The Plot Thickens

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So here’s how the plot was going to work. 20 men of South Asian descent, traveling in pairs, buy tickets for flights the US on-line. They pack their carry-ons carefully, with their bottles of acetone and hydrogen peroxide. They’re a little nervous as they approach Check-In, but confident that things will go well. And then the woman behind the desk asks the first question:

Tickets and passports?

The two South Asians look at each other, start stammering right away, their nervousness showing.

Um, uh, well, um, you see, we don’t have passports. But can you let us on a plane to America anyway??

At which point the ticket clerk starts laughing hysterically at the foolishness of anyone who believes you can get on a flight to America without a passport.

But don’t laugh! The big terror bust the other day? Not only didn’t the terrorists have plane tickets yet, but some of them didn’t even have passports!!!

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How Many Terrorists Does One F-16 Get You?

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Fred Kaplan tries to teach BushCo a lesson about cooperating with unsavory regimes by pointing out the central role Pakistan played in yesterday’s big terrorist bust.

There’s a broader lesson here, and it speaks to the Bushadministration’s present jam throughout the Middle East and in otherdanger zones. If the British had adopted the same policy toward dealingwith Pakistan that Bush has adopted toward dealing with, say, Syria orIran (namely, it’s an evil regime, and we don’t speak with evilregimes), then a lot of passenger planes would have shattered andspilled into the ocean, hundreds or thousands of people would havedied, and the world would have suddenly been plunged into very scaryterritory.

This is not one of Kaplan’s strongest articles. He makes an important point about our relationship with Syria and Iran, sure. But to play up BushCo’s short-sightedness on Syria and Iran, Kaplan pretends that only Britain cooperated with Pakistan’s ISI on this terrorist bust. Kaplan thereby ignores that the US–in both this bust and the war on terror more generally–has precisely the kind of relationship he would advocate, one cognizant of the fact that, "the concept of morality in international relations is more complex than President Bush sometimes seems to recognize." Indeed, I have a suspicion that Pakistan’s involvement here may raise some very challenging questions about our cooperation with them on the war on terror.

Consider how Pakistan itself describes its involvement in this terrorist bust.

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Unsound Methods

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Via Steve Gilliard I see we’re still using unsound methods to create ourselves some informers.

The story of the San Francisco resident [Yassine Ouassif] — a security guard andpart-time engineering student — is in some ways unremarkable. He is oneof many immigrants investigated, yet not charged or deported, in thepost-Sept. 11 era. But his case reveals a lesser-known aspect of thewar on terror: the federal government’s high-stakes — some say coercive— tactics to recruit Muslim collaborators.

Ouassif treaded water for seven months in a murky administrativenetherworld — facing vague accusations of terrorist activity, butgranted no court hearing — while he says he was pressed aggressively tobecome an informant.

[snip]

But lawyers and local Islamic leaders in California cite at least adozen recent cases of clients who were aggressively encouraged tobecome informants after they were detained for minor visa violations.

"They are trying to cultivate and exploit innocent people, enticingthem, bribing them, tricking them in all these ways to snitch and spy,"said Shakeel Syed, executive director of the 70-mosque Islamic ShuraCouncil of Southern California.

I say "still using unsound methods" because at different times reasonably knowledgeable people have explained that our "unsound methods" in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo were designed, at least partially, to create informants. Particularly with Abu Ghraib, when we were faced with an Iraqi insurgency that we couldn’t infiltrate (not least, I’m sure, because we’ve thrown so many Arabic speakers out on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell violations), we humiliated people detained randomly so that we could later use to blackmail them. Take pictures of an Iraqi man covered in feces and wearing woman’s underwear on his head, and chances are he’s going to try to prevent you from circulating those pictures in his community.

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Pat Lang's Four Questions and Hezbollah

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What a dirty trick Pat Lang played, sending his friends a list of four issues with the US-French peace plan, but not addressing those four issues himself.

  1. France and the United States are not at war with each other.  They cannot agree to end the fighting.
  2. Hizbullah thinks it is winning both tactically and strategically.Why will it agree to anything other than a cease-fire in place?
  3. Such a cease-fire will be a victory for Hizbullah.
  4. Who will disarm Hizbullah if it accepts such a cease-fire?

I’m with Pat in doubting the feasability of the peace plan, as far as I understand it, and for some of the same reasons. I mean, Condi can’t even get Olmert (much less Peretz) to keep a straight face when she makes requests of them. Presumably Bolton was closely involved in this, and presumably he has more sway with Israel. But thus far the US has seemed unwilling and possibly unable to pressure Israel to play nice.

And France, as a stand-in for Hezbollah? I could see Chirac speaking with and for Rafiq Hariri’s Lebanon before his death. But Lebanon’s government has been all but castrated by the Israeli assault. So unless you’ve got a surrogate for Hezbollah, or preferably Hezbollah itself, you’ll be left with the problem of getting Hezbollah to agree to a plan it had no part in. Until Hezbollah is brought into the process, I assume they will answer, as they seem to be already, "Yeah, who’s going to disarm us? You and whose army?"

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More Fog about the Fog of War

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I feel like I’m watching a ping pong game being played over this giant monster, about to raise its head and knock over the entire ping pong table.

On Wednesday, the WaPo broke the news (a mere two years old now) that the 9/11 Commission strongly suspected that Pentagon officials lied about their actions on 9/11.

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concludedthat the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to misleadthe commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog ofevents on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.

Suspicionof wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secretmeeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring thematter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, accordingto several commission sources. Staff members and some commissionersthought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable causeto believe that military and aviation officials violated the law bymaking false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping tohide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.

Perhaps that scoop was tied to the imminent publication of a much more extensive Vanity Fair article, based on the tapes from NORAD. Perhaps both scoops are tied to the imminent publication of a book by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, which will describe the discrepancy.

The tapes, the author of the Vanity Fair article, Michael Bronner, says, make NORAD look pretty good.

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Judy's Call Data Versus My Call Data

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There’s an irony to yesterday’s 2nd Circuit Court decision that the NYT must turn over Judy Miller’s and Phillip Shenon’s phone records to DOJ. Since the District Court decision that the NYT didn’t have to turn over phone data, we’ve learned that the government is already getting our phone data–all of ours, journalist or not–in the name of fighting terrorism. Not that that should affect existing First Amendment privilege, but keeping in mind that AT&T is already handing over your phone records, consider what the Circuit Court decision describes as Judy’s and Shenon’s actions.

The opinion starts the chronology with an October 1, 2001 Judy Miller and KurtEichenwald article that discusses government efforts to shut down a bunch ofcharities tied to Al Qaeda.

Widening the financial assault on Osama bin Laden, administrationofficials are preparing to freeze the assets of about two dozen morecharities and other organizations that are suspected of providing moneyand support to his terrorist operations, government officials saidyesterday.

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One Week

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The First Fourth Generation World War

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Steve Soto posts an email exchange with Sam Gardiner that strongly supports a point I’ve been making.

A major piece of what I was being told was shocking. Iranand Syria were involved in the planning for the hostage takings. I waseven told where and when their planning meeting took place. Anindividual with former connections to the CIA told me the currentsituation is all is about the Iranian nuclear program. I was skepticalof that explanation until I heard Zal Khalilzad, the US Ambassador toIraq, on CNN late in the day. He said, "It is about the Iranian nuclearprogram." 

In other words, Iran did not wait for the US preemptive strike.  It conducted its own.

To understand why I think Iran actually gains by this, I need to make clear how I suspect Iran’s leaders calculated their risk and reward. Many have assumed that Iran’s cost-benefit analysis weighed status quo in the Middle East and the prospect of a deal at the UN, versus implication in a regional war with Israel. If the Iranians had believed this to be the case, they would never have intervened in this confrontation (and understand, I am convinced they pre-empted an Egyptian cease fire; other claims are tough to measure because of the politics involved). I strongly suspect the Iranian cost-benefit analysis weighed certain war against the US on the US’ terms versus war not on the US’ terms.

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What IF Iran Is Behind the Burgeoning Regional War?

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Via hilzoy via Glenn Greenwald, I found this description of Mubarak’s attempts to broker peace between Hamas and Israel.

"Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak yesterday told the Cairo daily AlAhram that he had drafted an agreement for the release of abductedIsraeli soldier Gilad Shalit, but that it had been scuttled by outsidepressure on Hamas.

"I would not be revealing any secrets by saying I had writtenportions of a dignified resolution to the soldier crisis," Mubarak saidin the interview.

According to the Egyptian leader, Israel promised to releasenumerous Palestinian prisoners, and Hamas leader Khaled Meshal andPalestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas had both been told.However, the agreement was not implemented due to pressure on Hamas.

"Then Hamas was pressured and entities I do not want to nameintervened in the mediation. This blocked the impending agreement,"Mubarak said."

To my mind, it’s the most concrete evidence I’ve seen that Iran or Syria is stage-managing the growing chaos in the Middle East.

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