SOTU

He took us all to church, that was nice. I love a guy waxing poetic about the indomitable greatness of the American spirit and all that, and the man does have talent. All in all, though, from a policy point of view I didn't find much about the speech that was particularly amazing, or particularly horrible. It was a little interesting that after announcing an aggressive jobs program, he gave the Republicans some specific red meat with nuclear power and offshore drilling - but then only issued what I thought was a rather vague insistence that they get on board with health care or get out of the way.

From my amateur perspective, nothing matters to Obama's political future more than passing health care - and I think he could have gone further to put Congress on notice...a deadline, or something. The speech wouldn't have done anything on its own, anyhow, so maybe it doesn't matter. The next few weeks will be tell the true tale of whether Barack Obama really wants to govern.

Go ahead, call me paranoid

Pop quiz: Does an American citizen enjoy a Constitutional protection against being summarily executed by his own government without trial or due process, based on suspicion of terrorist affiliations? If you answered yes, of course he does, that's ridiculous, then you haven't read today's Washington Post:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests," said one former intelligence official.

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy."

Just to be clear, we aren't talking about people who pick up a weapon and begin firing on American forces, or are intercepted in the midst of an attack. The President is asserting the right to put your name on a list, and if they can find you anywhere in the world, to send in the military to kill you. This authority is governed by no specific statute, and comes with no judicial oversight. One assumes that in practical terms and for the time being, the practice is limited to overseas operations and people with strange sounding names. Nevertheless, there is evidently no real right to provide evidence in your own defense or confront witnesses, much less a trial of any kind. Just the good graces and judgment of the President of the United States.

Look - even if I virulently disagree, I can sort of understand at least the philosophy behind suspension of privacy rights in a time of war, and maybe even the transient allure of indefinite detention powers. I'm not giving an inch on torture - but now Obama can just decide to kill someone? An American? You know it's not like they don't get bad intelligence, people - seriously, are we all just supposed to take our chances here?

In other not-unrelated news, the most loudly repeated tale from the last eight years that torturing a high-value member of al Qaeda was effective has been walked back by the guy shopping it around the Beltway. No harm done there, I suppose.

West Wing Quote of the Day

[Toby is articulating the benefits of the World Trade Organization, against the vapid arguments of a group of protesters he calls "anarchists wannabees on vacation".]

TOBY ZIEGLER: You want the benefits of free trade? Food is cheaper. Food is cheaper, clothes are cheaper, steel is cheaper, cars are cheaper, phone service is cheaper. You feel me building a rhythm here, that's because I'm a speechwriter, I know how to make a point. It lowers prices, it raises incomes - you see what I did there with "lowers" and "raises" there, that's called the science of listener attention. We did repetition, we did floating opposites, and then you end with the one that's not like the others, are you ready? Free trade stops wars. Free trade stops wars! And then we figure out a way to fix the rest! One world, one peace, I'm sure I saw that on a sign somewhere.

This is battlefield Earth

Barack Obama's justice department announced last week that approximately 50 detainees at Guantanamo Bay are to be imprisoned indefinitely, without being targeted for either civilian trial or military commission. The reasoning, according to the government is that these 50 prisoners (approximately 25% of all those currently held at Gitmo) are "to difficult to prosecute and too dangerous for release". 40 other prisoners are set for trial, and 110 are targeted for release (if their own countries will take them back).

There is absolutely nothing controversial about a country at war detaining prisoners captured on the battlefield, and holding them until the conflict has ended. That's because prisoners of war aren't criminals - once the war has ended, they get to go home. Perpetrators of war crimes, by contrast, don't get to go home when the conflict is over - they get prosecuted under due process, and then punished for those crimes, up to and including by execution. This group of 50 individuals has been given a third designation by the government, the people who we know are guilty, but we can't prove it, so just trust us. This category was created not with any special law passed by Congress, but exists (according to the Obama administration) by virtue of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Let's review. The "battlefield", just so we all understand, is the planet. The ACLU has just released a handy little chart that shows where the Gitmo detainees were picked up - this is a worldwide arrest pattern, and it includes the United States. Also, this particular "war" is not likely to coherently end in our lifetimes - even if Iraq and Afghanistan tamper down in the next 10 years, it's difficult to imagine a final victory over Islamic terrorism ever really conclusively happening - sort of like drugs or poverty. So, Barack Obama has asserted the government's right to arrest anyone, anywhere in the world, and imprison them forever without independent due process, simply by asserting that they're too dangerous to release but too difficult to prosecute. I have to ask - where the hell are the people who don't trust the government to run a health insurance plan in all this?

If these people were dangerous, there'd be some kind of evidence against them. If that evidence were related to sensitive national security information, there are rules for handling classified material that have worked fine for decades. If that evidence was obtained by torturing the suspects, then it's inherently unreliable. The fact we're even talking about this, under a Democratic president, with no substantive opposition, is simply amazing, and unprecedented.

I'm trying to find a list of the 50 to confirm this, but if I'm not mistaken, one of the individuals who won't be going home any time soon is British/Saudi national Shaker Aamer, who, it just so happens, claims to have been tortured by asphyxiation at Gitmo the same night in 2006 that three inmates died under suspicious circumstances. I'm just saying.

Citizens United vs. FEC

Few things fill me with a greater sense of nostalgia then when I get to agree and make common cause with my conservative friends. I'd have thought that my objection to wholesale expansion of government surveillance and detention powers would more often have done the trick on that score, but for reasons that surpass understanding, the ground has proved less fertile than I imagined. Today, however, huzzah! A partial sliver of a half-hearted alignment, in the case of Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission.

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court has struck down regulations limiting corporate and union sponsorship of campaign advertisements. (Hey, surprise, George Will loves it! Dahlia Lithwick hates it! Moving on.) Justice Kennedy's opinion trumpeted the Court's ruling as a triumph for free speech, while Justice Stevens' heartfelt dissent lamented the coming tsunami of profit-seeking short term influence into the electoral process.

Make no mistake - outsized corporate influence of congressional and presidential campaigns is at the heart of every single policy dysfunction in this country, from health care to defense to banking to agriculture subsidies. Congress is collectively 100% beholden to the ongoing interests that fund the ambitions of its members, and while I do find the entire corrupt edifice flatly disgusting, it's a mistake to place all the blame for it on the corporations themselves. If you're angry (and you should be), focus your ire on a) party leaders that select candidates based on their ability to raise money rather than their talent for serving the public, b) individual politicians who care more about getting and staying in office that about anything they might be able to accomplish while they're there, c) a press that abdicates their responsibility to insist on disclosure and accountability, and most importantly, d) an uneducated and passive public who prefers to participate in partisan cage matches and root for the home team than they do about real results.

However satisfying it might be, in this theater of the absurd, to restrict the amplification of corporate speech when we find its effects distasteful, the First Amendment simply does not permit it. The framers didn't even put a helpful little caveat in there, like "a well-regulated militia being necessary"...there's no wiggle room on freedom of expression, save imminent danger. (There are some interesting arguments out there as to whether corporations are entitled to as much freedom of speech, but they are unconvincing to me. Happy to discuss.) More fundamentally, however, is the fact that Constitution or no Constitution it's almost never a good idea to try to fix a imbalance in the marketplace of ideas through authoritarian censorship.

To use an analogy which I hasten to point out is loose and merely illustrative in nature (so no one freak out), a few years ago the President of William and Mary used his discretionary authority to remove an Anglican altar cross from permanent display in the College's oldest chapel, where by custom it had been for nearly 100 years (there were built in exceptions for non-sectarian events held in the chapel). The President's reasoning was that the Cross, and its attendant Christian expression, created an unwelcoming environment for students and faculty who did not share the faith. The fact that the President was never quite able to empirically justify these concerns, or even properly articulate them for that matter, was somewhat beside the point. At issue for myself and others was that by deciding for himself the proper levels of amplification of various points of view, he was (inadvertently, we presumed) making the campus a less diverse place, not a more diverse place. A legitimization of administration-imposed limits in one arena held the specter of indeterminate limits to be imposed elsewhere in the future; and the costs of that kind of regulation ultimately outweigh the benefits. What the President should have been doing to satisfy his diversity agenda, rather than attempt to dampen what he perceived as a dominant voice, was work tirelessly to ensure that a wide variety of avenues and opportunities for expression remained open and accessible to all, and then let the marketplace work. Secondarily, he could have focused his attention on correcting any negative consequences of a dominant Christian expression - if he could find them, that is - as opposed to focusing on the expression itself. (I pause here to note that the President's other, somewhat vague argument - that there were Establishment Clause concerns in play with the Cross given the school's state status - was also well countered and disposed of by our august opposition committee, but that's another post for another time.)

Similarly, the appropriate remedy for outsized corporate spending in the democratic process isn't arbitrary limits on corporate spending. If corporate spending is indeed dominant, that can be remedied by improving the abilities of individual citizens to organize and make their voices heard. Some of this government can help with, through vastly expanded public campaign financing options (public money that would be very well spent), and some of it is plain old fashioned grass roots on our own dimes. Barack Obama's primary campaign (though not his general election campaign) proved that this is at least possible, and entrenched interests can be defeated - so there's no reason to throw up our hands now. The other thing that absolutely must be done is to impose stricter limits and harsher penalties on the means by which politicians are personally enriched by their corporate relationships, by exploring things like term limits, tighter restrictions on the revolving door to the private sector, more stringent disclosure rules, etc. The incentives for our illustrious leaders need a thorough recalibration - and that can be achieved by the democratic process.

Of course, that's all theory. In practice, the political environment at the moment is unlikely to support any of these things, at least in the short term - but as I said, we really only have ourselves to blame for that. No one ever said that advanced citizenship is easy, but it seems a small price to pay in the end. We need to work to find the hidden interests and stop rewarding the violators by continuing to send them back to office. Throw them all out and demand better, even if it damns the whole broken two-party system in the process.

In recognition of the very real difficulties we face, however, I will go so far as to say that the Court was in no sense obligated to rule as they did, even if all else being equal, I agree with them on principle. As Richard Hasen outlines, this decision was actually among the more egregious cases of judicial activism in recent memory, given the long-standing case law in play. Historically the Court has refrained from making grand Constitutional pronouncements except in extreme circumstances - and a dearth of corporate money in the system doesn't remotely qualify. Again, that doesn't make it wrong on the law, but it does make it politically insensitive and probably unwise. It also shows the real-world consequences of having right-wing Presidents appointing justices to the Court (Roberts and Alito joined the decision, Sotomayor dissented). A silver lining of the whole she-bang might be that we can finally put to rest the notion that only liberal justices "legislate from the bench."

In any event, progressives, don't lose too much hope - something tells me this ruling could come in very handy if, say, Sarah Palin gets the GOP nomination. It all began over something called "Hillary: The Movie"...what's good for the goose, and all.

West Wing Quote of the Day

[Sam and Ainsley have been debating the Equal Rights Amendment, and the discussion has devolved to standard left v. right.]

SAM SEABORN: You know, you Republicans are so fond of calling government depraved because it won't regulate what you can see on a newsstand, or what sex we're allowed to have sex with, or a woman's right to choose - but don't you dare regulate this deadly weapon in my pocket, because that would violate my freedom.

AINSLEY HAYES: Yes, and you Democrats are all for freedom of speech unless it means prayer in a public school, and you're all for the freedom of information act unless I want to find out if my fourteen-year-old has had an abortion...

SS: Well, we believe in the ERA.

AH: And good for you.

SS: How can you possibly have an objection to-

AH: Because it's humiliating Sam. An amendment to the Constitution that says I'm equal under the law to a man - I'm mortified there's reason to think I wasn't before. I'm a citizen of the United States of America, not part of a special class that requires your protection. I don't need to have my rights handed down to me by a bunch of old, white men. The same 14th amendment that protects you, protects me, and I went to law school, just to make sure. And with that, I'm going back down to the mess, because I think I may have seen there, a peach.

[exits]

SS: I could have countered that, but I'd already moved on to other things in my head.

The case of Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani et. al.; The Guantanamo "Suicides"

Many Americans are fond of exhorting the mainstream Muslim community to take a more active role in denouncing the depredations of al Qaeda and their terrorist allies. The theory is that if Islam is a religion of peace, the truly faithful wouldn't permit murderous extremists to carry their standard, and the fact that such denouncements have not occurred to our satisfaction counts as evidence that perhaps the face of "true" Islam is accurately represented by the terrorists themselves. The more bellicose among us, it has further seemed to me, have even permitted this perceived lack of outrage to mitigate the regret one might feel at the often-indiscriminate death and destruction meted out in Muslim countries by the American military, as though merely sharing elements of a culture with violent criminals quite reasonably comes with a high but predictable price.

This week, Harpers Online published an article by Scott Horton, which lays out in exhaustive, stomach-turning, journalistic detail the evidence that in 2006, agents of the United States government tortured three men to death at a secret facility adjacent to the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Horton further outlines the facts that lead one to suspect the government of an immediate and far-reaching effort to cover up the crimes, by manufacturing evidence of a coordinated suicide by the Guantanamo prisoners, mutilating the bodies to prevent independent autopsies, and of course, telling lie upon lie upon lie to the American people.

One is of course free to dismiss this as a wild conspiracy theory, but I challenge you to do that after reading the article in full. This is not a brand new story; soon after the news broke in 2006, a group of law students and faculty at Seton Hall University pored over the official government reports and found dozens of anomalies and inconsistencies, which led them to suspect something was seriously amiss. But now, the evidence Scott Horton brings to bear includes corroborated reports from American military personnel at Guantanamo, some of them decorated, most of them with the most conservative and patriotic credentials. These are individuals who claim to have heard screams frequently emanating from a facility near Guantanamo that wasn't supposed to exist. Who say they saw the bodies of three men being delivered to the medical facility from outside the base, as opposed to from the prison block like the government said following the suicide reports. Who have taken great personal risk in telling the story Horton reports.

For what it's worth, even though it shouldn't much matter, the three dead men in question were quite far from the 'worst of the worst' typically associated with the US's 'enhanced interrogation' programs. One had been sold to the Americans for a $5000 bounty, under the shaky claim that he had once served as a Taliban cook. Another was found living in a flat where the government thought Abu Zubaydah may once also have stayed. Each, as it happens, were on a list of prisoners to be released from American custody, on the grounds that there was no evidence that they had the intent or ability to inflict harm on the national interest. This is the group that, after their deaths, the government claimed committed suicide in an act of asymmetrical warfare against the United States, by binding their own feet and hands, shoving rags down their own throats, and hanging themselves in their cells, all at the exact same time, and all without base security noticing what was happening until it was too late.

Horton does not draw any final conclusions in his article, understanding that a criminal investigation is the only proper mechanism to do so. Indeed, one of the provisions of the Convention Against Torture, signed by Ronald Reagan and ratified by a Republican Congress, mandates that signatories investigate all credible allegations of torture-related crimes to a satisfactory conclusion. Barack Obama, on the other hand, has fully embraced a policy of "looking forward, not backward" when it comes to alleged crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration (outside those of a few low-level scapegoats), which of course puts him at odds with international law. In such an environment, there's not much for Horton to do but put the available facts into the public domain, which he has done without the notice, to date, of the liberally biased mainstream press.

If you've been reading this blog for a while - if you read this, this, this, and this , to note a few - maybe you're wondering if I don't take some kind of grotesque pleasure in continually writing about this stuff; if I've begun to crave the exposure of American malfeasance, because it satisfies some kind of newly minted, liberal, anti-authoritarian fetish. I assure you, that couldn't be farther from the truth. There's a reason why a terrorist attack on the citizens of the United States of America is a bonafide outrage - not just because it's where my family and I live, but objectively, transcendentally so. What makes this country special isn't geography or economy, or even culture - it's the one belief we all supposedly share, that government's authority over the individual is limited, by laws established by citizens of equal value, and more fundamentally than that, by the Truth of universal human dignity. Accordingly, the mere possibility that murder by torture of innocent people could have occurred in the 21st century, under the American flag, makes me absolutely sick to my stomach. And whether any of us like it or not, we are dealing with much more than mere possibility. Sooner or later, we will have to come to terms with all this, as we did with Jim Crow and Korematsu. That day can't come soon enough. In the meantime, though, we ought to take great care before judging too harshly the inaction of Muslims who fail to act strongly enough for our tastes against the criminals in their midst.

George Will on the Constitutionality of Health Care Reform

George Will has an op-ed in yesterday's Washington Post where he questions the constitutionality of the Democrats' plans to introduce an individual mandate to purchase health insurance, as part of the overall reform package. His skepticism on this point is based on the quite reasonable view, presumably held by all good conservatives, that the government's primary purpose (and thus the Constitution's) is to protect individual liberties from encroachment by the majority. Under this theory, government action that possesses even broad democratic support, and certain societal benefit, should be struck down in the event it causes the individual to be inappropriately compelled or constrained.

The first item to point out here is Will's very selective discomfort when it comes to this kind of thing. In short, he thinks a lot of things are unconstitutional, and doesn't mind saying so, particularly when those things are championed by liberals (campaign finance reform comes to mind). On the other hand, he's significantly less troubled in other areas which would seem to have equal relevance to the subject of individual liberty (for example, unrestricted surveillance, indefinite detentions, and generally, selective enforcement of the first, fourth, fifth, and eighth Amendments). To my mind a "true" conservative the way he describes one might worry more about the government's asserted right to spy on, arrest, and torture anyone it suspects of illicit activities, but I can't seem to find any op-eds from Will to that effect. Seems to me Will's conservatism is one where money talks, and that's about it. (Even his recent abandonment of ambiguity on the subject of Afghanistan relies heavily on simple cost-benefit analysis.) And listen, that's fine - he's entitled to as wide and selective a range of opinion as anyone else, and more often than not he has something very worthwhile to say - but let's not pretend that his brand of constitutional analysis is any more or less pure than that of the unwashed masses. His are as fundamentally political a set of priorities as anyone's, at the end of the day.

On the merits, Will correctly points out that the constitutional basis for the mandate, for its supporters, is going to be the "necessary and proper" component of the Commerce Clause. His is a slippery slope argument - if Congress can call an individual mandate to purchase health insurance necessary and proper, what's to stop it from saying the same thing about, say, calisthenics enforced by the threat of increased taxes? Of course, Will knows very well that the law doesn't require the political branches to behave in a manner that ensures absolute logical consistency; good judgment, checked by the electoral process, is both built into the system and relied upon to produce flexibility and prevent excess. That's why Will is less interested in actually striking the mandate than he is in shoring up the conservative case against it. But for the record, I can tell you why the individual mandate is actually "necessary", in much more than a political sense: the private insurance market can't survive without it. As I've written before, the whole point of the individual mandate is to compensate for the new regulations that force health insurance companies to cover sick people at reasonable rates. Once you tell those companies that they can't deny coverage based on existing conditions or cap payouts in times of catastrophic need, they will absolutely certainly go out of business unless there are enough healthy people paying into the premiums. So if you want to continue relying on the private insurance market to raise the coverage level, an individual mandate to buy into the system is the only way to keep the whole thing solvent. Sounds necessary and proper to me - I'd be shocked if that wasn't enough for the High Court.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but there was always another path to take here. If the government were permitted to operate a public health insurance option, there's be no need to regulate the insurance companies, and no need to enforce an individual mandate. Which means that the public option would not only have increased health insurance coverage across the country, but in comparison to the current plan, it's also is friendlier to both individual liberty and free market principles. Not sure, but I think I just made the case that "true" conservatives should have been supporting the public option all along...

West Wing Quote of the Day

PRESIDENT JOSIAH BARTLETT: Did you know that two thousand years ago, a citizen of Rome could walk across the face of the known world, free of the fear of molestation? He could walk across the earth, cloaked only in the protection of the words Civus Romanus. "I am a Roman citizen." Where was Morris' protection, or anyone else on that plane? Where is the retribution for the families? And where is the warning to the rest of the world, that Americans shall walk this earth unharmed, lest the clenched fist of the most mighty military force in the history of man comes crashing down on your house? In other words, Leo, what the hell are we doing here?

CHIEF OF STAFF LEO MCGARRY: We are behaving the way a superpower ought to behave.

JB: Well our behavior has produced some pretty crappy results. Matter of fact, I'm not sure it hasn't induced them.

LM: What are you talking about?

JB: I'm talking about 286 American Marines in Beirut! I'm talking about Somalia, I'm talking about Nairobi!

LM: And you think ratcheting up the body count is going to act as a deterrent?

JB: Damn right!

LM: Well then you are just as stupid as these guys who think the death penalty is going to act as a deterrent against drug kingpins. As though drug kingpins don't already live their daily lives under the possibility of execution. And their executions are a lot less dainty than ours, and tend to take place without the bother and expense of due process. So, my friend, if you want to start using American military might as the Arm of the Lord...you can do that. We're the only superpower left. You can conquer the world, like Charlemagne. But you better be prepared to kill everyone. And you better start with me, because I will raise up an army against you, and I will beat you.

---

JB: Ah, Leo...When I think about all the effort you put into getting me to run, and all the work you did to get me elected, I could pummel your ass with a baseball bat.

Two Holiday Season events in our ongoing War

Perhaps it's not a bad thing that I've been as yet unable to sit and write substantively on the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day, and on the December 28 suicide attack that killed seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan. A few weeks reflection is often clarifying, and plus there's much that I'd need to retract and correct had I relied on immediate-aftermath media reports.

Above all, on the Christmas bombing we thank Providence that the attack failed. Two issues persist though: why did all elements of the plot succeed up until the point of detonation, and why did it fail from that point forward? On the Sunday after the attack, I watched as the most pressing issue for cable news shows appeared to be whether President Obama's language and demeanor showed the Necessary Seriousness. This line of attack was led by the execrable Peter King, R-NY - but I don't really blame him. It's the public's own fault, for tolerating a media approach to politics whose sole purpose is to show us partisan gladiator battles, even when dealing with matters of life and death. And of course the Democrats were no better, rising gallantly to Obama's defense by lugging out comparisons to Bush, until Obama himself, in about the most agitated speech of his career, telling the public just how Disappointed he was for the failures of his system, and how Unacceptable it all was - not that a single person has been fired, reprimanded, or even cited over the issue, of course.

As has been said by kings and queens, the guy can give a speech, and his speeches tend to act as a bit of narrative closure for both his supporters and opponents. But in the meantime, watch what's happened. The President is compelled to sound tough and ever more bellicose against the Enemy, and now a whole new front has opened up in the war on al Qaeda in Yemen - another country to bomb, another population to radicalize. Attempts that Obama was making to close Guantanamo are further derailed, since some of the people stationed there, even though they did nothing to deserve their initial detention, might someday in the future return to a life of terrorism - certainly an odd legal principle if there ever was one. And finally, the people all but demand to have their privacy invaded further in a vain attempt to Feel Safe (70% of the public wants to be full-body scanned at the airport now). Is any of this actually making us safer? What if detaining innocent people indefinitely, based on things they might do in the future (a risk no doubt exacerbated by the abusive treatment they've reportedly received), actually generates anti-American sentiment and creates more people willing to die fighting us? What if overloading the security apparatus with the results of meaningless, sweeping, worldwide surveillance actually makes it more difficult to snuff out the cases where there's a legitimate threat, like when a guy's father actually comes to the US Embassy and reports that his son has the ability and intent to kill American civilians? Obama can rail on about working harder and smarter all he wants, but it seems like we're foregoing a legitimate discussion of effective security in favor of political theater.

As for why the attack ultimately failed, it's worth pointing our current TSA scanning procedures have evidently necessitated ever-more sartorially creative approaches on the part of al Qaeda, which is a security success of its own sort. One is also grateful for the quick thinking and bravery of the plane's other passengers, which ironically remains our best defense, even as we demand more aggressive action from the government. Finally though, the sad question must be asked, if the intent of terrorism is to induce terror and affect policy, given what's been outlined in the paragraphs above, to what extent was the Christmas Day attack actually a failure? Abdulmutallab doesn't appear to be the sharpest tack in the drawer, but is anyone wondering why he attempted to detonate his bomb in plain view of the rest of the passengers? Is it possible that, knowing how hard it is to actually smuggle a bomb onto a plane big enough to actually bring it down, that al Qaeda's primary aim was to remind Americans that they shouldn't feel safe when flying?

As for a suicide attack on Americans that did succeed, one need look no further than the bombing of a CIA outpost in Afghanistan a few days after Christmas. I think it's important to note, since there's a linguistic morality in play here as well, that strictly speaking this was not an act of terrorism. However depraved an act of betrayal the bombing was (and it was), terrorism is explicitly targeted against civilians, which the CIA in Afghanistan is not. We've been prosecuting our war in Afghanistan and Pakistan against the Taliban in large part through drones, and the CIA's been running the drones. The Agency has been sniffing out targets for unmanned bombing runs by cultivating spies in the region, and in this case, they thought they had someone who could give them al Qaeda's top people. A Jordanian double agent, as card-carrying a member of the jihadist opposition as one is likely to find, took the time to gain the Americans' trust, got close enough to do massive damage, and killed seven agents. The attack had the dual effect of robbing the US of decades of intelligence experience in the region, and also of damaging the war effort itself. There are conflicting reports about this, but it seems as though once these high-value assets reach a certain level of trust, security in terms of getting them into CIA facilities is lessened, under the theory that their information on potential drone targets is incredibly time-sensitive. In the aftermath of the December bombing, this is sure to be revisited. Also, now that it's clear just how mistaken the Agency can be about one of its assets, it brings into question the reliability of the entire drone program - how many drone missions originated from similar tips, and how many of those were motivated not by loyalty to American interest, but rather personal vendettas and territorial squabbles? Reports are that civilians continue to be killed by the attacks in large numbers - what if those providing the targets are just lying to us? In any event, this is a sad story all around - God bless the memories of those lost.

General McChrystal is saying that victory is within reach in Afghanistan, and the population is by and large in support of our efforts. I'm skeptical on both counts, but this is one arena where I pray nightly to be wrong. No peace yet.