Day: September 8, 2006

Election Surprise: Is Osama bin Laden in Custody?

Jon Ponder
Imagine how those numbers would change if Bush bagged bin Laden. The shift among conservative independents could flip the mid-terms.

He’s baaack: My tinfoil hat has been snap-crackle-and-popping all week over the sudden return of Osama bin Laden. Starting Tuesday, the day after Labor Day, the president launched his campaign of political terror with a series of speeches intended, apparently, to terrify swing voters and security moms into voting for the GOP in the fall elections. The speeches were unremarkable, except for a surprising number of references to the world’s most wanted terrorist. Coincidentally, a new video of bin Laden that was taped in September 2001 also appeared this week.

Where has Osama been? After the attacks in 2001, President Bush said he wanted the terrorist mastermind “dead or alive.” But as months passed and bin Laden eluded capture — and with the distraction of the president’s misadventure in Iraq — poor Osama became a non-person of interest to the White House political team. I think we can assume that bin Laden went from being wanted dead or alive to Osama been-forgotten because the CIA and the Pentagon simply could not find him.

Flash forward to this week: Conversely, they would only begin referring to Osama again if they’ve got him — he’s sitting in a cell in a secret prison in Uzbekistan. (I hope they’re torturing him by forcing him to watch Bush’s speeches end to end.)

Consider this:

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Study Finds That Members of Congress are Liars

Buck Banks

Surprise — not: The Pew Research Center offers a summary of a study by a couple of political scientists that found that members of Congress tell the truth only about 25 percent of the time when debating major legislation on the House and Senate floor.

Gary Mucciaroni of Temple University and Paul J. Quirk of the University of British Columbia sought to see how truthful America’s lawmakers were in debating three major bills: welfare reform in 1995-96, the estate tax in 1999-2000 and telecommunication deregulation in 1996.

They meticulously sifted through the Congressional record to identify key claims made by each side to support its own case and to rebut the assertions of its opponents. Then they compared the claims with available data to see if they were true, false or somewhere in between. In all, they examined the accuracy of 18 claims made in 43 separate House and Senate debates.

How did the nation’s lawmakers do?

Not so well. In all, these researchers judged the claims made in only 11 of the 43 debates to have been largely substantiated by the facts. Another 16 were deemed to be “unsubstantiated” — a polite way of saying they were misleading, mostly false or flatly wrong. An additional 16 were judged a politically artful mix of fact and fiction. In all, as reported in their new book, Deliberative Choices: Debating Public Policy in Congress, the researchers rated the quality of the debates somewhere between “fair” and “poor” — a C-, at best.

Does one party tell whoppers more often than the other? It’s hard to tell, Mucciaroni said. “The Republicans performed worse than the Democrats in the welfare reform and estate tax debates, but not as much in telecommunications. We feel that this is probably due to the Republicans controlling Congress, especially the House. We might expect Democrats to do as poorly if they were in control…because majority status emboldens the majority to make more extravagant claims and they feel pressure to deliver ‘results.'”

The researchers stopped short of claiming that members of the House and Senate told deliberate lies to advance their positions. “We don’t pretend to know whether they are lying, are ignorant, or misperceive the facts and informed opinion on an issue,” he said. “Instead of using ‘flatly lying,’ we prefer ‘flatly incorrect’ or ‘flatly inaccurate’.”

We say call a lie a lie and a liar a liar, and be done with it.

New Rules for Military Interrogations from a Kinder, Gentler Dept. of Defense

Buck Banks

Humane HUMINT: Wednesday, President Bush announced that the Department of Defense had released a new handbook that provides guidelines for interrogation that is designed to avoid the kinds of excesses and abuses perpetrated by military personnel, intelligence officers and contractors at Abu Ghraib Prison. The DoD even issued a press release about it (cue the martial music):

“The work which our interrogators do … saves lives, … U.S. lives, coalition lives and innocent civilian lives,” said Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence. “And we’re immensely proud of the accomplishments of our interrogator workforce.”

Kimmons said the new Army Field Manual 2-22.3, “Human Intelligence Collector Operations,” provides specific guidelines for those directly involved in detention and interrogation efforts in straightforward language.

‘We’re immensely proud of the accomplishments of our interrogator workforce.’

It applies to everyone involved in detainee operations and interrogations, including battlefield interrogations at the point of capture, he said.

The field manual outlines 19 acceptable interrogation approaches, and includes examples of correct usage of these techniques. “It tries to leave as little to the imagination as possible without being overly prescriptive, and we think we’ve done a good job,” Kimmons said.

The manual also lists specific unauthorized behaviors and clarifies the difference between military intelligence and military police roles. Although these roles are complementary, military police don’t participate in interrogations and don’t set up conditions or “soften” detainees, Kimmons said.

The manual also very explicitly describes the chain of command and responsibility and makes it clear that every soldier is responsible for reporting abuses of the manual, even by higher-ups.

I was curious about the manual, so I downloaded the PDF and browsed around in it for a while. It’s a fascinating document, and I was surprised the DoD made it available to the public. You can download a copy here (link at bottom of page: FM 2-22.3.pdf), but be warned, it’s almost 400 pages long.
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Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing; but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold; and a citizen who knows that the earth is round and older than six thousand years is less dangerous than one of equal capacity who believes it is a flat ground floor between a first floor heaven and a basement hell.

— George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish playwright