James Joyner provides a rebuttal to the notion that KSM should be tried, and it is notable for the fact that it contains actual arguments and not screaming and wailing and wet underpants.

One of the things I don’t understand about the reaction to trying KSM and others is why people on the right are reacting the way they are. After 9/11, the general attitude was one of defiance- “we’re gonna rebuild the World Trade Center bigger than it was before.” I remember people suggesting we should build the new WTC in the shape of a middle finger to show the terrorists we won’t take it:

And who can forget Michelle Malkin’s ridiculous I am John Doe Manifesto? That was just a couple years ago. What happened to the right wing swagger? When did they turn into such a bunch of scared wimps? When did they go from standing there in the rubble with George Bush and his megaphone to hiding under Dick Cheney’s desk cowering in fear?

Personally, I can’t think of anything more defiant than taking KSM, frog-marching him through Manhattan, giving him a fair trial, and then sending him to prison forever or executing him. That is how you show the terrorists that we aren’t going to be fazed.

For goodness sakes, right wingers. Man up for a change. I honestly think I liked the belligerent cowboy right-wingers better than the diaper-clad bed-wetters we have now.

Hopefully being tried and then sent to prison for the rest of their lives, where they can rot to death next to the unabomber and Eric Rudolph:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and four others accused in the attacks will be put on criminal trial in New York, Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to announce later Friday.

The decision, described by people familiar with the matter, is part of wider announcement planned on how to bring to justice detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay prison. It’s the first set of decisions before a Monday deadline on how to deal with the more than 200 prisoners remaining at the facility, which President Barack Obama has ordered closed.

The wingnut freakout over this will be predictable and amusing, because as we all know, real patriots have no faith in our judicial system and law enforcement officers.

*** Update ***

Literally, as I wrote this post, I got a Red State Action Alert:

Today Barack Obama is going to announce that the terrorist mastermind of September 11th, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, will be sent to New York City for a criminal trial in a civilian court.

In that trial, the terrorist will get all the rights afforded an American citizen in a criminal trial, including the right to a fair trial, the right to a taxpayer funded attorney, the right to review all the evidence against him, potentially including classified intelligence matters, the right to exclude evidence against him including, potentially, any confession obtained through enhanced interrogation techniques, etc.

At best, this will be a show trial fit not for the American Republic, but a third world kleptocratic totalitarian regime. At worse, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will gain access to classified material he can then leak to other terrorists while New York yet again becomes a target for terrorists. We have already had occasions in this country where terrorists’ sympathetic lawyers have conveyed information, orders, and plans to other terrorists.

You can find more details here.

Call your Congressman and Senator right now. Tell them they should use every tool at their disposal to block this. The number to call is 202-224-3121.

Sincerely yours,

Erick Erickson
Editor, RedState.com

I love that his range of possible outcomes includes a “show trial” as the best possible outcome. Authoritarians simply have no faith in our Democracy whatsoever.

Remember the other day when Hillary Clinton asserted that she did not think drone attacks killing civilians could be viewed as a form of terrorism by the Pakastani populace? This cracked me up:

A letter about healthcare reform to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), apparently from former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, triggered a security scare that briefly shut down much of the Senate on Wednesday.

The typed letter, tucked inside a hand-written business envelope, appeared in Reid’s office without postage, in an outgoing mailbox bin. A Senate postal clerk noticed the envelope and alerted a Reid staffer, who in turn notified Capitol Police about 2 p.m.

A small swarm of officers responded, first shutting down the hallway outside Reid’s office and then taking the even rarer step of shutting down the wide Ohio Clock corridor that senators use for press conferences outside the Senate’s main entrance. Mindful of the ricin and anthrax attacks in 2001, teams of hazardous materials technicians were called and tested the envelope before opening it and discovering Koop’s letter.

“The staff in the Capitol in particular and on the Hill in general are very sensitive to mail that ends up in an office and hasn’t been cleared,” said Senate Sergeant at Arms Terry Gainer.

So, to review. When Pakistani citizens watch their friends and neighbors blown up by missile strikes, it is the position of this administration that they should not view it as terrorism. On the other hand, when we receive a letter without a stamp, we shut down a portion of the most powerful government in the world out of a general hysteria over terrorism.

I’m even going to go out on a limb and wager that more Af/Pak citizens have been killed by missiles than Americans have been by unstamped letters.

Also, this is excellent news for conservatives and really puts the health care reform agenda in a bad spot.

Something has to be done about this:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton came face-to-face Friday with simmering Pakistani anger over U.S. aerial drone attacks in their country and drew back slightly from her blunt remarks suggesting Pakistani officials know where terrorists are hiding.

In a series of public appearances on the final day of a three-day visit, Clinton was pressed repeatedly by Pakistani civilians and journalists about the secret U.S. program that uses drones to launch missiles to kill terrorists.

***

During an interview with Clinton broadcast live in Pakistan with several prominent female TV anchors, before a predominantly female audience of several hundred, one member of the audience said the Predator attacks amount to ‘’executions without trial’’ for those killed.

Another asked Clinton how she would define terrorism.

‘’Is it the killing of people in drone attacks?’’ she asked. That woman then asked if Clinton considers drone attacks and bombings like the one that killed more than 100 civilians in the city of Peshawar earlier this week to both be acts of terrorism.

‘’No, I do not,’’ Clinton replied.

Well, Secretary Clinton might not think small unmanned drones firing missiles into villages is terrorism, but it is pretty damned clear a lot of people in Pakistan would disagree with that assessment.

And I’m pretty damned sure if predator drones were flying over American cities firing missiles into populated areas and killing a bunch of innocents, Secretary Clinton and everyone else in the country would pretty quickly label it terrorism. Hell, if someone mails an unnamed white powder to someone, we freak out for a couple months. Let alone blowing up dozens of people every week.

Looks like we might one day see Rumsfeld’s handy work:

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) learned today of the existence of video and audio tapes of the abusive interrogations of client Mohammed al Qahtani, the victim of the “First Special Interrogation Plan” personally overseen by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

“After the intense scrutiny of the government’s torture and interrogation of Mr. al Qahtani, it is shocking that the government has hidden the existence of these tapes from the public for so many years,” said CCR Attorney Gitanjali S. Gutierrez. “The government’s interrogation of him has been the topic of multiple military, Justice Department and congressional investigations. These tapes should have been acknowledged long ago.”

Until recently, the Government had adamantly denied that any U.S. personnel engaged in acts of torture during Mr. al Qahtani’s interrogation, but on January 14, 2009, Military Commission Convening Authority Susan Crawford conceded that by subjecting Mr. al Qahtani to systematic 20-hour interrogations, prolonged sleep deprivation, 160 days of severe isolation, forced nudity, sexual and religious humiliation, and other aggressive interrogation tactics, the government had engaged in acts of torture. Much of this information appeared in interrogation logs leaked to the press as early as 2006.

I’m surprised these have not been disappeared like the other tapes. I wonder if like waterboarding, the wingnuts are going to recreate all of these interrogations to prove torture is not torture.

Did Hannity ever get waterboarded yet?

They seem to be getting it done:

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, senior government officials have announced dozens of terrorism cases that on closer examination seemed to diminish as legitimate threats. The accumulating evidence against a Denver airport shuttle driver suggests he may be different, with some investigators calling his case the most serious in years.

Documents filed in Brooklyn against the driver, Najibullah Zazi, contend he bought chemicals needed to build a bomb — hydrogen peroxide, acetone and hydrochloric acid — and in doing so, Mr. Zazi took a critical step made by few other terrorism suspects.

If government allegations are to be believed, Mr. Zazi, a legal immigrant from Afghanistan, had carefully prepared for a terrorist attack. He attended a Qaeda training camp in Pakistan, received training in explosives and stored in his laptop computer nine pages of instructions for making bombs from the same kind of chemicals he had bought.

And then there is this:

A 19-year-old Jordanian citizen is expected to make an appearance before a federal magistrate in Dallas this morning after authorities accused him of attempting to blow up a downtown Dallas skyscraper.

Hosam Maher Husein Smadi was arrested Thursday after he parked a vehicle laden with government-supplied fake explosives in the underground parking garage of Fountain Place, a 60-story tower in the 1400 block of Ross Avenue at North Field Street, authorities said.

These seem to me to be success stories, and real threats (unlike that one group of clowns in Queens a couple months ago). I also like how they are sort of taking it in stride and not having big, showy press conferences with Eric Holder trying to scare the shit out of us.

Meanwhile:

Reporting from Washington – U.S. officials are planning to add as many as 14,000 combat troops to the American force in Afghanistan by sending home support units and replacing them with “trigger-pullers,” Defense officials say.

The move would beef up the combat force in the country without increasing the overall number of U.S. troops, a contentious issue as public support for the war slips. But many of the noncombat jobs are likely be filled by private contractors, who have proved to be a source of controversy in Iraq and a growing issue in Afghanistan.

What exactly is our strategy in Afghanistan? And I’m not being sarcastic, I honestly do not know what we are trying to accomplish anymore.

DougJ’s earlier post today on Cheney reminded me of this article from Walter Pincus the other day:

Morale has sagged at the CIA following the release of additional portions of an inspector general’s review of the agency’s interrogation program and the announcement that the Justice Department would investigate possible abuses by interrogators, according to former intelligence officials, especially those associated with the program.

A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, the third-ranking CIA official at the time of the use of harsh interrogation practices, said that although vigorous oversight is crucial, the public airing of once-classified internal assessments and the prospect of further investigation are damaging the agency. “Morale at the agency is down to minus 50,” he said.

At the same time, former inspector general John L. Helgerson, whose review of the program was largely declassified Monday, said that the release, though painful, would ensure that the agency confronts difficult issues head on, instead of ignoring or trying to bury them.

Unlike virtually everything else in Fred Hiatt’s fishwrap, I tend to trust Pincus and his body of work, so I have no doubt that morale might be low.

What astounds me, though, is that morale might be low at the CIA because the Justice department might prosecute people who- get this- BROKE THE LAW. Imagine that- the Justice department has duties other than politically motivated prosecutions, micromanaging US Attorneys, and stocking the department with religious nuts and gay-bashers.

And what I find even more astounding is that the Republicans and Dick Cheney are, so far, successfully pivoting and presenting themselves as the defenders of the CIA, when it has been Dick Cheney and the neocon establishment that has spent the last four decades undermining, attacking, and debasing the CIA. It wasn’t the liberals who cooked up Team B- that would be George Herbert Walker Bush who approved it, Paul Wolfowitz who was part of the team, and Richard Perle who was instrumental in making it happen. It wasn’t Ted Kennedy and the liberals who spent the entire last decade undermining the CIA and basically making George Tenet say whatever the hell Dick Cheney wanted them to say, that would be the Republicans. It wasn’t Dennis Kucinich who ignored the August 6th CIA memo about bin Laden, setting the stage for the largest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t the dirty hippies at the DNC who created the Office of Special Plans to create an excuse to attack Iraq and directly undermine the intelligence from the CIA, that was Dick Cheney and Doug Feith and company.

And let’s not forget that it wasn’t Russ Feingold and Barbara Boxer who outed a covert CIA agent and then conducted a full-on media jihad against her and her husband. No, again the honors for that go to Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and Bob Novak.

So if morale is low at the CIA and they are feeling a little butthurt, they might want to think about how things have happened the last few decades. They aren’t in the position they are in because of Eric Holder. Far from it. And if they can’t figure this out on their own, and need me to point this crap out, then quite frankly, I don’t think they are smart enough to be handling classified intelligence in the first damned place.

This is depressing because it is such a realistic portrayal of our discourse:

I’m surprised I didn’t see Captain Ed in there.

(via)

What he said:

The document reads, like so much else from the Cheney years, like a document from a South American dictatorship in the 1970s or 1980s. If someone had told me a few years ago that it had popped up in the John_Walker_Lindh_Custody Soviet archives, I would have believed him. Read the whole thing if you can. It is a distressing document. Here’s what the “CIA pros” did to prisoners (the non-CIA pros improvised the president’s directive to torture and abuse prisoners in very similar ways): stress positions, nudity, hooding, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, long time standing, beatings, hypothermia, and walling. They key thing, according to the CIA, is to enhance “the potential dread a high-value detainee might have of US custody”. Notice the shift from the standards of the past. In the past, the US was known for being a country whose soldiers would never mistreat prisoners; now, the US wants the world to know that US custody is something to be dreaded. That’s what Cheney did to America. He’s proud of it. If you are ever captured by a US soldier, and suspected of terrorism, you know that torture will be coming soon. The values of Washington and Eisenhower and Reagan are inverted. The reputation of the US as a defender of human rights is reversed. The point is that America must be feared for its willingness to abandon all human rights.

What is going to happen when this happens to an American soldier, and the wingnuts scream torture until the other country claims they based their interrogation techniques on Bush era memos?

Ed Morissey, with the predictable tough guy spin:

Are we to believe that the men who killed 3,000 men, women, and children were so sensitive that those threats would leave them psychologically scarred for life — but mass murder didn’t? Will the DoJ now prosecute police officers who blow smoke in subjects’ faces, either inadvertently or deliberately, during interrogations? Isn’t this defining torture down to an absurd level? If anything, it shows that the statutes governing torture are ridiculously vague.

And how many American lives is it worth to prevent this? 10,000? 5,000? Your family’s? Like it or not, those were the stakes in the weeks following 9/11.

Putting aside the fact that there is nothing vague about whether or not it is legal to stage mock executions, these clowns will never figure it out, will they? This is not about the terrorists, it is about us. Decent nations don’t torture, they don’t threaten to rape the children of prisoners, they don’t stage mock executions, they don’t waterboard people 200 times in one month. No matter what the stakes.

And they certainly don’t do those things and get any right to pretend they have some sort of moral authority on the world stage. Period.

This Ambinders quote (via Sullivan’s borg) is intriguing:

Lieberman should be satisfied that Holder has decided to limit the investigation to twelve documented instances of abuse, and that the White House’s first reaction here was to worry about morale at the CIA…

Is there another part of the government that we allow to just engage in wanton lawlessness, and then when the misdeeds are uncovered, the first priority in the investigation is the department’s “morale?” If IRS agents found a way to embezzle millions of dollars, when we discovered it and prosecuted them, would we worry about the morale of the IRS?

Also, just curious, but I thought we were working under the rules for the last decade, which state, quite clearly, “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to hide.” Did a new edition come out and I missed the rule change? Or was that just for us regular citizens?

Damn you, Gary Gygax. I guess I need a new Player’s Handbook.

We don’t have it:

Several news organizations reported Friday night that a Central Intelligence Agency report due to be made public next week details extreme tactics employed by agency interrogators, including what was described as a “mock execution.” Those news organizations’ reports could not be independently confirmed.

The content of the document, a 2004 report by the agency’s inspector general, was first described by Newsweek, which cited anonymous sources. The Associated Press and The Washington Post, also citing anonymous sources, reported some of the same details, including the claim that a threat of execution was used in dealing with one detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

A federal judge had ordered that the report be made public Monday in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, The A.P. reported.

It’s going to be awesome spending the next week listening to cretins on right-wing blogs tell us that this is ok, because Al Qaeda actually executes people. Liberal media, also. We didn’t need to know this.

Question: Is it possible to be too cynical with the Bush crowd?

Answer: No.

I give up.