "the only responsible course of action" for him to take was to make the men and women of the intelligence community targets of investigation and possible prosecution. It's the Obama administration's way of showing gratitude.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney gave THE WEEKLY STANDARD a statement Monday night about the CIA documents and the coming Justice Department investigation:

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.

...of how a terrorist was released! Imagine that, investigating bad guys instead of the people defending the country. Lieberman says that the suggestions "that there was an intermixing here of Megrahi's fate with British interests and oil exploration in Libya are shocking." He went on, "I don't want to believe they are true, but they are hanging so heavily in the air that I hope that our friends in Britain will convene an independent investigation of this action by the Scottish Justice Minister to release a mass murderer."

Meanwhile, in the "reality-based community," Chuck Schumer has suggested that the United Nations rebuke Libya over the celebration of a man who blew up a commercial airliner. Note to Chuck Schumer: Libya is an elected member of the United Nations Security Council, and the next president of the United Nations General Assembly will be none other than Ali Abdessalam Treki, a former Libyan ambassador to the United Nations. Good luck with that Senator.

That seems to be the Obama administration's strategy for the war on terror overseas contingency operations against al Qaeda. The IG report, the independent prosecutor, taking the CIA out of the interrogation business, releasing Mohammed Jawad back into the wild, and that's all just in the last 24 hours. Special Report does a pretty good job of laying out where things stand now:

That's the title on a Republican memo now being circulated on the Hill:

DATE: August 24, 2009
SUBJECT: release of CIA IG report confirms effectiveness of CIA interrogation program

A redacted version of the CIA Inspector General Report on the CIA interrogation program was released today. Media coverage seems to imply that CIA interrogators were constantly going beyond programmatic guidance, where the IG Report found the reality to be that “there were few instances of deviations from approved procedures.” IG Report page 5, para 10. Additionally, the media today has latched on to the use of a gun in an interrogation, without usually reporting the other important element of that salacious story, which is that the interrogator was promptly disciplined for his actions. Joby Warrick and R. Jeffrey Smith, CIA Officer Disciplined for Alleged Gun Use in Interrogation, Wash Post (Aug. 23, 2009).

Similarly going unreported today is that the release of the IG report should finally put to rest claims that the CIA interrogation program was not effective and did not produce actionable intelligence, made, for example, by Senator Whitehouse on the floor of the Senate on June 9, 2009. Analysis of the effectiveness of the CIA interrogation program in the IG Report reveals the following:

• “Agency senior managers believe that lives have been saved as a result of the capture and interrogation of terrorists who were planning attacks, in particular, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Abu Zubaydah, Hambali, and Al-Nashiri.” page 88 para 217.
• After the use of the enhanced interrogation techniques on the bomber of the USS Cole, “al-Nashiri provided lead information on other terrorists during his first day of interrogation.” pages 35-36, para 76.
• Hambali “provided information that led to the arrest of previously unknown members of an Al-Qa’ida cell in Karachi.” page 87 para 216.
• Intelligence derived from the CIA interrogation program led to a general increase in relevant intelligence reports, producing over 3,000 intelligence reports between 9/11 and the end of April 2003. page 86 para 213.
• A redacted entity “judge the reporting from detainees as one of the most important sources for finished intelligence.” Similarly, another redacted entity “viewed analysts’ knowledge of the terrorist target as having much more depth as a result of information from detainees and estimated that detainee reporting is used in all counterterrorism articles produced for the most senior policymakers.” page 88 para 218.

Analysis of the effectiveness of the CIA interrogation program in documents released with the CIA IG report reveals the following:

• “Results from the first al Qaeda HVT interrogated using the aforementioned enhanced techniques, Abu Zubayda, have been outstanding. . . . This has ultimately led to some instances of the US Government being able to neutralize Al Qaeda capabilities worldwide before there was an opportunity for those capabilities to engage in operations harmful to the United States.” CIA Business Plan discussing RDI program, page 13, March 7, 2003.
• “using the quality of the intelligence as the yardstick, the program has been an absolute success.” Interview with a senior CIA officer regarding CIA RDI program, page 1, para 2, July 17, 2003.
• “there was no other way CTC [CIA Counterterrorist Center] could have gotten the information they have obtained from the detainees.” Interview with a senior CIA officer regarding CIA RDI program, page 1, para 2, July 17, 2003.
• “detainees have provided information that led to the arrest of other terrorists Zubadayh provided information that led to the raid that netted Ramzi Bin al-Shibh.” Interview with a senior CIA officer regarding CIA RDI program, page 2, para 3, July 17, 2003.
• al Nashiri “is providing actionable intelligence” after the use of the enhanced interrogation techniques. Spot report regarding interrogation of al Nashiri, page 1, para 2, Jan. 22, 2003.

It is unclear why two other documents analyzing the effectiveness of the CIA interrogation program, namely the CIA CTC Effectiveness Memo and the CIA DI Khalid Sheikh Mohammad Preeminent Source Memo, were not released contemporaneously with the IG report. DOJ legal opinions, for example, have cited the Effectiveness Memo for the proposition that “the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al-Qa’ida has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001.” OLC CAT Memo, page 8, May 30, 2005.

A statement from the Connecticut senator on AG Holder's decision to name a prosecutor to investigate and potentially criminally charge CIA interrogators:

“I respectfully regret this decision by Attorney General Holder and fear our country will come to regret it too because an open ended criminal investigation of past CIA activity, which has already been condemned and prohibited, will have a chilling effect on the men and women agents of our intelligence community whose uninhibited bravery and skill we depend on every day to protect our homeland from the next terrorist attack. Career prosecutors in the Department of Justice have previously reviewed allegations of abuse and concluded that prosecution was not warranted, with the exception of one CIA contractor who has already been convicted. President Obama has established clear guidelines to ensure that past abuses are not repeated and has stated his desire to look forward rather than backward.

“We cannot take for granted the fact that our homeland has not been attacked since September 11, 2001. That has occurred only because of the constant vigilance and unflinching efforts by those brave individuals in our military, civilian homeland security and counterterrorism agencies, and the intelligence community. These public servants must of course live within the law but they must also be free to do their dangerous and critical jobs without worrying that years from now a future Attorney General will authorize a criminal investigation of them for behavior that a previous Attorney General concluded was authorized and legal.”

Here's the statement from the president's press secretary:

The President has said repeatedly that he wants to look forward, not back, and the President agrees with the Attorney General that those who acted in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance should not be prosecuted. Ultimately, determinations about whether someone broke the law are made independently by the Attorney General.

Update: Sen. McConnell's statement:

“We must remain mindful that we still are very much a nation at war with terrorists who spend every hour of their day planning how to hurt America and Americans. That’s why reports that the Department of Justice has directed a special prosecutor to investigate the men and women tasked with keeping America safe is such a poor and misguided decision.

“Several years ago, career professionals at the Department decided the facts did not support prosecuting America’s intelligence professionals based on the practices at issue today. Now, the administration risks chilling our defense and intelligence community’s ability to protect us from future terrorist attacks by reopening this matter. If these reports are true, the American people will be rightly outraged by the administration’s actions in this critical area.”

President Obama said on Saturday:

"Some are also saying that coverage for abortions would be mandated under reform. Also false. When it comes to the current ban on using tax dollars for abortions, nothing will change under reform."

FactCheck.org reported on Friday:

"As for the House bill as it stands now, it’s a matter of fact that it would allow both a "public plan" and newly subsidized private plans to cover all abortions."

The House bill would mandate the establishment of at least one insurance plan that covers elective abortions in every regional health-care "exchange" for federally-subsidized plans. Who's "bearing false witness" about the health-care bill again?

Apparently I overestimated Leon Panetta and underestimated Denis Blair. The Washington Post reports that Panetta has all but lost his turf war with Blair, while ABC reports that Panetta threatened to quit over administration plans to go after CIA operatives for interrogations that went beyond what had been legally authorized by the Bush administration OLC -- Holder will appoint a special prosecutor to go after the Agency according to the Post. The Washington Post also reports that the interrogation of high-value detainees will no longer be conducted by the CIA. And that's not all. Eli Lake reports today that General Petraeus is setting up his own intelligence service at CENTCOM with a focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. (It's almost like someone wants to change the subject from health care.)

The CIA is retreating on all fronts and Panetta seems powerless to stop the rout.

Conservatives will no doubt have mixed emotions over this latest turn of events. The CIA spent years undermining the Bush administration -- I heard one Republican say that he'd counseled Bush to clean out the Agency on day one of his first term, and that his failure to do so had been nothing short of a disaster. On the other hand, conservatives don't want to see patriotic Americans hung out to dry for pushing the envelope in interrogations of al Qaeda terrorists. To take just one example, this latest revelation that a CIA interrogator had brandished and fired a gun in an effort to scare a detainee into talking is not without precedent. Allen West was booted from the Army for engaging in similar conduct during the course of an interrogation in Iraq and subsequently ran for Congress in Florida and almost defeated incumbent Democrat Ron Klein. The point being, not all Americans are outraged by government officials who play fast and loose with the rules in order to save lives -- at least nothing that's been reported yet from Gitmo, unlike Abu Ghraib, has shocked the conscience of most Americans. West probably would have won that election if it hadn't been such a bad year for the Republican party.

The problem for Panetta is that he can't protect his own people from Democrats in Congress and at the White House, so it seems unlikely he will be getting a lot of support from his own people as all this plays out. They may even work to further undermine Panetta in the hopes of getting a more effective chief. But in the short-term, the intelligence community's center of gravity is clearly shifting away from the CIA and toward the DNI, which happens to be even worse than the CIA insofar as it is staffed and run by a bunch of incompetent political pantywaists.

One more thought: Barack Obama allowed Congressional Democrats to wage war on the CIA and has now allowed his administration to pile on. He allowed Congressional Democrats to put together the stimulus, cap and trade, and now health care, all with little leadership from his administration. Will the president ever stand up to Democrats in Congress as part of this new transformative, post-partisan politics he promised to usher in?

From a Department of Justice press release:

On July 30, 2009, consistent with the U.S. government’s notice that it would no longer treat Jawad as detainable under the Authorization for Use of Military Force, a federal court ordered the U.S. government to release him from detention at Guantanamo Bay. On Aug. 6, 2009, in accordance with Congressionally-mandated reporting requirements, the administration informed Congress of its intent to transfer Jawad.

Jawad’s transfer was carried out under an arrangement between the United States and the government of Afghanistan. The United States has coordinated closely with the government of Afghanistan to ensure the transfer takes place under appropriate security measures and will continue to consult with the Afghan government regarding Jawad.

See Thomas Joscelyn on the Jawad case here.

Interesting bit on the decline of U.S. production capacity, via Loren Thompson at the Lexington Institute's new blog.

With the Obama Administration moving to put more emphasis on manufacturing policy, the Lexington Institute is releasing a report this week detailing just how severe the nation's industrial decline has become. Here are some key facts you may not have heard. China produced five times more steel last year than the U.S. The U.S. has not built a single new domestic oil refinery in 30 years. U.S. companies can no longer make antibiotics like penicillin without supplies from foreign sources. American shipbuilders have not produced a single commercial vessel for use in international trade in this decade. China surpassed the U.S. in electronics production in 2006. Despite all the bold talk a few years back about America becoming a services-based, information-age economy, the reality is that our share of global output is eroding steadily. A CIA assessment says that the shift of wealth from the West to the East is without precedent in modern history, and that America's future as the world's dominant economy is now very much in doubt. The problem isn't really with our science or with our schools -- we still have the most scientists and the best universities in the world -- but with the disappearance of manufacturing. Over the last 30 years, the amount of domestically consumed manufactured goods made overseas has increased from a tenth to a third of the total.

Thompson thinks it might be one of our most pressing security challenges (at least in the long term), and I'm inclined to agree. America's ability to produce, innovate, and create has traditionally served as the backbone of our warfighting efforts. Quoth the old axiom, amateurs study strategy, professionals study logistics. During World War II, the Germans marveled at the infinite stream of fighting vehicles that rolled off the rust belt's auto assembly lines and poured into the European theater, while they were porting artillery with horse drawn carriages. During the Cold War, the Soviets poured billions into strategies that would close the Atlantic to US resupply convoys -- fearing only our nuclear weapons over our ability to manufacture.

Today, that "Made in America" tag is just too pricey. Unions have driven up the cost of labor to unsustainable levels, while choking environmental regulations and aggressive corporate taxes have suffocated our ability to produce domestically. It's no wonder the next generation of American weapon systems, which our troops desperately need, are so expensive.

Aside: go take a look at the Lexington Institute's new blogging endeavour, Early Warning. Should be an outstanding security policy resource.

For some time I've argued that the Pakistani military, despite its operation against the Taliban in Swat, has no intention of going into the real Taliban strongholds of North and South Waziristan. And just one day after Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud's death was reported, I said the Pakistani military may actually use his death as a reason to declare victory against the Taliban and avoid going into South Waziristan. US officials agree:

The problems in Afghanistan have been aggravated by what the American commanders call the Pakistani military’s limited response to the threat of militants based there. Although General Scaparrotti said that cooperation by Pakistan and the United States against the militants had improved recently, he stressed that it was important for the Pakistanis to keep up the pressure, particularly after the reported killing of the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud.

That echoed concerns from Obama administration officials who worry that with the absence of Mr. Mehsud, who was the Pakistani government’s enemy No. 1, the military would shift its emphasis away from the tribal areas where the Taliban and Al Qaeda operate. “They think it’s ‘game over,’ ” one senior administration official said. “It’s more like, ‘game over, next level.’”

Last week, the Pakistani Army said it needs "months" before it could move into South Waziristan and that an operation against the Taliban may not start until after the winter. If the Pakistani governemnt really believes the Taliban is in disarray after the death of Baitullah and is serious about taking out the Taliban, it would have struck while the iron was hot. Instead, the military and intelligence services appear to be relying on a clumsy and ineffective information campaign designed to cause Taliban infighting while these services continue to support Taliban leaders that have sworn allegiance to Mullah Omar and vowed to fight the NATO forces in Afghanistan.

For the first time since the U.S.-Taiwan Defense Command closed in 1979, U.S. Marines have taken up positions on the island of Taiwan -- as part of the relief effort in the wake of Typhoon Morakot. Yes, they're there as part of rescue and relief operations, but that won't make the ChiComs any happier about it. Beijing probably won't make too much noise about the presence of U.S. troops on the island for fear of undermining its efforts to win hearts and minds in Taiwan, but surely the regime will find a way to send a message to the Obama administration that it views such operations as 'unhelpful' to cross-strait relations.

Here's some video of uniformed U.S. Marines walking past ROC flags and another showing the crew of a C-130.

After months of deliberation, the president’s task force on interrogation and detention policies has recommended the formation of an “elite interrogation unit” to question “key terror suspects,” the Washington Post reports.“[S]hifting the center of gravity away from the CIA and giving the White House direct oversight,” the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG, will be based at the FBI, but run by the president’s National Security Council staff from the White House.

Members of HIG will rely almost exclusively on Army Field Manual guidelines for the interrogation of prisoners of war to question their quarry, and thus, presumably, they will have acquired the qualities desirable in an interrogator, as designated by FM 34-52:

· An interest in human relations

· A desire to react to the challenge of personal interplay

· An enthusiasm for the collection of information

· A profound interest in foreign languages and cultures (1-13)

Moreover, “Usually a neat, organized, and professional appearance will favorably influence the source,” and “A hostile and antagonistic source is most difficult to interrogate. In many cases, he refuses to talk at all, and offers a real challenge to the interrogator. An interrogator must have self-control, patience, and tact when dealing with him." Just so you know.

And, to be certain there are no misunderstandings, the Post says:

Interrogators will not necessarily read detainees their rights before questioning, instead making that decision on a case-by-case basis, officials said.

“It is not going to, certainly, be automatic in any regard that they are going to be Mirandized," one official said, referring to the practice of reading defendants their rights. "Nor will it be automatic that they are not Mirandized."

The interrogation-authority-grab by the Obama White House could send shockwaves through the Bush-mind-control-conspiracy-theory community, and sting the New York Times as a lover’s betrayal. But oh, happy, happy day for jihadist murderers the world over who may chance to hear from Samantha Power's own lovely lips: "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand these rights?"

It's hard to keep the rules straight in our post-racial society:

President Obama's aides were so furious that Gov. Paterson dragged him into a rant about racism that they sent a message sharply criticizing the governor's comments just hours after he made them, The Post has learned.

Aides to Obama were angered by Paterson's tirade on liberal talk-radio station WWRL on Friday, sources said.

Paterson blamed his political woes on racially slanted coverage and predicted the president would be the next "victim" of biased media.

Obama's team delivered a pointed message to Paterson within hours of the morning broadcast, multiple sources said.

It came in a call from White House political director Patrick Gaspard, who has deep ties to the New York political scene, to Larry Schwartz, the governor's first deputy secretary.

Gaspard wanted to know "why [Paterson] was dragging the president into" his troubles, said one source.

Presumably Paterson was told he acted "stupidly."

We can dream, folks. We can dream of a Daschle vs. Thune moment in 2010:

It's the highest stakes ever for a Nevada election, and former boxer Sen. Harry Reid is on the ropes early. Either Republican Danny Tarkanian or Sue Lowden would knock out Reid in a general election, according to a recent poll of Nevada voters.

The results suggest the Democratic Senate majority leader will have to punch hard and often in order to retain his position as the most accomplished politician in state history, in terms of job status.

Nevadans favored Tarkanian over Reid 49 percent to 38 percent and Lowden over Reid 45 percent to 40 percent, according to the poll.

Reid's strategy, according to his spokesman, is to convince Nevadans that he can get them job creation and lower health care costs by 2010. Perhaps not the soundest strategy, with the way things are looking now.

And, now for the understatement of the century, I give you Brad Coker, director of Mason-Dixon polling:

"It is going to be harder to turn them out for Harry Reid than it was for Barack Obama. I suspect some of that might be the charisma quotient."

You think?

On some level this shouldn't surprise anyone: the terrorist president of Iran has appointed a terrorist defense minister. But it is the final nail in the coffin of Obama's appeal for fist unclenching. The Ahmadinejad government begins with the absence of domestic legitimacy. Now it is flouting the authority of interpol, the international police agency. Is there anyone who thinks the Iranians will keep their commitments on a nuclear proliferation treaty?

Former Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge is in the news these days because a forthcoming memoir apparently makes the claim that he felt pressure from his Bush administration colleagues to raise the terror alert level before the 2004 elections. Sounds like a blockbuster claim.

There are others. In reading about the book on Amazon, I learned that Ridge's book will reveal "how the DHS was pressured to connect homeland security to the international 'war on terror.'"

Wow, can't wait to get those details. Everyone knows that the Department of Homeland Security, established after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, has nothing at all to do with protecting the homeland from terrorist attacks. What blatant politicization of national security. I bet Dick Cheney and Karl Rove came up with that one. Sheesh.

Over at the Corner, Andy McCarthy points to this Politico story about a recent order by a D.C. District Court giving Gitmo detainee Abdul Raheem Ghulam Rabbani the right to ask 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) some questions about Rabbani’s role in al Qaeda. The details of how these questions will be posed to KSM are unclear, but apparently Rabbani’s lawyers will be allowed to submit a list of written queries. Who is Abdul Raheem Ghulam Rabbani? Both he and his brother are notorious al Qaeda safehouse operators who worked for KSM and other senior al Qaeda operatives.

The 9/11 Commission noted in its final report that after the muscle hijackers were trained in Afghanistan -- training that included how to storm a cockpit and the butchering of a “sheep and a camel with a knife to prepare to use knives during the hijackings” -- they made their way to the Rabbani brothers’ safehouse in Karachi, Pakistan.

A memo prepared for one of Abdul Raheem’s administrative review boards (ARB) at a Gitmo hearing states that he “identified seventeen of the September 11, 2001 hijackers who stayed at” the Karachi safehouse. Abdul Raheem was also able to identify “five of the suspects indicted in the 1998 bombings of United States Embassies” in Kenya and Tanzania as “men he had seen in Afghanistan” or “men he had assisted” in Karachi.

The Rabbani brothers were not just responsible for hosting al Qaeda hijackers and embassy bombers en route to their martyrdom. Both were first allegedly trained at Abu Zubaydah’s Khalden training camp in Afghanistan and then went on to long al Qaeda careers. In 2002, Abdul Raheem was allegedly “part of a cell that was tasked to purchase cars, conduct casing of hotels, and purchase and build explosives devices to be used in car bomb attacks against United States troops.”

Mohammed, the younger of the two, was part of this same al Qaeda cell. A memo prepared for one of Mohammed’s ARB hearings at Gitmo notes: “The car bomb attack would target hotels in Karachi, Pakistan, where large numbers of United States troops were housed on a regular basis.”

The Rabbani brothers were captured during a series of raids in Pakistan in September 2002. During those same raids, “authorities recovered detonating devices from” one of their safe houses. A memo prepared for Abdul Raheem’s case at Gitmo notes:

The devices were recovered from a room in the safe house in which a number of personal effects, including family photos and letters, belonging to [a] senior al Qaeda operative and a bundle of wrapped passports, most of which were valid passports belonging to the wives and children of Osama bin Laden.

In fact, both of the Rabbani brothers are alleged to have longstanding ties to bin Laden. Mohammed reportedly told authorities that “he helped with the move of” Osama bin Laden and bin Laden’s family “to the Tora Bora region in Afghanistan” in July 2001. Of course, bin Laden and al Qaeda were preparing for the September 11 attacks and the possibility of America’s retaliation at that time. Thus, al Qaeda set up a fallback zone in the Tora Bora Mountains. Mohammed “stated he assisted by obtaining food and construction material to fortify Tora Bora cave complexes.”
Mohammed also reportedly gave up this tidbit while in U.S. custody (see here):

[Mohammed] stated that there were 10 Mujahedin still operating in the United States for every operative arrested by United States authorities. [Mohammed] also stated he knew al Qaeda leaders were actively planning terrorist attacks in the United States using American citizens as the operatives.

While the 10-1 ratio given by Mohammed was probably bluster, he was right about the part concerning al Qaeda’s attempts to use American citizens in post-9/11 attacks. Jose Padilla is just one example of an American citizen who was captured (just a few months prior to Mohammed’s capture) while plotting for al Qaeda. There are plenty of examples of American and Western citizens and residents recruited by al Qaeda for post-9/11 operations. Their status as Westernized men was supposed to make it easier for them to execute an attack in the heightened security environment. It would be interesting to find out if Mohammed or his brother knew of, and alerted authorities to, any additional American or European citizens who were similarly situated.

Now a judge has decided that Abdul Raheem has the right to ask KSM, via his lawyers, some questions about his terrorist biography. As McCarthy notes, this same judge (and others like him) have no “responsibility or expertise in national security matters.” Imagine if we had left our defense in the months following September 11 to him and his ilk by giving every detainee taken into custody speedy access to the courts.

The ad from Rick Scott, and his group Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, to air on Boston TV and in Martha’s Vineyard during Obama's vacation, including on NESN during four Red Sox-White Sox games (which Obama will surely be watching). The size of the buy is reported at 150k:

Some choice quotes from his interview with President Obama:

"What an honor for me to say I'm live at the White House and I'm joined by the President of the United States."...

"Mr. President, what an honor for me, and thank you, sir, for this privilege, and thank you for coming back to my radio program."...

"You're needed across town. I appreciate very much the privilege of coming to the White House. Mr. President, thank you so much for being on the Michael Smerconish program."...

The interview was only aired on radio, but it's certainly possible Smerconish offered the president a Brian Williams-like bow at the end of their talk. Of course there's nothing wrong with showing a little deference to the commander in chief, but Smerconish comes off like a toady, not a journalist, or even a semi-serious talking head.

You'd think this was his first time in a Big City.

Military defense attorneys are under investigation by the Justice Department for showing photographs of covert CIA operatives -- secretly shot by “researchers” hired by the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers -- to Gitmo detainees in preparation for potential trials, the Washington Post reports:

It is unclear whether the military lawyers under investigation identified the CIA personnel in the photographs to the al-Qaeda suspects or simply asked the detainees whether they had ever seen them. It is also unclear whether the inquiry involves violations of federal statutes prohibiting the identification of covert CIA officers or violations of military commission rules governing the disclosure of classified information, including to the defendants.

Nyuh huh. Guess it takes a Republican administration, pics of non-covert lefty CIA employees, and a disgruntled former Deputy Secretary of State to reveal them, to make something like that really, really clear.

Be sure to check out the inimitable Dorothy Rabinowitz's take on cable-show-of-the-moment Mad Men:

The life force of this period series, it becomes ever clearer, is business—the advertising business, the business of the interconnecting lives of the Sterling Cooper staff, all inextricably fused to the job, the place and career concerns. For, despite the grand dimensions that have been attributed to it as a work of social commentary, the series is at heart the latest addition to an old and honored television genre—the workplace drama. A highly distinguished one, to be sure, and far darker and more complex than, say, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."

This is probably the reason, come to think of it, that the equally good NBC show The Office and Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End are also popular.

Charlie Cook says that "[T]he situation this summer has slipped completely out of control for President Obama and Congressional Democrats. Today, The Cook Political Report’s Congressional election model, based on individual races, is pointing toward a net Democratic loss of between six and 12 seats, but our sense, factoring in macro-political dynamics is that this is far too low."

New ABC News / Washington Post poll has Obama's disapproval rating on health care at 50 percent. Faith in Obama's leadership is at 49 percent.

Pelosi says a bill without a public option won't pass the House, while it's unlikely that a bill with an explicit "public option" could ever pass the Senate.

Gallup's Daily Track has Obama's overall job approval at a new low.

Obama's under criticism from the left and the Obama-friendly right.

Exit questions: Is health care reform more or less likely than it was at the beginning of August? And will the spectacle of the president vacationing at a $50,000-a-week resort on Martha's Vineyard while the unemployment rate is at 9.4 percent improve the White House's prospects?

Obama yesterday:

"Last year, just about this time, you will recall that the Republicans had just nominated their vice presidential candidate, and everybody was - you know, the media was obsessed with it, and cable was 24 hours a day, and 'Obama's lost his mojo,' and ... You remember that? There's something about August going into September where everybody in Washington gets all we-we-ed up."

NBC's First Read blog today: "The hand-wringing, doubts, and skepticism of August 2008, however, later turned into Obama's decisive seven-point victory in November."

As NBC blogger Mark Murray goes on to note, however, "campaigning - especially when the outgoing president and his party were incredibly unpopular - is much different than governing." You don't say.

Michael Rubin puts together a nifty little chart to help us figure out what kind of prison time the world's worst mass murders would face in Scotland, where the going rate is about 11.5 days for every man, woman, or child slaughtered:

Huckabee on Israel (via Ben Smith):

"There's great division within the American Jewish Community about the level of support for Israel," he went on. "I think they all support Israel, want to see it succeed.But you'll find people all over the board about whether they think is ought to have ... absolute control over its border and whether they should give up land for peace and just thow many countries can oversee Jerusalem at one time."

"I don't find that kind of dichotomy generally within the Evangelical community," Huckabee said. "It's pretty adamant: There ought to be one city. It ought to be a Jewish state. And it ought tot be secure. So maybe one of the hard things is to convince some of our Jewish friends that Evangelicals are the best friends they've got -- because I think generally, that's the case."

I'm convinced. Evangelicals and other Christian supporters of Israel do far more to sustain political support for Israel in Washington than the Jews ever could. And that's why the anti-Israel left is so determined to smear them as religious fanatics. Huckabee's just fighting the smears.

The New York Times reveals the awful truth about the secret air war against high value al Qaeda targets in Pakistan -- the drones are being armed by evil government contractors. And while the paper felt comfortable suppressing any news of the capture and confinement of one of its own reporters earlier this year, it shows no compunction in revealing the secret location of the base from which these drones are launched:

The C.I.A. has for several years operated Predator drones out of a remote base in Shamsi, Pakistan, but has secretly added a second site at an air base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, several current and former government and company officials said. The existence of the Predator base in Jalalabad has not previously been reported.

What possible value does this information have to readers of the New York Times that would justify the increased risk to the military personnel and contractors that man that base? Meanwhile, the Times does its best to indict the work of those contractors with little anecdotes about combat mishaps like this:

They said that Blackwater’s direct role in these operations had sometimes led to disputes with the C.I.A. Sometimes when a Predator misses a target, agency employees accuse Blackwater of poor bomb assembly, they said. In one instance last year recounted by the employees, a 500-pound bomb dropped off a Predator before it hit the target, leading to a frantic search for the unexploded bomb in the remote Afghan-Pakistani border region. It was eventually found about 100 yards from the original target.

A bomb fell 100 yards from its intended target and we are supposed to infer from this that contractors are not up to the job? Uniform personnel are also capable of dropping bombs far from their intended targets. There was the hydrogen bomb the Air Force accidentally dropped off the coast of Georgia 40 years ago. There was another lost off the coast of Spain around the same time. More recently we had the CIA targeting the Chinese embassy in Belgrade -- of course that might not have been an accident at all -- and the accidental transport of six nuclear missiles across the continental United States just two years ago. Missing your mark by 100 yards in a combat situation hardly seems like a major screw-up.

Why should the American people care who is arming these drones as long as this program remains the most effective element of the Obama administration's war on terror. If the Boy Scouts were doing the job we shouldn't have any concern but to make sure they'd all gotten their merit badges. Now our only concern should be making sure that the Jalalabad base so needlessly identified by the New York Times remains secure enough to continue the important work of the contractors, CIA, and uniformed personnel who are currently stationed there.

National Review's John J. Miller profiles Marco Rubio in the cover story of the latest issue:

Several factors may work to Rubio’s advantage. The primary is closed, which means that only registered Republicans can participate. Turnout probably will be low, which increases the importance of conservative activists. Rubio also has started to attract national attention. Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee have en­dorsed him. Interestingly, Jeb Bush has remained quiet, fueling speculation that he might back Rubio if the race is close next summer. His son, Jeb Bush Jr., is a confirmed Rubio supporter. That Rubio is of Cuban ancestry doesn’t hurt, either. “Finding Latino stars in the Republican party is a big deal,” says Mike Murphy, a GOP political consultant and Rubio donor. “I don’t want to pigeonhole him -- I’d like him if he was Scandinavian -- but it’s a plus.”

The biggest challenge for Rubio will be money. In the second quarter of this year, Crist amassed $4.3 million. Rubio managed about one-twelfth of that amount: $340,000. This low figure has caused some to question his discipline. A shake-up of his campaign staff this summer raised doubts, too. Rubio clearly enjoys the performance aspect of politics. To win, however, he’ll also need to devote hours and hours of each day to the drudgery of fundraising: making cold calls, asking strangers for money, and receiving far more rejections than checks. This is the only way he’ll gain the resources to put ads on television, which is the only way to compete in a large state with as many media markets as Florida.

The good news is that Rubio doesn’t have to match Crist dollar for dollar. But he does need to hit a certain mark -- enough to lift his name into the consciousness of most Florida Republicans. It can probably be done for about $5 million, give or take. Primaries are famously fluid, with lots of last-minute deciders. Candidates such as Rubio can close hard and fast in the final two or three weeks, but only if they spend a long time preparing to make the most of their opportunity.

Rubio hasn't been able to gain much ground against Crist in the polls since he declared his candidacy in May--he still trails the governor by more than 20 points--but the latest Rasmussen poll shows both Crist and Rubio beating the Democratic challenger by double-digits, which would seem to diminish the argument that Crist is much more electable than Rubio.

It's important to remember that normal voters may not pay attention to the race until the closing month of the campaign (August of next year) when Rubio will be able to hit the airwaves in full force--if he raises enough money. In 2004, Pat Toomey trailed Arlen Specter 37 percent to 52 percent on April 7, and on April 27 narrowly lost the primary 49 percent to 51 percent.

Crist has a sunnier personality than Arlen Specter and is more willing and better at tacking to the right in the primary, but Rubio is a more exciting candidate (than Crist or Toomey). If Crist's numbers continue to hover around 50 percent, Rubio has a very good shot to win if he can raise enough money to get his message out.

“I am a family man: first and foremost I am a son, husband, father and grandfather.” Thus said Lockerbie bomber Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi in his appeal to the Scottish authorities for compassionate release. And thus Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill on Scotland’s decision to comply: “Our justice system demands that judgment be imposed but compassion available. Our beliefs dictate that justice be served but mercy be shown.” Would those be Scottish beliefs? British? They sure as hell aren’t the beliefs of the families of al-Megrahi’s American victims, who would show him just the kind of mercy he showed their loved ones.

If only we’d had the balls to warn the Scots there’d be consequences for taking this shameful decision before they took it, like, say, an interruption of our deep and wide economic ties, maybe there’d have been a different outcome. If only our government were willing to do more than “strongly condemn” Scotland’s inexplicable decision--Mr. MacAskill’s mercy notwithstanding--to send this killer home to a hero’s welcome in Libya. And if only we had a president capable of producing more than this puling garbage: “We thought it was a mistake. . . . We've also obviously been in contact with the families of the Pan Am victims and indicated to them that we don't think this was appropriate.”

If only all that stuff, we wouldn’t now be witnessing the rubbing of salt in the wounds of the survivors of the 270 victims of “family man”al-Megrahi.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board zeroes in on Obama's health care non sequiturs:

So the health-care status quo needs top-to-bottom reform, except for the parts that "you" happen to like. Government won't interfere with patients and their physicians, considering that the new panel of experts who will make decisions intended to reduce tests and treatments doesn't count as government. But Medicare shows that government involvement isn't so bad, aside from the fact that spending is out of control -- and that program needs top-to-bottom reform too.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Despite several weeks of huffing and puffing about disrupting Afghanistan's election to decide the next president and provincial council representatives, the Taliban had a poor showing today. There were 73 recorded acts of violence in 15 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces; 27 people were killed on elections day, including eight Afghan soldiers, nine police officers, nine civilians, and one US soldier. Security forces stopped suicide bombers in Kabul while small arms attacks were suppressed in Paktika and Baghlan.

It's not that the Taliban lacked targets; there were almost 7,000 polling sites the Taliban could have hit. The Taliban only succeeded in blocking polling in eight of Afghanistan's 398 districts. Those eight districts were already deemed to be under Taliban control.

What won't be known is how successful the Taliban were in intimidating voters to stay away from the polls. Turnout in many areas is said to be low, but a portion of low turnout can also be attributed to voter apathy.

While the Taliban have been resurgent over the past several years, they clearly do not possess the strength to shut down a national event like an election. Events like today's shed light on the limitations and weaknesses of the enemy. The Taliban's power still rests in the shadows, at night, when security forces return to their bases. That is a problem, a major one that can only be fixed by boosting NATO and Afghan security forces and restoring a measure of legitimacy to the Afghan government. And making those two things happen is another set of problems. But we can see today that the Taliban also have problems of their own.

The president whined today on Michael Smerconish's show:

You know, passing a big bill like this is always messy. FDR was called a socialist when he passed Social Security. JFK and Lyndon Johnson, they were both accused of a government takeover of health care when they passed Medicare. This is the process that we go through -- because, understandably, the American people have a long tradition of being suspicious of government, until the government actually does something that helps them, and then they don't want anybody messing with whatever gets set up.

President Obama might not be aware of this but FDR passed Social Security with massive Republican support -- 81 Republicans voted in favor of the measure in the House and only 15 against while 16 Republicans voted in favor in the Senate and just 5 against. Johnson's Medicare package was only marginally more contentious. Just 13 Republicans voted in favor of Medicare in the Senate to 17 against, but in the House, more Republicans (70) voted for Johnson's Medicare plan than against (68).

Maybe President Obama should stop wee-weeing and start trying to get some Republican support for his bill -- as both Johnson and FDR successfully did. Getting a bill like this is not, in fact, always messy. Rather, there is clearly something particular about Obama's approach that has created this mess.

Pelosi said today, "there is no way I can pass a bill in the House of Representatives without a public option." Does she mean it? Is she using the public option as a bargaining chip or do the internal politics of her caucus demand that any health care package include a public option? One senior GOP aide in the House offered me this analysis on background earlier today:

Barring a major turn of events, the chance of a public option passing through both the House and the Senate is minimal. The big question now is what compromise will look like. This is not where the President wanted to be, and he has bled a TON of political capital. Worse for him is that independents are turning away from his agenda in droves, and his liberal base will not tolerate compromise.

So...we seem to be at an impasse. The Dems probably don't have the votes to ram the public option through the Senate, and they don't have the votes for a bill without a public option in the House. But don't blame Democrats for any of this -- the White House certainly isn't. Per Obama, it's the Republicans that are conspiring against him: "early on a decision was made by the Republican leadership that said, look, let’s not give them a victory."

Note to Obama: 1) Not everything is about you. Republicans don't like your health care reform because it's an enormously expensive monstrosity that does not even meet your own minimum requirements of being deficit neutral and reducing health care inflation; and 2) maybe you didn't notice but the Democrats have a filibuster-proof majority in Congress.

Update: A Republican emails to remind me of comments by Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad just four days ago on Fox News Sunday: “Conrad (D-N.D.), who supports setting up health insurance co-operatives with government seed money to compete with private insurers, described the public option as all but a lost cause. ‘Look, the fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the U.S. Senate for the public option, there never have been,’ Conrad said in an interview on ‘Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.’ ‘So to continue to chase that rabbit is, I think, a wasted effort,’ Conrad said.”

President Obama explained during his health care pep talk for Organizing for America activists today what exactly has been dragging down his vision for Obamacare:

"There's something about August going into September where everyone in Washington gets all 'wee-weed' up," the president said.

Yes, wee-wee, the sneakiest fear-monger. Tinkle, the silent consensus-killer. There is some debate as to what the president meant, though it may have had something to do with Sarah Palin? I don't know, everyone's equally stumped:

He pointed to last August's selection of then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) to join the Republican ticket as the GOP's vice presidential nominee.

"'Obama's lost his mojo,'" the president said the media were saying after Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) campaign received a short-lived bump from palin.

"You remember all that?" Obama added.

I, for one, believe he was probably telling us yet another story about profiteering doctors. This time, urologists, who are infamous for taking excessive urine samples from patients for extra cash. That's a practice that I think we can all agree is pretty "wee-weed up."

The Obama administration is keen on highlighting the progress it is making in closing down Gitmo. Naturally, it could count on the Washington Post (“Administration Makes Progress on Resettling Detainees”) to do its PR. The Post’s account gives us a good sense of how the administration sees things in broad terms currently. But a close look reveals that all is far from settled, and the “progress” highlighted in the article’s title and opening lines is, in reality, rather limited.

According to the Post, there are 229 detainees remaining at Gitmo. But, “the cases of nearly 120 have yet to be reviewed.” That is, the administration has yet to review more than half (120 out of 229) of the Gitmo cases. There are about five months left until President Obama’s self-imposed deadline for closing Gitmo, and the administration isn’t even half way done with its work.

That is the real lede for the Post’s story, but it is only mentioned five paragraphs in.

Indeed, the Post briefly notes that the administration still faces “major obstacles” in closing Gitmo, but doesn’t really get into any of them. For example, the Post says that the administration is trying to determine what to do with the 98 Yemenis still detained there. The administration is wary about sending them back to their home country, which is home to one of the strongest al Qaeda arms on the planet and ruled by a duplicitous and corrupt government.

Thus, the administration is still apparently trying to get the Saudis to take at least some of the Yemeni detainees into its jihadist rehabilitation program. The Saudis have rejected previous overtures in this vein, but the Obama administration hasn’t given up trying. John O. Brennan, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, is leading the ongoing negotiations.

But why does the administration still think the Saudi rehabilitation program is a good fit for at least some of the Yemeni detainees? And why isn’t the Post questioning this proposal? There are a number of good reasons to think the Saudi program is not a good option, to say the least, for the Yemeni detainees.

Next, the Post says “[t]hirty detainees have been tentatively approved for prosecution,” with “teams of federal and military prosecutors” still “assessing where to put” 29 of them on trial. So, even for those detainees the administration knows it wants to continue to detain and prosecute, it is not sure how it will go about it. Will the administration try these 29 detainees in federal courts or military commissions? Apparently, the administration does not know.

Somewhat bizarrely, the Post refers to Ramzi Binalshibh (one of the Yemenis who isn’t being transferred any time soon) as “an alleged co-conspirator in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.” This is akin to saying al Qaeda allegedly carried out the September 11 attacks. Binalshibh is not a typical defendant awaiting prosecution. He is a known al Qaeda operative, who has admitted -- repeatedly -- that he directly participated in the September 11 operation.

Biden:

"I know George Bush, and he’s no Barack Obama."

Oh Lordy day, I tell ya!

Last week, there were several instances of protesters showing up outside of town hall meetings openly carrying firearms. Anti-gun activists and the media were flabbergasted not only at the audacity of the protesters, but that the carrying of firearms happened to be perfectly legal where it occurred. (Eleven states allow unlicensed open carry, with 13 more requiring a permit.)

MSNBC, not content to simply say, “Golly, guns are scary!” decided that there must be something racist going on. After showing close-cropped video footage of a protester with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle slung over his shoulder, MSNBC host Contessa Brewer went on to say:

“Yes, there are Second Amendment rights, for sure, but also there are questions of whether this has a racial overtone. I mean, here you have a man of color in the presidency, and you have white people showing up with guns strapped to their waist.”

The only problem with MSNBC’s narrative of simmering racial tension and extremism is that the man with the rifle was, in fact, black.

After getting slammed this morning by just about every conservative blog in existence, an MSNBC spokesman, responding to Politico, issued this weak-kneed, watery response:

"Contessa was speaking generally and not about that specific person with the automatic weapon."

(An AR-15 isn’t automatic, by the way, but I wouldn’t want to start holding MSNBC to any sort of fact-checking standard.)

So, if I understand correctly, Brewer was claiming the town hall protesters carrying guns were generally racist. That seems like a perfectly reasonable and well-founded assertion. No need, then, to show any evidence to the contrary, except to deliberately crop it out and use the footage to support Brewer’s claim.

Marshall Ackerman, who's been a doctor since 1969 in the D.C. metro area, doesn't much appreciate the characterization of doctors during the health care debate. Click through to read the whole thing for the full extent of Obama's, shall we say, "misinformation" about physicians.

But that's not why Ackerman is anti-Obamacare. He charts his first-hand experience with the changes Medicare brought to his profession and wonders what further government involvement will do to the men and women we depend on to treat the rest of us:

I have been a practicing orthopedic surgeon for 40 years. I have observed profound changes in my profession since the advent of Medicare, changes that have affected patients' access to care. As reimbursements plummeted, internists abandoned hospital care to the new specialty of hospitalists, created boutique practices and stopped participating with health insurance companies. Physicians in all specialties have been retiring at earlier ages than ever before....

Consider the implications when a global fee will be paid to the hospital: Then hospital and physician incentives will be aligned, and patients will bear the cost of the search for ever-cheaper implants and techniques, such as a return to cemented total hips. Forget metal-on-metal bearings, resurfacing, rotating platforms, high-flex knees, navigation systems or bilateral replacements. And if our hospitals are financially penalized for occurrences such as infection and deep-vein thrombosis after surgery, who will operate on the obese, the hypertensive or the diabetics among us? Experience with government funding reveals a never-ending spiral of decreased reimbursements in the name of restraining costs. In the end, this will come out of the care we all receive.

The effects of government intervention with price controls is something liberals don't address well. Being a doctor is a complex job that requires many years of very expensive training, and extremely expensive malpractice insurance. Making a decent living after those years of schooling is what makes the profession attractive enough to bring some of America's best and brightest to it. When government uses its "negotiating power" to bring down the cost of medical care by artificially setting prices below what the market can sustain, the system will lose doctors. They deserve a reward for their efforts— beyond the great honor of having their motives impugned by the president of the United States in a health care speech, of course.

The men and women who treat us every day do not have to be doctors, as anesthesiologist Ronald Dworkin notes in today's WSJ:

The progressives' third mistake is to skimp on anesthesiology. In no medical specialty is the spread between the Medicare rates and private insurance rates greater. Progressives expect to pay anesthesiologists Medicare rates, which are 65% less than private insurance rates, without any change in the system. But there will be changes.

Some anesthesiologists will leave the field. They are already faced with lawsuits at every turn. Something else has happened in America that threatens to tip the balance for anesthesiologists. Americans have grown very fat. This complicates anesthesia tremendously. Putting in IVs, spinals and epidurals is harder. Inserting breathing tubes is much more dangerous.

Doctors are largely very smart, driven professionals who could become successful entrepreneurs, ad men, consultants, or (gasp!) lobbyists. You name it. Liberals will kvetch that doctors aren't or shouldn't be in it for the money. Indeed, many of them aren't, and spend much of their spare time helping the poor with overseas medical missions, inner-city dental check-ups, and free clinics. But they do and should act in their own self-interest.

"Planes come first," says the Russian military.

The Russian Defense Ministry and the Tupolev aircraft maker have signed a contract on the development of a new-generation strategic bomber, the company's general director said on Wednesday.

"We signed a contract this year on research and development of a future strategic bomber for the Russian strategic aviation. It will be a conceptually new plane based on the most advanced technologies," Igor Shevchuk said at the MAKS-2009 air show near Moscow.

Russia's Air Force commander, Col. Gen. Alexander Zelin earlier said a fifth-generation strategic bomber could be used effectively in both conventional and nuclear conflicts.

"The new plane will use a wide selection of high-precision weapons, and will have a whole range of new combat capabilities, allowing it to apply new methods to carrying out deterrence tasks," he said.

Tupolev is projecting a 2020 deployment, which translates to 2030 from Russian to English. If Tupolev is half as inefficient as Sukhoi -- Ivan's fighter production company which has promised a "Raptor-killer" for years -- then I wouldn't give their NGB a second thought. What does worry me is the prospect of proliferation and an influx of Chinese money. If the PLA were to field an advanced bomber, presumably boasting supercruise and a certain level of stealth, the balance of power in the Pacific would be drastically altered -- a condition exponentially worsened by the cancelation of the F-22 program.

I’m not quite sure what to expect when Tom DeLay takes to the dance floor on next month’s Dancing With the Stars. But I can’t get out of my mind David Brent’s “performance” in BBC’s The Office. (Remember how Brent describes his style: “I’ve sort of fused Flashdance with M.C. Hammer shit.” Also note how the crowd is humming the bass line to “Disco Inferno.”)

I would definitely vote for DeLay if he could pull that off.

The Obama administration is, according to the Washington Post, still discussing the possibility of sending at least some (it is not clear how many) of the 98 Yemeni detainees held at Gitmo to Saudi Arabia. The administration has previously floated the idea of having the Yemenis reeducated in the Saudis’ rehabilitation program for jihadists. The only real question is: Why?

At least three problems come immediately to mind.

First, the Saudis have rejected previous overtures in this vein on multiple occasions. This likely indicates that the Saudis themselves don’t think this is such a good idea. And the administration will almost certainly have to spend some of its political capital to convince them otherwise. The United States regularly tries to get the Saudis to do more with respect to shutting down terrorism and extremism financing. Asking the Saudis to watch over citizens of another country, when their cooperation on so many other related matters is uneven, is a bit of a stretch.

Second, the Saudi rehabilitation program is clearly not as effective as was initially claimed. Earlier this year, the Saudis reported that 11 of the Kingdom’s 85 most wanted terrorists were former Gitmo detainees who were “rehabilitated” in the program. (One has since reentered Saudi custody.) One of these 11 is now a prominent leader of al Qaeda’s arm on the Arabian Peninsula. That same al Qaeda branch is the chief reason the Obama administration does not want to send the Yemenis back to their home country. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is particularly strong in Yemen. Besides the 11 former Gitmo detainees, dozens of other terrorists placed on Saudi Arabia’s most wanted list had also been “rehabilitated.”

Moreover, testimony from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) reveals that U.S. intelligence officials are increasingly wary of the program, or at least they should be. The Federation of American Scientists (fas.org) recently released a declassified version of the ODNI’s written responses to questions posed by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence earlier this year. The responses, which were crafted for an annual threat hearing held on February 12, include a number of interesting tidbits about the Saudi rehabilitation program.

Continetti takes Joe Klein to task for his patently false claim that "There is no Republican health-care alternative in 2009." It's the kind of "intellectual dishonesty" of which Klein and others on the left so often accuse Republicans. But Klein isn't just intellectually dishonest. He's plain dishonest. How else to explain the fact that after nearly two months, he has still not retracted this statement:

...the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit is a triumph of diplomacy. It should be something more than that, though: the beginning of a negotiation. Releasing Shalit is a gesture by Hamas that clearly demands an Israeli response--opening the checkpoints into Gaza for construction equipment and materials, so the Gazans can start rebuilding their homes, would be a start.

Gilad Shalit still languishes in captivity. There was no triumph of diplomacy, but a triumph of naivete -- Klein had such a friendly interview with Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal earlier that month that he came away believing "that Israel is the prime impediment to progress in the Middle East."

Maybe Klein would like to inform his readers that Gilad Shalit has not yet been released by Hamas? Or am I just being a "prosaic tactician"?

Roll Call reports:

The NRSC’s Aaron Harrison was taking a lot of heat from the RNC sideline. Harrison played for the RNC last year, switching to the NRSC this year. As he walked to the sideline amid a chorus of catcalls, Harrison turned to the RNC sideline and said, “This is all RNC leadership’s fault. They didn’t re-sign me.”

How bad are the numbers on health care for the administration? So bad that Cantor spokesman Brad Dayspring can one on one an analysis by the Plum Line's Greg Sargent:

Poll Shows GOP Arguments About Health Care May Be Resonating
...
• 67 percent of Americans believe that wait times for health care services (such as surgery) will increase (91 percent of Republicans, 37 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of Independents).

• Roughly 6 out of 10 Americans believe that taxpayers will be required to pay for abortions (78 percent of Republicans, 30 percent of Democrats, 58 percent of Independents)

• 5 out 10 believe the federal government will become directly involved in making personal health care decisions (80 percent of Republicans, 25 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of Independents)

• Almost 6 out of 10 Americans believe that a public insurance option as proposed would be too expensive for the United States to afford (84 percent of Republicans, 27 percent of Democrats, 58 percent of Independents).

• 51 percent believe that the public insurance option will increase health care costs (79 percent of Republicans, 21 percent of Democrats, 53 percent of Independents).

This is, of course, only one poll, and other polls clearly show support for key aspects of reform, such as the public option. But these numbers won't make the White House and Dems happy.

And while the media reaches for the smelling salts every time a poll indicates that Republicans believe some dubious proposition about health care reform, how about the delusional 79 percent of Democrats who are telling pollsters that these reforms will not increase health care costs. How on earth can they think that we're going to insure 47 million people without having to pay more for health care -- or are they just following the lead of the president, who insists that it's as simple as offering red pills instead of blue pills (or is it the other way around?)?

More trouble in Paradise for the president, and not just from the storm brewing off Martha’s Vineyard that threatens to interfere with his vacation. At a fundraiser for the Lambda Legal Defense Fund held last month by a wealthy gay couple at their ocean-front Fire Island home, Obama’s name invoked something less than the adulation he has come to expect from his well-heeled lib fan base. Time’s John Cloud reports:

At last year's brunch, cheers went up virtually every time Barack Obama's name was uttered. This time, when Lambda executive director Kevin Cathcart began to review the President's record on gay issues, he was greeted with steely silence.

Turns out the president’s record on gay issues, like his record on so many matters of import to the various “communities” that lavished their money and their votes upon him, is mixed. On the one hand, he’s against gay marriage, and, as Cloud puts it, “pandered to African-American audiences -- a group that was already for him” by inviting a black singer who “believes one’s sexuality can be changed by praying to Jesus Christ” to perform at campaign events. On the other hand, he claims to oppose the Defense of Marriage Act. On the third hand, his administration defended DOMA in a lawsuit, employing “a legal argument so reactionary that it would embarrass Dick Cheney (who, incidentally, is to the left of Obama on marriage).” On the fourth hand, “Now the Administration says it opposes DOMA and wants it overturned -- but that tradition dictates that it defend the law.” On the fifth hand . . . well, you get the picture.

Obama's triangulation between left and right has become excruciatingly obvious on this issue, and he's not quite as deft a politician as Bill Clinton at keeping his left flank at bay. I wouldn't be surprised if, next summer at the 32nd Fire Island Pines fundraiser for Lambda, I hear booing when the President's name is mentioned.

At best, you could say this is the portrait of every liberal politician struggling to find the balance between “values” that are very much at war with one another. At worst, this is the story of a particular man, Barack Obama, who combines the mastery of a pol willing to use any means, including not a little prevarication, to get himself elected with the ineptitude of a person so accustomed to the free ride that he is actually shocked when someone hands him a bill and expects him to pay it.

Looking forward to reading about that booing next year, Mr. Cloud.

I don't know whether Joe Klein believes Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin is a "nihilist" and a "hypocrite" engaged in a "disinformation jihad" aimed at persuading the "tight, white, extremist bubble" that is the GOP to defeat ObamaCare. Still, it might have been a good idea for Klein to have read Ryan's health care reform plan, or the Republican Study Committee proposal, or Michele Bachmann's Health Care Freedom of Choice Act, or the many ideas included in Yuval Levin's latest editorial in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, before he wrote in his new column that "There is no Republican health-care alternative in 2009."

The White House released behind-the-scenes pictures from the Obama administration this week, evidently fearful that between WhiteHouse.gov, his Twitter feed, near-constant presence on TV, and spam e-mails to unwilling citizens, he might be in danger of being slightly underexposed.

Whew!

In these behind-the-scenes photos we get an even more intimate look at the president's substantial self-regard. For instance, the Obama family has outfitted Bo Obama with an "I Heart Obama" leash. Fashionable and utterly self-absorbed!

He plays basketball with, as ABC terms them, "Obama-branded basketballs."

And, he's moved from giving iPods loaded with his own speeches to visiting dignitaries to...wait for it...autographed Obama basketballs.

Stay tuned for next week's behind-the-scenes look at the new Oval Office rug, which will undoubtedly be a custom-woven version of his campaign logo "O."

Charles Krauthammer seeks a research assistant for one or two year term. Email resume to job[at]charleskrauthammer.com.

A deep point from Erick Erickson at RedState in response to Obama's statement to some 1,000 rabbis yesterday that “We are God’s partners in matters of life and death”:

Partners “in life and death.” Really? So this is a tacit admission that Barack Obama’s government is going to play a role in matters of death?

The Washington Post reports on the administration's efforts to release and resettle Gitmo detainees:

"Obama has a lot of political capital. Countries want to do something for him, and that allows us to say, 'This is it, this is what we want you to do,' " said a senior administration official. "This is going a lot better than we might have thought."

The administration puts out a statement on the release of Abdel Basset Mohamed al-Megrahi:

The United States deeply regrets the decision by the Scottish Executive to release Abdel Basset Mohamed al-Megrahi. Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for his role in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which blew up over Scotland on December 21, 1988. As we have expressed repeatedly to officials of the government of the United Kingdom and to Scottish authorities, we continue to believe that Megrahi should serve out his sentence in Scotland. On this day, we extend our deepest sympathies to the families who live every day with the loss of their loved ones. We recognize the effects of such a loss weigh upon a family forever.

So, the administration can use its political capital to get European nations to take in freed detainees from Gitmo, but can't convince them to keep convicted terrorists in jail.

Remember when the media breathlessly reported on all of the anti-Bush protesters who advocated assassinating the president?

HT: Jonah Goldberg

"I know there's been a lot of misinformation in this debate, and there are some folks out there who are frankly bearing false witness," President Obama said during a conference call with religious folks this evening, "but I want everyone to know what health insurance reform is all about."

He then repeated all of the misleading statements weaved into his stump speech, such as his statement that "If you like your health care plan you can keep your health care plan."

But he also added a new lie to the list, saying:

"You've heard that this is all going to mean government funding of abortion. Not true. These are all fabrications that have been put out there in order to discourage people from meeting what I consider to be a core ethical and moral obligation--and that is that we look out for one another, that I am my brother's keeper and I am my sister's keeper. And on the wealthiest nation on earth right now, we are neglecting to live up to that call."

While the White House "reality check" website was silent on the issue of abortion in Obamacare, his campaign website quotes a false outdated factcheck.org statement that "In fact, none of the health care overhaul measures that have made it through the committee level in Congress say that abortion will be covered".

In fact, the Capps Amendment passed by the House Energy and Commerce committee would require the establishment of at least one plan covering elective abortions in every federally-subsidized exchange, and it gives the HHS Secretary the authority to include abortion coverage in the public plan and requires that the public plan cover abortion if the Hyde amendment (which bans funding of abortions through Medicaid) is repealed.

Supporters of the Capps Amendment argue that in theory the amendment would require an abortionist to be paid out of the premiums contributed by the individual (not with the federal subsidies). So, say, an individual contributes $500 to purchase an insurance policy, and the federal government provides that individual with $3,000 in taxpayer-subsidies. When the bill comes due from the abortionist, he will theoretically be paid out of the $500 contributed by the individual.*

This is a distinction without a difference. Without the federal subsidies the individual would not have access to a plan that covers abortion -- i.e. without the taxpayer-subsidies many people would otherwise be paying full price for an abortion out of pocket.

Currently, health insurance plans for federal employees cannot cover abortions. Their premium dollars cannot be segregated and used to purchase abortions. Pro-life leaders call this a "bookkeeping scheme". Can any intellectually honest person call it something else? As Reason's Jacob Sullum wrote, "The Democrats might as well tell the anti-abortion taxpayer that they won't use his money to kill fetuses, which will be done only with money from taxpayers who have no compunctions about the procedure."

*It is unclear who will pay for the additional cost of abortions that cost more than the total premiums contributed.

Obama leaves for Martha's Vineyard this weekend -- a visit that may coincide with the arrival of Bill:

Remember when Obama thought that questions of religious import were "above my pay grade"? Or when the left thought that an American president shouldn't presume to act on behalf of the Lord? Not any more:

In a morning conference call with about 1000 rabbis from across the nation, Obama asked for aid: "I am going to need your help in accomplishing necessary reform," the President told the group, according to Rabbi Jack Moline, who tweeted his way through the phoner.

"We are God's partners in matters of life and death," Obama went on to say, according to Moline's real-time stream.

So if Obama's on God's team, which team is the other 54 percent of Americans on?

George Stephanopoulos: "Administration officials are thinking about how to use the former First Couple [the Clintons] on the subject they know so much about: health care."

The independents who provided the lift for the Democrats' soaring political fortunes in 2006 and 2008 are abandoning the Democratic party. The new Pew poll has Obama's job approval rating at 51 percent, and finds that "Independents, who approved of Obama’s job performance by nearly two-to-one in June (56 percent to 29 percent) are now about evenly divided: 45 percent approve while 43 percent disapprove."

Nationally, the Republicans have not benefited fully from the independent out-migration. But at the state level, the shift is helping the GOP's fortunes. Republicans lead in Virginia and New Jersey in 2009, and Tom Bevan notes at the RCP blog that Bill McCollum, a Republican candidate to replace Gov. Charlie Crist in 2010, leads Democrat Alex Sink by 4 points, "due almost exclusively to a big swing among Independents."

Why the change? It must have something to do with Obama's governance to date. My guess: the man who campaigned as an advocate for a "new" bipartisan politics has proven to be a partisan, liberal Democrat. People still like Obama, they just don't like his policies.

Independents still support Obama, but they are headed in a direction that no doubt worries the White House. Maybe Obama will reassert his connection with these voters; maybe not. But their exodus serves as a reminder that American politics is determined by people who do not identify with a concrete set of partisan and ideological commitments.

Courtesy Michael Yon, who writes:

I made this photo last night in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. This Landing Zone is very dangerous. A few weeks ago, another helicopter was coming into this LZ and was shot down at the last minute, killing all passengers and crew. Two children on the ground also were killed. The sparks coming off the rotors occur when the helicopters land in hot, dusty conditions. The landing itself occurs in a dangerous "brownout." Brownout danger is compounded by the sparks which light up the dust and can confuse pilots who are wearing extremely sensitive nightvision goggles.

View the entire photo series here.

Mark Murray writes at MSNBC.com that yesterday's NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll found that "Americans remain skeptical about White House plans to overhaul the nation's health system." It sure did!

But the poll also finds that "myths endure" concerning pending health care legislation, according to the Journal's Washington Wire. Among these "myths," Susan Davis writes, is the idea that "the overhaul will lead to a 'complete' government takeover of the health care system." Writes Davis: "[T]here is also no actual proposal for that."

Of course there isn't. (Unless you count, you know, John Conyer's HR 676, which imposes "Medicare for all"-style government health care and has 93 cosponsors.)

But the NBC / Journal poll question didn't ask whether respondents thought the bill "was a government takeover of health care." It asked whether the bill "will lead to a government takeover of the health system [my emphasis]." That's a subjective prediction, not a statement of fact.

Some opponents of health care reform believe that the plan - the "public option" in particular - may result in unanticipated outcomes and subsequent government interventions that could crowd out the private insurance market and lead to a system of national health care. This is not an outlandish position. Even Barney Frank has said that the "public option" (which he supports) is "the only way" that "we're going to get to single payer [i.e., government health care]." By the Journal's reasoning, then, Frank is also propagating a "myth," as the House bill does not currently contain provisions for a single-payer system.

The rhetoric of "fact-checking" has allowed journalists to show that a politician's claims or an individual's perceptions may not be true. Which is good. But it has also allowed a lot of journalists to betray partisan biases under the cloak of "truth-telling." Which is not so good.

At yesterday's White House press briefing, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs took a step back to reiterate a familiar Democratic argument that we need a "public plan" to provide "choice and competition" in the health insurance market. "I want to step back just for one second and discuss -- because we threw around the notions of choice and competition -- let's discuss why you need choice and competition," said Gibbs, who continued:

my home state of Alabama, BlueCross/BlueShield has roughly 89 percent of the private health insurance market, okay? We all understand that in a monopoly, where one side dominates the entire market, it's going to be hard to keep down costs, right? If you had one place to eat lunch before you came to the briefing, do you think it would be cheap?

"Probably not," replied CNN's Ed Henry, who served as Gibbs's interlocutor during this Socratic dialogue.

"Probably not," Gibbs agreed. "If you had two places to eat, my sense is competing dishes might not be as expensive as if there were only one."

Gibbs's argument sounds reasonable enough, but Republicans have a sound, two-fold response: (1) Replacing a private monopoly with a public monopoly won't do much good (a study by the Lewin Group shows that the government plan could cover 100 million people), and (2) there are better ways to promote choice and competition in the marketplace.

"It is government policy that prevents competition in the health insurance industry," Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) told me during a phone interview. Shadegg has sponsored the Health Care Choice Act to allow individuals to purchase policies across state lines to increase competition. Each state currently regulates what and who insurance companies must cover, and, as this report from the National Center for Policy Analysis shows, there is a much stronger correlation between costs and regulation. For example, a 25-year old man in highly-regulated New Jersey or New York would pay more than $5,000 for a policy while the same person would pay only about $1,500 in lightly-regulated Iowa or Kansas.

In addition to letting people purchase policies across state lines, Shadegg argues that "we have to enable people to purchase their own health insurance at the same tax advantage basis that a company can buy it."

"What if you got home today and you got two letters, one from your auto insurance company and one from your health insurance company?" Shadegg asks. "For auto insurance you'd call one of their competitors, and ask 'what can you do for me?' " But you wouldn't have that option if you get your insurance through your employer. "That's what helps make health insurance companies very unaccountable," he says. "They only have to market to employers, they don't have to market to you and me."

One of the most contentious issues among military planners is how, exactly, we should be fighting the counter-insurgency in Afghanistan. CENTCOM boss General Petraeus figured Iraq out quickly, but cracking the Hindu Kush's human terrain remains -- as it has for centuries -- the bane of empires and great powers. "Is the military mission to engage, push back and dismantle the Taliban networks," asks Bing West, "with population protection being a tactic to gain tips and local militia, or is the military mission to build a nation by US soldiers protecting the widespread population, with engagements against the Taliban as a byproduct?"

West figures it's the latter, for two reasons. First, non-kinetic operations are more palatable to the American public, the lifeblood of any war effort. That's why you see Navy recruiting commercials emphasizing foreign tsunami and disaster relief just as frequently as their standard warheads-on-foreheads fare. Second, denying insurgents use of the local population is prime-directive number one in any low-intensity fight. There's two ways to accomplish that mission: brutalize the population until they're broken like a well-trained horse (a favorite insurgent tactic) or -- because the first option is proscribed by our Western values -- feed, shelter, and protect them until you can bring your superior firepower to bear on the now-isolated enemy.

That soft power, it seems, is the new hotness in Afghanistan. But is it costing us our ability to inflict severe casualties on the Taliban? Controlling the population is only the first step in a successful COIN fight, the second is decimating the opposition to a point where they can no longer function as a combat entity. West lays this out succinctly:

...our ground forces are not inflicting heavy losses on the enemy. However, the annual bill for the US military in Afghanistan exceeds $70 billion, with another four to six billion for development. We’ve already spent $38 billion on Afghan reconstruction. Congress may eventually balk at spending such sums year after year. The problem is we’re liable to be gradually pulled out while the Taliban is intact. Nation-building alone is not sufficient; the Taliban must be disrupted.

My colleague Bill Roggio has made similar points here on the blog -- you'll never be able to fully reconstruct Afghanistan as long as there's a big chunk of the indigenous population eager to tear the place back down. History's failed counterinsurgency fights have been marked by efficient armies obsessed with kill ratios instead of the human terrain. The point West is making, and I think it's a sound one, is that we've moved so far in the opposite direction, we may be forgetting that the enemy still needs to be crushed -- however delicately.

As the Obama administration presses Pakistan to continue the battle against the Taliban in the tribal areas, Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, is courting Pakistan's Islamists as part of the effort to listen to critics of American policy. One of the Islamist leaders Holbrooke met with was Fazl-ur-Rehman, a known supporter of the Taliban. Here is how Reuters described Rehman:

Holbrooke rejected the party's complaints about a Western "assault" on Islam, saying "that could not be further from the truth" with Obama, who has roots in the religion, now in the White House.

Fazl-ur-Rehman, whose Jamiat-e-ulema-e-Islam party was active in rousing support for the Taliban in 1990s, also got an audience with Holbrooke and his team.

Rehman denies al Qaeda's responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and once warned that if U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan, no American in Pakistan would be safe.

In more recent years, however, Rehman's relationship with the Taliban has grown uneasy, and he has publicly supported negotiations between the U.S.-backed government in Kabul and the Islamist group.

Actually, Rehman and his political party haven't backed all that far away from supporting the Taliban. In fact, Rehman's party was responsible for hosting a rally for supporters of slain Afghan Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah in 2007.

Dadullah was one of the most capable and wanted Taliban commanders in Afghanistan. He was in charge of the Taliban's military operations in the South, which includes Helmand and Kandahar, the two most violent provinces in Afghansitan. Dadullah is also responsible for incorporating suicide attacks into Taliban operations -- he hosted camps that trained suicide bombers.

During the rally in Pakistan's Baluchistan province, senior members of Rehman's party eulogized Dadullah in front of more than 10,000 supporters. Also, recordings from senior Taliban leaders, including his brother Mansoor, who took over Taliban operations, were piped in.

"We will complete Dadullah's mission by expelling Americans and liberating Afghanistan," Mansoor said.

"The charged audience kept raising slogans of ‘Long live Mullah Omar, Long Live Osama bin Laden and Taliban movement,’" a Pakistani newspaper reported in June 2007.

One should question whether Holbrooke is courting those who merely disagree with U.S. policy, or the enemy.

Contentions has two excellent blog posts, the first by Noah Pollak and the second by Ted R. Bromund, about the recent decision by Yale University to censor an upcoming book it is releasing about the 2005 Danish Muhammad cartoon controversy, The Cartoons That Shook the World, by removing from it the relevant cartoons themselves and several other depictions of Muhammad. The reasoning behind their deletion, as cited by Martin Kramer, is that they would "provoke a violent outcry" if published in the book, a claim Contentions (and Christopher Hitchens) rightly slams as ridiculous and as one that absolves the perpetrators of such violence of any culpability for their actions:

“[N]ote who is not held responsible: the potential rioters, who are apparently automatons and spring uncontrollably and unstoppably into action whenever a Westerner dares to offend them. Thus, as part of our relentless quest for a quiet life, the press must avoid causing offense to anyone. If that is not appeasement, I don’t know what is.”

Also, as Roger Kimball notes, this establishes a dangerous standard by which other depictions of Muhammad may be censored:

“What happens when some enterprising young curator puts together an exhibition of the work of Gustave Doré? Will he be told that he cannot include that work depicting Mohammed in Hell? What happens when someone wants to do a catalogue raisonné of the work of Salvador Dalí? Will his image of Mohammed be omitted? Ditto on William Blake, Botticelli, and Giovanni da Modena, all of whom illustrated that passage from Dante. The Koran forbids any depiction of Mohammed, so what about that bas relief at the U.S. Supreme Court by Adolph Weinman depicting Mohammed holding a sword?”

Even if these fears never materialize, this is another disappointing moment for the rapidly diminishing ideal of open discourse on college campuses.

Funny how Obamacare makes for strange bedfellows. After Whole Foods CEO John Mackey expressed his opposition to the administration’s health care reform plans in the Wall Street Journal, liberals have been up in arms, and as reported by Ylan Q. Mui in today’s Washington Post, a Boycott Whole Foods movement has been born:

"A lot of people have been paying a premium for the Whole Foods brand for years," said Mark Rosenthal, a playwright living in Massachusetts who founded the Boycott Whole Foods group a few days ago. It has nearly 14,000 members. "A lot of people are sad to look at this corporation and see that it is just like any other, if not worse."

Which has led to a counterreaction: “Now is the time for all good capitalists to shop at Whole Foods,” urges conservative columnist Kathleen Parker. Not that John Mackey is a conservative--he’s a serious libertarian and an environmental activist. He is also a health fanatic: His employees have terrific benefits and can earn 30 percent discounts if they meet weight and blood pressure benchmarks.

But it seems that for these boycotters, it isn’t enough that Mackey shares their thoughts on a greener planet. They may agree with him 90 percent of the time. But it’s not enough, so Mackey must pay a price.

For the record, I’ve been to Whole Foods--or as it is commonly known, “Whole Paycheck.” Many of the products I find annoying. Grass-fed beef is incredibly pricey (for $21 a pound, you can get dry-aged steakhouse cuts). But the wild sockeye Alaskan salmon is worth every penny.

So take Parker’s advice and support Whole Foods, even if you can afford only two diver scallops for dinner (just don’t overcook them!). And if you still aren’t persuaded to help Mackey out, allow me to share the thoughts of one boycotter quoted in Mui’s Post piece:

"Dear Store Manager," a member of the Boycott Whole Foods Facebook group wrote, "The 30 risotto cakes that I purchased from Jenkintown Whole Foods, last Friday, were scrumptious. But today they are giving me indigestion of the soul as I realize that my money may have funded the demise of the public option in the nation's health care reform legislative debate."

Now go out there and get something organic.

From a just posted piece by Elliott Abrams:

This week brought the odd juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated events: the death of former South Korean president Kim Dae Jung, and the visit to the United States of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. What links the two events is America's human rights policy--or lack of it.

Read the whole thing here.

As the Times and Politico report today, the White House is now backing a unilateral approach to health care reform. How did we reach this impasse? Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny report:

Top Democrats said Tuesday that their go-it-alone view was being shaped by what they saw as Republicans’ purposely strident tone against health care legislation during this month’s Congressional recess, as well as remarks by leading Republicans that current proposals were flawed beyond repair.

Translation: It's all the GOP's fault.

But not just the GOP! Here's today's Post story on the intra-Democratic debate on the public option:

"I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We've gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don't understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform."

"It's a mystifying thing," he added. "We're forgetting why we are in this."

Translation: The left is to blame, too.

Is the White House ever responsible for its political miscalculations?

Because now it's treason. Meet Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.), who appeared at a left-wing conference to accuse Senator Chuck Grassley of "treason" for expressing concern about the possibility of health care rationing.

Meanwhile, the Democratic party has stopped trying to brand opponents of Obamacare as a "mob" of adherents to National Socialism, but there is an actual mob out there breaking the law and imposing its own brand of vigilante justice and it is not composed of right-wingers. The Oakland Tribune reports:

Anti-war activists protested Monday at the University of California, Berkeley to call for the firing of a law professor who co-wrote legal memos that critics say were used to justify the torture of suspected terrorists.

Campus police arrested at least four people who refused to leave the university's law school building.

The demonstrators said John Yoo should be dismissed, disbarred and prosecuted for war crimes for his work as a Bush administration attorney from 2001 to 2003, when he helped craft legal theories for waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques.

Just a reminder: the left has no problem with accusing people of war crimes and treason for holding dissenting opinions.

HT: Hot Air

From the Miami Herald:

The Obama administration has filed classified notices with Congress of plans to transfer six Guantánamo detainees to foreign countries under a new congressional reporting rule created to hamper the closure of the controversial prison camps, a source familiar with the process said on Tuesday.

All six so-called risk assessments and notification of transfers were filed Aug. 7, meaning the first transfers under the new notification bureaucracy could occur over the weekend at the earliest.

One of the six Gitmo detainees mentioned in the paragraph above is Mohammed Jawad, who is accused of throwing a grenade at a vehicle carrying two American servicemen and their Afghan translator. All three were wounded in the attack. The administration said it was pursuing the possibility of a criminal prosecution against Jawad, but that is looking increasingly unlikely.

In addition, who are the five other Gitmo detainees the administration is planning to transfer? What standards were used to determine that they were worthy of transfer? What measures will be taken to ensure they do not become a security risk after they leave Gitmo? Is the Obama administration paying countries to take them? If so, how much? What do we know about these detainees' lives, including putative ties to the terror network, prior to their time at Gitmo?

These are just a few of the questions that come to mind. The Bush administration's transfer and release policies were not transparent either, and significant mistakes were made prior to January 2009. And the classified notices are most likely in accordance with Congress's specified notification standards. But, isn't this supposed to be the most transparent administration in history? Isn't it supposed to be better?

Why shouldn't the public be made aware of which detainees are up for transfer?

CNN's Larry King showed the above video of Barney Frank laying the smack down on a woman at a townhall meeting who compared Obama to Hitler. CNN left out the fact that this woman is a Lyndon LaRouche Democrat.

In the full video (via Allahpundit), the woman says, "This policy is already on the way out. It already has been defeated by LaRouche." She also underscores her crazy LaRouchite beliefs by claiming that the U.S. has "30% real unemployment". No one disputes that LaRouchites are on the fringe -- but it's indisputable that they are fringe Democrats. They oppose Obamacare because they want a single-payer plan.

While Nancy Pelosi and liberal talk-show host Bill Press have been smearing protesters as fascists and Nazis, left-wing bloggers have been attacking protesters for comparing Obama to Hitler. It seems townhall attendees just can't win.

Just as it would be unfair to assume that all Think Progress readers are idiots who call conservatives Nazis just because a few commenters do, it's a cheap trick to pretend that the few people who show up with Obama as Hitler signs are representative of the protesters (especially when many of those people are Lyndon LaRouche Democrats).

Jake Tapper: Will Bagram become Obama's Gitmo?

Byron York wonders where have all the anti-war protesters gone?

Ace: Howard Dean says Republicans want to "kill the bill and kill the president."

Allahpundit Polls show Obama’s disapproval rating, GOP’s generic ballot lead at new highs. (NBC poll shows Obama down to 51% approval rating.)

Pretty please: Biden in 2016.

The New Republic's Noam Scheiber: right-wing Obamacare opponents "are either insane or deeply cynical." Or both! Left-wingers and their false dichotomies . . .

Having spent ten days mostly out of news range, I missed watching as it happened the fabulous Sarah Palin takedown of the Obamacare “death panels.” But am now all caught up, thanks to Richard Cohen’s column of today attacking her.

Mrs. Palin needs no defending by me—she’s got more than smarts and guts enough to take on the 98-ounce weakling that is Mr. Cohen’s mind. And in general the piece showcases his usual sneering rediscovery of the wheel—“aha! I have thought up something almost original: I’ll compare a conservative to Joseph McCarthy!”

But something he says more or less in passing cries out for special note:

as is almost always the case with right-wing populists, the shooter has aimed at her own foot. Palin's "death panel" remarks either killed or helped kill the proposal to offer end-of-life counseling. The victims will be the poor, the uninformed and the ideologically blind who will find themselves unable to make a graceful exit. The affluent have their living wills and such. The poor have only their grief.

A graceful exit after end-of-life counseling. Well, thanks to Sarah Palin’s McCarthyite meddling, only very rich old people who are ideologically sophisticated enough to realize what a drain they are on the rest of us will get to experience the pulling of their own plugs, while old poor people (and recalcitrant rubes like her who refuse to practice eugenics on their own children), who really should consider offing themselves rather than wasting precious medical resources by seeking treatment, will continue selfishly struggle to stay alive.

In the most recent habeas decision handed down by a D.C. District Court judge, the court ruled that Gitmo detainee Adham Mohammed Ali Awad is properly held in U.S. custody.

The judges’ habeas rulings have been remarkably uneven, frequently leaving out key facts or applying inconsistent or unreasonable standards for weighing evidence.

For example, the court’s ruling in the Uighur detainees’ habeas case did not even mention Abdul Haq -- a key al Qaeda terrorist who the detainees admitted was the head of their group and responsible for overseeing their training. The result is that courts frequently ignore or downplay evidence that should count heavily against the detainees’ favor. That is why, in my view, a significant number of habeas decisions have gone against the government thus far.

I’ll have more to say on the courts’ habeas rulings in the future. Regardless, judging by the U.S. government’s evidence and allegations against Awad, it certainly appears the courts got it right in this instance. In addition, consider some of the statements Adham (aka “Waqas”) Mohammed Ali Awad has reportedly made while in U.S. custody. According to a memo prepared by the U.S. government:

[Awad] called all Americans evil, men without testicles, and game players. The detainee said interrogators do not interrogate, they just meet with detainees to beautify themselves.

[Awad] stated that he prays to God every night that the interviewers get tongue and throat cancer so they can no longer interview detainees. When asked if he was threatening the interviewers with his prayer, the detainee said that he was.

The habeas decision in Awad’s case is still classified, so we cannot tell the precise reasons the judge decided he was properly detained. It is unlikely that any of Awad’s inflammatory comments weighed against him because the courts have not put much weight on them in previous decisions. It is more likely that Awad’s time training at Osama bin Laden’s Tarnak Farms, a pre-9/11 training facility for elite al Qaeda terrorists, and other troubling pieces of evidence weighed heavily against him.

For instance, Awad was arrested after hunkering down in a hospital in Afghanistan with other al Qaeda terrorists for a lengthy siege that was only ended after U.S. Special Forces stormed the building. Five al Qaeda members were killed in the process and U.S. servicemen uncovered a significant arms cache. Awad was initially taken to the hospital after he was reportedly involved in a car crash while fleeing the American invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. Awad lost a leg in the process.

Awad’s reported comments are not atypical of the Gitmo detainees. At times, even the most hardened detainees feign passivity. But then again, sometimes they just can’t keep themselves from lashing out at the “infidels.”