Eclectablog, who has been doing solid reporting on the takeover of Benton Harbor by an Emergency Financial Manager, has been wondering why MI’s Democratic Party hasn’t been more vociferous in supporting Benton Harbor. Today, he reported that MI Dems Chair Mark Brewer told Berrien County’s Dems that the MDP would not help them.

The occasion was the monthly meeting of the South County Democratic Club in Berrien County. Commissioner Dennis Knowles was in attendance. According to Commissioner Knowles, with whom I have spoken, Chair Brewer informed him that the MDP “could not help Benton Harbor” though he encouraged their recall effort of Rep. Al Pscholka. The MDP, however, will not assist in any way. In other words, Benton Harbor is on their own.

Now, while I don’t always agree with Brewer’s tactics, I respect his pragmatism, so I suspect part of what’s going on is driven by funding and/or a sense of the viability of recall efforts (the Snyder recall, in particular, would be really difficult to pull off because of the way our recall law is written).

But I also suspect something else is going on. Remember, Democrats in MI have themselves supported the concept of Emergency Financial Managers. In fact Jennifer Granholm’s administration put Pontiac and Benton Harbor itself into EFM status. So while Dems might be happy to knock off some Republican State Reps, they apparently remain committed to a city-based approach to financial stability. And that, it seems, stems at least partly from the way race has played out in this state.

As I noted before, one of the key factors contributing to Benton Harbor’s awful state is racism. Ditto Detroit, the schools of which are widely assumed to be the next target for Snyder’s EFM law. In both cases, a long history of segregation has resulted in the loss of the tax base of the city as more affluent whites left. The proper financial solution to that problem should have been more regionalized funding, but that wasn’t politically viable. Remember–MI is the home of the Reagan Democrats, the working class whites whom Reagan persuaded to put social  issues ahead of their own class interest.

The thing is, it probably could be today. Or could have been just after the 2008 election. Here’s what Stan Greenberg said at that point when he claimed–prematurely, given the rise of the TeaPartiers–the Reagan Democrats were dead.

For more than 20 years, the non-college-educated white voters in Macomb County have been considered a “national political barometer,” as Ronald Brownstein of National Journal described them during the Democratic convention in August. After Ronald Reagan won the county by a 2-to-1 margin in 1984, Mr. Brownstein noted, I conducted focus groups that “found that these working-class whites interpreted Democratic calls for economic fairness as code for transfer payments to African-Americans.” So what do we think when Barack Obama, an African-American Democrat, wins Macomb County by eight points?

I conducted a survey of 750 Macomb County residents who voted Tuesday, and their responses put their votes in context. Before the Democratic convention, barely 40 percent of Macomb County voters were “comfortable” with the idea of Mr. Obama as president, far below the number who were comfortable with a nameless Democrat. But on Election Day, nearly 60 percent said they were “comfortable” with Mr. Obama. About the same number said Mr. Obama “shares your values” and “has what it takes to be president.”

Given Macomb’s history, this story helps illustrate America’s evolving relationship with race. These voters, like voters elsewhere, watched Mr. Obama intently and became confident he would work for all Americans and be the steady leader the times required.

For a brief period in 2008, MI (which is a pretty damned segregated state) put aside its legacy of racism in hopes a black President could bring benefits for all Americans. (Then Republicans used Obama’s imperfect effort to do that–in the form of health care–to stoke that racism again.)

It seems to me, Democrats need to finally, enthusiastically embrace a model that puts collective well-being at the center of a plan to respond to globalization, rather than letting black cities suffer the twin plights of racism and globalization. And that ought to include not only some political support for Benton Harbor’s fight for democracy, but also some creative solutions that don’t amount to starving cash strapped cities all in the name of short term–and short-sighted–fiscal responsibility.

Some of us have been having fun on Twitter discussing the reported power struggle in al Qaeda to replace Osama bin Laden in terms we’d use to discuss an American election. Which made this report–which Frontline linked as part of their Kill/Capture program that aired last night–all the more chilling. The author, Kate Clark, consulted “survivors, witnesses, police, senior Afghan officials – and, crucially, senior officers in the Special Forces unit which carried out” a September 2, 2010 bombing strike. She concluded that rather than killing a senior Taliban official, as JSOC still maintains, the airstrike killed a group of men campaigning for parliament.

Clark examines in depth the intelligence chain that led JSOC to kill a local campaign party, believing they were instead targeting the Taliban commander. That chain started with intelligence from a detainee.

The intelligence operation which ultimately led to the 2 September 2010 attack, started, according to the Special Forces unit, with information came from a detainee in US custody. This allowed them ultimately to identify a relative of the detainee as the shadow deputy governor of Takhar, one Muhammad Amin, and to map a Taleban‐ and IMU‐related cluster through the monitoring of cell phones.

For some reason, the intelligence analysts tracking this cluster concluded that Amin had started using the SIM card of the guy they eventually targeted, Zabet Amanullah.

The intelligence analysts came to believe that the SIM card of one of the numbers that Muhammad Amin had been calling in Kabul was passed on to him. They believed that he started to use this phone and to ‘self‐identify’ as Zabet Amanullah.

And in spite of the fact that Amanullah and Amin spoke by phone two days before the attack, JSOC maintained they were the same person. Amin explained in an interview with another researcher,

About two days before his death Zabet Amanullah spoke to me on the phone and told me that he was determined to block Qazi Kabir from being elected to parliament. That is why he was supporting Abdul Wahid Khorasani, that and the fact that they are related… After the incident, I saw my name in the media and realised the attack was intended for me… I did not discuss this with anyone…

At no time did the analysts investigate the biography of Zabet Amanullah, which would have alerted them that he was a prominent local figure (and, as Clark lays out in a poignant biography she includes, a former human rights worker who had survived three rounds of imprisonment and torture). Instead, JSOC insisted that the technical data targeting a phone was enough to justify the attack.

The Special Forces unit denied that the identities of two different men, Muhammad Amin and Zabet Amanullah, could have been conflated; they insisted the technical evidence that they were one person is irrefutable.

[snip]

When pressed about the existence – and death – of an actual Zabet Amanullah, they argued that they were not tracking a name, but targeting the telephones.

The report discusses the legal implications of this mistaken killing in depth–the failure to cross-check intelligence and the failure to protect others in the convoy who gave no sign of belligerence.

But the metaphor of it all–of the US using faulty intelligence to bomb an Afghan trying to practice democracy–captures what we’re doing in Afghanistan so much more aptly.

To be fair, Steny Hoyer can’t lay sole claim to be the Congressman representing the National Security Agency–the NSA actually gets three Congressmen: Steny, John Sarbanes, and Dutch Ruppersberger.

But I think it fair to note that Steny has, at key times, been the beneficiary of big political contributions from corporations with NSA sensitivities–like AT&T and Mantech. Just as notably, he’s gotten even bigger money from the banksters (particularly JP Morgan Chase, which has its own chunk of federal business) and other finance companies that ruined our economy.

In other words, Steny’s opposition to contractor transparency might be considered self-interest.

Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said government contracts should be awarded based solely on the reputation of the company and the substance of its bid. The issue of political contributions, he said, has no place in the process.

“The issue of contracting ought to be on the merits of the contractor’s application and bid and capabilities,” Hoyer told reporters at the Capitol. “There are some serious questions as to what implications there are if somehow we consider political contributions in the context of awarding contracts.”

Now, perhaps it’s the reporting, but consider the logic of this funny claim: “There are some serious questions as to what implications there are if somehow we consider political contributions in the context of awarding contracts.” Who is the “we” here? Contracting officers? If they were to consider donations to affirmatively award contracts, they’d be committing Hatch Act violations and risk losing their job. But seeing big donations from, say, Mitchell Wade to a powerful Congressman like Duke Cunningham might raise concerns from contracting officers about undue influence (though admittedly, Cunningham’s staffers made it pretty clear to contracting officers what they wanted).

Is the “we” Congressmen themselves? Is Steny really suggesting that Congressmen are not aware of who their donors are, are not intimately familiar with how much they’re raking in from contractors?

Which leaves the possibility that by “we” Steny means “us,” citizens, journalists, and good government advocates. Is Steny suggesting that “we” shouldn’t consider the (ahem) possibility that members of Congress push contracts for their campaign donors? That we shouldn’t consider the implications of such possibilities?

Then again, the guy who steered warrantless wiretapping immunity through Congress might simply want to avoid making it easier for us to understand not just how contracts tie to political donations, but legislation itself.

According to this post, this op-ed in the WSJ got badly edited after it was originally published. The bolded words are just some of what WSJ axed after the fact. (h/t Naked Capitalism)

The official wisdom is that Greece, Ireland and Portugal have been hit by a liquidity crisis, so they needed a momentary infusion of capital, after which everything would return to normal. But this official version is a lie, one that takes the ordinary people of Europe for idiots. They deserve better from politics and their leaders.

To understand the real nature and purpose of the bailouts, we first have to understand who really benefits from them. Let’s follow the money.

At the risk of being accused of populism, we’ll begin with the obvious: It is not the little guy that benefits. He is being milked and lied to in order to keep the insolvent system running. He is paid less and taxed more to provide the money needed to keep this Ponzi scheme going. Meanwhile, a kind of deadly symbiosis has developed between politicians and banks: Our political leaders borrow ever more money to pay off the banks, which return the favor by lending ever-more money back to our governments, keeping the scheme afloat.

In a true market economy, bad choices get penalized. Not here. When the inevitable failure of overindebted euro-zone countries came to light, a secret pact was made. Instead of accepting losses on unsound investments—which would have led to the probable collapse and national bailout of some banks—it was decided to transfer the losses to taxpayers via loans, guarantees and opaque constructs such as the European Financial Stability Fund, Ireland’s NAMA and a lineup of special-purpose vehicles that make Enron look simple. Some politicians understood this; others just panicked and did as they were told.

The money did not go to help indebted economies. It flowed through the European Central Bank and recipient states to the coffers of big banks and investment funds.

The edits are interesting in their own right. But I couldn’t help but think of an op-ed Flynt Leverett wrote back in 2006. Though the entire op-ed was, according to CIA officials, unclassified, during the review process the White House decided the parts that described Iran’s cooperation with the United States after 9/11 had to be redacted.

Back in 2006, the fact that Iran had made significant efforts to reach out the US undercut the Village’s entire narrative about national security.

It’s not clear whether WSJ’s editors decided on their own that revealing that the serial bankster bailouts benefit just the banksters was too dangerous for WSJ’s readers, or whether someone in Timmeh Geithner’s neighborhood called to complain (as they did when an Irish Times columnist revealed that Timmeh was behind nixing the IMF’s efforts to restructure Ireland’s debt).

But when a counter-narrative comes to be viewed as this dangerous, it’s usually a testament to the fragility of the narrative it threatens. In Leverett’s case, the counter-narrative threatened the stupid efforts to shore up US hegemony in the Middle East by attacking Iran; in this case, the counter-narrative threatens our continuing willingness to embrace austerity so the banksters can get richer. Of course both narratives are about the same thing: sustaining US power.

I can’t decide whether it’s pathetic or funny that our power continues to rest on such fragile narratives.

The Obama Administration was gung ho to brag about the GM IPO last year. But if I’m not mistaken, this is the first time the White House has bragged nationally about jobs created thanks to the auto bailout (Ron Bloom, who got promoted into an official Assistant to the President role at the beginning of the year, wrote this).

Today brings word of more good news for the American auto industry. GM announced that it would hire 4,200 workers at seventeen of its plants around the country.

President Obama took office amidst the worst recession in a generation and nowhere was this devastion [sic] felt harder than in the American auto industry and the communities it has supported for decades. In the year before GM and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy, the auto industry shed over 400,000 jobs.

Facing this situation head on, the President made a bold and, at the time, politically unpopular choice: Despite calls from critics to simply let these companies – and the entire American auto industry – crumble, he refused to allow these companies to fail. Had the Administration failed to intervene, conservative estimates suggest that it would have cost at least an additional one million jobs and devastated vast parts of our nation’s industrial heartland.

But at the same time, the President did not provide unconditional support.  He insisted that the companies and their stakeholders make tough choices and undertake massive restructurings requiring huge sacrifices from all of their stakeholders.

Because of this “tough love,” the American auto industry is now positioned to grow and prosper as the economy recovers.  Since GM and Chrysler emerged from bankruptcy in June 2009 the auto industry has added 115,000 jobs – the fastest pace of job growth in the auto industry since 1998. Last year, for the first time in 16 years, the Detroit Three actually gained market share compared to their foreign counterparts.

And these companies are not  just making cars and trucks – they’re making the kind of fuel efficient cars and trucks that will power us to energy independence, protect consumers against rising gas prices, and ensure America wins the future.

Some of the workers GM is hiring and re-hiring in today’s announcement will be at work producing larger-than-initially-planned quantities of the widely acclaimed Chevy Volt. And just last month, Ford – which didn’t receive government assistance but which supported our aid to GM and Chrysler and has said publicly that it would not have survived if the rest of the American auto industry had been allowed to collapse – reported its best first-quarter profit in more than a decade thanks in large part to its new fuel-efficient vehicles.

In the wake of an historic recession, there is no doubt that much work remains. And we will not rest until every American who is looking for work can find a job. But today’s announcement is another positive sign – including more than 2 million private sector jobs created over the past 14 months – that we’re seeing across the country.

The comparative silence about the success of the bailout in the terms that really matter to actual people–jobs–not only confirms Main Street suspicions about the White House viewing the economy solely through the lens of the banksters, but it also leads beltway folks like John Dickerson to wonder out loud whether there is anything a President can do to fix the economy (Dickerson must have skipped those weeks when his American history class covered the New Deal).

The effects of the too-small stimulus, though real, are a lot harder to see. But aside from the decade-long Military Industrial Complex stimulus the DC area has enjoyed, the auto bailout and related energy investments was the biggest concentrated stimulus the Administration championed. And it has had an effect, both in hiring at GM and Chrysler, but also in hiring in MI more generally.

It’d be nice if the Administration not only bragged about that, but replicated it for places like Nevada.

Update: John Dickerson corrects me; this July 2010 briefing (a presser leading up to an Obama trip to visit several plants in the MidWest, bragged about jobs created). Thanks to Dickerson for the correction.

Used to be, when you vanquished your enemy, you declared victory and went home.

Not this time. Just a week after the death of Osama bin Laden–who declared war on the US in 1996–Buck McKeon has renewed his effort to rewrite the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force so as to include our secret wars in Yemen, Pakistan, and wherever else an unchecked President wants it to be. As part of the bargain, McKeon’s GWOT 2.0 would give the President the authority to detain our enemies in this newly-redefined war for the length of the hostilities (otherwise known as “forever”).

Benjamin Wittes has a good analysis of McKeon’s GWOT 2.0 here.

Now, I realize it’s not as simple as declaring victory and going home. In fact, I bet that a new AUMF, which would divorce the President’s super-duper terrorist fighting powers from the territory of Afghanistan, might make him more likely to declare victory in Afghanistan and go home. Moreover, by redefining the GWOT such that we can attach those super-duper powers to, say, Anwar al-Awlaki rather than 9/11, then the President won’t face legal pressure to free indefinite detainees because the war has ended. While it won’t happen yet, if the US were to nab a few more key al Qaeda leaders using the intelligence seized from OBL’s compound, you could make a legitimate argument that it’s time to let the indefinite detainees free.

I’m just betting, but I suspect that’s the direction the Administration’s thinking will head from where it’s currently at, which–according to Josh Gerstein–is undecided.

A White Houses spokesman declined to comment to POLITICO about the administration’s official position on whether the AUMF needs to be reaffirmed or replaced.

However, a senior administration official said Obama aides are split over whether to endorse the idea of updating the use-of-force resolution.

“After ten years, you may need something other than the AUMF,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “As an intellectual policy matter you can make a very good argument for doing that [but] there are divisions.”

It would offer them flexibility in Afghanistan just in time for the electorate to voice its displeasure with our endless wars abroad, while guarding super-duper powers the President has come to apparently cherish.

I realize, too, that we can’t say “we killed OBL, so let’s stop fighting terrorists.” But therein lies the key issue, the week after OBL’s death. Note the logic Wittes gives for supporting some kind of new AUMF (though he has some concerns about McKeon’s version):

This provision is sure to come under fire from the political left, which will argue that it is an expansion of the war just as Bin Laden has been killed. This is silly. It largely enshrines in law the administration’s current interpretation of the AUMF as pertains to the scope of the conflict and the scope of detention authority in the conflict. And it would put Congress explicitly behind the power to detain the enemy for the first time. It is more of an updating of the AUMF, whose focus on the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks is requiring increasingly strained interpretation to address the combatants in today’s fight, than an expansion of it. The provision seems to me very healthy–for the reasons I have given in the past.

While Wittes’ support for a new AUMF have been more thoughtful in the past, the logic here is basically that it is a good thing for Congress to endorse what a President is already doing if what he is already doing “strain[s] interpretation” of an original Congressional authorization. It’s the same kind of logic that held Congress should pass the FISA Amendments Act with immunity to give legal sanction to what the President was already doing. And like the FAA, a new AUMF would take place without an assessment of efficacy. A year after FAA passed, the IG report on the illegal wiretap program showed that program had not been all that effective. But it was too late to go back and put those Presidential powers back in their genie bottle.

About the most valuable reason for engaging with the torture apologists’ claims that torture led to OBL also has to do with efficacy. Human intelligence was critically important–particularly the kind practiced by people who could recognize the importance of a courier. NSA wiretaps abroad was crucially important. Our partnership with Pakistan was crucial as well. But even accounting for OBL’s dead daughter, it’s not clear that dropping drones based on dubious intelligence was all that effective (even ignoring the blowback that has led directly to radicalization of others). And given that a new AUMF would primarily authorize drone strikes in sovereign countries and indefinite detention (both enhanced wiretapping and intelligence ops are now tied to terrorism more generally, not an AUMF), it’s not clear that it would support effective policies.

Spencer addresses this point well–particularly the expansion of the AUMF to include “associated forces”–in his story on GWOT 2.0.

“Associated forces” could place the U.S. at war with terrorist entities that don’t concern themselves with attacking the United States. Think Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani terrorist group aligned with al-Qaida that pulled off the Mumbai bombings of 2008. Under the House language, there’s nothing to stop Obama or his successors from waging war against them. It comes close to “terrorism creep,” says Karen Greenberg, the executive director of the Center for Law and Security at New York University.

Greenberg doesn’t dispute that the war on al-Qaida goes far beyond bin Laden. But before voting on an expansion of the war — beyond al-Qaida — “we need to absorb first what the death of bin Laden means,” she says. “We need to stop and think and re-think. The idea that we’re going to keep reacting and not have a thoughtful time out is just unacceptable.”

I’d add one more thing. If we embrace GWOT 2.0 without some real thought about what the most effective response should be, we’re also going to chip away at more widespread international adherence to rule of law. You’ll increasingly see countries using our practices as justification to, say, assassinate a political figure in a neighboring country as a terrorist. You’re going to see not just the US, but the entire globe, accelerate down a slippery slope, potentially greatly destabilizing the world as a result.

The Obama Administration has an excuse to rethink (though the attempted assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki suggests they don’t want to conduct such a rethink) not just about what we’ve done–and the legal cover that all that really should have had–but what has been effective and what has been counterproductive. It seems Republicans are in such a rush to double down on war powers that they may lead us, and the world, further down the path of stupid belligerency.

I think a parade to celebrate would be a much smarter idea.

As Mark Bittman said when he tweeted this press releasem, “If bottled water is getting recalled we’re all in a lot of trouble.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – May 4, 2011 – Officials at the Arkansas Department of Health (ADH) announced today that test results on a sample taken from certain lots of Mountain Pure bottled drinking water show the presence of biological contamination.

The company has announced a voluntary recall of lots marked with a four-digit time code. The time code is written in military time, and the affected time period is from 2200 through 0400. This is etched into the plastic bottle. Also included is an expiration date code that says either Best By 2-27-2013 MPWA or Best By 2-28-2013 MPWA. These are bottles of purified drinking water in the 16.9 fl. oz. (506 ml.) size. ADH is recommending that anyone who might have purchased or received any of this bottled water dispose of it or return it to the point of purchase.

More testing is needed to identify the specific type of mold and its origin, and that is expected to take several more days. ADH has recommended to the company that they recall the entire lot where this sample originated, and the recall process is underway.

According to William L. Mason, MD, MPH, branch chief for the Preparedness and Emergency Response branch at ADH, it is unlikely that a healthy person would become ill from drinking this water. “People with a weakened immune system might be at higher risk,” Mason said. “Anyone who thinks they may have become ill after drinking this water should consult a physician.”

The affected water was found in a shipment of bottled water ordered by the city of Clinton for use during disaster response efforts that are on-going there. In some communities, including Clinton, public drinking water systems are under precautionary boil orders to help reduce the possibility of diarrheal illness. Residents are urged to boil drinking water for one minute prior to consuming it or to drink bottled water.

“We want to stress that the bottled water recall applies only to the specific lots of Mountain Pure water that are on the recall,” Mason said. “We are still saying that bottled water and water that you have purified by boiling is the safest way to provide drinking water in those communities with disrupted water supplies.”

This water was distributed because the water treatment plant in Clinton, AR, failed after heavy rains. According to the “Pure Mountain” people, the mold was introduced into the bottles as dust fell into the bottles during “purification.”

He said dust particles got into some water bottles during the capping of filled water bottles as part of the final process known as ozonation, where ozone is used to remove iron, manganese, taste, odors and sulfur without adding chemicals.

The particles may not show up for several days, depending on the temperature at which the bottled water is stored, according to Stacks.

It’s bad enough that we can’t produce eggs or peanut butter without contamination. But it seems somehow symbolic that we can’t manage to bottle water without introducing some kind of contamination.

Robert Chesney notes that the HASC Mark on the Defense Authorization bill includes a section on cyberwar. Here’s the entire section:

This section would affirm that the Secretary of Defense has the authority to conduct military activities in cyberspace. The committee recognizes that because of the evolving nature of cyber warfare, there is a lack of historical precedent for what constitutes traditional military activities in cyberspace.

In particular, this section would clarify that the Secretary of Defense has the authority to conduct clandestine cyberspace activities in support of military operations pursuant to the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40; 50 U.S.C. 1541 note) outside of the United States or to defend against a cyber attack on an asset of the Department of Defense.

The committee notes that al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces are increasingly using the internet to exercise command and control as well as to spread technical information enabling attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in areas of ongoing hostilities.

While these terrorist actions often lead to increased danger for U.S. and coalition forces in areas of ongoing hostilities, terrorists often rely on the global reach of the internet to communicate and plan from distributed sanctuaries throughout the world. As a result, military activities may not be confined to a physical battlefield, and the use of military cyber activities has become a critical part of the effort to protect U.S. and coalition forces and combat terrorism globally.

In certain instances, the most effective way to neutralize threats and protect U.S. and coalition forces is to undertake military cyber activities in a clandestine manner. While this section is not meant to identify all or in any way limit other possible military activities in cyberspace, the Secretary of Defense’s authority includes the authority to conduct clandestine military activities in cyberspace in support of military operations pursuant to an armed conflict for which Congress has authorized the use of all necessary and appropriate force or to defend against a cyber attack on a Department of Defense asset.

Because of the sensitivities associated with such military activities and the need for more rigorous oversight, this section would require quarterly briefings to the congressional defense committees on covered military activities in cyberspace.

While Chesney focuses on the use of “clandestine” in this passage (which I’ll return to), I think one of the key phrases is simply the requirement that DOD brief the Armed Services Committees quarterly on what it’s doing in cyberspace. As the AP reported in January, the SASC complained during the confirmation hearings of Michael Vickers that they weren’t getting briefed on clandestine cyberwar activities. Vickers claimed in response that the law only required that DOD brief Congress on human clandestine activities.

The Senate Armed Services Committee voiced concerns that cyber activities were not included in the quarterly report on clandestine activities. But Vickers, in his answer, suggested that such emerging high-tech operations are not specifically listed in the law — a further indication that cyber oversight is still a murky work in progress for the Obama administration.

Vickers told the committee that the requirement specifically calls for clandestine human intelligence activity. But if confirmed, he said, he would review the reporting requirements and support expanding the information included in the report.

So this section appears to close Vickers’ loophole, now requiring that DOD brief Congress on its activities in its quarterly clandestine activities reports.

In addition to legally demanding briefings, the section appears to affirmatively approve–as clandestine activities–cyberattacks against an AUMF-authorized target (so, al Qaeda and people like Anwar al-Awlaki we claim to be included in AUMF), and cyberdefense against an attack on an asset of DOD.

By the way, anyone want to speculate whether a Specialist allegedly downloading several databases onto a Lady Gaga CD constitutes a cyberattack on a DOD asset? Because if this permission includes WikiLeaks, then this section might be retroactively authorize attacks–say, DNS attacks on US-based servers–on WikiLeaks (note that DOD can attack outside the US, but such geographical limits are not placed on defensive actions).

In any case, as Chesney emphasizes, this section specifically authorizes attacks on AUMF-authorized targets and defense against attacks on DOD targets. Chesney notes that by calling these activities “clandestine,” it makes them a Traditional Military Activity.

That is to say, the language in § 962 refers to DOD authority to engage in cyber operations which are mean to go undiscovered but not meant to be denied.  That alone would presumably keep them from being categorized as a “covert action” subject to presidential finding and SSCI/HPSCI notification requirements.  Yet one can imagine that this does not quite suffice to solve the boundary dispute, insofar as it might not be clear on the front end that one would be willing to acknowledge sponsorship of an operation publicly if it becomes known…and indeed it might well be that the activity is very much meant to be both concealed and denied, making it hard at first blush to show that the activity is not a Title 50 covert action after all.  But in at least some instances there is a separate reason it should not be deemed a covert action: i.e., when the action is best understood as a high-tech equivalent to a traditional military activity (the “TMA” category being an explicit exception to the T50 covert action definition).  And that appears to be the case with the two categories explicitly described above, or at least arguably so.

The explanatory statement accompanying § 962 supports this reading.  It opens by stating that

[t]he committee recognizes that because of the evolving nature of cyber warfare, there is a lack of historical precedent for what constitutes traditional military activities in cyberspace.

So, to summarize, this section appears to affirmatively authorize two types of activities, defining them as clandestine operations, and mandating that Congress get quarterly briefings on them.

But note this clause: “this section is not meant to identify all or in any way limit other possible military activities in cyberspace.”

So, it appears, there may be these two types of explicitly authorized clandestine operations, and then the stuff John Rizzo warned about.

The House Armed Services Committee Mark-Up for next year’s Defense Authorization is out. And it includes funds to build drone hangars at four bases in the Continental US. The bases are–with images showing how far a Predator drone might be able to fly with its 2,300 mile range–are below:

Fort Riley, KS ($60 million)

Fort Campbell, KY ($67 million)

Fort Bragg, NC ($54 million)

Fort Hood, TX ($47 million)

Congratulations California! You seem to be slightly out of range of these new drone hangars.

Mind you, these aren’t the domestic drones you’re looking for. The domestic drones–piloted by the Air National Guard at Fort Drum, NY to monitor black bears in the Adirondacks–just cover the East coast. These drones probably won’t have a domestic purpose.

Still, with members of Congress itching to approve drone overflight in the name of job-creation, how long will it be before we see drones overhead?

Normally, Marc Thiessen’s torture apologies aren’t worth my time. But seeing as how I didn’t whack any piñatas on Cinco de Mayo, why not Thiessen’s latest, in which he claims those who deny CIA interrogations played a part in nabbing bin Laden are the latest birthers?

Note the formulation, though: Thiessen’s not talking about torture. He’s talking about CIA interrogations generally, even while he links to a Sully post that in turn links to me (thanks Sully!). Sully was explicitly talking about torture, not interrogations generally, and I was talking specifically about waterboarding, and from that Thiessen concludes we deny CIA interrogations had any role in nabbing OBL.

What’s the matter, Marc? Is your shifting of the debate indication you know you’ve lost the torture debate?

And boy does he lose that debate. Thiessen spends much of his column talking about people whose interrogations led to other plots, some of them totally debunked even within the documents Thiessen quotes. About the only piece he really connects to OBL is this interpretation of the intelligence Abu Faraj al-Libi contributed.

Take, for example, the file on Abu Faraj al-Libi — one of several CIA detainees who helped lead the agency to bin Laden’s courier. The document describes Abu Faraj as the “communications gateway” to bin Laden who once in custody “reported on al-Qai’das methods for choosing and employing couriers, as well as preferred communications means.” Based on intelligence obtained from Abu Faraj and other CIA detainees, it states that “in July 2003, [Abu Faraj] received a letter from UBL’s designated courier” (to whom he referred by a false name, Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan) in which “UBL stated [Abu Faraj] would be the official messenger between UBL and others in Pakistan.” The file also notes a vital piece of intelligence: To better carry out his new duties “in mid-2003, [Abu Faraj] moved his family to Abbottabad” — the city where bin Laden eventually met his end — “and worked between Abbottabad and Peshawar.” And the file reveals that “in mid-April 2005, [Abu Faraj] began arranging for a store front to be used as a meeting place and drop point for messages he wanted to exchange” with bin Laden’s courier and was captured while waiting to meet him.

So to summarize Thiessen’s spin of how al-Libi helped nab OBL:

• Al-Libi told the CIA that at a time when he was a key messenger for OBL, he had been in Abottabad
• Al-Libi told the CIA how important couriers were
• Al-Libi managed to hide the name of the all-important courier through whom we eventually found OBL, even under torture

Okay, Marc, so what did the CIA do with that intelligence? As Jose Rodriguez (who was head of Clandestine Services at the time) helpfully explained, they concluded from al-Libi’s interrogation that OBL was just a figurehead.

Al-Libbi told interrogators that the courier would carry messages from bin Laden to the outside world only every two months or so. “I realized that bin Laden was not really running his organization. You can’t run an organization and have a courier who makes the rounds every two months,” Rodriguez says. “So I became convinced then that this was a person who was just a figurehead and was not calling the shots, the tactical shots, of the organization. So that was significant.”

And later that same year, the CIA shut down its dedicated hunt for OBL.

The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday.

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said.

The decision is a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit before Osama bin Laden became a household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush pledged to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice “dead or alive.”

The realignment reflects a view that Al Qaeda is no longer as hierarchical as it once was, intelligence officials said, and a growing concern about Qaeda-inspired groups that have begun carrying out attacks independent of Mr. bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

It wasn’t until the intelligence community got the courier’s real identity, and with it traced him back to Abbottabad–neither of which (according to reports thus far) came from al-Libi–that the intelligence community managed to track the courier in Abbottabad and in turn to OBL.

Now, as even the little bit I wrote that was quoted in Sully’s post made clear (so Thiessen presumably read it), the point I’m making is not that CIA interrogations didn’t yield information and–just as importantly–unbelievable denials–that ultimately helped lead to OBL. Rather, that either torture didn’t do as promised (that is, ensure we got all the important information that might lead to OBL’s location quickly) or the torturers were unable to understand the intelligence they were getting and so the intelligence was not used for years after we got it. Here’s what Sully quoted from me.

We can conclude that either KSM shielded the courier’s identity entirely until close to 2007, or he told his interrogators that there was a courier who might be protecting bin Laden early in his detention but they were never able to force him to give the courier’s true name or his location, at least not until three or four years after the waterboarding of KSM ended. That’s either a sign of the rank incompetence of KSM’s interrogators (that is, that they missed the significance of a courier protecting OBL), or a sign he was able to withstand whatever treatment they used with him.

And Thiessen’s own argument backs that up! According to his own argument, al-Libi gave us two key pieces of information, lied about another, and … the CIA responded by deprioritizing their hunt.

This, apparently, is Thiessen’s idea of a success!

And so, while those of us who note how torture stalled the hunt for OBL and didn’t deliver as promised note that fact, Thiessen sits at the WaPo proclaiming misunderstood leads and detainee lies a sign of success.

Alas, thwacking Thiessen’s nonsense won’t do a damn bit of good. Like torture, I guess, piñata thwacking never seems to work with dead-enders like Thiessen.

(Piñata image by peasap, used under Creative Commons license)