Update on Afghanistan coming next week

I will wait for President Obama's address to the nation next week to make a final judgment. But his reported plan to send an additional 35,000 troops to Afghanistan, when the definition of victory in that country is still yet to be articulated, disappoints and depresses me. We're going to lose a lot more people, and we're going to kill a lot more people, and none of us can actually say why, except that unless we don't, the President of the United States might just appear weak and uncommitted. We're all just idiots, sometimes.

Here is a transcript of Bill Moyers' Journal, where he takes us through LBJ's year-long process of inexorably escalating the Vietnam War. Read it, to get a sense of where we may be headed. The parallels aren't exact, but they're unnerving still. This is how it ends:

Now in a different world, at a different time, and with a different president, we face the prospect of enlarging a different war. But once again we're fighting in remote provinces against an enemy who can bleed us slowly and wait us out, because he will still be there when we are gone.

Once again, we are caught between warring factions in a country where other foreign powers fail before us. Once again, every setback brings a call for more troops, although no one can say how long they will be there or what it means to win. Once again, the government we are trying to help is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent.

And once again, a President pushing for critical change at home is being pressured to stop dithering, be tough, show he's got the guts, by sending young people seven thousand miles from home to fight and die, while their own country is coming apart.

And once again, the loudest case for enlarging the war is being made by those who will not have to fight it, who will be safely in their beds while the war grinds on. And once again, a small circle of advisers debates the course of action, but one man will make the decision.

We will never know what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had said no to more war. We know what happened because he said yes.

The KSM trial

My point of view will come as little surprise to those who follow this blog. Every argument I've seen not to try KSM and his co-conspirators in New York, in federal court, only plays out as an argument to have done so far sooner, before the torture, before the misguided efforts at creating a legal black hole. Make no mistake, we're not "giving" KSM the rights accorded citizens of the United States. On the contrary, we're reclaiming those rights for ourselves by affirming the limits on the government's power to make up the rules as they go along. Trust the NYPD. Trust the FBI. And don't worry about the defendants using the trial as a platform to spout anti-American rhetoric. It won't be anything the world hasn't heard before - sticks and stones, and all that.

Two notes. One, Obama and Holder should shut up about failure not being an option and don't worry, we can still keep the guy locked up even if he gets acquitted. It won't be a show trial unless the judge and the jury, not the prosecution, lets it be. Procedurally speaking, that's going to have to be enough. And two, there are myriad protections against the forced release of classified information during the trial. Given the rules of evidence, nothing the government doesn't want out gets out. Mukasey's warnings on the op-ed page of the Journal, about bin Laden finding out the US was on to him during the first WTC trial, don't hold up. See here for details. Trust the process.

The case of Maher Arar: No recourse for torture and rendition

Another absolute travesty in the arena of illegal torture and rendition, this time perpetrated by the Second Circuit US Court of Appeals. In September of 2002, the United States government detained Canadian national Maher Arad, under suspicion of membership in a terrorist organization. As you read the rest of this post, keep in mind the undisputed fact that no one currently maintains this suspicion. Maher Arad is an international businessman, with a family, who was picked up by mistake. Subsequent to his detainment, Arad was abusively interrogated without access to counsel for two weeks. Despite his pleas that he would be tortured, he was then sent in chains to Syria by way of Jordan for the express purpose of additional interrogation. He spent nearly one year in Syria being starved and beaten and confined in a coffin-sized cell. during the course of this treatment he falsely confessed to being a member of al Qaeda and having trained with terrorists in Afghanistan. (In actuality he had never been to Afghanistan.) Arad's confessions were then reported back to American officials by the Syrians. The details of Arad's American confinement can be found here. The gruesome details of what happened to Arad in Syria can be found here. After a year, Arad was released back to Canada, presumably because the Americans realized there was no point in taking the confessions seriously and that there was no additional evidence.

Arar is, quite reasonably it would seem, suing John Ashcroft and the US Government. It's worth pointing out that the Canadian government has already paid Arad a settlement of $9 million, and has produced a scathing report that not only fully exonerates Arad, but squarely places blame for the incident on both their own laxity and American malfeasance. In the case against the U.S., the government has asserted not an affirmative defense, but a state secrets privilege that, they say, precludes any adjudication of the events of Arad's rendition whatsoever, on the grounds that any investigation of the facts of the case by an independent court would represent a threat to national security. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has sided with the government in a 7-4 decision.

This is Obama's Justice Department, making the argument that the United States literally cannot be held responsible, in any way, for anything it does in the name of security. Even if it means taking an innocent man from his family to be tortured for a year. The Court isn't saying it finds the government Not Guilty, or that the facts of the case don't support any civil culpability. It's saying that the matter can't even be adjudicated. That the Courts don't have any authority to even address the issue, based solely on the executive's assertion of that non-authority. I can't imagine anything more controversial and repugnant - I mean, one could argue that in 2002, we made some mistakes and our presence of mind should be taken into consideration. But to assert categorically that the victims of our abuses aren't entitled to any recompense, or even a fair hearing of events, seven years after the fact? I mean even if we want to claim that torturing one innocent man is worth it if torturing nine others stops a terrorist attack (an empirically dubious claim at that), wouldn't the slightest sense of human decency demand that we at least offer a formal apology and settlement to the innocent one?

Forget about who's President for a second, and take a moment to consider that this is all happening on our watch. What the American government does, it does only with the acquiescence of the American people. We - you and I and our families - are saying to the rest of the world that we reserve the right to torture innocent people. If you truly believe in self-government, there is no other way to interpret the case of Maher Arar. The longer this goes on, the more difficult it will be to dispute the accusation that America is nothing but an Ordinary Nation, with no claim to principle of any stripe. We must demand better, or in the end it's on us.