Cheney Says He Was Right All Along

Former Vice President Dick Cheney gave an interview to Politico today in which he warned of a devastating WMD attack on the US, talked up the effectiveness of torture, and  suggested that the time for diplomacy towards America's enemies was past. Sound familiar?:

Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

Cheney also "called Guantanamo a 'first-class program,' and 'a necessary facility' that is operated legally and with better food and treatment than the jails in inmates' native countries."

Of course, he offers no evidence for the confluence of terrorism and WMD, or indeed for a situation in which waterboarding prevented a terrorist attack- not because there is none, you understand, but because such information is Top Secret:

He expressed confidence that files will some day be publicly accessible offering specific evidence that waterboarding and other policies he promoted — over sharp internal dissent from colleagues and harsh public criticism — were directly responsible for averting new Sept. 11-style attacks.

The beauty of Cheney's version of history is that he can't be proven wrong- and should the worst happen on Obama's watch he'll be able to pat himself on the back and say he was right all along. Some are accusing him of fear mongering, but to me it looks like sour grapes.

US Threatens UK to Keep Gitmo Torture Secret

(thanks to Ali Yenidunya for co-writing this entry)

The British High Court ruled this afternoon that evidence of the torture of a Britain resident at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, and the British intelligence services' knowledge of that torture, must remain secret because of US threats to stop sharing intelligence with Britain.



The judges unhappily and reluctantly issued their decision in the case of Binyam Mohamed, who has been held in Guantanamo since 2002. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband had claim that the disclosure of evidence, originally contained in documents given to him by the US government, would threaten British national security.

The judges made clear that they had been told the US threat remained in place under the Obama Administration. This outweighed their assessment that there was "no disclosure of sensitive intelligence matters" in the American documents:

Indeed, we did not consider that a democracy governed by the rule of law would expect a court in another democracy to suppress a summary of the evidence contained in reports by its own officials ... relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be.

David Davis, Conservative Member of Parliament and former Shadow Home Minister, has taken the issue to the House of Commons. He wants to investigate whether the UK was threatened by the US officials and whether Britain had taken part in tortures: “David Miliband, the UK Foreign Minister, should explain what degree of complicity we have in this.”

Today's Obamameter: The Latest in US Foreign Policy (2 February)

Latest Post: Obama vs. the Generals on Iraq
Latest Post: No More War on Terror
Latest Post: Obama Outsourcing Torture?

Current Obamameter Reading: Cloudy with Signs of Thunder

7:45 p.m. "The Cable" reports that US intelligence analysts from the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Intelligence Council will hold a closed/Top Secret/Codeword briefing on Iran for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday afternoon.

5:20 p.m. Complications and possibly worse from Sunday's provincial elections in Iraq. Tribal leaders in Anbar Province, upset at the apparent dominance of the Sunni religious Iraqi Islamic Party, have claimed widespread fraud and threatened violence if the results are upheld. The head of the Anbar Tribes List warned:

We will set the streets of Ramadi ablaze if the Islamic Party is declared the winners of the election. We will make Anbar a grave for the Islamic Party and its agents. We will start a tribal war against them and those who cooperate with them.

The turnout in parts of Anbar was as low as 25 percent.

5:15 p.m. More trouble in Somalia, only days after the election of a new President. Reports of 16 to 39 dead after a roadside bomb targeting African Union peacekeepers exploded, and the soldiers opened fire in response.



2:45 p.m. One to Watch This Afternoon. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will brief President Obama on Monday afternoon about the plans to send up to 25,000 US troops to Afghanistan. Almost 4000 have been deployed already, 17,000 are in three brigades to be sent soon, and 5000 are support forces.

2:30 p.m. Following our weekend exclusive secret US-Iran talks, there is a further revelation today. Senior Obama Administration officials have told The Wall Street Journal that California Congressman Howard Berman planned to meet Iranian Speaker of the Parliament Ali Larijani in Bahrain in December. At the last minute, however, Larijani withdrew.

The meeting was brokered by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, which had organised the Manama Dialogue on regional security in Bahrain.

11:40 a.m. Today's Country on Notice for Bad Behaviour: Turkey. We're not the only ones to notice Turkey's shifting foreign policy and the aftermath of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's criticism of Israel at the Davos Economic Forum. The Washington Post features an editorial by Soner Cagaptay which shakes a big finger at the naughtiness in Ankara:

The erosion of Turkey's liberalism under the AKP [Justice and Development Party] is alienating Turkey from the West. If Turkish foreign policy is based on solidarity with Islamist regimes or causes, Ankara cannot hope to be considered a serious NATO ally. Likewise, if the AKP discriminates against women, forgoes normal relations with Israel, curbs media freedoms or loses interest in joining Europe, it will hardly endear itself to the United States. And if Erdogan's AKP keeps serving a menu of illiberalism at home and religion in foreign policy, Turkey will no longer be special -- and that would be unfortunate.

It is purely coincidence that Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the stridently pro-Israeli Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

10:10 a.m. Juan Cole offers an overview of early returns from the Iraqi provincial elections. His interesting evaluation is that parties supporting a strong central government (such as Da'wa and some Sunni parties) have done better than those (Kurdish parties and Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq) favouring more power for provincial governments.

9:45 a.m. A senior United Nations official has been kidnapped in southwest Pakistan. He is John Solecki, an American who is head of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office in Quetta.

9:40 a.m. A Taliban suicide bomber has killed 21 people in an attack on a police training centre in Uruzgan province in Afghanistan.

Morning Update (9 a.m. GMT; 4 a.m. Washington): The signs of thunder comes in the revelation, first set out by The Los Angeles Times on Saturday and analysed by Canuckistan in Enduring America today, of a complexity in President Obama's rollback of Dubya-era orders permitting unlimited detention and torture.

White House staffers are telling the media that "rendition", the practice in which detainees are transferred by the US to other countries who may or may not carry out the torture that Obama has banned, will continue. The leaks appear to be an assurance to the military and the CIA that they can continue to pick up enemy suspects and not worry about legal issues, provided they get the bad guys into the hands of foreign allies.

Obama Outsourcing Torture?

"An invaluable tool, (the CIA) said, is the practice in which U.S. agencies transfer individuals arrested in one country to another allied country that is able to extract information from them and relay it to the United States.”

Washington Post, 1 Nov. 2002

In their haste to fall over themselves in praising the Obama administration’s decision to close Guantanamo and CIA secret prisons, much of the media forgot to ask if that also applied to rendition. Rendition, a practice that began not with the now departed Bush administration but with its Democratic predecessor, involved the transferring of terrorism suspects from American control to the custody of American allies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. And how do these countries “extract information” from suspects. Here’s an account from the Washington Post of some of the methods employed by Jordan’s General Intelligence Department:

Former prisoners have reported that their captors were expert in two practices in particular: falaqa, or beating suspects on the soles of their feet with a truncheon and then, often, forcing them to walk barefoot and bloodied across a salt-covered floor; and farruj, or the "grilled chicken," in which prisoners are handcuffed behind their legs, hung upside down by a rod placed behind their knees, and beaten

We now have the apparent answer about rendition. The LA Times reported yesterday that it will continue as will the CIA’s power to kidnap people off the streets in foreign countries as it has done in widely publicized cases in Europe. The difference, according to one anonymous Obama official, is that “if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice."  The Obama administration should be asked as soon as possible whether torture is within these “parameters.” If it is it is further evidence that the main difference between the Obama version of the war on terror and that of his predecessor is in the way that it is sold to the public.