Iraq and Terrorism

by Charles

In the LA Times yesterday, a former official with the National Security Council made the case that, because the Bush administration is not making an "active effort" to negotiate with North Korea and Iran, the practical result is a form of "passive appeasement". He is right about Iran but dead wrong about North Korea.

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I have the unpleasant task here of disagreeing with a few of my co-authors. For me they’ve got their priorities out of order. I conclude this from what I view as, in this overall context, splitting hairs over what constitutes a gulag in comparison to what occurs in Guantanamo. The goal of the AI report is not to bring down Bush or any of the other paranoid fantasies I’m reading across the blogosphere. It is simply to stop the acts we know are happening, regardless of whether we disagree about why they’re happening. It is perhaps telling (and shameful) that seemingly all our Vice-President or President can do in response to criticism is join in the bashing of one of the world’s most altruistic organizations, but, my friends, these are the facts:

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Daniel Drezner states, far better than I did, the odd sense that many of us are ____ on Flushgate (choose one, and only one, cliche’ to fill in the MadLib):  failing to see the forest for the trees; confusing the horse for the hay*; seeing the stars but not the sky**; and generally missing the boat.  Drezner writes:

Let me put this more bluntly: assume that the Newsweek goof was of the maximal variety — i.e., despite Gitmo prisoner claims, it turns out that no Qu’ran was ever flushed down any toilet. Should it nevertheless be considered a major foreign policy problem that this report triggered significant protests in Afghanistan, a populace with good reasons to support the United States? In today’s New York Times, David Brooks is right to point out the blogosphere’s misplaced foci, and suggests that "radical clerics in Afghanistan" used the story to trigger outrage. What bothers me is that it was too damn easy for the clerics to whip up anti-American sentiment.

I leave it to my readers: am I overly concerned about this?

It would behoove us all — particularly those of us who believe in an engaged U.S. foreign policy — to be just as concerned as Drezner.  Success in the war on terror requires that we win the battle of ideas.  The fact that a single mistaken sentence in a newsmagazine blurb can derail our foreign policy efforts to such an extent that it requires repeated rebukes from the President and his senior staff — well, let’s just say that it’s not a good thing.

As for the penalty that should be applied to Newsweek:  the most balanced decision I’ve read thus far comes from Jane Galt.  Go read the whole thing.

UPDATE:  And also read our own Charles Bird, if you haven’t already; it’s an insightful and provokative piece.

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Pejman Yousefzadeh, writing in RedState, delivers a well-put rant targeting Messrs. Drum‘s and Sullivan‘s argument that (per Drum):

the only thing that matters to conservative bloggers [regarding the Koran-flushing story in Newsweek] is their continuing jihad against the liberal media. All else is subordinate.

This is an idiotic statement — and it does not become less idiotic merely because it’s being made by my "favorite liberal blogger."  As Pejman puts it:

I probably shouldn’t even bother to write this because life is short, but it appears to be important to point out to Andrew Sullivan and his snide and newfound fan that in all likelihood, the reason "conservative bloggers" are upset and angry about the Newsweek screwup is that it cost lives in the Middle East and it could have cost a lot more lives as well. In addition–and this is a somewhat important point, so please pay attention Political Animals and New Republic senior editors–it harmed our country’s prestige and standing on the basis of a story that was entirely false. It is the kind of story that can fan rather vicious flames, and if you want to fan flames, you damn well better make sure that you have your facts right. If you do, feel free to publish the story. If you don’t and you publish the story anyway and people die as a result and your country ends up suffering diplomatically . . . well . . . it ain’t a good day at the office, now is it?

…. And here’s a news flash: I have this belief–call me naïve, but I hope that you would be wrong in doing so–that bloggers on the other side of the ideological and partisan divide have the exact same wish. That’s difficult to do, of course, when a prime blogger on the other side of the ideological and partisan divide decides to put forth his own little spin hinting at dark and malevolent plans on the part of "conservative bloggers." Maybe, just maybe, we might actually have some noble and upstanding motives in expressing our concerns.

Pejman is, frankly, spot on.  But there’s an important point that both sides in this "debate" seem to be losing sight of.  A poorly-sourced sentence in a paragraph-sized blurb in an American newsmagazine did not, in and by itself, cause this explosion of violence.  It was the match, to be sure.  But the powder was already present, prepared, and primed.   

The real story — missed among the partisan bickering — is the fact that there was so much powder lying around that a relatively small mistake could ignite it.  Indeed, what the jihadist explosions demonstrate more than anything is that we are not even close to winning in the war in Afghanistan (and let’s not even begin with our putative allies, the alternatively fascist and jihadist Pakistanis).  One small slip (and it was small, despite the hype) is all that’s needed to set the bomb off — and maybe set us and our allies back on our heels.

Blast Newsweek, sure.  Blast Messrs. Drum and Sullivan for their conspiracy theories, absolutely.  But don’t overstate the case, and don’t take your eye off the ball.  Newsweek didn’t kill anyone; the folks in Afghanistan and Pakistan did.  All Newsweek is guilty of is making the kind of mistake that can occur only where there is a free press and free society.  In fact, such mistakes will inevitably occur where people are free.  The central aim of a republic is not, contrary to popular belief, message control — and that remains true even while we are at war.   

And that, from a certain way of thinking, is a good thing.

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Current estimates go as high as $300 billion. That’s $300 billion dollars the invasion of Iraq is going to cost US taxpayers. Some day. Maybe more.

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UPDATE: As hilzoy wisely notes in the comments:

It will certainly be more. Since, as you note, this will just be added to the deficit, we will have to pay debt service on it. And anyone who has ever taken out a mortgage and looked at the total amount they will pay by the end of the 30 year term, and seen how very much more it is than the original price of the house (even at what my spam keeps assuring me are Today’s Low Rates!), knows that the debt service on $300 billion will be a lot of money.

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On Friday, October 11, 2002, Congress voted to authorize Bush to attack Iraq if Hussein refused to give up WMD as required by U.N. resolutions. Shortly after that we heard a range of estimates for what such action would cost.

In January 2003, the White House was downplaying reports that the effort could cost as much as $60 billion:

White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels told The New York Times in an interview published Tuesday that such a conflict could cost $50 billion to $60 billion — the price tag of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

But Trent Duffy, an OMB spokesman, said Daniels did not intend to imply in the Times interview that $50 billion to $60 billion was a hard White House estimate.

"He said it could — could — be $60 billion," Duffy said. "It is impossible to know what any military campaign would ultimately cost. The only cost estimate we know of in this arena is the Persian Gulf War, and that was a $60 billion event."

Duffy also was careful to caution that President Bush had not made a decision to use military force against Saddam’s regime.

Bush economic adviser Larry Lindsey had estimated closer to $200 billion, but he was dumped by the White House. Apparently his skills at such estimates were not appreciated.

And we were told repeatedly that the recontruction costs would not come out of our pockets, but rather, those of the Iraqis:

1. “Well, the reconstruction costs remain a very — an issue for the future. And Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, is a rather wealthy country. Iraq has tremendous resources that belong to the Iraqi people. And so there are a variety of means that Iraq has to be able to shoulder much of the burden for their own reconstruction.” Press Secretary Ari Fleischer (February 18, 2003)
2. “There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people…and on a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years…We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” Paul Wolfowitz [Source: House Committee on Appropriations Hearing on a Supplemental War Regulation, 3/27/03]
3. “I don’t believe that the United States has the responsibility for reconstruction, in a sense…[Reconstruction] funds can come from those various sources I mentioned: frozen assets, oil revenues and a variety of other things, including the Oil for Food, which has a very substantial number of billions of dollars in it. Donald Rumsfeld [Source: Senate Appropriations Hearing, 3/27/03] (emphasis mine)

Compare that last statement, in particular, with this:

President Bush said Monday that seeing Iraq through reconstruction to a stable and secure democracy is a worthy cause that the United States will press regardless of whether its coalition partners remain there.

"The fundamental question is: Is it worth it? And the answer is, ‘Absolutely, it’s worth it for a free Iraq to emerge’," said Bush….

Bush considers it worth it.

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by hilzoy

***UPDATE: Newsweek is stepping back from this story:

“Their [the reporters’] information came from a knowledgeable U.S. government source, and before deciding whether to publish it we approached two separate Defense Department officials for comment. One declined to give us a response; the other challenged another aspect of the story but did not dispute the Qur’an charge. (…)

Last Friday, a top Pentagon spokesman told us that a review of the probe cited in our story showed that it was never meant to look into charges of Qur’an desecration. The spokesman also said the Pentagon had investigated other desecration charges by detainees and found them “not credible.” Our original source later said he couldn’t be certain about reading of the alleged Qur’an incident in the report we cited, and said it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts. Top administration officials have promised to continue looking into the charges, and so will we. But we regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst.”

*** [End of Update. What comes next is the original post…]***

Here’s an obvious thought: it’s really, really important that in our efforts to defeat al Qaeda, we not be seen as fighting a war on Islam itself. It’s important because we should not actually be fighting a war on Islam, but on Islamic terrorists, who bear about the same relation to Islam that people who blow up abortion clinics bear to Christianity. And it’s important because it would be disastrous if ordinary Muslims, who might otherwise not support al Qaeda, got the idea that they had to defend Islam itself against us. This is not exactly rocket science.

Unfortunately, it seems to have eluded some of our interrogators at Guantanamo. From Newsweek:

“Investigators probing abuses at Guantanamo Bay have confirmed some infractions alleged in internal FBI e-mails that surfaced late last year. Among the previously unreported cases, sources tell NEWSWEEK: interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects, placed Qur’ans on toilets and, in at least one case, flushed a holy book down the toilet.”

In light of this, I transfer to Newsweek and its reporters this quote from the original post: “Way to go, guys. Way to make us all proud.”

Flushing a Qur’an down the toilet. Gosh, that’s really helpful. I hope they got a lot of useful information that way, given the consequences:

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As you’ve probably read by now, the US Army is suspending all recruitment efforts for one day of retraining because of a string of ethics violations, which some recruiters are saying is related to the pressure on them to meet quotas. This retraining comes on the heels of news that the Army and Marines are both having trouble reaching their recruitment goals. Nearly all reports suggest the unpopularity of the Iraq war is a large factor in this, but there’s no reason with all the violence to imagine we’ll be able to bring significant numbers of the troops there back soon. So what can the Army and Marines do about this problem? In a New York Times article, Damien Cave reported that the Pentagon and marketing experts are brainstorming on four central ideas:

1. Skip the Cash, Use Peer Pressure
2. Create a Military of One
3. Privatize, Privatize, Privatize
4. Tie Military Service to Citizenship

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Via kos, a quote from Seymour Hersh:

“I get a call from a mother. She wants to see me somewhere in northeastern America. I go see her. There’s a kid that was in the unit, the 372nd. They had all come home early. If you remember the timeline, they did their stuff in late 2003, reported in 2004. This mother is telling me — I’m writing in the spring of 2004 — March of 2004, the kid had come home in the same unit totally changed. Young, pretty woman, vibrant. Depressed, disconsolate, inconsolable, isolated. Had been newly married. Left her husband, left the family, moved to a nearby town, working a night job or whatever. And nobody could figure out what’s going on.

She sees the stories about Abu Ghraib. She goes, knocks on the door, shows the young woman the newspaper, and door slams, bam! And at that point, as she tells me, later — as she tells me in real time — this is May, early May — she goes back, the kid had been given a computer, a portable computer like. (…) So she claims — this not a woman familiar with Freud or the unconscious — she claims at that point she just decided to look at the computer after hearing about Abu Ghraib. She said she had — she just hadn’t looked at it. She just was going to clean it up and take it to her office as a second computer. No thoughts. And she is deleting files. She sees a file marked “Iraq.” And she hits it, and out comes 60 or 80 digital photographs of the one that The New Yorker ran of the naked guy standing against a cell in terror, hands behind his back so he can’t protect his private parts, which is the instinct. And two snarling German dogs — shepherds. Somebody said they’re Belgian shepherds, perhaps, but two snarling shepherds, you know, on each side of him. And the sequence — in the sequence, the dogs attack the man, blood all over. (…)

So she looks at this stuff and eventually calls me. And we do it all, and we get permission. We run the photographs, just one — how much — and the thought there of the editors was how much do you humiliate the Arab world and the Arab man. One is enough. You know, we can describe what else is on the picture. We just don’t need more than one. And then, later the mother calls me back, and we became friends. This happens a lot to people in my business. You get to like people. And she says, you know, one thing I didn’t tell you that you have to know about the young woman, when she came back, every weekend, she would go and get herself tattooed, and eventually, she said, she was filling her body with large, black tattoos, and eventually, they filled up every portion of her skin, was tattooed, at least all the portions you could see, and there was no reason to make assumptions about the other portions. She was tattooed completely. It was as if, the mother said, she wanted to change her skin.” (emphasis added.)

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I’ve been doing some thinking lately about what it takes to kill your enemy during war, and keep killing them. I’m sure I have some more thinking to do on the subject (…hey, that’s what blogs are for, no?), but I’ve come to some preliminary conclusions I want to put out there.

In the "Who Defeated the Nazi’s" thread, constant reader Phil posted an excerpt from a review of a book by Uwe Timm, a German whose brother died trying to kill Russians, but not before complaining about the way the English were bombing Germany in a letter:

The diary also reveals what Timm regards as German disregard for suffering anywhere except in Germany. [His brother] Karl-Heinz writes, " I’m worried about everyone at home, we hear reports of air raids by the English every day. If only they’d stop that filthy business. It’s not war, it’s the murder of women and children — it’s inhumane ." To which Timm responds:

"It is hard to comprehend and impossible to trace the way sympathy and compassion in the face of suffering could be blanked out, while a distinction emerged between humanity at home and humanity here in Russia. In Russia, the killing of civilians is normal, everyday work, not even worth mentioning; at home it is murder. . . . I have now read other diaries and letters of the time; some observe the suffering of the civilian population and express outrage, others speak of the killing of civilians — Jews and Russians alike — as the most natural thing in the world. The language they’ve been fed makes killing easier: inferior human beings, parasites, vermin whose lives are dirty, degenerate, brutish. Smoking them out is a hygienic measure."

That strikes me as the essence of maintaining the will to kill: "the way sympathy and compassion in the face of suffering could be blanked out," but whereas Timm feels it’s impossible to trace, I feel there must be some identifiable paths to this state of mind.

So I asked myself: If you want to maintain your nation’s willingness to kill other people, what emotional strings do you pull? What tools do you use to blank out sympathy and compassion in the face of suffering?

Now you all know I opposed the invasion of Iraq, so I’m not going to pretend I’m objective here. I will attempt to be fair though. I think there are three primary tools nations can use to maintain their populace’s will to kill: fear, information operations, and the rhetoric of "the other."

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The secret memo was first published by The Times in London on Sunday. If the timing was designed to affect the British election it didn’t seem to stop the Labour Party from getting re-elected (although, their loses are widely predicted to mean Blair won’t serve out the full term as PM). But why it’s taken the US press so long to pick up the story is a mystery. Finally, though, it seems to be:

A highly classified British memo, leaked during Britain’s just-concluded election campaign, claims President Bush decided by summer 2002 to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and was determined to ensure that U.S. intelligence data supported his policy.

The memo, in which British foreign-policy aide Matthew Rycroft summarized a July 23, 2002, meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair with top security advisers, reports on a U.S. visit by Richard Dearlove, then head of Britain’s MI-6 intelligence service.

The visit took place while the Bush administration was declaring to Americans that no decision had been made to go to war. While the memo makes observations about U.S. intentions toward Iraq, the document does not specify which Bush administration officials met with Dearlove.

The MI-6 chief’s account of his U.S. visit was paraphrased by the memo: "There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and [weapons of mass destruction]. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. … There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

I’ve argued forever it seems that what we know now indicates that Bush lied about several of his intentions leading up the invasion (including the repeated assertion that the decision to invade was only made after all alternatives had been exhausted). Perhaps that’s how wars are waged. Perhaps lies are an essential part of it. That doesn’t mean we can’t call a "lie" a "lie" however.

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So I’m grabbing a coffee and muffin from the cafe near the gallery this morning. From the cover of the stack of New York Times on the counter stares back at me this young soldier who had her arm wounded so badly in Iraq she needed a prosthetic replacement. She looked stoic, proud, and not at all like she’d appreciate pity, but her photo broke my heart all the same. In a flash, I could see the explosion, the blood, the agony, the rush to treatment, and the way time stood still at the point the doctors told her they had to amputate. Note that I’m writing this before I read the entire article so this may not be exactly what happened. This particular soldier’s story is something I’ll read later; my inspiration for this post was her portrait.

I have a similar reaction each time I see reports of our soldiers who’ve lost a limb or their sight in combat. It’s a story I’ll see every two months or so: a news report from Walter Reed or wherever with someone learning to walk or eat with their new fake limbs. The soldiers usually put on a brave face and say their only regret is they can’t return to help their buddies, but sometimes you’ll see a kernel of certainly understandable fear or anger. It’s at that point my German-Irish temper flairs and I want the incompetent fools who couldn’t find some alternative to sending them over there dragged from their plush offices and stoned in the streets. But even this, I know, is but a misplaced response to an unbearable ache in my heart.

As coincidence would have it, while I was waiting in line at the cafe, Neil Young’s hauntingly lonely version of "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" was playing over the stereo. I walked out wondering whether that was applicable here. If Young is right, what do I love about these strangers, these wounded soldiers? I only know well one soldier who was wounded in combat, my cousin, and he only needed surgery to restore his hand (he used to be quite the banjo player [no snickers please, I’m serious] so that’s a significant loss, but one he’s past now), and while I love my cousin, I’m not thinking of him when I watch these news stories. Maybe Young is wrong, maybe it’s not only love. It is something, though, because the pain is acute.

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by Charles

"I praise the jihad against the occupiers in Iraq.  Throats must be split and skulls must be shattered."

"There is nothing wrong with [suicide attacks] if they cause great damage to the enemy."

"Jihad against the occupiers is a must.  [It is] not only a legitimate right but a religious duty."

The first two quotes were spoken by Saudi clerics on Arabic TV, and the final quote came from a religious statement published last November and signed by 26 Saudi clerics, according to MSNBC.  Saudi Arabia is purportedly an American ally, yet its religious leaders continue to encourage its citizens to kill American soldiers and to execute terrorist attacks.  Some of those clerics are on the Saudi government payroll.  Most galling–and most deserving of my nomination–is the official Saudi response:

He [a "senior Saudi official"] says the government cannot control these clerics because most are not on the payroll, and they are exercising their rights to free speech.

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This is a post about process.  Boring, I know.  You’d rather be talking about conclusions.  You’d rather be arguing right and wrong.  You’d rather be debating ends, not means.  (God knows I would.) 

But this is a post about process.  Because process — boring,  banal, bureaucratic process — is what’s really important.  If you want to do this you must do it that way.  No, you may not jump to the head of the line.  Yes, you must fill out the form in triplicate.  Civilization is life measured in coffee spoons; and this is, on the whole, a good thing.

(But it’s also why, if you’re wondering, civilization makes the artist in us despair.)

I’ve written on this subject before.  In posts that annoyed nearly everyone, I argued for gay marriage but against finding a "right" to gay marriage in the Constitution.  It is annoying, I agree.  Much better would be for me to simply decree that gays should be allowed to marry and be done with it.  But that’s not process; that’s not playing by the rules or tradition.  That’s making it up as you go along and, when the next guy comes along, who’s to say he doesn’t make it worse?  So the means matter.  They matter as much as — and sometimes more than — the ends.

But I don’t come here to fight old fights.  Or to talk about the process being done (or not done) to poor Ms. Schiavo.  I’m here to discuss another abuse of process that is right now happening.  I want to stop the cheering (for there undoubtably will be some) before it begins.

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By Edward

A report by the BBC’s Greg Palast on Newsnight indicates that US "Big Oil" executives have had an alarming amount of input into how Iraq’s oil industry (and hence, elections and other things) has been run since the fall of Hussein. From secret planning meetings well before 9/11 to defeating a Neo-Con plan to privatize the Iraqi oil industry (and thereby destroy the OPEC cartel), Big Oil has been effectively putting its interest in not being barred from bidding on Iraqi reserves ahead of other concerns.

Two years ago today – when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad – protesters claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq’s oil once Saddam had been conquered.

In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists".

"Big Oil" appears to have won. The latest plan, obtained by Newsnight from the US State Department was, we learned, drafted with the help of American oil industry consultants.

Insiders told Newsnight that planning began "within weeks" of Bush’s first taking office in 2001, long before the September 11th attack on the US.

An Iraqi-born oil industry consultant, Falah Aljibury, says he took part in the secret meetings in California, Washington and the Middle East. He described a State Department plan for a forced coup d’etat.

Mr Aljibury himself told Newsnight that he interviewed potential successors to Saddam Hussein on behalf of the Bush administration.

We’ve always known that Bush was full of it when he suggested the invasion would not take place if Hussein complied with the weapons inspectors (and I don’t mind saying, this nullifies the defense that noncompliance with standing UN resolutions justified the war IMO), but intentions to move forward with a forced coup d’etat months before 9/11 makes all the WMD in the hands of terrorists blather that much more insulting.

But back to the Oil Industry, though. Apparently, in one way, what was good for Big Oil was indeed good for the nation (Iraq, that is). Apparently, going into Iraq, the NeoCons were in control in as much as privatization was the plan, but that idea quickly revealed itself to have been a match meeting a stick of dynamite:

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by Charles

The appointment of State Department veteran John Bolton to the UN ambassadorship was a bold one.  You don’t select a guy like Bolton and expect milquetoast.  Quite the opposite.  While there is no shortage of tut-tutting and worries from unnamed sources, Bolton is just the guy to challenge the waning moral authority and ineffectual leadership of this bloated bureaucratic body, as Anne Applebaum aptly noted.  So, in keeping with the spirit of this choice, I propose a bold three-point initiative for Mr. Bolton after his confirmation.  These are the sort of right-off-the-starting-block actions that will set the right tenor between the US and UN for the remainder of Bush’s term.  Two of the three are deliberately confrontational.  As they should be, since the UN has more often than not worked against American and global interests than with them.

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By Edward

So the bad apples have been isolated, there is no connection to the top brass, and stricter guidelines have been put in place to keep incidents like those that happened at Abu Ghraib from happening again. All is relatively well in the world with regard to America’s relationship to torture. At least according to the recently released report by Navy Vice Adm. Albert T. Church, who "conducted more than 800 interviews and reviewed the conclusions of several other investigations."

Church concluded that no civilian or uniformed leaders directed or encouraged abuse, and his report holds Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top defense leaders largely blameless on the narrow question of pressuring interrogators as well as the larger matter of interrogation policies.

"We found no evidence to support the notion that the office of the secretary of defense (or other military or White House staff) applied explicit pressure for intelligence or gave ‘back channel’ permission to forces in the field in Iraq or in Afghanistan" to exceed the bounds of authorized interrogation practices, the report said.

But if that’s the case (i.e., those we elected are not responsible), why do even I still feel the need to shower every time this subject comes up? Can all of the abuses now coming to light really be dismissed as merely a lack of expertise and oversight? Who are these bad apples cropping up in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba, and even the CIA? What’s it say about our culture or our military in general that bad apples are so plentiful? Are our troops really just that stressed out or undertrained? Why isn’t that seen as a crisis?

The report’s conclusion hinges on this one statement:

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by Edward

via a diary by Harley on Tacitus
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What kind of monsters are they churning out over at the CIA? I mean, I know they must have taken lots of heat for missing the signs that the 9/11 attacks were coming, but at what point did Tenet or whomever start approving secret rendition programs and training our agents to behave just like the tyrants we’re supposed to be clearing off the earth:

In November 2002, a newly minted CIA case officer in charge of a secret prison just north of Kabul allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets, according to four U.S. government officials aware of the case.

The Afghan guards — paid by the CIA and working under CIA supervision in an abandoned warehouse code-named the Salt Pit — dragged their captive around on the concrete floor, bruising and scraping his skin, before putting him in his cell, two of the officials said.

As night fell, so, predictably, did the temperature.

By morning, the Afghan man had frozen to death.

After a quick autopsy by a CIA medic — "hypothermia" was listed as the cause of death — the guards buried the Afghan, who was in his twenties, in an unmarked, unacknowledged cemetery used by Afghan forces, officials said. The captive’s family has never been notified; his remains have never been returned for burial. He is on no one’s registry of captives, not even as a "ghost detainee," the term for CIA captives held in military prisons but not registered on the books, they said.

"He just disappeared from the face of the earth," said one U.S. government official with knowledge of the case.

The CIA case officer, meanwhile, has been promoted…

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By Edward

Update: cross-posted on Liberal Street Fighter

What is it about NeoCon supporters that causes them to party like it’s 1999 over the most precarious of victories? Revenge of the high-school wallflowers syndrome? Seriously, from the "Mission Accomplished" embarrassment; to the decorating of Tenet, Franks, and Bremer; to the currently spreading canonization of Paul Wolfowitz, it’s as if they have a warehouse bursting at the seams with streamers and helium balloons they can’t hold back. "Puh-le-e-e-e-aze, let’s us dance now…we’ve learned the Macarena!"

Let me back up here, though, before anyone concludes that this is about sour grapes. Back when it was first becoming apparent to me that the invasion of Iraq was less about WMD and more about Wolfowitz et al.’s desire to test their social re-engineering theories, I acknowledged openly and frequently that perhaps one day he would be heralded as a genius in our history books. In fact, I truthfully said I hope so. But the cart is being shoved out ahead of the horse all over the place where Wolfie’s concerned.

In a column stuffed with the sort of sentiments normally reserved for love-struck teenagers’ diaries, David (I really am the NYTimes’ most transparent hack) Brooks is nearly panting with adulation for the man he says has "always been an ardent champion of freedom." But, as usual, Brooks gets it exactly backwards:

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Most of Giuliana Sgrena’s suspicion that she was targeted by US forces could be explained away in terms of bias (she was always against the war) and circumstances (she was reportedly "celebrating" in the car, so it’s possible she was not watching what was happening in front of the car), but, unless she’s simply lying about what her captors said, there’s either an eerie coincidence to her car being shot up (with apparently up to 400 rounds) or something stinks to high heaven:

In an article Sunday, Sgrena said her captors warned her shortly before her release to beware of the Americans. She later told Italian state TV RAI that "when they let me go, it was a difficult moment for me because they told me, `The Americans don’t want you to return alive to Italy.’" She didn’t elaborate.

The US account of what happened differs significantly from Sgrena’s:

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The Dutch Reporter has been keeping tabs on Islamic extremism in the Netherlands, in particular the travails of two politicians under virtual house arrest for fear of terrorist attacks against them.  The Washington Post wrote a piece last month on Geert Wilders, who has taken a strong stance against extremism within Dutch borders.  He is literally living in a prison:

Parliamentary representatives Geert Wilders, who receives many dead threats from Islamic immigrants is already for months housed in prison camp Zeist. A high secure prison that was also used for the Lockerbie terrorists. Wilders has to sleep in a prison cell…Representative Wilders is told, that he has to stay in jail until September before he can get other housing. Five years a go this prison was used to hold the Libyan terrorist who blew up a plane above Lockerbie. After the Lockerbie trial the prison has been used for drug traffickers from Schiphol. But at this moment it is used for illegal aliens and other criminals.

Fellow parliamentary member Hirsi Ali–who wasn’t murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri because Theo Van Gogh proved an easier target–was "housed on a heavily guarded Marine complex in Amsterdam".  Ironically, the imprisoned legislator just received an emancipation prize from a Dutch feminist magazine.

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