Is there a grade worse than “F”?

A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the last 18 years worked at the government’s elite biodefense research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Md., had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation.

. . . .

The extraordinary turn of events followed the government’s payment in June of a settlement valued at $5.82 million to a former government scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, who was long targeted as the FBI’s chief suspect despite a lack of any evidence that he had ever possessed anthrax.

The payout to Hatfill, a highly unusual development that all but exonerated him in the mailings, was an essential step to clear the way for prosecuting Ivins, according to lawyers familiar with the matter.

Except there now won’t be any prosecution. No testimony in open court. No hearing that might shed a little light on how the government chased the presumably wrong lead for five years before a shakeup at the FBI shifted focus to Ivins. Now we are to believe that the case is closed because the alleged suicide is somehow tantamount to a confession.

In Bush-Cheney terms, a dead “culprit” without having to go through open US courts is a BIG win.

* * * *

And then there’s the global part of the Global War on Terror™:

American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials.

The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region.

. . . .

The information linking the ISI to the bombing of the Indian Embassy was described in interviews by several American officials with knowledge of the intelligence. Some of the officials expressed anger that elements of Pakistan’s government seemed to be directly aiding violence in Afghanistan that had included attacks on American troops.

Some American officials have begun to suggest that Pakistan is no longer a fully reliable American partner and to advocate some unilateral American action against militants based in the tribal areas.

It is significant that Barack Obama began his much-discussed trip abroad in Afghanistan, not Iraq.  in recent days, Obama has succeeded in shifting debate from Iraq to Afghanistan, while McCain has struggled to keep up, essentially doing his best to adopt Obama’s point that more troops are needed in Afghanistan.  While the media has essentially forgotten about Afghanistan,  Obama has been arguing for months that Bush and McCain’s obsession with Iraq caused us to take our eye off Afghanistan and Pakistan–a region that actually has something to do with getting Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. 

Until very recently, McCain rejected this view, repeatedly calling Iraq “the central front in the war on terror” and dismissing calls to redeploy troops to Afghanistan.  After Obama’s recent speech arguing that the misguided war in Iraq distracted us from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and calling for a new strategy that would take the fight to Al Qaeda in its safe haven, McCain claimed he, too, would move troops from Iran to Afghanistan (though he quickly “revised” his position, ambiguously suggesting some of new troops might come from other countries.) 

What business does an active duty general have in weighing in on the presidential election?  Gen. Petraeus seems to have no problem wading into politics, as we’ve seen in the past.  Gen. Petraeus played politics again today–a few minutes ago, MSNBC ran an interview in which Andrea Mitchell asked Gen. Petraeus about Barack Obama’s plan to withdraw and redeploy troops from Iraq over a 16 month period.  I naively wondered why Gen. Petraeus didn’t beg off, declining to comment on a specific proposal at issue in the presidential election.  Instead, he gave the McCain response, saying timetables are not a good idea, that decisions must be based on facts on the ground, and adding that “the enemy might get a vote” (meaning we might have to respond to insurgent activity). 

I am paraphrasing, as there is no transcript or video available yet.  This is dangerous stuff.  Active duty generals shouldn’t be just one more cable TV talking head.  I would have thought this was obvious, but Gen. Petraeus’s shows otherwise.

What is it with the Republicans and torture?  They like to joke about it, they create euphemisms to describe it, they deny it goes on, even in the face of undisputed evidence.

Congressman Darrell Issa made the latest bizarre comment on the matter, claiming today that “we treat our hospital patients worse than Al Qaeda [detainees].”  First, not all of the detainees we have held at Guantanamo and elsewhere are actually Al Qaeda members–we have released hundreds who were not, after holding them for years without charges. 

Second, I don’t know what hospital Issa goes to, but he is either badly misinformed about how we treat detainees or else he is being deliberately misleading.  As Think Progress points out, detainees have been subjected to waterboarding, severe sleep deprivation, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, and threats with military dogs.  In addition, hundreds of detainees have died in U.S. custody, and at least 25 were declared homicides.  We don’t treat hospital patients like that–if we did, it would be a crime (as much of the treatment mention here is).

Sen. McCain brags that the surge in Iraq has succeeded, despite the fact that the surge has failed to meet benchmarks Bush set to measure its success and despite the fact that, 18 months after the surge began, the war continues, with no end in sight.

Now, McCain argues that changing the tide in Afghanistan, where the Taliban is making a comeback and an increasing number of American soldiers have been killed in recent months, is as simple as doing the same thing in Afghanistan that we have done in Iraq.

McCain brags that “I know how to win wars“.  My question is: why doesn’t McCain implement his plan for Afghanistan now?  He has the president’s ear and claims to have turned the president around on Iraq–why not do the same now for Afghanistan?  Why wait, especially as the situation is taking a turn for the worse?

In fact, Iraq is not a model of success.  McCain claims that he knows how to win wars, but the surge, while a tactical success (US troops, once again, performed admirably), has not done anything to resolve Iraq’s poliitcal crisis and shows no signs of ending the war.

If McCain has a plan to fix things in Afghanistan, he should present it to Congress and the president.  Otherwise, his plan seems to be more about winning an election than winning any war.

Barack Obama gave a thoughtful, reasonable, intelligent speech today exposing the Bush-McCain obsession with Iraq.  As Obama aptly put it, Bush and McCain don’t have a strategy for succeeding in Iraq, they have a strategy for staying in Iraq.  So far, that strategy has worked quite well–more than five years after US troops arrived in Iraq, about 150,000 of them are stlll there. 

McCain argues that the surge has worked, although it has actually failed to meet the benchmarks Bush and McCain set to measure its success.  In responding to Obama’s common sense, McCain offered only bluster, promising to personally hunt down Bin Laden and arrogantly declaring “I know how to win wars.”

Exactly which wars are you talking about Sen. McCain?  I have nothing but respect for Sen. McCain’s service, and for all the men and women who honorably served in Vietnam, but we didn’t actually win that war.  Our military won a victory in Iraq, a war launched on false pretenses, but political leaders like Bush and McCain are determined to keep them in Iraq indefinitely and have frittered away any fruits of the military victory.  Afghanistan is slipping away from us.  I know that the media constantly defers to McCain’s authority on all matters military, but will anyone in the press/barbecue corps have the courage to point out that McCain’s chest-thumping rhetoric about “knowing how to win wars” simply doesn’t make any sense? 

Obama’s right: Bush and McCain have obsessed over Iraq for too long, at the expense of other, more pressing threats in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.  The war in Iraq has not made us safer and it has exacted a terrible toll on our military and their families, while the rest of us are not asked to sacrifice.  Most Americans have had enough of this obsession and understand that it is past time to end the war in Iraq.  Obama will do that.  McCain will not.

For years, supporters of the misconceived Iraq war, including Bush and McCain, have offered slogans, bravado, and confusion in place of a real policy in Iraq.  When a war that was supposed to last only a few weeks, months at the most, stretched on for years, we were told to “stay the course”, that there was a choice between fighting insurgents in Iraq or over here (despite the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 or any attack launched on Americans soil), and that anyone who offered a different viewpoint was waving the white flag of surrender.

These advocates for unending war have never gotten Iraq right.  They were wrong about Saddam Hussein’s alleged ties to Al Qaeda, wrong about Iraq’s supposed stores of WMD, ready to be unleashed against the United States, wrong about how long the war would last, wrong about how much the war would cost, both in terms of human life and squandered resources, wrong about how this war would affect our national security–it has made us less safe, as our own intelligence reports tell us.

Barack Obama offers a common sense approach to Iraq, one that reflects the view of a sustained and substantial majority of Americans who understand that this war is not strengthening the United States.  In an op-ed today, he points out that the Iraqi prime minister himself is calling for a timetable for the removal of American troops (timetables, of course, are something Bush and McCain once decried as the refuge of the defeatist).  He rightly obseves that this is an opportunity for us to do what is long overdue–remove our troops from Iraq and re-focus our military on the real threat that confronts us–a regrouping Al Qaeda establishing safe havens in Pakistan and elsewhere.

Imagine if a foreign leader said of rising American obesity rates, “maybe that’s a way of killing them.” It feels absurd even to type these words, but McCain actually cracked a “joke” like this about Iranians, saying of rising U.S. cigarette imports to Iran: “maybe that’s a way of killing them.”

This isn’t diplomatic, it’s not presidential, it’s not even funny. McCain’s friends in the media may lap up this bluster as further evidence of McCain’s supposed bona fides on foreign policy. The reality is that McCain is unpolished and lacks the tact necessary to be a statesman. This is hardly the first time he has said something intemperate, tone-deaf, or just plain stupid when it comes to foreign affairs.

By the way, does McCain think our beef is with Iran’s leaders, or the Iranian people? His painful joke suggests he makes no distinction.

The faltering McCain campaign is trying, once again, to create a controversy over nothing.  Obama recently acknowledged that he will “continue to refine” his policy with regard to Iraq, as warranted.  The McCain campaign claims that this somehow indicates a change in course.  As Col. Sherman Potter on MASH would say, “horse hockey.” 

I understand the McCain campaign is desperate, but this is completely unserious, and I wish the media would treat it accordingly.  Obama simply acknowledged that the contours of his policy in Iraq are not set in stone.  Unlike Bush and McCain, he is capable of adjusting his plans to fit reality.  Obama wants to initiate a 16-month phased withdrawal from Iraq.  If circumstances change and it makes more sense to do this in 14 months, or 18 months, he would “refine” his policy, as he said.  That’s called common sense flexibility.  It’s not evidence of a shifting position.

Bush and McCain think they are in a John Wayne movie, that saying something, no matter how off base, and sticking to it, immovable as stone, is what matters most. 

Here are some of the problems with McCain’s “policy” in Iraq, which is essentially “we’ll stay until we win”.  First, it’s not working, and it makes no sense.  There’s nothing to “win” at this point.  The US military accomplished its objectives.  Iraq is ungovernable and beset by violence that demands political solutions beyond the US military’s bailiwick.  Second, and more to the point of this piece, McCain is completely oblivious to the need for flexibility.  What happens if a greater threat presents itself–as is actually the case.  What if Al Qaeda has found a safe haven and reconstituted itself in Pakistan?  Actually, that is what US intelligence officials say is happening.  McCain’s tunnelvision focus on Iraq leaves us incapable of focusing on threats elsewhere–McCain has already decided that the biggest threat we face is in Iraq, and nothing can change his view on that.  That is inflexibility, and it is what we have lived with for seven years under Bush.  It is not a real policy–it is stubbornness and bravado n place of rational thought.

Here are some basic questions I’d love to see the media ask McCain: if your current policy in Iraq isn’t working, what would you do?  If we are in the same place in 1 year that we are right now, what will you do?  What if things get worse in Iraq?  What if things get worse elsewhere?  What if Al Qaeda continues to build a safe haven in Pakistan?  What if the military tells you that, we only have so many troops to go around, and you have to choose between continuing to keep 150,000 troops in Iraq, or sending sufficient troops to destroy Al Qaeda in Pakistan?

Essentially, the question is: Sen. McCain, if your current plan doesn’t work, what is your plan B for Iraq?

It’s worth having the ability to modify your plan when circumstances change.  That’s not a flip-flop, it’s understanding how the world works and recognizing that stubbornness isn’t always the best policy.

I’m mixing my movie metaphors, I’m afraid. The headline is a reference to Dr. Strangelove, but an article in today’s New York Times is more reminiscent of The Manchurian Candidate.

Well, part of it, anyway.

The part where the Chinese commandant brainwashes Americans such as Laurence Harvey (never mind that accent) and Frank Sinatra.

I don’t know if Richard Condon had seen the article titled Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War which was published two years before his novel The Manchurian Candidate came out in 1959, but I could not read the Times article without flashing on the 1962 film.

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The chart was part of collection of documents made public a couple of weeks ago at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, but the connection to the Chinese version was not realized till an independent interrogation expert pointed it out to the New York Times. This chart, mind you, was taken verbatim from the Chinese version as published a half-century ago—only the title at the top was changed before the thing was brought down to Guantanamo to train interrogators there.

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

Is it historical amnesia, or is it willful ignorance? I gotta ask, because this is hardly the first piece of evidence we’ve had that the Bush Administration adopted a policy of torturing detainees using techniques repeatedly proven to be ineffective, and, most likely, counterproductive. Techniques that were also known to be in direct conflict with standing American policy and the Geneva Conventions. Techniques that were repeatedly labeled as torture and/or “brainwashing” by the US government throughout the previous six decades.