Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 55

Obamacare for Israel

 The message for Israel is simple: Enjoy your Obamacare!

The past week’s presidential aggression-and-retreat two-step -- amid indignant protestations that there had ever been any aggression in the first place -- perfectly fit Obama’s pattern, which is already shopworn less than three years into his term. To cite the classic case, who could forget the single-payer shuffle?

“I have not said that I am a supporter of a single-payer system,” declaimed Mr. Obama in 2009, as reported by National Review’s Jim Geraghty. The president’s assertion was an insult to the public intelligence, no matter how credulously the Obamedia repeated it. Out here in YouTube world, it was readily demonstrated that Obama had long been a dogmatic adherent of socialized medicine -- meaning a complete government takeover of the health sector, destroying the private insurance industry and rationing care as if it were a corporate asset to be doled out by bureaucrats rather than a matter of personal choice in a free market.

#ad#“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health-care program,” Obama said in 2003, before denying that he’d said any such thing a few years later. He was a state senator then, reelected in one of the country’s most left-wing districts and speaking comfortably in his element -- activists for socialized medicine. Those who heard him speak his mind found his sentiments pedestrian, the sort of thing he said all the time. “A single-payer health-care plan, a universal health-care plan,” he’d elaborated, “that’s what I’d like to see.”

It was no surprise to people who actually knew Obama, such as Dr. Quentin Young, an Obama supporter from their Hyde Park neighborhood and the head of a socialized medicine lobby, Physicians for a National Health Program. Dr. Young argued that the dastardly private insurers were swimming in “profits that are breathtaking and obscene.” As Dr. Young recalled, Obama’s comments were “his categorical response,” something the state senator often repeated among constituents.

Obama is an Alinskyite, though, a practical radical. Ineffective radicals are so blinded by ideology, so intoxicated by their own sense of righteousness, that they refuse to gauge the public sensibilities. Alinskyites are no less committed to their ideology; indeed, only a person who has completely bought into his ideology can maintain the patient discipline necessary to implement his utopia incrementally. That discipline is what makes the Alinskyite effective. Such an operator understands that you must always check the public pulse: Figure out how far you can push people, but never push so far that you lose political viability. Without power, radicalism is a dead end. The race is not to the swift but to the electable.

So Obama tweaked his health-care positions, pretending he’d never said the things he’d said, massaging his message depending on the sensibilities of his audience. He shrewdly banked on a press corps willing to be enlisted to his purposes, and on the natural tendency of decent people to give likeable politicians the benefit of the doubt, to assume they are not being lied to.

The public did not want an all-out government takeover, so Obama claimed that wasn’t where he was coming from. The public does not want to underwrite insurance for illegal aliens, so the number of uninsured Americans described in Obama speeches suddenly shrank by 10 or 20 million when people started to catch on to his ambitious intentions. The public is far more worried about costs than about the uninsured, so Obama couched his plan’s astronomical spending in the rhetoric of fiscal discipline -- presto, tens of millions of people would get a new entitlement that would somehow cost Americans less money. The public was promised a workable, affordable system, so the administration now issues thousands of waivers from Obamacare’s onerous terms, lest the dreaded emperor-has-no-clothes moment come before the 2012 election.

All of these were tactical maneuvers, not strategic ones. This is the thing to understand about Obama’s vaunted pragmatism. The president is not pragmatic in a free-wheeling sense, but pragmatic within the framework of leftist ideology. In the case of health care, the goal -- unmistakable to anyone willing to gaze at the horizon instead of today’s talking points -- is fully socialized medicine, the most practical route to a socialist economy in the United States. Each tactical adjustment is made with the ultimate goal in mind. Whether the moment’s politics call for galloping or inching along, the end is always in sight.

#page#That is the formula for understanding Obama on Israel. In the hard-core Left from which the president hails, Israel is no less reviled than the health-insurance companies. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proudly boasted in his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, “America has no better friend than Israel.” That would be reason enough for those consumed by a blame-America-first mentality to loathe Israel. Palestinian Muslims live on global largesse and complain that it’s not enough, epitomize the culture of victimhood, and lionize terrorist “martyrs” who are no more savage (though a good bit more competent) than the iconic Bill Ayers and his Weather Underground. In short, the Palestinians check all the Left’s boxes. Even if Obama’s circle of Chicago friends did not include the rabidly anti-Israel Ayers and former PLO mouthpiece Rashid Khalidi, there would be little mystery about who is assigned the hero’s role and who is the villain in the president’s estimate of this long-running drama.

#ad#But Obama could not say such a thing and remain politically viable. He knows that. Anyone who watched the rousing bipartisan ovation that washed over his bête noire, Netanyahu, in Congress on Tuesday would know that. This is an ardently pro-Israel country, and Obama’s Palestinian sympathies are no more representative of where Americans stand than is the longing for single-payer health care. Just like leading from the rear, governing from the fringe is a skill. It is necessary to dissemble.

The 1967 borders the president floated last week are the single-payer of American Middle East policy. Just as single-payer is code for socialized medicine, the ’67 borders are code for an indefensible Israel that cannot survive as a Jewish state. Such an Israel is the dream of every leftist who has deluded himself into believing that Israel is a guilt-induced mistake of the post-Holocaust era, and that Israel’s continued existence as an outpost of Western liberalism in the Islamic world is the cause of Muslim animus and terror. You’ll never hear Obama or the Left say that. They will repeat the mantra that America’s bond with Israel is unbreakable, just as they repeated the mantra that the goal of “reforming” health care is to “control costs” (as opposed to controlling Americans). But it is what they really think, just as they really think health care should be nationalized to promote their idea of social justice, regardless of how much it costs.

By dilating on the ’67 borders, a practical radical gauges how far he can push the public without saying outright what his goal is. That is what Obama tried to do last week. He appeared to qualify the call for retrenching Israel’s boundaries with an allusion to land “swaps” -- just as he frequently caveats his support for single-payer with hollow words about adjusting it to the private system we have, or about its being what he’d design on a clean slate but not necessarily what he seeks now.

In the case of Israel, the practical radical miscalculated. American Jews and other friends of Israel know that retreat to the ’67 borders is the Arab premise, not the premise from which all interested parties begin settlement discussions. The American and Israeli position has long been that those borders are implausible. Consequently, for an American president to utter “1967 borders,” with or without “swaps,” was a seismic shift.

Obama’s error was to wager that it would be a shift to which the public would be open, or at least indifferent. He has made the same sort of mistake before, confounding the unpopularity of the war in Iraq with what he hopefully took to be the unpopularity of Bush counterterrorism in general -- a miscalculation that has led him into embarrassing reversals on commitments to close Gitmo, end military commissions, and return counterterrorism to the law-enforcement model.

This time, the blowback was immediate and instantly complemented by a dressing down from Netanyahu, a stunningly deft combination of eloquence, passion, and steely defiance cloaked in diplomatic respect. In what seemed like the blink of an eye between Thursday’s State Department speech and Sunday’s AIPAC speech, Obama went from asserting, “We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps,” to risibly claiming that he’d said Israel and Palestine “will negotiate a border that is different from the one that existed on June 4, 1967.” He went from trying to dictate the course of future events to laughably insisting that all he’d meant was that Israelis and Palestinians would have to negotiate settlement terms on their own.

No one should be fooled, and no one was. Obama beat a breakneck retreat precisely because both his fans and his detractors realized he had tried to do something bold, his pretense to the contrary notwithstanding.

The solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is straightforward, just as fixing what ails the health-care system is simple. The former requires Arab and Muslim concessions that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, that terrorism is an unacceptable tactic for resolving political differences, and that Israel will not be engulfed by floods of “refugees.” The latter needs an acknowledgment that health care is no more a corporate asset than private property is and that a real market -- one that eliminates third-party payers and turns users into sentient consumers -- would drive down prices.

Of course, neither of these scenarios is acceptable to the Obama Left, so we’ll continue to see bobbing and weaving about 1967 borders and land swaps and preexisting conditions and end-of-life counseling and similar head-spinning esoterica. Always remember that these are just chess moves. Obama eyes the whole board, and he makes the occasional blunder, but he never kicks over the table: He keeps his eyes on ultimate goal. To beat him, it is necessary to know that -- and make sure America knows it. The next time around, there’d be no reelection to worry about.

Borderline Treachery

Would that the president of the United States were as worried about Arizona’s border as he is about “Palestine’s.”

There was less fanfare about this latest Obama oration on the future of the Middle East, staged at Foggy Bottom, than there was about his 2009 Cairo speech. It was, however, every bit as delusional, and twice as treacherous.

As for the delusional, “Arab Spring” devotees are thrilled that the president has morphed into his predecessor on the Democracy Project -- the enterprise in which future generations of American taxpayers go deeper into hock as our tapped-out government borrows more Chinese billions in order to stimulate the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the few shovel-ready projects President Obama has managed to find (and as a union, the Brothers make the SEIU look like the Jaycees). There is cruel irony in the Arab Spring hallucination, though, evidenced by this bit of rhetorical flourish: “Through the moral force of nonviolence, the people of the region have achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplished in six years.”

#ad#As the president utters his paeans to nonviolence, Egyptians and Iraqis continue slaughtering their religious minorities, and Bashar Assad, the “reformer,” murders his Syrian subjects in the street with the help of his friends at Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist organization whose day job is running the Lebanese government. The democracy fetish that gave Hezbollah and Hamas thugs the patina of political legitimacy is about to place Egypt under the thumb of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is itching to deep-six the treaty that has kept peace with Israel for 30 years. Speaking of Israel, it is recovering from a weekend in which thousands of “peaceful protesters” stormed four of its borders. Meanwhile, Iraq, which is touted by Arab Spring enthusiasts -- and now even the Obama Left -- as a Democracy Project success story, just announced that it will show its gratitude to American soldiers and taxpayers by expanding military ties with Iran, the world’s leading facilitator of Islamist terror. Pakistan, when not holding memorial services for Osama bin Laden, is exploding in bloodshed. The Obama administration is pleading with the Taliban to come to the negotiating table; you may recall that the Taliban is the reason our troops are still in Afghanistan preventing the collapse of its fragile “democracy” and the reopening of a safe haven for al-Qaeda. And al-Qaeda’s current safe haven, Yemen, is the site of a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. So much for nonviolence.

The president stumbled into a bracing truth when he compared the change achieved by the people in the region, on the one hand, and by terrorists on the other. The change both are seeking is the same: the creation of sharia societies. Obama and Democracy Project promoters like to frame the Arab Spring as the ultimate rejection of al-Qaeda. But it is, at most, a discovery that there are better tactical routes to the promised land than al-Qaeda’s crude brutality. That promised land is not Western liberalism; it is Islam in all its repression of free speech, religious liberty, and equality -- American principles the president spoke of his boundless determination to promote, while avoiding a single mention of Islam or sharia, which make achieving those principles a pipedream in this region.

Speaking of the promised land, the real one, Israel, is apparently getting smaller. This was Obama’s news-making treachery, and its ramifications are impossible to predict, other than that they bode ill.

For the first time in history, an American president explicitly called for a settlement of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict premised on the 1967 borders -- i.e., the 1949 armistice line, the tenuous state of play before Israel captured the West Bank (actually, Judea and Samaria), the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights in the Arab war of aggression to destroy the Jewish state. To be sure, Obama said that there would also have to be territorial “swaps” to satisfy security concerns. This caveat, though, is cold comfort for Israel, America’s only true ally in the region.

To begin with, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to point out, the 1967 borders are “indefensible.” That is why they have never been the starting point of U.S. policy, even though they always hover over negotiations. In its implacable hostility to Israel, the “international community” chooses to forget how and why the Arab side first grabbed, then lost, the territory in question. For nearly a half century since the adoption of U.N. Security Council resolution 242, the Washington Institute’s Robert Satloff explains, American administrations of both parties have called for eventual Israeli withdrawal to “secure and recognized” borders, a phrase interpreted as “not synonymous with the pre-1967 boundaries.”

By his new articulation, President Obama would deny Israel crucial negotiating leverage. If there is to be a peace settlement (which there cannot be until there are two parties that want peace), Israel must have the latitude to make territorial concessions in exchange for reliable concessions on security and other matters. It cannot be coerced into accepting an Obama-imposed fait accompli that leaves it fatally vulnerable to enemies whose ferocity is only encouraged by this bullying.

Bear in mind that what are called the “1967 borders” were never agreed-upon national boundaries. The Jewish claim on Judea and Samaria has roots in antiquity. This fact was intentionally obfuscated by Obama’s earlier suggestion in Cairo that Israel’s creation was an ill-conceived payback for the Holocaust, as it is by the convention of referring to Judea and Samaria as “the West Bank,” the name Jordan gave them when it seized and occupied them at the conclusion of Israel’s war of independence. The Arabs, of course, never created a Palestinian state when it was within their power to do so. Thus, the final disposition of this territory has never been resolved. It is a subject for negotiations, not predetermined Palestinian sovereignty.

#page#When, in the decades after the 1967 war, Israelis built homes in Judea and Samaria, they were building on ancient Jewish land. Hundreds of thousands of them now live in the thriving communities that the world, in its glossary of delegitimization, calls “settlements.” But recognizing how dramatically conditions on the ground had changed since 1967, President Bush declared in 2004 that that there could not realistically be “a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.” As the Washington Times’ Eli Lake reports, Prime Minister Netanyahu -- who was sandbagged by Obama’s newly announced policy only a day before his scheduled meeting with the president -- will now press for a reaffirmation of this U.S. commitment, reminding Obama that Bush’s conclusion was overwhelmingly supported by Congress.

#ad#Not only is Obama’s new position on the borders a sellout of this American commitment to Israel; it is an adoption of Hamas’s position. This is palpably alarming for several reasons. The first involves rewarding terrorism, the Islamic practice of which Obama purports to be eradicating. Hamas (i.e., the Palestinian branch of the same Muslim Brotherhood that is poised to take the reins in neighboring Egypt) remains pledged to Israel’s destruction. In his speech, Obama paid lip service to the pie-in-the-sky assumption that Hamas will ultimately come to see terrorism as futile (even as the jihadists reap the benefits of practicing terror). But he did not demand that Palestinians convincingly renounce terror and accept without reservation Israel’s permanent existence as a Jewish state. This president’s demands are made only on Israel; Hamas gets hopey-changey cajoling.

Because it will never recognize Israel’s right to exist, Hamas’s support for the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders does not translate into support for the dreamy two-state solution. It is a way station to Hamas’s goal of a one-state solution. This is to be reached by an inside/outside strategy: The newly formed “Palestine” would continue to pressure Israel with terror attacks from without, while within Israel, Islamists would exploit democracy, assembling the critical mass of Israeli Arabs, leftists, and returned Palestinian “refugees” needed to destroy Israel’s character as a Jewish state.

Then there is the matter of timing. The president chose to announce his new position on the 1967 borders only days after the Palestinian Authority -- run by Fatah, the “moderates” who maintain their own terrorist wing, the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades -- formed a unity government with Hamas. Again, while from one side of his mouth the president claims the Arab Spring is a rejection of terror, from the other he tells the terrorists that their methods work.

In the course of insisting that the Palestinians must have their own sovereign state, Obama also slipped in the stipulation that it must be a contiguous state. Oughtn’t it to go without saying that Gaza does not abut Judea and Samaria? You can’t make them “contiguous” without ceding to the Palestinians the swath of Israel that would be needed to connect them.

To be fair, Obama is not the first to use this disturbing formulation. Bush State Department officials, who often seemed every bit as eager to placate the Palestinians, used to say “contiguous,” too. Still, hearing this word from a U.S. president who has already called for a territorial contraction that would make their country indefensible, and who seems decidedly blasé about its contiguity, Israelis cannot be blamed for wondering whether the land “swaps” Obama has in mind will carve Israel into separate slices.

For all the appalling things Obama did say, however, the worst was what he didn’t. In the greater scheme of things, borders are a subordinate issue, and they’d be a trivial one were it not for Israel’s existential security problems. Many rival countries have territorial disputes, but they either live with them or settle them because they do not question each other’s right to exist as sovereign nations. The Palestinians, by contrast, do not accept Israel’s existence. They do not want peace and they will not renounce terror. And why would they? Terror is serving them quite well, the “international community” having embraced the terrorists while making pariahs of the region’s only true democracy and beacon of human rights.

An American president who really wanted to outline the only worthy settlement of this intractable conflict could have given a very short speech. The Palestinians must accept Israel, they must convincingly renounce terrorism (none of this “resistance” legerdemain), and they must drop the ludicrous demand for a right of return that would effectively overrun Israel. If they did those three things, the territorial boundaries would take care of themselves, and Obama could go back to not worrying about America’s borders.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Misled by Senator McCain?

After my column appeared yesterday, I did a follow up post wondering aloud whether I myself had been misled by Senator McCain's Washington Post essay, which I'd described as misleading. My specific focus was my assumption -- which I am now convinced was erroneous -- that the unidentified informant Sen. McCain referred to was Hassan Ghul, an al Qaeda operative who was captured in Iraq.

At the time Sen. McCain's op-ed appeared last Friday, there was rampant speculation that Ghul, rather than other top al Qaeda leaders like KSM who'd been captured elsewhere and subjected to harsh interrogation, was the source of the most critical intelligence leading to the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan. That critical intelligence strand involved the identification of a bin Laden courier whose nom de guerre is Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.

In the op-ed, Sen. McCain indicated that, according to information he'd gotten from CIA Director Leon Panetta, al-Kuwaiti's name had first come to the CIA's attention "from a detainee in another country." I assumed the Senator was referring to Ghul. Ghul, after all, had clearly provided critical intel about al-Kuwaiti. Marc Thiessen, however, reported Monday (also in the Post) that another unidentified detainee held in an unidentified country had mentioned al-Kuwaiti in 2002. That mention was insignificant -- the CIA only found it in the files (in a dated liaison report from another country's intelligence service) because information from detainees subjected to harsh interrogation tactics had caused them to scrub their files for any intelligence about al-Kuwaiti. Moreover, the fleeting mention of al-Kuwaiti did not tell them anything they did not already know by that point. That is, I gave Sen. McCain the benefit of the doubt that he'd at least been referring to a source of some importance (Ghul) -- that he'd not attributed significance to a source who was unimportant.

It is now clear that Sen. McCain was, in fact, speaking about the unimportant source. I can confirm that because we now know the source mentioned the name in 2002. Ghul was not even captured until 2004. 

How do I know this? After my post from yesterday, I got an email from a member of Sen. McCain's staff, who told me she "wanted to point out some hard facts" that had been "provided to the Senator in a letter from the CIA from Director Panetta." The staffer, however, was not looking to provide me those facts directly. Rather, the Senator's office is touting a post on Monday from the Washington Post's leftwing blogger Greg Sargent. Mr. Sargent's post, which I had not seen, contains a lengthy excerpt from Director Panetta's letter -- although Sargent does not explain who gave him the letter (it "was sent my way by a source," says he). 

When I read the published portions of the letter, and compared them to Sen. McCain's essay, I was taken aback by the information McCain elected not to include in his essay. Here are the Panetta letter passages excerpted by Sargent:

Nearly 10 years of intensive intelligence work led the CIA to conclude that Bin Ladin was likely hiding at the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. there was no one “essential and indispensible” key piece of information that led us to this conclusion. Rather, the intelligence picture was developed via painstaking collection and analysis. Multiple streams of intelligence — including from detainees, but also from multiple other sources — led CIA analysts to conclude that Bin Ladin was at this compound. Some of the detainees who provided useful information about the facilitator/courier’s role had been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. Whether those techniques were the “only timely and effective way” to obtain such information is a matter of debate and cannot be established definitively. What is definitive is that that information was only a part of multiple streams of intelligence that led us to Bin Ladin.

Let me further point out that we first learned about the facilitator/courier’s nom de guerre from a detainee not in CIA custody in 2002. It is also important to note that some detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques attempted to provide false or misleading information about the facilitator/courier. These attempts to falsify the facilitator/courier’s role were alerting.

In the end, no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts. This information was discovered through other intelligence means.

Based on this, Sen. McCain's staffer opined, "I don't think you were misled and I hope you will conclude as much from the information in this [Sargent] story below." I have written back as follows:

Thank you for sharing this, which I hadn't seen -- I was on a cross-country trip Monday into Tuesday. 

When I said I may have been misled, I was referring to Sen. McCain's essay, which is what I read, not to a leftwing blogger's spin on the "hard facts" in the essay, which I had not read. Those details, of course, were not released by Senator McCain; they were revealed a few days later in the Greg Sargent article you tout -- Mr. Sargent having used these revelations to grouse about "conservatives" after somehow obtaining this "private letter" from the Director of the CIA to the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. 

 

Now that I've read the published portions of the Panetta letter that you've highlighted for me, I must say I am even more mystified by Sen. McCain's essay. Particularly curious are the "hard facts" from Director Panetta that Sen. McCain chose to omit. Clearly, the Senator elected not to reveal the Director's concession that useful information leading to bin Laden's capture came from detainees subjected to what Director Panetta calls "enhanced interrogation techniques" (but Sen. McCain calls "torture"). This is a striking omission given that the Senator, in the course of accusing former Attorney General Mukasey of giving a "false" account, conveyed the impression that the information from detainees subjected to harsh interrogation had been uniformly "false and misleading" -- as the Senator put it with respect to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who, it turns out, did provide the CIA with al-Kuwaiti's nickname ... one of the assertions by Judge Mukasey that the Senator summarily dismissed as "false"). 

 

Sen. McCain even left out Director Panetta's explanation that the CIA first heard the al-Kuwaiti nickname in 2002. Had he simply included this innocuous fact in his essay, it would have been clear that Hassan Ghul -- who was not captured until 2004 -- could not have been the source. I'd also note that Sen. McCain attributed to Director Panetta a claim that does not appear in the published portions of what Mr. Panetta wrote, namely, that the unidentified 2002 source singled out al-Kuwaiti as "an important member of al-Qaeda."  

 


At any rate, given that Sen. McCain is now having his staff point people to a published account of what Director Panetta actually wrote, one is left to wonder why the Senator himself did not just tell us exactly what the Director said, rather than selectively mine the Director's letter.

 

While I don't know that anything's been clarified, I do appreciate your courtesy.

Did I Give McCain More Credit Than He Deserves?

As K-Lo has mentioned, my column today is about Senator McCain's allegation that former Attorney General Mukasey gave a "false" account of the intelligence trail that led to the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, and McCain's absurd claim that the CIA's enhanced interrogation program for high level al-Qaeda detainees did not play a key role in discovering the courier who, in turn, led the intelligence community to bin Laden's location. It has come to my attention that I may actually have given Senator McCain more credit than he deserves.

As I argue, and as Marc Thiessen has pointed out, McCain's statements on the matter have been ambiguous and misleading. I now realize that, in the course of trying to parse what he said, I, too, may have been misled.

Sen. McCain claimed that "the first mention of the name of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti," the courier in question, "came from a detainee held in another country." Many critics, who, like McCain, condemn the CIA interrogation program, claim that the critical breakthrough in identifying the courier was the interrogation of Hassan Ghul. Unlike the top al-Qaeda detainees most closely associated with the CIA program -- e.g., Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Ubaydah, Mohammed al-Qhatani, and Abu Faraj al-Libi -- Ghul was captured and initially detained in Iraq. Consequently, I have assumed (just as many others assume) that McCain's reference to a detainee captured in another country related to Ghul, who was undeniably critical to the intelligence mosaic that led to the courier.

That may have been an error. A careful reading of Marc Thiessen's Washington Post column yesterday indicates that McCain may actually have been referring to a different detainee -- an unidentified detainee who was captured in an unidentified country. The only thing we really know about this detainee is that, unlike Ghul, he was of absolutely no significance to the intelligence community's quest to locate the courier who led them to bin Laden. Here is the relevant section of Marc's column:

I interviewed several former senior intelligence officials after McCain’s speech. Every one of them told me that they first learned about al-Kuwaiti from CIA detainees, not from a detainee in another country. I was told that McCain was referring to an old foreign liaison report that included a passing reference to al-Kuwaiti, but that CIA officials did not become aware of this report until many years later, after CIA detainees had alerted them to al-Kuwaiti’s importance. They only found it because they had ordered a “deep dive” on him — scouring all their databases for everything they could find about the bin Laden courier — based on intelligence from detainees.

Many officials did not remember the report at all — a sign of how little importance it held. Those that did said the agency would never have come across the old report had they not already been looking for al-Kuwaiti, and it told them nothing useful that they did not already know. So while the report may technically have been the “first mention” of al-Kuwaiti, the CIA did not “learn” about bin Laden’s courier from this report — it learned about him from the questioning of high-value terrorists, many of whom underwent enhanced interrogation.

As one former CIA official with direct knowledge told me, “Detainees provided the information regarding the courier network and Ahmed in particular that started this whole thing. None of it came from another detainee from another location.”

To summarize, I have given McCain the benefit of the doubt that he has been talking about someone (namely, Ghul) who at least had some significance in the discovery of al-Kuwaiti. And perhaps he has been -- the Senator's statements have been so cagey, it's hard to tell. Assuming he was referring to Ghul, the burden of my column was to demonstrate that (a) even without factoring in Ghul's information, the other detainees subjected to harsh interrogation tactics provided salient intelligence, and (b) Ghul himself was subjected to harsh interrogation tactics (albeit not waterboarding), so even the intelligence from his interrogation is traceable to the CIA program that, according to McCain, did not help us locate first the courier and then bin Laden. 

But it turns out that I may have been wrong to give McCain as much credit as I did. He may actually have been talking about a source (whom he has not named) who had utterly nothing to do with finding al-Kuwaiti -- based on an insignificant report about which that the agents who were looking for al-Kuwaiti would not even have learned had they not already been tipped off to al-Kuwaiti's importance by detainees subjected to the CIA program's harsh interrogation tactics.

Maverick Malice

Shortly after Osama bin Laden met his demise at the hands of U.S. special forces, Michael Mukasey opined in the pages of the Wall Street Journal that harsh interrogation tactics had been key to identifying a courier, which, in turn, led to locating bin Laden’s compound. Such an assessment, from a highly respected former attorney general, was bound to be influential. Indeed, the CIA’s enhanced-interrogation program, used on a select few high-level al-Qaeda detainees following the 9/11 attacks, had figured prominently in Mukasey’s confirmation hearings. He had, at the behest of Congress, thoroughly reviewed the program upon taking the reins at DOJ. Americans would rightly assume that his opinion was not based on speculation; it was the informed judgment of a renowned former federal judge.

#ad#That made it too much for Sen. John McCain, a bitter opponent of the interrogation program. McCain has labeled the interrogation tactics “torture” and claims they do not work. At least, that’s what he often claims. Other times, he grudgingly concedes that they do work but says we shouldn’t use them, because they are unreliable and contrary to our values. Still other times, he says he’d expect officials to use them in a “ticking bomb” crisis even though they are unreliable and contrary to our values#...#and that therefore those officials shouldn’t be prosecuted for the “torture” -- at least if the tactics worked -- even though he wouldn’t want you to think non-prosecution means these tactics are permissible under any circumstances. Is that clear?

Safely returned to the Senate after the party establishment helped him turn back a conservative primary challenger, McCain is predictably back to his familiar role as the Obamedia’s favorite Republican -- a distinction earned by ripping conservative Republicans. Thus did the senator take to the pages of the Washington Post to claim that Mukasey’s account was “false.”

Not “mistaken,” mind you, but “false.” It’s a stinging word, one that deprives Judge Mukasey of the assumption of good faith one might have expected an “exemplary statesman” to accord a jurist with a well-earned reputation for probity -- though I confess that I am not surprised.

Nor, alas, is it surprising to find that it is McCain who is being disingenuous. As Marc Thiessen deduced in his own Washington Post column on Tuesday, McCain’s attacks are crafted to be technically correct (at least if we define “correct” with the same elasticity McCain uses to define “torture”), but they are “completely misleading.” Far from being false, Mukasey’s conclusion that the intelligence trail to bin Laden traced directly back to harsh interrogation, particularly (though by no means exclusively) the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is on the mark. McCain is the one twisting the facts -- all the worse when one considers that the senator has been perfectly willing to rely on intelligence gleaned from “torture” when it suits his purposes.

Mukasey said that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in the “torrent of information” he’d surrendered after being broken by waterboarding, had given up the name of bin Laden’s courier. McCain countered (italics mine for reasons that will soon be apparent):

The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti -- the nickname of the al-Qaeda courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden -- as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts, or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaeda. 

The shameful fact is that McCain is well aware that the name of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti was known to the CIA long before the agency questioned this “detainee held in another country” -- namely, Hassan Ghul, an al-Qaeda operative captured in Iraq in 2004. Yet McCain misleads readers into supposing that it was through Ghul that the CIA first learned of al-Kuwaiti’s existence. The senator does not make this claim outright, because he knows it would be false. Instead, he ambiguously conflates the first mention of the courier’s name with details like the description of the courier as “important,” as well as the courier’s whereabouts and his role in the terror network. By this sleight of hand, McCain gives himself deniability were anyone to call him on creating a misimpression (as Mukasey later did).

Thiessen, a former Bush adviser and author of Courting Disaster, the definitive account of Bush counterterrorism, is emphatic: He spoke with several former senior intelligence officials about McCain’s claims, and every one confirmed that the CIA learned about al-Kuwaiti and bin Laden’s courier system from the al-Qaeda detainees who were interrogated in the CIA program -- not from Ghul or from an Iraqi government account of its own questioning of Ghul.

#page#This should come as no surprise. Tom Joscelyn, the nonpareil terrorism researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, notes (here and here) that al-Kuwaiti’s name was given to the CIA during the questioning of Mohammed al-Qhatani, who was captured during the Battle of Tora Bora in late 2001. Qhatani was the would-be 20th hijacker who was stopped from entering the United States during the latter stages of the 9/11 plot, and he became cooperative only after being subjected to harsh interrogation (though he was not waterboarded). Qhatani knew al-Kuwaiti because, at the direction of KSM, al-Kuwaiti had trained him in the use of e-mail and other communications aspects of the 9/11 plot. KSM, of course, was captured in 2003 largely because of information learned in the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, both of whom were waterboarded. As Mukasey correctly said, KSM himself broke after waterboarding and gave up, among many other things, al-Kuwaiti’s name.

#ad#So, putting Ghul to the side, the CIA independently knew al-Kuwaiti’s name and that he was an important member of al-Qaeda who had worked directly for KSM. This is not to say the information from Ghul was insignificant. We needn’t deprecate some sources in order to elevate others -- that’s McCain’s game. Ghul’s interrogation was significant to the growing mosaic: revealing that the courier, al-Kuwaiti, was close to Faraj al-Libi, KSM’s successor as al-Qaeda’s operations chief.

Moreover, it is absurd for McCain to use Ghul as the linchpin of his morality tale, pitting the purportedly unreliable “tortured” sources versus Ghul, whom readers are led to believe was questioned using conventional procedures -- as McCain puts it, referring to Ghul, “we believe he was not tortured.”

In point of fact, as Judge Mukasey reaffirmed in his rebuttal to McCain’s op-ed, no one was tortured under the CIA procedures -- the most extreme agency tactic, waterboarding (as carefully designed and implemented), did not come close to the legal line of torture. McCain, however, has been demagoguing harsh tactics as “torture” for seven years, and he has not limited this libel to torture -- he cited all of the harsh tactics as “cruel, inhuman, and degrading,” working feverishly in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 to have them banned. It is thus quite something for the demagogue to reverse course -- because it happens to fit the narrative he’s trying to sell today: that Ghul wasn’t “tortured” just because he wasn’t waterboarded. U.S. officials acknowledge that he was subjected to several of the harsh tactics -- stress positions, sleep deprivation, slamming into a (hollow) wall. If you’ve been following McCain’s histrionics on “torture” since 2004, you’d have to find Ghul every bit as tainted a source as KSM.

McCain curiously makes much of the fact that KSM and al-Libi sought to protect Kuwaiti -- the former by minimizing his role, the latter by withholding his true name. But as any good interrogator will tell you (and as any layman who has ever sat on a jury can attest), what a witness lies about can be just as edifying as what he comes clean on. In this instance, given what the CIA knew about Kuwaiti from all sources, the lies and obfuscations of KSM and al-Libi served to underscore his importance -- they were a boon, not a distraction.

What’s more, the misinformation did not come during the waterboarding. Thiessen points out that, if an interrogator asked questions at all while the abusive tactics were being employed, they were questions to which he knew the answers. The purpose of waterboarding (and some other harsh tactics) was not to get information while the tactic was being employed; the purpose was to break the source’s will. The misinformation from KSM and al-Libi, just like the accurate information they provided, came later. Once they became ostensibly cooperative, they then did what every ostensibly cooperative informant does: impart some true information and some untrue information. Determining which is which is the discipline of corroboration. Investigators and intelligence agents don’t stop when the source says something they want to hear -- they compare it with other information they know, do follow-up investigation, and figure out whether the source is being straight.

Most disturbingly, though, McCain seems to have gone out of his way to minimize what the CIA learned when al-Libi was captured and turned over to the agency for questioning in 2005. There was a lot more to it than al-Kuwaiti. Al-Libi gave salient information that pointed to Abbottabad as bin Laden’s headquarters. It turns out that al-Libi was known as the “communications gateway” to bin Laden. As Thiessen relates, drawing on a recent WikiLeaks disclosure, once al-Libi began talking, he

“reported on al-Qaeda’s methods for choosing and employing couriers, as well as preferred communications means.” Based on intelligence obtained from [al-Libi] and other CIA detainees, [the WikiLeaks document] states that “in July 2003, [al-Libi] received a letter from UBL’s designated courier” (to whom he referred by a false name, Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan) in which “UBL stated [that al-Libi] would be the official messenger between UBL and others in Pakistan.” The file also notes a vital piece of intelligence: To better carry out his new duties “in mid-2003, [al-Libi] moved his family to Abbottabad#...#and worked between Abbottabad and Peshawar.”

#page#Consequently, even without Ghul, the CIA would have known that bin Laden could be in the Abbottabad vicinity, because al-Libi had relocated there specifically to help him relay messages; that bin Laden communicated with his terror network through a group of trusted couriers; and that al-Kuwaiti was an important al-Qaeda member who had been a protégé in Pakistan of al-Libi’s predecessor, KSM. In considering the intelligence package that led to the bin Laden raid, the contribution of these details -- the fruits of cooperation coerced through harsh interrogation -- is obvious.

#ad#There has always been a good-faith argument against harsh interrogation tactics. One needn’t agree with it to grasp its force: The United States should never engage in abusive practices that suggest torture because it betrays core principles of decency and due process to which we are committed. But McCain and his adherents won’t make their principled stand there, because it would require them to say what they are unwilling to say: Put to the unsavory choice, they would prefer to see innocent people -- perhaps thousands of Americans -- die than tolerate the slightest physical abuse of any morally culpable terrorist who is withholding life-saving information. So instead they play the game of deny, deny, deny -- no matter how clear it is that harsh interrogations were effective and led to concrete results: attacks thwarted and terrorists captured or killed. You are to take it as gospel that if a source was subjected to harsh tactics, you can’t believe a word he says.

Except, of course, when it suits other political objectives. Senator McCain very publicly championed the 9/11 Commission. As he contemplated another White House bid, he saw high-profile support of the commission’s investigation -- no matter how much of a dog-and-pony show it became -- as a way to showcase his leadership on the great national-security issue of our time. Being a creature of Washington, McCain was also drawn to the commission’s Washington approach: When our ungainly government fails to prevent a quite preventable atrocity because its endless layers of bureaucracy fail to communicate with each other, the answer is to add more layers, more bureaucracy, and, of course, more money.

In its final report, the commission sought an extensive overhaul of the intelligence community and of homeland security. In large part, the commission justified its proposals based on what its investigation had concluded about al-Qaeda: the terror network’s history, organization, goals, and practices. McCain was so impressed by the product that, in 2004, he proposed the 9/11 Commission Implementation Act, seeking adoption of the commission’s suggested framework.

Have you had a look at the commission’s 2004 final report lately? It’s worth a gander, particularly chapters five and seven, as well as the related footnotes. Virtually everything the commission reported about al-Qaeda comes from the interrogations of KSM, Zubaydah, and other high-ranking jihadists who were subjected to harsh tactics. The commissioners never got to examine the sources in person; they relied on the classified reports of the sources’ debriefings by interrogators. Yet the report recites its findings as conclusive fact, generally without qualification.

There were no cautions from Senator McCain about the folly of relying on “torture” evidence. He evidently thought the CIA interrogations laid a foundation plenty sturdy enough for reshaping the U.S. government, including its $40 billion–plus behemoth of an intelligence community. But now you’re to understand that the same interrogations had nothing to do with finding Osama bin Laden.

It takes a maverick.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Thanks

I'm just back from a whirlwind few days, speechifying in Washington and Los Angeles. Many thanks to all my friends (old and new) and to NR fans at the Federalist Society's DC Chapter and at the American Freedom Alliance. Lots of fun had ... lots of sleep needed!

So I heard, like, Newt said something about Medicare? Couldn't be, right?

Scariest Sentence I Have Read in a Long Time

From Andrew's post: "Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) indicated that the new Biden group held the best opportunity for lawmakers to reach a compromise."

An Ill Season

Screaming “With our blood and soul, we will defend you, Islam,” jihadists stormed the Virgin Mary Church in northwest Cairo last weekend. They torched the Coptic Christian house of worship, burned the nearby homes of two Copt families to the ground, attacked a residential complex, killed a dozen people, and wounded more than 200: just another day in this spontaneous democratic uprising by Muslim hearts yearning for freedom.

In the delusional vocabulary of the “Arab Spring,” this particular episode is known as a sectarian “clash.” That was the Washington Post’s take. Its headline reads “12 dead in Egypt as Christians and Muslims clash” -- in the same way, one supposes, that a mugger’s fist can be said to “clash” with his victim’s face. The story goes on, in nauseating “cycle of violence” style, to describe “clashes between Muslims and Coptic Christians” that “left” 12 dead, dozens more wounded, “and a church charred” -- as if it were not crystal clear who were the clashers and who were the clashees, as if the church were somehow combusted into a flaming heap without some readily identifiable actors having done the charring.

#ad#The thugs in question were Egyptian Muslims. Were they representative of all Egyptian Muslims? No, but it would be more accurate to portray them as such than to suggest, as the Pollyanna narrative holds, that Egypt (and Tunisia, and Yemen, and Syria, and Lebanon, and Algeria, and …) is teeming with legions of Gamal al-Madisons.

This is the Egypt where the toppling of the pro-American, pro-peace Mubarak regime was celebrated by the rape of CBS correspondent Lara Logan amid the familiar chants of “Allahu Akbar!” The same Egypt where, just a few weeks ago, Islamist factions wiped out the proponents of democracy by a whopping 78–22 margin in a referendum on the formation of a new government. The result ensures a Muslim Brotherhood hammerlock on the new parliament, and perhaps even the presidency -- a Brotherhood leader having announced this week that he will run against the popular but weak Amr Mousa.

The provocation that stirred Muslims this time, as if there had to be one, involved a rumor that Copts are preventing a Christian woman from converting to Islam -- and who wouldn’t grab the blowtorch over that? The rumor is probably not true, but what difference does that make? A Christian woman about whom a similar claim was made a couple of years ago ultimately denied that she had ever attempted to become a Muslim. That didn’t stop enraged Muslims -- rage being the default condition -- from killing 51 people in a similar arson attack on a Syriac Catholic church in post-Saddam, “Made in the U.S.A.” Baghdad.

Meanwhile, back in Egypt, the Copts have been dealing with a rash of “clashes” ever since the early breakout of spring. The Wall Street Journal provides the rundown: a church in Alexandria bombed on New Year’s Eve, killing 23; a Cairo church attacked by angry mobs in March; and last month, rioters in Qena demanding the ouster of the regime-appointed governor because he is a Christian and, under sharia standards, thus unfit to govern in a Muslim land.

Straining to preserve the storyline of a vibrant democracy movement that unites Egyptians across sectarian lines, the Post dispatch was quick to add that the “unrest” in Cairo broke out amid “demonstrations attended by Copts and Muslims to show unity and demand better protection from the government.” Of course, these demonstrations got steamrolled. Why? Because the “Arab Spring” is not the Arab Spring. It is the Islamist ascendancy. Like good democracy fetishists, though, the media is seeing the Egypt it wants to see. To the contrary, in the real Egypt, Islamist ideology is the mainstream, coursing from the beating heart of Al-Azhar University through every part of the country. Without the much-derided Mubarak around to clamp down on it, Islamists have Copts and secularists paralyzed by their habitual “unrest” and “clashes.”

#page#The most ruefully amusing part of the coverage is the water the media dutifully carries for the Obama administration’s campaign to airbrush the Muslim Brotherhood -- setting the stage to present the Brothers’ catastrophic accession as a success in the march toward the end of history. In the Post story, the words “Muslim Brotherhood” are nowhere to be found. The “clash,” you are to understand, is the handiwork of the “Salafists.” These, according to the Post, are “a faction of ultraconservative Muslims [who] have become increasingly visible in recent months.” Really? And why would that be? The Post suggests it could be that the “Salafists” are “seeking to boost their standing ahead of elections, scheduled for this fall, by fomenting religious tension.”

#ad#Gee, they sound just like the Muslim Brotherhood. But no, couldn’t be. The Journal is even more adamant on that point. Not content to ignore the Brothers’ hands in all this, its news story is an explicit argument that the Brotherhood and the “Salafis” are two very different camps. The Salafis are depicted as the hardliners, emerging from the shadows since “spring” began, and now “implicated in a series of attacks against Christians.” The Brotherhood, by contrast, is the “more moderate” faction -- a “discrete political and religious institution” that “condemned the violence.” Sure, they share “a few common political goals, such as the desire to see Sharia law incorporated into the Egyptian legal system,” but you must understand that “the Salafists’ fundamentalist outlook is distinct from the Brotherhood’s merely conservative ideology.” Got that? In fact, “strict Salafis consider more moderate Islamists, such as the Brotherhood, as ‘innovators’ whose practice of the faith includes new or foreign concepts that were introduced into the religion long after the Prophet’s death.”

Hooey. The Muslim Brothers are Salafists. As I detail in The Grand Jihad, the Brotherhood rigorously hews to the Salafist ideology of its founder, Hassan al-Banna. It is a retro-reformist movement that seeks to return to the Islam of Mohammed and the first generations of Muslims -- the Salafiyyah (a term derived from al-Salaf al-Salih, the Righteous Companions: Mohammed and the first “rightly guided” caliphs). This is the Islam the Brotherhood seeks to impose on the world, through implementation of Islam’s legal and political system, sharia. The goal of the Salafists is “shared” with the Brotherhood precisely because the Brotherhood and the Salafists are one, as their just-announced electoral pact suggests. What is that goal? Contrary to the Journal’s claim, sharia already is incorporated in the Egyptian legal system: The goal is to make sharia the only law of Egypt, just as it is the only law of Saudi Arabia and Iran. It is the goal of the Brotherhood in all of the scores of countries in which it operates: gradually implement sharia, enclave by enclave, country by country, until a global caliphate is established.

The Brothers have been playing this game for decades: stoking violence but distancing themselves when the violence breaks out; condemning “terrorism” but glorifying “resistance”; feigning a commitment to regular politics but forming Hamas; decrying Osama bin Laden’s attacks on civilians but -- when speaking to Arabic audiences -- praising bin Laden as a heroic mujahid, a warrior in Allah’s jihad against the oppressors. Yet, when the Obama administration hears the Brothers’ motto -- “Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Koran is our law, jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!” -- it thinks: “largely secular”!

This spring, we’re having a clash with reality.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Mukasey Fires Back at McCain

Former U.S. attorney general Michael Mukasey has issued a succinct response to Sen. John McCain's allegation, in a Washington Post op-ed published Thursday, that Mukasey (in an earlier WSJ op-ed) had provided a "false" account of how the information train leading to Osama bin Laden's demise traced back to the harsh interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Judge Mukasey states:

Senator McCain described as “false” my statement that Khalid Sheik Mohammed broke under harsh interrogation that included waterboarding, and disclosed a torrent of information that included the nickname of Osama bin Laden’s courier.  He strongly implied in the remainder of his column in the Washington Post that this harsh interrogation was not only useless but also illegal.  He is simply incorrect on all three counts.

KSM disclosed the nickname — al Kuwaiti — along with a wealth of other information, some of which was used to stop terror plots then in progress.  He did so after refusing to answer questions and, when asked if further plots were afoot, said that his interrogators would eventually find out. Another detainee, captured in Iraq, disclosed that al Kuwaiti was a trusted operative of KSM’s successor, abu Faraj al-Libbi. When al-Libbi went so far as to deny even knowing the man, his importance became obvious. 

Both former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former Director of National Intelligence Admiral Michael McConnell have acknowledged repeatedly that up to 2006, many of the valuable leads pursued by the intelligence community came from the three prisoners who were subjected to harsh techniques that included waterboarding in order to secure their cooperation. 

So far as the waterboarding technique used by CIA operators, as outlined in the memoranda released by the Department of Justice, it was entirely legal at the time, which is to say before the passage of later statutes in 2005 and 2006, by which time it was no longer in use and under which it has not been evaluated.

In other words, the harsh interrogation techniques were both effective and lawful.  

More on NYC terror plot

Fox News has more on the terror arrests by the NYPD. There are two men under arrest, said to be U.S. citizens "of North African descent." The arrests apparently came in connection with a sting operation in which the men were trying to buy guns and grenades for a terrorist plot. Fox says it is unclear whether this case is the same as the one the New York Post is reporting about, involving an American-born Muslim who was plotting to attack a synagogue. (See my earlier post.) I imagine this will all get clearer in the next hour or two.