Sunday news: let's embrace our trashy side edition

Are you looking for something more?  Are you looking for something less?  Are you looking for anything at all?   Join me in today's somewhat-weekly exploration of things that make the world tick.

• Six reasons to have casual sex.  No additional comment is really necessary.
• U.S. to WikiLeaks dude:  We gon' find you.  Even if we have to make stuff up.
• It's a well known fact that visitors to U.S. National Parks have an average IQ of -12.  With a cell phone, this goes down to -57.
• More in the e-readers are cooler than books saga. 
• Tired of motorcades?  Blame Theodore Roosevelt. 
• So Obama is the next Reagan?  Yee haw.  Let me just start packing my bags now.
• Coverage of Australia's PM has a sexist bent.  Are we supposed to be surprised?
• Speaking of Australia and it's super weird electoral system, they're in electoral limbo for an indefinite period.
• Continuing on the sexist line, were you aware that women are fully capable of managing tough things like nuclear weapons policy?  O.  M.  G. 
• DC Mayor Adrian Fenty has determined that being a dick to the entire human race may not be the best strategy, so he's gonna do better next time 'round.  I don't buy it.

Well now, that's that.  Don't you feel enlightened?  Ladies, don't go nuke anything.

Sunday news: there's a tear in my beer edition

I'm trying to spend the bulk of the weekend working on a long-overdue project that I owe to some of my crazy activist pals.  But one should always take a few moments to soak in the radiant rays of sunshine that are Sunday newspapers.  Here's a few kickers for you.

• Dear Europe:  This is the point where you develop an affinity for sad country songs.  Save the last dance for me.
• I'm reconsidering the issue of spawn.  Here's your one chance Fancy, don't let me down.
• Perhaps if I weren't so cynical, I'd believe all these lines about Obama/Bush differences.  Waitin' for the love of a travelin' soldier.
• Dear Graduates:  "entry-level" is now defined as somebody who's 35 and has an MBA.  One of these days.

And that's all she wrote.  You don't have to say you love me.  

Sunday news: motherly love edition

Last Sunday happened to also be my mother's birthday, and, of course, today is a special Hallmark Holiday aimed at making mothers feel special.  I see it more as a plot by a one person to get two cards in a week.  So, here you go:  a motherload of Sunday tales to keep us all reproducing (ya know, if you want... totally cool if you don't).  

• Greece:  we created western civilization, and maybe we'll destroy it. 
• Britain (Britain, Britain):  here lies the last vestiges of actually being able to govern one's nation.
• Would you believe that people are constantly trying to manage their public persona, even the one they put on teh internets?
• "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military bureaucratic complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
• Do you ever get the impression that DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee doesn't understand money?  And wasn't she supposed to cut bureaucracy?
• This happens every day.

Thinking about the Hamdan verdict

I was going to do a little write-up on yesterday's Hamdan decision, but the NYT editorial page expressed my various thoughts (including outrage) so well, that I'm just going to link to them.

For a more detailed account of why the verdict is bunk, check out Opinio Juris.

Is the world really that scary?

The NYT ran a curious op-ed this morning by Jamie Gorelick and Slade Gorton, formerly of the 9/11 Commission, calling for a complete rethink/reallignment of the current presidential transition process (to the extent that any real process exists). While the idea of having presidential nominees line up people for key national security posts before they've won the election, and having those people be given access to lots of sensitive information well before November sounds nice at first blush, I wonder if the proposal is worthwhile or even plausible.

Candidates at this juncture are rightly concerned with campaigning. To be able to name their future cabinets in the summer before the election, they would have to expend incredible resources and take time off the trail, when they should be meeting with the American people writ-large, and not a few bright national security and foreign policy luminaries. Both McCain and Obama had difficult primary campaigns to endure, and it just doesn't strike me as realistic that they could name a whole slate of people for cabinet posts when it takes a few months just to identify a running mate. This is not to say that presidential candidates shouldn't think about who their final teams should be -- indeed, their campaigns likely reflect the inner circle that will follow into an administration -- but the timing may not be right. Further, is it a good idea to name the cabinet early on, and thus create bad blood among those who might be useful for the campaign?

The other major question I have about the proposal is whether or not it's smart to be doling out sensitive information to two potential National Security Councils before the election takes place. While I'm no fan of the Bush administration's secretive policies, at the same time there is some intelligence information out there that is rightly distributed to a limited audience. It seems to me that the dangers of leaks and all the rest grows higher if you put highly politicized people (campaigning campaign advisors/cabinet members to be) into that fray.

I do agree, though, that key posts need to be filled early on, and that the Senate should confirm as many nominees as possible on January 20. Yet doesn't this usually happen? Have we ever really gone weeks without a Secretary of State or Defense in recent memory?

The proposal has good ideas, I guess, but is maybe a little too far removed from reality to be useful.

A discussion you should follow

FP's Passport and UN Dispatch (see sidebar) have teamed up to run a special blogging series, aka Peacekeeping Salon, featuring thoughts on the state of United Nations peacekeeping operations and imperatives for the next U.S. administration. The conversation is just starting, but it's worth a read. Click here to visit, and be sure to glance at the background paper here (pdf).

EDIT: If you need some convincing as to why the U.S. should be fully engaged in and supportive of UN peace operations, read this.

Yet another example of a derailed national security policy

I applaud these women up in Greenbelt for their efforts to help military families stretch their incredibly limited resources. However, I continue to be sickened that we can't seem to provide a decent salary to the individuals (many of whom were already low-income) we send into the line of fire in wars with no clear objective and no end in sight.

That is all.

Attempting to make sense of U.S. policy on African peace and security

For the past week or so, I've been trying to wrap my brain around U.S. policy toward Africa, in light of a presidential visit, the FY09 budget request, and the development of events on the ground.

First, an incredibly brief synopsis of the current security situation in Africa. The Ethiopian/U.S. intervention in Somalia has basically failed to bring security to the country, and has possibly made it worse. The whole point of supporting intervention in the first place was to root out terrorist threats there, but that obviously can't be done in a context of more generalized fighting. Just up the road, Ethiopia and Eritrea are in a period of heightening tensions, with Eritrea basically thwarting the UN peacekeeping mission along the border. Looking a little further west, implementation of the CPA in Sudan is more precarious than ever, the Darfur peacekeeping operation is pretty much stalled, fighting continues in Chad and C.A.R., which has led to refugees now flowing into Cameroon, and the EU peacekeeping mission for Chad/C.A.R. is basically on hold. There's a bit of hope that we might soon see some positive progress in Northern Uganda, and if so, that process might require some greater international assistance. Things in the eastern Congo are still tenuous. Who knows what will happen in Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, the countries of the Mano River Basin in West Africa are on the long, slow road to recovery, and need support.

In this context (or, perhaps, in spite of it), the Bush Administration has proposed a dramatic cut to its financial support to UN peacekeeping, which of course is in addition to our existing arrears to the peacekeeping fund. Instead, they propose focusing more exclusively on various troop training/peacekeeping capacity building programs through bilateral agreements. These programs have existed for several years now, under a huge variety of names, but generally focus on generating more professional armed forces that are trained in the intricacies of peace and stability operations. Although some somewhat shady partners get help through these programs (like Ethiopia), in general I think they're a good thing.

So what's the problem then? It's pretty simple, actually. All the trained troops in the world won't make a peacekeeping operation effective. Those troops need equipment, transportation, weaponry of various types (beyond the assortment provided through the programs above), and most importantly, civilian leadership in each mission. What's the point of having a bunch of trained troops if there aren't any missions to send them to? A peace operation is usually a pretty complex undertaking, and well-trained, professional security forces are but one part of them. With the number of UN and African Union peace operations continuing to increase in Africa, it is essential that the Administration look at the whole picture when making policy and budgetary decisions of this sort.

If, then, the Bush Administration thinks they're somehow promoting peace and stability in Africa through their robbing Peter to pay Paul funding logic, they definitely have another thing coming. If their proposal makes it into the actual 2009 budget (and based on last year's stunning performance by Congressional Democrats, it likely will), this will become yet another foreign policy mess that the next administration will have to clean up.

More good economic news...

Tourists no longer want to come to the United States! Yay!

Cuz... uh... we really don't need all those euros (and loonies)???

Seriously, we need to seriously consider our ass backwards immigration policies if an article in a major European newspaper first tells people that the United States isn't worth the effort, and then offers a list of comparable alternative destinations.

I leave you with this lovely sampling from the above, on the lovely welcome foreign visitors get at our borders:

A preflight e-interrogation, epic queues at immigration, thin-lipped questioning from aggressive border guards, and an outside chance of a rubber-gloved rectal rummage are all part of the fun. So, if Chertoff and co want to tighten Fortress America further, it’s time we considered other more welcoming holiday options. Such as Iran or North Korea.

Chertoff and company: you're brilliant, really.

Yes, sometimes it's personal

I was reading this article (sub req'd) the other day about the major contributions gay people made to American culture during the middle of the 20th century. The authory, Michael Sherry, dealt quite deftly with the painful-to-beneficial relationship between great gay artists (like Copland, Bernstein, etc) and the mainstream media. Society recognized that their work was brilliant, while concurrently abhorring the [real and imagined] lives these men and women lived. Thus these individuals existed in a tenuous position. Revered on one hand, reviled on the other. Indeed, many commentators feared what having a strong, yet gay, artist community would have some sort of disastrous consequences on the moral fiber of American society as a whole, and there was a sort of Lavender Scare in the early sixties as a result.

Most students of U.S. history and politics recall that various Red Scares took place during the 1920s and again in the late 40s-50s. These scares were particularly hard on both the arts community and the foreign and security policy communities, for different reasons. The common thread, of course, was that gay and lesbian people got scooped up in each of these scares. The natural resilience to societal pressures that artist communities usually possess brushed this off relatively easily. In the policy community, though, where conformism is essential, the effects were devastating.

Fast forward to today. You still can't legally be gay in the military. The military, being one massive tool of foreign and security policy, and an apparatus that interacts with almost all other segments of the policy community, clearly has an effect on culture. The current leadership at the State Department has often harped on promoting freedom and human rights. Yet it is conspicuously silent on LGBT issues. With these combined influences, it's still a pretty lonesome place for LGBT people in that community. Other oppressed groups have been able to make more visible inroads in these areas. Yet given a culture of forced invisibility, it's pretty hard for LGBT people to make the same kind of advances. Thus for an individual such as myself, with a passion for working in international affairs and a strong desire to influence policy and thus positive change, I tend to feel disempowered and silenced, because to find gay people in that world, one basically goes on a quest for the Northwest Passage. It's not completely impossible to find out LGBT people in foreign and security policy land, but you're not going to find a lot.

So why is it so much more difficult for LGBT people to feel any sense of place in the policy realm? For one, as Sherry puts it so much better than I ever could, "the labels 'gay' and 'American' do not yet readily collapse into one." There is still a lot of stigma (particularly moral stigma), and much of this is perpetuated at the highest levels of society (just think about how George Bush got elected in 2004). I once talked with a former employer of mine, a woman who was advising members of Congress on foreign affairs in a day when such women were particularly rare. She described a lot of challenges that I feel myself (I'm not trying to appropriate her experience, I'm just noting similarities).

I guess my point is that I feel stifled a lot of the time. Granted, I'm young, and part of that has to do with insufficient experience to match aspirations. But part of it is a genuine concern that making even a mention of my personal life could preclude me from work somewhere. Admittedly, I wouldn't want to work somewhere where that would be the case, but still, knowing that it could occur is still troubling. I've certainly got being white and male going for me, but not fully fitting into that archetype is a problem (in some eyes) nonetheless.

Bottom line: yes, I can talk about decorating, but I'm trained to talk about force strength, strategic planning, transitional justice, and corruption (among other things). Don't think I'm "soft" because I'm a homo. And you, yes you with the ugly blue suit and the same tired comb-over everyone else in your building is sporting: I can play ball in your court, I just happen to prefer a flashier uniform.

Fun quotes from foreign policy land

First up to bat, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, talking about why she won't run for president:

I understand American politics very badly. I've always said I'm much better at understanding international politics than American politics. I just know that I've got a job to do for the rest of this president's term. That's what I'm concentrating on. . . . I haven't thought much about it myself. I'm thinking more about these days how to get other people to hold elections that are free and fair around the world.

Well gee golly, Condi. Your stellar grasp on international politics has led to a quagmire, a resurgent Tali-terrorist threat, a nuclear North Korea, and a really really cranky Iran. Top that all off with a completely stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process and a now four-year old genocide in Darfur. As for getting other people to hold those free and fair elections, I have two questions: 1) Florida and Ohio, much? and 2) the current elections in Nigeria, from whom we buy a lot of oil, are turning out to be a smashing success, aren't they?

If this is what your excellent command of international politics gets us, I'm quite glad you're refraining from giving us your thoughts on Social Security and immigration reform. Lord knows they'd be stunning policy failures that would make your current boss look brilliant.

Now let's move on to round two, with General John J. Sheehan (USMC, Ret.), talking about why he turned down the job of coordinating the Iraq and Afghanistan wars among several government agencies (which, by the way, is the National Security Advisor and President's job):

It would have been a great honor to serve this nation again. But after thoughtful discussions with people both in and outside of this administration, I concluded that the current Washington decision-making process lacks a linkage to a broader view of the region and how the parts fit together strategically. We got it right during the early days of Afghanistan -- and then lost focus. We have never gotten it right in Iraq. For these reasons, I asked not to be considered for this important White House position. These huge shortcomings are not going to be resolved by the assignment of an additional individual to the White House staff. They need to be addressed before an implementation manager is brought on board.

Translation: "Not gonna do it. Wouldn't be prudent." Alternatively, the Administration is clueless and they're not gonna find some savior for their debacles until they figure out just what purpose their debacles serve.

Good choice, General. Besides, you're probably making way more money in the private sector anyway, and probably also have time to see your family. Lack of family time has been a key motivator for those jumping off the H.M.S. WhiteHousePanic.

There you have it folks. We're totally fucked, and nothing will change until we get some personnel changes at the top, and/or an infusion of intellectual capital in the capital.

Help for the UN, version 1.0

It seems as though your world peace and security apparatus is dysfunctional.

What would you like to do?

1) Plead with the world's only remaining superpower to stop ignoring it whenever said superpower can't get its way.

2) Send yet another terse letter to that pesky African dictator who keeps thwarting its plans, reminding him that the decisions of the peace and security apparatus are legally binding.

3) Create another committee, to create subcommittees, to think about how one might make the peace and security apparatus less resemblant of the Stone Age.

4) Outsource to regional conglomerates, regardless of capabilities.

5) Have Lakhdar Brahimi make it work -- they don't call him Mr. Fix-it for nothing.

6) Replace all apparatus members with high school students and hope that they can do better.

Photo from here.

State of the Hangover 2007

Madam Speaker, Members of Congress, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, fellow citizens,

I begin this address they way it should always begin, with these words:

The state of our hangover is strong!

That said, there is a need to offer some critique as to the state of our Union. After watching the president last night, I must say that I remain unconvinced about basically everything he proposed. The health insurance scheme just came across as confusing and even bizarre, with even the vice president looking uncertain. The talk of balancing the budget should not be taken at only face value. The real source of U.S. growing debt is the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which thus far have been financed in non-budget supplemental bills. Thus while there is a deficit in the regular budget, the far greater problem is these security funds which aren't even included in the budget. Yes, we should control earmarks. But we also need to realize that tax cuts to the wealthy probably wasn't the best idea.

Take a moment to worry over immigration. Them Mexicans are coming over faster than the Minute Men can shoot 'em. That's why we're gonna build a big fence to keep them out. The illegals, obviously. And of course terrorists. Terrorists are everywhere. The other domestic issues mentioned I have largely forgotten, as I was drinking pretty fast.

With regard to national security, I cannot reiterate enough the heart of the president's message: Be afraid, be very afraid. Them terr'ists is comin' to get you, your little cute babies with the plump cheeks, and your puppies. In fact, they're going to destroy all the puppies. Kitties too. Be afraid. They're after us. They'll attack us as we sleep, as we refill our SUVs with the shit-tons of fuel that fund their operations, and as we gorge ourselves on massive volumes of corn-product-based fast food items. Be afraid, dammit. That FDR guy, and his little snippit about "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" was obviously, gravely, tragically mistaken.

As for our current military ventures abroad, the president wants you to trust that by continuing to do the exact same thing we've been doing, we will see success. Someday. Hopefully soon. Those sovereign Iraqis need to do what we tell them to. Also, at least there has been some realization that the country is too stretched to blow up Iran or DPRK right now, but that will certainly not stop us from lobbing a few bombs into Somalia every now and again.

In last bits of substance, lets talk about malaria and saving African babies. Look at that tall dude from the big country of Africa who does something decent back in his village. Remember that of course there are no cities in that big country. Just quaint villages. And mosquitos. Basically I'm saying this to get Bill Gates and those Darfur bitches off my back.

And hey, look at all those other brave people who do good things.

And freedom, liberty, and et cetera.

God bless... _____?

The less than loyal opposition responds

Friends, the president is a shit head. He's done a whole lot of wrong. In fact, Senator Webb's not even gonna bother to rebut him. Just send out a friendly reminder that the Senator's son is in Iraq while Jenna and Barbara are terrorizing Latin America. Also, remember George, if you don't lead, we will (and you won't like it).

Why the Bush Iraq plan will fail

I realize the title sounds presumptuous, but hear me out. The President's plan for Iraq won't work primarily because it relies on a military solution, though even its economic elements are shaky. The main problem here is that the United States lacks legitimacy in the eyes of Iraqis, and thus cannot be an honest broker in whatever peace process may exist.

The most problematic element is the U.S. military presence in Iraq. These forces made fast work of overthrowing the admittedly nasty regime of Saddam Hussein, and then became an occupying force backed up by what was essentially a colonial government in the form of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). While many Iraqis undoubtedly had no lost love for Hussein (as evidenced by the circumstances around his execution), it is incredibly unlikely that they wanted a foreign force to come in and essentially replace him. Think of the American Revolution led not by the colonists, but by the French, who then installed their own regime while we got our act together. It wouldn't be so popular, would it?

President Bush wants more troops in order to stabilize the country, particularly Baghdad and its environs. Yet because our forces lack legitimacy (meaning no Iraqis in theater ever invited them in), they cannot possibly fulfill the role of a stabilization force. Such forces require some degree of impartiality, which an invader turned occupier force simply cannot truly exercise. This is why a phased withdrawal combined with a robust capacity building program is essential to American strategy in Iraq. American forces are, and always will be, targets of insurgents bent on driving the Americans out of Iraq.

Similar arguments can be made for U.S. attempts at restoring/sparking Iraqi economic growth. Here again, American actors lack the legitimacy and impartiality needed to be seen as acting in good faith. While I am pleased that the Administration is coming around to the need for non-military measures, the tactics laid out lack the key element of legitimacy and thus cannot be sustained. On a slightly different note, the connection made between codifying a law on oil resources and promoting national reconciliation is a bit bizarre. If anything, the debate over how to divide Iraq's oil wealth among its constituent groups is the most contentious issue in the country. Only if some sort of agreement were reached that somehow managed to satisfy Shi'a, Sunnis and Kurds could there be some moves towards reconciliation. Yet given the broader political climate in the country, this outcome seems unlikely for many years.

Furthermore, the President's plan relies heavily on playing rough with Iraq's neighbors, particularly Iran and Syria. That simply will not work. You cannot seek support for rebuilding a country while simultaneously alienating two adjacent countries. Like it or not, the autocrats in Damascus and Tehran will have to be engaged in this process. As we have seen in the negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, American tough talk and belligerence will only be met by the same from the other side.

I don't have a plan for Iraq myself. Obviously the President and other policymakers have tremendously more resources at their disposal than some lowly grad student. Yet I feel like there can be no success -- at least defined as anything beyond getting our forces out in mostly one piece -- without some sort of internationalization of the effort. Have the Iraqis ask some respectable third part to come in. Of course in present circumstances that will be nearly impossible, not only because Iraq is now the hot potato of the world, but also because the world's peacekeeping/peace enforcement capacity is stretched pretty thin. Additionally, the U.S. is unlikely to want to deploy troops to other places as part of other international missions, even if it totally withdraws from Iraq. While I'm reluctant to use the word quagmire, I would classify the present situation we're in vis a vis Iraq as a bit of a pickle.

If you're interested, compare and contrast the President's speech tonight with the Iraq Study Group and Joint Chiefs of Staff (if you can find it) reports that came out last month.

UPDATE: Here is a nice chart from NYT comparing different proposed plans with the Bush speech.

Somalia update

Remember how just a few hours ago I wrote calling for careful engagement with Somalia?

This is not what I meant.

New Congress, new problems

As proof of Pat Robertson's impending rain of hellfire upon the United States of Gay Communist Democrats, I just saw a completely white squirrel running around on the sidewalk across the street. No, this wasn't a cat. It totally moved like a squirrel. Unless it was a squir-cat, which would be incredibly worse.

But back to the news. Nancy Pelosi has been sworn in and since she's ruled out impeachment, is plotting the "plane crash" of Bush and Cheney so she'll usurp Hillary as first woman president. Observe this picture from the NYT first day of Congress gallery:The caption for this should totally be Charlton Heston's old line "from my cold, dead hands!"

Meanwhile in the Senate, new majority leader Harry Reid was completely ignored. Probably because Senator Clinton's husband showed up, and promptly threatened Dick Cheney with a nice, clean, "surgical" tactical bombing campaign, right in the pacemaker. Again from the NYT gallery: "Listen bitch, if you don't straighten up, my wife is gonna nail your ass to the wall. You and your little Bush dog too."

So there you have it folks. Our bi-annual Come to Jesus Meeting on how to be civil with each other. The White House is so ready for the bipartisanship, that they're already casting aside dead weight, intelligent, foreign and domestic.

A few thoughts on war

I recently watched the film Turtles Can Fly, which is the first film that was produced in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The film centers around children in pre-2003 invasion Kurdistan, who make their living by collecting landmines and sorting mortar casings. And that, I assure you, is the least of the war-time horrors portrayed. Yet there is an odd beauty in the film, but that doesn't make the subject matter any more palatable.

Like most Americans at this point, I am troubled by the war in Iraq. As the civilian death toll is now in the hundreds of thousands and the military death toll is now above that of September 11, I find this war, which I have always viewed as illegal and unjustified, even more repugnant. Cloaking the whole venture in the language of some unwinable War on Terror makes it even more disgusting. Anyone who thinks that destroying a whole country and the subsequent killing of such a massive number of people is acceptable in avenging and/or preventing a terrorist attack that killed 3,000, is sorely mistaken. Not only does this war fly completely in the face of accepted norms of proportionality, it has no clear purpose, no defined goals, and a continually diminishing measure of success.

Yet I am most disturbed by the effects and affects of the war on Iraqis themselves. This past summer, for the first time, I saw first-hand the effects of war among Liberian refugees. In some cases, living with a destroyed economic and political system is the least of concerns. The question of survival perpetually looms large. The psychological effects of the whole affair are particularly destructive. How do children cope with having witnessed their parents violently killed in front of them? How do women deal with children that are the product of rape by armed gangs of militants? What does one do when the entire network of social support, both formal and informal, has been torn from beneath them?

In a political context, the wars in Iraq and Liberia are almost completely dissimilar. But in terms of civilian costs, they aren't that much different. Yet these are exactly the costs that are usually ignored. Even as the world adopts lofty language like the responsibility to protect, the world's superpower, through its hubris, has sparked a huge slaughter of civilians. War is, and should be, an extension of policy. But what if that policy is flawed? What if the policymakers are unwilling to deal with reality? What if the whole war policy was based upon faulty factual and legal assumptions from the outset?

These are just a few thoughts. Don't take them as me diminishing the effect of terror attacks on American soil. Don't take them as assaults on the military - they don't make war, they just implement it. Just understand that this is a little of where I come from, and outlines a few things I'm currently mulling.

Useful tips from the U.S. Government

Want to build a bomb? Better yet, aiming to design some WMD in your basement? You'll probably need some sort of instructions, right? And perhaps maybe a basic understanding of chemistry or physics. Not to mention equipment, a secret lair, a secret handshake, and probably a Swiss bank account.

But even with all that other stuff, you're nowhere without instructions.

That's where the federal government steps in.

The New York Times today reports that a website the government set up to detail all of Saddam Hussein's weapons initiatives had posted for some time detailed instructions on some of the steps needed to build an atomic weapon. The IAEA apparently protested this level of detail sometime last week. Yet the site stayed up until NYT made some phone calls.

(Sidebar: amazing how NYT is seen as more of an expert on these things than the lil old International Atomic Energy Agency.)

It gets better.

This wasn't the first time such information had been posted. Apparently back in the spring there were directions on how to build chemical weapons. They stayed up until some UN agency got really uppity. Better still, the documents translated into English from Arabic.

This was apparently all part of some huge effort to convince the American people that the whole Iraq war thing was justified.

Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents

A common sense return to the Constitution

On Friday, the UN released a report that called for the closure of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. This isn't the first time such a call has been issued, and it won't be the last. But the fact that the Administration continues to ignore such calls bothers me considerably.

There are several issues at stake with Guantanamo Bay, and how the way the prison is run actually weakens U.S. anti-terror policy. First, the prison is a bastion of injustice where detainees have no opportunity for any sort of legal assistance whatsoever. They are just swept up, locked up, and kept there, without charge or trial. That's not the American way. You see, even if 90% of the detainees actually are terrorists who have planned to attack the United States, that still leaves 10% who aren't. Further, terrorists fight ideological battles. You don't convince somebody that democratic institutions are the way to go by throwing them in the slammer to rot. Gulags were Stalin's forte - American presidents have no business reproducing such institutions.

Next we have the whole martyrdom thing. Let's be honest here. What better way for a terrorist to go than at the hands of the great satan? The more of these guys in Cuba we screw over, the more terrorists we create globally. And I'm not just talking Afghanistan and Iraq here. Terror movements are growing in places like Indonesia and Darfur, and will be fierce in their own right soon enough. We actually reap dividends by giving these detainees a fair and public trial in a civil court. We gain nothing by treating them like dirt, no matter how criminal they are.

Finally there are the claims that the detainees are valuable sources of information. So great, we can find out where Osama bin Laden (OBL) was hiding six months ago. That kind of information doesn't do us a damn bit of good. Of course al Qaeda and other groups are planning attacks on the U.S. and its allies. That's a given, because it's just what they do. But, we can gain better intelligence by increasing the operations side of the CIA and refocusing the NSA on tracking foreign, rather than domestic, communications. Once upon a time there were operatives who followed OBL around and reported back on what he did. Now, not so much. Thus we've lost that valuable means of intelligence and we can't replace that with botched prison interrogations.

Basically, the U.S. needs to treat the Guantanamo prisoners like criminals: arrest them, charge them, try them, and carry out the sentence. I don't believe in going easy on them and I don't believe in letting them off with no contest. I just want to see some due process here. Just leaving them down there like pigs in an East Carolina hog farm, wallowing around in misery, does nothing to promote American interests.