According to reports, we first started tracking the couriers who would ultimately lead us to Osama bin Laden over four years ago.

The stream of information that led to Sunday’s raid began over four years ago, when U.S. intelligence personnel were alerted about two couriers who were working with al Qaeda and had deep connections to top al Qaeda officials. Prisoners in U.S. custody flagged these two couriers as individuals who might have been helping bin Laden, one official said

“One courier in particular had our constant attention,” the official said. He declined to give that courier’s name but said he was a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a “trusted assistant” of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a former senior al Qaeda officer who was captured in 2005.

“Detainees also identified this man as one of the few couriers trusted by bin Laden,” the official said. The U.S. intelligence community uncovered the identity of this courier four years ago, and two years ago, the U.S. discovered the area of Pakistan this courier and his brother were working in.

In August 2010, the intelligence agencies found the exact compound where this courier was living, in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The neighborhood is affluent and many retired Pakistani military officials live there.

The reference to Abu Faraj al-Libi is notable in this context for two reasons. He was one of the last High Value Detainees picked up. The Red Cross dates his capture to May 2, 2005 (though he appears to have been held in joint Pakistani-US custody for a time and his Detainee Assessment Brief says he was transferred to US custody on June 6, 2005), and of the HVDs moved to Gitmo in September 2006, he was the last to be picked up.

More interesting, though, are some details from his DAB. In 2003, OBL assigned al-Libi to be “the official messenger” between himself and others in Pakistan. And, apparently at that point, al-Libi moved with his family to Abbottabad, the city where OBL was found.

In July 2003, detainee received a letter from UBL’s designated courier, Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan, requesting detainee take on the responsibility of collecting donations, organizing travel, and distributing funds to families in Pakistan. UBL stated detainee would be the official messenger between UBL and others in Pakistan.12 In mid-2003, detainee moved his family to Abbottabad, PK and worked between Abbottabad and Peshawar.13

His DAB describes al-Libi providing intelligence on al Qaeda’s courier system.

Detainee reported on al-Qaida’s methods for choosing and employing couriers, as well preferred communication means.

And in May 2005 (when the Red Cross says he was captured), al-Libi said he was responsible for facilitating al Qaeda in “settled areas of Pakistan.”

In TD-314/37025-05, detainee stated of early May 2005, he was responsible for facilitation within the settled areas of Pakistan, communication with UBL and external links.

That all sounds suspiciously like the kind of portfolio that might include arranging for a custom-built mansion in Abbottabad for OBL’s family.

None of this means, of course, that al-Libi is the HVD who first IDed the courier who ultimately led to OBL. But it does seem like he was a likely source of that information.

It’s probably just a coincidence that the US finally got Osama bin Laden at a time when its relationship with Pakistan is at a post-9/11 low. President Obama said the discovery of OBL came from a lead first generated last August.

Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.

Plans for the operation intensified over a series of Principals meetings in March and April.

The president chaired no fewer than five national security council meetings on this topic – on March 14th, March 29th, April 12th, April 19th and April 28th.

“When a case had been made that this was a critical target we began to prepare this mission in conjunction with the US military,” a senior administration official said.

At 8:20am on Friday, April 29th in the Diplomatic Room, President Obama met with National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, White House chief of staff William Daley, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan and deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough and gave the order for the operation.

But we did not give Pakistan a heads up.

Which is why the details Jane Perlez lays out–notably, that OBL’s hideout was nearly adjacent to the Pakistani equivalent of West Point, where General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani proclaimed victory over terrorism last month–raise so many questions about whether Pakistan knew OBL was hiding out in this compound.

[OBL] was killed in Abbottabad, a city of about 500,000, in a large and highly secured compound that, a resident of the city said, sits virtually adjacent to the grounds of a military academy. In an ironic twist, the academy was visited just last month by the Pakistani military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, where he proclaimed that Pakistan had “cracked” the forces of terrorism, an assessment that was greeted with skepticism in Washington.

Update: Here’s an ABC video from the mansion, also showing how close the military academy is.

And Perlez describes the curious silence from top Pakistani leaders about OBL’s death.

After the killing of Bin Laden became public in Pakistan, an ISI official confirmed his death but then insisted, contrary to President Obama’s statement, that he was killed in a joint United States-Pakistani operation, apparently an effort to show that Pakistan knew about the operation in advance.

On Monday, General Kayani, President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan, and the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, met in Islamabad but had not issued any statement more than six hours after President Obama’s announcement of Bin Laden’s death.

Finally, Perlez notes that we picked up a key al Qaeda operative in Abbottabad in February, just as the Raymond Davis was souring our relations with Pakistan significantly.

A Qaeda operative, Umar Patek, an Indonesian involved in the Bali bombings in 2002, was captured in a house in Abbottabad in February where he was protected by a Qaeda courier, who worked as a clerk at the city post office.

As relations with Pakistan have grown strained over the last several months, they have insisted we just need to trust them. Until we learn how it is that they missed this mansion specially built for OBL’s family, it seems further suspicion, not trust, is the appropriate stance.

This Time article is designed to be a swan song to Robert Mueller’s career; it builds over almost 6,500 words to the conclusion that, “Most people inside the bureau believe that the blown opportunities to head off 9/11 would not recur today.” Mueller, the article suggests, has fixed the problems that led the FBI to miss 9/11.

But a number of details make the article well worth a very close read. For example, it:

• Provides an example of the kinds of things that make it into Mueller’s daily brief
• Describes how Mueller almost quit when the White House ordered the FBI to return materials seized from William Jefferson’s congressional office
• Describes one of Mueller’s futile attempts to get our supposed partner in the war on terror, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, to arrest Jamal al-Badawi, the USS Cole bomber

Of particular interest, though, is the article’s description of the FBI’s parallel tracking of two alleged WMD terrorists: the Saudi Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari and the white supremacist Kevin William Harpham.

Two men, 1,300 miles apart, had Mueller’s attention when he convened his operations brief on Feb. 17. Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, a 20-year-old Saudi national, studied chemical engineering at Texas Tech University. Kevin William Harpham, 36, an unemployed Army veteran and avowed white supremacist, lived in a small town near Spokane. On this day the FBI’s interest was a closely guarded secret, but indictments to come would allege that the two men were behind separate plots to set off powerful homemade bombs. Until recently, the FBI had not heard of either man.

The Spokane attack struck without warning on Jan. 17. Shortly before the start of Spokane’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade, city workers found an abandoned backpack along the route. Inside was an explosive core laced with rat poison — an anticoagulant — and surrounded by lead fishing weights. A remote car starter and cell-phone parts were mated in a detonation circuit. The FBI lab in Quantico, Va., recovered DNA, but there was no suspect to test for a match.

Good luck and shoe leather led the FBI to Aldawsari, the Saudi student. One of the trip-wire programs rolled out after 9/11 invited vendors of hazardous goods to report unusual purchases to the feds. Aldawsari went undetected at first as he acquired the ingredients of TNP, an explosive used in World War I artillery shells. Amazon.com filled an order for 3 gal. of concentrated sulfuric acid, and the Georgia-based QualiChem Technologies shipped 10 boxes of nitric acid to a FedEx mail drop. Neither reported the buys. Aldawsari also dodged a student-visa review after flunking out of Texas Tech. Only on Feb. 1, when he ordered phenol, his last ingredient, did Aldawsari trip an alarm. Carolina Biological Supply tipped the FBI’s Charlotte, N.C., field office, and Con-Way Freight, where Aldawsari planned to take delivery, sent word to the Dallas field office by way of the Lubbock police.

By showing the parallel pursuit, Time reveals something disturbing about our country’s pursuit of terrorists. While the President gets briefed on suspected Islamic terrorists, he doesn’t get briefed on suspected right wing terrorists.

Harpham’s plot, if the allegations prove true, turned out to be the more advanced. He had built a powerful bomb and placed it, for maximum carnage, atop a metal bench with a brick wall behind it to focus the blast. The half-complete work of Aldawsari, an Arab whose jihadi aims fit the popular image of a terrorist, received far more public attention. More than a year ago, Mueller raised some eyebrows when he testified that “homegrown and lone-wolf extremists pose an equally serious threat.” But that message did not take root in the body politic or even in the national-security establishment. As the FBI chased the twin terrorist plots all through February, President Obama’s team heard daily reports about Aldawsari’s case but not Harpham’s. Some of Mueller’s lieutenants marveled at the contrast.

Domestic plots are not routinely included in the President’s daily briefing or the interagency threat matrix, an FBI official says, even though “the degree of harm is often greater” than in jihadi terrorist plots.

This is a troubling revelation, particularly in an article that concludes the FBI would have prevented 9/11. It suggests that the FBI–and the President–might still miss a similar attack launched by the next Timothy McVeigh. Billions of dollars and an entire shift of focus, and yet we’re still not watching white terrorists as closely as we watch brown ones.

And on the subject of terrorism investigation, the Time article explains–but does not emphasize–an important detail about the investigation of Aldawsari. As I noted when he was arrested, he was the perfect candidate for a Lone Wolf warrant. He was a non-resident alien and when we got a lead on him he appeared to be (and in fact turned out to be) acting alone. He’s just the kind of self-radicalized non-US person whom the PATRIOT Act’s Lone Wolf provision is meant to target. But, as Acting head of DOJ’s National Security Division Todd Hinnen revealed to Congress in March, we didn’t use the Lone Wolf provision to investigate Aldawsari. Time provides some details about what we did use.

When Mueller convened his executive team on Feb. 17, Aldawsari had been under a microscope for two weeks. Four shifts of agents watched the Saudi engineering student 24 hours a day. Vehicles equipped with StingRay transceivers followed him around greater Dallas, recording his cell-phone calls. Agents had slipped secretly into Aldawsari’s apartment, armed with a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. They inventoried his chemicals, cloned his computer drive and copied a journal handwritten in Arabic.

Hours before that morning’s briefing, Aldawsari had published a blog post alluding to a special celebration of his upcoming 21st birthday. One of his handwritten journal entries, according to a hasty FBI translation, said, “And now, after mastering the English language, learning how to build explosives and continuous planning to target the infidel Americans, it is time for jihad.”

[snip]

In Lubbock, the team that searched Aldawsari’s apartment had been interrupted and did not have time to learn whether he had unpacked his chemicals or whether he had the makings for a high explosive that required no phenol. The hasty retreat also left a gap in electronic surveillance, which nowadays has to include not only phone taps and pinhole cameras but voice-over-Internet, social-network messaging and online-gaming consoles. The Texas plot was unfolding across three e-mail addresses, which sent one another lists of “targets” and “nice targets” and directions for handling TNP. Was it one man? Two? Three?

The search team had to get back in. Mueller had no patience for explanations that agents were doing “pattern-of-life analysis” to find an opening. “You’re not getting it done,” Mueller said. “What are you going to do about it?” Later that day, the sneak-and-peek squad got it done. Then the investigators solved the mystery of the three e-mail addresses: Aldawsari was using all of them, they concluded, to send notes to himself.

While this passage doesn’t explain all of the warrants (or lack thereof) the FBI used to investigate Aldawsari, it’s clear they were able to get a Sneak and Peek warrant (as well as, presumably, warrants to wiretap his communications) without having to resort to the Lone Wolf provision. That seems to support the argument of those like Julian Sanchez, that investigators have the tools they need to find someone like Aldawsari without continued approval of the Lone Wolf provision.

Besides, the Lone Wolf wouldn’t be available to investigate the far more dangerous bomb used in the MLK Day attempt. Maybe we should focus on guarding against terrorist attacks by American citizens rather than trying to extend powers we don’t need to investigate the non-citizens we’re already scrutinizing closely.

To a degree, this reminds me of the Joshua Claus moment, when DOD banned reporters like Carol Rosenberg and Michelle Shephard because they uttered the name “Joshua Claus” in their coverage of his testimony in Omar Khadr’s trial. (Shephard had interviewed him previously, so they were basically asking her to forget information she had gathered independently to be able to cover Gitmo.)

White House officials have banished one of the best political reporters in the country from the approved pool of journalists covering presidential visits to the Bay Area for using now-standard multimedia tools to gather the news.

The Chronicle’s Carla Marinucci – who, like many contemporary reporters, has a phone with video capabilities on her at all times – pulled out a small video camera last week and shot some protesters interrupting an Obama fundraiser at the St. Regis Hotel.

She was part of a “print pool” – a limited number of journalists at an event who represent their bigger hoard colleagues – which White House press officials still refer to quaintly as “pen and pad” reporting.

As with coverage of Omar Khadr’s trial, the Obama Administration seems to be demanding that journalists abdicate their jobs and their instincts to play by the rules.

But the event reminds me of something else: how the White House asked (and persuaded) all the big US outlets to suppress the widely discussed news that Raymond Davis was a spy, even while publications overseas and dirty fucking hippie bloggers were reporting on it.

As the account of Marinucci’s treatment makes clear, the rules they want to enforce on pool reporting basically put her at a disadvantage to everyone else in the room who had and used a cell phone video.

Carla cannot do her job to the best of her ability if she can’t use all the tools available to her as a journalist. The public still sees the videos posted by protesters and other St. Regis attendees, because the technology is ubiquitous. But the Obama Administration apparently wants to give the distinct advantage to citizen witnesses at the expense of professionals.

While there’s a bit of professional snobbery here, it is entirely justified. The White House bizarrely imagines it can manage Obama’s image by imposing rules on journalists it can’t impose on others. Not only does that not do a damn thing to prevent videos like this from getting out. It profoundly corrupts the role of journalists, imposing requirements that ensure they offer only a highly scripted and obviously false view of an event.

It’s simply not fair to require that journalists not tell stories that are already out there in the public sphere. That turns them, once and for all, into stenographers. That’s not what our country needs from presidential press coverage.

Politico has a festival of stupidity on yesterday’s release by Obama of his long form birth certificate. The varieties of stupid in the article include:

• Ignoring the real precedent of the blowjob that shall not be named
• Blaming birtherism on the InterToobz, and not cable TV
• Conflating correct doubts about Bush ignoring warnings about al Qaeda with 9/11 Trutherism

The central argument of the piece relies on Robert Gibbs’ claim that “we’ve crossed some Rubicon” into a realm in which “there are no arbiters of truth.” And while Politico reports Obama’s advisors trace this new era to, “the decline of traditional media and the rise of viral emails and partisan Web and cable TV platforms,” Politico labels this new era simply “the Internet era.”

It’s the hippies’ fault, apparently, and not that of the traditional press (or even the cable news channels) themselves.

As a result, the argument goes, Obama faces a new challenge to rebut claims like birtherism that no one before him did.

And to sustain that claim–to sustain the claim that Obama faces something Clinton didn’t, to sustain the claim that we are only newly in an “era of public life with no referee — and no common understandings between fair and unfair, between relevant and trivial, or even between facts and fantasy,” Politco drones on for over 1600 words with no more than indirect allusions to the fact that, in an era when the NYT still reigned supreme, a President was impeached over a consensual blowjob with the enthusiastic complicity of that arbiter of truth, the traditional press.

It takes some work for Politico and those it quotes to avoid mentioning that blowjob precedent. Politico muses,

It’s hard to imagine Bill Clinton coming out to the White House briefing room to present evidence showing why people who thought he helped plot the murder of aide Vincent Foster— never mind official rulings of suicide — were wrong.

But it doesn’t consider the discussions by very serious arbiters of truth that maybe we need to see which direction the President’s penis curves to confirm or refute claims about the President’s sex life. It doesn’t consider that the Village cherished a certain semen-stained dress like the holy grail.

Because all that happened in an era when the press had a clear consensus about what was fair and unfair, relevant and trivial, you see.

And rather bizarrely, Politico quotes the man who might have preempted that blowjob impeachment by doing what Obama did, a man who has admitted to me publicly that he wanted to come out and say it was just a consensual blowjob between adults:

Marcy Wheeler: So, finally you get to the point where, yes, Clinton did not, was not completely forthcoming about a consensual blow job. The other thing that I think could have happened is that a lot of people said but, fundamentally what happened was a consensual blow job between consenting adults. I think it’s between Bill and Hillary and Monica Lewinsky. And again, that didn’t happen. So those are three things that might have short-circuited the story.

Joe Lockhart: I will say this. I spent two and a half years with great discipline not once using that phrase, and you won’t get it out of me today. I think it, I agree with you, but it’s just, it’s a mental block. You have no idea how many times I wanted to say exactly that from behind the podium. It’s just a goddamn [grimaces face]. I completely agree with that.

Yet in his extensive quotes for this story, Joe Lockhart doesn’t mention the blowjob directly either.

Joe Lockhart, who was Clinton’s White House press secretary, said: “You’ve lost the ability to starve a story to death. So what you have to do is raise the price of those who are making the charges. If Donald Trump is out there saying this, you’ve got to make him pay a price for throwing a bomb before too much collateral damage is done.”

The days of not elevating an opponent or refraining from punching down are gone.

“You literally can’t laugh anything off,” Lockhart said. “There’s nothing neutral in politics. It’s either helping you or hurting you. You’ve got to make sure it’s helping you or you’re going to lose.”

[snip]

“The political discourse is much worse now, but that’s not always to the detriment of the so-called victim,” [Ari Fleischer] said. “In this case, President Obama came out looking better.”

Lockhart agreed, recalling some of the conservatives who tormented his boss.

“Look at the rogue’s gallery of Clinton accusers,” he said. “Most of them blew themselves up.”

And Lockhart noted that even now, the most hardcore of the birthers still won’t be satisfied.

“They’ll probably ask for the first diaper,” he said. “They’ll want to see the DNA.”

The other really fascinating thing is the way the Politico strives for the false balance that is one of the culprits for this problem by claiming this has affected Democrats and Republicans equally. To do so, they conflate two claims made against Bush.

George W. Bush, likewise, was never tempted to take to the Rose Garden to deny allegations from voices on the liberal fringe who believed that he knew about the Sept. 11 attacks ahead of time and chose to let them happen.

The “fringe” accusation, of course, is that al Qaeda did not cause 9/11, the US government did; it’s not a distinctly partisan accusation in the least, nor is it one that was ever treated at a level in the press like birtherism. The very mainstream accusation, however, is that George Bush received a briefing on August 6, 2001 warning that “Bin Laden determined to strike in US,” told his briefer he had covered his ass, and then continued to blow off people like Richard Clarke and George Tenet trying to do something about it. And sure, Bush didn’t take the Rose Garden to deny that; he sent Condi to try to deny it to the 9/11 Commission.

Finally, there’s Politico’s curious treatment of the TANG scandal, which is a precedent where, like Obama, an Administration directly addressed a controversy.

Democratic professionals, meanwhile, may not have publicly embraced the controversy over alleged gaps in George W. Bush’s Vietnam-era service in the National Guard, but they enjoyed it when liberal commentators waved that flag.

Not only did they address it, they succeeded in having Dan Rather fired for reporting on it.

Perhaps Obama isn’t trying hard enough to force Fox to fire Roger Ailes and all the Presidential candidate-Fox hosts that validate birtherism publicly? Because that would likely end the birther controversy more effectively than releasing his birth certificate will.

And somehow also gone missing, like that blowjob that shall not be named, is the traditional media’s long embrace of Swiftboaters, further proof that Presidential level figures really do need to rebut false claims early and have had to do so for years.

In any case, with its suggestion that AZ’s circumcision law doesn’t have direct precedent with Bill Clinton’s blowjob, Politico ignores some of the real underlying causes of this problem, which has a lot more to do with a well-funded scandal industry that plays all type of press successfully, from Drudge and viral emails to the NYT, than it has to do with more recent changes in the media.

I’m going to be in transit for another half day yet, but I wanted to comment on this motion David Remes, Gitmo detainee Saifullah Paracha’s attorney, filed to request emergency access to the Detainee Assessment Brief on his client released by WikiLeaks on Monday. (h/t Benjamin Wittes)  Remes describes the implications of the protection order he works under, noting specifically the warning DOJ sent out the other day.

For example, because the government considers the documents classified, and counsel holds a “secret” security clearance, he is concerned that if he views the documents online, the government might revoke his clearance. Losing his clearance will disable him from continuing to represent his current or future detainee clients and jeopardize his ability to obtain further clearances. Counsel is concerned that the government may even prosecute him. To avoid any potential sanctions, undersigned counsel errs on the side of extreme caution and refrains from viewing the documents.

The only place undersigned counsel can view these documents and fear no potential sanctions is at a Secure Facility the Justice Department has provided in the Washington area for counsel with “secret” level clearances. To the best of counsel’s knowledge, the Secure Facility contains no secure computer onto which the Wikileaks documents can be downloaded. Moreover, counsel is confident that the Justice Department will not ferry the documents to the Secure Facility for viewing and use by counsel. Even if the leaked documents were made available for viewing and use by counsel at the Secure Facility, counsel located far from the Facility – some thousands of miles away – would have to journey to the Facility to view and use them. [my emphasis]

That is, Remes could view the documents in just one place without risking losing his clearance and his ability to defend his client, or even criminal sanctions–a DOJ Secure Facility. Yet DOJ is not going to make the documents accessible there. So he’s SOL; he can’t see them.

Remes goes on to describe how this prevents him from defending his client publicly, specifically because he can’t comment for a big article the NYT did which (IMO) offered a credulous reading of Paracha’s file. While that article contains a quote from ACLU National Security Project Director Hina Shamsi noting that the information in the files is uncorroborated, and while NYT admits much of the evidence derives from KSM whom they note was waterboarded, rather than point out obvious suspect details in Paracha’s file, it simply repeats those details uncritically.

Here’s just one reason why Remes needs to have access to the file to adequately represent his client and refute credulous readings of Paracha’s file:

(S//NF) The plan called for shipping explosives in containers that detainee used to ship women’s and children’s clothing to the US. Detainee agreed to this plan. KU-10024 [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] claimed in early March 2003, PK-10020 and PK-10018 [Ammar al-Baluchi, KSM’s nephew] were arranging the details with detainee and his son Uzair. KU-10024 stated detainee knew all the details of the plan. Uzair understood PK-10018 and PK-10020 were al-Qaida, but KU-10024 was unsure how much Uzair [Paracha’s son] knew about the actual smuggling plan.8 [my emphasis]

There are, in general, just two kinds of evidence offered by KSM in March 2003: evidence the CIA itself claims was disinformation offered by KSM in his early days of captivity while he was still successfully resisting interrogation, and evidence offered up under torture, potentially one of the 183 waterboarding sessions KSM survived in March 2003.

It’s unclear which category this piece of intelligence falls into, but the use of the verb “claimed” suggests there’s something about the intelligence that may have led even the briefer on Paracha’s file to doubt it.

The intelligence report cited for this detail (and therefore collected in March 2003), TD-314/16519-03, is cited three more times in Paracha’s file, only one of which is corroborated by reports dated 2004 and 2005.

In other words, one of the claims against Paracha can be traced back to a March 2003 interrogation of KSM that no one should consider credible. The entire case against Paracha builds off this early interrogation.

There are a number of other reasons to doubt the “facts” laid out in Paracha’s file. Notably, references to Aafia Siddiqui make no mention of her earlier reported detention by the US in Afghanistan, and instead claims “Siddiqui was detained in Afghanistan in mid-July 2008,” thereby hiding a key detail as to the credibility of any intelligence Siddiqui may have offered (or, just as likely, making no mention of intelligence Siddiqui refuted during years of interrogation in US custody in Afghanistan).

Parts of Paracha’s file reveal real weaknesses in the government’s case against him. These are all very basic details Remes needs to point out, particularly if NYT reporters aren’t going to read the file critically themselves. But given the way the protection order works, he can’t do that.

Check out this sentence, which appears at the end of the Executive Summary of a document purporting to debunk the “cover stories” of detainees who claimed to have traveled to Afghanistan to teach the Koran.

Mujahideen that traveled to Afghanistan following the attacks of 11 September 2001 did so with the knowledge that Usama Bin Laden and Al-Qaida were the likely perpetrators of the attack.

Note the assumptions. First, that the detainees picked up in Afghanistan were, by definition, mujahadeen. The document doesn’t define the term. It does contextualize the term “mujahadeen” within the fight against the Russians, then calls recent “recruits” mujahadeen uncritically. And nowhere in the document does it explain how to assess a detainee’s claim that he was not an active fighter, a trainee at an al Qaeda camp, or even a trainee more generally.

Nowhere does the document address evidentiary problems assessing when a detainee left for Afghanistan and/or arrived there and whether the departure preceded 9/11 (though this is one of the least problematic parts of this statement).

As to the claim that detainees that traveled to Afghanistan after 9/11 did so “with the knowledge that Usama Bin Laden and Al-Qaida were the likely perpetrators of the attack”? Here’s the shoddy proof the document offers for the claim that these detainees assumed to be trained fighters knew of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden’s role in it.

There was already speculation on 11 September 2001 as to the origins of the perpetrators of the attacks, and the US Government publicly named Usama bin Laden and Al-Qaida no later than 12 September 2001. Even before this announcement, there were communications between extremists in Afghanistan and elsewhere identifying UBL as the sponsor of the attacks. Prior to the attacks, the recruits would have no way of knowing they would soon be engaged in a battle with a US-led coalition because of the deaths of thousands of innocent people. This does not decrease the recruits [sic] involvement with terrorist groups including Al-Qaida, however, as their travel to Afghanistan and their room and board in the months following their arrival were paid for by the Al-Qaida, the Taliban, and or other supporting extremist groups [sic] fund raising activities and the recruit elected to remain in Afghanistan. Some detainees state they attempted to leave but could not, this too is part of their cover story to show they were not in Afghanistan of their own free will. After 11 September 2001, the new recruits could no longer claim ignorance to the actions of Al-Qaida and the likelihood of hostilities resulting from the US desire to bring those responsible to justice. Therefore, especially following the attacks, Muahideen traveling to Afghanistan did so with the distinct desire to defend UBL and his organization.

Now, there are a lot of basic problems with the claim about speculation that al Qaeda executed the attacks just after 9/11, not least that key players within the Bush Administration were fighting the argument at the time that al Qaeda caused the attack. Ultimately, this amounts to an argument that because Richard Clarke was sure al Qaeda caused the attack, it meant the Americans generally were loudly backing that certainty rather than, for example, trying to turn this into a war against Iraq.

Then there’s the problem that intelligence in US possession by the time this was issued in August 2004 made clear that even Osama bin Laden himself did not expect the US to retaliate as they did. If he was expecting the US to respond with limited missile strikes, than how they hell are purported recruits (ignoring the problem of proving they were recruits) supposed to expect the full response the US made?

Then there’s the implicit problem–with the reference to Al-Qaida “and or other supporting extremist groups”–that many of these purported mujahadeen weren’t even purportedly training with al Qaeda. Even if they knew al Qaeda carried out the attack, where is the proof that because the US would, at some point in the future, assert that those “supporting extremist groups” were affiliated with the attack, recent recruits of those “supporting” groups had to have known that the US would ultimately deem those groups as supporting as well?

But the really big problem here is the failure to even attempt to establish what the media/communications consumption of someone purporting to be teaching the Koran in rural Afghanistan would have, and whether it might credibly include awareness of what Richard Clarke was arguing within the Situation Room of the White House in the days right after 9/11 (not least given the assertion that a number of these detainees had limited schooling). I mean, most Americans on September 12, 2001, watching footage of the attack over and over on CNN, probably didn’t know that al Qaeda caused the attack; many still doubt it did. But we’re insisting someone reading the Koran in Afghanistan would know?

It all feels very familiar. When confronted with refutations of their claims that Iraq had WMD before the war, the US repeatedly attributed those refutations–by people like Hans Blix and Mohammed el Baradei (not people who happened to leave for Afghanistan at an inauspicious time)–to Iraqi cover stories. Anything that didn’t confirm their assumptions was, by definition, a cover story. Only even with all the intelligence claims on Iraq that have been released, we never got to see how shoddy the logic those arguing it was all a cover story really was.

Seeing the logic, though, I’m not sure which is more appalling and embarrassing: that many people treated this as valid analysis? Or that someone had either such bad logical skills or such a desire to generate propaganda that he’d consider this report a coherent argument?

Last week, Spencer reported on an Air Force contract for software to move towards self-piloted drones.

The Air Force recently gave Stottler Henke Associates $100,000 to deliver a software package that can keep drones from colliding into human-piloted planes as they take off and land. Stottler’s proposal, called the Intelligent Pilot Intent Analysis System, models pilots’ behavior in manifested and predicted scenarios: how they take off, how they land, how they maneuver in between. It also incorporates information from Air Traffic Control and guidance for specific runways. All that will tell the drone how to react when a plane veers close or the trajectory of the two planes might portend a crash.

Put simply, it’s analogous to getting a drone to think like a pilot, getting into his head. And it’s a big step for drone autonomy. “We’re encoding that knowledge that human pilots have, what they’re going to do,” Stottler says.

Then on Friday, Walter Pincus had an article describing discussions in the UK and here about whether using drones desensitizes their users to the death they cause.

The British study noted that drones are becoming increasingly automated. With minor technical advances, it said, a drone could soon be able to “fire a weapon based solely on its own sensors, or shared information, and without recourse to higher, human authority.” It cautioned that the Defense Ministry “currently has no intention to develop” such systems.

Nonetheless, the aircraft, piloted by people far from the battlefield, represents an approaching technological tipping point “that may well deliver a genuine revolution in military affairs,” according to the Joint Doctrine Note, which was conducted under the direction of the British Chiefs of Staff. Titled “The United Kingdom Approach to Unmanned Aircraft Systems,” it was first disclosed last week by the Guardian newspaper.

[snip]

Retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, former Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, acknowledged that the use of drones comes with potential problems with public perceptions. “Our adversaries have interjected this as a question in [people’s] minds, as an attempt to limit the use of what is very, very effective,” he said.

Though, as FAIR notes, while the lede of Pincus’ article referred to “debates,” what he described in his article was really a chorus of drone supporters.

Readers of the Washington Post can see this headline in today’s edition (4/25/11) about the U.S. drone airstrikes:

Debates Underway on Combat Drones

But there is no actual debate in the article. Reporter Walter Pincus cites a British military study that calls the use of missile-firing drones “a genuine revolution in military affairs,” adding that the “use of unmanned aircraft prevents the potential loss of aircrew lives and is thus in itself morally justified.”

Pincus goes on to explain:

At a Washington conference of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) last week, the issue of drones was also widely discussed.

That “wide discussion” would seem to have involved drone proponents from the CIA and the military.

Aside from any real debate, though, this discussion about all the lives that drones save seem to be missing one more detail: the recent news that two Americans were killed in a friendly fire drone strike.

Which is why I find it particularly tragic that our abstract certainty about who is and who is not a terrorist has led to this: the friendly fire death of two Americans last week–including Navy medic Benjamin Rast from Niles, MI–in a Predator drone strike in Afghanistan.

The investigation is looking into the deaths of a Marine and a Navy medic killed by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator after they apparently were mistaken for insurgents in southern Afghanistan last week, two senior U.S. defense officials said Tuesday.

[snip]

Marine Staff Sgt. Jeremy Smith of Arlington, Tex., and Seaman Benjamin D. Rast of Niles, Mich., were hit while moving toward other Marines who were under fire in Helmand province.

Perhaps appropriately, the LAT just laid out in chilling detail the ways in which our drone targeting is prone to human error (the LAT article appeared after Smith and Rast were killed but before DOD admitted they were killed by a drone strike). In an effort to bypass unreliable Afghan partners, we have moved increasingly to targeting people who act or look like insurgents. But from 15,000 feet above the ground, with analysis conducted 7,000 miles away, it seems Americans own troops can look like insurgents, too.

It is clear that we’ve reached a point in our use of drones where the experts who use them are considering what relation they have on our own humanity. But if we have that discussion without, at the same time, talking about not just the “lives saved” but those tragically lost, haven’t we also lost our humanity?

An unfortunate side effect of the NYT and NPR’s attempt to preempt WikiLeaks’ embargo on the Gitmo Files is that their coverage–rather than the coverage of those who had been working on the files for several weeks–got the most attention. Notably, McClatchy’s team of Tom Lasseter (who had done a series on Gitmo) and Carol Rosenberg (who knows more about it than anyone) had to scramble to get their first story out.

McClatchy’s [chief of correspondents Mark] Seibel said the WikiLeaks notified him at 5:30 p.m. EST that the embargo was lifted. So McClatchy — and the other news organizations working on the project — needed to scramble to finish their first stories as The Times and NPR put the finishing touches on theirs.

Carol Rosenberg, a reporter for McClatchy’s Miami Herald and one of the foremost authorities on Guantanamo Bay in the press corps, said she was caught off guard by the abrupt change of plans. “All I know is I spent nearly the last month digging through documents and was surprised tonight to learn that the embargo was about to be lifted on two hours notice,” Rosenberg said in an email.

Which is why the topic of their second story is so important. It shows that 8 unreliable detainees, several of whom are known to have been tortured, provided a great deal of the intelligence justifying the continuing detention of Gitmo detainees.

The allegations and observations of just eight detainees were used to help build cases against some 255 men at Guantanamo ­ roughly a third of all who passed through the prison. Yet the testimony of some of the eight was later questioned by Guantanamo analysts themselves, and the others were subjected to interrogation tactics that defense attorneys say amounted to torture and compromised the veracity of their information.

How different would the focus on the Gitmo Files be if the first story about it were about the unreliability of the intelligence in the Detainee Assessment Briefs, rather than how many people labeled “high risk” in those DABs went on to be transferred?

To see background on the people who incriminated many of the other Gitmo detainees, go read the whole article. Meanwhile, I just wanted to point out one point about the Gitmo protection order I described yesterday.

McClatchy notes that Mohammed al-Qahtani–whom Convening Authority Susan Crawford admitted was tortured at Gitmo–provided intelligence against 31 detainees.

Muhammad al Qahtani, a Saudi man whose interrogations reportedly included 20-hour sessions and being led around by a leash, appeared as a source in at least 31 cases. A Guantanamo analyst note about Qahtani acknowledged that “starting in winter 2002/2003, (Qahtani) began retracting statements,” though it argued that based on corroborating information “it is believed that (his) initial admissions were the truth.”At the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, the firm that has championed Qahtani’s unlawful detention lawsuit, senior attorney Shane Kadidal said that “the information that was given in the first place (by Qahtani) was not reliable.” As a condition of his security clearance, Kadidal said, he couldn’t discuss the specifics of the WikiLeaks documents.

As they point out, Shane Kadidal and the Center for Constitutional Rights have handled his defense and presumably know a great deal about the intelligence tied to Qahtani. But because DOJ (and surely, DOD) have warned them that speaking about the Gitmo Files leaked by WikiLeaks would be a violation of their protection order, they can’t comment on them.

In effect, in the name of protecting secrets that are already in the public domain, DOJ has gagged the people best able to comment on these issues.

But then, that’s the way our government uses secrecy to stifle informed discussions in this country.

According to Josh Gerstein, DOJ decided not to charge anyone in the illegal wiretap leak probe.

The Justice Department has dropped its long-running criminal investigation of a lawyer who publicly admitted leaking information about President George W. Bush’s top-secret warrantless wiretapping program to The New York Times – disclosures that Bush vehemently denounced as a breach of national security.

[snip]

The Justice Department would not discuss the current status of the probe, which began in late 2005 after the Times story was published with a formal leak complaint from the National Security Agency. However, [Thomas] Tamm’s attorney, Paul Kemp, told POLITICO he and his client were informed “seven or eight months ago” that the investigation into Tamm was over.

The information was relayed during a meeting with the prosecutor handling the case, William Welch, Kemp said. The Justice Department recently issued Tamm a letter confirming that the probe had concluded, the defense attorney said.

Prosecutors also appear to have lost interest in a former National Security Agency official who also publicly acknowledged being a source for the Times on the warrantless wiretapping story, Russell Tice. An attorney for Tice, Joshua Dratel, said it has been several years since prosecutors contacted him about the investigation.

Gerstein discusses the possibility that the investigation was dropped because it was found to be illegal.

“What leaps out to me is the fact that the program was arguably illegal, so while that does not provide a legal defense or immunity to the leaker, from a practical jury-appeal standpoint, which a seasoned prosecutor should consider, how appealing is the case going to be if they’re prosecuting government attorneys for disclosing the program but … the people who were doing the wiretapping don’t get prosecuted?” asked [Peter] Zeidenberg, who was a prosecutor on the leak-related case against Bush White House aide Lewis Libby. “How would you like to be the prosecutor to get up there and make that argument?”

Note, Vaughn Walker’s decision against the government in the al-Haramain case was just over a year ago, so it may be that his decision provided a big disincentive to the government to pursue the case.

Of course, that raises the possibility that the same might be true for Bradley Manning. Granted, his case will not be judged by a jury of civilians; he will have a military jury. Still, as more and more documents he allegedly leak reveal our government’s knowing cover-up that it was detaining innocent people and abetting Iraqi torture, it may make it a lot less palatable to argue against Manning.