Preventative Detention
Hilzoy pronounces herself "happy as a clam" with President Obama's speech yesterday on national security issues, with one glaring exception: But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 22, 2009 08:20
The Story of the Uighar Captives at Gitmo
Via Conor Friedersdorf, I've come across an astonishing series of blog posts by Hilary Bok that track the story of the 17 Uighar captives in Guantanamo Bay. (It's in six parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). You should read the whole series, which forthrightly defends these captives from the lies that have been hurled at them in ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 21, 2009 23:32
Pots Call Kettles REALLY, REALLY Black
Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within and Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom, has joined forces with Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson, in excoriating some moderately prominent conservative bloggers as "a bunch of kooks" for their embrace of unsavory elements in the European anti-jihadist community. You know, when you start to ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 7, 2009 15:35
Air Force One Flyover Frightens New Yorkers
An aircraft that would have been "Air Force One" except that President Obama wasn't on board staged an ill-fated photo op in New York City yesterday morning. It was supposed to be a photo opportunity, a showcase of Air Force One alongside the sweep of New York City skyline. But as the low-flying Boeing 747 speeded in the shadows of skyscrapers, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 28, 2009 10:20
Quote of the Day – Repugnant Edition
"For those most committed to the ridiculous crusade for terrorist rights, 'enhanced interrogation' is not only immoral and illegal, it's ineffective. That argument, like Khalid Sheik Mohamed, doesn't hold water." - Michael Goldfarb One wonders what John McCain, who suffered torture for five years as a guest of the North Vietnamese and whose campaign employed Goldfarb as deputy communications director, thinks ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 24, 2009 06:00
Torture and Sex: Moral Relativism or Morally Unrelated?
Kevin Drum observes, When the subject has anything to do with sex, the right in America is the party of moral absolutes. We know what's right, we know what's wrong, and even if there's a price to pay we can't shirk our responsibility to set a proper example and do the right thing. But when the subject is torture, suddenly it's all ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 22, 2009 13:07
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Waterboarded 183 Times
Marcy Wheeler picks an interesting factoid out of the "Bradford memo," one of several documents detailing the interogation techniques used by the U.S. intelligence community released last week by the Obama administration: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 (his first month in custody) alone. As noted repeatedly on this site and others over the years, waterboarding is ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 19, 2009 06:31
Wiretaps Run Amok
Andrew Sullivan is soliciting right-of-center comments on a report by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen that has mostly attracted left-of-center commenters thus far. Here's the lede: The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 16, 2009 13:10
Robert Oakley on Somalia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan
Few Americans know more about Africa and the Middle East than Robert Oakley, whose distinguished diplomatic career included stints U.S. ambassador to Zaire , Somalia, and Pakistan;Special Envoy to Somali; director of State's Office of Combatting Terrorism; and Assistant to the President for Middle East and South Asia. With help from my colleague Shuja Nawaz, director of the Atlantic Council's new ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 15, 2009 08:36
Biden on ‘Global War on Terror’ – Video
Townhall's Greg Hengler seems pleased to have caught Vice President Biden in a contradiction of the Obama administration's new verbal policy eschewing the phrase "Global War on Terror." Hengler quips, "Maybe Biden just forgot the phrase 'Overseas Contingency Operation.'" Others reacting to this and aggregated at memeorandum seem to have watched said video and come away with the same conclusion. Ed ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 8, 2009 06:33
Taliban Claim Responsibility for Binghamton Shootings
On Tuesday, Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud responded to a $5 million reward for his arrest by threatening terrorist attacks in America. "You can't imagine how we could avenge this threat inside Washington, inside the White House," Reuters quoted him as saying. Today, he's claiming responsibility for yesterday's shooting spree in Binghamton, New York. The diminutive Mehsud is considered the prime ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 4, 2009 06:19
Obama: Focus on Al Qaeda (Just Like Bush)
President Obama told CBS' "Face the Nation" that the Bush administration had lost its focus in Afghanistan and that his team will "refocus attention on al Qaeda." He additionally promised that "we now have resourced properly this strategy. It's not going to be an open-ended commitment of infinite resources. We've just got to make sure that we are focused on ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 30, 2009 11:12
Quote of the Day: Pakistan Edition
"Pakistan is 173 million people, 100 nuclear weapons, an army bigger than the U.S. Army, and al-Qaeda headquarters sitting right there in the two-thirds of the country that the government doesn't control. The Pakistani military and police and intelligence service don't follow the civilian government; they are essentially a rogue state within a state. We're now reaching the point where ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 23, 2009 13:44
Air Force Publishes Phone Book!
Steven Aftergood notes that, "The United States Air Force has published a detailed organizational chart of its headquarters (pdf) including the names and telephone numbers of key personnel" and points out that this seemingly uninteresting fact "represents a departure from the post-9/11 Pentagon practice of withholding the names and phone numbers of Pentagon officials from publication in the Department of ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 20, 2009 10:00
Moderate Taliban an Oxymoron?
In my New Atlanticist piece "Who Are the 'Moderate' Taliban?," I round up the reactions to President Obama's weekend promise to "reach out to moderate elements of the Taliban" and note that they're almost uniformly negative. On the surface, "moderate Taliban" sounds as nonsensical are "nonviolent terrorist" or "tolerant Nazi." Still, as Steve Hynd recently pointed out, the term "Taliban" is tossed ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 9, 2009 14:14
