Win or lose, many see Palin as future of party
By Kate Zernike and Monica Davey, New York Times, October 29, 2008

Whether the Republican presidential ticket wins or loses on Tuesday, a group of prominent conservatives are planning to meet the next day to discuss the way forward, and whatever the outcome, Gov. Sarah Palin will be high on the agenda.

Ms. Palin, of Alaska, has had a rocky time since being named as Senator John McCain’s running mate, but to many conservatives her future remains bright. If Mr. McCain wins, she will give the social conservative movement a seat inside the White House. If he loses, she could emerge as a standard bearer for the movement and a potential presidential candidate in 2012, albeit one who will need to address her considerable political damage.

Her prospects, in or out of government, are the subject of intensive conversations among conservative leaders, including the group that will meet next Wednesday in rural Virginia to weigh social, foreign policy and economic issues, as well as the political landscape and the next presidential election. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Richard Cohen nailed it in his description of how Palin had the National Review and Weekly Standard editors drooling over her:

Palin is a down-the-line rightie, so her inexperience, her lack of interest in foreign affairs, her numbing provincialism and her gifts for fabrication (Can we go over that “bridge to nowhere” routine again?) do not trouble her ideological handlers. Let her get into office. They will govern.

Accuracy of polls a question in itself
By Michael Abramowitz, Washington Post, October 29, 2008

Could the polls be wrong?

Sen. John McCain and his allies say that they are. The country, they say, could be headed to a 2008 version of the famous 1948 upset election, with McCain in the role of Harry S. Truman and Sen. Barack Obama as Thomas E. Dewey, lulled into overconfidence by inaccurate polls.

“We believe it is a very close race, and something that is frankly very winnable,” Sarah Simmons, director of strategy for the McCain campaign, said yesterday.

Few analysts outside the McCain campaign appear to share this view. And pollsters this time around will not make the mistake that the Gallup organization made 60 years ago — ending their polling more than a week before the election and missing a last-minute surge in support for Truman. Every day brings dozens of new state and national presidential polls, a trend that is expected to continue up to Election Day. [continued…]

Prospect of peace talks rises in Afghanistan
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2008

The Afghan war is at its highest pitch since it began seven years ago, growing daily in scope and savagery. Yet on both sides of the conflict, the possibility of peace negotiations has gained sudden prominence.

Among Western and Afghan officials, analysts and tribal elders, field commanders and foot soldiers, the notion of talks with the Taliban, once dismissed out of hand, has recently become the subject of serious debate.

Both sides acknowledge that there are enormous impediments. Each camp has staked out negotiating positions that are anathema to the other. Neither side professes the slightest trust in the other’s word. Each side claims not only a battlefield edge, but insists that it is winning the war for public support.

But whether they are willing to admit it publicly, both sides have powerful incentives for turning to negotiations rather than pushing ahead with a grinding war of attrition. Would-be mediators have emerged, preliminary contacts have taken place, and more indirect talks are likely soon. [continued…]

U.S. mulls talks with Taliban in bid to quell Afghan unrest
By Yochi J. Dreazen, Siobhan Gorman and Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, October 28, 2008

The U.S. is actively considering talks with elements of the Taliban, the armed Islamist group that once ruled Afghanistan and sheltered al Qaeda, in a major policy shift that would have been unthinkable a few months ago.

Senior White House and military officials believe that engaging some levels of the Taliban — while excluding top leaders — could help reverse a pronounced downward spiral in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. Both countries have been destabilized by a recent wave of violence.

The outreach is a draft recommendation in a classified White House assessment of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, according to senior Bush administration officials. The officials said that the recommendation calls for the talks to be led by the Afghan central government, but with the active participation of the U.S.

The idea is supported by Gen. David Petraeus, who will assume responsibility this week for U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Gen. Petraeus used a similar approach in Iraq, where a U.S. push to enlist Sunni tribes in the fight against al Qaeda in Iraq helped sharply reduce the country’s violence. Gen. Petraeus earlier this month publicly endorsed talks with less extreme Taliban elements.

The final White House recommendations, which could differ from the draft, are not expected until after next month’s elections. The next administration wouldn’t be compelled to implement them. But the support of Gen. Petraeus, the highly regarded incoming head of the U.S. Central Command, could help ensure that the policy is put in place regardless of who wins next month’s elections.

The proposed policy appears to strike rare common ground with both presidential candidates. Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama has said he thinks talks with the Taliban should be considered and has advocated shifting more military forces to Afghanistan. Republican contender Sen. John McCain supports, as part of his strategy, reaching out to tribal leaders in an effort to separate “the reconcilable elements of the insurgency from the irreconcilable elements of the insurgency,” Randy Scheunemann, the campaign’s top foreign-policy adviser, said Monday. [continued…]

¡Viva! Obama 2008
By Amigos de Obama, 2008

To the candidate who is Barack Obama
I sing this corrido with all my soul
He was born humble without pretension
He began in the streets of Chicago
Working to achieve a vision
To protect the working people
And bring us all together in this great nation
¡Viva! Obama ¡Viva! Obama
Families united and safe and even with a health care plan
¡Viva! Obama ¡Viva! Obama
A candidate fighting for our nation
It doesn’t matter if you’re from San Antonio
It doesn’t matter if you’re from Corpus Christi
From Dallas, from the Valley, from Houston or from El Paso
What matters is that we vote for Obama
Because his struggle is also our struggle, and today we urgently need a change
Lets unite with our great friend
¡Viva! Obama ¡Viva! Obama
Families united and safe and even with a health care plan
¡Viva! Obama ¡Viva! Obama
A candidate fighting for our nation

Editor’s Comment — Here’s how to improve the tenor of political campaigning: all campaign ads must be set to music with lyrics. I have little doubt the McCain campaign just couldn’t muster as fine a mariachi band.

Of course there will be those who argue that an all-musical campaign would diminish the seriousness of a presidential election, but please, don’t tell me that what we have now is serious.

So, if it’s not serious, at least it can be uplifting. ¡Viva! Obama.

Christian right intensifies attacks on Obama
By Eric Gorski and Rachell Zoll, AP, October 24, 2008

Terrorist strikes on four American cities. Russia rolling into Eastern Europe. Israel hit by a nuclear bomb. Gay marriage in every state. The end of the Boy Scouts. All are plausible scenarios if Democrat Barack Obama is elected president, according to a new addition to the campaign conversation called “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” produced by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family Action.

The imagined look into the future is part of an escalation in rhetoric from Christian right activists who are trying to paint Obama in the worst possible terms as the campaign heads into the final stretch and polls show the Democrat ahead.

Although hard-edge attacks are common late in campaigns, the tenor of the strikes against Obama illustrate just how worried conservative Christian activists are about what should happen to their causes and influence if Democrats seize control of both Congress and the White House. [continued…]

Building a White House team before the election is decided
By Peter Baker and Jackie Calmes, New York Times, October 25, 2008

With the economy in tatters at home and two wars still raging abroad, Senator Barack Obama’s team is preparing for a fast start, should he win the election, to what could be the most challenging and volatile transition between presidents in 75 years.

Mr. Obama’s advisers are sifting résumés, compiling policy options and discussing where to hold his first news conference as president-elect. Democrats say Mr. Obama hopes to name key members of his White House, economic and security teams soon after the election. His transition chief has even drafted a sample Inaugural Address.

Presidential nominees typically start preparing for transitions before the election, but Mr. Obama’s plans appear more extensive than in the past and more advanced than those of Senator John McCain, his Republican opponent. Mr. McCain has also assigned confidants to prepare for a transition but instructed them to limit their activities as he tries to rescue his foundering campaign, Republicans said.

Already the capital is buzzing with discussion about who would fill top positions. Obama advisers mention Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, as a possible White House chief of staff, and Timothy F. Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as Treasury secretary. To demonstrate bipartisanship, advisers said Mr. Obama might ask two members of President Bush’s cabinet to stay, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. [continued…]

Guantanamo tribunals overseer under investigation
By Josh Meye, Los Angeles Times, October 25, 2008

A Pentagon official overseeing the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals is the subject of two investigations into his conduct, including one wide-ranging ethics examination into whether he abused his power and improperly influenced the prosecutions of enemy combatants.

An internal Air Force investigation into the activities of Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann appears to be the more significant of the two probes because it was launched only after a preliminary inquiry found sufficient grounds to move forward, military officials said.

The Air Force is reviewing allegations that Hartmann bullied prosecutors, logistics officials and others at Guantanamo — resulting in cases going to trial that were not ready and the prosecution of at least one individual on charges that were unwarranted — and assertions that he advocated using coerced evidence despite prosecutors’ objections.

It also is looking into allegations that Hartmann made intentionally misleading statements, both in public and during the Guantanamo tribunal proceedings, in an effort to downplay the direct role that he played in the overall prosecution effort and in several cases, according to interviews with military lawyers. [continued…]

The making (and remaking) of McCain
By Robert Draper, New York Times, October 26, 2008

The smartest bit of political wisdom [McCain’s chief campaign strategist, Steve Schmidt] ever heard was dispensed by George W. Bush one spring day at the White House residence in 2004, at a time when his re-election effort was not going especially well. The strategists at the meeting — including Schmidt, who was directing the Bush campaign’s rapid-response unit — fretted over their candidate’s sagging approval ratings and the grim headlines about the war in Iraq. Only Bush appeared thoroughly unworried. He explained to them why, polls notwithstanding, voters would ultimately prefer him over his opponent, John Kerry.

There’s an accidental genius to the way Americans pick a president, Schmidt remembers Bush saying that day. By the end of it all, a candidate’s true character is revealed to the American people.

Had Schmidt been working for his present client back in 2000, he might have disputed Bush’s premise. After all, in McCain’s first run for the presidency, “true character” was the one thing the Vietnam hero and campaign-finance-reform crusader seemed to have going for him eight years ago in the Republican primaries. Bush had everything else, and he buried McCain. What campaigns peddle is not simply character but character as defined by story — a tale of opposing forces that in its telling will memorably establish what a given election is about. In 2000, the McCain effort played like that of a smart and plucky independent film that ultimately could not compete for audiences against the Bush campaign’s summer blockbuster. Four years later, in the race against John Kerry, Schmidt and the other Bush strategists had perfected their trade craft. With a major studio’s brutal efficiency, they distilled the campaign into a megabudget melodrama pitting an unwavering commander in chief against a flip-flopper, set in a post-9/11 world where there could be no room for error or equivocation.

Schmidt has been in charge of strategy for the McCain campaign since early this summer, and his effort to prevail in the battle of competing story lines has been considerably more problematic. The selling of a presidential “narrative” the reigning buzz word of this election cycle has taken on outsize significance in an age in which a rush of visuals and catch words can cripple public images overnight. Mitt Romney, it is said, lost because he could not get his story straight. Hillary Clinton found her I’m-a-fighter leitmotif too late to save her candidacy. By contrast, the narrative of Barack Obama has seemed to converge harmonically with the shifting demographics and surging discontent of the electorate. It may well be, as his detractors suggest, that Obama is among the least-experienced presidential nominees in our nation’s history. But to voters starved for change, the 47-year-old biracial first-term Democratic senator clearly qualifies. That, in any event, is his story, and he has stuck to it.

John McCain’s biography has been the stuff of legend for nearly a decade. And yet Schmidt and his fellow strategists have had difficulty explaining how America will be better off for electing (as opposed to simply admiring) a stubborn patriot. In seeking to do so, the McCain campaign has changed its narrative over and over. Sometimes with McCain’s initial resistance but always with his eventual approval, Schmidt has proffered a candidate who is variously a fighter, a conciliator, an experienced leader and a shake-’em-up rebel. “The trick is that all of these are McCain,” Matt McDonald, a senior adviser, told me. But in constantly alternating among story lines in order to respond to changing events and to gain traction with voters, the “true character” of a once-crisply-defined political figure has become increasingly murky.

Schmidt evidently saw the financial crisis as a “true character” moment that would advance his candidate’s narrative. But the story line did not go as scripted. “This has to be solved by Monday,” Schmidt told reporters that Wednesday afternoon in late September, just after McCain concluded his lengthy meeting with his advisers and subsequently announced his decision to suspend his campaign and go to Washington. Belying a crisis situation, however, McCain didn’t leave New York immediately. He spent Thursday morning at an event for the Clinton Global Initiative, the nonprofit foundation run by former President Bill Clinton. As McCain headed for Washington later that morning, he was sufficiently concerned about the situation that Schmidt felt compelled to reassure him. “Remember what President Clinton told you,” Schmidt said, referring to advice Clinton had dispensed that morning: “If you do the right thing, it might be painful for a few days. But in the long run it will work out in your favor.”

After arriving on Capitol Hill nearly 24 hours after his announcement, McCain huddled with three of his closest political allies: fellow senators Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman and Jon Kyl. Later that day at a White House meeting convened by Bush and also attended by Congressional leaders of both parties as well as both candidates, McCain said almost nothing, even when House Republicans declared that they were not yet willing to sign onto the administration’s $700 billion proposal. Despite the fact that the deal maker had produced no deal, McCain announced the next day that his campaign would resume — “optimistic that there has been significant progress towards a bipartisan agreement,” as a campaign statement put it — and traveled to Mississippi that Friday afternoon to debate Obama. On Sunday morning, Schmidt went on “Meet the Press” to insist that his boss’s foray had been crucial in bringing “all of the parties to the table,” with the result that “there appears to be a framework completed.” The next day — Monday, Sept. 29, the day by which Schmidt had earlier warned the crisis “has to be solved” — the House Republicans played the key role in defeating the bailout legislation.

Scene by scene, McCain failed to deliver the performance that had been promised. Of course, this was no mere movie. America was in crisis. Perhaps with the Bush theory in mind, Steve Schmidt had advised McCain to “go in all the way” on the financial crisis so as to reveal his candidate’s true character. But given a chance to show what kind of president he might be, McCain came off more like a stymied bystander than a leader who could make a difference. Judging by the polls, the McCain campaign has yet to recover. [continued…]

Reaching out to Iran
By Lawrence J. Korb and Laura Conley, IHT, October 24, 2008

Few countries were as helpful to the United States in its early involvement in Afghanistan as Iran. Yet after the fall of the Taliban, the U.S. failed to capitalize on the possibilities of that strategic relationship. Now coalition and Afghan troops are losing ground against the same insurgents they confronted in 2001, in a war that the United States is unlikely to win unless it rethinks its relationship with Iran.

Even before the terrorist acts on Sept. 11, 2001, Iran opposed the Taliban and strongly backed the Afghan Northern Alliance. After the attacks, Tehran stepped forward to help topple Afghanistan’s extremist Sunni government and pledged $560 million for reconstruction efforts.

Furthermore, Iran demonstrated an impressive ability to work with and guide the nascent Afghan government. James Dobbins, the Bush administration’s first special envoy to Afghanistan, recognized Iran’s substantial contributions in training and equipping the Afghan Army. He also praised their contributions at the Bonn Conference in 2001. [continued…]

Pakistan uses tribal militias in Taliban war
By Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah, New York Times, October 24, 2008

Two tribal elders lay stretched out in an orthopedic ward here last week, their plastered limbs and winces of pain grim evidence of the slaughter they survived when a suicide bomber blew himself up in the midst of their tribal gathering.

These wounded men, and many others in the hospital, were supposed to be the backbone of a Pakistani government effort to take on the Taliban, and its backers, Al Qaeda, with armies of traditional tribesmen working in consultation with the Pakistani military.

The tribal militias, known as lashkars, have quickly become a crucial tool of Pakistan’s strategy in the tribal belt, where the army has been fighting the Taliban for more than two months in what army generals acknowledge is a tougher and more protracted slog than they had anticipated. And, indeed, the lashkars’ early efforts have been far from promising.

As the strength of the militants in the tribal areas grows, and as the war across the border in Afghanistan worsens, the Pakistanis are casting about for new tactics. The emergence of the lashkars is a sign of the tribesmen’s rising frustration with the ruthlessness of the Taliban, but also of their traditional desire to run their own affairs and keep the Pakistani Army at bay, Pakistani officers and law enforcement officials say. [continued…]

Blogger.com (Blogspot) is banned in Turkey
Political Islam in Turkey, October 24, 2008

There is still no information about the cause of the ban but everybody suspects religious fundamentalist Adnan Oktar who is responsible for most of the Internet bans in Turkey.

He recently made a name for himself by having the site of British biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins banned for Turkish Internet users.

Oktar is taking any content on the net which supports Darwinism to the Turkish court system and mentions his title as a “Creationist.”

But whether he is involved or not in this recent blogger.com ban is still not confirmed. [continued…]

Muslim McCain fans confront intolerance at rally
By Davin Hutchins, American News Project, October 20, 2008

At a John McCain rally in Woodbridge, Virginia, three people handed out “Obama for Change” bumper stickers with the Communist sickle and hammer and the Islamic crescent, saying Obama was a socialist with ties to radical Islam. Several moderate McCain supporters, Muslim and Christian alike, struck back – relentlessly bombarding the group distributing the flyers until they left the premises. [continued…]

SEE THE VIDEO

Editor’s Comment — It might come as news to a few McCain supporters but socialism (as in the God-denying Soviet type) and Islam mix like oil and water. Why can’t they just stick to a coherent form of bigotry? Obama is the anti-Christ, or Obama is a terrorist, or the simplest line of all: we don’t want a black president.

There’s an interesting giveaway phrase in the dialogue above from the guy who describes himself as a Christian conservative: “I don’t think it’s a bad thing to question Barack Obama’s type… ”

Hmmm… And what “type” would that be?

Bush decides to keep Guantánamo open
By Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, October 21, 2008

Despite his stated desire to close the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, President Bush has decided not to do so, and never considered proposals drafted in the State Department and the Pentagon that outlined options for transferring the detainees elsewhere, according to senior administration officials.

Mr. Bush’s top advisers held a series of meetings at the White House this summer after a Supreme Court ruling in June cast doubt on the future of the American detention center. But Mr. Bush adopted the view of his most hawkish advisers that closing Guantánamo would involve too many legal and political risks to be acceptable, now or any time soon, the officials said.

The administration is proceeding on the assumption that Guantánamo will remain open not only for the rest of Mr. Bush’s presidency but also well beyond, the officials said, as the site for military tribunals of those facing terrorism-related charges and for the long prison sentences that could follow convictions.

The effect of Mr. Bush’s stance is to leave in place a prison that has become a reviled symbol of the administration’s fight against terrorism, and to leave another contentious foreign policy decision for the next president. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — If in his final months in office, Bush was to have announced that Guantanamo was being closed, his decision would have been totally out of character. He would in effect have been acknowledging that he had a responsibility to resolve a problem that he had created. Instead, as a deadbeat president, he’d rather just walk away.

Having already decided that the judgment of history won’t come until after his death, Bush has freeze-wrapped his conscience by refusing to question himself. We can only hope that history moves faster than he would hope and the questions he won’t address now are posed later by others while he is under oath. It might not happen for a decade or two, but meanwhile, the prospect of life as a social and political pariah is just around the corner.

If an hour is a long time in politics, we must start thinking in centuries
By George Monbiot, The Guardian, October 21, 2008

The problem is simply stated. As Gordon Brown – discussing what he perceives to be an improvement in his political fortunes – says, “an hour is a long time in politics”. It used to be a week, but everything is speeding up. To remain in office or to remain in business, decision-makers must privilege the present over the future. Discount rates ensure that investments made today are worth nothing in 10 years’ time; the political cycle demands that no one looks beyond the next election.

The financial crisis is just one consequence of a system which demands that governments sacrifice long-term survival for short-term gains. In this case, political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic – from Reagan to Brown – decided to appease business lobbyists and boost short-term growth by allowing the banks to use new financial instruments, many of which were as dodgy as a three-pound coin. It made perfect political sense, as long as the inevitable crash took place after they left office.

For similar reasons we are likely to be ambushed by other nasty surprises: runaway climate change, resource depletion, foreign policy blowback, new surveillance and genetic technologies, skills shortages, demographic change, a declining tax base, private and public debt. Politics is the art of shifting trouble from the living to the unborn. [continued…]

As fuel prices fall, will push for alternatives lose steam?
By Steven Mufson, Washington Post, October 20, 2008

Just four months ago, a conference here on electric cars drew four times as many people as expected. District fire marshals ordered some of the crowd to leave, and the atmosphere was more like that of a rock concert than an energy conference. A brief film depicted an electric car owner driving off with a beautiful woman to the strains of “The Power of Love” while her original companion struggles to pay for gasoline. The audience cheered.

One discordant note in the series of enthusiastic speeches came from Bill Reinert, one of the Toyota Prius designers. He cautioned that designing and ramping up production of a new car takes five years.

“If oil goes down to $60 or $70 a barrel and gasoline gets back to $2.50 a gallon, and that very possibly could happen,” he said, “will that demand stay the same or will we shift back up?”

It didn’t take five years to hit those numbers. One type of oil shock has given way to another. Even more swiftly than the price of oil rose, it has tumbled to the range that seemed far-fetched when Reinert spoke and oil was more than $130 a barrel. Now that drop threatens a wide variety of game-changing plans to find alternatives to oil or ways to drastically reduce U.S. consumption. [continued…]

Decades of eroded trust and democracy did the damage
By Benjamin Barber, The Guardian, October 20, 2008

Economic remedies for the fiscal crisis continue to frustrate their political backers. On that black Monday when the US Congress refused to pass the $700bn bail-out, the market plummeted 477 points. A few days later, after Congress reversed itself and passed the $700bn bail-out, the market dropped nearly 800 points. Since then it has gyrated wildly, drawing markets in Britain, continental Europe and Asia into the maelstrom. What’s going on – a crisis in economic capital or in fiscal confidence?

Neither exactly. As the global hysteria makes evident, trust is at stake, but not purely fiscal or economic trust. De-leveraging banks, insuring deposit accounts, penalising CEOs and socialising risk can’t do the trick because trust is ultimately political – more specifically, democratic. Trust is a crucial form of social capital, a recognition of the common ground on which we stand as citizens. It is the glue that holds rival producers and consumers together and lets them do the business that would otherwise do them in. Whereas the whole point of the market is competition – selfishness and narcissism as instruments of market calculation.

The dirty little secret is, however, that market capitalism works only when it can feed parasitically off active democratic social capital. When too many mortgages fail and too many banks come under pressure and too much bad paper gets sold and too many hedge funds don’t realise what they’ve bought, and credit freezes up and stocks tumble, the trust deficit appears. And no amount of fiscal tinkering, government pushing, banking reform, resolute de-leveraging or presidential and ministerial rhetoric can make up for this democratic deficit. [continued…]

A new breed grabs reins in Anbar
By Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post, October 21, 2008

As the day crossed into dusk, Jassim Muhammed al-Sweidawi sat on brown floor cushions, chain-smoking, calmly watching the tribesmen argue over blood money.

A man from the Dulaimi tribe had killed a man from the Jenabi tribe. The elders of both tribes could have sought justice in a provincial court. They could have conferred with traditional sheiks versed in centuries-old ways of resolving disputes. But they didn’t. They came to Sweidawi, a sunburned, American-backed chieftain who in less than two years had become the most powerful man in this patch of eastern Ramadi.

He asked the men if they trusted his authority. They nodded. Within minutes, he worked out a settlement. The men were not happy, but they also feared Sweidawi and needed his protection. “Your appreciation for me will not be forgotten,” the chieftain, 52, said after both men had kissed his cheeks.

“Sheik Jassim,” as his tribesmen call Sweidawi, is among a new generation of tribal leaders asserting influence across Sunni areas. They have won their respect by fighting Sunni insurgents of the al-Qaeda in Iraq group. With American money and support, they have brought a fragile order to Anbar province, once Iraq’s most violent theater, accomplishing in months what the U.S. military could not do in years.

But the rise of these sheiks, collectively called the Awakening, is already touching off new conflicts that could deepen without U.S. military backing for the movement. They have stripped traditional tribal leaders of influence. They have carved up Sunni areas into fiefdoms, imposing their views on law and society and weakening the authority of the Shiite-led central government. Divisions are emerging among the new breed of tribal leaders, even as they are challenging established Sunni religious parties for political dominance. [continued…]

Afghanistan’s emerging antiwar movement
By Anand Gopal, Christian Science Monitor, October 20, 2008

In a musty room near the edge of town, a group of bearded men sit on the floor and heatedly discuss strategy. The men are in the planning stages of an event that they hope will impact Afghan politics – a peace jirga, or assembly, that will agitate for the end of the war between the Taliban and Afghan government by asking the two sides to come to a settlement.

“People are growing tired of the fighting,” says Bakhtar Aminzai of the National Peace Jirga of Afghanistan, an association of students, professors, lawyers, clerics, and others. “We need to pressure the Afghan government and the international community to find a solution without using guns.”

Mr. Aminzai is not alone in his sentiments. As violence and insecurity grow in this war-ravaged nation, a broad network of peace activists have been quietly pushing for negotiations and reconciliation with the Taliban.

This push coincides with recent preliminary talks in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government hosted a secret high-level meeting in September with former Taliban officials and members of the Afghan government. The event was intended to ultimately open the door to direct talks with the Taliban.

Analysts interviewed say that the majority of Afghans favor some sort of negotiated settlement between the warring sides, but many peace activists are critical of the Saudi talks. “We want reconciliation with the Taliban through a loya jirga,” or grand assembly of Afghans, says Fatana Gilani, head of the Afghanistan Women’s Council (AWC), a leading nongovernmental organization (NGO) here. “We don’t want interference from foreign countries or negotiations behind closed doors,” she says. [continued…]

Pakistani legislators show little appetite for a fight
By Jane Perlez, New York Times, October 21, 2008

An unusual parliamentary debate organized to forge a national policy on how to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda has exposed deep ambivalence about the militants, even as their reach extends to suicide attacks in the capital.

In one of his first initiatives as president, Asif Ali Zardari called the session in an effort to mobilize Pakistan’s political parties and its public to support the fight against the militants, which he has now called Pakistan’s war.

But instead, the nearly two weeks of closed sessions have been dominated by calls for dialogue with the Taliban and peppered with opposition to what lawmakers condemned as a war foisted on Pakistan by the United States, according to participants.

The tenor of the debate has highlighted the difficulties facing Mr. Zardari and Washington as they urgently try to focus Pakistan’s full attention on the militant threat at a time when the Pakistani military is locked in heavy fighting in the tribal areas. [continued…]

The GOP’s American apartheid vs. socialism we can believe in
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, October 18, 2008

“Socialism we can believe in”?

OK. It’s not going to be a slogan the Obama campaign will ever want to use, but were it not the fact that fifty years after Sen Joe McCarthy’s death we still live in the shadow of the McCarthy era, there’s no reason why in a liberal democracy “socialism” should be a dirty word. (And must we remind ourselves that democracy is inherently liberal rather than authoritarian?)

How could the spirit of socialism more eloquently be expressed than in a question Barack posed yesterday in front of a crowd of over 100,000 people in St. Louis, Missouri:

“In America, do we simply value wealth — or do we value the work that creates it?“

Karl couldn’t have put it better, yet for so many Americans who’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of the myth of free enterprise, the freedom of wealth creation has been abstracted from the context within which it occurs. Work is turned into a gift for those who most desperately need it, bestowed by those claim the largest portion of its rewards. But that isn’t really the work we believe in.

*

The GOP could learn a thing or two from the South Africans and the Israelis: If you believe in and want to sustain a divided society, you should only cling on to such a position for as long as you can deprive your opponents of political rights.

As the McCain campaign to cruises around slicing and dicing America into its “real” and “pro-American” components, it seems to have forgotten that the other camp — those less than real, half-hearted Americans — have the right to vote. Telling an uncommitted voter that he or she is not a patriotic America unless they vote McCain-Palin, seems like the best way of pushing them off the fence — into the Obama camp.

As so often happens, once the dominant power loses its dominance, it clings on to the tactics of domination — even when they have become self defeating.

The torture time bomb
By Philippe Sands, The Guardian, October 18, 2008

As the US presidential election reaches a climax against the background of the financial crisis, another silent, dark, time bomb of an issue hangs over the two candidates: torture. For now, there seems to be a shared desire not to delve too deeply into the circumstances in which the Bush administration allowed the US military and the CIA to embrace abusive techniques of interrogation – including waterboarding, in the case of the CIA – which violate the Geneva conventions and the 1984 UN torture convention.

The torture issue’s cancerous consequences go deep, and will cause headaches for the next president. New evidence has emerged in Congressional inquiries that throw more light on the extent to which early knowledge and approval of the abuse went to the highest levels. What does a country do when compelling evidence shows its leaders have authorised international crimes?

For three years I have followed a trail which leads unambiguously to the conclusion that the real bad eggs were not Lyndie England or others on the ground in Abu Ghraib, but the most senior officials in the White House, the Pentagon and the department of justice. Over recent months, Congress has been looking into the role of senior officials involved in the development of interrogation rules. These have attracted relatively scant attention; little by little, however, senators and congressmen have uncovered the outlines of a potentially far-reaching criminal conspiracy. [continued…]

McCain’s radical pal
By Joe Klein, Time, October 18, 2008

One of the ways I got to know John McCain a decade or so ago was through a mutual friend—a fellow by the name of David Ifshin. I knew David through Democratic Party politics. He was a stalwart moderate, a member of the Democratic Leadership Council and an occasional adviser to Bill Clinton. Our wives were, and are, close friends. But McCain’s relationship with David was far more interesting.

Ifshin, you see, had been a vehement anti-Vietnam radical. He had even gone to Hanoi at the height at the war and given a speech denouncing the American pilots dropping bombs on North Vietnamese civilians as “war criminals.” The speech was broadcast repeatedly in the Hanoi Hilton, where McCain was being held captive. More than a few people thought Ifshin was guilty of treason.

After McCain was tortured and broken by the North Vietnamese and signed a confession of “criminality,” he was so ashamed that he attempted suicide—and later made a vow that he wouldn’t question the decisions or statements made by anybody else about the war. And so, when he arrived in the U.S. after his released and was asked about the antiwar protesters by Life magazine, he refused to condemn them. He kept to this policy, more or less, until 1984 when, as an ambitious young politician, he was asked by the Reagan campaign to deliver a speech slamming one of Walter Mondale’s top advisors—his campaign counsel, David Ifshin—for going to Hanoi, and giving aid and comfort to the enemy during wartime.

McCain gave the speech but, he later told me, felt great remorse about it. “I didn’t know the guy. I’d never met him,” he told me.

McCain and Ifshin met the following year at the annual AIPAC convention in Washington—and there is some disagreement what happened next: Both men later told me that the other initiated the conversation by apologizing. “McCain said, ‘I’m sorry I gave that speech. I didn’t even know you’” Ifshin told me. “And I said to him, ‘You’re apologizing to me?’ I’ve been wanting to apologize to you for years. I feel so terrible about that speech I gave in Hanoi.”

The two became fast friends. They did charitable work together in Vietnam and elsewhere. When Bill Clinton went to the Vietnam Memorial for Memorial Day 1993, both Ifshin and McCain were there, too. And when McCain saw a sign in the crowd—“Clinton: Tell Us About Ifshin”—McCain went to the floor of the Senate the next day and said, “Let me tell you about David Ifshin…David is a friend of mine.” [continued…]

Turns out there’s good news on Main St.
By Joel Kotkin, Washington Post, October 19, 2008

As the financial crisis takes down Wall Street, the regular folks on Main Street are biting their nails, watching the toxic tsunami head their way. But for all our nightmares of drowning in a sea of bad mortgages, foreclosed homes and shrunken retirement plans, the truth is that the effects of this meltdown won’t be all bad in the long run. In one regard, it could offer our society a net positive: Forced into belt-tightening, Americans are likely to strengthen our family and community ties and to center our lives more closely on the places where we live.

This trend toward what I call “the new localism” has been underway for some years, driven by changing demographics, new technologies and rising energy prices. But the economic downturn will probably accelerate it as individuals and corporations look not to the global stage but closer to home, concentrating and congregating on the Main Streets where we choose to live — in the suburbs, in urban neighborhoods or in small towns.

In his 1972 bestseller, “A Nation of Strangers,” social critic Vance Packard depicted the United States as “a society coming apart at the seams.” He was only one in a long cavalcade of futurists who have envisioned an America of ever-increasing “spatial mobility” that would give rise to weaker families, childlessness and anonymous communities.

Packard and others may not have been far off for their time: In 1970, nearly 20 percent of Americans changed their place of residence every year. But by 2004, that figure had dropped to 14 percent, the lowest level since 1950. Americans born today are actually more likely to reside near their place of birth than those who lived in the 19th century. Part of this is due to our aging population, because older people are far less likely to move than those under 30. But more limited economic options may intensify this phenomenon while bringing a host of social, economic and environmental benefits in their wake. [continued…]

Going global
By Harold Meyerson, Washington Post, October 18, 2008

The era of small government is over. Regulation is back. Governments now control finance.

Amid all the mind-boggling developments of the past two weeks, however, perhaps the greatest is this: government is going global.

Initially, the financial crisis that followed the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers appeared confined to the United States. Within days, however, it had spread to Europe. Haltingly, governments on both sides of the Atlantic began to develop national plans to shore up their banks and unfreeze their lending. Ten years ago, such national solutions would probably have sufficed. But when they were rolled out ten days ago, they fizzled almost instantly, partly because they failed to inject enough capital into a tottering financial system, but also because their scope was merely national, while the economy they sought to save had grown so global that national solutions no longer sufficed. [continued…]

We forgot everything Keynes taught us
By Robert Skidelsky, Washington Post, October 19, 2008

No one can complain of a shortage of information about the Great Financial Meltdown. The biggest growth industry today is words: A whole new vocabulary has spread from board tables to kitchen tables. Superannuated whiz kids planting cabbages to offset their newly straitened means can blame their troubles on collateralized debt obligations, special investment vehicles, credit default swaps. Subprime mortgage holders find themselves censured for a new and virulent disease called toxic debt.

But what is in even shorter supply than credit is an economic theory to explain why this financial tsunami occurred, and what its consequences might be. Over the past 30 years, economists have devoted great intellectual energy to proving that such disasters cannot happen. The market system accurately prices all trades at each moment in time. Greed, ignorance, euphoria, panic, herd behavior, predation, financial skulduggery and politics — the forces that drive boom-bust cycles — only exist offstage in their models.

The Great Financial Meltdown would not have surprised the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who died in 1946, for he thought that this was exactly how unregulated markets would behave. The New Economics, as Keynesian economics was known in the United States until it became the Obsolete Economics, was designed to prevent such turbulence. It held that governments should vary taxes and spending to offset any tendency for inflation to rise or output to fall. [continued…]

How we lost the war we won
By Nir Rosen, Rolling Stone, October 30, 2008

The highway that leads south out of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, passes through a craggy range of arid, sand-colored mountains with sharp, stony peaks. Poplar trees and green fields line the road. Nomadic Kuchi women draped in colorful scarves tend to camels as small boys herd sheep. The hillsides are dotted with cemeteries: rough-hewn tombstones tilting at haphazard angles, multicolored flags flying above them. There is nothing to indicate that the terrain we are about to enter is one of the world’s deadliest war zones. On the outskirts of the capital we are stopped at a routine checkpoint manned by the Afghan National Army. The wary soldiers single me out, suspicious of my foreign accent. My companions, two Afghan men named Shafiq and Ibrahim, convince the soldiers that I am only a journalist. Ibrahim, a thin man with a wispy beard tapered beneath his chin, comes across like an Afghan version of Bob Marley, easygoing and quick to smile. He jokes with the soldiers in Dari, the Farsi dialect spoken throughout Afghanistan, assuring them that everything is OK.

As we drive away, Ibrahim laughs. The soldiers, he explains, thought I was a suicide bomber. Ibrahim did not bother to tell them that he and Shafiq are midlevel Taliban commanders, escorting me deep into Ghazni, a province largely controlled by the spreading insurgency that now dominates much of the country.

Until recently, Ghazni, like much of central Afghanistan, was considered reasonably safe. But now the province, located 100 miles south of the capital, has fallen to the Taliban. Foreigners who venture to Ghazni often wind up kidnapped or killed. In defiance of the central government, the Taliban governor in the province issues separate ID cards and passports for the Taliban regime, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Farmers increasingly turn to the Taliban, not the American-backed authorities, for adjudication of land disputes.

By the time we reach the town of Salar, only 50 miles south of Kabul, we have already passed five tractor-trailers from military convoys that have been destroyed by the Taliban. The highway, newly rebuilt courtesy of $250 million, most of it from U.S. taxpayers, is pocked by immense craters, most of them caused by roadside bombs planted by Taliban fighters. As in Iraq, these improvised explosive devices are a key to the battle against the American invaders and their allies in the Afghan security forces, part of a haphazard but lethal campaign against coalition troops and the long, snaking convoys that provide logistical support. [continued…]

20bn barrel oil discovery puts Cuba in the big league
By Rory Carroll, The Guardian, October 18, 2008

Friends and foes have called Cuba many things – a progressive beacon, a quixotic underdog, an oppressive tyranny – but no one has called it lucky, until now .

Mother nature, it emerged this week, appears to have blessed the island with enough oil reserves to vault it into the ranks of energy powers. The government announced there may be more than 20bn barrels of recoverable oil in offshore fields in Cuba’s share of the Gulf of Mexico, more than twice the previous estimate.

If confirmed, it puts Cuba’s reserves on par with those of the US and into the world’s top 20. Drilling is expected to start next year by Cuba’s state oil company Cubapetroleo, or Cupet. [continued…]

Brave new world
By Klaus Schwab, Forbes, October 8, 2008

The deleveraging and shifting of capital flows occurring globally at this moment are not reversible trends. The economic changes happening now are structural, not cyclical, and therefore truly transformative.

I believe this transformation will, over time, reveal the following.

First, crises in a global world economy require numerous institutions and governments to respond, because any major crisis will have multiple dimensions to it that are beyond the comprehension or mandate of any single institution or government. Complexity and interdependency are characteristics inherent to globalization. In fact, there is growing grassroots awareness that global challenges are interlinked, but current governance institutions appear unable to pursue the measures needed to address them holistically.

For example, the connection between climate change, food scarcity and energy security is evident, yet an integrated solution to the three is not. There is a mismatch between the global challenges of the 21st century and the global governance institutions of the 20th century. Putting aside the current financial crisis, the failure to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, the failure to conclude the Doha Round of trade negotiations and the struggle to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol all point toward this conclusion.

Second, calls for greater global or regional collaboration will not be easily answered. Shortcomings in strategic foresight, global cooperation and managing complexity are together what landed us in the current predicament. Leaders in policy and in industry must first develop a more systematic and strategic view of global issues if any future collaboration is to be effective and sustainable.

Again, decision-making in a complex global environment requires identifying the multiple dimensions of a challenge and establishing the relationship between those dimensions. Plotting issues, interests and institutions, and understanding how they are connected, are necessary first steps in solving complex international problems. Yet this function is largely absent from our existing compartmentalized global governance architecture and in many corporate boardrooms. [continued…]

Gordon does good
By NOBEL PRIZE WINNER! Paul Krugman, New York Times, October 13, 2008

Has Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, saved the world financial system?

O.K., the question is premature — we still don’t know the exact shape of the planned financial rescues in Europe or for that matter the United States, let alone whether they’ll really work. What we do know, however, is that Mr. Brown and Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the Exchequer (equivalent to our Treasury secretary), have defined the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up.

This is an unexpected turn of events. The British government is, after all, very much a junior partner when it comes to world economic affairs. It’s true that London is one of the world’s great financial centers, but the British economy is far smaller than the U.S. economy, and the Bank of England doesn’t have anything like the influence either of the Federal Reserve or of the European Central Bank. So you don’t expect to see Britain playing a leadership role.

But the Brown government has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions. And this combination of clarity and decisiveness hasn’t been matched by any other Western government, least of all our own. [continued…]

Economic woes chill effort to stop global warming
AP, October 12, 2008

Attempts to tackle global warming are being made more difficult by the spreading economic crisis even as Democratic congressional leaders say it’s still a top goal for next year.

At the very least, fear of a prolonged economic downturn is expected to delay attempts by the United States to cap greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate as well as both presidential candidates say addressing climate change by imposing mandatory restrictions on heat-trapping pollution — especially carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels — remains a priority. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — If Obama wants to be the new FDR, this is how he should help America spend its way out of the coming economic slump: massive investment in green technology. An obvious place to start is with an auto industry that is on the brink of collapse. Chrysler, Ford, and GM should be offered a bailout contingent on them placing themselves on a fast track to becoming the global leaders in non-polluting transportation.

If they can’t totally reinvent themselves, they (and this country) will meet the fate they deserve.

Fire the campaign
By William Kristol, New York Times, October 13, 2008

It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign.

He has nothing to lose. His campaign is totally overmatched by Obama’s. The Obama team is well organized, flush with resources, and the candidate and the campaign are in sync. The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed.

He may be anyway. Bush is unpopular. The media is hostile. The financial meltdown has made things tougher. Maybe the situation is hopeless — and if it is, then nothing McCain or his campaign does matters.

But I’m not convinced by such claims of inevitability. McCain isn’t Bush. The media isn’t all-powerful. And the economic crisis still presents an opportunity to show leadership.

The 2008 campaign is now about something very big — both our future prosperity and our national security. Yet the McCain campaign has become smaller. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — As the neocons stare political oblivion in the face it’s easy to see why Bill Kristol isn’t ready to dump McCain, but the idea that three weeks away from election day McCain could dump his campaign is laughable. Not only that — it glosses over the fact that a campaign does and always should tell us a great deal about the candidate. Anyone ill-served by their own campaign thereby demonstrates their lack of leadership.

If John McCain is a decent man who has allowed himself to become tarnished by being ill-advised his own handlers, he’s not cut out to become president. Indeed, hard as he has tried, it’s far from clear whether he has ever truly and unequivocally believed in his own candidacy.

Afghanistan: A country locked in a spiral of doom
By Christina Lamb, The Sunday Times, October 12, 2008

Until recently I used to argue confidently that we needed more troops – and more helicopters – in Afghanistan. As a novice reporter based in the Pakistan border town of Peshawar in the late 1980s, I had grown to love this harsh but beautiful country and felt personally betrayed at witnessing how we abandoned Afghanistan after backing its mujaheddin to oust the Soviet Union.

We paid for it with 9/11 and shouldn’t make the same mistake again, I declared to anyone who would listen. And, unlike the Iraqis, the Afghan people wanted us there.

When British troops arrived in force, in what we all described as “the lawless province of Helmand” in 2006, I was one of the first reporters out here. Embedded with the paras, I felt it was a worthy mission and a great adventure, until one afternoon we were ambushed by Taliban in a muddy field. I realised then that politicians back home might be talking of reconstruction and not firing a single shot, but this was war. Two and a half years, a doubling of troops to more than 8,000, and several million bullets later, British forces may hold five small districts in Helmand but the local governor himself says the Taliban control at least half the province.

As for the rest of the country, in all but the north the picture is unrelentingly grim. An aid worker smuggled me security maps compiled by the United Nations (no longer made public because they reveal just how bad things are). These show the relentless sweep from Helmand and the south across the country of pink, which represents “uncontrolled hostile environment” – no-go areas. In 2005, when the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), which included British military personnel, was active in the country, there was not a single pink patch; today more than half the country is pink. [continued…]

Taliban leader killed by SAS was Pakistan officer
By Christina Lamb, The Sunday Times, October 12, 2008

British officials covered up evidence that a Taliban commander killed by special forces in Helmand last year was in fact a Pakistani military officer, according to highly placed Afghan officials.

The commander, targeted in a compound in the Sangin valley, was one of six killed in the past year by SAS and SBS forces. When the British soldiers entered the compound they discovered a Pakistani military ID on the body.

It was the first physical evidence of covert Pakistani military operations against British forces in Afghanistan even though Islamabad insists it is a close ally in the war against terror. [continued…]

Obama is right about talking to Iran
By Vali Nasr, Wall Street Journal, October 13, 2008

These days in Washington and on the campaign trail Russia and Iran compete for the title of the greatest foreign policy challenge facing America.

Many have assumed that Russia can help solve the Iran problem, but few have considered that the reverse is also true. Iran is important to Russia’s game plan and how Moscow weighs its options going forward. That makes talking to Iran an essential part of America’s plans for containing Russia.

For Russia, an isolated Iran in conflict with the West is a boon. With Iran’s rich gas reserves off limits, Russia can hold Europe hostage and divide NATO while also creating linkage between its support for international pressure on Iran and Western response to its aggression in the Caucasus.

Washington cannot resist a Russian sphere of influence stretching from the Black Sea to Aral Mountains unless it plays the Iran card to its advantage. That means dropping its objection to the flow of Iranian gas to Europe, and engaging Iran in talks on security and stability of the Caucasus. [continued…]

Time to go home, Nouri al-Maliki tells Britain
By Deborah Haynes and Richard Beeston, The Times, October 13, 2008

British combat forces are no longer needed to maintain security in southern Iraq and should leave the country, Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, has told The Times.

In an exclusive interview in Baghdad, Mr al-Maliki also criticised a secret deal made last year by Britain with the al-Mahdi Army, Iraq’s largest Shia militia. He said that Basra had been left at the mercy of militiamen who “cut the throats of women and children” after the British withdrawal from the city.

The Iraqi leader emphasised, however, that the “page had been turned” and he looked forward to a friendly, productive relationship with London. “The Iraqi arena is open for British companies and British friendship, for economic exchange and positive cooperation in science and education.” [continued…]

Police pour into Mosul to protect Christians from sectarian killings
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, October 13, 2008

The Iraqi government was yesterday rushing 1,000 police to Mosul to try to stop a murderous campaign against Christians which has forced thousands to flee the northern city.

Officials say about 4,000 people have taken flight in the past week to escape the killings being carried out by Islamic extremists intent on wiping out one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. “The violence is the fiercest campaign against the Christians since 2003,” said the provincial governor of Mosul, Duraid Kashmula. “Among those killed over the last 11 days were a doctor, an engineer and a handicapped person.” At least three houses belonging to Christians were blown up in the Sukkar district of Mosul, regarded as a bastion of al-Qa’ida in Iraq, on Saturday night. [continued…]

Bringing Guantanamo home
By Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, October 11, 2008

What happens at Gitmo stays at Gitmo. That was always the hope. When the Bush administration fenced off a dusty little patch of lawlessness in Cuba, the idea was that breaking the law abroad would somehow preclude us from breaking it at home. But last week revealed, yet again, that the worst of Guantanamo was always destined to spill over into the United States. Gitmo’s lawlessness is now our own.

The prison camp was created to construct a “legal black hole,” a place where U.S. and international human rights law would go to die. The case of 17 Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs)—Chinese Muslims from western China’s Xinjiang region—is one of the blackest chapters of the story. The Uighurs fled Chinese persecution (including forced abortion and banishment) and settled in Afghanistan, then moved on to Pakistan in 2001 to escape bombing raids. There they were turned over by local villagers to American authorities for bounty. They were transferred to Guantanamo more than six years ago but cleared for release in 2004. The U.S. government credibly fears they will be tortured if returned to China, and since no other country will take them, they have remained for all this time at Gitmo. Indeed, reports have it that some still remain in solitary confinement there. [continued…]

Guantanamo prosecutor who quit had ‘grave misgivings’ about fairness
By Josh Meyer, Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2008

Darrel J. Vandeveld was in despair. The hard-nosed lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, a self-described conformist praised by his superiors for his bravery in Iraq, had lost faith in the Guantanamo Bay war crimes tribunals in which he was a prosecutor.

His work was top secret, making it impossible to talk to family or friends. So the devout Catholic — working away from home — contacted a priest online.

Even if he had no doubt about the guilt of the accused, he wrote in an August e-mail, “I am beginning to have grave misgivings about what I am doing, and what we are doing as a country. . . .

“I no longer want to participate in the system, but I lack the courage to quit. I am married, with children, and not only will they suffer, I’ll lose a lot of friends.”

Two days later, he took the unusual step of reaching out for advice from his opposing counsel, a military defense lawyer.

“How do I get myself out of this office?” Vandeveld asked Major David J.R. Frakt of the Air Force Reserve, who represented the young Afghan Vandeveld was prosecuting for an attack on U.S. soldiers — despite Vandeveld’s doubts about whether Mohammed Jawad would get a fair trial. Vandeveld said he was seeking a “practical way of extricating myself from this mess.”

Last month, Vandeveld did just that, resigning from the Jawad case, the military commissions overall and, ultimately, active military duty. In doing so, he has become even more of a central figure in the “mess” he considers Guantanamo to be. [continued…]