Closing Gitmo Requires Tough Judgments on Inmates

by AP

President-elect Barack Obama's planned review of Guantanamo Bay prisoners, a prelude to closing the detention center, must weigh the threats posed by an extraordinarily diverse group, from die-hard jihadists to innocent men swept up in war.

Two presidential transition team advisers said Monday that Obama is preparing to issue an executive order in his first day or week in office setting in motion the extensive survey needed to close the US military prison in Cuba.

His team faces a daunting task.

Some cases are clear cut. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, brought to Guantanamo in 2006 from CIA custody, has claimed responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks. He said he wants to be executed to achieve martyrdom.

On the other end of the spectrum are men even the Pentagon acknowledges are no threat -- 17 Uighur dissidents who remain detained over fears for their safety if returned to their homeland in China.

Most of the roughly 250 remaining prisoners lie in the murky middle....

What Do You Do When The Guy Across the Negotiating Table Wants to Destroy You?

by Newt Gingrich

Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearings are underway in the Senate today. A good question for any senator who is interested in being honest about the real problem in the Middle East is this:

“Senator Clinton, imagine that you’re the Israeli Foreign Minister: What do you do when the other party at the ‘peace table’ is openly committed to your destruction?”

This is the question that all our political and foreign policy elites who are demanding that Israel immediately agree to a “cease fire” with Hamas in Gaza should be asking.

And this is the fact that the anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic mobs that are taking to the streets in London, Edinburgh, Berlin and Washington, DC should know:

Hamas is openly, publicly and proudly committed to the destruction of the state of Israel. This is a negotiating partner?

“There is No Solution For the Palestinian Problem Except Through Jihad”

These are the words of the Hamas charter:

Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.

And here is how the founding document of Hamas treats the concept of “negotiations”:

"There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."

Two Facts of Violence in Mid-East: Hamas and Iran

There are two main facts of the violence in the Middle East that all Americans -- and particularly our leaders -- should be aware of:

The first is that Hamas exists to destroy Israel. Its leaders wake up every morning with one goal -- to eliminate what they call the “Zionist entity.”

The second fact of violence in the Middle East is the ongoing effort by Iran (using Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas as its proxies) to undermine pro-American governments in the region.

“A New Emphasis on Respect” in Relations with Iran?

On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, President-elect Obama repeated his campaign pledge to negotiate with Iran.

He also promised that there would be a “new emphasis on respect” in his administration’s dealings with Tehran.

President-elect Obama may want respect.

But Iran’s theocratic rulers want victory.

This is a dangerous mismatch of goals for America and a potentially nuclear, aggressor regime to have.

To Understand Iran and Gaza, Obama Should Look to Lincoln

President-elect Obama has expressed a welcome fondness for Abraham Lincoln. To understand the regimes in Iran and Gaza, all of us should read more Lincoln.

When the southern states began to secede from the Union with Lincoln’s election in 1860, Lincoln concluded that negotiating with the South would be futile. There were only two options:

To make it impossible for the South to leave the Union.

Or to allow the Union itself to be destroyed.

Lincoln choose to “preserve, protect and defend” the Union and 620,000 Americans died implementing his policy.

But in doing so, Lincoln saved the Union. And the “mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone” endure to this day.

The Policy of the United States Must Be That Israel’s Right to Survive is Unequivocal

Similarly, there are no easy solutions in Gaza. But there are a few milestones that Israel should achieve -- and the United States should support -- before any ceasefire with Hamas is granted:

1) Hamas’ capacity to inflict violence on the state of Israel must be destroyed, or at least significantly reduced.
2) No missiles -- period -- must be fired from Gaza into the sovereign state of Israel.
3) The border between Gaza and Egypt must be sealed and verified by an Israeli and/or independent verifier.

The policy of the United States of America has been and must be that Israel’s right to survive is unequivocal. Therefore, the greatest danger to Israel in the long run is for it to experience violence followed by a false truce which allows its enemies time to rearm and initiate yet another cycle of violence.

Iran and Hamas will not voluntarily end this cycle of violence. They must be brought to the point where they have no choice.

Smart Spending Versus Dumb Spending

As Democratic and Republican politicians in Washington busy themselves with the task of spending hundreds of billions more of your tax dollars to stimulate the economy, it is high time Washington realize that not all spending is equal.

There is smart spending, and there is dumb spending.

I’ve talked before about what I consider smart spending to be. It’s spending that improves the long-terms health and productivity of the economy, that attracts new investment to America, and that allows taxpayers to keep more of what they earn.

Then there’s dumb spending.

This often takes the form of pork barrel projects; spending, not in America’s interest, but in the narrow, political interest of a politician or interest group.

$22 Million to Fund Two Downtown Harrisburg, Pa., Hotels

In other words, dumb spending is typically political spending. And it’s hard to see how politicians in Washington can be expected to pass the $750 billion stimulus bill advocated by President-elect Obama without a lot of politics creeping in.

Especially when the nation’s mayors have compiled a wish list of over 15,000 local projects they’d like Uncle Sam to fund.

Exhibit A is a proposed Museum of Organized Crime in Las Vegas, Nev. As I said on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" (watch it here), one would think the mob has enough money to build their own museum.

Exhibit B on the dumb spending list is the request by the mayor of Harrisburg, Pa., for $22 million to build two downtown hotels.

This isn’t stimulating the economy. This is stimulating the mayor’s friends in Harrisburg – and hurting the private entrepreneurs who own and operate hotels in the area.

For the sake of the taxpayers footing the bill, and the entrepreneurs struggling without a government bailout, this kind of dumb spending must end.

Your friend,

States continue spending sprees

As a federal bailout takes shape, many states continue to spend money at boom-time rates even though revenue is sinking.

The mismatch between spending and revenue has left states facing projected shortfalls of up to $80 billion over the next six months, equal to as much as 10% of what states had planned to spend.....

Obama to order Guantanamo Bay prison closed

President-elect Barack Obama plans to order the closing of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay as early as his first week in office to show a break from the Bush administration's approach to the war on terror, according to two officials close to the transition.

In Foreign Policy, a New Trio at the Top

By Anne E. Kornblut and Glenn Kessler

When Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) gavels the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to order today and welcomes Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) to her confirmation hearing as President-elect Barack Obama's nominee to be secretary of state, he will mark the ascendance of a new triumvirate dominating the foreign policy arena.

The hearing will also call attention to a particularly awkward tangle of relationships.....

Homeland Security Approves $450M 'Bio Threat' Lab

The Department of Homeland Security has approved a site at Kansas State University for a $450 million lab to study livestock diseases and some of the world's most dangerous biological threats.

Is the Trans-Texas Corridor dead?

Gov. Rick Perry and TxDOT want you to think so

.... the Trans-Texas Corridor project includes a 4,000 mile network of four NAFTA Superhighway truck-train pipelines that TxDOT plans to build over a 50-year period.

"Still," Corsi says, "close examination shows Perry's declaration from Iraq involves yet more public relations efforts by the governor and TxDOT to defuse criticism from voters and reposition a hugely unpopular initiative by dropping the designation 'Trans-Texas Corridor,' or 'TTC,' while still allowing TxDOT to proceed with the components of the original TTC plan that had been scheduled for implementation now."

TxDOT Executive Director Amadeo Saenz said major corridor projects will be scaled back to comprise several small projects closer to 600-feet wide than the originally planned 1,200 foot-wide TTC design. Perry has also confirmed that a new corridor parallel to Interstate-35, previously known as TTC-35, and projects like Interstate 69 will continue.....

From each group that backed Obama, an agenda

(Compiler's note: Hmmmmm - food for thought.)

by Joe Garofoli

Nobody disagrees that passing an economic stimulus package is the top priority for the incoming Obama administration and the new Congress. Then what? Tighter emissions standards for cars? Easing the rules on organizing for labor unions? Universal health care? Ending the wars? Net neutrality?

The flipside of knitting together a winning coalition of techies, anti-war activists, women, labor unions, young voters and the like is: (a) everybody thinks they were most instrumental in sending Obama and more Democrats to Washington, and (b) they want Obama and the Democrats to make their policy wish lists reality - first. Or, at least, right after a stimulus bill is passed.

"But since Obama won by such a wide margin, no one group can claim credit for his victory," said Scott Lilly, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

Even before it addresses the stimulus package, Congress has to consider nine appropriations bills left from the last Congress, Lilly said. And, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi anticipates having a stimulus bill ready for Obama to sign by the Feb. 16 Presidents Day holiday, Lilly, a former staff director for the House Appropriations Committee and a 30-year veteran of Capitol Hill, said "that sounds to me to be extremely ambitious."

After a stimulus package is approved, the legislative runway will get really crowded. Health care reform is near the top of many lists, but not all.

The problems facing the country are so severe that Obama is not going to be able to favor one group over another because they were major contributors to his election, Lilly said. "And there is probably an international situation that will take up a lot of the president's time and attention after the stimulus gets done."

Here's a look at some of the proposals, wish lists and demands that await the president-elect and the 111th Congress:

Anti-war activists

After spending almost eight years toting George W. Bush effigies through the streets, the anti-war movement is confident that Obama will address its issues. But even before Obama has taken the oath of office, he has already disappointed some.

"Obama has been missing in action on the massacre of people in Gaza," said Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the anti-war organization Code Pink. It makes little difference to her that Obama has avoided making broad policy statements before becoming president for fear of giving mixed signals to foreign governments. "It makes me tremendously worried about what he'll do when other situations like that come up. It took him until (last week) to say he was concerned, and he didn't even call for a cease-fire."

Code Pink has compiled a list of "President Obama's Promises to Keep" from his campaign statements. Among them:

-- End the war in Iraq.

-- Close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay.

-- Reject the Military Commissions Act, which critics say violates the civil rights of people held as enemy combatants.

-- Bar the torture of prisoners of war and enemy combatants.

-- Work to eliminate nuclear weapons.

-- Abide by Senate-approved treaties.

Organized labor

Labor organizations spent more than $450 million to send Obama and other Democrats to Washington. The AFL-CIO alone has compiled a 64-page list entitled the "AFL-CIO Recommendations for the Obama Administration." Top priority - besides jobs in the stimulus package - is the Employee Free Choice Act. It would enable employees to form a union as soon as a majority signed cards saying they wanted one. The Service Employees International Union, the nation's largest labor union, will spend $10 million to support such legislation. Various employer groups are lining up against it.

But would Obama be risking too much political capital early in his term on a politically partisan issue that could galvanize - and revive - conservatives?

"The Obama transition team absolutely has not communicated that to us," said Thea Lee, policy director for the AFL-CIO.

Some of labor's other top wishes:

-- Health care reform.

-- Reverse staffing cuts that led to long Social Security claim backlogs.

-- Extend unemployment benefits.

-- Increase financing for food stamps.

-- Change Bush administration policies on government contract work, worker safety and training to be fairer to workers.

Women

The National Organization for Women has an 11-page "Feminist Action Agenda for 2009 and Beyond" for the incoming administration and Congress. "And that was our short list," NOW President Kim Gandy said. "After eight years of going backward with the Bush administration, we have a lot of issues that need to be addressed."

NOW already has a beef with Obama's stimulus package: It is too heavy on male-dominated infrastructure-rebuilding - i.e., construction jobs - Gandy said. She'd like to see more stimulus cash spread to what she described as "human infrastructure-rebuilding jobs" such as home health aides, teachers, teacher's aides and social workers.

Here are a few top items from NOW's agenda and Gandy:

-- Address the wage gap between men and women.

-- Stop abstinence-only birth control education funding in favor of programs that stress both abstinence and contraception.

-- Assure access to contraception.

-- Establish a Cabinet-level Office on Women that's analogous to the Office on Drug Control Policy.

Environmentalists

Environmental organizations were some of Obama's strongest backers, as many were upset by Bush administration positions on everything from climate change to land conservation to water policy. Shortly after the election, leading environmental organizations, including the Environmental Defense Fund and the Sierra Club, created a new group called Saveourenvironment.org and submitted a list of goals to the Obama transition team.

Among them:

-- Cut the nation's dependence on oil in half.

-- Move electricity generation to 100 percent from clean sources like wind and solar.

-- Create 5 million new clean-energy jobs.

-- Reduce global warming pollution by at least 80 percent.

In a speech on the economy last week, Obama called for "the creation of a clean-energy economy" that "will double the production of alternative energy in the next three years." Without being specific on the number of new jobs this would generate, he said, "We will put Americans to work in new jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced - jobs building solar panels and wind turbines, constructing fuel-efficient cars and buildings."

Techies

The Obama campaign had a special affinity with the online world, as it revolutionized the Internet as a fundraising and organizing tool in a presidential campaign. The Free Press Action Fund, a media reform organization, has outlined an expansion of the nation's broadband network - at a cost of $44 billion - and compiled a wish list that mirrors those of other online activists:

-- It wants Obama to back his long-stated support for the principles of net neutrality with a law that would "forbid discrimination on the Internet based on the source, destination or ownership of online content."

-- It wants the Obama administration to champion greater diversity in media ownership. Changes to current ownership rules could come after the administration appoints a new Federal Communications Commission chairman.

-- San Francisco's Electronic Frontier Foundation has been fighting how the Bush administration has used electronic surveillance of citizens. It would like to see that practice end.

In a speech last week on infrastructure investments, Obama proposed "expanding broadband lines across America, so that a small business in a rural town can connect and compete with their counterparts anywhere in the world."

Groups and their agendas

Several organizations are compiling wish lists and suggestions for the new administration and Congress.

-- Through Thursday, the social change digital hub Change.org of San Francisco is hosting online voting for its "Top 10 Ideas for America." When it presents the ideas on Friday, it hopes to form a national advocacy campaign for each idea with nonprofit organizations and create policy. For more information go to www.change.org/ideas.

-- In December, members of the liberal online hub MoveOn.org voted on their top priorities for the new administration. The top four: universal health care; economic recovery and job creation; building a green economy and ending the war in Iraq. For more information, go to

www.pol.move on.org/2009/agenda/results/results2.html.

-- For more information about Code Pink's "President Obama's Promises to Keep," go to www.code pinkaction.org/arti cle.php?id=4568.

-- For more information about the "AFL-CIO Recommendations for the Obama Administration," go to change.gov/open_

government/entry/afl_cio_turn_around_amer ica/.

-- For more information about the Free Press Action Fund's "Down Payment on Our Digital Future: Stimulus Policies for the 21st-Century Economy," go to www.freepress.net/files/DownPayment_Digital Future.pdf.

-- For more information about the environmental community's Obama wish list, go to www.saveourenvi ronment.org/.

How Tech Changes Our Thinking About War

By Noah Shachtman

Technological innovations – from the clock to the internet – don't just change how armies fight their battles. They changed how those armies think about war, in the first place. That's the subject of one of the more important new books of 2009: The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2009).

Author, Antoine Bousquet, a Lecturer in International Relations at Birkbeck College in London, offers a vision of modern Western military organization that draws its fundamental logic from the social artifacts of science and technology. "From the ascendancy of the scientific worldview in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to present day," he writes, "an ever more intimate symbiosis between science and warfare has established itself with the increasing reliance on the development and integration of technology within complex social assemblages of war." Instead of debating whether war drives technological innovation or vice versa, it actually explains how key technologies in modern history evolved into metaphors for social organization -- in turn enabling the military, as a consummate social organization, to regulate itself.

The Scientific Way of Warfare ("SWOW," Bousquet calls it) is a remarkable work of synthesis, drawing on the contemporary writing of Manuel Castells, Paul Edwards, John Arquilla, and (especially) Martin Van Creveld. The book’s broad historical sweep doesn’t get caught up in the finer details, though, which might frustrate readers looking for a more detailed military history. Instead, it boils its subject down to "four distinct regimes of the scientific way of warfare, each of which is characterized by a specific theoretical and methodological constellation: mechanistic, thermodynamic, cybernetic, and chaoplexic warfare." At the heart of each, he writes, "we find an associated paradigmatic technology, respectively the clock, the engine, the computer and the network."

Clocks, with their precise parsing of time, gave us "mechanistic warfare," characterized by linear, predictable, reliable geometries (think Frederick the Great’s archetypal Prussian forces). "Thermodynamic warfare" evolved from concepts of dynamic motion and energy, associated with newly developed mechanical engines, resulting in the sort of industrialized, technologically enabled slaughter that chewed up millions of human bodies in World War I. "Cybernetic warfare" came about in World War II, Bousquet explains, with the ascent of the computer technology needed to manage the data floods of the code-breakers of Bletchley Park and the bomb-builders of Los Alamos. It signaled the dominance of information in strategic thinking, and the ascent of the all-powerful systems analyst in war planning.

One stage of military practice doesn't collapse under the weight of the next, however. In fact, new scientific regimes of warfare don’t necessarily improve how war is organized and fought. Instead, they get tripped up on the limitations of the previous generation, legacies of the old school preventing the next regime from fully taking hold and moving things forward. This might just be a fancy way of saying we always plan to fight the last war. But it identifies some important distinctions and helps explain things like the failure of Vietnam - Robert MacNamara’s pervasive quantification didn’t do much, in the end, to convince the Viet Cong that they were facing defeat.

It also sets the conditions for Bousquet’s fourth scientific regime of war, which looks to chaos theory and complexity science to understand and predict the networked threats of everything from L.A. street gangs to transnational jihadis and Russian hackers. Bousquet borrows the term "chaoplexity," which first appeared in John Horgan's 1996 book The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, to coin his own terminology, "chaoplexic warfare."

Chaoplexic war, likes its cybernetic predecessor, is information driven. But cyberneticism emphasized total control of the battlespace through information dominance; in theory, that was supposed to create a predictable, controllable warzone environment. Chaoplexity, on the other hand, understands the order hidden within chaos and complexity. It's an understanding, translated to military thinking, that would theoretically enable soldiers to recognize, accept, and cope better with the uncertainties of combat. Characterized by "non-linearity, self-organization, and emergence," the central metaphor of chaoplexic war "is that of the network, the distributed model of information exchange perhaps best embodied by the Internet."

Pentagon has a doctrine of "network-centric warfare," of course. But, despite paying lip service to chaoplexity, it's still stuck in the cybernetic muck, Bousquet argues. "Serious questions" remain as to whether network-centric warfare is really part of the new way of war – or just a "re-branding" of older approaches.

The book’s later chapters, on cybernetic and chaoplexic warfare, are mostly about the United States, which has had radically different experiences of armed conflict since WWII from almost any other nation on earth. Here, SWOW’s descriptions of networks and chaoplexity feel more like tactical cyberneticism than a truly new approach to war. New communications and surveillance technologies make it possible for the military to coordinate networked units right down to the squad level. But it also makes it possible to nano-manage them by remote control, second guessing every move they make, often under fire. That’s not the same thing as giving field units the autonomy to make their own decisions and accepting the uncertainty that comes with it. It’s also dangerous. SWOW doesn’t tell us much about where chaoplexic war will be fought, either - or more importantly, how chaoplexic armies will interpret and cope with the spaces in which they fight. When I pressed Bousquet on this, I had in mind the sort of urban worm-holing that Israeli Defense Forces have perfected for operations in and through Palestinian camps. He acknowledge that wars of the future will likely happen, for the most part, in cities. And so it goes in Gaza.

-- Michael A. Innes is Director of The Complex Terrain Laboratory, and the editor of Denial of Sanctuary: Understanding Terrorist Safe Havens. (Praeger, 2007). This is his first post for Danger Room.

Our Broken CIA and the Death of Innocents

(Compiler's note: A must read article. We will be hearing more about this in the future.)

By Peter Hoekstra

Some within our intelligence community seem to think that they are above the law.

On April 20, 2001, one of the worst tragedies in the CIA’s history occurred when an infant baby girl — seven-month old Charity Bowers — and her mother, Roni, were killed when a bullet passed through Roni’s body and lodged in Charity’s skull. The projectile was fired by the Peruvian air force, which shot down the Bowers’ single-engine Cessna with the assistance of the CIA as part of a counternarcotics program. Charity’s father, brother, and the pilot survived a crash landing on the Amazon River.

A CIA Inspector General report concluded that baby Charity and her mother died due to the apparently deliberate failure of CIA officers to follow proper procedures to protect the lives of innocent civilians — not only in the 2001 shoot-down of the Bowers aircraft, but in all previous shoot-downs that occurred in Peruvian airspace between 1995 and 2001.

The CIA Inspector General also found that persons within the CIA mounted an extensive cover-up of the facts of this tragedy from the White House, the Justice Department, and Congress. The CIA lied to Congress and the executive branch about the downing of the Bowers plane to shield its personnel from being held accountable and from possible prosecution.

Shocked? You should not be. Such behavior has become all too commonplace at America’s premier intelligence agency. The CIA is supposed to closely coordinate all intelligence matters with the executive branch and Congress because their very nature precludes transparency and normal accountability mechanisms. It has repeatedly failed to do so.

Instead, the CIA briefs Congress as little as it believes it can get away with, and frequently plays what I call the “20-questions game” — where CIA officers tell Congress about important information only if members of Congress stumble upon the exact right questions. In addition, I have been long concerned that some within the agency have intentionally undermined the Bush administration and its policies over the last few years. This argument is supported by the Valerie Plame case, and the long string of unauthorized disclosures to the news media from an organization that prides itself on being able to keep secrets.

The shoot-down of the Bowers’ plane is an example not only of CIA incompetence and mismanagement, but of an intelligence subculture that thinks it is above the law. Some CIA managers apparently think they can evade their legal requirement to fully and honestly cooperate with the Justice Department and Congress. How can we trust our nation’s security to intelligence officers who have been so reckless and irresponsible?

In response to the publicity over the CIA Inspector General report, CIA Director Michael Hayden promised to turn over the matter to an accountability board to determine whether any disciplinary action is warranted in the Bowers case. When a board is convened, I plan to testify before it. However, given the CIA’s abysmal record in handling the Bowers case to date, Congress and the Justice Department must also carefully review the relevant facts. The CIA cannot be trusted to investigate this case alone.

The CIA’s repeated failure to keep Congress fully and currently informed requires a shake-up in the Agency’s senior leadership. I am encouraged, therefore, that President-elect Obama has tapped Leon Panetta, a man with significant managerial and Washington experience — outside of the intelligence community — to be the next head of the CIA. I support Panetta’s nomination as part of what I hope will be the first step to clean up the agency and make it more accountable to Congress and therefore the American people. True, he is not part of the intelligence club. That is a positive. A fresh perspective is needed.

Baby Charity and her mother Roni were killed not because of a one-time human error. They died because of an intelligence bureaucracy where parts are broken and which thinks it can operate above the law. Without accountability, U.S. intelligence agencies cannot be trusted to protect our nation from harm or to operate in an ethical manner that will not embarrass our nation abroad or endanger American civil rights at home. Without accountability, U.S. intelligence agencies cannot be trusted with the significant authority they have been given to keep America safe and secure.