Mladic on his own?
Writing from Belgrade for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, Balkans expert Tim Judah thinks there may be real movement behind the rumors of Ratko Mladic's imminent/already/maybe/guess not capture, after speaking with Braca Grubacic, "one of Serbia's best-connected analysts":

Whereas in the past, [Grubacic] says, Mladic has lived in army barracks and had tight links to Serbia's security establishment, Kostunica's government - determined not to have talks with the EU suspended and also to create some positive PR just at the moment that talks on the future of Kosovo have begun - has finally managed to 'break Mladic's relations with the army'. 'I believe he is on his own now,' said Grubacic.

Mladic is wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for crimes against humanity in connection with the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre.

Judah's article continues with an update on the status of the trial of the "Scorpions" involved in the notorious execution video that surfaced last year:

If it had not been for the Mladic story, then another one might have been leading the news in Serbia - the on-going trial of members of the infamous Scorpions militia, who were filmed executing captured Muslims from Srebrenica in 1995. This week one of the accused told the court, 'It is certain that I am guilty before God, but whether I am guilty for executing my orders, it is up to you to assess.'

Meanwhile, judging by a BBC report, Mladic supporters in the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) were perhaps worried enough -- and certainly numerous enough -- for 10,000 to turn up for a rally in Belgrade today. An SRS leader pledged there would be "no forgiveness" for anyone surrendering Mladic -- suggesting, when I thought about it, that the SRS may be as in the dark as the rest of us. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:25:00 PM -- |  

 
Dubai Ports World
Writing for "The Nation," William Greider has himself a good laugh about Bush's demagoguery coming home to roost:

David Brooks, the high-minded conservative pundit, dismissed the Dubai Ports controversy as an instance of political hysteria that will soon pass. He was commenting on PBS, and I thought I heard a little quaver in his voice when he said this was no big deal. Brooks consulted "the experts," and they assured him there's no national security risk in a foreign company owned by Middle East Muslims--actually, by an Arab government--managing six major American ports. Cool down, people. This is how the world works in the age of globalization.

Of course, he is correct. [...]

Greider concludes:

So why is the fearmonger-in-chief being so casual about this Dubai business?

Because at some level of consciousness even George Bush knows the inflated fears are bogus. So do a lot of the politicians merrily throwing spears at him. He taught them how to play this game, invented the tactics and reorganized political competition as a demagogic dance of hysterical absurdities, endless opportunities to waste public money. Very few dare to challenge the mindset. Thousands have died for it.

Unlike digby, I'd say this is only partly right. Fearmonger-in-chief: check. Many fears are bogus, inflated: check. Bush knows that at some level: check. But specific concerns about the Dubai Port deal being inflated and bogus: well... how does Greider know? How does Bush know? How do any of us know? Is it unreasonable to want to find out? Maybe Greider, Kevin Drum, digby ("right on the money"), and others are right to think this is nothing more than political poetic justice, but I'm less sanguine about the merits of allowing the sale to go forward.

A recent Zogby/AAI poll* indicates overwhelmingly negative opinions towards the United States in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where Dubai Ports World is based. Arguably deservedly so -- the reasons given are American mistreatment of Arabs and the Iraq war. So I'm willing to stipulate, for the sake of argument, that 99% of Dubai Port employees and management back at the home office are superb human beings who I'd be lucky and honored to have dinner with. That still leaves awkward facts like two UAE 9/11 hijackers and members of the UAE royal family reportedly joining a hunting party with Bin Laden in Afghanistan back in 1999.

I'm assured, and do not doubt, that DP World will have to work with U.S. customs, Coast Guard and Homeland Security officials day in, day out at these American ports. Why the latter should fill me with confidence is beyond me, but again, let's assume everyone's doing a heckuva job for the sake of argument.

What one still has is a company that literally has bought the keys to America's front door, and that is based in and owned by a government and a Wahhabist aristocratic ruling class with a few strikes against it. You would think government ownership of a port facility ought to be against conservative and free-market principles, the more so when the government itself is an unaccountable family affair. But what do I know.

I'm asked to believe ownership of these port facilities would pose no additional risk to Americans. Yet ownership, at least to me, means Dubai Port board member, vice president, or upper management man X would have a substantially easier time observing customs and homeland security procedures, monitoring shipments, manipulating port records, and/or arranging physical access to these ports than he did before the sale. X and/or his angry young cousin, that is: the same AAI poll indicates people there consider nepotism the most important reason jobs are hard to find in the UAE.

But again, what do I know. Maybe "things don't work that way"; maybe the emir of Dubai himself will not be able to pull up a chair and download the shipping records and inspection protocols for Dubai Port World's operations in Philadelphia. Show me -- and because I won't believe you the first time, show me again and try harder.

To call that racist or "anti-Arab," as variously Rush Limbaugh, Tom Friedman, and the Arab American Institute do, is to drain that word of all meaning. There are good reasons to want to know who exactly controls Dubai Ports World, and what safeguards, if any, stand between us and a "Bin Laden II" using this company's access to American ports to his advantage.

Writing for Wired Magazine (and excerpted at his blog), security expert Bruce Schneier makes sense:

Pull aside the rhetoric, and this is everyone's point. There are those who don't trust the Bush administration and believe its motivations are political. There are those who don't trust the UAE because of its terrorist ties -- two of the 9/11 terrorists and some of the funding for the attack came out of that country -- and those who don't trust it because of racial prejudices. There are those who don't trust security at our nation's ports generally and see this as just another example of the problem.

And there are those of us so far gone as to not trust the Bush administration, the UAE's ruling class, and our nation's port security, all at the same time. Schneier concludes:

The solution is openness. The Bush administration needs to better explain how port security works, and the decision process by which the sale of P&O was approved. If this deal doesn't compromise security, voters -- at least the particular lawmakers we trust -- need to understand that.

Now that's "right on the money." The Bush administration has to prove it's safe to me-- the more so since they usually argue we must accept all kinds of other crimes and moral failures in the name of national security.

=====
*AAI: Arab American Institute. 500 UAE respondents surveyed 10/18/05--10/24/05; 21% favorable to US, 73% unfavorable; 44% say nepotism is chief cause of employment difficulties in the country. MOE +/- 10%.

NOTES: Greider, Limbaugh (actually "Seeing the Forest" cite of Limbaugh) links via "Hullabaloo." Friedman excerpted by Atrios. Zogby/AAI lead via publius ("Legal Fiction"), who cites older 2004 data. Their discussions are worth reading, and I agree with much of each writer's post.
UPDATE, 2/23: In Tapped, Yglesias disputes Friedman et al's charges of racism against those questioning the port deal, for reasons similar to mine. And a Rasmussen poll shows only 17% of Americans approve of the Dubai Ports deal, while 63% disapprove. (1000 respondents, 2/22-23, MOE +/- 4%) (via Atrios).
posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:41:00 PM -- |  

 
Trust me, this'll bring 'em around
When Trust is Gone (Daniel Froomkin, washingtonpost.com) --- With President Bush's credibility damaged and his political clout eroded, maybe it was just a matter of time before "trust me" didn't hack it anymore -- even with his most loyal supporters in Congress.

Bush Threatens Veto Against Bid To Stop Port Deal (Jim Vandehei, Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post) --- Facing a sharp bipartisan backlash, Bush took the unusual step of summoning reporters to the front of Air Force One to condemn efforts to block a firm from the United Arab Emirates from purchasing the rights to manage ports that include those in New York and New Orleans.

White House Working to Avoid Wiretap Probe (Charles Babington, Washington Post)--- [Senators] Hagel and Snowe declined interview requests after the meeting, but sources close to them say they bridle at suggestions that they buckled under administration heat. The White House must engage "in good-faith negotiations" with Congress, Snowe said in a statement.

Facing Pressure, White House Seeks Approval for Spying (Sheryl Gay Stolberg, David Sanger, New York Times) --- The administration opened negotiations with Congress last week, but it is far from clear whether Mr. Bush will be able to fend off calls from Democrats and some Republicans for increased oversight of the eavesdropping program, which is run by the National Security Agency.

The latest Republican to join the growing chorus of those seeking oversight is Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," Mr. Graham, a former military prosecutor whose opinion on national security commands respect in the Senate, said he believed there was now a "bipartisan consensus" to have broader Congressional and judicial review of the program.

---
Looks like it's time for some hunting trips with Dick, if you know what I mean.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 8:44:00 PM -- |  

 
Department of followups: extremist nuts edition
Following up on some old posts:

Sayyid Qutb's French connection, August 18, 2003 --- Sayyid Qutb is considered the political forefather of Islamists like Zawahiri and bin Laden, and my post was about his admiration for and frequent citation of the works of Alexis Carrel, who was among other things a medical Nobel prize winner, a Vichy France official, and an apologist for eugenics. The post was largely based on an article in the German newsweekly Die Zeit by Rudolph Walther.

Now a link to that post has been added (perhaps only temporarily) to a Wikipedia entry about Carrel -- a minor but welcome mark of distinction, but one which also rather promptly earned me a pro-Carrel troll's comment. It turns out the entry's "neutral point of view" is currently in dispute, by someone who wishes to consider discussion of Carrel's political views out of bounds, or irrelevant compared to his medical achievements.

As the Wikipedia entry notes, Carrel's influence on Qutb is ironic, since Monsieur Carrel didn't think much of Islam. But it's still not utterly surprising that Carrel's works are cited more often in Qutb's writings than any other document than the Qur'an itself -- the two share a totalitarian, elitist vision for the good of the dumb plebes whose lives they'd like to rule, from what I've gleaned of their writings. These days I wonder if getting Qutb's attention might have been just plain posthumous bad luck -- however richly deserved -- for Carrel; perhaps Qutb just imprinted on the first bit of fascist-lite philosophizing he came across, and let its jaundiced outlook on liberal Western culture dress up and influence his own.

At any rate, both seem at core pathetic figures; yet here we are, stuck with the consequences of their writings. If only they could have been bloggers back then -- the world could probably have happily ignored the both of them! Or, of course, they might have founded Les Petites Vertes Footballs and Islamist Green Soccerballs, and then what a world of hurt we'd be in.


Preemptive absolution, Al Qaeda style, April 18, 2004 --- Jane Mayer's piece "The Memo," discussed below ("Alberto J. Mora") reminded me of the Madrid train station bombers who felt drinking bottled Mecca "Zamzam" water magically absolved them of their sins in advance. Why? Captain Diane Beaver, legal advisor to "Joint Task Force 170," assigned to try to determine Al Qaeda's next move after 9/11. Mayer:

She acknowledged that American military personnel at Guantánamo, as everywhere else in the world, were bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which characterizes “cruelty,” “maltreatment,” “threats,” and “assault” as felonies. Beaver reasoned, however, that U.S. soldiers preparing to violate these laws in their interrogations might be able to obtain “permission, or immunity” from higher authorities “in advance.”

(Emphasis added.) Al Qaeda and the Pentagon: convergent evolution to preemptive absolution.


No one must ever again know anything, May 7, 2005 --- In the post, I told the amazing tale of LBJ administration "Presidential Daily Briefs" (PDBs) being kept classified by the Bush administration, so that they could not become part of an ineffable "mosaic of information" helping somebody (the Viet Cong?) gain insight into the Tao of PDBs and American intelligence. Such as they are. (A followup post mentioned that a pliant judge had granted the Bush administration's every wish.)

But not only are forty year old documents being kept secret for no good reason, already declassified ones are being reclassified. The New York Times' Scott Shanes reports ("U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents," Feb. 21):

In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

To be fair, the reclassification program had its start during the Clinton administration. To continue being fair, it has vastly accelerated under the Cheney administration. Rather than once again engage in my own quaint handwringing about this, I'll treat you to someone else's: "I think this is a travesty," said Dr. Nelson, who said she believed that some reclassified material was in her files. "I think the public is being deprived of what history is really about: facts." Get with the program, Dr. Nelson! We're not interested in those anymore.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:25:00 AM -- |  

 
Alberto J. Mora
Reagan conservative... general counsel, United States Navy... American hero:

Well before the exposure of prisoner abuse in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, in April, 2004, Mora warned his superiors at the Pentagon about the consequences of President Bush’s decision, in February, 2002, to circumvent the Geneva conventions, which prohibit both torture and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." He argued that a refusal to outlaw cruelty toward U.S.-held terrorist suspects was an implicit invitation to abuse. Mora also challenged the legal framework that the Bush Administration has constructed to justify an expansion of executive power, in matters ranging from interrogations to wiretapping. He described as "unlawful," "dangerous," and "erroneous" novel legal theories granting the President the right to authorize abuse. Mora warned that these precepts could leave U.S. personnel open to criminal prosecution."

-- "The Memo," Jane Mayer, New Yorker, 2/27 issue; via Nell.

As Marty Lederman at Balkinization points out, Mayer's report deepens our understanding of the genesis of the notorious "working group report" used to send Geoffrey Miller on his merry way to Iraq to "GTMOize" Abu Ghraib.

It turns out Mora worked hard to get the report drafted by John Yoo quashed, telling his boss William Haynes it was "deeply flawed" and should be locked away and “never let out to see the light of day again.” When Haynes disavowed torture as U.S. policy in a June, 2003 letter to Senator Patrick Leahy, Mora believed he'd succeeded -- the more so as he never had the chance to formally protest the report, which he had anticipated he would have to do. As Lederman summarizes this part of the story:

The Working Group itself, including Mora -- in whose name the Report was drafted -- were never informed that it was finalized and issued on April 4, 2003. Indeed, they were deceived by Pentagon General Counsel Haynes into believing that the Report had been scrapped after their persistent objections. But in fact, the final version of the Report -- based principally on the extreme legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel, which had aroused persistent outrage and objection from the career lawyers in the Pentagon -- was "signed out" on April 4th and "briefed" to Geoffrey Miller before he was assigned to Iraq.

I'm not quite there yet -- I'd much prefer they faced trial here in the United States -- but I'm beginning to think a future, untainted United States government should strongly consider extradition of at least Rumsfeld, Yoo, and Haynes to the Hague for war crimes, along with the evidence necessary to convict them.* These people knowingly, wilfully broke U.S. law and international law. They knew they were doing that because Mora told them so and the armed services' Judge Advocates General (JAGs) told them so. They did it anyway.

I will admit that "international law" can seem an oxymoron to me: laws are made by sovereign nations to apply to their citizens, they and their enforcement and adjudication shouldn't float free of specific legislatures, executives, and courts responsible to specific citizenries. On the other hand, those international understandings we've signed on to are, by our own lights, as deeply binding as the Constitution itself. The question is, who adjudicates the case when we break such understandings.

Frankly, we seem unlikely to do the job of punishing our Yoos and Rumsfelds here. Even if a new anti-torture, pro rule of law administration were in place, it might not want the long-running controversy of pursuing convictions of political rivals. Extradition might regrettably be more feasible: once it's done, it's done, and without presuming guilt or innocence.

It would be a cop-out, though, compared to slogging through to our own legal outcome. Yet some kind of punishment will be necessary for a clear re-establishment of the rule of law; it would place one kind of limit on how much the assertion of "unitary" executive power or other absurd constitutional theories can protect those just following its orders.

Meanwhile, Nell -- who actually knew Mora in college, she's everywhere -- points out:

It must have been especially galling to the son of an anti-Castro emigre that Guantanamo, Cuba would be the the place where the highest officials of the United States would wilfully discard our most fundamental values.

Mora told Mayer much the same in explaining why he didn't hesitate to speak out:

"It never crossed my mind," he said. "Besides, my mother would have killed me if I hadn’t spoken up. No Hungarian after Communism, or Cuban after Castro, is not aware that human rights are incompatible with cruelty.” He added, "The debate here isn’t only how to protect the country. It’s how to protect our values."

WWMT? -- "What would Mom think?" Might not be a bad measuring stick for future legal counsels. Believe it or not, Mora's new career is general counsel for Wal-Mart's international operations. The folks in Bentonville may have got themselves more than they bargained for.


=====
* I'm not completely out on a limb here. In an October 31, 2005 debate with John Yoo, University College of London law professor and Guantanamo detainee counsel Philippe Sands asserted that Nuremberg-style war crimes charges would be appropriate against Yoo for his legal advice. (Sands begins at approx. 7:00 minutes, his specific arguments begin at approx. 14:30 minutes). This would be similar to charges levied against Nazi legal counsels at Nuremberg. I would think Rumsfeld and Haynes might deserve the same for ignoring pointed, repeated protests against Yoo's analyses by their own senior legal staff, including Mora and the JAGs.

That's just based on this article; it could be that others such as Addington and Cheney deserve extradition as well. As for the big kahuna, on the one hand, I'd be tempted to allow Bush some kind of competency defense; on the other, his many admirers keep assuring me he's large and in charge. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:51:00 AM -- |