Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 56

NYC Terror Plot Stopped, Cops Say

New York City police have arrested an American-born Muslim in an alleged terror plot. Sketchy details are provided by the New York Post. The man, whose name has not yet been disclosed, is said to be in his 20s and to have schemed to attack at least one synagogue.

Oddly, it is said that the feds were not interested in the case, which was apparently pursued by the Manhattan district attorney's office after the FBI declined to get involved. I say this is odd because the FBI and the NYPD work together in the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and most cases are taken federal. But the NYPD also has an intel/anti-terrorism capacity that is very robust, and the City acts independently of the feds from time-to-time, much to the dismay of the feds.

We will get more information later: A press conference is scheduled for later today. Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly will appear.

UPDATE: In a demonstration of what I describe above as the often tense relationship between the feds and the NYPD, the Post also reports that the inspector who was second-in-command for the NYPD on the Joint Terrorism Task Force has been relieved of his post and reassigned. His offense? He defied the order of his boss -- the deputy police commissioner for intel, David Cohen -- to bring Cohen the FBI's latest dossier on Osama bin Laden. The inspector, John Nicholson, was caught in a no-win situation between the demand of his NYPD superior (who could easily have called his FBI counterpart and made the request personally) and the FBI's policy of not allowing its sensitive files to be removed from its premises. Nicholson, whose background is naval intelligence, was transferred too oversee ordinary crime patrol cops in Brooklyn. I'd love to be able to tell you that this sort of petty stuff is unusual, but . . .

Fighting Jihad with ... Comics!

Bosch Fawstin is a talented cartoonist. He is also a brave cartoonist. The mere suggestion that artistic expression might cast Islam in a poor light is known to kick the Islamic grievance industry into high gear, agitating the crazies who dutifully respond with threats and intimidation. In nothing flat, the artist submits -- usually under great additional pressure from publishers, studios, sponsors, etc. Sharia wins and free speech loses ... which means we lose. Bosch is tired of watching artists lose. He has thus composed a graphic novel called The Infidel, the first chapter of which he has just released as a digital comic book -- a comic book about a comic book, whose superhero, "Pigman" takes on the jihad, while the comic's author and his Muslim twin brother clash over their very different responses to 9/11. For more, see here.

Bosch told me he thinks it's high time that pop culture took a clear stand against enemies bent on destroying our freedoms and our way of life. He's front-and-center, doing his part.

Killing, Grilling, and Blabbing About the Intel Haul

In my column this morning, I jump into the killing v. grilling debate that Rich and Jonah (among others) have been weighing in on. Obviously, we have to go back to a preference for capturing and interrogating terrorists, rather than killing them, if we are going to prevent terrorist attacks. But, as I argue, bin Laden was in a very small category of iconic jihadists who needed killin', as they used to say in those great old Westerns. Being able to question him might have been a coup -- if we had in place an effective interrogation program and a swift means of executing him after some summary legal process. But we don't, and you need both -- and with a figure like bin Laden, not having either makes the kill v. grill question not a close call.

I couldn't agree more with Jonah on the matter of Obama blabbing about the bin Laden intel haul. A couple of days after the raid, I argued here that it would have been better to keep what had happened quiet, at least for a few days:

The real intelligence lapse here is not the failure to interrogate bin Laden (as much a coup as that may have been). It is the haste to get in front of the cameras and take credit. Not that Obama doesn’t deserve credit — that’s not my point. The reports coming out today indicate that the “motherlode” of intel (computers, hard-drives, discs, documents, etc.) was found in bin Laden’s compound. Officials are saying it may be the most significant trove of information about al-Qaeda ever seized. Well, if that is the case, there is a good chance that it could have helped analysts figure out where other top Qaeda leaders (like Zawahiri) are, where important camps are, and where active cells are located. But the only way you can exploit that kind of information is by keeping quiet about bin Laden for a few days while the analysts go through it and get the leads to the military and intelligence operatives so they can act on it — maybe roll up other key parts of the organization. Once you go public on bin Laden, it tells everyone else in al-Qaeda to get in the wind. The intel trove will still be very valuable for other reasons, but you’ve lost the opportunity to capture other big fish.... 

A friend of mine who knows this stuff took slight issue with this, pointing out that during the operation a chopper crashed and our guys had to destroy it, making a lot of noise and drawing a lot of attention, no doubt. (Let's assume, for argument's sake, that none of the Pakistanis knew we were coming ahead of time.) That is an excellent point, and it undoubtedly would have shortened the timeframe in which you could have kept this quiet. But precious few people knew where bin Laden was -- it was probably a better kept secret than the 9/11 plot, which was not widely known even among al-Qaeda members. And, unfortunately, attacks and explosions in Pakistan happen with some frequency. It's not like bin Laden's disappearance would have been immediately noticed in terrorist circles or that people would have assumed that whatever happened in Abbottabad must have involved bin Laden. As Jonah observes, "hours or days could be extremely valuable." It could have been enough time to pursue valuable leads on terror leaders and active cells -- and how great would it be to be debating whether we should have killed or captured additional top al-Qaeda terrorists?

Even if one were to dismiss out of hand the possibility of keeping the raid hush-hush, it makes no sense to brag publicly about the breadth of the intel haul. Let's say the president thought it important for some reason to dispel the theory (popular in the intelligence community) that bin Laden had been reduced to the status of a symbol who no longer had an operational role in al-Qaeda. Personally, I don't see how making that point would much improve the approval bump Obama was sure to get for authorizing a successful operation against a man Americans despise, but let's concede for argument's sake there is some marginal political benefit in it. All the president needed to say was, "The circumstances of the raid confirm that bin Laden was still playing a very active role in al-Qaeda's terrorist activities."

To be clear, I'd have winced even if he had limited his remarks to that. But there is no good reason to go public on the nature and extent of the seizures -- it doesn't help Obama at all, and it compromises the ability of the armed forces, the intelligence community, and law enforcement to exploit the information. 

Killing and Grilling

Every now and again, publicly or privately, people are nice enough to thank me for putting the “Blind Sheikh” behind bars. It is presumptuous to accept such accolades, since the effort to convict Omar Abdel Rahman and his underlings involved scores of other players. But that is not the main reason my pride quickly gives way to a gnawing regret.

In dancing on American graves after his 9/11 atrocities, Osama bin Laden was careful to credit Sheikh Abdel Rahman with issuance of the fatwa -- the Islamic religious edict -- that green-lighted them. The sheikh had announced the fatwa from the jail cell where he was serving his life sentence. “It is a duty upon all the Muslims around the world to come to free the sheikh, and to rescue him from his jail,” he declared. Regarding Americans, he demanded that “Muslims everywhere, dismember their nation, tear them apart, ruin their economy, provoke their corporations, destroy their embassies, attack their interests, sink their ships, and shoot down their planes, kill them on land, at sea, and in the air. Kill them wherever you find them.”

#ad#I haven’t been able to escape this memory in the ten days since U.S. special forces, acting at the direction of President Obama, stormed bin Laden’s Abbottabad hideaway and killed him with ruthless efficiency -- the sort of efficiency that strongly suggests bin Laden’s death was the objective of the mission.

Nor was this a one-off. It is merely the most notorious instance of a curious Obama counterterrorism policy. As Rich Lowry memorably framed the matter, “Our policy isn’t ‘to shoot first and ask questions later’; it is to shoot precisely so we don’t have to ask questions.”

The Lawyer Left is the core of the president’s base. From its legions, Obama recruited his attorney general, the top lawyer in his State Department, and many of his administration’s most influential voices. Its signal achievement has been to make a legal and political hash of terrorists’ detention and interrogation. It has become far easier and cleaner to kill the enemy than to capture and squeeze him for intelligence purposes.

This is an extraordinarily problematic situation. As I’ve conceded before, my principal concern about candidate Barack Obama was that, in his maddening solicitude toward anti-American Islamists, he would abandon the fight against Islamist terrorists. I’ve been delighted to be proved wrong about that. Considering where I feared he’d come out, it seems downright ungracious to complain that we are killing when we ought to be grilling.

Nevertheless, given that our concern here is national security rather than good manners, we have to complain -- at least about the policy, if not to its application in bin Laden’s case. As Rich points out -- as have Michael Mukasey, John Yoo, Marc Thiessen, and other compelling national-security thinkers -- intelligence is the most prized asset in any counterterrorism framework designed to prevent terrorist attacks.

#page#There is no intelligence equal to human intelligence. Just as there is a severe limit to what the U.S. criminal-justice system can accomplish against a national-security threat that plots against us from outside the jurisdiction of our courts and investigative agencies, so, too, are there limits to what even the best surveillance technology can accomplish from thousands of feet in the sky. To penetrate the jihad’s inner sanctums, we need people with access. It would be extremely difficult to insert spies into al-Qaeda’s highly insulated upper ranks -- just think of the time it would take and the things they would have to do to earn the trust of those wanton killers.

#ad#The only realistic option is to capture terrorists and interrogate them. Interrogation, moreover, will have to be tough in the hard cases -- the Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds, who will not break easily. It is all well and good to say the most effective, most reliable interrogation is based on the relationship of trust a skilled questioner can build with his subject over a course of months. But it doesn’t do us much good to find out months from now that terrorists were planning to blow something up next week. There are no magic words to break a KSM in a manner of moments, when the clock is ticking.

President Obama is enjoying counterterrorism success by slipstreaming behind Bush-era policies and exploiting the afterclap of the CIA’s Bush-era interrogation program. But the well is running dry. Unless we replenish it with new interrogation intelligence, the days when we can identify previously unknown terrorists and thwart their plans are numbered. You can’t rely on killing every terrorist when you don’t know every terrorist.

There is, however, a brute fact that seems lost in the current capture-versus-kill debate. In a war against a stateless, transnational jihadist movement reliant on the terror and propaganda value of symbolic figures associated with spectacular attacks, there are some terrorists who need killing.

At the time of his 1993 arrest, we had no death penalty available to invoke against the Blind Sheikh. Even if capital punishment had not been in remission, the charges and evidence against him would have made it a very long longshot. Without being executed, though, Abdel Rahman could never really be neutralized. My getting him a life sentence did not stop him.

The Blind Sheikh was incapable of building a bomb, hijacking a plane, or carrying out an assassination. His influence over the jihad lay in his renowned mastery of Islamic jurisprudence. He was more a symbol of why terrorists fight than an operative in the fight. As long as he lives, the symbol endures. Not only did he authorize the 9/11 attacks; heinous attacks have been carried out in an ongoing effort to extort the United States into releasing him.

As a practical and legal matter, nothing can be done about Abdel Rahman at this point -- other than keeping him deeply under wraps, minimizing (but never eliminating) his ability to stir jihadists to action. Bin Laden was another story.

Disclosures about the computer drives and other intel seized from his Pakistani compound indicate that al-Qaeda’s emir remained operational, even if his contact with subordinates was extremely limited. To jihadists the world over, though, he had become a legend -- the symbolic “strong horse” that faced down the Soviets and brought mass slaughter to our shores. His continued evasion of capture and his occasional video taunts emboldened our enemies.

There is a dire need in this war for intelligence. There is even a place for due process -- at least in some form. But war is about breaking the enemy’s will. On that score, there is a small group of iconic terrorists who are more useful to us sleeping with the fishes than singing like canaries. Osama bin Laden was one of them.

— 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.

Re: 'Some Sort of Support Network'

President Obama is obviously right that our government will need to bore through the intel recovered in the bin Laden raid for more insight into the nature of the relationship between bin Laden and the Pakistani government. But I do wish he wouldn't say things like "We don't know who or what [bin Laden's Pakistani] support network was. We don't know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that's something we have to investigate[.]..." 

Our government has known for many months that bin Laden was in Pakistan, living in that Abbottabad compound. Several press reports indicate that the CIA had a safehouse nearby, conducted extensive surveillance, and even went to Congress late last year for additional funding for its spying on the al-Qaeda leader. The White House, the armed forces, the State Department, the intelligence community, and even the FBI (and perhaps other arms of law enforcement) have had regular contact with Pakistani counterparts throughout this time. They have to have been making an assessment about who inside Pakistan knew what -- who was lying to us, and who might have been helping us (but needs cover now for having done so).  

No doubt, we already have a very good idea of what bin Laden's support network was. No one should expect the president to announce that to the world. But I don't think it helps to say we don't know. It suggests either that we haven't competently done our homework these last months or that the president is misleading us. Personally, I suspect its the latter. Again, I'd cut Obama slack on not saying what he knows, but I wish he'd do that in a way that just indicates he's not going to tell us what he knows. 

Did the United States Navy Pray for Allah to Forgive, Pardon, and Grant Heavenly Blessings to Osama bin Laden?

At his blog, Andrew Bostom reviews a Washington Times report that strongly suggests Osama bin Laden was, prior to burial at sea, given a funeral in accordance with the navy's protocols for funerals for Muslim military personnel. If this is so, it would have entailed the ceremonial washing and wrapping of the corpse by another Muslim -- symbolic of the cleansing away of the decedent's sins. Those gathered at the service, presumably naval and other U.S. government personnel aboard the ship, would then have been required to face Mecca as Islamic prayers were recited, including the following:

O Allah, forgive him, have mercy on him, pardon him, grant him security, provide him a nice place and spacious lodgings, wash him (off from his sins) with water, snow and ice, purify him from his sins as a white garment is cleansed from dirt, replace his present abode with a better one, replace his present family with a better one, replace his present partner with a better one, make him enter paradise and save him from the trials of grave [sic] and the punishment of hell.

Dr. Bostom goes on to discuss another disturbing aspect of all this which is not covered in the Washington Times story. The naval protocols also call for recitation of the opening sura (or chapter) of the Koran. If this was done, it should have included verse 1.7, which includes an eternal curse upon Jews and Christians -- as Bostom verifies with citations to authoritative commentaries on Islamic scripture.

Specifically, Allah is asked to guide Muslims on the "straight path," which is "the way of those on whom You have bestowed Your grace [i.e., the Muslims], not of those who have earned your anger [i.e., the Jews], nor of those who went astray [i.e., the Christians]." As the commentaries Bostom draws on elaborate, Jews are deemed to have earned Allah's wrath by ignoring and killing his prophets, while Christians are seen as having gone astray by indulging in such religious excesses as deifying Jesus, a prophet.

Is this what happened? We will only find out if the Obama administration releases the video footage of the funeral and burial. Since the government has already acknowledged that bin Laden was buried at sea, there would seem to be no good reason for withholding the video (with the understanding that the faces of any military personnel and identifiers of any sensitive locations could be obscured for security purposes). 

Holder vs. Holder

Why does the Obama Justice Department seem to have trouble mounting a full-throated, compelling legal defense of Osama bin Laden’s killing? The problem for Eric Holder the attorney general could be Eric Holder the private attorney.

In 2004, Mr. Holder chose to file an amicus brief on behalf of Jose Padilla, the al-Qaeda terrorist sent to our country by bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to carry out a post-9/11 second wave of attacks. In the brief, Holder argued that a commander-in-chief lacks the constitutional authority to do what his boss, the current commander-in-chief, has just done: determine the parameters of the battlefield. By Holder’s lights -- at least when the president is not named Obama -- an al-Qaeda terrorist must be treated as a criminal defendant, not an enemy combatant, unless he is encountered on a traditional battlefield.

#ad#It would be useful if staffers at congressional oversight hearings passed around copies of Holder’s Padilla brief. It is a comprehensive attack on Bush counterterrorism, an enthusiastic endorsement of the law-enforcement approach in vogue during the Clinton era (when Holder was deputy attorney general under Janet Reno, who also signed on to the Padilla brief). This might explain why Holder sometimes has difficulty answering seemingly easy questions. That’s what happened this week, when the Senate Judiciary Committee quizzed the attorney general on the lawfulness of the U.S. military’s targeted killing of bin Laden.

This should be a no-brainer, unless you are a transnational progressive, such as those in the Human Rights Watch crowd, which does not concede the primacy of American law when it comes to American government action; or a pedant such as Fox’s Andrew Napolitano, who seems to think the Constitution’s words “declare war” have a talismanic quality, as if Congress were powerless to authorize warfare without uttering them.

A few days after the 9/11 atrocities, Congress -- by huge bipartisan margins -- enacted a sweeping authorization of the use of military force (AUMF). The AUMF, which was promptly signed by President Bush and has been reaffirmed repeatedly in congressional appropriations signed by Presidents Bush and Obama, states in pertinent part:

The President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

Congress could not more clearly have empowered the president to launch military operations against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. No one was more responsible than bin Laden, who -- to use the crystal clear AUMF terminology -- planned and authorized the suicide-hijackings.

Not only did the AUMF put our nation on a firm war footing, Congress imposed no geographical or situational limitations on combat operations against those determined by the commander-in-chief either to have carried out 9/11 or to have harbored those terrorists. Manifestly, either Pakistan is our ally -- as its government and ours both profess -- in which case killing bin Laden on its soil is routine (there having been many U.S. strikes against the enemy in Pakistan), or Pakistan was harboring bin Laden in Abbottabad, in which case the AUMF expressly authorizes not only attacks against al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan but against Pakistan itself. Q.E.D.

Except it’s not that simple for Eric Holder the attorney general, because Eric Holder the private lawyer advocated greater legal protections for terrorists. 

The attorney general told the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the killing of bin Laden “was justified as an act of national self-defense.” But self-defense has nothing to do with it. True, the war is a defensive war in response to an atrocious terrorist attack; that, however, does not make each individual operation by which the war is waged an exercise in self-defense. In fact, had such a suggestion been made by a Bush-administration official, Holder would likely have been outraged: In effect, the self-defense rationale would give wartime presidents exactly the “blank check” the Lawyer Left insists they do not have. No, the operation in which bin Laden was killed was offensive, and rightly so.

As Fox news elaborated, the attorney general also trotted out a second theory:

Holder said it’s lawful to “target an enemy commander in the field,” just as U.S. forces did during World War II when it [sic] shot down a plane carrying Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto. Bin Laden was “by my estimation, and the estimation of the Justice Department, a lawful military target, and the operation was conducted consistent with our law [and] with our values.” Bin Laden made no attempts to surrender and there was “no indication he wanted to do that,” Holder said.

Notice that Holder’s defense here rests on the premise that bin Laden was targeted in the field, meaning, on a battlefield. If an enemy combatant is encountered on the battlefield and he does not surrender, he may be killed or captured -- it makes no difference whether he was armed, as bin Laden apparently was not.

#page#But hold on: Bin Laden was not confronted on a battlefield. Nor was he, like Admiral Yamamoto, in an aircraft, which theoretically can be a military asset -- or even used as a missile, as al-Qaeda has demonstrated. To the contrary, al-Qaeda’s emir was targeted in a residential neighborhood. Though he had some bodyguards, he was in the company of noncombatant women and children.

For most Americans, that does not detract at all from the legitimacy of bin Laden’s killing. This enemy has declared a global jihad against the United States. Al-Qaeda reserves to itself the prerogative to turn any place of its choosing into a battlefield. In fact, it would be perilous not to assume, when encountering al-Qaeda operatives, that this is exactly what they are up to. Their m.o., after all, is to target civilians for mass murder and to hide among civilians in order to frustrate retaliatory strikes. Consequently, it should make no difference that bin Laden was not found on a traditional battlefield -- that he was in a residential compound inside a country with which the United States is not at war. 

#ad#Nevertheless, what is not a problem for most Americans is a problem for Mr. Holder -- at least if we’re talking about Eric Holder the prominent Democratic lawyer who filed the Padilla amicus brief, an action that he failed to disclose to the Senate during his confirmation process.

Padilla was apprehended coming off a plane in Chicago. He was unarmed and in an airport, not on a traditional battlefield. Though not an enemy commander like bin Laden or Yamamoto, he was clearly an enemy combatant, and a quite deadly one, given the nature of his mission. Yet President Bush did not authorize his killing. Padilla was taken into custody by law-enforcement agents and later transferred to military custody after being designated an enemy combatant -- for which the Lawyer Left lustily rebuked the president.

Plainly, there are some distinctions between the Padilla and bin Laden situations. Not only was Padilla encountered inside our territory (after arriving on a flight from -- where else? -- Pakistan), he is also an American citizen. But Holder did not limit his argument on behalf of the terrorist to these circumstances. He also forcefully argued that the Bush administration did not have the power to treat Padilla as an enemy combatant because he was not found on a battlefield:

Amici do not question the power of the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to detain persons, even citizens, seized on an active field of battle. We recognize that the President has broad authority as Commander-in-Chief during a time of war or threat to the security of our Nation.#...#But the exigencies of the battlefield present a vastly different circumstance than even the bustle of O’Hare Airport.#...#While the government suggests that Padilla was arrested on a “battlefield,”#...#under its standards the “battlefield” against terrorism could extend throughout the world and the “hostilities” could be of indefinite and perhaps undefinable duration. Legal standards developed to deal with traditional wars cannot be imported wholesale into this very different context.

Holder was dangerously wrong. Put aside that no war comes with an expiration date. It was not the Bush administration that extended the battlefield “throughout the world.” The standards in question were set by al-Qaeda. That is no doubt why Congress prudently did not attempt to circumscribe the commander-in-chief’s discretion to determine what the battlefield is. We don’t want terrorists to have any sanctuaries.

This is also precisely why President Obama has “imported wholesale” into his command the traditional concept that a battlefield can be any location where the enemy can conduct operations -- which, in al-Qaeda’s case, is any place where its operatives are found. That is the risk a terrorist runs -- being an unlawful combatant who flouts laws of war designed to protect civilians, the terrorist must be denied the privileges that reward lawful combatants for conducting warfare honorably.

Contrary to Mr. Holder’s rationalizations about self-defense and “traditional” battlefields, President Obama was well within his power, under the Constitution and Congress’s AUMF, to order bin Laden’s killing in an offensive raid on a residential Pakistani compound. Only an unambiguous surrender by the al-Qaeda leader might have rendered the killing problematic. It was thus curious to find, in the Fox report, Holder’s supposition that, even if bin Laden had surrendered, there would have been a “good basis” for “those very brave Navy SEALs” to shoot bin Laden -- “in order to protect themselves and the other people who were in that building,” including “substantial numbers of women and children.”

Protections granted to honorable combatants under the laws of war -- many of which the Lawyer Left and the Obama administration have pushed to extend to terrorists -- generally hold that when quarter is sought, it must be given. It is “especially forbidden,” instructs Article 23 of the 1907 Hague Convention, “to kill or wound an enemy who, having laid down his arms, or having no longer means of defence, has surrendered at discretion.” It is, moreover, deemed an egregious violation of international law for a country at war to indicate that no quarter will be given, that it will take no prisoners.

But who knows? Maybe Mr. Holder is evolving.

—  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.

Annals of the Arab Spring: Egyptian "Democrats" Praise Bombing of Gas Pipeline to Israel

The Jerusalem Post reports that peaceful Egyptian protestors have descended on the Israeli embassy in Cairo today to celebrate the bombing of a pipeline in Sinai that delivers gas to Israel. [Hat tip: Andrew Bostom.] They demanded a "complete cancellation of normalization" of relations between Egypt and Israel, and a "complete halt" in Egyptian cooperation with Israel. In a burst of democracy, one protestor explained that if the Egyptian government won't cut off the supply of gas, "the people will." 

It is a remarkable coincidence that these Arab Spring protests have once again intensified on a Friday, the day Muslims go to weekly services at the mosques and are treated to sermons by their friendly imams. I hasten to note that this remains a spontaneous political uprising -- a mark of the yearning for freedom that stirs in every human heart. It has absolutely nothing to do with any religious doctrine, and it would be the crassest kind of Islamophobia to suggest otherwise.

Judge Mukasey on Interrogation and the Trail to bin Laden

Former attorney general Michael Mukasey has a great op-ed in this morning's WSJ about how crucial intelligence gleaned from terrorist interrogations is to our security. He also addresses the Obama administration's rashness not only in scrapping the CIA interrogation program before understanding its nature but in taking further steps -- the public revelation of techniques, the hounding of CIA agents by the Justice Department -- that will make it difficult to reinstate an effective interrogation program. It's all worth reading. Here's a sample:

The current president ran for election on the promise to do away with them even before he became aware, if he ever did, of what they were. Days after taking office he directed that the CIA interrogation program be done away with entirely, and that interrogation be limited to the techniques set forth in the Army Field Manual, a document designed for use by even the least experienced troops. It's available on the Internet and used by terrorists as a training manual for resisting interrogation.

In April 2009, the administration made public the previously classified Justice Department memoranda analyzing the harsh techniques, thereby disclosing them to our enemies and assuring that they could never be used effectively again. Meanwhile, the administration announced its intentions to replace the CIA interrogation program with one administered by the FBI. In December 2009, Omar Faruq Abdulmutallab was caught in an airplane over Detroit trying to detonate a bomb concealed in his underwear. He was warned after apprehension of his Miranda rights, and it was later disclosed that no one had yet gotten around to implementing the new program.

Yet the Justice Department, revealing its priorities, had gotten around to reopening investigations into the conduct of a half-dozen CIA employees alleged to have used undue force against suspected terrorists. I say "reopening" advisedly because those investigations had all been formally closed by the end of 2007, with detailed memoranda prepared by career Justice Department prosecutors explaining why no charges were warranted. Attorney General Eric Holder conceded that he had ordered the investigations reopened in September 2009 without reading those memoranda. The investigations have now dragged on for years with prosecutors chasing allegations down rabbit holes, with the CIA along with the rest of the intelligence community left demoralized.

Immediately following the killing of bin Laden, the issue of interrogation techniques became in some quarters the "dirty little secret" of the event. But as disclosed in the declassified memos in 2009, the techniques are neither dirty nor, as noted by Director Hayden and others, were their results little. As the memoranda concluded—and as I concluded reading them at the beginning of my tenure as attorney general in 2007—the techniques were entirely lawful as the law stood at the time the memos were written, and the disclosures they elicited were enormously important. That they are no longer secret is deeply regrettable. 

The debt limit question answers itself

We're $14.3 trillion in debt -- give or take another hundred trillion or so we keep off the books.

We're on a course to keep going another trillion or so a year deeper in debt as far as the eye can see.

We have no plan -- none, zero, nada ... -- for how we are going to pay that debt.

So, what do you say we increase our credit limit by another, say, $2 trillion -- you know, so we won't have to have this embarrassing conversation again before President Obama has to face the voters?