Recently in War on Terrorism Category

While we are often told by our political leaders that it is bad form to look back, one of the great questions of the past decade is why and how Osama bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora in December 2001. Thankfully not everyone has refused to review the situation. As the New York Times' Scott Shane writes about a new Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on Tora Bora:

"Removing the Al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat," the committee's report concludes. "But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide."

The report, based in part on a little-noticed 2007 history of the Tora Bora episode by the military's Special Operations Command, asserts that the consequences of not sending American troops in 2001 to block Mr. bin Laden's escape into Pakistan are still being felt.

The report blames the lapse for "laying the foundation for today's protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan."

This was one of the biggest errors of the Bush Administration's War on Terrorism. Why are we not supposed to hear from General Tommy Franks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumseld, and other leading Bush Administration officials about why they refused to send enough troops to ensure bin Laden's capture?

These are questions that should not be lost to the mists of time or our refusal to hold those in power to accountable for their mistakes.

Our friends the British have begun an investigation this week into their involvement into the Iraq War, one to which we should pay more close attention.

Glenn Greenwald, for example, reviews testimony yesterday that should remind us of how important the anthrax attacks which followed the September 11, 2001 attacks were to creating the climate of fear in the United States that fed into the Iraq invasion and so many other horrible policies. Yes, those same anthrax attacks so quickly deleted from our collective memory.

Yesterday, the former U.K. Ambassador to the U.S., Sir Christopher Meyer, testified as to the importance of the anthrax attacks, as Greenwald summarizes:

Meyer said attitudes towards Iraq were influenced to an extent not appreciated by him at the time by the anthrax scare in the US soon after 9/11. US senators and others were sent anthrax spores in the post, a crime that led to the death of five people, prompting policymakers to claim links to Saddam Hussein. . . .

On 9/11 Condoleezza Rice, then the US national security adviser, told Meyer she was in "no doubt: it was an al-Qaida operation" . . . It seemed that Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, argued for retaliation to include Iraq, Meyer said. . . .

But the anthrax scare had "steamed up" policy makers in Bush's administration and helped swing attitudes against Saddam, who the administration believed had been the last person to use anthrax. (emphasis by Greenwald)

As Greenwald then reminds us, the anthrax attacks remain "unresolved and uninvestigated." How the hell is that acceptable given how important they were? He reviews, with links, all of the sources that have serious questions for about the FBI's conclusion to this case.

I simply do not understand how we have left the anthrax attacks unresolved and wiped from our collective memory. They directly impacted more people than the September 11 attacks. They created more fear. (To this day, how many of us get training on the proper way to open mail?)

Some things deserve more of our attention. That's why I encourage you to go read Greenwald's post and restart your memory by clicking on his post's links.

The Washington Note's Steve Clemons estimates the financial cost of an Afghanistan surge.

Clemons notes his $105 billion price tag (which seems conservative to me) is higher than the annual cost of the health care reform plan and nearly 10 times higher than Afghanistan's nominal gross domestic product.

Many self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives would be happy to let this surge be paid for by increasing the national debt (something they would never demand for health care or infrastructure improvements).

At least some leaders, like House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, may force these self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives to face and debate their hypocrisy when it comes to our wars.

I agree with Digby, and thank Richard Clarke for pointing out that the trauma of September 11, 2001, is no excuse for bad decisions made by government leaders. As Clarke writes:

Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.

I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly detailed before the next vote -- which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission -- and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second Bush term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.

There should be no excusing this. Nor forgiving it. And as the evidence suggests, more investigations are in order.

We must come to terms with what happened if we hope to restore our national honor.

I applaud Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) for continuing his efforts to seek a real investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks by introducing the Anthrax Attacks Investigation Act of 2009.

It is long past time to have an investigation of the incident, why it was not prevented, and the questionable investigation into it.

Rep. Holt does an excellent job of explaining all of the issues into this seemingly forgotten terrorist attack on our nation.

Glenn Greenwald also discusses the legislation and recaps all of the important work and analysis he has done on the anthrax terror attack case. He argues, correctly in my view:

The importance of full disclosure of all facts surrounding the anthrax attacks cannot be overstated. This was the opposite of a run-of-the-mill crime. To the contrary, the anthrax attacks -- by design, as everyone acknowledges -- had an immense political impact on the country. Contrary to endless claims from Bush supporters that Bush allowed no more terrorist attacks on "the homeland" after 9/11, the anthrax attack was exactly such a terrorist attack.

For reasons I've detailed previously, I actually believe that the anthrax attacks played a larger role than the 9/11 attack itself in elevating America's fear levels to hysterical heights, which in turn put the citizenry into the state of frightened submission that enabled so many of the subsequent events of the Bush presidency. The 9/11 attacks appeared to be a one-time extraordinary event, but it was multi-staged anthrax attacks -- coming a mere four weeks later -- that normalized and personalized the Terrorist threat.

The anthrax attacks must be removed from our society's blind spot and given the proper focus such events deserve. The fact that we have so many questions today -- over seven years later -- is unacceptable.

Andrew Sullivan writes an extremely important post about our nation's use of torture -- and how we should not try to hide behind euphemisms like "under coercive conditions."

"Under coercive conditions". Excuse me, but what does that mean in English? Try: Because they got intelligence from torturing people. Coercion means force. It means they forced "information" out of them. Not coax, trick, lure, force. That means the victims had no choice. And the only way in which human beings can seriously have no choice at all is by subjecting them to such severe mental and physical pain and suffering that they have no option as human beings but to tell their torturers something.

Sullivan then does the vital job of explaining what was done in our name since September 11, 2001:

Even the word "torture" can be too vague and abstract a term. So let us state in plain English how Bush, Cheney, Tenet, et al. actually got information. They did it by subjecting prisoners to repeated drowning, or freezing, or heating, or sadistically long sleeplessness, or shackling or crucifying them until the pain could be borne no longer, or beating them until they pleaded for mercy, or threatening to kill or torture their children or wife or parents. Or all of the above in combination, in isolation, and with no surety of ever seeing the light of day again, with no right to meaningful due process of any kind, sometimes sealed off from light and sound for months at a time, or bombarded with indescribable noise day and night in cells from which there was no escape ever. This is what "under coercive conditions" actually means. It drove many of the victims into become mumbling, shaking, insane shells of human beings; it killed dozens; it drove others still to hunger strikes to try to kill themselves; and it terrified and scarred and "broke" the souls of many, many others. For what? Intelligence that cannot be trusted, and the loss of the sacred integrity of two centuries of American history. Did it save lives? We do not know. We do know that the people who are claiming it did have been unable to bring any serious case to justice based on their original claims, and are the people who are criminally responsible for the torture they have committed. Why would they not say it saved lives? And yet we have no other way to know. And we have the terrifying possibility that false information procured by torture provided a pretext to torture others in a self-perpetuating loop in which any ability to find out the actual truth is lost for ever. That, after all, is how some of the flawed intelligence that took us into Iraq was procured.

To paraphrase Hitch: torture poisons everything.

We must have an accounting. The truth of this must be told. Our national honor has been dirtied -- if not destroyed -- because of our nation's use of torture.

Those who broke George Washington's prohibition should not be allowed to go onto the lecture and book-selling circuit without consequence.

Yes, the economy is important.

But our national honor is also important. And nations need to be able to do more than one thing at a time.

As regular readers of this space know, I find the collective amnesia among our political and media leaders about the anthrax attacks of September and October 2001 extremely troubling and annoying.

Atrios finds Senator John McCain falling into this historical trap in a story about McCain offering warm words for President Bush as reported by Michael Cooper on the New York Times' The Caucus blog:

“I think that Tom Ridge — and President Bush — deserve some credit for the fact there’s not been another attack on the United States of America since 9/11,’’ he said.

As anyone who remembers the anthrax attacks must recognize, they deserve no such credit. The anthrax attacks, moreover, remain unsolved -- with serious problems with the government's current theory about how they happened.

No one is served by forgetting the anthrax attacks -- a terrorist strike that directly impacted millions of people. Remember getting plastic gloves to open business mail everyone?

It is well past time to remember what actually happened.

At some point, I wonder if people a bit higher up the food chain will be held responsible for our country violating one of George Washington's rules and resorting to torture. The New York Times has a story linking top-ranking Bush Administration officials much closer to this travesty than they have previously admitted.

Senior White House officials played a central role in deliberations in the spring of 2002 about whether the Central Intelligence Agency could legally use harsh interrogation techniques while questioning an operative of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah, according to newly released documents.

In meetings during that period, the officials debated specific interrogation methods that the C.I.A. had proposed to use on Qaeda operatives held at secret C.I.A. prisons overseas, the documents show. The meetings were led by Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, and attended by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top administration officials.

The documents provide new details about the still-murky early months of the C.I.A.’s detention program, when the agency began using a set of harsh interrogation techniques weeks before the Justice Department issued a written legal opinion in August 2002 authorizing their use. Congressional investigators have long tried to determine exactly who authorized these techniques before the legal opinion was completed.

One of the techniques discussed in the article is waterboarding, which is clearly torture -- and has been considered such for centuries.

This is an offense our nation must not sweep under the rug.

Andrew Sullivan nominates Northwestern University Law School Professor Steven Calabresi for a Malkin Award for this rubbish, but I want to point out one other travesty:

"This Administration deserves to be trusted because it has kept us safe from terrorist attack since 9/11, has fought and won two wars, has presided over eight years of economic growth, has appointed two stellar justices to the Supreme Court, and has even learned how to do Louisiana’s job of protecting that state from hurricanes. The day will come, and not before long, when Americans will wish that George Bush was still president." (emphasis added)

Can someone really be a credible law school professor if they do not remember that the anthrax terrorist attacks happened after September 11, 2001? I mean really. They were a big news story at the time. And they were a big news story just last week (!) given that there were Congressional hearings into the matter.

Most important, Does Calabresi understand that these anthrax attacks still have not been credibly explained?

Okay, that seems unlikely. But, as Matthew Yglesias notes, the New York Times report that President Bush has decided to allow raids into Pakistan makes one wonder if McCain will condemn this strategy now, as he did when Barack Obama advocated for it earlier.

The apparent suicide of Bruce E. Ivins, the FBI's lead suspect in the September-October 2001 anthrax attacks upon the United States, still leaves many vital unanswered questions about this now-often-overlooked but extremely important period in our nation's history.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald is leading the charge to hold people accountable to answer some of these questions. In doing so, he reminds us that the anthrax attacks were (wrongly) linked to Saddam Hussein -- and helped the Bush Administration build its public case to go to war.

The 2001 anthrax attacks remain one of the great mysteries of the post-9/11 era. After 9/11 itself, the anthrax attacks were probably the most consequential event of the Bush presidency. One could make a persuasive case that they were actually more consequential. The 9/11 attacks were obviously traumatic for the country, but in the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event. It was really the anthrax letters -- with the first one sent on September 18, just one week after 9/11 -- that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years after. It was anthrax -- sent directly into the heart of the country's elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets -- that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact. From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks.

It may be hard to remember this -- especially during a time when so many people are so willing to say that our nation has not been attacked since September 11, 2001. But Greenwald is correct -- like many businesses, the organization for which I worked then purchased a supply of plastic gloves and prepared other procedures for opening and sorting mail. This had a huge impact at the time. It was immediate, and no one knew for sure when and from whom the next infected letter might arrive.

Greenwald then reminds us of the key role ABC News played in (falsely) linking the anthrax attacks to Saddam Hussein -- at a time when Americans were fearful about what the next attack may mean.

Clearly, Ross' allegedly four separate sources had to have some specific knowledge of the tests conducted and, if they were really "well-placed," one would presume that meant they had some connection to the laboratory where the tests were conducted -- Ft. Detrick. That means that the same Government lab where the anthrax attacks themselves came from was the same place where the false reports originated that blamed those attacks on Iraq.

It's extremely possible -- one could say highly likely -- that the same people responsible for perpetrating the attacks were the ones who fed the false reports to the public, through ABC News, that Saddam was behind them. What we know for certain -- as a result of the letters accompanying the anthrax -- is that whoever perpetrated the attacks wanted the public to believe they were sent by foreign Muslims. Feeding claims to ABC News designed to link Saddam to those attacks would, for obvious reasons, promote the goal of the anthrax attacker(s).

Seven years later, it's difficult for many people to recall, but, as I've amply documented, those ABC News reports linking Saddam and anthrax penetrated very deeply -- by design -- into our public discourse and into the public consciousness. Those reports were absolutely vital in creating the impression during that very volatile time that Islamic terrorists generally, and Iraq and Saddam Hussein specifically, were grave, existential threats to this country.

If you don't believe it, Think Progress has a video of John McCain making the point on David Letterman on October 18, 2001.

It is simply unacceptable for this story to go away. Is Dr. Ivins really guilty? His suicide does not close the book on the case--and he has defenders who are strongly defending him. Given what happened to Dr. Steven Hatfill, and the multi-million settlement the U.S. government paid after falsely accusing him of these crimes, we should not take initial media reports at face value.

Did the same government scientists who unleashed anthrax on our nation also leak to the media the false connection to Saddam Hussein? Who was warning journalists like Richard Cohen to purchase cipro before the anthrax attacks became public?

I know John McCain's ad linking Britney Spears and Paris Hilton to Barack Obama is fun. It may also be interesting to examine in detail every presidential tracking poll out there.

But the anthrax attacks are more important. This story must not be allowed to drop out of our consciousness before these questions find answers.

This story should make you angry -- if you think the fight against terrorism should be more important than the comfort of our generals.

The Air Force's top leadership sought for three years to spend counterterrorism funds on "comfort capsules" to be installed on military planes that ferry senior officers and civilian leaders around the world, with at least four top generals involved in design details such as the color of the capsules' carpet and leather chairs, according to internal e-mails and budget documents.

What's worse, the general reportedly behind this travesty is up for a promotion -- when he should be fired immediately.

Air Force officials say the program dates from a 2006 decision by Air Force Gen. Duncan J. McNabb that existing seats on transport planes, including some that match those on commercial airliners, may be fine for airmen and troops but inadequate for the top brass. McNabb was then the Air Mobility commander; he is now the Air Force's vice chief of staff, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates nominated him in June to become head of the military's Transportation Command.

In a letter of complaint sent yesterday to Gates, POGO asserted that the new capsules will provide no special communications or work capabilities beyond those already available for top officials on Air Force transport aircraft. It is "a gross misuse of millions of taxpayer dollars that could otherwise be used to train and equip soldiers," wrote Danielle Brian, the group's executive director.

General McNabb should be fired. He can fly in comfort as a private consultant. Could we promote people who actually care about terrorism and the comfort of our troops -- rather than the comfort of themselves?

Also, this appears to be a situation where Congressional oversight has actually worked. More like this, please.

Over at Crooks and Liars, Jon Perr debunks the radical conservative talking point alleging that 30 former Guantanamo detainees had gone back to fight against the United States. This lie allegation has been promoted by Justice Antonin Scalia, Senator John McCain, and John "Torture Memo" Yoo, among others. As Perr writes:

That figure of 30 terror recidivists unleashing a bloodbath had been debunked by earlier studies from Denbeaux’s team and recent investigations from the McClatchy papers. But Denbeaux’s updated analysis, including the revelations that the Defense Department itself backtracked from the infamous Gitmo 30 in July 2007 and May 2008, shows the extent to which Justice Scalia engaged in cherry-picking dubious data to bolster his blood-curdling Boumediene dissent last week. And it hasn’t stopped the exaggerated number of Gitmo repeat terrorists (like the cry of “worse than Dred Scott“) from becoming a standard Republican talking point since the Court’s restoration of habeas corpus last week.

Really, they have no shame.

Here we go again. The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum quotes ABC's Jake Tapper in a post about the FISA bill debate. Let's look closely at what Tapper says in a FISA interview question to Barack Obama:

TAPPER: There has not been a terrorist attack within the U.S. since 9/11. And [the Bush administration says] the reason that is, is because of the domestic programs, many of which you opposed, the NSA surveillance program, Guantanamo Bay, and other programs. How do you know that they're wrong? It's not possible that they're right?

There has not been a terrorist attack within the U.S. since 9/11.

Tell that to the five people who died in the anthrax attacks that began on September 18, 2001.

Tapper is not the first person to go with this rewriting of our history. You can see it all the time on the internets.

Why have we as a country erased the anthrax attacks from our collective memory?

Our country has been attacked since September 11, 2001. An the anthrax attacks remain unsolved. Why don't we care about this fact?

It is stories like this one that explain why I hope President Bush and his entire team will be condemned throughout history for tarnishing what once was (and hopefully will be again) the world's shining city on the hill.

As McClatchy Newspaper's Tom Lasseter reports, we have imprisoned innocent people as enemy combatants and subjected them to beatings and other mistreatment while in our custody.

Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as "the worst of the worst."

But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo's Camp Four who hissed "infidel" and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn't: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

"He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government," a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.

An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.

Of course, when people pointed this out, the radical conservatives in the media and government declared us traitors. Those radicals on the right, however, were so blinded by their ideology to realize that by mistreating innocent people and holding them for years without recourse, we were making our country much less safe.

The McClatchy reporting also documented how U.S. detention policies fueled support for extremist Islamist groups. For some detainees who went home far more militant than when they arrived, Guantanamo became a school for jihad, or Islamic holy war.

Nice work by the Bush Administration. Nice work.