WhirledView

Friday Diplomacy Blogging

by Cheryl Rofer

The Jane Harman mess, which erupted on Monday, continued through the week. As bloggers (mainly; the MSM seemed to want to ignore the story) got down to the nitty-gritty of whom Harman was talking to and why the conversation was tapped, they tended to lose track of the bigger issue—that of US relations with Israel and Iran. So that’s where I’ll stay. My post on Monday tended to assume that the CQ report was accurate. I should have been more careful in noting that. I will stick with my hypothesis about the leaking,, which is as good as, and better than, all the others I’ve seen.

On Monday, I asked if a Times of London article might represent a deliberate Israeli leak. The Times of London loves controversy and, shall we say, high-risk articles. So it’s not the most reliable source. But if you wanted to wave a big stick while simultaneously weakening the message so that nobody starts throwing bombs around, planting a story with a not-entirely-reliable source might be a way to do it.

Torture: Some Bottom Lines

by Cheryl Rofer

This New York Times article has it all wrong.

At Core of Detainee Fight: Did Methods Stop Attacks?

Yes, the headline accurately describes what's in the article: an argument about whether the interrogation methods used by the Bush administration were effective in extracting information. But both are wrong: that's not the core. That's a subsidiary argument that ensues when proponents of torture argue that it's the only way to get the information, usually depending on some variant of the ticking-bomb scenario.

It's not the core. The core is that we are the United States, and we don't torture. Shepard Smith of Fox News, of all places, gets that right in a couple of videos.

And something that is probably worth saying again: If you have a terrorist and you know that that person possesses information that will prevent many deaths, then be enough of a patriot to take a chance on doing what you have to and take the consequences. No changes in laws needed. But look at the qualifications on that: you know that that person possesses information that will prevent many deaths. That wasn't the situation described in any of the documents released so far, and it doesn't look like it will be.

My blogfriend helmut has had many wise things to say about torture, and I've been trying to get him to say more. One of the most important is that torture typically collects bits and pieces of information, rather than that one dramatic revelation. So many people must be tortured, and the laws or policies must be changed to allow that. That seems to have been the case in the Bush administration.

Helmut summarizes the relevant law here. Click around his site for more. Here's just one post.

Torturous Logic: The Unconvincing Evasion of Responsibility

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

During his visit to the CIA campus yesterday, President Barack Obama got applause, big time, when he uttered the reassurance that agency operatives won’t be prosecuted for having followed orders to torture detainees in secret locales.  (Nazi Adolph Eichmann must be turning in his grave.)  White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had already said the drafters of the legal arguments facilitating the harsh interrogation techniques now recognized as torture won’t be on the legal hook either. 

The administration avers that legal action would be a hollow exercise in “looking back.”  It would be—horrors!— an indulgence in “retribution.”  It would, above all,  distract from the “important” business of the day.

No kidding!  That’s what we’re told. 

Ordinary law-abiding people tend to think that prosecution for criminal wrongdoing is, indeed, a matter of wholly legitimate retribution, especially when the crime is a systematic subversion of the law itself.  And since one can’t, even in today’s Constitutionally-handicapped America, prosecute people for what they haven’t already done (unless they are deemed to be “terrorists”), every court action does indeed involve looking back!  As for the importance argument,  now that the administration is using the out-and-out T word instead of euphemisms, how can prosecution not be on the agenda?  I mean—it’s T-O-R-T-U-R-E, the most horrible thing a human being can do to another human being, except for outright killing. 

When Japs and Jerries—to use those old WWII labels—did bestial things or ordered them to be done, their elaborate post-war attempts at exculpation didn’t save them from highly publicized trials and, once convicted, from imprisonment or hanging.   Yet, when American officials torture under the one-size-fits-all-atrocities rubric of “national security,” the world is supposed to be satisfied by the Obama administration’s proposal to just “move on.”  

When oh when will an American leader give us common folks (and all them furriners) credit for principled analysis and a little intelligence?  

Diplomacy Blogging: Things To Look For This Week

by Cheryl Rofer

Things are heating up between the United States and Israel. George Mitchell has told Israel's new prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, that his demand for the Palestinians to recognize Israel as the "state of the Jewish people" is unacceptable. Netanyahu now seems to be backing off. Earlier, Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's chief of staff, sent a message to Netanyahu too.

Meanwhile, back in the US, a story about AIPAC's influence has surfaced again. It seems that Jane Harman was overheard in a tapped phone call promising a suspected Israeli agent that she would try to help a couple of AIPAC staffers accused of espionage in 2006. As Josh Marshall says, "This story is so radioactive it's hard to know which of fifty different directions to go with it." So I won't try.

The question, for those who have been following my Friday Diplomacy Blogging, is why all this seems to be happening at the same time, particularly the memories of AIPAC influence past. There is also an AIPAC meeting coming up, in which the main speaker has not yet been announced, although there have been murmurs that it will be either Netanyahu or his racist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. However, President Obama has made it known that he doesn't plan to be available for a state visit.

Could it be that Emanuel's tough talk and the Harman story were both leaked by the administration quite deliberately as part of its strategy to encourage Israel to take a more constructive position toward the Palestinians? And is Netanyahu firing back with a leak of his own?

And the New York Times thinks that Obama isn't showing enough fight. Maybe they haven't been paying attention.

There are lots of good articles on Google News if you search any combinations of the names above, and I think there will be more during the week.

H/t to Sean Paul of The Agonist for insight behind the scenes.

Update (later in the morning): If it was the administration that leaked the Harman business, it occurred to me, they are "burning" Jane Harman, a Democrat. Clearly she will be damaged by this leak, short of a miracle. So why burn one of their own?

The story was there. It had surfaced in 2006 and then disappeared again. Better to get it out at a time of the administration's choosing and a time when it can be used for larger purposes than to have it festering with the possibility that a Republican or AIPAC shill will pull it out later to damage the administration.

I'm just theorizing here, trying to make sense of who's leaking and why.

Passport Fraud Problems - Why?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Here we go again. When will Walter Pincus, The Washington Post’s senior staff writer get the details right? As a commenter on his April 16 article “State Dept. is Making Changes in Wake of Passport Probe” pointed out, Pincus wrote in paragraph one that a GAO undercover investigator obtained two US passports based on fraudulent information while in paragraph three the number of passports obtained this way mysteriously doubled.

Who’s a person to believe – and this from a major reporter at The Washington Post?

The right answer is four. The April 13, 2009 GAO report upon which Pincus’ story is based stated on page 3 “Our undercover investigator was easily able to obtain four genuine U.S. passports using counterfeit or fraudulently obtained documents. In the most egregious case, our undercover investigator obtained a U.S. passport using counterfeit documents and the Social Security Number (SSN) of a man who died in 1965. . .” Check the report out yourself – its only nine pages long.

The GAO report is indeed disturbing and well worth reading but it only touches part of the picture. And be sure to read the footnotes – that’s where some of the most interesting data is located.

There are follow-on issues and additional questions that the Obama administration and Congress need to address that are not covered in the report or in Pincus’ article.

Here are a few that I would like to see raised – and answered - that were not.

• Why can’t one department of the US government coordinate with another especially in matters of national security?

The US and Latin America

By Bill Stewart

This week President Barack Obama attended the Summit of the Americas in Trinadad and Tobago. Earlier in the week, he made a crucially important visit to Mexico. Why didn't these visits arouse the same excitement at home as did his nine-day trip to Europe only two weeks ago? James (Scotty) Reston, the great New York Times journalist, once said that Americans will do anything about Latin America except read about it. In short, why don't Americans care about Latin America? I mean, really care?

There is no easy answer. Traditionally, Americans have seen themselves as an Anglo nation. Great Britain was our Mother Country. The original 13 colonies were, after all, English colonies, not Spanish, French or Portuguese. In the age of the Founding Fathers, Latin America was seen by most newly-independent Americans as corrupt and priest-ridden, kept in poverty and ignorance not only by a feudal Spain and Portugal, but also by a grasping and ignorant Church of Rome. Remember that the fledgling United States was overwhelmingly Protestant, with all the biases and prejudices of 18th century Protestantism. Some of that still remains.

Americans at that time also thought that Canada and Latin America, like the United States, would soon rid themselves of foreign rule, and that the US would assume its natural God-given role as primus inter pares among the nations of the New World. This, after all, was our backyard and we lived in the Big House. Eventually, Latin America did free itself of Spanish and Portuguese rule, although Canada retained its attachment to the British Crown. Even today, Queen Elizabeth 11 is the Queen of Canada, represented in Ottawa by a Canadian Governor General. In the 19th century, Americans were annoyed by Canada's Loyalist sympathies and often spoke of the need to united the two countries. This made the Canadians nervous right up until World War 1, which Canada entered in 1914, along with Great Britain. We entered in 1917. Similarly, Canada entered World War 11 in 1939, again along with Great Britain. We entered in December 1941. There are differences in perspective and outlook between the US and Canada. We are different countries. But, aside from the French Canadians, we speak the same language and share the same colonial heritage.

The Good, the Bad and the Questionable

By Patricia H. Kushlis

The Pentagon announced earlier this week that it had disbanded its office of public diplomacy – the successor to Rumsfeld’s controversial Office of Strategic Influence which was officially “closed” – for excellent reasons - due to Congressional pressure shortly after it was opened.

Hopefully, the Obama administration understands – unlike W – that the US military should never again be the preeminent face of America abroad – even in wartime. Leading with the tanks – even pictures of tanks and other warfare paraphernalia – does not win friends or positively influence most foreigners. On the contrary, it angers and frightens them away.

Psyops and public diplomacy are poles apart

Likewise, the Pentagon should not be charged with leading or coordinating US information programs overseas. This sends the wrong signals – besides, the Pentagon doesn’t do it all that well despite its oversized budget and far superior Internet skills. Military Psyops campaigns and public diplomacy should never be mixed but I question whether the military leadership really understands this.

Moreover, I’ve never been convinced that Psyops belongs in the US government’s information tool box at all. If nothing more than the problems encountered because of a far too large potential for blow-back of concocted stories into the US media. This is compounded in the Internet Age. Not only can it mislead the American public but it can also negatively impact foreign policy decision-making as well.

For that matter, the Obama administration should review the overall efficacy of US Psyops - particularly in countries where the media especially the print media – is not read, viewed or listened to or considered a trusted source of information. Rather from what I understand, these are countries where word of mouth still often carries the day. I would also argue that radio – not television or the Internet – reaches far more people than any other mass communication tool available in many parts of the world.

More questions than answers raised

The Pentagon’s announcement of its public diplomacy office closure raises far more questions than the New York Times report answers. This is also compounded by the White House’s April 14 announcement of the nomination of Judith McHale to be the latest Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy at State.

Friday Diplomacy Blogging

by Cheryl Rofer

North Korea and Iran often get pointed to as practitioners of non-rational diplomacy. That’s a dangerous thing to do. If they’re not rational, you can’t figure out what they will do next. But saying that they’re not rational may merely indicate that you’re not smart enough to figure out what they’ll do next. Or worse, that they’re not doing what you would do in their place or what you want them to do.

It’s always better to assume that countries or their leaders are acting rationally. That’s the only basis for analysis. Assuming that they’re not rational is equivalent to throwing up your hands or saying that you’re going to go ahead and do what you wanted to do, damn the torpedoes.

It’s not a bad first assumption that those in power want to remain in power and that they are likely to take strong steps to do that. The next is to figure out what they see as threats to their power.