The Great Congressional Bailout: Guantanamo (Part 2 --- Dan Froomkin)

The Great Congressional Bailout: Guantanamo (Part 1 — The Daily Show)
Keeping Guantanamo Open: Will Obama Give Way?

It's now less than 15 minutes until President Obama's news conference on Guantanamo Bay, 30 minutes until former Vice President Dick Cheney launches his latest assault on the Administration (and, if you'll forgive the editorial comment, decency) with a speech at the American Enterprise Institute.

So in anticipation and as an extension of our commentary this morning, here is Dan Froomkin's excellent blog on The Washington Post website taking apart the Congressional bailout, particularly by Obama's Democrats, on Guantanamo:

With Friends Like These

Here's one thing that hasn't changed in the Obama era: Republicans are still able to come up with scare tactics that turn Senate Democrats into a terrified and incoherent bunch of mewling babies.

It's hard to imagine anything more ridiculous than the suggestion that bringing some of the terror suspects currently incarcerated in Guantanamo to high-security prisons in America will pose a threat to local communities.

It is nothing more than a bogeyman argument, easily refuted with a little common sense. (Isn't that what prisons are for?) But that's assuming you don't spend your every moment living in fear of Republican attack ads questioning your devotion to the security of the country. Or that you have a modicum of respect for the intelligence of the American public.

Ah well. Old habits die hard, I guess. And Senate Democrats apparently remain an easily frightened bunch, after eight years of faint-hearted submission.

Here's a question. Democratic congressional leaders ostensibly want to close Guantanamo, which they recognize has become the ultimate symbol of the Bush administration's violations of human rights. They acknowledge that keeping it open only makes the country less safe -- and that any number of the detainees there have been imprisoned sometimes cruelly and often under false pretenses, for as long as seven years. So they want all the detainees there to -- what? Vanish? Die? How do they expect any other country to take custody of anyone if we refuse to do it ourselves?

Worrying about releasing prisoners here is one thing. But refusing to even consider putting them in our prisons is nonsense. It it tantamount to insisting that Guantanamo stay open.

But as Shailagh Murray writes in The Washington Post: "Under pressure from Republicans and concerned about the politics of relocating terrorism suspects to U.S. soil, Senate Democrats rejected President Obama's request for funding to close the Guantanamo Bay prison and vowed to withhold federal dollars until the president decides the fate of the facility's 240 detainees...

"As recently as last week, Senate Democrats had hoped to preserve a portion of Obama's Guantanamo funding request. But their resolve crumbled in the face of a concerted Republican campaign warning of dire consequences if some detainees ended up in prisons or other facilities in the United States, a possibility that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has acknowledged."

Specifically, as the Associated Press is now reporting, the Senate voted 90 to 6 today for an amendment that would keep any detainee held in the Guantanamo prison from being transferred to the United States.

Here's the transcript of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's nonsensical news conference yesterday.

Reid: "I think there's a general feeling... that the American people, and certainly the Senate, overwhelmingly doesn't want terrorists to be released in the United States. And I think we're going to stick with that...."

Q. "No one's talking about releasing them. We're talking about putting them in prison somewhere in the United States."

Reid: "Can't put them in prison unless you release them."

Q. "Sir, are you going to clarify that a little bit? I mean -- "

Reid: "I can't -- I can't -- I can't make it any more clear than the statement I have given to you. We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States. I think the majority -- I speak for the majority of the Senate....

Q. "[I]f a detainee is adjudicated not to be a terrorist, could that detainee then enter the United States?"

Reid: "Why don't we wait for a plan from the president? All we're doing now is nitpicking on language that I have given you. I've been as clear as I can. I think I've been pretty clear...."

Q. "But Senator, Senator, it's not that you're not being clear when you say you don't want them released. But could you say -- would you be all right with them being transferred to an American prison?"

Reid: "Not in the United States."

Q. (OFF-MIKE)

Reid: "I think I've had about enough of this."

Joseph Williams writes in the Boston Globe: "The decision to buck the president on Guantanamo left Democrats on the defensive and Republicans reveling at the discord....

"Caroline Frederickson, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington legislative office, said she and others...believe that the White House and Democrats are reacting to Republican fearmongering about terrorists on US soil.

"Any legitimate terror suspect, she said, would almost certainly be held in remote, high-security 'supermax' federal prisons, which are already home to convicted terrorists like British shoe bomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th hijacker of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"'That's what these prisons are designed for,' she said."

David M. Herszenhorn writes in the New York Times: "On Tuesday Republicans, including the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who has been warning for weeks about the dangers of closing the prison, applauded the Democrats' decision.

"At a news conference, Mr. McConnell said he hoped it was a prelude to keeping the camp open and dangerous terrorism suspects offshore, where he said they belong."

Herszenhorn writes: "Administration officials have indicated that if the Guantánamo camp closes as scheduled more than 100 prisoners may need to be moved to the United States, including 50 to 100 who have been described as too dangerous to release.

"Of the 240 detainees, 30 have been cleared for release. Some are likely to be transferred to foreign countries, though other governments have been reluctant to take them. Britain and France have each accepted one former detainee. And while as many as 80 of the detainees will be prosecuted, it remains unclear what will happen to those who are convicted and sentenced to prison."

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said yesterday that Obama will be giving a speech tomorrow on his Guantanamo plans, as well as other issues relating to detainees and detention policy.

"Thursday he'll outline his thoughts on detainee and detention issues, as well as the other issues like photos and memos," Gibbs said. "He'll outline the reasoning of why he strongly believes, and many in both parties believe, that closing Guantanamo Bay is in our best national security and foreign policy interest. And he will go through a number of the decisions related to that and other issues that we've discussed in the last few weeks that all relate to it."

Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei write for Politico: "Obama advisers are comparing Thursday's speech to his big-picture Georgetown University speech on the economy last month — not intended necessarily to produce 'hard news' but a sustained effort to describe and defend his policies and the political and intellectual assumptions behind them."

They also note that former vice president Cheney will be giving his own national-security speech tomorrow morning at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Glenn Greenwald blogs for Salon: "The 'debate' over all the bad and scary things that will happen if Obama closes Guantanamo and we then incarcerate those detainees in American prisons is so painfully stupid even by the standards of our political discourse that it's hard to put into words."

One key step in the process, Greenwald writes, entails "'Journalists' who are capable of nothing other than mindlessly reciting what they hear...depicting the Right's frightened neurosis as a Serious argument, and then overnight, a consensus emerges: Democrats are in big trouble politically unless they show that they, too, are as deeply frightened as the Right is."

Kevin Drum blogs for Mother Jones: "His own party won't support him against even the most transparent and insipid demagoguery coming from the conservative noise machine. The GOP's brain trust isn't offering even a hint of a substantive case that the U.S. Army can't safely keep a few dozen detainees behind bars in a military prison, but Dems are caving anyway. Because they're scared."

Also see Jon Stewart's take on the issue from last night's Daily Show.

Meanwhile, in a bit of related news, Josh Gerstein reports for Politico: "A federal judge has rejected aspects of the Obama administration's definition of who can legally be held as a prisoner in the war on terror.

"In a 22-page decision issued Tuesday evening, U.S. District Court Judge John Bates ruled that members in Al Qaeda or the Taliban could be detained, but that mere support for Al Qaeda activities is not a sufficient basis for the government to hold prisoners at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere.

"Bates said he pressed the Justice Department to explain why rendering assistance to Al Qaeda was enough to lock someone up without criminal charges.

"'After repeated attempts by the Court to elicit a more definitive justification for the 'substantial support' concept in the law of war, it became clear that the government has none,' wrote Bates, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush."

Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press takes a somewhat different view of the ruling, writing that the judge did allow the United States to hold some prisoners indefinitely.

The Summit: Obama Fiddles, Afghanistan and Pakistan Burn

Latest Post: Afghanistan Civilian Deaths: US Military Un-Apologises
Related Post: Pepe Escobar on Obama-Bush in Afghanistan-Pakistan
Related Post: Dan Froomkin on Afghanistan and Pakistan

We're still working through the analysis of yesterday's "summit" between President Obama and his Afghan and Pakistani counterparts, Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari. Let's just say, however, that there wasn't much of significance.

Obama's misleading line of a united fight against "Al Qa'eda and its extremist allies" was more than enough for Helene Cooper of The New York Times, who has been passing on the Administration's line for weeks, while The Washington Post settled for "Joint Action Against Taliban Push in South Asia". There was nothing --- nothing --- of consequence regarding future US political and military measures, only the platitudes of American officials: "The focus was on ways that Afghanistan and Pakistan, both unstable and strategically vital, could work with each other and with the United States to fight the militants who plague both countries."

If there were any political payoff from the summit, it came not for Obama but for his guests. Afghanistan's Karzai is the big winner. Yesterday, The Washington Post was still putting out the old news, "Administration Is Keeping Ally at Arm's Length". In fact, Karzai's beaming appearance alongside Obama --- despite the US President's finger-wagging about the "commitment to confronting" the Al Qa'eda/extremist threat --- was confirmation of victory. The Afghan President has locked up his re-election in August and continued US aid, quite a result given Washington's hope earlier this year that Karzai could be booted out of office.

Pakistan's Zardari has less reason to be comfortable. The US Government continues to put out the noise that a coalition in Islamabad with Nawaz Sharif is on the way. Any let-up on the Pakistan "offensive" against the Taliban in areas like Buner or perceived concessions to local tribes could lead Washington to renew pressure on the President and, behind the scenes, push the Pakistan military to act beyond and despite him). Still, yesterday's surface impression was that Zardari has to be accepted as an "elected" leader, so he (and his PR machine, working with The Wall Street Journal) have a bit of breathing space.

No, if you want significance, it came not in Washington but back in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Here are the articles that mattered: "Civilian Deaths Imperil Support for Afghan War", "In Pakistan, 'Great Rage, Great Fear'", and, this morning, "Afghans Protest over Farah Deaths".

The mass killing of civilians in Afghanistan's Farah Province --- there is still no clarity on the final death toll, with estimates of up to 130 dead --- will be this week's event to mark on the lengthening timeline of violence and muddle in the post-2001 conflict. And, in Pakistan, the most telling movement is not political discussions but the fleeing of hundreds of thousands from fighting between the Pakistani military and Taliban and from US airstrikes.

Two analyses landed on these key points today: Dan Froomkin in his blog for The Washington Post and Pepe Escobar for The Asia Times. Because both speak for and to our growing concern that summits and the battle by Karzai and Zardari for political survival are merely covering up an escalation in violence that accompanies the US "surge", we've reprinted them in separate entries.

Beyond the Summit: Dan Froomkin on Afghanistan and Pakistan

Latest Post: Obama Fiddles, Afghanistan and Pakistan Burn
Related Post: Pepe Escobar on Obama-Bush in Afghanistan-Pakistan

From Dan Froomkin's excellent overview blog "White House Watch" on The Washington Post site:

What the 'Military Solution' Looks Like

There's a tremendous sense of urgency surrounding President Obama's meetings today with the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And a sense of urgency often leads people to focus primarily on military solutions.

So it's worth stopping to consider what the "military solution" has been looking like recently in that region of the world.

Rahim Faiez writes for the Associated Press: "The international Red Cross confirmed Wednesday that civilians were found in graves and rubble where Afghan officials alleged U.S. bombs killed had dozens....

"Women and children were among dozens of bodies in two villages targeted by airstrikes, the International Committee of the Red Cross reported Wednesday, after sending a team to the district. The U.S. military sent a brigadier general to the region to investigate.

"A former Afghan government official said up to 120 people died in the bombing Monday evening...

"The first images from the bombings in Farah province emerged Wednesday. Photos from the site obtained by The Associated Press showed villagers burying the dead in about a dozen fresh graves, while others dug through the rubble of demolished mud-brick homes."

Matthew Lee writes for the Associated Press that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this morning said "the Obama administration 'deeply, deeply' regrets the loss of innocent life apparently as the result of a U.S. bombing in Afghanistan and will undertake a full review of the incident."

But the damage is done, both to the victims and to our goals. Consider what Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in February: "We have learned, after seven years of war, that trust is the coin of the realm -- that building it takes time, losing it takes mere seconds, and maintaining it may be our most important and most difficult objective.

"That's why images of prisoner maltreatment at Abu Ghraib still serve as recruiting tools for al-Qaeda. And it's why each civilian casualty for which we are even remotely responsible sets back our efforts to gain the confidence of the Afghan people months, if not years."



And now let's take a look at what's going on in Pakistan, where, as Warren P. Strobel and Margaret Talev write for McClatchy Newspapers, "Obama and his team are urging [Pakistani President Asif Ali] Zardari to mount a sustained offensive against the Taliban and its allies, who're imposing a brutal form of Islamic rule across the country's northwest."

The problem: "Religious militants, who aspire to fundamentalist religious rule like the Taliban maintained in Afghanistan for five years until 2001, took advantage of a cease-fire with the government to win control over the scenic Swat valley and have since moved into neighboring districts, some of which are 60 miles from the capital of Islamabad."

But here is what Zardari's solution looks like. As Saeed Shah wrote for McClatchy Newspapers on Monday: "The Pakistani army's assault against Islamic militants in Buner, in northwest Pakistan, is flattening villages, killing civilians and sending thousands of farmers and villagers fleeing from their homes, residents escaping the fighting said Monday...

"[R]esidents' accounts of the fighting contradict those from the Pakistani military and suggest that the government of President Asif Ali Zardari is rapidly losing the support of those it had set out to protect."

Strobel and Talev write that the "heavy-handed military force...could further undermine support for the government.

"'All they're doing is displacing civilians and hurting people,' said a U.S. defense official who asked not to be further identified because he isn't authorized to speak to the media. 'It's not going to work.'"

So what will work? Who knows? As Paul Richter and Christi Parsons write in the Los Angeles Times, Obama seems to have no choice but to "overhaul a painstakingly developed security strategy that was unveiled only five weeks ago but already has become badly outdated."

And the greatest urgency, in fact, is now seen on the Pakistan side of the border. As Richter and Parsons write: "In what is emerging as Obama's first major foreign policy crisis, U.S. officials fear the militants could fracture Pakistan, the far more populous nation, further destabilizing the region and even posing a grave risk to the security of Islamabad's nuclear arsenal...

"Though the situation in Afghanistan may not have improved, it does suddenly seem more manageable. 'By comparison, it looks like Canada,' one U.S. official said in an interview."

Canada? With 60,000 American troops soon to be in harm's way? I don't think so. But you get the point.

Meanwhile, Obama is dealing with two reluctant allies.

As Rajiv Chandrasekaran writes in The Washington Post, "senior members of Obama's national security team say [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai has not done enough to address the grave challenges facing his nation. They deem him to be a mercurial and vacillating chieftain who has tolerated corruption and failed to project his authority beyond the gates of Kabul....

"Vexed by the challenge of stabilizing Afghanistan with a partner they regard as less than reliable, Obama's advisers have crafted a two-pronged strategy that amounts to a fundamental break from the avuncular way President George W. Bush dealt with the Afghan leader.

"Obama intends to maintain an arm's-length relationship with Karzai in the hope that it will lead him to address issues of concern to the United States, according to senior U.S. government officials. The administration will also seek to bypass Karzai by working more closely with other members of his cabinet and by funneling more money to local governors."

And Karen DeYoung writes in The Washington Post: "The Obama administration 'unambiguously' supports Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, even as it puts 'the most heavy possible pressure' on his government to fight extremists in the country, Richard C. Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, told Congress yesterday....

"When the three sit down today, Obama will tell Zardari and Karzai that they 'have to work together, despite their issues and their history. That's just what has to be done,' said one of two senior administration officials who briefed reporters at the White House about the visits on the condition of anonymity."

As the New York Times editorial board writes: "American officials don’t have much confidence in either leader — a fact they haven’t tried to conceal. Most Afghans and Pakistanis share their doubts. But if there is any hope of defeating the Taliban, Mr. Obama will have to find a way to work with both men — and find the right mixture of support and blunt pressure to get them to do what is necessary to save their countries."