Many thanks.
2010-01-24
KSM to Military Tribunal
If you believe that the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed kangaroo court should be moved from New York City to a military tribunal, please sign the petition at the link below. You can make a difference.
Al Qaeda Murders Muslims
Killing Muslims
America needs to publicize al Qaeda's main 'achievement'
By Ralph Peters
January 23, 2010, New York Post, Page 21
AL Qaeda does one thing extremely well: killing Muslims. Between 2006 and 2008, only 2 percent of the terror multinational's victims were Westerners.
The rest were citizens of Muslim countries. Even as al Qaeda claims to be their defender.
I've long complained that we fail to capitalize on al Qaeda's blood thirst in our information operations. Al Qaeda (as well as the Taliban and other insurgent groups) slaughters Muslims -- yet we let the media flip the blame to us.
Last weekend, a Pentagon insider passed me a no-nonsense study recently released by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. "Deadly Vanguards: A Study of al Qaeda's Violence Against Muslims" is exactly the kind of work our analysts should produce -- but rarely do.
Using exclusively Arabic-language media reports and including only those incidents for which al Qaeda proudly claimed responsibility, this scrupulously documented study explodes the myth of al Qaeda as a champion of Muslims:
*Between 2004 and 2008, only 15 percent of al Qaeda's victims were Westerners, and that number skewed upward because of the Madrid and London attacks.
*Between 2006 and 2008, a non-Westerner was 54 times likelier to die in an al Qaeda attack than a Westerner.
*"Outside of the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, 99 percent of al Qaeda's victims were non-Western in 2007 and 96 percent were non-Western in 2008."
Bravo to Scott Helfstein, Nassir Abdullah and Muhammad al-Obaidi for producing this supremely useful report. Now the question is: Will we use it?
The propaganda skills of our enemies eclipse our timid, lawyer-ridden information operations. In the Muslim world, we get blamed even for al Qaeda's proudest massacres of Muslims -- while Pakistanis blame us for Taliban suicide bombings.
As this report documents, we possess facts that could be wielded as weapons. But we're no more willing to fight an aggressive information war than we are to wage a serious ground war against our enemies.
Personally, I was astonished -- and delighted -- that this hard-headed report came out of West Point, the most politically correct major institution in the US Army, now dedicated to the proposition that killing our nation's enemies is so yesterday. Is there new hope for the stumbling Long Gray Line?
Back to al Qaeda: Our porcine intelligence system doesn't bother to ask the basic question of why al Qaeda kills Muslims so avidly. (Even conservative Muslim scholars are questioning al Qaeda's practices.)
The answer's as clear as a sunny day in the desert: Al Qaeda fully reflects its Saudi parentage. Neither the Saudis nor al Qaeda cares a whit about individual Muslims. They only care about Islam.
I've seen, in country after country, how the Saudis sacrifice the well-being and human potential of countless Muslims in order to prevent them from integrating into local societies and to promote the dour Wahhabi cult that has deformed Islam so horribly: purity matters, people don't.
Likewise, al Qaeda is happy to sacrifice any number of Muslims to promote its neo-Wahhabi death cult. The al Qaeda serpent may have turned on the Saudi royals, but their differences are a matter of degree.
Meanwhile, we imagine that our passivity and "tolerance" are virtues. We fail to capitalize on al Qaeda's horrendous record, while our government protects the Saudi-funded extremists who poison American mosques.
(Our leaders blather about "freedom of religion," ignoring the fact that there's no freedom of religion in Saudi Arabia. Can't we prohibit religious funding from states that don't themselves exercise tolerance? We're being idiotic, not virtuous.)
We continue to hear endless nonsense from Washington about how "soft power" is so much more effective than military force. OK, show us. Three good men at West Point have given us a powerful information weapon against al Qaeda.
Will our leaders have the sense to use it?
Ralph Peters' latest book is "The War After Armageddon."
2010-01-23
Aphorisms and Truisms
"There is nothing so incompetent, ineffective, and arrogant than an unreasonable, unaccountable, and unrepentant government monopoly." Tom Carroll
"Under capitalism everybody provides for their own needs by serving others." Ludwig von Mises
"Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe." George Will
"The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results." Thomas Sowell
"Government doesn't work. You work. I work. Federal Express works. Microsoft works, the Salvation Army works, Alcoholics Anonymous works, but government doesn't work." Harry Browne
"We can have a free society or a welfare state. We cannot have both." Robert Higgs
"Capitalism, and capitalism alone, has rescued the human race from degrading poverty, rampant sickness, and early death." Lew Rockwell
"Our government is a free-for-all of dumb ideas!" Rick Santelli
"Under capitalism everybody provides for their own needs by serving others." Ludwig von Mises
"Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe." George Will
"The welfare state has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results." Thomas Sowell
"Government doesn't work. You work. I work. Federal Express works. Microsoft works, the Salvation Army works, Alcoholics Anonymous works, but government doesn't work." Harry Browne
"We can have a free society or a welfare state. We cannot have both." Robert Higgs
"Capitalism, and capitalism alone, has rescued the human race from degrading poverty, rampant sickness, and early death." Lew Rockwell
"Our government is a free-for-all of dumb ideas!" Rick Santelli
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money." Alexis de Tocqueville
The Obama administration makes the Keystone Cops look like the Rand Corporation.
"If you don't go when you want to go, you'll find that when you do go you've already gone." Attributed to Burt Monro (1899-1978)
"We fail to capitalize on al Qaeda's horrendous record (of killing Muslims), while our government protects the Saudi-funded extremists who poison American mosques." Ralph Peters
When the government robs Peter (at the point of a gun) to pay Paul, it can pretty much count on the support of Paul.
"Tax dollars should go to buy weapons to kill terrorists, not to lawyers to defend them." Scott Brown
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." Marcus Tullius Cicero
In one short year, Barack Obama has accomplished the heretofore impossible. He has done a flawless job! Through sheer force of Herculean arrogance coupled with galactic naïveté, he, unlike anyone else in history, has managed to make Jimmy Carter look like George Washington (profound apologies to George Washington).
"There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action." Bertrand Russell
"If you're going to shoot - shoot, don't talk." Tuco
2010-01-22
Why Obama Should Be Impeached Now!
Stop Blaming the CIA
The report released by the White House Thursday into the failure to stop al Qaeda’s attempt to blow up a passenger plane over Detroit found a number of mistakes were made—including the misspelling of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s name and the failure to put him on the no-fly list. But the ultimate failure was much larger. According to the New York Times, “The report concluded that the government’s counterterrorism operations had been caught off guard by the sophistication and strength of a Qaeda cell in Yemen, where officials say the plot against the United States originated.”
President Obama laid blame for this failure on the agency he has put under siege since his second day in office: the CIA. “This was not a failure to collect intelligence,” he declared this week, “it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence we had …. That’s not acceptable and I will not tolerate it.” But the President’s chief counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, told a different story, acknowledging that we did not, in fact, have all the intelligence we needed: “We did have the information throughout the course of the summer and fall about … plans to carry out attacks,” Brennan said. “We had snippets of information …. We may have had a partial name. We might have had an indication of a Nigerian. But there was nothing that brought it all together.”
The ability to detain and question senior terrorist operatives is not a luxury we can do without; it is essential to preventing new attacks on our country.
The question is: why did we have nothing that brought all the “snippets” of information together? Because within 48 hours after taking office, President Obama eliminated the only tool that would allow the intelligence community to do so: the CIA program to interrogate senior terrorist leaders. Thanks to Obama, America no longer have the capability to detain and question the only individuals who know how the information fits together—the terrorists themselves.
In the age of terror, our enemies do not have large armies or flotillas of warships that can be observed by spies or tracked by satellites. Instead, the terrorists conspire in secret, hide among civilians, and attack us from within. Their plans to kill innocent men, women, and children are known only to a handful of cruel men.
This means there are essentially three ways to gain information about terrorist attacks:
The first, and hardest, is to penetrate the enemy. This can be done, but it is no easy task. Al Qaeda is a small, secretive network of Arab extremists that is extremely suspicious of outsiders. And we saw this week just how difficult it is to penetrate their ranks. The terrorist who blew up a CIA base in Afghanistan—killing seven operatives—turns out to have been a double agent, a trusted source who was really working for the enemy.
The second method is “signals intelligence”—using advanced technology to intercept and monitor the enemy’s electronic communications. Signals intelligence has been essential to the fight against terror, but it has inherent limitations. When intelligence officials monitor terrorist communications, they are passive listeners to the conversations of others. They cannot ask questions, probe for additional information, or sometimes even identify voices or email addresses in intercepted communications. Moreover, the terrorists know they are being monitored, so they are careful to speak codes that are difficult to break without inside information.
This leaves only one other human intelligence tool: interrogation. The interrogation of senior terrorist leaders has distinct advantages over other forms human intelligence. It allows our intelligence professionals to ask the terrorists direct questions. Because terrorists are held in secret and cut off from the outside world, CIA officials can expose sensitive intelligence to them during questioning without fear it will get back to terrorists at large. CIA officials can use information gained from one detainee to question other detainees—and then go back and confront the first detainee with what they learned. Captured terrorists can also help the CIA verify whether the sources we recruit inside al Qaeda are trustworthy, and providing reliable information. They can identify voices in phone calls and email addresses, and decipher enemy codes that would otherwise remain a mystery. No other tool provides our intelligence community with this kind of dynamic flexibility.
Moreover, while signals intelligence or sources can give us the “snippets of information” Brennan says we had about the Detroit attack, only the interrogation of captured terrorists can give us the full picture we were lacking in this case—the information needed to prevent attacks. As former CIA Director Mike Hayden explained in an interview for my book, Courting Disaster, “Intelligence is like putting a puzzle together and never being allowed to see the picture on the cover of the box. The people who got into the CIA program were, by definition, senior leaders. They had seen the cover. And so, they were valued for more than the fact that they knew data. They knew what the final picture roughly looked like.”
In other words, a captured terrorist can do more than give the CIA additional pieces of the puzzle; he can tell the agency how all the various pieces of the puzzle fit together. He can show us the cover of the box.
According to recently declassified CIA documents, after 9/11, there were two terrorist networks at large that were planning new attacks on America: the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed network that planned the 9/11 attacks (and had set in motion plots to fly planes in to Heathrow airport and blow up the U.S. consulate in Karachi), and the “Hambali network” which KSM had tasked to hijack an airplane and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles. We knew virtually nothing about these two networks or their plans—until KSM and other senior al Qaeda leaders provided information under CIA questioning that allowed us to dismantle them. (I can already hear the howls of protest from liberals who argue that no useful intel ever came from an enhanced interrogation technique. But they apparently never bothered to read theevidence to the contrary).
Now, eight years after 9/11, we face a new terror network—a mysterious branch of al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula that almost succeeded in bringing down a commercial airliner over one of America’s largest cities. By the Obama administration’s own admission, we know very little about this network or its plans to attack America. The reason is because we are not trying to capture the leaders of this network alive, and bring them in for interrogation so they can show us to cover of the box.
The ability to detain and question senior terrorist operatives is not a luxury we can do without; it is essential to preventing new attacks on our country. This is something John Brennan once understood. Asked in a 2007 interview if enhanced interrogation techniques were necessary to keep America safe, Brennan replied: “Would the U.S. be handicapped if the CIA was not, in fact, able to carry out these types of detention and debriefing activities? I would say yes.”
On his second day in office Obama eliminated this capability—and this, in his own advisor’s assessment, handicapped our country in the fight against terror. Indeed, President Obama has admitted as much. Speaking at the CIA soon after shutting down the CIA interrogation program, Obama told officials, “I’m sure that sometimes it seems as if that means we’re operating with one hand tied behind our back … So yes, you’ve got a harder job. And so do I. And that’s okay.”
It’s not okay, Mr. President. It almost caused another attack.
Marc Thiessen’s new book, Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama is Inviting the Next Attack, will be published by Regnery on January 18th.
Bush Got It Right - Obama Gets It Wrong! And It Just Might Kill You!
January 18, 2010, 4:00 a.m.
Meet the Real Jack Bauers
In Courting Disaster, the real CIA interrogators explain why their methods bear no resemblance to what you see on Fox’s 24.
By Marc A. Thiessen
Meet the Real Jack Bauers
In Courting Disaster, the real CIA interrogators explain why their methods bear no resemblance to what you see on Fox’s 24.
By Marc A. Thiessen
National Review Online
This week saw the premiere of a new season of 24, with CTU agent Jack Bauer preparing to leave the world of counterterrorism for a quiet life as a grandfather in Los Angeles. But he is pulled back into the fight to stop the attempted assassination of a Middle Eastern leader in New York. As he questions an informant, he thrusts a gun into the man’s neck but then pulls back, telling him, “You’re lucky I’m retired.” In another time, the man would have suffered far worse.
The public view of interrogations had been shaped by the fictional Bauer, who captures a terrorist and proceeds to torture him — holding down his head in a bathtub full of water, using a Taser to shock him, lopping off his fingers with a cigar cutter — while screaming questions until the terrorist finally breaks and gives up the location of the nuclear bomb that is about to go off.
For some critics of U.S. interrogation policy, this is not fiction, but a depiction of reality. In Newsweek, Dahlia Lithwick has written that “high-ranking lawyers in the Bush administration erected an entire torture policy around the fictional edifice of Jack Bauer.” And Philippe Sands, author of the book Torture Team, has written that the show has been the “midwife” for torture’s “actual use on real, living human beings.” None of this is true.
Unlike these critics, I have had the chance to actually meet the real Jack Bauers — the CIA officials who questioned Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other senior terrorist leaders and got them to reveal their plans for new terrorist attacks. They explained to me why their approach has nothing in common with the methods used by Bauer on the fictional 24.
On July 31, 2006, I walked up the winding stairs of the Eisenhower Building to a secure conference room in the offices of the National Security Council’s intelligence directorate. I had been assigned to write a speech for President Bush acknowledging the existence of what was then the most highly classified program in the war on terror: the CIA program to detain and question captured terrorists. To write this speech, I was given access to some of the most sensitive intelligence our country possessed on the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda terrorists, as well as to intelligence officers who could explain to me how the program worked and why it had been successful in stopping new terrorist attacks.
Sitting across the table from me were several CIA officials, including two men I will call Harry and Sam (not their real names), I didn’t know anything about the individuals before me except that they were with the CIA and knowledgeable about the interrogation program.
As we began our discussion, I told them I believed the key to the success of the speech was to demonstrate the effectiveness of CIA interrogations with real, concrete examples of how the program saved lives. If Americans knew that CIA interrogations were effective, most would have no problem with the techniques the agency had employed. Some might even be shocked at how restrained they had been. Many Americans, I said, imagined that what went on at the CIA “black sites” mirrored what they saw on 24.
They began by clarifying precisely how the program actually worked. While 24 depicts violent scenes where interrogators inflict severe pain to get time-sensitive intelligence on terrorist dangers, in the real world, they told me, this is not how interrogations take place.
They explained, for example, that there is a difference between “interrogation” and “de-briefing.” Interrogation is not how we got information from the terrorists; it is the process by which we overcome the terrorists’ resistance and secure their cooperation — sometimes with the help of enhanced interrogation techniques.
Once the terrorist agreed to cooperate, I was told, the interrogation stopped and “de-briefing” began, as the terrorists were questioned by CIA analysts, using non-aggressive techniques to extract information that could help disrupt attacks.
The interrogation process was usually brief, they said. According to declassified documents, on average “the actual use of interrogation techniques covers a period of three to seven days, but can vary upwards to 15 days based on the resilience” of the terrorist in custody.
Most detainees, they told me, did not undergo it at all. Two-thirds of those brought into the CIA program did not require the use of any enhanced interrogation techniques. Just the experience of being brought into CIA custody — the “capture shock,” arrival at a sterile location, the isolation, the fact that they did not know where they were, and that no one else knew they were there — was enough to convince most of them to cooperate.
Others, like KSM, demonstrated extraordinary resistance. But even KSM’s interrogation did not take long before he moved into debriefing. He had been captured in early March, they said, and before the end of the month he had already provided information on a plot to fly airplanes into London’s Heathrow airport.
As they described the information the CIA had gotten from KSM and others, I slowly realized that these men were not simply describing what others in the agency had done; I was sitting face to face with the individuals who had actually questioned terrorists at the CIA’s black sites and gotten the information they were describing to me themselves.
Harry, it turned out, had interrogated KSM. He explained that interrogations involved strict oversight. There was no freelancing allowed — every technique had to be approved in advance by headquarters, and any deviation from the meticulously developed interrogation plan would lead to the immediate removal of the interrogator.
Harry said the average age of CIA interrogators was 43 and that each interrogator received 250 hours of training before being allowed to come in contact with a terrorist. And even after that, he said, they had to complete another 20 hours working together with an experienced interrogator before they could lead an interrogation on their own. Contrary to the claims later made by some critics, such as FBI agent Ali Soufan, the CIA did not send a bunch of inexperienced people to question high-value detainees.
Harry explained that the interrogations were not violent, as some imagined. He said that the interrogators’ credo was to use “the least coercive method necessary” and that “each of us is put through the measures so we can feel it.” He added: “It is very respectful. The detainee knows that we are not there to gratuitously inflict pain. He knows what he needs to do to stop. We see each other as professional adversaries in war.” (Indeed, Mike Hayden told me years later that KSM referred to Harry as “emir” — a title of great respect in the jihadist ranks.)
Critics have charged that enhanced interrogation techniques are not effective because those undergoing them will say anything to get them to stop. Soufan, the FBI agent and CIA critic, has written: “When they are in pain, people will say anything to get the pain to stop. Most of the time, they will lie, make up anything to make you stop hurting them. . . . That means the information you’re getting is useless.”
What this statement reveals is that Soufan knows nothing about how the CIA actually employed enhanced interrogation techniques. In an interview for my book, former national-security adviser Steve Hadley explained to me, “The interrogation techniques were not to elicit information. So the whole argument that people tell you lies under torture misses the point.” Hadley said the purpose of the techniques was to “bring them to the point where they are willing to cooperate, and once they are willing to cooperate, then the techniques stop and you do all the things the FBI agents say you ought to do to build trust and all the rest.”
Former CIA director Mike Hayden explained to me that, as enhanced techniques are applied, CIA interrogators like Harry would ask detainees questions to which the interrogators already know the answers — allowing them to judge whether the detainees were being truthful and determine when the terrorists had reached a level of compliance. Hayden said, “They are designed to create a state of cooperation, not to get specific truthful answers to a specific question.”
Indeed, the first terrorist to be subjected to enhanced techniques, Zubaydah, told his interrogators something stunning. According to the Justice Department memos released by the Obama administration, Zubaydah explained that “brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship.” In other words, the terrorists are called by their religious ideology to resist as far as they can — and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know.
Several senior officials told me that, after undergoing waterboarding, Zubaydah actually thanked his interrogators and said, “You must do this for all the brothers.” The enhanced interrogation techniques were a relief for Zubaydah, they said, because they lifted a moral burden from his shoulders — the responsibility to continue resisting.
The importance of this revelation cannot be overstated: Zubaydah had given the CIA the secret code for breaking al-Qaeda detainees. CIA officials now understood that the job of the interrogator was to give the captured terrorist something to resist, so he could do his duty to Allah and then feel liberated to speak. So they developed techniques that would allow terrorists to resist safely, without any lasting harm. Indeed, they specifically designed techniques to give the terrorists the false perception that what they were enduring was far worse than what was actually taking place.
Once interrogators like Harry had secured a detainee’s cooperation, the enhanced techniques stopped, and the de-briefers entered the picture. Sam was a de-briefer — a subject matter expert with years of experience studying and tracking al-Qaeda members. His expertise had contributed to the capture of the terrorists he was now questioning — and now he put that expertise to work to find out what they knew.
Like the interrogators, de-briefers were carefully selected and trained before coming into contact with a detainee. They knew each detainee’s personal history, and what information they should know — allowing them to hone in on key details, maintain a fast pace of questions, and verify the truthfulness of the terrorists’ responses.
Sam had spent countless hours with KSM and the other terrorists held by the agency. When he elicited new information, he and the other de-briefers did not simply take the terrorists at their word. They checked their statements against other forms of intelligence and information from other captured terrorists — and confronted the detainees with evidence when they were holding information back or trying to mislead them.
Indeed, one reason the program was so effective, Sam told me, is that the de-briefers had 24/7 access to the detainees, many of whom were held in the same location. This allowed de-briefers to play one terrorist against the other. If KSM told them something about another terrorist in their custody, they could immediately confront the other terrorist with KSM’s revelations and get him to provide more details — and then go back with that information to get more from KSM.
They did this to great effect — confronting KSM and others with the statements of other terrorists in CIA custody, and getting information that helped them unravel planned attacks. Harry and Sam walked me through specific examples of how the interrogations had helped disrupt a series of terrorist plots in this way, showing me how information from a particular terrorist custody had led to the capture of other specific individuals, who in turn led us to other individuals, until the plots had been disrupted. These disrupted plots are detailed in Courting Disaster.
For example, information from detainees in CIA custody led to the arrest of an al-Qaeda terrorist named Jose Padilla, who was sent to America on a mission to blow up high-rise apartment buildings in the United States.
Information from detainees in CIA custody led to the capture of a cell of Southeast Asian terrorists which had been tasked by KSM to hijack a passenger jet and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles.
Information from detainees in CIA custody led to the capture of Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, KSM’s right-hand-man in the 9/11 attacks, just as he was finalizing plans for a plot to hijack airplanes in Europe and fly them into Heathrow airport and buildings in downtown London.
Information from detainees in CIA custody led to the capture of Ammar al-Baluchi and Walid bin Attash, just as they were completing plans to replicate the destruction of our embassies in East Africa by blowing up the U.S. consulate and Western residences in Karachi, Pakistan.
Information from detainees in CIA custody led to the disruption of an al-Qaeda plot to blow up the U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti, in an attack that could have rivaled the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.
Information from detainees in CIA custody helped break up an al-Qaeda cell that was developing anthrax for terrorist attacks inside the United States.
In addition to helping break up these specific terrorist cells and plots, CIA questioning provided our intelligence community with an unparalleled body of information about al-Qaeda — giving U.S. officials a picture of the terrorist organization as seen from the inside, at a time when we knew almost nothing about the enemy who had attacked us on 9/11.
In addition, CIA detainees helped identify some 86 individuals whom al-Qaeda deemed suitable for Western operations — most of whom we had never heard of before. According to the intelligence community, about half of these individuals were subsequently tracked down and taken off the battlefield. Without CIA questioning, many of these terrorists could still be unknown to us and at large — and may well have carried out attacks against the West by now.
Until the program was temporarily suspended in 2006, well over half of the information our government had about al-Qaeda — how it operates, how it moves money, how it communicates, how it recruits operatives, how it picks targets, how it plans and carries out attacks — came from the interrogation of terrorists in CIA custody.
Another reason the program was so effective, Harry and Sam explained, was that because the terrorists were in a secure location, CIA officials could also expose sensitive information to them — asking them to explain the meaning of materials captured in terrorist raids, and to indentify phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and voices in recordings of intercepted communications. This could never be done if the terrorists were being held in a facility where they had regular contact with the outside world. The danger of this information getting out would have been far too great.
Harry and Sam told me that the agency believed without the program the terrorists would have succeeded in striking our country again.
Harry put it bluntly: “It is the reason we have not had another 9/11.”
Their work was vital, but it was not easy. They took great care to stay within the confines of the law and to ensure the safety of those in their custody. For their efforts, they have been vilified as torturers by critics who know next to nothing about what went on at the “black sites” where they worked. In 2005, CIA director Porter Goss tapped two outside officials to conduct a review of the effectiveness of the CIA interrogation program: Gardner Peckham, the former national-security adviser to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and John Hamre, former deputy secretary of defense in the Clinton administration. Both spent several months at CIA headquarters studying the program and meeting with officials involved.
Peckham recalls having a long conversation late one night with one of the interrogators when he was conducting his review. This was “a very dedicated, capable guy who told me that he had been in with KSM one day, and KSM had basically said to him matter-of-factly, ‘If I ever get out of this hole, I’m going to kill you and your entire family.’ We were sitting there at nine o’clock at night or something, and he said to me, ‘You know, I work long days; this is hard. When I get down about it, I just think back to the film footage of the two people standing on the window of the World Trade Center on the 90-something floor, grasping each other by the hand and stepping out into space.’ He said, ‘I think of those two people, and I just go back to work.’”
Peckham says, “That really got to me. That level of dedication. These guys knew they were, in a lot of ways, limiting their futures by doing this kind of work, I think.They were risking something. But they knew a lot of other people were risking things too. And they knew it was important work, and I just have an enormous amount of respect for the people who are in this program. And I have such profound disrespect for those who ran for the tall grass when it started to become exposed, and even less regard for those who now seek to take political advantage of it.”
— Marc Thiessen is a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. This article is adapted from his new book, Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack, released this week by Regnery. For more information visit: www.courtingdisaster.net
2010-01-19
This Is Just Fantastic! (And In A Bad Way!)
Government Welfare: Cell Phones for the Poor
Posted By Rachel Sheffield On January 18, 2010
The Heritage Foundation
Government-sponsored text messaging? You got it. [1]
Welfare recipients in approximately 20 states–with more to follow [2]– are currently eligible to receive a free cell phone with a limited number of monthly minutes [3]. All individuals that qualify for state or federal welfare–food stamps, Medicaid, etc.–and have an income at or below 135% of the poverty level, are eligible. According to a Fox News report, the cell phone service is currently the fastest growing welfare program in the country [4].
In 2008, the fund that foots the bill for this program contributed $819 million to subsidize low-income telephone services [5]. The fund is projected to grow to over $1 billion this year [6]. That’s $1 billion of over $800 billion the United States will spend on welfare in 2010 [7].
This particular program is covered by the federal Universal Service Fund. At first it received its money by essentially taxing telephone companies that provided long-distance service, with the money then being used to provide affordable rates for those living in less densely populated areas where phone service was more costly. However, in 1996, Congress voted to extend the use of this fund to subsidize low-income households and subsequently expanded the list of those required to pay into the fund to include: local telephone companies, wireless companies, paging services, and payphone providers [8]. (Naturally, the cost for this fund is passed to the customer[9].) In 2008, the Federal Communications Commission began subsidizing cell phones for low-income households [10].
Besides the $1 billion price tag, which is likely to increase as more states implement the service, not to mention the concern for growing entitlement created by this program, cell phone recipients are loosely monitored. According to Heritage welfare expert Robert Rector, this means that if an individual’s income increases to where he or she is no longer eligible for the service, there is no one to make sure he or she stops receiving it [11].
Jose A. Fuentes, director of Government Relations for TracFone–one of the providers of the free phone service–says that the phones are not meant “for heavy usage.” Instead, they are meant “for quick phone calls, as well as a way for people to reach you in case of…emergency or for calls from a potential employer,” not meant to replace a landline [12]. This idea indicates that not only should government subsidize phone service, but that as SafeLink, one of the providers of the cell phones, states,“cell phone ownership is a right.” [13]
This is just another example of the ever-expanding welfare state and the increasing entitlement mentality. At the very least, policymakers should require greater monitoring of the program to prevent misuse. Furthermore, if the purpose of the cell phones is truly to give lower-income people more access to potential employers, participants should be required to account for their job search activities. A welfare program that does not require personal responsibility will only encourage dependency and diminish human dignity.
2010-01-17
You Want CHANGE --- We Got CHANGE!
In one short year, Barack Obama has accomplished the heretofore impossible. He has done a flawless job! Through sheer force of Herculean arrogance coupled with galactic naïveté, he, unlike anyone else in history, has managed to make Jimmy Carter look like George Washington (profound apologies to George Washington).
2010-01-09
China Crash
Contrarian Investor Sees Economic Crash in China
SHANGHAI — James S. Chanos built one of the largest fortunes on Wall Street by foreseeing the collapse of Enron and other highflying companies whose stories were too good to be true.
Now Mr. Chanos, a wealthy hedge fund investor, is working to bust the myth of the biggest conglomerate of all: China Inc.
As most of the world bets on China to help lift the global economy out of recession, Mr. Chanos is warning that China’s hyperstimulated economy is headed for a crash, rather than the sustained boom that most economists predict. Its surging real estate sector, buoyed by a flood of speculative capital, looks like “Dubai times 1,000 — or worse,” he frets. He even suspects that Beijing is cooking its books, faking, among other things, its eye-popping growth rates of more than 8 percent.
“Bubbles are best identified by credit excesses, not valuation excesses,” he said in a recent appearance on CNBC. “And there’s no bigger credit excess than in China.” He is planning a speech later this month at the University of Oxford to drive home his point.
As America’s pre-eminent short-seller — he bets big money that companies’ strategies will fail — Mr. Chanos’s narrative runs counter to the prevailing wisdom on China. Most economists and governments expect Chinese growth momentum to continue this year, buoyed by what remains of a $586 billion government stimulus program that began last year, meant to lift exports and consumption among Chinese consumers.
Still, betting against China will not be easy. Because foreigners are restricted from investing in stocks listed inside China, Mr. Chanos has said he is searching for other ways to make his bets, including focusing on construction- and infrastructure-related companies that sell cement, coal, steel and iron ore.
Mr. Chanos, 51, whose hedge fund, Kynikos Associates, based in New York, has $6 billion under management, is hardly the only skeptic on China. But he is certainly the most prominent and vocal.
For all his record of prescience — in addition to predicting Enron’s demise, he also spotted the looming problems of Tyco International, the Boston Market restaurant chain and, more recently, home builders and some of the world’s biggest banks — his detractors say that he knows little or nothing about China or its economy and that his bearish calls should be ignored.
“I find it interesting that people who couldn’t spell China 10 years ago are now experts on China,” said Jim Rogers, who co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Sorosand now lives in Singapore. “China is not in a bubble.”
Colleagues acknowledge that Mr. Chanos began studying China’s economy in earnest only last summer and sent out e-mail messages seeking expert opinion.
But he is tagging along with the bears, who see mounting evidence that China’s stimulus package and aggressive bank lending are creating artificial demand, raising the risk of a wave of nonperforming loans.
“In China, he seems to see the excesses, to the third and fourth power, that he’s been tilting against all these decades,” said Jim Grant, a longtime friend and the editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, who is also bearish on China. “He homes in on the excesses of the markets and profits from them. That’s been his stock and trade.”
Mr. Chanos declined to be interviewed, citing his continuing research on China. But he has already been spreading the view that the China miracle is blinding investors to the risk that the country is producing far too much.
“The Chinese,” he warned in an interview in November with Politico.com, “are in danger of producing huge quantities of goods and products that they will be unable to sell.”
In December, he appeared on CNBC to discuss how he had already begun taking short positions, hoping to profit from a China collapse.
In recent months, a growing number of analysts, and some Chinese officials, have also warned that asset bubbles might emerge in China.
The nation’s huge stimulus program and record bank lending, estimated to have doubled last year from 2008, pumped billions of dollars into the economy, reigniting growth.
But many analysts now say that money, along with huge foreign inflows of “speculative capital,” has been funneled into the stock and real estate markets.
A result, they say, has been soaring prices and a resumption of the building boom that was under way in early 2008 — one that Mr. Chanos and others have called wasteful and overdone.
“It’s going to be a bust,” said Gordon G. Chang, whose book, “The Coming Collapse of China” (Random House), warned in 2001 of such a crash.
Friends and colleagues say Mr. Chanos is comfortable betting against the crowd — even if that crowd includes the likes of Warren E. Buffett and Wilbur L. Ross Jr., two other towering figures of the investment world.
A contrarian by nature, Mr. Chanos researches companies, pores over public filings to sift out clues to fraud and deceptive accounting, and then decides whether a stock is overvalued and ready for a fall. He has a staff of 26 in the firm’s offices in New York and London, searching for other China-related information.
“His record is impressive,” said Byron R. Wien, vice chairman of Blackstone Advisory Services. “He’s no fly-by-night charlatan. And I’m bullish on China.”
Mr. Chanos grew up in Milwaukee, one of three sons born to the owners of a chain of dry cleaners. At Yale, he was a pre-med student before switching to economics because of what he described as a passionate interest in the way markets operate.
His guiding philosophy was discovered in a book called “The Contrarian Investor,” according to an account of his life in “The Smartest Guys in the Room,” a book that chronicled Enron’s rise and downfall.
After college, he went to Wall Street, where he worked at a series of brokerage houses before starting his own firm in 1985, out of what he later said was frustration with the way Wall Street brokers promoted stocks.
At Kynikos Associates, he created a firm focused on betting on falling stock prices. His theories are summed up in testimony he gave to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce in 2002, after the Enron debacle. His firm, he said, looks for companies that appear to have overstated earnings, like Enron; were victims of a flawed business plan, like many Internet firms; or have been engaged in “outright fraud.”
That short-sellers are held in low regard by some on Wall Street, as well as Main Street, has long troubled him.
Short-sellers were blamed for intensifying market sell-offs in the fall 2008, before the practice was temporarily banned. Regulators are now trying to decide whether to restrict the practice.
Mr. Chanos often responds to critics of short-selling by pointing to the critical role they played in identifying problems at Enron, Boston Market and other “financial disasters” over the years.
“They are often the ones wearing the white hats when it comes to looking for and identifying the bad guys,” he has said.
New Roth IRA Edge For The Wealthy
New Roth IRA Edge For The Wealthy
Roth IRAs can be a sweet deal. If you've invested wisely so that you expect your income tax rate to rise in the future, including retirement, a Roth typically hands you more after-tax money than a traditional IRA.
But high-income taxpayers face hurdles with Roths. A key one: You can't make Roth contributions — or deduct traditional IRA contributions — if your income is over certain amounts.
Still, there are legal ways to get around those limits, thanks to a new tax rule. Now, anyone with a traditional IRA can convert that account to a Roth IRA.
You'll have to pay ordinary income tax on any amount you convert that got tax-deferred treatment. But you'll be eligible for Roth IRA benefits, such as completely tax-free withdrawals after five years and after age 59 1/2. And, depending on your future tax rate, you could end up with more after-tax money.
Up to this year, such conversions were available only to those with modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) of $100,000 or less.
Anyone with earned income, and workers' spouses, can make a nondeductible contribution to a traditional IRA. In fact, you now can contribute for 2009 and 2010.
Then you can convert your traditional IRA to a Roth IRA.
You can contribute to a traditional IRA for 2009 up to April 15. You also can contribute to a traditional IRA for 2010, now that it's a new year.
Workers and their spouses can contribute up to $5,000 each year to their IRAs. Those 50 or older can contribute up to $6,000.
So a hypothetical John and Mary Smith, both age 51, could kick in as much as $24,000 by next April 15. That can be put into traditional or Roth IRAs, or a combination.
That's important because of restrictions on who has a legal green light to contribute to a Roth IRA.
Single taxpayers have the OK if their MAGI is $120,000 or less in 2009 or 2010. The MAGI ceiling for couples filing jointly is $176,000 in 2009 and $177,000 this year.
Workers covered by an employer's retirement plan can deduct their contributions to a traditional IRA for 2009 if their MAGI is $65,000 or less (single) or $109,000 (joint).
For 2010, the ceiling for singles goes up to $66,000.
Spouses of covered workers can't deduct traditional IRA contributions if their joint MAGI was over $176,000 last year or is over $177,000 this year.
Legal Loophole
So you are shut out from Roth IRA contributions and from traditional IRA deductions if your income tops the limits described above.
But you can make a nondeductible contribution to a traditional IRA, up to the $5,000 or $6,000 limit for each year, regardless of income.
Then you can convert the balance to a Roth IRA. You'll wind up with the benefits of a Roth IRA.
You can withdraw the money you converted at any time, tax-free. After five years and after age 59 1/2, your investment earnings also qualify for tax-free withdrawals.
And you'll never have to take any required minimum withdrawals from your Roth IRA.
The money can keep growing tax-free, potentially for years or decades.
"Your beneficiaries could wind up with a bigger after-tax windfall than they'd get from inheriting a traditional taxable IRA," said Ed Slott, who publishes the IRA Advisor newsletter. They'd pay no tax on it.
If you make a nondeductible contribution to a traditional IRA and convert to a Roth IRA, you set the stage for tax-free investment earnings, for yourself or your beneficiaries.
Suppose you contribute $12,000 of after-tax dollars to a traditional IRA for 2009 and 2010.
Then this year you convert to a Roth IRA when your account balance is still $12,000. Those are all after-tax dollars so you won't owe any income tax on the conversion.
But suppose you make $12,000 of nondeductible contributions. They grow to $15,000 in your traditional IRA. Can you convert just the $12,000 of after-tax dollars, tax-free?
No. Every Roth IRA conversion is taxed in proportion to the pretax money in all of your traditional IRAs. That's the case even if nondeductible contributions are in just, say, one of several IRAs.
If you have $15,000 in traditional IRAs, including $12,000 of nondeductible contributions, the after-tax money is 80% of the total.
If you convert the $15,000 to a Roth IRA, you'll owe tax on $3,000, 20% of the total.
Figuring Your Tax
Suppose you convert only $12,000 to a Roth IRA and leave $3,000 in the traditional IRA.
You'll have $2,400 of taxable income, 20% of the $12,000.
The same holds if you already have a traditional IRA and make nondeductible contributions. Suppose you have $88,000 in a traditional IRA now. All that money is pretax.
You contribute $12,000 of after-tax money for 2009 and 2010. Now you have a total of $100,000. So 88% of the conversion is taxable.
Obama's Green Jobs Do Harm - Not Good!
Obama’s Green Jobs Plan Will Do More Harm Than Good
Posted January 8th, 2010 at 4.14pm in Energy and Environment.
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