WashPost: “Detainee Tortured, Says U.S. Official”

The Washington Post, January 14 2009, by Bob Woodward:

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a “life-threatening condition.”

“We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,” said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.

And also in today’s Post:

A former military prosecutor said in a declaration filed in federal court yesterday that the system of handling evidence against detainees at Guantanamo Bay is so chaotic that it is impossible to prepare a fair and successful prosecution.

Darrel Vandeveld, a former lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, filed the declaration in support of a petition seeking the release of Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan who has been held at the military prison in Cuba for six years. Jawad was a juvenile when he was detained in Kabul in 2002 after a grenade attack that severely wounded two U.S. Special Forces soldiers and their interpreter.

Vandeveld, who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was the lead prosecutor against Jawad until he asked to be relieved of his duties last year, citing a crisis of conscience. He said the case has been riddled with problems, including alleged physical and psychological abuse of Jawad by Afghan police and the U.S. military, as well as reliance on evidence that was later found to be missing, false or unreliable.

Vandeveld said in a phone interview that the “complete lack of organization” has affected nearly all cases at Guantanamo Bay. The evidence is often so disorganized, he said, “it was like a stash of documents found in a village in a raid and just put on a plane to the U.S. Not even rudimentary organization by date or name.”

Interesting Articles about Obama

The New Yorker:

Chicago is not Obama’s home town, but it’s where he chose to forge his identity. Several weeks ago, he moved many of the Democratic National Committee’s operations from Washington to Chicago, making the city the unofficial capital of the Democratic Party; his campaign headquarters are in an office building in the Loop, Chicago’s downtown business district. But Chicago, with its reputation as a center of vicious and corrupt politics, may also be the place that Obama needs to leave behind.

The New York Times:

But there has been little humor about Mr. Obama: about his age, his speaking ability, his intelligence, his family, his physique. And within a late-night landscape dominated by white hosts, white writers, and overwhelmingly white audiences, there has been almost none about his race.

“We’re doing jokes about people in his orbit, not really about him,” said Mike Sweeney, the head writer for Mr. O’Brien on “Late Night.” The jokes will come, representatives of the late-night shows said, when Mr. Obama does or says something that defines him — in comedy terms.

“We’re carrion birds,” said Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show” on the Comedy Central channel. “We’re sitting up there saying ‘Does he seem weak? Is he dehydrated yet? Let’s attack.’ ”

The New York Times:

“As President, I will pursue a tough, smart and principled national security strategy — one that recognizes that we have interests beyond Baghdad, in Kandahar and Karachi, in Tokyo and London, in Beijing and Berlin,” he said. “I will focus this strategy on five goals essential to making America safer: ending the war in Iraq responsibly; finishing the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban; securing all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue states; achieving true energy security; and rebuilding our alliances to meet the challenges of the 21st century.”

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama

Obama:

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs – to the larger aspirations of all Americans — the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination – and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past – are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

“inhaling democracy”

IM conversation with an Iraqi friend now living in New York:

Friend: are u following spitzer’s resignation now
Friend: ?
Friend: crazy

Cyrus Farivar: yeah

Friend: cool
Friend: his wife is so pissed
Friend: man that’s so cool
Friend: they just resign like that
Friend: when they make awful mistakes

Cyrus Farivar: why is that cool?

Friend: in iraq
Friend: that never happened
Friend: no one resigned
Friend: no matter what they did
Friend: they outlived the people
Friend: i’m relishing the democratic process
Friend: kind of inhaling democracy

NYT’s Voices from the Polls

I’m interviewing voters as they come out of the voting booths in Oakland, Piedmont and Lafayette today for the NYT’s online feature “Voices from the Polls”.

Check it out here.

Update: I had to go all the way out to Danville to find Republicans. Seriously.

Daniel Hernandez on NPR: “Age, Not Race, Splits Latinos’ Democratic Vote”

Big ups once again to Daniel Hernandez for his commentary on last night’s All Things Considered : “Age, Not Race, Splits Latinos’ Democratic Vote”.

As he blogs:

Friends, my latest commentary for NPR’s “All Things Considered” ran today. It addresses the question of whether “Latino” “tensions” and “unease” with “blacks” will prevent “Latinos” from voting for “the black candidate,” Barack Obama, in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary season. Please listen here.

A bunch of those terms up there are in quotes because, damnit, the more I listen to the mainstream press in this campaign, the less I become sure that I am a breathing person created by the particular astral forces in play at the moment of my birth, my upbringing, and whatever free choices I’ve made as a sentient adult. Instead, if you listen to the papers, I’m being led to believe that because I’m Mexican American I am just a replicant, an amalgamation of whatever polls, statistics, and assumed truths that reporters, politicians, pundits, and fat-cat non-profit gurus digest and re-ingest as modern gospel.

Right now the ridiculous and dangerous “conventional wisdom” being fomented by the press is that Latinos won’t vote for Obama because he has dark skin (In sentence form, doesn’t that idea sound just absolutely absurd?). NPR reporter Mandalit del Barco tackled this subject a few days ago and found some interesting analysis. See also the well-supported writing of Gregory Rodriguez and Roberto Lovato for more.

In my perspective, I don’t propose a blind denial of race or its force in American life. What I’ve been trying to express is an exasperation with the amount of undue consequence we give to an ephemeral boogey-man that has already been proven, time and again, to be a flawed concept. In other words, I’m from the United States. In the country that I know, people who are committed to its principles know deep down that by now everyone is everything. What we do once we get past that baseline is the only thing that matters.

Does the News Matter To Anyone Anymore?

David Simon asks, in The Washington Post:

What I don’t understand is this:

Isn’t the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium — isn’t an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?

It’s hard to say that, even harder to think it. By that premise, what all of us pretended to regard as a viable commodity — indeed, as the source of all that was purposeful and heroic — was, in fact, an intellectual vanity.

Newsprint itself is an anachronism. But was there a moment before the deluge of the Internet when news organizations might have better protected themselves and their product? When they might have — as one, industry-wide — declared that their online advertising would be profitable, that their Web sites would, in fact, charge for providing a rare and worthy service?

Falafel story a fake?

The FBI denies all knowledge of the falafel story:

Having never heard of this, I spoke to the counterterrorism managers, who in the story were identified as having hatched the plan, as well as everyone else who would have had any knowledge of it. Nobody did. At one point in the story, writer Jeff Stein opines “as ridiculous as it sounds,” in reference to the alleged food monitoring plan, which reportedly was described to Mr. Stein by “well-informed sources.”

In this case, too ridiculous to be true.

CQ, are you still standing by your story?

[via The Lede ; Hat tip: Clark Boyd]

Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda’s Secrets

WashPost:

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group’s communications network.

“Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless,” said Rita Katz, the firm’s 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE’s methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz’s version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government’s ability to anticipate attacks.

While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. “We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies,” said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

But privately, some intelligence officials called the incident regrettable, and one official said SITE had been “tremendously helpful” in ferreting out al-Qaeda secrets over time.

Three LA kids become Marines


There’s a lot of famous scenes where soldiers go through boot camp, and get yelled at and drilled until it’s instilled. But how real is that, and what does it take to go from civvie to a Semper-Fi-spewin’ Marine?

The LA Times follows three kids, including one Iranian-American, to find out:

While still in high school, the friends had enlisted under the Marines’ buddy program, which guaranteed they would train in the same platoon throughout boot camp. In July, a Times article recounted the friends’ decisions to enlist and the trauma that had ensued in their homes. Now, their eager anticipation was about to run into reality.

[Staff Sgt. Juan] Diazdumeng rattled off a compendium of boot camp horrors: Black Friday, four days hence, when the recruits are assigned drill sergeants and platoons. Hell Week, the third week, crammed with debilitating tests of stamina. The Crucible, the eighth week, a punishing three-day sojourn in the mountains of Camp Pendleton.

His voice softened as he offered final advice: “Listen to the drill instructors. Do everything they tell you. Do not ask questions. They are telling you to do certain things for a reason, OK? And have a great time. Boot camp is so much fun.”

It would be one of the last times over the next three months that a Marine in authority would speak to the three recruits in a calm, nurturing, reassuring tone. In just a few hours, they would be confronted by hyper-aggressive drill sergeants whose piercing screams would begin a process of stripping suburban teenagers of their civilian psyches, their blasé attitudes, their very identities.

Be sure to watch the narrated slideshow.