Pruning Shears

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Nidal Malik Hasan’s shooting rampage at Ft. Hood has raised questions about whether the FBI had sufficient warning to prevent it. I have not seen anyone claim Patriot Act provisions were in any way invoked, but clearly they didn’t prevent anything. I commented at Prairie Weather that indiscriminate collection - basket warrants, wholesale sucking up of internet traffic and even “targeted” things like warrantless wiretapping and library record searches create a greater volume of information than can be intelligently processed. It doesn’t keep “lone wolf” types like Hasan from acting because even when it is identified as suspicious behavior it exists within a haystack of other suspicious behavior. Which, again as I commented, means the Patriot Act is being kept around for some other reason.

As to whether the Patriot Act can disrupt more organized plots, its preemptive philosophy prevents us from ever making such an evaluation. Even its defenders can at best use qualified language like “the Lackawanna Six plot…may well have resulted in another 9/11” and “the Portland Seven investigation, which may well have prevented an attack on synagogues and Jewish schools.” The way to investigate is not to arrest based on the law enforcement equivalent of a Rorschach test. They way to do it under a proper system of law was demonstrated by the UK as detailed by Ron Suskind (p. 46):

They might have made arrests in a week, or in a month. Clearly the hijackers were moving into some next stage of planning, but many inside of the intelligence and law enforcement communities were beginning to suspect it was more experimentation than anything resembling a “dry run.” If so, taking them down too early would leave investigators with insufficient evidence to effectively prosecute. The British model is, after all, to be patient, gather sufficient evidence to try terror suspects in open court, and get long prison terms, treating it all as a criminal matter rather than a historic - and terrorist-glamorizing - clash of power and ideology.

The UK “might have made” the arrests because it didn’t get to actually make them. It seems Jose Rodriguez, a man with his own interesting history, was sent to Pakistan by the Vice President’s office to leak one Rashid Rauf’s whereabouts. His arrest forced the Brits to move in before they were ready, though it did provide a couple good news cycles for George Bush. Priorities. Fred Kaplan then secured his spot in the hilariously unintentionally accurate bad analysis hall of fame for this: “The plot was foiled because of intelligence information, much of it provided by a nasty source that has itself been linked to terrorist organizations.”

The Center for American Progress was in the news for the wrong reason. The most significant news item concerning it was its call to delay closing Guantánamo. As David Dayen wrote in the post, “There is perhaps no organization in Washington with a closer relationship to the White House than the Center for American Progress.” So now CAP is taking a position that it has itself identified with neocon lunatics. Access is a heady drug indeed.

Keeping Guantánamo open will only create more problems for the administration. If human rights violations of others don’t create a sufficient sense of urgency then maybe its own political inconvenience will. Or, as political theorist Mel Brooks put it, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

Jeremy Scahill:

You know who’s guarding Hillary Clinton in Afghanistan right now? Blackwater. You know who guards members of Congress? Blackwater. They have half a billion dollars in contracts in Afghanistan right now. CIA, State Department, Defense Department. Why is President Obama keeping these guys on the payroll? There has never been a company in recent history that made the case that corporations are corrupt, evil organizations [better] than Blackwater.

Bybee to rule on Yoo. But prosecuting torture would make us look like a banana republic.

I understand Glenn Greenwald’s concern about shopping around prosecutions for whichever system will most likely convict, particularly this sentiment (emph. in orig.): “In a healthy system of justice, the Government gives everyone it wants to imprison a trial and then imprisons only those whom it can convict. The process is constant (trials), and the outcome varies (convictions or acquittals). Obama is saying the opposite: in his scheme, it is the outcome that is constant (everyone ends up imprisoned), while the process varies and is determined by the Government (trials for some; military commissions for others; indefinite detention for the rest).” But as he also acknowledges the crazy response on the right from what is after all a fairly modest step has to be addressed. Conservative bedwetting and screeching over the danger of trials has to be discredited before it’s politically possible to have them on a large scale. It’s part of the long, slow climb out of the abyss.

Perhaps a timetable to leave Afghanistan might actually help the situation there. By the way, want to know why Spencer Ackerman is a superb journalist? Because he wrote (emph. in orig.) “I’m dubious about the al-Qaeda/Taliban divergence precisely because I want to believe it.” Not many reporters will admit to needing such an internal barometer. Also, on the day after he wrote that he fully retracted an inaccurate report and had the courage to offer the truth as an explanation:

From the start, the post should have a) more clearly indicated that my source wasn’t present at the meeting; b) more clearly indicated that the account provided was single-sourced; and c) verified the information provided before publication. My enthusiasm for a hot story outpaced my professional judgment. For that I take full responsibility, retract the story and issue a full apology for its publication.