the human province

The London Review recently published an article on the Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist, and Stephen Walt, a Harvard government professor. (An unabridged version is available here.)

There has been a lot of talk about the paper, most of it pretty inane, like this piece from the Wall Street Journal, which seems to try to give the anti-semitism defense a veneer of resectability by slightly nuancing it:

The authors are at pains to note that the Israel Lobby is by no means exclusively Jewish, and that not every American Jew is a part of it. Fair enough. But has there ever been an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that does not share its basic features? Dual loyalty, disloyalty, manipulation of the media, financial manipulation of the political system, duping the goyim (gentiles) and getting them to fight their wars, sponsoring and covering up acts of gratuitous cruelty against an innocent people -- every canard ever alleged of the Jews is here made about the Israel Lobby and its cause. No wonder former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke was quick to endorse the article, calling it a "great step forward."

I do not mean to suggest that Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt are themselves anti-Semitic. But as outgoing Harvard President Larry Summers once noted, what may not be anti-Semitic in intent may yet be anti-Semitic in effect. By giving aid and comfort to people who have no trouble substituting the word "Jews" for "Israel Lobby," the Mearsheimer-Walt article is anti-Semitic in effect.

Not all of the criticisms, however, stoop to such non-arguments. This piece by the University of Chicago's Daniel Drezner focuses on what he sees as the empirical problems of the piece:

Walt and Mearsheimer should not be criticized as anti-Semites, because that's patently false. They should be criticized for doing piss-poor, monocausal social science.

To repeat, the main empirical problems with the article are that:

A) They fail to demonstrate that Israel is a net strategic liability;
B) They ascribe U.S. foreign policy behavior almost exclusively to the activities of the "Israel Lobby"; and
C) They omit consderation of contradictory policies and countervailing foreign policy lobbies.

At the end of the day, however, the piece that I found to be the most interesting came from Ha'aretz:

It sometimes takes AIPAC omnipotence too much at face value and disregards key moments - such as the Bush senior/Baker loan guarantees episode and Clinton's showdown with Netanyahu over the Wye River Agreement. The study largely ignores AIPAC run-ins with more dovish Israeli administrations, most notably when it undermined Yitzhak Rabin, and how excessive hawkishness is often out of step with mainstream American Jewish opinion, turning many, especially young American Jews, away from taking any interest in Israel.

Yet their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's, too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.

I tend to agree that the Israel lobby is pushing a foreign policy agenda that is often detrimental to American national interest and usually gives the opposite appearance of being the fair broker that the US tries to sell itself as in the Middle East. And while idiots like David Duke might use articles like this to push their elementary racism, we know that there is a lobby and that it is effective, and that we should not let bigots like him dictate what is acceptable and what is off limits for reasonable discussion. Like Mearsheimer and Walt say in their paper:

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers' unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby?s task even easier.

Another fair account of the paper appears in an Op-Ed aricle by Nicholas Goldberg in the LA Times:

The idea of a powerful "Jewish lobby" that has its gnarled fingers in the machinery of the government is an old and repugnant canard. Along with the Jews who supposedly own the media and those who reputedly control the banks, the cabal of sinister, third-column Hebrews who whisper into the ears of our leaders is a classic in the traditional checklist of anti-Semitic fulminations.

So it's no surprise that in the modern era, even to broach the idea of a "Jewish lobby" is unacceptable. It's just not done in polite society -- even in situations in which there's some truth to it. Few would deny, after all, that there are people who lobby for various Jewish issues, including, of course, Israel (just as there are a lot of Jews working in Hollywood and just as Jews do own the New York Times). But even though we know these things, we generally don't talk about them.

...So what are we to make of [the article]? Is it anti-Semitism or honesty? Propaganda cloaked in academic respectability -- or a courageous willingness to identify the elephant in the room?

...It seems silly to deny that a powerful lobby on behalf of Israel exists. The real question is how pernicious it is. Does it, in fact, persuade us to act counter to our national interest -- or is it a positive thing, as publisher Mortimer Zuckerman suggests?

His answer to this question is to read the article yourself. I couldn't agree more.


UPDATE: The London Review speaks out against charges of anti-semitism.

Also, Noam Chomsky weighs in.

There has been a lot of talk lately about nuclear prolifilation and double standards, particularly with the nuclear fuel deal struck between the US and India, which has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. (The only other countries that have not signed are Israel and Pakistan.) The claim of double standards is that the US has turned a blind eye to ISrael's nuclear weapons program, yet is threatening Iran, which has signed the Treaty, with sanctions for their pursuit of nuclear technology. The treaty stipulates the following:

Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; and not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices.

While North Korea was a signatory, it pulled out of the treaty in 2003, which does not seem to be against the text of the treaty:

Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.

So in response to claims of a double standard, both in comparison to Israel and India (or even Pakistan), Avner Cohen wrote a piece in Ha'aretz suggesting that Israel come clean on the bomb (print-ready version). His argument is twofold, legal and "existential." Legally, Cohen argues, Israel never signed the treaty, whereas Iran did:

The attempt to put Israel and Iran on the same level, or even to create a concrete political connection between them, is ignorant, unfair and biased. First of all, from the point of view of international law: whereas Iran is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and is committed to comply with it, Israel, like India and Pakistan, is not a signatory to the treaty and therefore is not beholden to a formal commitment. Whereas Iran has been caught in flagrant breach of its international commitments, Israel has not broken such commitments. In other words, like the seven other nuclear states in the world, and in stark contrast to Iran, Israel has never relinquished the right to develop nuclear weaponry.

Here, he is only partially right. While nuclear powers like France, the US, Britian, Russia and China never gave up their right to have nuclear weapons, they did sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, unlike Israel, Pakistan and India. So it's not really fair to put Iran, Israel and, say, Russia in the same basket. It's hard to know what to make of countries that refuse to sign an international treaty like that one. Legally, they're not bound to any course of action, but practically speaking, are countries that renege on a treaty any safer than those that never signed in the first place? Furthermore, if we're speaking in purely legal terms, Iran is within its rights to develop nuclear power, because the treaty explicitely ensures the right to pursue "nuclear energy for peaceful purposes":

Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

But let's not be coy. We know that even if Iran were to not produce nuclear weapons immediately, just positioning itself to be able to do so in short notice would make it a dominant force in the region. But there is little that the US or Israel, Iran's rival in the region, could do about that, legally speaking, that is.

Cohen's second argument is that Israel should somehow be given carte blanche for nuclear weapons, since she has always and still faces an "existential threat."

According to foreign reports, Israel began to develop its Samson option in the 1950s, while it was establishing a state for a people still in the shadow of conflagration, in a hostile geopolitical environment that was opposed to its very existence. It found itself committed to the creation of an insurance policy within the pre-1967 borders, without external guarantees for its existence. In the political climate of that time, a decade after the Holocaust, Israel had perhaps the strongest strategic and moral justification for turning to the nuclear option, certainly no less than France or China, which also began the atomic journey at that time.

Not only is Iran not under existential threat - its nuclear aspirations are an issue that puts it on a collision course with the world. Even the leaders of North Korea are not daring to declare their aspirations to wipe countries off the map, as the president of Iran has declared with respect to Israel.

This is essentially an argument for Israeli exceptionalism, and it brings up the question of whether some countries should be allowed to have nuclear weapons but not others.

Cohen is confusing moral and strategic justifications for nuclear weapons here. Sure, Israel had strategic reasons for pursuing nuclear weapons, but so does Iran. We all know that having nuclear weapons changes the equation and makes countries like the US much more likely to choose diplomacy over military force. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent to regime change. Personally, I think that the Middle East should be a nucler weapons-free zone, but for that to happen, Israel would have to realize that it is not possible for it to remain the sole nuclear power in the region. The mere fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is enough to encourage its neighbors to catch up.

In the end, the only real justification for one country to have nuclear weapons while another is not allowed is that of power politics. Those that have weapons are in a position to deny these weapons to other countries. It would be difficult to come up with criteria to decide otherwise. Would these criteria be economic? Social? Should there be a committee that would take these things into consideration and then make a ruling? This would be very complicated, and as things stand, it would most likely be the Security Council that would make that call, and of course for those five countries, each of which is a nuclear power, there should be no nuclear proliferation. For these countries, what is good for the goose is not good for the gander.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that other countries (North Korea, Isreal, India and Pakistan) would clandestinely pursue nuclear weapons. And knowing that the nuclear powers of the world will not willingly allow any other countries to obtain nuclear weapons, the best way to ensure non-proliferation would seem to be to ensure that they have no reason to seek them. And in this case, Israel should start asking itself if it's preferable to be a nuclear power among others in the region or to be a non-nuclear power in a nuclear-free Middle East.



Note:

On why and how the world could live with a nuclear Iran, here are two interesting articles from the Times:

Suppose we just let Iran have the bomb
We can live with a nuclear Iran

Irshad Manji asks an interesting question in today's Times when explaining how she learned to love the wall that has made life for many Palestinians even harder than it already was. She wonders if an effort to prevent suicide bombings justifies further hardship for Palestinians.

She answers yes, presumably because "before the barrier, there was the bomber." Even if she would prefer to overlook the fact that before the bomber, there was the occupation, Ms. Manji should concede that there are any number of ways to ensure security for a state, but that many of them are cruel, immoral and against international law.

An important point was made by Israel's Chief Justice in his ruling on the wall, in which he quoted his judgment prohibiting the torturing of Palestinian detainees: "This is the destiny of a democracy: she does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back."

Those who proclaim their love for the wall would do well to remember this.

Public Radio International's This American Life recently ran a very interesting episode about Guantanamo Bay and habeas corpus, called Habeas Schmaebeas (real audio). They interview two people who have been released from the camp that's not quite in Cuba and not quite in the US where over 500 people have been imprisoned without being charged with a crime. One of the people interviewed is a Pakestani man named Bader who was arrested there (and handed over to American authorities) for running a satirical Urdu language newspaper. Jack Hitt does a good job dispelling some of the misinformation about the people who are being held in Guantanamo Bay:

We're told over and over that these prisoners are so terrible that we need an off-shore facility away from US law to hold them. But then there's Bader. And every day, more storie like his are coming out, and they raise the question: Is Guantanamo a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of mistakes?

He quotes Bush and Cheney, who had this to say about the matter:

Bush: "These are people that got scooped up off a battlefield attempting to kill U.S. troops. And I want to make sure, before they're released, that they don't come back to kill again."

Cheney: "The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They're bomb makers. They're facilitators of terror. They're members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban."

Then he quotes Seton Hall University Law School's Report on Guantanamo Detainees, which is based on written determinations the Government has produced for detainees that it has designated as enemy combatants, which were prepared after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals that began in 2004. The report's findings were as follows:

1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed "fighters for;" 30% considered "members of;" a large majority ? 60% -- are detained merely because they are "associated with" a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist group is unidentified.

4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.

5. Finally, the population of persons deemed not to be enemy combatants ? mostly Uighers ? are in fact accused of more serious allegations than a great many persons still deemed to be enemy combatants.

Another reports done on Guantanamo, which came out at about the same time as Seton Hall's can be found here and here.

These reports confirm that the remarks that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney have been making about how these people are the "worst of the worst" and have been "scooped up off a battle field" are patently false. The issue that is perhaps the most disconcerting is that 86 percent of Gitmo detainees were arrested by Pakistani or Northern Alliance forces at a time when the US was offering a large bounty for turning in suspected Taliban or al Qaeda members. One example of a flyer informing Afghans of the bounty read:

You can receive millions of dollars for helping the Anti-Taliban Force catch Al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.

This is a copy of another flyer:



It seems obvious that most of these Pakistani and Afghan (and sometimes Chinese) dirt farmers being passed off as the "worst of the worst" were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. The US government doesn't seemed too concerned about giving them a trial or habeas corpus rights, and I can say that being held incognito for years and tortured and humiliated on a daily basis is enough to turn even a poor Chinese dirt farmer into an anti-American terrorist.

Reading Eliot Weinberger's What I heard about Iraq in 2005, I came accross a very funny but sobering quote from a recently released Abu Ghraib detainee, collected by independent journalist, Dahr Jamail:

"The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house."

I've been on hiatus for the last couple of months. Most of that was spent at work, and the last two weeks have been spent in Lebanon.

Starting tomorrow, I'll be writing again. A lot has gone on in the last couple of months concering Sudan, and I'll have some things to say about my brief time in Beirut.

In the Times this weekend, Kristof challenged Bill O'reilly to really defend Christmas values (as opposed to complaining about the imaginary war on Christmas by godless liberals):

...Fox News Channel's crusade against infidels who prefer generic expressions like "Happy Holidays" included 58 separate segments in just a five-day period.

After I suggested in last Sunday's column that a better way to honor the season might be to stand up to genocide in Darfur (a calamity that Mr. O'Reilly has ignored), Mr. O'Reilly denounced me on his show as a "left-wing ideologue."

...So I have a challenge for Mr. O'Reilly: If you really want to defend traditional values, then come with me on a trip to Darfur. I'll introduce you to mothers who have had their babies clubbed to death in front of them, to teenage girls who have been gang-raped and then mutilated - and to the government-armed thugs who do these things.

You'll have to leave your studio, Bill. You'll encounter pure evil. If you're like me, you'll be scared. If you try to bully some of the goons in Darfur, they'll just hack your head off. But you'll also meet some genuine conservative Christians - aid workers who live the Gospel instead of sputtering about it - and you'll finally be using your talents for an important cause.

So, Bill, what'll it be? Will you dare travel to a real war against Christmas values, in which the victims aren't offended shoppers but terrified children thrown on bonfires? I'm waiting to hear.

It's comforting to see more coverage of Darfur, and if the region comes up in a spat between O'Reilly and Kristof, then all the better.

O'Reilly responds (I couldn't find a permalink) to Kristof's op-ed by only addressing the Darfur claim in a single sentence -- by saying that he had not ignored Darfur, without giving any examples -- and spent the rest of his "talking points memo" calling Kristof a dishonest ideologue and character assassin, stating that he doesn't understand America:

Mr. Kristof is a committed secularist who seems to not understand the culture war, or that his team is intent on diminishing the traditions of Christmas and other Judeo-Christian hallmarks, and that is deeply offensive to most Americans.

Kristof lives in The New York Times world--an isolated island of politically correct liberalism with little connection to everyday Americans. But in the spirit of Christmas, I've asked St. Nicholas to bring our pal Nicholas a special gift--the wisdom to see what is really going on and to do some honest analysis.

Of course O'Reilly's comments are so mind-numbingly stupid that it's not even necessary to rebut them (but if you really feel the need to, you can check out Adam Cohen's piece on the so-called war on Christmas). So what's really important to me is that the world is getting a little more exposure to the genocide in Darfur, and if Bill O'Reilly comes off (once again) as a jackass, well that's just icing on the cake.


Otherwise, I've started reading Gérard Prunier's new book on Darfur (available in English as well as in French. So far it's given a very interesting background of Darfur as an independent Sultanate and sparked my interest in the Mahdists. But I'm only about 60 pages in, so I'll hold my comments on it until I'm done.

In today's Washington Post, the story of Khaled Masri's wrongful imprisonment, is told. He was apparently on his way to Macedonia after a spat with his wife in Germany, (he is a German citizen of Egyptian origin), when he was abducted at the Macedonian border by the police because he name was similar to an associate of one of the 9/11 hijackers. He was then handed over to the CIA in Skjope.

The local deputy CIA chief (the station chief was on vacation) dealt directly with the Counterterrorism Center (CTC), since the European divison division chief was also on vacation. The Post offers us a little background on CTC, including how they operate:

After the September 2001 attacks, pressure to locate and nab potential terrorists, even in the most obscure parts of the world, bore down hard on one CIA office in particular, the Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, located until recently in the basement of one of the older buildings on the agency's sprawling headquarters compound. With operations officers and analysts sitting side by side, the idea was to act on tips and leads with dramatic speed.

The possibility of missing another attack loomed large. "Their logic was: If one of them gets loose and someone dies, we'll be held responsible," said one CIA officer, who, like others interviewed for this article, would speak only anonymously because of the secretive nature of the subject.

To carry out its mission, the CTC relies on its Rendition Group, made up of case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists. Their job is to figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside, or a secluded corner of an airport where local authorities wait.

Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons -- referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.

The decision was taken to send Masri to prison in Afghanistan, where he says he was interrogated and beaten and warned, "You are here in a country where no one knows about you, in a country where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will know." Then his passport was analyzed and found to be genuine, at which point the CIA toyed with the idea of just sending him back to Macedonia as if nothing had happened without telling the German authorities. Finally, since Macedonia had refused to accept him, he was sent to Albania and then later flown back to Germany.

In the end, Masri says he was told by his detainer, he had been kidnapped, drugged, beaten and detained because he "had a suspicious name." The lesson he has learned from this horrible ordeal is that the US is "just like in the Arab countries: arresting people, treating them inhumanly and less than that, and with no rights and no laws."

Via Kristof's column today, I found a blog by an aid worker in Darfur, who is giving uncensored information from Sudan and who, for fear of being kicked out of the country, is remaining anonymous.

In case you can't access the Kristof article, he's not really saying anything new: the African Union peacekeepers don't have enough people, money or matériel; the US isn't doing anything; things are getting worse, not better.

But at least Kristof keeps writing about Darfur. He may, at times, sound like a slightly annoying record that keeps skipping, particularly if you listen to the multimedia pieces on the Times website, but he is one of the only people from a large American media outlet who has been struggling to keep Darfur ingrained in his public's fickle short-term memory. And for that, he deserves respect.

I just received a package from my family with some Christmas presents and the last three months of Harper's. There was a "reading" in there that I had never heard about. It is an exerpt from a March 2004 email in which Air Force Captain John Carr, one of the military prosecuters in the cases at Guantanamo Bay who has since then been transferred, complained to Army Colonel Fred Borch about the way the Office of Military Commissions was being carried out.

The Australian Broadcast Service seems to be the first to report that the trials were to be rigged.

I can't seem to find a transcript of the email on the internet, so I'm retyping the exerpt published in the November issue of Harper's (emphasis mine):

Sir,

I feel a responsibility to emphasize a few issues. Our cases are not even close to being adequately investigated or prepared for trial. There are many reasons why we find ourselves in this unfortunate position--the starkest being that we have had little or no leadership or direction for the last eight months. It appears that instead of pausing, conducting an honest appraisal of our current preparation plan for the future, we have invested substantial time and effort in concealing our deficiencies and misleading not only each other but also those outside our office who are either directly responsible for or asked to endorse our efforts. My fears are not insignificant that the inadequate preparation of the cases and misrepresentation related thereto may constitute dereliction of duty, false official statements, and other criminal conduct.

You asked in our meeting last week what else you could do but lead by example. In regards to the environment of secrecy, deceit, and dishonesty in this office, the attorneys appear merely to be following the example that you have set.

A few examples include:

You continue to make statements to the office that you admit in private are not true. You have stated for months that we are ready to go immediately with the first four cases. At the same time, emails are being sent out admitting that we don't have the evidence to prove the general conspiracy, let alone the specific accused's culpability.

You have repeatedly said to the office that the military panel will be handpicked and will not acquit these detainees, and we only needed to worry about building a record for the review panel. In private you stated that we are really concerned with review by academicians ten years from now, who will go back and pick the cases apart.

The fact that we did not approach the FBI for assistance prior to December 17 is not only indefensible but an example of how this office and others have misled outsiders by pretending that interagency cooperation has been alive and well for some time, when in fact the opposite is true.

It is my opinion that the primary objective of the office has been the advancement of the process for personal motivations--not the proper preparation of cases or the interests of the American people. The posturing of our prosecution team chiefs to maneuver onto the first case is overshadowed only by the zeal with which they hide the specific facts of their case from review or scrutiny. The evidence does not indicate that our military and civilian leaders have been accurately informed of the state of our preparation, the true culpability of our accused, or the sustainability of our efforts.

If the appropriate decision-makers are provided with the accurate information and determine that we must go forward on our current path, then all would be very committed to accomplishing this task. It instead appears, however, that the decision-makers are being provided false information to get them to make the key decisions, only to learn the truth after a point of no return.

When I volunteered to assist with this process, I expected there would at least be a minimal effort to establish a fair process and diligently prepare cases against significant accused. Instead, I find a half-hearted and disorganized effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged. It is difficult to believe that the White House has approved this situation, and I fully expect that one day, soon, someone will be called to answer for what our office has been doing for the last fourteen months.

While many may simply be concerned with a moment of fame and the ability in the future to engage in small-time practice, that is neither what I aspire to do not what I have been trained to do. I cannot morally, ethically, or professionally continue to be a part of this process.

According to the ABC article, prosecutor Major Robert Preston feels the same way: "After all, writing a motion saying that the process will be full and fair when you don't really believe it is kind of hard, particularly when you want to call yourself an officer and lawyer."

The London Review recently published an article on the Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist, and Stephen Walt, a Harvard government professor. (An unabridged version is available here.)

There has been a lot of talk about the paper, most of it pretty inane, like this piece from the Wall Street Journal, which seems to try to give the anti-semitism defense a veneer of resectability by slightly nuancing it:

The authors are at pains to note that the Israel Lobby is by no means exclusively Jewish, and that not every American Jew is a part of it. Fair enough. But has there ever been an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that does not share its basic features? Dual loyalty, disloyalty, manipulation of the media, financial manipulation of the political system, duping the goyim (gentiles) and getting them to fight their wars, sponsoring and covering up acts of gratuitous cruelty against an innocent people -- every canard ever alleged of the Jews is here made about the Israel Lobby and its cause. No wonder former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke was quick to endorse the article, calling it a "great step forward."

I do not mean to suggest that Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt are themselves anti-Semitic. But as outgoing Harvard President Larry Summers once noted, what may not be anti-Semitic in intent may yet be anti-Semitic in effect. By giving aid and comfort to people who have no trouble substituting the word "Jews" for "Israel Lobby," the Mearsheimer-Walt article is anti-Semitic in effect.

Not all of the criticisms, however, stoop to such non-arguments. This piece by the University of Chicago's Daniel Drezner focuses on what he sees as the empirical problems of the piece:

Walt and Mearsheimer should not be criticized as anti-Semites, because that's patently false. They should be criticized for doing piss-poor, monocausal social science.

To repeat, the main empirical problems with the article are that:

A) They fail to demonstrate that Israel is a net strategic liability;
B) They ascribe U.S. foreign policy behavior almost exclusively to the activities of the "Israel Lobby"; and
C) They omit consderation of contradictory policies and countervailing foreign policy lobbies.

At the end of the day, however, the piece that I found to be the most interesting came from Ha'aretz:

It sometimes takes AIPAC omnipotence too much at face value and disregards key moments - such as the Bush senior/Baker loan guarantees episode and Clinton's showdown with Netanyahu over the Wye River Agreement. The study largely ignores AIPAC run-ins with more dovish Israeli administrations, most notably when it undermined Yitzhak Rabin, and how excessive hawkishness is often out of step with mainstream American Jewish opinion, turning many, especially young American Jews, away from taking any interest in Israel.

Yet their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's, too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.

I tend to agree that the Israel lobby is pushing a foreign policy agenda that is often detrimental to American national interest and usually gives the opposite appearance of being the fair broker that the US tries to sell itself as in the Middle East. And while idiots like David Duke might use articles like this to push their elementary racism, we know that there is a lobby and that it is effective, and that we should not let bigots like him dictate what is acceptable and what is off limits for reasonable discussion. Like Mearsheimer and Walt say in their paper:

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers' unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby?s task even easier.

Another fair account of the paper appears in an Op-Ed aricle by Nicholas Goldberg in the LA Times:

The idea of a powerful "Jewish lobby" that has its gnarled fingers in the machinery of the government is an old and repugnant canard. Along with the Jews who supposedly own the media and those who reputedly control the banks, the cabal of sinister, third-column Hebrews who whisper into the ears of our leaders is a classic in the traditional checklist of anti-Semitic fulminations.

So it's no surprise that in the modern era, even to broach the idea of a "Jewish lobby" is unacceptable. It's just not done in polite society -- even in situations in which there's some truth to it. Few would deny, after all, that there are people who lobby for various Jewish issues, including, of course, Israel (just as there are a lot of Jews working in Hollywood and just as Jews do own the New York Times). But even though we know these things, we generally don't talk about them.

...So what are we to make of [the article]? Is it anti-Semitism or honesty? Propaganda cloaked in academic respectability -- or a courageous willingness to identify the elephant in the room?

...It seems silly to deny that a powerful lobby on behalf of Israel exists. The real question is how pernicious it is. Does it, in fact, persuade us to act counter to our national interest -- or is it a positive thing, as publisher Mortimer Zuckerman suggests?

His answer to this question is to read the article yourself. I couldn't agree more.


UPDATE: The London Review speaks out against charges of anti-semitism.

Also, Noam Chomsky weighs in.

There has been a lot of talk lately about nuclear prolifilation and double standards, particularly with the nuclear fuel deal struck between the US and India, which has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. (The only other countries that have not signed are Israel and Pakistan.) The claim of double standards is that the US has turned a blind eye to ISrael's nuclear weapons program, yet is threatening Iran, which has signed the Treaty, with sanctions for their pursuit of nuclear technology. The treaty stipulates the following:

Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; and not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices.

While North Korea was a signatory, it pulled out of the treaty in 2003, which does not seem to be against the text of the treaty:

Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.

So in response to claims of a double standard, both in comparison to Israel and India (or even Pakistan), Avner Cohen wrote a piece in Ha'aretz suggesting that Israel come clean on the bomb (print-ready version). His argument is twofold, legal and "existential." Legally, Cohen argues, Israel never signed the treaty, whereas Iran did:

The attempt to put Israel and Iran on the same level, or even to create a concrete political connection between them, is ignorant, unfair and biased. First of all, from the point of view of international law: whereas Iran is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and is committed to comply with it, Israel, like India and Pakistan, is not a signatory to the treaty and therefore is not beholden to a formal commitment. Whereas Iran has been caught in flagrant breach of its international commitments, Israel has not broken such commitments. In other words, like the seven other nuclear states in the world, and in stark contrast to Iran, Israel has never relinquished the right to develop nuclear weaponry.

Here, he is only partially right. While nuclear powers like France, the US, Britian, Russia and China never gave up their right to have nuclear weapons, they did sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, unlike Israel, Pakistan and India. So it's not really fair to put Iran, Israel and, say, Russia in the same basket. It's hard to know what to make of countries that refuse to sign an international treaty like that one. Legally, they're not bound to any course of action, but practically speaking, are countries that renege on a treaty any safer than those that never signed in the first place? Furthermore, if we're speaking in purely legal terms, Iran is within its rights to develop nuclear power, because the treaty explicitely ensures the right to pursue "nuclear energy for peaceful purposes":

Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

But let's not be coy. We know that even if Iran were to not produce nuclear weapons immediately, just positioning itself to be able to do so in short notice would make it a dominant force in the region. But there is little that the US or Israel, Iran's rival in the region, could do about that, legally speaking, that is.

Cohen's second argument is that Israel should somehow be given carte blanche for nuclear weapons, since she has always and still faces an "existential threat."

According to foreign reports, Israel began to develop its Samson option in the 1950s, while it was establishing a state for a people still in the shadow of conflagration, in a hostile geopolitical environment that was opposed to its very existence. It found itself committed to the creation of an insurance policy within the pre-1967 borders, without external guarantees for its existence. In the political climate of that time, a decade after the Holocaust, Israel had perhaps the strongest strategic and moral justification for turning to the nuclear option, certainly no less than France or China, which also began the atomic journey at that time.

Not only is Iran not under existential threat - its nuclear aspirations are an issue that puts it on a collision course with the world. Even the leaders of North Korea are not daring to declare their aspirations to wipe countries off the map, as the president of Iran has declared with respect to Israel.

This is essentially an argument for Israeli exceptionalism, and it brings up the question of whether some countries should be allowed to have nuclear weapons but not others.

Cohen is confusing moral and strategic justifications for nuclear weapons here. Sure, Israel had strategic reasons for pursuing nuclear weapons, but so does Iran. We all know that having nuclear weapons changes the equation and makes countries like the US much more likely to choose diplomacy over military force. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent to regime change. Personally, I think that the Middle East should be a nucler weapons-free zone, but for that to happen, Israel would have to realize that it is not possible for it to remain the sole nuclear power in the region. The mere fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is enough to encourage its neighbors to catch up.

In the end, the only real justification for one country to have nuclear weapons while another is not allowed is that of power politics. Those that have weapons are in a position to deny these weapons to other countries. It would be difficult to come up with criteria to decide otherwise. Would these criteria be economic? Social? Should there be a committee that would take these things into consideration and then make a ruling? This would be very complicated, and as things stand, it would most likely be the Security Council that would make that call, and of course for those five countries, each of which is a nuclear power, there should be no nuclear proliferation. For these countries, what is good for the goose is not good for the gander.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that other countries (North Korea, Isreal, India and Pakistan) would clandestinely pursue nuclear weapons. And knowing that the nuclear powers of the world will not willingly allow any other countries to obtain nuclear weapons, the best way to ensure non-proliferation would seem to be to ensure that they have no reason to seek them. And in this case, Israel should start asking itself if it's preferable to be a nuclear power among others in the region or to be a non-nuclear power in a nuclear-free Middle East.



Note:

On why and how the world could live with a nuclear Iran, here are two interesting articles from the Times:

Suppose we just let Iran have the bomb
We can live with a nuclear Iran

Irshad Manji asks an interesting question in today's Times when explaining how she learned to love the wall that has made life for many Palestinians even harder than it already was. She wonders if an effort to prevent suicide bombings justifies further hardship for Palestinians.

She answers yes, presumably because "before the barrier, there was the bomber." Even if she would prefer to overlook the fact that before the bomber, there was the occupation, Ms. Manji should concede that there are any number of ways to ensure security for a state, but that many of them are cruel, immoral and against international law.

An important point was made by Israel's Chief Justice in his ruling on the wall, in which he quoted his judgment prohibiting the torturing of Palestinian detainees: "This is the destiny of a democracy: she does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back."

Those who proclaim their love for the wall would do well to remember this.

Public Radio International's This American Life recently ran a very interesting episode about Guantanamo Bay and habeas corpus, called Habeas Schmaebeas (real audio). They interview two people who have been released from the camp that's not quite in Cuba and not quite in the US where over 500 people have been imprisoned without being charged with a crime. One of the people interviewed is a Pakestani man named Bader who was arrested there (and handed over to American authorities) for running a satirical Urdu language newspaper. Jack Hitt does a good job dispelling some of the misinformation about the people who are being held in Guantanamo Bay:

We're told over and over that these prisoners are so terrible that we need an off-shore facility away from US law to hold them. But then there's Bader. And every day, more storie like his are coming out, and they raise the question: Is Guantanamo a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of mistakes?

He quotes Bush and Cheney, who had this to say about the matter:

Bush: "These are people that got scooped up off a battlefield attempting to kill U.S. troops. And I want to make sure, before they're released, that they don't come back to kill again."

Cheney: "The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They're bomb makers. They're facilitators of terror. They're members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban."

Then he quotes Seton Hall University Law School's Report on Guantanamo Detainees, which is based on written determinations the Government has produced for detainees that it has designated as enemy combatants, which were prepared after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals that began in 2004. The report's findings were as follows:

1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed "fighters for;" 30% considered "members of;" a large majority ? 60% -- are detained merely because they are "associated with" a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist group is unidentified.

4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.

5. Finally, the population of persons deemed not to be enemy combatants ? mostly Uighers ? are in fact accused of more serious allegations than a great many persons still deemed to be enemy combatants.

Another reports done on Guantanamo, which came out at about the same time as Seton Hall's can be found here and here.

These reports confirm that the remarks that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney have been making about how these people are the "worst of the worst" and have been "scooped up off a battle field" are patently false. The issue that is perhaps the most disconcerting is that 86 percent of Gitmo detainees were arrested by Pakistani or Northern Alliance forces at a time when the US was offering a large bounty for turning in suspected Taliban or al Qaeda members. One example of a flyer informing Afghans of the bounty read:

You can receive millions of dollars for helping the Anti-Taliban Force catch Al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.

This is a copy of another flyer:



It seems obvious that most of these Pakistani and Afghan (and sometimes Chinese) dirt farmers being passed off as the "worst of the worst" were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. The US government doesn't seemed too concerned about giving them a trial or habeas corpus rights, and I can say that being held incognito for years and tortured and humiliated on a daily basis is enough to turn even a poor Chinese dirt farmer into an anti-American terrorist.

Reading Eliot Weinberger's What I heard about Iraq in 2005, I came accross a very funny but sobering quote from a recently released Abu Ghraib detainee, collected by independent journalist, Dahr Jamail:

"The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house."

I've been on hiatus for the last couple of months. Most of that was spent at work, and the last two weeks have been spent in Lebanon.

Starting tomorrow, I'll be writing again. A lot has gone on in the last couple of months concering Sudan, and I'll have some things to say about my brief time in Beirut.

In the Times this weekend, Kristof challenged Bill O'reilly to really defend Christmas values (as opposed to complaining about the imaginary war on Christmas by godless liberals):

...Fox News Channel's crusade against infidels who prefer generic expressions like "Happy Holidays" included 58 separate segments in just a five-day period.

After I suggested in last Sunday's column that a better way to honor the season might be to stand up to genocide in Darfur (a calamity that Mr. O'Reilly has ignored), Mr. O'Reilly denounced me on his show as a "left-wing ideologue."

...So I have a challenge for Mr. O'Reilly: If you really want to defend traditional values, then come with me on a trip to Darfur. I'll introduce you to mothers who have had their babies clubbed to death in front of them, to teenage girls who have been gang-raped and then mutilated - and to the government-armed thugs who do these things.

You'll have to leave your studio, Bill. You'll encounter pure evil. If you're like me, you'll be scared. If you try to bully some of the goons in Darfur, they'll just hack your head off. But you'll also meet some genuine conservative Christians - aid workers who live the Gospel instead of sputtering about it - and you'll finally be using your talents for an important cause.

So, Bill, what'll it be? Will you dare travel to a real war against Christmas values, in which the victims aren't offended shoppers but terrified children thrown on bonfires? I'm waiting to hear.

It's comforting to see more coverage of Darfur, and if the region comes up in a spat between O'Reilly and Kristof, then all the better.

O'Reilly responds (I couldn't find a permalink) to Kristof's op-ed by only addressing the Darfur claim in a single sentence -- by saying that he had not ignored Darfur, without giving any examples -- and spent the rest of his "talking points memo" calling Kristof a dishonest ideologue and character assassin, stating that he doesn't understand America:

Mr. Kristof is a committed secularist who seems to not understand the culture war, or that his team is intent on diminishing the traditions of Christmas and other Judeo-Christian hallmarks, and that is deeply offensive to most Americans.

Kristof lives in The New York Times world--an isolated island of politically correct liberalism with little connection to everyday Americans. But in the spirit of Christmas, I've asked St. Nicholas to bring our pal Nicholas a special gift--the wisdom to see what is really going on and to do some honest analysis.

Of course O'Reilly's comments are so mind-numbingly stupid that it's not even necessary to rebut them (but if you really feel the need to, you can check out Adam Cohen's piece on the so-called war on Christmas). So what's really important to me is that the world is getting a little more exposure to the genocide in Darfur, and if Bill O'Reilly comes off (once again) as a jackass, well that's just icing on the cake.


Otherwise, I've started reading Gérard Prunier's new book on Darfur (available in English as well as in French. So far it's given a very interesting background of Darfur as an independent Sultanate and sparked my interest in the Mahdists. But I'm only about 60 pages in, so I'll hold my comments on it until I'm done.

In today's Washington Post, the story of Khaled Masri's wrongful imprisonment, is told. He was apparently on his way to Macedonia after a spat with his wife in Germany, (he is a German citizen of Egyptian origin), when he was abducted at the Macedonian border by the police because he name was similar to an associate of one of the 9/11 hijackers. He was then handed over to the CIA in Skjope.

The local deputy CIA chief (the station chief was on vacation) dealt directly with the Counterterrorism Center (CTC), since the European divison division chief was also on vacation. The Post offers us a little background on CTC, including how they operate:

After the September 2001 attacks, pressure to locate and nab potential terrorists, even in the most obscure parts of the world, bore down hard on one CIA office in particular, the Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, located until recently in the basement of one of the older buildings on the agency's sprawling headquarters compound. With operations officers and analysts sitting side by side, the idea was to act on tips and leads with dramatic speed.

The possibility of missing another attack loomed large. "Their logic was: If one of them gets loose and someone dies, we'll be held responsible," said one CIA officer, who, like others interviewed for this article, would speak only anonymously because of the secretive nature of the subject.

To carry out its mission, the CTC relies on its Rendition Group, made up of case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists. Their job is to figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside, or a secluded corner of an airport where local authorities wait.

Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons -- referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.

The decision was taken to send Masri to prison in Afghanistan, where he says he was interrogated and beaten and warned, "You are here in a country where no one knows about you, in a country where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will know." Then his passport was analyzed and found to be genuine, at which point the CIA toyed with the idea of just sending him back to Macedonia as if nothing had happened without telling the German authorities. Finally, since Macedonia had refused to accept him, he was sent to Albania and then later flown back to Germany.

In the end, Masri says he was told by his detainer, he had been kidnapped, drugged, beaten and detained because he "had a suspicious name." The lesson he has learned from this horrible ordeal is that the US is "just like in the Arab countries: arresting people, treating them inhumanly and less than that, and with no rights and no laws."

Via Kristof's column today, I found a blog by an aid worker in Darfur, who is giving uncensored information from Sudan and who, for fear of being kicked out of the country, is remaining anonymous.

In case you can't access the Kristof article, he's not really saying anything new: the African Union peacekeepers don't have enough people, money or matériel; the US isn't doing anything; things are getting worse, not better.

But at least Kristof keeps writing about Darfur. He may, at times, sound like a slightly annoying record that keeps skipping, particularly if you listen to the multimedia pieces on the Times website, but he is one of the only people from a large American media outlet who has been struggling to keep Darfur ingrained in his public's fickle short-term memory. And for that, he deserves respect.

I just received a package from my family with some Christmas presents and the last three months of Harper's. There was a "reading" in there that I had never heard about. It is an exerpt from a March 2004 email in which Air Force Captain John Carr, one of the military prosecuters in the cases at Guantanamo Bay who has since then been transferred, complained to Army Colonel Fred Borch about the way the Office of Military Commissions was being carried out.

The Australian Broadcast Service seems to be the first to report that the trials were to be rigged.

I can't seem to find a transcript of the email on the internet, so I'm retyping the exerpt published in the November issue of Harper's (emphasis mine):

Sir,

I feel a responsibility to emphasize a few issues. Our cases are not even close to being adequately investigated or prepared for trial. There are many reasons why we find ourselves in this unfortunate position--the starkest being that we have had little or no leadership or direction for the last eight months. It appears that instead of pausing, conducting an honest appraisal of our current preparation plan for the future, we have invested substantial time and effort in concealing our deficiencies and misleading not only each other but also those outside our office who are either directly responsible for or asked to endorse our efforts. My fears are not insignificant that the inadequate preparation of the cases and misrepresentation related thereto may constitute dereliction of duty, false official statements, and other criminal conduct.

You asked in our meeting last week what else you could do but lead by example. In regards to the environment of secrecy, deceit, and dishonesty in this office, the attorneys appear merely to be following the example that you have set.

A few examples include:

You continue to make statements to the office that you admit in private are not true. You have stated for months that we are ready to go immediately with the first four cases. At the same time, emails are being sent out admitting that we don't have the evidence to prove the general conspiracy, let alone the specific accused's culpability.

You have repeatedly said to the office that the military panel will be handpicked and will not acquit these detainees, and we only needed to worry about building a record for the review panel. In private you stated that we are really concerned with review by academicians ten years from now, who will go back and pick the cases apart.

The fact that we did not approach the FBI for assistance prior to December 17 is not only indefensible but an example of how this office and others have misled outsiders by pretending that interagency cooperation has been alive and well for some time, when in fact the opposite is true.

It is my opinion that the primary objective of the office has been the advancement of the process for personal motivations--not the proper preparation of cases or the interests of the American people. The posturing of our prosecution team chiefs to maneuver onto the first case is overshadowed only by the zeal with which they hide the specific facts of their case from review or scrutiny. The evidence does not indicate that our military and civilian leaders have been accurately informed of the state of our preparation, the true culpability of our accused, or the sustainability of our efforts.

If the appropriate decision-makers are provided with the accurate information and determine that we must go forward on our current path, then all would be very committed to accomplishing this task. It instead appears, however, that the decision-makers are being provided false information to get them to make the key decisions, only to learn the truth after a point of no return.

When I volunteered to assist with this process, I expected there would at least be a minimal effort to establish a fair process and diligently prepare cases against significant accused. Instead, I find a half-hearted and disorganized effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged. It is difficult to believe that the White House has approved this situation, and I fully expect that one day, soon, someone will be called to answer for what our office has been doing for the last fourteen months.

While many may simply be concerned with a moment of fame and the ability in the future to engage in small-time practice, that is neither what I aspire to do not what I have been trained to do. I cannot morally, ethically, or professionally continue to be a part of this process.

According to the ABC article, prosecutor Major Robert Preston feels the same way: "After all, writing a motion saying that the process will be full and fair when you don't really believe it is kind of hard, particularly when you want to call yourself an officer and lawyer."

The London Review recently published an article on the Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist, and Stephen Walt, a Harvard government professor. (An unabridged version is available here.)

There has been a lot of talk about the paper, most of it pretty inane, like this piece from the Wall Street Journal, which seems to try to give the anti-semitism defense a veneer of resectability by slightly nuancing it:

The authors are at pains to note that the Israel Lobby is by no means exclusively Jewish, and that not every American Jew is a part of it. Fair enough. But has there ever been an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that does not share its basic features? Dual loyalty, disloyalty, manipulation of the media, financial manipulation of the political system, duping the goyim (gentiles) and getting them to fight their wars, sponsoring and covering up acts of gratuitous cruelty against an innocent people -- every canard ever alleged of the Jews is here made about the Israel Lobby and its cause. No wonder former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke was quick to endorse the article, calling it a "great step forward."

I do not mean to suggest that Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt are themselves anti-Semitic. But as outgoing Harvard President Larry Summers once noted, what may not be anti-Semitic in intent may yet be anti-Semitic in effect. By giving aid and comfort to people who have no trouble substituting the word "Jews" for "Israel Lobby," the Mearsheimer-Walt article is anti-Semitic in effect.

Not all of the criticisms, however, stoop to such non-arguments. This piece by the University of Chicago's Daniel Drezner focuses on what he sees as the empirical problems of the piece:

Walt and Mearsheimer should not be criticized as anti-Semites, because that's patently false. They should be criticized for doing piss-poor, monocausal social science.

To repeat, the main empirical problems with the article are that:

A) They fail to demonstrate that Israel is a net strategic liability;
B) They ascribe U.S. foreign policy behavior almost exclusively to the activities of the "Israel Lobby"; and
C) They omit consderation of contradictory policies and countervailing foreign policy lobbies.

At the end of the day, however, the piece that I found to be the most interesting came from Ha'aretz:

It sometimes takes AIPAC omnipotence too much at face value and disregards key moments - such as the Bush senior/Baker loan guarantees episode and Clinton's showdown with Netanyahu over the Wye River Agreement. The study largely ignores AIPAC run-ins with more dovish Israeli administrations, most notably when it undermined Yitzhak Rabin, and how excessive hawkishness is often out of step with mainstream American Jewish opinion, turning many, especially young American Jews, away from taking any interest in Israel.

Yet their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's, too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.

I tend to agree that the Israel lobby is pushing a foreign policy agenda that is often detrimental to American national interest and usually gives the opposite appearance of being the fair broker that the US tries to sell itself as in the Middle East. And while idiots like David Duke might use articles like this to push their elementary racism, we know that there is a lobby and that it is effective, and that we should not let bigots like him dictate what is acceptable and what is off limits for reasonable discussion. Like Mearsheimer and Walt say in their paper:

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers' unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby?s task even easier.

Another fair account of the paper appears in an Op-Ed aricle by Nicholas Goldberg in the LA Times:

The idea of a powerful "Jewish lobby" that has its gnarled fingers in the machinery of the government is an old and repugnant canard. Along with the Jews who supposedly own the media and those who reputedly control the banks, the cabal of sinister, third-column Hebrews who whisper into the ears of our leaders is a classic in the traditional checklist of anti-Semitic fulminations.

So it's no surprise that in the modern era, even to broach the idea of a "Jewish lobby" is unacceptable. It's just not done in polite society -- even in situations in which there's some truth to it. Few would deny, after all, that there are people who lobby for various Jewish issues, including, of course, Israel (just as there are a lot of Jews working in Hollywood and just as Jews do own the New York Times). But even though we know these things, we generally don't talk about them.

...So what are we to make of [the article]? Is it anti-Semitism or honesty? Propaganda cloaked in academic respectability -- or a courageous willingness to identify the elephant in the room?

...It seems silly to deny that a powerful lobby on behalf of Israel exists. The real question is how pernicious it is. Does it, in fact, persuade us to act counter to our national interest -- or is it a positive thing, as publisher Mortimer Zuckerman suggests?

His answer to this question is to read the article yourself. I couldn't agree more.


UPDATE: The London Review speaks out against charges of anti-semitism.

Also, Noam Chomsky weighs in.

There has been a lot of talk lately about nuclear prolifilation and double standards, particularly with the nuclear fuel deal struck between the US and India, which has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. (The only other countries that have not signed are Israel and Pakistan.) The claim of double standards is that the US has turned a blind eye to ISrael's nuclear weapons program, yet is threatening Iran, which has signed the Treaty, with sanctions for their pursuit of nuclear technology. The treaty stipulates the following:

Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; and not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices.

While North Korea was a signatory, it pulled out of the treaty in 2003, which does not seem to be against the text of the treaty:

Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.

So in response to claims of a double standard, both in comparison to Israel and India (or even Pakistan), Avner Cohen wrote a piece in Ha'aretz suggesting that Israel come clean on the bomb (print-ready version). His argument is twofold, legal and "existential." Legally, Cohen argues, Israel never signed the treaty, whereas Iran did:

The attempt to put Israel and Iran on the same level, or even to create a concrete political connection between them, is ignorant, unfair and biased. First of all, from the point of view of international law: whereas Iran is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and is committed to comply with it, Israel, like India and Pakistan, is not a signatory to the treaty and therefore is not beholden to a formal commitment. Whereas Iran has been caught in flagrant breach of its international commitments, Israel has not broken such commitments. In other words, like the seven other nuclear states in the world, and in stark contrast to Iran, Israel has never relinquished the right to develop nuclear weaponry.

Here, he is only partially right. While nuclear powers like France, the US, Britian, Russia and China never gave up their right to have nuclear weapons, they did sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, unlike Israel, Pakistan and India. So it's not really fair to put Iran, Israel and, say, Russia in the same basket. It's hard to know what to make of countries that refuse to sign an international treaty like that one. Legally, they're not bound to any course of action, but practically speaking, are countries that renege on a treaty any safer than those that never signed in the first place? Furthermore, if we're speaking in purely legal terms, Iran is within its rights to develop nuclear power, because the treaty explicitely ensures the right to pursue "nuclear energy for peaceful purposes":

Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

But let's not be coy. We know that even if Iran were to not produce nuclear weapons immediately, just positioning itself to be able to do so in short notice would make it a dominant force in the region. But there is little that the US or Israel, Iran's rival in the region, could do about that, legally speaking, that is.

Cohen's second argument is that Israel should somehow be given carte blanche for nuclear weapons, since she has always and still faces an "existential threat."

According to foreign reports, Israel began to develop its Samson option in the 1950s, while it was establishing a state for a people still in the shadow of conflagration, in a hostile geopolitical environment that was opposed to its very existence. It found itself committed to the creation of an insurance policy within the pre-1967 borders, without external guarantees for its existence. In the political climate of that time, a decade after the Holocaust, Israel had perhaps the strongest strategic and moral justification for turning to the nuclear option, certainly no less than France or China, which also began the atomic journey at that time.

Not only is Iran not under existential threat - its nuclear aspirations are an issue that puts it on a collision course with the world. Even the leaders of North Korea are not daring to declare their aspirations to wipe countries off the map, as the president of Iran has declared with respect to Israel.

This is essentially an argument for Israeli exceptionalism, and it brings up the question of whether some countries should be allowed to have nuclear weapons but not others.

Cohen is confusing moral and strategic justifications for nuclear weapons here. Sure, Israel had strategic reasons for pursuing nuclear weapons, but so does Iran. We all know that having nuclear weapons changes the equation and makes countries like the US much more likely to choose diplomacy over military force. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent to regime change. Personally, I think that the Middle East should be a nucler weapons-free zone, but for that to happen, Israel would have to realize that it is not possible for it to remain the sole nuclear power in the region. The mere fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is enough to encourage its neighbors to catch up.

In the end, the only real justification for one country to have nuclear weapons while another is not allowed is that of power politics. Those that have weapons are in a position to deny these weapons to other countries. It would be difficult to come up with criteria to decide otherwise. Would these criteria be economic? Social? Should there be a committee that would take these things into consideration and then make a ruling? This would be very complicated, and as things stand, it would most likely be the Security Council that would make that call, and of course for those five countries, each of which is a nuclear power, there should be no nuclear proliferation. For these countries, what is good for the goose is not good for the gander.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that other countries (North Korea, Isreal, India and Pakistan) would clandestinely pursue nuclear weapons. And knowing that the nuclear powers of the world will not willingly allow any other countries to obtain nuclear weapons, the best way to ensure non-proliferation would seem to be to ensure that they have no reason to seek them. And in this case, Israel should start asking itself if it's preferable to be a nuclear power among others in the region or to be a non-nuclear power in a nuclear-free Middle East.



Note:

On why and how the world could live with a nuclear Iran, here are two interesting articles from the Times:

Suppose we just let Iran have the bomb
We can live with a nuclear Iran

Irshad Manji asks an interesting question in today's Times when explaining how she learned to love the wall that has made life for many Palestinians even harder than it already was. She wonders if an effort to prevent suicide bombings justifies further hardship for Palestinians.

She answers yes, presumably because "before the barrier, there was the bomber." Even if she would prefer to overlook the fact that before the bomber, there was the occupation, Ms. Manji should concede that there are any number of ways to ensure security for a state, but that many of them are cruel, immoral and against international law.

An important point was made by Israel's Chief Justice in his ruling on the wall, in which he quoted his judgment prohibiting the torturing of Palestinian detainees: "This is the destiny of a democracy: she does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back."

Those who proclaim their love for the wall would do well to remember this.

Public Radio International's This American Life recently ran a very interesting episode about Guantanamo Bay and habeas corpus, called Habeas Schmaebeas (real audio). They interview two people who have been released from the camp that's not quite in Cuba and not quite in the US where over 500 people have been imprisoned without being charged with a crime. One of the people interviewed is a Pakestani man named Bader who was arrested there (and handed over to American authorities) for running a satirical Urdu language newspaper. Jack Hitt does a good job dispelling some of the misinformation about the people who are being held in Guantanamo Bay:

We're told over and over that these prisoners are so terrible that we need an off-shore facility away from US law to hold them. But then there's Bader. And every day, more storie like his are coming out, and they raise the question: Is Guantanamo a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of mistakes?

He quotes Bush and Cheney, who had this to say about the matter:

Bush: "These are people that got scooped up off a battlefield attempting to kill U.S. troops. And I want to make sure, before they're released, that they don't come back to kill again."

Cheney: "The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They're bomb makers. They're facilitators of terror. They're members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban."

Then he quotes Seton Hall University Law School's Report on Guantanamo Detainees, which is based on written determinations the Government has produced for detainees that it has designated as enemy combatants, which were prepared after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals that began in 2004. The report's findings were as follows:

1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed "fighters for;" 30% considered "members of;" a large majority ? 60% -- are detained merely because they are "associated with" a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist group is unidentified.

4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.

5. Finally, the population of persons deemed not to be enemy combatants ? mostly Uighers ? are in fact accused of more serious allegations than a great many persons still deemed to be enemy combatants.

Another reports done on Guantanamo, which came out at about the same time as Seton Hall's can be found here and here.

These reports confirm that the remarks that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney have been making about how these people are the "worst of the worst" and have been "scooped up off a battle field" are patently false. The issue that is perhaps the most disconcerting is that 86 percent of Gitmo detainees were arrested by Pakistani or Northern Alliance forces at a time when the US was offering a large bounty for turning in suspected Taliban or al Qaeda members. One example of a flyer informing Afghans of the bounty read:

You can receive millions of dollars for helping the Anti-Taliban Force catch Al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.

This is a copy of another flyer:



It seems obvious that most of these Pakistani and Afghan (and sometimes Chinese) dirt farmers being passed off as the "worst of the worst" were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. The US government doesn't seemed too concerned about giving them a trial or habeas corpus rights, and I can say that being held incognito for years and tortured and humiliated on a daily basis is enough to turn even a poor Chinese dirt farmer into an anti-American terrorist.

Reading Eliot Weinberger's What I heard about Iraq in 2005, I came accross a very funny but sobering quote from a recently released Abu Ghraib detainee, collected by independent journalist, Dahr Jamail:

"The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house."

I've been on hiatus for the last couple of months. Most of that was spent at work, and the last two weeks have been spent in Lebanon.

Starting tomorrow, I'll be writing again. A lot has gone on in the last couple of months concering Sudan, and I'll have some things to say about my brief time in Beirut.

In the Times this weekend, Kristof challenged Bill O'reilly to really defend Christmas values (as opposed to complaining about the imaginary war on Christmas by godless liberals):

...Fox News Channel's crusade against infidels who prefer generic expressions like "Happy Holidays" included 58 separate segments in just a five-day period.

After I suggested in last Sunday's column that a better way to honor the season might be to stand up to genocide in Darfur (a calamity that Mr. O'Reilly has ignored), Mr. O'Reilly denounced me on his show as a "left-wing ideologue."

...So I have a challenge for Mr. O'Reilly: If you really want to defend traditional values, then come with me on a trip to Darfur. I'll introduce you to mothers who have had their babies clubbed to death in front of them, to teenage girls who have been gang-raped and then mutilated - and to the government-armed thugs who do these things.

You'll have to leave your studio, Bill. You'll encounter pure evil. If you're like me, you'll be scared. If you try to bully some of the goons in Darfur, they'll just hack your head off. But you'll also meet some genuine conservative Christians - aid workers who live the Gospel instead of sputtering about it - and you'll finally be using your talents for an important cause.

So, Bill, what'll it be? Will you dare travel to a real war against Christmas values, in which the victims aren't offended shoppers but terrified children thrown on bonfires? I'm waiting to hear.

It's comforting to see more coverage of Darfur, and if the region comes up in a spat between O'Reilly and Kristof, then all the better.

O'Reilly responds (I couldn't find a permalink) to Kristof's op-ed by only addressing the Darfur claim in a single sentence -- by saying that he had not ignored Darfur, without giving any examples -- and spent the rest of his "talking points memo" calling Kristof a dishonest ideologue and character assassin, stating that he doesn't understand America:

Mr. Kristof is a committed secularist who seems to not understand the culture war, or that his team is intent on diminishing the traditions of Christmas and other Judeo-Christian hallmarks, and that is deeply offensive to most Americans.

Kristof lives in The New York Times world--an isolated island of politically correct liberalism with little connection to everyday Americans. But in the spirit of Christmas, I've asked St. Nicholas to bring our pal Nicholas a special gift--the wisdom to see what is really going on and to do some honest analysis.

Of course O'Reilly's comments are so mind-numbingly stupid that it's not even necessary to rebut them (but if you really feel the need to, you can check out Adam Cohen's piece on the so-called war on Christmas). So what's really important to me is that the world is getting a little more exposure to the genocide in Darfur, and if Bill O'Reilly comes off (once again) as a jackass, well that's just icing on the cake.


Otherwise, I've started reading Gérard Prunier's new book on Darfur (available in English as well as in French. So far it's given a very interesting background of Darfur as an independent Sultanate and sparked my interest in the Mahdists. But I'm only about 60 pages in, so I'll hold my comments on it until I'm done.

In today's Washington Post, the story of Khaled Masri's wrongful imprisonment, is told. He was apparently on his way to Macedonia after a spat with his wife in Germany, (he is a German citizen of Egyptian origin), when he was abducted at the Macedonian border by the police because he name was similar to an associate of one of the 9/11 hijackers. He was then handed over to the CIA in Skjope.

The local deputy CIA chief (the station chief was on vacation) dealt directly with the Counterterrorism Center (CTC), since the European divison division chief was also on vacation. The Post offers us a little background on CTC, including how they operate:

After the September 2001 attacks, pressure to locate and nab potential terrorists, even in the most obscure parts of the world, bore down hard on one CIA office in particular, the Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, located until recently in the basement of one of the older buildings on the agency's sprawling headquarters compound. With operations officers and analysts sitting side by side, the idea was to act on tips and leads with dramatic speed.

The possibility of missing another attack loomed large. "Their logic was: If one of them gets loose and someone dies, we'll be held responsible," said one CIA officer, who, like others interviewed for this article, would speak only anonymously because of the secretive nature of the subject.

To carry out its mission, the CTC relies on its Rendition Group, made up of case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists. Their job is to figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside, or a secluded corner of an airport where local authorities wait.

Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons -- referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.

The decision was taken to send Masri to prison in Afghanistan, where he says he was interrogated and beaten and warned, "You are here in a country where no one knows about you, in a country where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will know." Then his passport was analyzed and found to be genuine, at which point the CIA toyed with the idea of just sending him back to Macedonia as if nothing had happened without telling the German authorities. Finally, since Macedonia had refused to accept him, he was sent to Albania and then later flown back to Germany.

In the end, Masri says he was told by his detainer, he had been kidnapped, drugged, beaten and detained because he "had a suspicious name." The lesson he has learned from this horrible ordeal is that the US is "just like in the Arab countries: arresting people, treating them inhumanly and less than that, and with no rights and no laws."

Via Kristof's column today, I found a blog by an aid worker in Darfur, who is giving uncensored information from Sudan and who, for fear of being kicked out of the country, is remaining anonymous.

In case you can't access the Kristof article, he's not really saying anything new: the African Union peacekeepers don't have enough people, money or matériel; the US isn't doing anything; things are getting worse, not better.

But at least Kristof keeps writing about Darfur. He may, at times, sound like a slightly annoying record that keeps skipping, particularly if you listen to the multimedia pieces on the Times website, but he is one of the only people from a large American media outlet who has been struggling to keep Darfur ingrained in his public's fickle short-term memory. And for that, he deserves respect.

I just received a package from my family with some Christmas presents and the last three months of Harper's. There was a "reading" in there that I had never heard about. It is an exerpt from a March 2004 email in which Air Force Captain John Carr, one of the military prosecuters in the cases at Guantanamo Bay who has since then been transferred, complained to Army Colonel Fred Borch about the way the Office of Military Commissions was being carried out.

The Australian Broadcast Service seems to be the first to report that the trials were to be rigged.

I can't seem to find a transcript of the email on the internet, so I'm retyping the exerpt published in the November issue of Harper's (emphasis mine):

Sir,

I feel a responsibility to emphasize a few issues. Our cases are not even close to being adequately investigated or prepared for trial. There are many reasons why we find ourselves in this unfortunate position--the starkest being that we have had little or no leadership or direction for the last eight months. It appears that instead of pausing, conducting an honest appraisal of our current preparation plan for the future, we have invested substantial time and effort in concealing our deficiencies and misleading not only each other but also those outside our office who are either directly responsible for or asked to endorse our efforts. My fears are not insignificant that the inadequate preparation of the cases and misrepresentation related thereto may constitute dereliction of duty, false official statements, and other criminal conduct.

You asked in our meeting last week what else you could do but lead by example. In regards to the environment of secrecy, deceit, and dishonesty in this office, the attorneys appear merely to be following the example that you have set.

A few examples include:

You continue to make statements to the office that you admit in private are not true. You have stated for months that we are ready to go immediately with the first four cases. At the same time, emails are being sent out admitting that we don't have the evidence to prove the general conspiracy, let alone the specific accused's culpability.

You have repeatedly said to the office that the military panel will be handpicked and will not acquit these detainees, and we only needed to worry about building a record for the review panel. In private you stated that we are really concerned with review by academicians ten years from now, who will go back and pick the cases apart.

The fact that we did not approach the FBI for assistance prior to December 17 is not only indefensible but an example of how this office and others have misled outsiders by pretending that interagency cooperation has been alive and well for some time, when in fact the opposite is true.

It is my opinion that the primary objective of the office has been the advancement of the process for personal motivations--not the proper preparation of cases or the interests of the American people. The posturing of our prosecution team chiefs to maneuver onto the first case is overshadowed only by the zeal with which they hide the specific facts of their case from review or scrutiny. The evidence does not indicate that our military and civilian leaders have been accurately informed of the state of our preparation, the true culpability of our accused, or the sustainability of our efforts.

If the appropriate decision-makers are provided with the accurate information and determine that we must go forward on our current path, then all would be very committed to accomplishing this task. It instead appears, however, that the decision-makers are being provided false information to get them to make the key decisions, only to learn the truth after a point of no return.

When I volunteered to assist with this process, I expected there would at least be a minimal effort to establish a fair process and diligently prepare cases against significant accused. Instead, I find a half-hearted and disorganized effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged. It is difficult to believe that the White House has approved this situation, and I fully expect that one day, soon, someone will be called to answer for what our office has been doing for the last fourteen months.

While many may simply be concerned with a moment of fame and the ability in the future to engage in small-time practice, that is neither what I aspire to do not what I have been trained to do. I cannot morally, ethically, or professionally continue to be a part of this process.

According to the ABC article, prosecutor Major Robert Preston feels the same way: "After all, writing a motion saying that the process will be full and fair when you don't really believe it is kind of hard, particularly when you want to call yourself an officer and lawyer."

The London Review recently published an article on the Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist, and Stephen Walt, a Harvard government professor. (An unabridged version is available here.)

There has been a lot of talk about the paper, most of it pretty inane, like this piece from the Wall Street Journal, which seems to try to give the anti-semitism defense a veneer of resectability by slightly nuancing it:

The authors are at pains to note that the Israel Lobby is by no means exclusively Jewish, and that not every American Jew is a part of it. Fair enough. But has there ever been an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that does not share its basic features? Dual loyalty, disloyalty, manipulation of the media, financial manipulation of the political system, duping the goyim (gentiles) and getting them to fight their wars, sponsoring and covering up acts of gratuitous cruelty against an innocent people -- every canard ever alleged of the Jews is here made about the Israel Lobby and its cause. No wonder former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke was quick to endorse the article, calling it a "great step forward."

I do not mean to suggest that Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt are themselves anti-Semitic. But as outgoing Harvard President Larry Summers once noted, what may not be anti-Semitic in intent may yet be anti-Semitic in effect. By giving aid and comfort to people who have no trouble substituting the word "Jews" for "Israel Lobby," the Mearsheimer-Walt article is anti-Semitic in effect.

Not all of the criticisms, however, stoop to such non-arguments. This piece by the University of Chicago's Daniel Drezner focuses on what he sees as the empirical problems of the piece:

Walt and Mearsheimer should not be criticized as anti-Semites, because that's patently false. They should be criticized for doing piss-poor, monocausal social science.

To repeat, the main empirical problems with the article are that:

A) They fail to demonstrate that Israel is a net strategic liability;
B) They ascribe U.S. foreign policy behavior almost exclusively to the activities of the "Israel Lobby"; and
C) They omit consderation of contradictory policies and countervailing foreign policy lobbies.

At the end of the day, however, the piece that I found to be the most interesting came from Ha'aretz:

It sometimes takes AIPAC omnipotence too much at face value and disregards key moments - such as the Bush senior/Baker loan guarantees episode and Clinton's showdown with Netanyahu over the Wye River Agreement. The study largely ignores AIPAC run-ins with more dovish Israeli administrations, most notably when it undermined Yitzhak Rabin, and how excessive hawkishness is often out of step with mainstream American Jewish opinion, turning many, especially young American Jews, away from taking any interest in Israel.

Yet their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's, too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.

I tend to agree that the Israel lobby is pushing a foreign policy agenda that is often detrimental to American national interest and usually gives the opposite appearance of being the fair broker that the US tries to sell itself as in the Middle East. And while idiots like David Duke might use articles like this to push their elementary racism, we know that there is a lobby and that it is effective, and that we should not let bigots like him dictate what is acceptable and what is off limits for reasonable discussion. Like Mearsheimer and Walt say in their paper:

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers' unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby?s task even easier.

Another fair account of the paper appears in an Op-Ed aricle by Nicholas Goldberg in the LA Times:

The idea of a powerful "Jewish lobby" that has its gnarled fingers in the machinery of the government is an old and repugnant canard. Along with the Jews who supposedly own the media and those who reputedly control the banks, the cabal of sinister, third-column Hebrews who whisper into the ears of our leaders is a classic in the traditional checklist of anti-Semitic fulminations.

So it's no surprise that in the modern era, even to broach the idea of a "Jewish lobby" is unacceptable. It's just not done in polite society -- even in situations in which there's some truth to it. Few would deny, after all, that there are people who lobby for various Jewish issues, including, of course, Israel (just as there are a lot of Jews working in Hollywood and just as Jews do own the New York Times). But even though we know these things, we generally don't talk about them.

...So what are we to make of [the article]? Is it anti-Semitism or honesty? Propaganda cloaked in academic respectability -- or a courageous willingness to identify the elephant in the room?

...It seems silly to deny that a powerful lobby on behalf of Israel exists. The real question is how pernicious it is. Does it, in fact, persuade us to act counter to our national interest -- or is it a positive thing, as publisher Mortimer Zuckerman suggests?

His answer to this question is to read the article yourself. I couldn't agree more.


UPDATE: The London Review speaks out against charges of anti-semitism.

Also, Noam Chomsky weighs in.

There has been a lot of talk lately about nuclear prolifilation and double standards, particularly with the nuclear fuel deal struck between the US and India, which has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. (The only other countries that have not signed are Israel and Pakistan.) The claim of double standards is that the US has turned a blind eye to ISrael's nuclear weapons program, yet is threatening Iran, which has signed the Treaty, with sanctions for their pursuit of nuclear technology. The treaty stipulates the following:

Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; and not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices.

While North Korea was a signatory, it pulled out of the treaty in 2003, which does not seem to be against the text of the treaty:

Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.

So in response to claims of a double standard, both in comparison to Israel and India (or even Pakistan), Avner Cohen wrote a piece in Ha'aretz suggesting that Israel come clean on the bomb (print-ready version). His argument is twofold, legal and "existential." Legally, Cohen argues, Israel never signed the treaty, whereas Iran did:

The attempt to put Israel and Iran on the same level, or even to create a concrete political connection between them, is ignorant, unfair and biased. First of all, from the point of view of international law: whereas Iran is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and is committed to comply with it, Israel, like India and Pakistan, is not a signatory to the treaty and therefore is not beholden to a formal commitment. Whereas Iran has been caught in flagrant breach of its international commitments, Israel has not broken such commitments. In other words, like the seven other nuclear states in the world, and in stark contrast to Iran, Israel has never relinquished the right to develop nuclear weaponry.

Here, he is only partially right. While nuclear powers like France, the US, Britian, Russia and China never gave up their right to have nuclear weapons, they did sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, unlike Israel, Pakistan and India. So it's not really fair to put Iran, Israel and, say, Russia in the same basket. It's hard to know what to make of countries that refuse to sign an international treaty like that one. Legally, they're not bound to any course of action, but practically speaking, are countries that renege on a treaty any safer than those that never signed in the first place? Furthermore, if we're speaking in purely legal terms, Iran is within its rights to develop nuclear power, because the treaty explicitely ensures the right to pursue "nuclear energy for peaceful purposes":

Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

But let's not be coy. We know that even if Iran were to not produce nuclear weapons immediately, just positioning itself to be able to do so in short notice would make it a dominant force in the region. But there is little that the US or Israel, Iran's rival in the region, could do about that, legally speaking, that is.

Cohen's second argument is that Israel should somehow be given carte blanche for nuclear weapons, since she has always and still faces an "existential threat."

According to foreign reports, Israel began to develop its Samson option in the 1950s, while it was establishing a state for a people still in the shadow of conflagration, in a hostile geopolitical environment that was opposed to its very existence. It found itself committed to the creation of an insurance policy within the pre-1967 borders, without external guarantees for its existence. In the political climate of that time, a decade after the Holocaust, Israel had perhaps the strongest strategic and moral justification for turning to the nuclear option, certainly no less than France or China, which also began the atomic journey at that time.

Not only is Iran not under existential threat - its nuclear aspirations are an issue that puts it on a collision course with the world. Even the leaders of North Korea are not daring to declare their aspirations to wipe countries off the map, as the president of Iran has declared with respect to Israel.

This is essentially an argument for Israeli exceptionalism, and it brings up the question of whether some countries should be allowed to have nuclear weapons but not others.

Cohen is confusing moral and strategic justifications for nuclear weapons here. Sure, Israel had strategic reasons for pursuing nuclear weapons, but so does Iran. We all know that having nuclear weapons changes the equation and makes countries like the US much more likely to choose diplomacy over military force. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent to regime change. Personally, I think that the Middle East should be a nucler weapons-free zone, but for that to happen, Israel would have to realize that it is not possible for it to remain the sole nuclear power in the region. The mere fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is enough to encourage its neighbors to catch up.

In the end, the only real justification for one country to have nuclear weapons while another is not allowed is that of power politics. Those that have weapons are in a position to deny these weapons to other countries. It would be difficult to come up with criteria to decide otherwise. Would these criteria be economic? Social? Should there be a committee that would take these things into consideration and then make a ruling? This would be very complicated, and as things stand, it would most likely be the Security Council that would make that call, and of course for those five countries, each of which is a nuclear power, there should be no nuclear proliferation. For these countries, what is good for the goose is not good for the gander.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that other countries (North Korea, Isreal, India and Pakistan) would clandestinely pursue nuclear weapons. And knowing that the nuclear powers of the world will not willingly allow any other countries to obtain nuclear weapons, the best way to ensure non-proliferation would seem to be to ensure that they have no reason to seek them. And in this case, Israel should start asking itself if it's preferable to be a nuclear power among others in the region or to be a non-nuclear power in a nuclear-free Middle East.



Note:

On why and how the world could live with a nuclear Iran, here are two interesting articles from the Times:

Suppose we just let Iran have the bomb
We can live with a nuclear Iran

Irshad Manji asks an interesting question in today's Times when explaining how she learned to love the wall that has made life for many Palestinians even harder than it already was. She wonders if an effort to prevent suicide bombings justifies further hardship for Palestinians.

She answers yes, presumably because "before the barrier, there was the bomber." Even if she would prefer to overlook the fact that before the bomber, there was the occupation, Ms. Manji should concede that there are any number of ways to ensure security for a state, but that many of them are cruel, immoral and against international law.

An important point was made by Israel's Chief Justice in his ruling on the wall, in which he quoted his judgment prohibiting the torturing of Palestinian detainees: "This is the destiny of a democracy: she does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back."

Those who proclaim their love for the wall would do well to remember this.

Public Radio International's This American Life recently ran a very interesting episode about Guantanamo Bay and habeas corpus, called Habeas Schmaebeas (real audio). They interview two people who have been released from the camp that's not quite in Cuba and not quite in the US where over 500 people have been imprisoned without being charged with a crime. One of the people interviewed is a Pakestani man named Bader who was arrested there (and handed over to American authorities) for running a satirical Urdu language newspaper. Jack Hitt does a good job dispelling some of the misinformation about the people who are being held in Guantanamo Bay:

We're told over and over that these prisoners are so terrible that we need an off-shore facility away from US law to hold them. But then there's Bader. And every day, more storie like his are coming out, and they raise the question: Is Guantanamo a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of mistakes?

He quotes Bush and Cheney, who had this to say about the matter:

Bush: "These are people that got scooped up off a battlefield attempting to kill U.S. troops. And I want to make sure, before they're released, that they don't come back to kill again."

Cheney: "The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They're bomb makers. They're facilitators of terror. They're members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban."

Then he quotes Seton Hall University Law School's Report on Guantanamo Detainees, which is based on written determinations the Government has produced for detainees that it has designated as enemy combatants, which were prepared after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals that began in 2004. The report's findings were as follows:

1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed "fighters for;" 30% considered "members of;" a large majority ? 60% -- are detained merely because they are "associated with" a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist group is unidentified.

4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.

5. Finally, the population of persons deemed not to be enemy combatants ? mostly Uighers ? are in fact accused of more serious allegations than a great many persons still deemed to be enemy combatants.

Another reports done on Guantanamo, which came out at about the same time as Seton Hall's can be found here and here.

These reports confirm that the remarks that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney have been making about how these people are the "worst of the worst" and have been "scooped up off a battle field" are patently false. The issue that is perhaps the most disconcerting is that 86 percent of Gitmo detainees were arrested by Pakistani or Northern Alliance forces at a time when the US was offering a large bounty for turning in suspected Taliban or al Qaeda members. One example of a flyer informing Afghans of the bounty read:

You can receive millions of dollars for helping the Anti-Taliban Force catch Al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.

This is a copy of another flyer:



It seems obvious that most of these Pakistani and Afghan (and sometimes Chinese) dirt farmers being passed off as the "worst of the worst" were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. The US government doesn't seemed too concerned about giving them a trial or habeas corpus rights, and I can say that being held incognito for years and tortured and humiliated on a daily basis is enough to turn even a poor Chinese dirt farmer into an anti-American terrorist.

Reading Eliot Weinberger's What I heard about Iraq in 2005, I came accross a very funny but sobering quote from a recently released Abu Ghraib detainee, collected by independent journalist, Dahr Jamail:

"The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house."

I've been on hiatus for the last couple of months. Most of that was spent at work, and the last two weeks have been spent in Lebanon.

Starting tomorrow, I'll be writing again. A lot has gone on in the last couple of months concering Sudan, and I'll have some things to say about my brief time in Beirut.

In the Times this weekend, Kristof challenged Bill O'reilly to really defend Christmas values (as opposed to complaining about the imaginary war on Christmas by godless liberals):

...Fox News Channel's crusade against infidels who prefer generic expressions like "Happy Holidays" included 58 separate segments in just a five-day period.

After I suggested in last Sunday's column that a better way to honor the season might be to stand up to genocide in Darfur (a calamity that Mr. O'Reilly has ignored), Mr. O'Reilly denounced me on his show as a "left-wing ideologue."

...So I have a challenge for Mr. O'Reilly: If you really want to defend traditional values, then come with me on a trip to Darfur. I'll introduce you to mothers who have had their babies clubbed to death in front of them, to teenage girls who have been gang-raped and then mutilated - and to the government-armed thugs who do these things.

You'll have to leave your studio, Bill. You'll encounter pure evil. If you're like me, you'll be scared. If you try to bully some of the goons in Darfur, they'll just hack your head off. But you'll also meet some genuine conservative Christians - aid workers who live the Gospel instead of sputtering about it - and you'll finally be using your talents for an important cause.

So, Bill, what'll it be? Will you dare travel to a real war against Christmas values, in which the victims aren't offended shoppers but terrified children thrown on bonfires? I'm waiting to hear.

It's comforting to see more coverage of Darfur, and if the region comes up in a spat between O'Reilly and Kristof, then all the better.

O'Reilly responds (I couldn't find a permalink) to Kristof's op-ed by only addressing the Darfur claim in a single sentence -- by saying that he had not ignored Darfur, without giving any examples -- and spent the rest of his "talking points memo" calling Kristof a dishonest ideologue and character assassin, stating that he doesn't understand America:

Mr. Kristof is a committed secularist who seems to not understand the culture war, or that his team is intent on diminishing the traditions of Christmas and other Judeo-Christian hallmarks, and that is deeply offensive to most Americans.

Kristof lives in The New York Times world--an isolated island of politically correct liberalism with little connection to everyday Americans. But in the spirit of Christmas, I've asked St. Nicholas to bring our pal Nicholas a special gift--the wisdom to see what is really going on and to do some honest analysis.

Of course O'Reilly's comments are so mind-numbingly stupid that it's not even necessary to rebut them (but if you really feel the need to, you can check out Adam Cohen's piece on the so-called war on Christmas). So what's really important to me is that the world is getting a little more exposure to the genocide in Darfur, and if Bill O'Reilly comes off (once again) as a jackass, well that's just icing on the cake.


Otherwise, I've started reading Gérard Prunier's new book on Darfur (available in English as well as in French. So far it's given a very interesting background of Darfur as an independent Sultanate and sparked my interest in the Mahdists. But I'm only about 60 pages in, so I'll hold my comments on it until I'm done.

In today's Washington Post, the story of Khaled Masri's wrongful imprisonment, is told. He was apparently on his way to Macedonia after a spat with his wife in Germany, (he is a German citizen of Egyptian origin), when he was abducted at the Macedonian border by the police because he name was similar to an associate of one of the 9/11 hijackers. He was then handed over to the CIA in Skjope.

The local deputy CIA chief (the station chief was on vacation) dealt directly with the Counterterrorism Center (CTC), since the European divison division chief was also on vacation. The Post offers us a little background on CTC, including how they operate:

After the September 2001 attacks, pressure to locate and nab potential terrorists, even in the most obscure parts of the world, bore down hard on one CIA office in particular, the Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, located until recently in the basement of one of the older buildings on the agency's sprawling headquarters compound. With operations officers and analysts sitting side by side, the idea was to act on tips and leads with dramatic speed.

The possibility of missing another attack loomed large. "Their logic was: If one of them gets loose and someone dies, we'll be held responsible," said one CIA officer, who, like others interviewed for this article, would speak only anonymously because of the secretive nature of the subject.

To carry out its mission, the CTC relies on its Rendition Group, made up of case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists. Their job is to figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside, or a secluded corner of an airport where local authorities wait.

Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons -- referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.

The decision was taken to send Masri to prison in Afghanistan, where he says he was interrogated and beaten and warned, "You are here in a country where no one knows about you, in a country where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will know." Then his passport was analyzed and found to be genuine, at which point the CIA toyed with the idea of just sending him back to Macedonia as if nothing had happened without telling the German authorities. Finally, since Macedonia had refused to accept him, he was sent to Albania and then later flown back to Germany.

In the end, Masri says he was told by his detainer, he had been kidnapped, drugged, beaten and detained because he "had a suspicious name." The lesson he has learned from this horrible ordeal is that the US is "just like in the Arab countries: arresting people, treating them inhumanly and less than that, and with no rights and no laws."

Via Kristof's column today, I found a blog by an aid worker in Darfur, who is giving uncensored information from Sudan and who, for fear of being kicked out of the country, is remaining anonymous.

In case you can't access the Kristof article, he's not really saying anything new: the African Union peacekeepers don't have enough people, money or matériel; the US isn't doing anything; things are getting worse, not better.

But at least Kristof keeps writing about Darfur. He may, at times, sound like a slightly annoying record that keeps skipping, particularly if you listen to the multimedia pieces on the Times website, but he is one of the only people from a large American media outlet who has been struggling to keep Darfur ingrained in his public's fickle short-term memory. And for that, he deserves respect.

I just received a package from my family with some Christmas presents and the last three months of Harper's. There was a "reading" in there that I had never heard about. It is an exerpt from a March 2004 email in which Air Force Captain John Carr, one of the military prosecuters in the cases at Guantanamo Bay who has since then been transferred, complained to Army Colonel Fred Borch about the way the Office of Military Commissions was being carried out.

The Australian Broadcast Service seems to be the first to report that the trials were to be rigged.

I can't seem to find a transcript of the email on the internet, so I'm retyping the exerpt published in the November issue of Harper's (emphasis mine):

Sir,

I feel a responsibility to emphasize a few issues. Our cases are not even close to being adequately investigated or prepared for trial. There are many reasons why we find ourselves in this unfortunate position--the starkest being that we have had little or no leadership or direction for the last eight months. It appears that instead of pausing, conducting an honest appraisal of our current preparation plan for the future, we have invested substantial time and effort in concealing our deficiencies and misleading not only each other but also those outside our office who are either directly responsible for or asked to endorse our efforts. My fears are not insignificant that the inadequate preparation of the cases and misrepresentation related thereto may constitute dereliction of duty, false official statements, and other criminal conduct.

You asked in our meeting last week what else you could do but lead by example. In regards to the environment of secrecy, deceit, and dishonesty in this office, the attorneys appear merely to be following the example that you have set.

A few examples include:

You continue to make statements to the office that you admit in private are not true. You have stated for months that we are ready to go immediately with the first four cases. At the same time, emails are being sent out admitting that we don't have the evidence to prove the general conspiracy, let alone the specific accused's culpability.

You have repeatedly said to the office that the military panel will be handpicked and will not acquit these detainees, and we only needed to worry about building a record for the review panel. In private you stated that we are really concerned with review by academicians ten years from now, who will go back and pick the cases apart.

The fact that we did not approach the FBI for assistance prior to December 17 is not only indefensible but an example of how this office and others have misled outsiders by pretending that interagency cooperation has been alive and well for some time, when in fact the opposite is true.

It is my opinion that the primary objective of the office has been the advancement of the process for personal motivations--not the proper preparation of cases or the interests of the American people. The posturing of our prosecution team chiefs to maneuver onto the first case is overshadowed only by the zeal with which they hide the specific facts of their case from review or scrutiny. The evidence does not indicate that our military and civilian leaders have been accurately informed of the state of our preparation, the true culpability of our accused, or the sustainability of our efforts.

If the appropriate decision-makers are provided with the accurate information and determine that we must go forward on our current path, then all would be very committed to accomplishing this task. It instead appears, however, that the decision-makers are being provided false information to get them to make the key decisions, only to learn the truth after a point of no return.

When I volunteered to assist with this process, I expected there would at least be a minimal effort to establish a fair process and diligently prepare cases against significant accused. Instead, I find a half-hearted and disorganized effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged. It is difficult to believe that the White House has approved this situation, and I fully expect that one day, soon, someone will be called to answer for what our office has been doing for the last fourteen months.

While many may simply be concerned with a moment of fame and the ability in the future to engage in small-time practice, that is neither what I aspire to do not what I have been trained to do. I cannot morally, ethically, or professionally continue to be a part of this process.

According to the ABC article, prosecutor Major Robert Preston feels the same way: "After all, writing a motion saying that the process will be full and fair when you don't really believe it is kind of hard, particularly when you want to call yourself an officer and lawyer."

The London Review recently published an article on the Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist, and Stephen Walt, a Harvard government professor. (An unabridged version is available here.)

There has been a lot of talk about the paper, most of it pretty inane, like this piece from the Wall Street Journal, which seems to try to give the anti-semitism defense a veneer of resectability by slightly nuancing it:

The authors are at pains to note that the Israel Lobby is by no means exclusively Jewish, and that not every American Jew is a part of it. Fair enough. But has there ever been an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that does not share its basic features? Dual loyalty, disloyalty, manipulation of the media, financial manipulation of the political system, duping the goyim (gentiles) and getting them to fight their wars, sponsoring and covering up acts of gratuitous cruelty against an innocent people -- every canard ever alleged of the Jews is here made about the Israel Lobby and its cause. No wonder former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke was quick to endorse the article, calling it a "great step forward."

I do not mean to suggest that Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt are themselves anti-Semitic. But as outgoing Harvard President Larry Summers once noted, what may not be anti-Semitic in intent may yet be anti-Semitic in effect. By giving aid and comfort to people who have no trouble substituting the word "Jews" for "Israel Lobby," the Mearsheimer-Walt article is anti-Semitic in effect.

Not all of the criticisms, however, stoop to such non-arguments. This piece by the University of Chicago's Daniel Drezner focuses on what he sees as the empirical problems of the piece:

Walt and Mearsheimer should not be criticized as anti-Semites, because that's patently false. They should be criticized for doing piss-poor, monocausal social science.

To repeat, the main empirical problems with the article are that:

A) They fail to demonstrate that Israel is a net strategic liability;
B) They ascribe U.S. foreign policy behavior almost exclusively to the activities of the "Israel Lobby"; and
C) They omit consderation of contradictory policies and countervailing foreign policy lobbies.

At the end of the day, however, the piece that I found to be the most interesting came from Ha'aretz:

It sometimes takes AIPAC omnipotence too much at face value and disregards key moments - such as the Bush senior/Baker loan guarantees episode and Clinton's showdown with Netanyahu over the Wye River Agreement. The study largely ignores AIPAC run-ins with more dovish Israeli administrations, most notably when it undermined Yitzhak Rabin, and how excessive hawkishness is often out of step with mainstream American Jewish opinion, turning many, especially young American Jews, away from taking any interest in Israel.

Yet their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's, too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.

I tend to agree that the Israel lobby is pushing a foreign policy agenda that is often detrimental to American national interest and usually gives the opposite appearance of being the fair broker that the US tries to sell itself as in the Middle East. And while idiots like David Duke might use articles like this to push their elementary racism, we know that there is a lobby and that it is effective, and that we should not let bigots like him dictate what is acceptable and what is off limits for reasonable discussion. Like Mearsheimer and Walt say in their paper:

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers' unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby?s task even easier.

Another fair account of the paper appears in an Op-Ed aricle by Nicholas Goldberg in the LA Times:

The idea of a powerful "Jewish lobby" that has its gnarled fingers in the machinery of the government is an old and repugnant canard. Along with the Jews who supposedly own the media and those who reputedly control the banks, the cabal of sinister, third-column Hebrews who whisper into the ears of our leaders is a classic in the traditional checklist of anti-Semitic fulminations.

So it's no surprise that in the modern era, even to broach the idea of a "Jewish lobby" is unacceptable. It's just not done in polite society -- even in situations in which there's some truth to it. Few would deny, after all, that there are people who lobby for various Jewish issues, including, of course, Israel (just as there are a lot of Jews working in Hollywood and just as Jews do own the New York Times). But even though we know these things, we generally don't talk about them.

...So what are we to make of [the article]? Is it anti-Semitism or honesty? Propaganda cloaked in academic respectability -- or a courageous willingness to identify the elephant in the room?

...It seems silly to deny that a powerful lobby on behalf of Israel exists. The real question is how pernicious it is. Does it, in fact, persuade us to act counter to our national interest -- or is it a positive thing, as publisher Mortimer Zuckerman suggests?

His answer to this question is to read the article yourself. I couldn't agree more.


UPDATE: The London Review speaks out against charges of anti-semitism.

Also, Noam Chomsky weighs in.

There has been a lot of talk lately about nuclear prolifilation and double standards, particularly with the nuclear fuel deal struck between the US and India, which has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. (The only other countries that have not signed are Israel and Pakistan.) The claim of double standards is that the US has turned a blind eye to ISrael's nuclear weapons program, yet is threatening Iran, which has signed the Treaty, with sanctions for their pursuit of nuclear technology. The treaty stipulates the following:

Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; and not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices.

While North Korea was a signatory, it pulled out of the treaty in 2003, which does not seem to be against the text of the treaty:

Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.

So in response to claims of a double standard, both in comparison to Israel and India (or even Pakistan), Avner Cohen wrote a piece in Ha'aretz suggesting that Israel come clean on the bomb (print-ready version). His argument is twofold, legal and "existential." Legally, Cohen argues, Israel never signed the treaty, whereas Iran did:

The attempt to put Israel and Iran on the same level, or even to create a concrete political connection between them, is ignorant, unfair and biased. First of all, from the point of view of international law: whereas Iran is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and is committed to comply with it, Israel, like India and Pakistan, is not a signatory to the treaty and therefore is not beholden to a formal commitment. Whereas Iran has been caught in flagrant breach of its international commitments, Israel has not broken such commitments. In other words, like the seven other nuclear states in the world, and in stark contrast to Iran, Israel has never relinquished the right to develop nuclear weaponry.

Here, he is only partially right. While nuclear powers like France, the US, Britian, Russia and China never gave up their right to have nuclear weapons, they did sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, unlike Israel, Pakistan and India. So it's not really fair to put Iran, Israel and, say, Russia in the same basket. It's hard to know what to make of countries that refuse to sign an international treaty like that one. Legally, they're not bound to any course of action, but practically speaking, are countries that renege on a treaty any safer than those that never signed in the first place? Furthermore, if we're speaking in purely legal terms, Iran is within its rights to develop nuclear power, because the treaty explicitely ensures the right to pursue "nuclear energy for peaceful purposes":

Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

But let's not be coy. We know that even if Iran were to not produce nuclear weapons immediately, just positioning itself to be able to do so in short notice would make it a dominant force in the region. But there is little that the US or Israel, Iran's rival in the region, could do about that, legally speaking, that is.

Cohen's second argument is that Israel should somehow be given carte blanche for nuclear weapons, since she has always and still faces an "existential threat."

According to foreign reports, Israel began to develop its Samson option in the 1950s, while it was establishing a state for a people still in the shadow of conflagration, in a hostile geopolitical environment that was opposed to its very existence. It found itself committed to the creation of an insurance policy within the pre-1967 borders, without external guarantees for its existence. In the political climate of that time, a decade after the Holocaust, Israel had perhaps the strongest strategic and moral justification for turning to the nuclear option, certainly no less than France or China, which also began the atomic journey at that time.

Not only is Iran not under existential threat - its nuclear aspirations are an issue that puts it on a collision course with the world. Even the leaders of North Korea are not daring to declare their aspirations to wipe countries off the map, as the president of Iran has declared with respect to Israel.

This is essentially an argument for Israeli exceptionalism, and it brings up the question of whether some countries should be allowed to have nuclear weapons but not others.

Cohen is confusing moral and strategic justifications for nuclear weapons here. Sure, Israel had strategic reasons for pursuing nuclear weapons, but so does Iran. We all know that having nuclear weapons changes the equation and makes countries like the US much more likely to choose diplomacy over military force. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent to regime change. Personally, I think that the Middle East should be a nucler weapons-free zone, but for that to happen, Israel would have to realize that it is not possible for it to remain the sole nuclear power in the region. The mere fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is enough to encourage its neighbors to catch up.

In the end, the only real justification for one country to have nuclear weapons while another is not allowed is that of power politics. Those that have weapons are in a position to deny these weapons to other countries. It would be difficult to come up with criteria to decide otherwise. Would these criteria be economic? Social? Should there be a committee that would take these things into consideration and then make a ruling? This would be very complicated, and as things stand, it would most likely be the Security Council that would make that call, and of course for those five countries, each of which is a nuclear power, there should be no nuclear proliferation. For these countries, what is good for the goose is not good for the gander.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that other countries (North Korea, Isreal, India and Pakistan) would clandestinely pursue nuclear weapons. And knowing that the nuclear powers of the world will not willingly allow any other countries to obtain nuclear weapons, the best way to ensure non-proliferation would seem to be to ensure that they have no reason to seek them. And in this case, Israel should start asking itself if it's preferable to be a nuclear power among others in the region or to be a non-nuclear power in a nuclear-free Middle East.



Note:

On why and how the world could live with a nuclear Iran, here are two interesting articles from the Times:

Suppose we just let Iran have the bomb
We can live with a nuclear Iran

Irshad Manji asks an interesting question in today's Times when explaining how she learned to love the wall that has made life for many Palestinians even harder than it already was. She wonders if an effort to prevent suicide bombings justifies further hardship for Palestinians.

She answers yes, presumably because "before the barrier, there was the bomber." Even if she would prefer to overlook the fact that before the bomber, there was the occupation, Ms. Manji should concede that there are any number of ways to ensure security for a state, but that many of them are cruel, immoral and against international law.

An important point was made by Israel's Chief Justice in his ruling on the wall, in which he quoted his judgment prohibiting the torturing of Palestinian detainees: "This is the destiny of a democracy: she does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back."

Those who proclaim their love for the wall would do well to remember this.

Public Radio International's This American Life recently ran a very interesting episode about Guantanamo Bay and habeas corpus, called Habeas Schmaebeas (real audio). They interview two people who have been released from the camp that's not quite in Cuba and not quite in the US where over 500 people have been imprisoned without being charged with a crime. One of the people interviewed is a Pakestani man named Bader who was arrested there (and handed over to American authorities) for running a satirical Urdu language newspaper. Jack Hitt does a good job dispelling some of the misinformation about the people who are being held in Guantanamo Bay:

We're told over and over that these prisoners are so terrible that we need an off-shore facility away from US law to hold them. But then there's Bader. And every day, more storie like his are coming out, and they raise the question: Is Guantanamo a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of mistakes?

He quotes Bush and Cheney, who had this to say about the matter:

Bush: "These are people that got scooped up off a battlefield attempting to kill U.S. troops. And I want to make sure, before they're released, that they don't come back to kill again."

Cheney: "The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They're bomb makers. They're facilitators of terror. They're members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban."

Then he quotes Seton Hall University Law School's Report on Guantanamo Detainees, which is based on written determinations the Government has produced for detainees that it has designated as enemy combatants, which were prepared after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals that began in 2004. The report's findings were as follows:

1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed "fighters for;" 30% considered "members of;" a large majority ? 60% -- are detained merely because they are "associated with" a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist group is unidentified.

4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.

5. Finally, the population of persons deemed not to be enemy combatants ? mostly Uighers ? are in fact accused of more serious allegations than a great many persons still deemed to be enemy combatants.

Another reports done on Guantanamo, which came out at about the same time as Seton Hall's can be found here and here.

These reports confirm that the remarks that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney have been making about how these people are the "worst of the worst" and have been "scooped up off a battle field" are patently false. The issue that is perhaps the most disconcerting is that 86 percent of Gitmo detainees were arrested by Pakistani or Northern Alliance forces at a time when the US was offering a large bounty for turning in suspected Taliban or al Qaeda members. One example of a flyer informing Afghans of the bounty read:

You can receive millions of dollars for helping the Anti-Taliban Force catch Al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.

This is a copy of another flyer:



It seems obvious that most of these Pakistani and Afghan (and sometimes Chinese) dirt farmers being passed off as the "worst of the worst" were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. The US government doesn't seemed too concerned about giving them a trial or habeas corpus rights, and I can say that being held incognito for years and tortured and humiliated on a daily basis is enough to turn even a poor Chinese dirt farmer into an anti-American terrorist.

Reading Eliot Weinberger's What I heard about Iraq in 2005, I came accross a very funny but sobering quote from a recently released Abu Ghraib detainee, collected by independent journalist, Dahr Jamail:

"The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house."

I've been on hiatus for the last couple of months. Most of that was spent at work, and the last two weeks have been spent in Lebanon.

Starting tomorrow, I'll be writing again. A lot has gone on in the last couple of months concering Sudan, and I'll have some things to say about my brief time in Beirut.

In the Times this weekend, Kristof challenged Bill O'reilly to really defend Christmas values (as opposed to complaining about the imaginary war on Christmas by godless liberals):

...Fox News Channel's crusade against infidels who prefer generic expressions like "Happy Holidays" included 58 separate segments in just a five-day period.

After I suggested in last Sunday's column that a better way to honor the season might be to stand up to genocide in Darfur (a calamity that Mr. O'Reilly has ignored), Mr. O'Reilly denounced me on his show as a "left-wing ideologue."

...So I have a challenge for Mr. O'Reilly: If you really want to defend traditional values, then come with me on a trip to Darfur. I'll introduce you to mothers who have had their babies clubbed to death in front of them, to teenage girls who have been gang-raped and then mutilated - and to the government-armed thugs who do these things.

You'll have to leave your studio, Bill. You'll encounter pure evil. If you're like me, you'll be scared. If you try to bully some of the goons in Darfur, they'll just hack your head off. But you'll also meet some genuine conservative Christians - aid workers who live the Gospel instead of sputtering about it - and you'll finally be using your talents for an important cause.

So, Bill, what'll it be? Will you dare travel to a real war against Christmas values, in which the victims aren't offended shoppers but terrified children thrown on bonfires? I'm waiting to hear.

It's comforting to see more coverage of Darfur, and if the region comes up in a spat between O'Reilly and Kristof, then all the better.

O'Reilly responds (I couldn't find a permalink) to Kristof's op-ed by only addressing the Darfur claim in a single sentence -- by saying that he had not ignored Darfur, without giving any examples -- and spent the rest of his "talking points memo" calling Kristof a dishonest ideologue and character assassin, stating that he doesn't understand America:

Mr. Kristof is a committed secularist who seems to not understand the culture war, or that his team is intent on diminishing the traditions of Christmas and other Judeo-Christian hallmarks, and that is deeply offensive to most Americans.

Kristof lives in The New York Times world--an isolated island of politically correct liberalism with little connection to everyday Americans. But in the spirit of Christmas, I've asked St. Nicholas to bring our pal Nicholas a special gift--the wisdom to see what is really going on and to do some honest analysis.

Of course O'Reilly's comments are so mind-numbingly stupid that it's not even necessary to rebut them (but if you really feel the need to, you can check out Adam Cohen's piece on the so-called war on Christmas). So what's really important to me is that the world is getting a little more exposure to the genocide in Darfur, and if Bill O'Reilly comes off (once again) as a jackass, well that's just icing on the cake.


Otherwise, I've started reading Gérard Prunier's new book on Darfur (available in English as well as in French. So far it's given a very interesting background of Darfur as an independent Sultanate and sparked my interest in the Mahdists. But I'm only about 60 pages in, so I'll hold my comments on it until I'm done.

In today's Washington Post, the story of Khaled Masri's wrongful imprisonment, is told. He was apparently on his way to Macedonia after a spat with his wife in Germany, (he is a German citizen of Egyptian origin), when he was abducted at the Macedonian border by the police because he name was similar to an associate of one of the 9/11 hijackers. He was then handed over to the CIA in Skjope.

The local deputy CIA chief (the station chief was on vacation) dealt directly with the Counterterrorism Center (CTC), since the European divison division chief was also on vacation. The Post offers us a little background on CTC, including how they operate:

After the September 2001 attacks, pressure to locate and nab potential terrorists, even in the most obscure parts of the world, bore down hard on one CIA office in particular, the Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, located until recently in the basement of one of the older buildings on the agency's sprawling headquarters compound. With operations officers and analysts sitting side by side, the idea was to act on tips and leads with dramatic speed.

The possibility of missing another attack loomed large. "Their logic was: If one of them gets loose and someone dies, we'll be held responsible," said one CIA officer, who, like others interviewed for this article, would speak only anonymously because of the secretive nature of the subject.

To carry out its mission, the CTC relies on its Rendition Group, made up of case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists. Their job is to figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside, or a secluded corner of an airport where local authorities wait.

Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons -- referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.

The decision was taken to send Masri to prison in Afghanistan, where he says he was interrogated and beaten and warned, "You are here in a country where no one knows about you, in a country where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will know." Then his passport was analyzed and found to be genuine, at which point the CIA toyed with the idea of just sending him back to Macedonia as if nothing had happened without telling the German authorities. Finally, since Macedonia had refused to accept him, he was sent to Albania and then later flown back to Germany.

In the end, Masri says he was told by his detainer, he had been kidnapped, drugged, beaten and detained because he "had a suspicious name." The lesson he has learned from this horrible ordeal is that the US is "just like in the Arab countries: arresting people, treating them inhumanly and less than that, and with no rights and no laws."

Via Kristof's column today, I found a blog by an aid worker in Darfur, who is giving uncensored information from Sudan and who, for fear of being kicked out of the country, is remaining anonymous.

In case you can't access the Kristof article, he's not really saying anything new: the African Union peacekeepers don't have enough people, money or matériel; the US isn't doing anything; things are getting worse, not better.

But at least Kristof keeps writing about Darfur. He may, at times, sound like a slightly annoying record that keeps skipping, particularly if you listen to the multimedia pieces on the Times website, but he is one of the only people from a large American media outlet who has been struggling to keep Darfur ingrained in his public's fickle short-term memory. And for that, he deserves respect.

I just received a package from my family with some Christmas presents and the last three months of Harper's. There was a "reading" in there that I had never heard about. It is an exerpt from a March 2004 email in which Air Force Captain John Carr, one of the military prosecuters in the cases at Guantanamo Bay who has since then been transferred, complained to Army Colonel Fred Borch about the way the Office of Military Commissions was being carried out.

The Australian Broadcast Service seems to be the first to report that the trials were to be rigged.

I can't seem to find a transcript of the email on the internet, so I'm retyping the exerpt published in the November issue of Harper's (emphasis mine):

Sir,

I feel a responsibility to emphasize a few issues. Our cases are not even close to being adequately investigated or prepared for trial. There are many reasons why we find ourselves in this unfortunate position--the starkest being that we have had little or no leadership or direction for the last eight months. It appears that instead of pausing, conducting an honest appraisal of our current preparation plan for the future, we have invested substantial time and effort in concealing our deficiencies and misleading not only each other but also those outside our office who are either directly responsible for or asked to endorse our efforts. My fears are not insignificant that the inadequate preparation of the cases and misrepresentation related thereto may constitute dereliction of duty, false official statements, and other criminal conduct.

You asked in our meeting last week what else you could do but lead by example. In regards to the environment of secrecy, deceit, and dishonesty in this office, the attorneys appear merely to be following the example that you have set.

A few examples include:

You continue to make statements to the office that you admit in private are not true. You have stated for months that we are ready to go immediately with the first four cases. At the same time, emails are being sent out admitting that we don't have the evidence to prove the general conspiracy, let alone the specific accused's culpability.

You have repeatedly said to the office that the military panel will be handpicked and will not acquit these detainees, and we only needed to worry about building a record for the review panel. In private you stated that we are really concerned with review by academicians ten years from now, who will go back and pick the cases apart.

The fact that we did not approach the FBI for assistance prior to December 17 is not only indefensible but an example of how this office and others have misled outsiders by pretending that interagency cooperation has been alive and well for some time, when in fact the opposite is true.

It is my opinion that the primary objective of the office has been the advancement of the process for personal motivations--not the proper preparation of cases or the interests of the American people. The posturing of our prosecution team chiefs to maneuver onto the first case is overshadowed only by the zeal with which they hide the specific facts of their case from review or scrutiny. The evidence does not indicate that our military and civilian leaders have been accurately informed of the state of our preparation, the true culpability of our accused, or the sustainability of our efforts.

If the appropriate decision-makers are provided with the accurate information and determine that we must go forward on our current path, then all would be very committed to accomplishing this task. It instead appears, however, that the decision-makers are being provided false information to get them to make the key decisions, only to learn the truth after a point of no return.

When I volunteered to assist with this process, I expected there would at least be a minimal effort to establish a fair process and diligently prepare cases against significant accused. Instead, I find a half-hearted and disorganized effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged. It is difficult to believe that the White House has approved this situation, and I fully expect that one day, soon, someone will be called to answer for what our office has been doing for the last fourteen months.

While many may simply be concerned with a moment of fame and the ability in the future to engage in small-time practice, that is neither what I aspire to do not what I have been trained to do. I cannot morally, ethically, or professionally continue to be a part of this process.

According to the ABC article, prosecutor Major Robert Preston feels the same way: "After all, writing a motion saying that the process will be full and fair when you don't really believe it is kind of hard, particularly when you want to call yourself an officer and lawyer."

The London Review recently published an article on the Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist, and Stephen Walt, a Harvard government professor. (An unabridged version is available here.)

There has been a lot of talk about the paper, most of it pretty inane, like this piece from the Wall Street Journal, which seems to try to give the anti-semitism defense a veneer of resectability by slightly nuancing it:

The authors are at pains to note that the Israel Lobby is by no means exclusively Jewish, and that not every American Jew is a part of it. Fair enough. But has there ever been an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that does not share its basic features? Dual loyalty, disloyalty, manipulation of the media, financial manipulation of the political system, duping the goyim (gentiles) and getting them to fight their wars, sponsoring and covering up acts of gratuitous cruelty against an innocent people -- every canard ever alleged of the Jews is here made about the Israel Lobby and its cause. No wonder former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke was quick to endorse the article, calling it a "great step forward."

I do not mean to suggest that Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt are themselves anti-Semitic. But as outgoing Harvard President Larry Summers once noted, what may not be anti-Semitic in intent may yet be anti-Semitic in effect. By giving aid and comfort to people who have no trouble substituting the word "Jews" for "Israel Lobby," the Mearsheimer-Walt article is anti-Semitic in effect.

Not all of the criticisms, however, stoop to such non-arguments. This piece by the University of Chicago's Daniel Drezner focuses on what he sees as the empirical problems of the piece:

Walt and Mearsheimer should not be criticized as anti-Semites, because that's patently false. They should be criticized for doing piss-poor, monocausal social science.

To repeat, the main empirical problems with the article are that:

A) They fail to demonstrate that Israel is a net strategic liability;
B) They ascribe U.S. foreign policy behavior almost exclusively to the activities of the "Israel Lobby"; and
C) They omit consderation of contradictory policies and countervailing foreign policy lobbies.

At the end of the day, however, the piece that I found to be the most interesting came from Ha'aretz:

It sometimes takes AIPAC omnipotence too much at face value and disregards key moments - such as the Bush senior/Baker loan guarantees episode and Clinton's showdown with Netanyahu over the Wye River Agreement. The study largely ignores AIPAC run-ins with more dovish Israeli administrations, most notably when it undermined Yitzhak Rabin, and how excessive hawkishness is often out of step with mainstream American Jewish opinion, turning many, especially young American Jews, away from taking any interest in Israel.

Yet their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's, too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.

I tend to agree that the Israel lobby is pushing a foreign policy agenda that is often detrimental to American national interest and usually gives the opposite appearance of being the fair broker that the US tries to sell itself as in the Middle East. And while idiots like David Duke might use articles like this to push their elementary racism, we know that there is a lobby and that it is effective, and that we should not let bigots like him dictate what is acceptable and what is off limits for reasonable discussion. Like Mearsheimer and Walt say in their paper:

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers' unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby?s task even easier.

Another fair account of the paper appears in an Op-Ed aricle by Nicholas Goldberg in the LA Times:

The idea of a powerful "Jewish lobby" that has its gnarled fingers in the machinery of the government is an old and repugnant canard. Along with the Jews who supposedly own the media and those who reputedly control the banks, the cabal of sinister, third-column Hebrews who whisper into the ears of our leaders is a classic in the traditional checklist of anti-Semitic fulminations.

So it's no surprise that in the modern era, even to broach the idea of a "Jewish lobby" is unacceptable. It's just not done in polite society -- even in situations in which there's some truth to it. Few would deny, after all, that there are people who lobby for various Jewish issues, including, of course, Israel (just as there are a lot of Jews working in Hollywood and just as Jews do own the New York Times). But even though we know these things, we generally don't talk about them.

...So what are we to make of [the article]? Is it anti-Semitism or honesty? Propaganda cloaked in academic respectability -- or a courageous willingness to identify the elephant in the room?

...It seems silly to deny that a powerful lobby on behalf of Israel exists. The real question is how pernicious it is. Does it, in fact, persuade us to act counter to our national interest -- or is it a positive thing, as publisher Mortimer Zuckerman suggests?

His answer to this question is to read the article yourself. I couldn't agree more.


UPDATE: The London Review speaks out against charges of anti-semitism.

Also, Noam Chomsky weighs in.

There has been a lot of talk lately about nuclear prolifilation and double standards, particularly with the nuclear fuel deal struck between the US and India, which has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. (The only other countries that have not signed are Israel and Pakistan.) The claim of double standards is that the US has turned a blind eye to ISrael's nuclear weapons program, yet is threatening Iran, which has signed the Treaty, with sanctions for their pursuit of nuclear technology. The treaty stipulates the following:

Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; and not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices.

While North Korea was a signatory, it pulled out of the treaty in 2003, which does not seem to be against the text of the treaty:

Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.

So in response to claims of a double standard, both in comparison to Israel and India (or even Pakistan), Avner Cohen wrote a piece in Ha'aretz suggesting that Israel come clean on the bomb (print-ready version). His argument is twofold, legal and "existential." Legally, Cohen argues, Israel never signed the treaty, whereas Iran did:

The attempt to put Israel and Iran on the same level, or even to create a concrete political connection between them, is ignorant, unfair and biased. First of all, from the point of view of international law: whereas Iran is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and is committed to comply with it, Israel, like India and Pakistan, is not a signatory to the treaty and therefore is not beholden to a formal commitment. Whereas Iran has been caught in flagrant breach of its international commitments, Israel has not broken such commitments. In other words, like the seven other nuclear states in the world, and in stark contrast to Iran, Israel has never relinquished the right to develop nuclear weaponry.

Here, he is only partially right. While nuclear powers like France, the US, Britian, Russia and China never gave up their right to have nuclear weapons, they did sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, unlike Israel, Pakistan and India. So it's not really fair to put Iran, Israel and, say, Russia in the same basket. It's hard to know what to make of countries that refuse to sign an international treaty like that one. Legally, they're not bound to any course of action, but practically speaking, are countries that renege on a treaty any safer than those that never signed in the first place? Furthermore, if we're speaking in purely legal terms, Iran is within its rights to develop nuclear power, because the treaty explicitely ensures the right to pursue "nuclear energy for peaceful purposes":

Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

But let's not be coy. We know that even if Iran were to not produce nuclear weapons immediately, just positioning itself to be able to do so in short notice would make it a dominant force in the region. But there is little that the US or Israel, Iran's rival in the region, could do about that, legally speaking, that is.

Cohen's second argument is that Israel should somehow be given carte blanche for nuclear weapons, since she has always and still faces an "existential threat."

According to foreign reports, Israel began to develop its Samson option in the 1950s, while it was establishing a state for a people still in the shadow of conflagration, in a hostile geopolitical environment that was opposed to its very existence. It found itself committed to the creation of an insurance policy within the pre-1967 borders, without external guarantees for its existence. In the political climate of that time, a decade after the Holocaust, Israel had perhaps the strongest strategic and moral justification for turning to the nuclear option, certainly no less than France or China, which also began the atomic journey at that time.

Not only is Iran not under existential threat - its nuclear aspirations are an issue that puts it on a collision course with the world. Even the leaders of North Korea are not daring to declare their aspirations to wipe countries off the map, as the president of Iran has declared with respect to Israel.

This is essentially an argument for Israeli exceptionalism, and it brings up the question of whether some countries should be allowed to have nuclear weapons but not others.

Cohen is confusing moral and strategic justifications for nuclear weapons here. Sure, Israel had strategic reasons for pursuing nuclear weapons, but so does Iran. We all know that having nuclear weapons changes the equation and makes countries like the US much more likely to choose diplomacy over military force. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent to regime change. Personally, I think that the Middle East should be a nucler weapons-free zone, but for that to happen, Israel would have to realize that it is not possible for it to remain the sole nuclear power in the region. The mere fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is enough to encourage its neighbors to catch up.

In the end, the only real justification for one country to have nuclear weapons while another is not allowed is that of power politics. Those that have weapons are in a position to deny these weapons to other countries. It would be difficult to come up with criteria to decide otherwise. Would these criteria be economic? Social? Should there be a committee that would take these things into consideration and then make a ruling? This would be very complicated, and as things stand, it would most likely be the Security Council that would make that call, and of course for those five countries, each of which is a nuclear power, there should be no nuclear proliferation. For these countries, what is good for the goose is not good for the gander.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that other countries (North Korea, Isreal, India and Pakistan) would clandestinely pursue nuclear weapons. And knowing that the nuclear powers of the world will not willingly allow any other countries to obtain nuclear weapons, the best way to ensure non-proliferation would seem to be to ensure that they have no reason to seek them. And in this case, Israel should start asking itself if it's preferable to be a nuclear power among others in the region or to be a non-nuclear power in a nuclear-free Middle East.



Note:

On why and how the world could live with a nuclear Iran, here are two interesting articles from the Times:

Suppose we just let Iran have the bomb
We can live with a nuclear Iran

Irshad Manji asks an interesting question in today's Times when explaining how she learned to love the wall that has made life for many Palestinians even harder than it already was. She wonders if an effort to prevent suicide bombings justifies further hardship for Palestinians.

She answers yes, presumably because "before the barrier, there was the bomber." Even if she would prefer to overlook the fact that before the bomber, there was the occupation, Ms. Manji should concede that there are any number of ways to ensure security for a state, but that many of them are cruel, immoral and against international law.

An important point was made by Israel's Chief Justice in his ruling on the wall, in which he quoted his judgment prohibiting the torturing of Palestinian detainees: "This is the destiny of a democracy: she does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back."

Those who proclaim their love for the wall would do well to remember this.

Public Radio International's This American Life recently ran a very interesting episode about Guantanamo Bay and habeas corpus, called Habeas Schmaebeas (real audio). They interview two people who have been released from the camp that's not quite in Cuba and not quite in the US where over 500 people have been imprisoned without being charged with a crime. One of the people interviewed is a Pakestani man named Bader who was arrested there (and handed over to American authorities) for running a satirical Urdu language newspaper. Jack Hitt does a good job dispelling some of the misinformation about the people who are being held in Guantanamo Bay:

We're told over and over that these prisoners are so terrible that we need an off-shore facility away from US law to hold them. But then there's Bader. And every day, more storie like his are coming out, and they raise the question: Is Guantanamo a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of mistakes?

He quotes Bush and Cheney, who had this to say about the matter:

Bush: "These are people that got scooped up off a battlefield attempting to kill U.S. troops. And I want to make sure, before they're released, that they don't come back to kill again."

Cheney: "The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They're bomb makers. They're facilitators of terror. They're members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban."

Then he quotes Seton Hall University Law School's Report on Guantanamo Detainees, which is based on written determinations the Government has produced for detainees that it has designated as enemy combatants, which were prepared after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals that began in 2004. The report's findings were as follows:

1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed "fighters for;" 30% considered "members of;" a large majority ? 60% -- are detained merely because they are "associated with" a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist group is unidentified.

4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.

5. Finally, the population of persons deemed not to be enemy combatants ? mostly Uighers ? are in fact accused of more serious allegations than a great many persons still deemed to be enemy combatants.

Another reports done on Guantanamo, which came out at about the same time as Seton Hall's can be found here and here.

These reports confirm that the remarks that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney have been making about how these people are the "worst of the worst" and have been "scooped up off a battle field" are patently false. The issue that is perhaps the most disconcerting is that 86 percent of Gitmo detainees were arrested by Pakistani or Northern Alliance forces at a time when the US was offering a large bounty for turning in suspected Taliban or al Qaeda members. One example of a flyer informing Afghans of the bounty read:

You can receive millions of dollars for helping the Anti-Taliban Force catch Al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.

This is a copy of another flyer:



It seems obvious that most of these Pakistani and Afghan (and sometimes Chinese) dirt farmers being passed off as the "worst of the worst" were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. The US government doesn't seemed too concerned about giving them a trial or habeas corpus rights, and I can say that being held incognito for years and tortured and humiliated on a daily basis is enough to turn even a poor Chinese dirt farmer into an anti-American terrorist.

Reading Eliot Weinberger's What I heard about Iraq in 2005, I came accross a very funny but sobering quote from a recently released Abu Ghraib detainee, collected by independent journalist, Dahr Jamail:

"The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house."

I've been on hiatus for the last couple of months. Most of that was spent at work, and the last two weeks have been spent in Lebanon.

Starting tomorrow, I'll be writing again. A lot has gone on in the last couple of months concering Sudan, and I'll have some things to say about my brief time in Beirut.

In the Times this weekend, Kristof challenged Bill O'reilly to really defend Christmas values (as opposed to complaining about the imaginary war on Christmas by godless liberals):

...Fox News Channel's crusade against infidels who prefer generic expressions like "Happy Holidays" included 58 separate segments in just a five-day period.

After I suggested in last Sunday's column that a better way to honor the season might be to stand up to genocide in Darfur (a calamity that Mr. O'Reilly has ignored), Mr. O'Reilly denounced me on his show as a "left-wing ideologue."

...So I have a challenge for Mr. O'Reilly: If you really want to defend traditional values, then come with me on a trip to Darfur. I'll introduce you to mothers who have had their babies clubbed to death in front of them, to teenage girls who have been gang-raped and then mutilated - and to the government-armed thugs who do these things.

You'll have to leave your studio, Bill. You'll encounter pure evil. If you're like me, you'll be scared. If you try to bully some of the goons in Darfur, they'll just hack your head off. But you'll also meet some genuine conservative Christians - aid workers who live the Gospel instead of sputtering about it - and you'll finally be using your talents for an important cause.

So, Bill, what'll it be? Will you dare travel to a real war against Christmas values, in which the victims aren't offended shoppers but terrified children thrown on bonfires? I'm waiting to hear.

It's comforting to see more coverage of Darfur, and if the region comes up in a spat between O'Reilly and Kristof, then all the better.

O'Reilly responds (I couldn't find a permalink) to Kristof's op-ed by only addressing the Darfur claim in a single sentence -- by saying that he had not ignored Darfur, without giving any examples -- and spent the rest of his "talking points memo" calling Kristof a dishonest ideologue and character assassin, stating that he doesn't understand America:

Mr. Kristof is a committed secularist who seems to not understand the culture war, or that his team is intent on diminishing the traditions of Christmas and other Judeo-Christian hallmarks, and that is deeply offensive to most Americans.

Kristof lives in The New York Times world--an isolated island of politically correct liberalism with little connection to everyday Americans. But in the spirit of Christmas, I've asked St. Nicholas to bring our pal Nicholas a special gift--the wisdom to see what is really going on and to do some honest analysis.

Of course O'Reilly's comments are so mind-numbingly stupid that it's not even necessary to rebut them (but if you really feel the need to, you can check out Adam Cohen's piece on the so-called war on Christmas). So what's really important to me is that the world is getting a little more exposure to the genocide in Darfur, and if Bill O'Reilly comes off (once again) as a jackass, well that's just icing on the cake.


Otherwise, I've started reading Gérard Prunier's new book on Darfur (available in English as well as in French. So far it's given a very interesting background of Darfur as an independent Sultanate and sparked my interest in the Mahdists. But I'm only about 60 pages in, so I'll hold my comments on it until I'm done.

In today's Washington Post, the story of Khaled Masri's wrongful imprisonment, is told. He was apparently on his way to Macedonia after a spat with his wife in Germany, (he is a German citizen of Egyptian origin), when he was abducted at the Macedonian border by the police because he name was similar to an associate of one of the 9/11 hijackers. He was then handed over to the CIA in Skjope.

The local deputy CIA chief (the station chief was on vacation) dealt directly with the Counterterrorism Center (CTC), since the European divison division chief was also on vacation. The Post offers us a little background on CTC, including how they operate:

After the September 2001 attacks, pressure to locate and nab potential terrorists, even in the most obscure parts of the world, bore down hard on one CIA office in particular, the Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, located until recently in the basement of one of the older buildings on the agency's sprawling headquarters compound. With operations officers and analysts sitting side by side, the idea was to act on tips and leads with dramatic speed.

The possibility of missing another attack loomed large. "Their logic was: If one of them gets loose and someone dies, we'll be held responsible," said one CIA officer, who, like others interviewed for this article, would speak only anonymously because of the secretive nature of the subject.

To carry out its mission, the CTC relies on its Rendition Group, made up of case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists. Their job is to figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside, or a secluded corner of an airport where local authorities wait.

Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons -- referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.

The decision was taken to send Masri to prison in Afghanistan, where he says he was interrogated and beaten and warned, "You are here in a country where no one knows about you, in a country where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will know." Then his passport was analyzed and found to be genuine, at which point the CIA toyed with the idea of just sending him back to Macedonia as if nothing had happened without telling the German authorities. Finally, since Macedonia had refused to accept him, he was sent to Albania and then later flown back to Germany.

In the end, Masri says he was told by his detainer, he had been kidnapped, drugged, beaten and detained because he "had a suspicious name." The lesson he has learned from this horrible ordeal is that the US is "just like in the Arab countries: arresting people, treating them inhumanly and less than that, and with no rights and no laws."

Via Kristof's column today, I found a blog by an aid worker in Darfur, who is giving uncensored information from Sudan and who, for fear of being kicked out of the country, is remaining anonymous.

In case you can't access the Kristof article, he's not really saying anything new: the African Union peacekeepers don't have enough people, money or matériel; the US isn't doing anything; things are getting worse, not better.

But at least Kristof keeps writing about Darfur. He may, at times, sound like a slightly annoying record that keeps skipping, particularly if you listen to the multimedia pieces on the Times website, but he is one of the only people from a large American media outlet who has been struggling to keep Darfur ingrained in his public's fickle short-term memory. And for that, he deserves respect.

I just received a package from my family with some Christmas presents and the last three months of Harper's. There was a "reading" in there that I had never heard about. It is an exerpt from a March 2004 email in which Air Force Captain John Carr, one of the military prosecuters in the cases at Guantanamo Bay who has since then been transferred, complained to Army Colonel Fred Borch about the way the Office of Military Commissions was being carried out.

The Australian Broadcast Service seems to be the first to report that the trials were to be rigged.

I can't seem to find a transcript of the email on the internet, so I'm retyping the exerpt published in the November issue of Harper's (emphasis mine):

Sir,

I feel a responsibility to emphasize a few issues. Our cases are not even close to being adequately investigated or prepared for trial. There are many reasons why we find ourselves in this unfortunate position--the starkest being that we have had little or no leadership or direction for the last eight months. It appears that instead of pausing, conducting an honest appraisal of our current preparation plan for the future, we have invested substantial time and effort in concealing our deficiencies and misleading not only each other but also those outside our office who are either directly responsible for or asked to endorse our efforts. My fears are not insignificant that the inadequate preparation of the cases and misrepresentation related thereto may constitute dereliction of duty, false official statements, and other criminal conduct.

You asked in our meeting last week what else you could do but lead by example. In regards to the environment of secrecy, deceit, and dishonesty in this office, the attorneys appear merely to be following the example that you have set.

A few examples include:

You continue to make statements to the office that you admit in private are not true. You have stated for months that we are ready to go immediately with the first four cases. At the same time, emails are being sent out admitting that we don't have the evidence to prove the general conspiracy, let alone the specific accused's culpability.

You have repeatedly said to the office that the military panel will be handpicked and will not acquit these detainees, and we only needed to worry about building a record for the review panel. In private you stated that we are really concerned with review by academicians ten years from now, who will go back and pick the cases apart.

The fact that we did not approach the FBI for assistance prior to December 17 is not only indefensible but an example of how this office and others have misled outsiders by pretending that interagency cooperation has been alive and well for some time, when in fact the opposite is true.

It is my opinion that the primary objective of the office has been the advancement of the process for personal motivations--not the proper preparation of cases or the interests of the American people. The posturing of our prosecution team chiefs to maneuver onto the first case is overshadowed only by the zeal with which they hide the specific facts of their case from review or scrutiny. The evidence does not indicate that our military and civilian leaders have been accurately informed of the state of our preparation, the true culpability of our accused, or the sustainability of our efforts.

If the appropriate decision-makers are provided with the accurate information and determine that we must go forward on our current path, then all would be very committed to accomplishing this task. It instead appears, however, that the decision-makers are being provided false information to get them to make the key decisions, only to learn the truth after a point of no return.

When I volunteered to assist with this process, I expected there would at least be a minimal effort to establish a fair process and diligently prepare cases against significant accused. Instead, I find a half-hearted and disorganized effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged. It is difficult to believe that the White House has approved this situation, and I fully expect that one day, soon, someone will be called to answer for what our office has been doing for the last fourteen months.

While many may simply be concerned with a moment of fame and the ability in the future to engage in small-time practice, that is neither what I aspire to do not what I have been trained to do. I cannot morally, ethically, or professionally continue to be a part of this process.

According to the ABC article, prosecutor Major Robert Preston feels the same way: "After all, writing a motion saying that the process will be full and fair when you don't really believe it is kind of hard, particularly when you want to call yourself an officer and lawyer."