Antony Loewenstein

More than ten years after 9/11, the Obama administration remains determined to maintain flawed military trials for terror suspects but as this New York Times investigation reveals, housing people on the US mainland hasn’t caused the end of America:

It is the other Guantánamo, an archipelago of federal prisons that stretches across the country, hidden away on back roads. Today, it houses far more men convicted in terrorism cases than the shrunken population of the prison in Cuba that has generated so much debate.

An aggressive prosecution strategy, aimed at prevention as much as punishment, has sent away scores of people. They serve long sentences, often in restrictive, Muslim-majority units, under intensive monitoring by prison officers. Their world is spare.

Among them is Ismail Royer, serving 20 years for helping friends go to an extremist training camp in Pakistan. In a letter from the highest-security prison in the United States, Mr. Royer describes his remarkable neighbors at twice-a-week outdoor exercise sessions, each prisoner alone in his own wire cage under the Colorado sky. “That’s really the only interaction I have with other inmates,” he wrote from the federal Supermax, 100 miles south of Denver.

There is Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, Mr. Royer wrote. Terry Nichols, who conspired to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building. Ahmed Ressam, the would-be “millennium bomber,” who plotted to attack Los Angeles International Airport. And Eric Rudolph, who bombed abortion clinics and the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

In recent weeks, Congress has reignited an old debate, with some arguing that only military justice is appropriate for terrorist suspects. But military tribunals have proved excruciatingly slow and imprisonment at Guantánamo hugely costly — $800,000 per inmate a year, compared with $25,000 in federal prison.

The criminal justice system, meanwhile, has absorbed the surge of terrorism cases since 2001 without calamity, and without the international criticism that Guantánamo has attracted for holding prisoners without trial. A decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, an examination of how the prisons have handled the challenge of extremist violence reveals some striking facts:

¶ Big numbers. Today, 171 prisoners remain at Guantánamo. As of Oct. 1, the federal Bureau of Prisons reported that it was holding 362 people convicted in terrorism-related cases, 269 with what the bureau calls a connection to international terrorism — up from just 50 in 2000. An additional 93 inmates have a connection to domestic terrorism.

¶ Lengthy sentences. Terrorists who plotted to massacre Americans are likely to die in prison. Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square in 2010, is serving a sentence of life without parole at the Supermax, as are Zacarias Moussaoui, a Qaeda operative arrested in 2001, and Mr. Reid, the shoe bomber, among others. But many inmates whose conduct fell far short of outright terrorism are serving sentences of a decade or more, the result of a calculated prevention strategy to sideline radicals well before they could initiate deadly plots.

¶ Special units. Since 2006, the Bureau of Prisons has moved many of those convicted in terrorism cases to two special units that severely restrict visits and phone calls. But in creating what are Muslim-dominated units, prison officials have inadvertently fostered a sense of solidarity and defiance, and set off a long-running legal dispute over limits on group prayer. Officials have warned in court filings about the danger of radicalization, but the Bureau of Prisons has nothing comparable to the deradicalization programs instituted in many countries.

¶ Quiet releases. More than 300 prisoners have completed their sentences and been freed since 2001. Their convictions involved not outright violence but “material support” for a terrorist group; financial or document fraud; weapons violations; and a range of other crimes. About half are foreign citizens and were deported; the Americans have blended into communities around the country, refusing news media interviews and avoiding attention.

¶ Rare recidivism. By contrast with the record at Guantánamo, where the Defense Department says that about 25 percent of those released are known or suspected of subsequently joining militant groups, it appears extraordinarily rare for the federal prison inmates with past terrorist ties to plot violence after their release. The government keeps a close eye on them: prison intelligence officers report regularly to the Justice Department on visitors, letters and phone calls of inmates linked to terrorism. Before the prisoners are freed, F.B.I. agents typically interview them, and probation officers track them for years.

Both the Obama administration and Republicans in Congress often cite the threat of homegrown terrorism. But the Bureau of Prisons has proven remarkably resistant to outside scrutiny of the inmates it houses, who might offer a unique window on the problem.

Cracks, very small cracks, are starting to appear in the age-old blindness towards Israeli apartheid. Why? Because a mute person knows that indefinite Zionist occupation of Palestinian land is bad for Palestinians, awful for Israelis and madness for America and the world (via Politico):

Two of the Democratic Party’s core institutions are challenging a bipartisan consensus on Israel and Palestine that has dominated American foreign policy for more than a decade.

The Center for American Progress, the party’s key hub of ideas and strategy, and Media Matters, a central messaging organization, have emerged as vocal critics of their party’s staunchly pro-Israel congressional leadership and have been at odds, at times, with Barack Obama’s White House, which has acted as a reluctant ally to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government.

The differences are ones of tone – but also of bright lines of principle – and while they haven’t yet made any visible impact on Democratic policy, they’ve shaken up the Washington foreign policy conversation and broadened the space for discussing a heretical and often critical stance on Israel heretofore confined to the political margins.

The daily battle is waged in Media Matters’ emails, on CAP’s blogs, Middle East Progress and ThinkProgress and most of all on Twitter, where a Media Mattters official, MJ Rosenberg, regularly heaps vitriol on those who disagree as “Iraq war neocon liar” (the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg) or having “dual loyalties” to the U.S. and Israel (the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin). And while the Center for American Progress tends to walk a more careful line, warm words for Israel can be hard to find on its blogs.

Events of recent years such as GOP attacks on Obama as insufficiently loyal to Israel, Israel’s controversial raid on a Turkish ship bound for Gaza and debates over the Iranian nuclear program have deepened the divide between some on the Democratic left and the party’s mainstream foreign policy apparatus.

“Like segregation in the American South, the siege of Gaza (and the entire Israeli occupation, for that matter) is a moral abomination that should be intolerable to anyone claiming progressive values,” wrote Matt Duss, a CAP policy analyst and the director of Middle East Progress, last year, after an Israeli raid on a flotilla challenging the blockade of Gaza turned violent.

The numbers prove it (via IPS):

Despite repeated expressions of support by President Barack Obama for democratic change during the “Arab Spring”, the United States remains widely distrusted in the region, according to a major new survey of public opinion in five Arab countries released here Monday.

Instead, Turkey is viewed as having played the “most constructive” role in the past year’s events and its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, emerged as the most admired leader by far in the region, according to the 2011 edition of the annual “Arab Public Opinion Survey” conducted by Shibley Telhami of the Brookings Institution.

The survey, which was conducted during the last half of October, was based on detailed interviews of some 3,000 respondents from urban centres in Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It also included Saudi Arabia, the results from which, however, arrived too late to be weighted with the other five countries.

“Turkey is the biggest winner of the Arab Awakening,” said Telhami, who noted that, despite increasing disillusionment with Obama’s performance on Israel-Palestinian issues, the U.S. president himself appears to have gained some ground in Arab public opinion since the summer of 2010 when the last survey was conducted.

Nonetheless, most Arabs, according to the new poll, continue to believe that Washington’s policies in the Middle East are mainly driven by its desire to control oil and protect Israel from its Arab neighbours. Only five percent said they believe the U.S. is driven by the desire to spread human rights or democracy.

After more than 10 years of Western-led war in Afghanistan, The Guardian’s Jonathan Steele says that it is a conflict that we’ll (thankfully) never win. Take note America, Britain and Australia:

Two days after 9/11, I wrote a column in The Guardiansaying that if the U.S. reaction was to put boots on the ground in Afghanistan and try to occupy that country and to bring about regime change, they would suffer exactly the same fate as the Soviet Union. And I’m afraid to say that I’ve been proved right on that, because they’re following exactly the same techniques as the Russians. It’s what I call the garrison strategy. You hold the main cities, you try and keep the roads going open between them, and you make little forays into the countryside and try and push out a bit. But it doesn’t work, because you create new resistance by being there. The resistance comes because you’re there; you’re not there because of the resistance. The occupying force itself creates the resistance.

And so, the crucial thing now is to recognize that the war is unwinnable. It is a stalemate. There is no military victory. And this is the lesson that I’m afraid President Obama hasn’t yet learned from what the Soviets did, because Mikhail Gorbachev came into power in the Kremlin in 1985, after five years of war, when 9,000 Soviets soldiers had already died. He inherited somebody else’s war from his predecessor. And he realized immediately that the war was unwinnable. He consulted his military. They also said the war is unwinnable. They didn’t say, “We want a surge.” They didn’t say, “We want new troops, new equipment, you know, more scope, more money.” They recognized that the thing is a disaster. Obama hasn’t yet recognized that. And in fact it’s worse than that, because people like General Petraeus are still convinced that there can be a military victory. He has the ear of the President. He’s the head of the CIA, sees him virtually every day. And so, it’s really important, I think, that the American public—and we know from the polls that more than half are against this war—really make their voice heard.

Any illusions about the American empire’s footprint reducing in the Middle East is fictional. Washington is keen to more closely partner with any dictatorship it can. But of course this isn’t meddling, it’s just what empire’s do. Note this irony-free comment in a lead New York Times piece that details the Obama administration’s desire to build a physical presence on the ground in a range of brutal states (all in the name of moving towards democracy, clearly):

“We will have a robust continuing presence throughout the region, which is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region, which holds such promise and should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in Tajikistan after the president’s announcement.

Wired explains that the American occupation of Iraq isn’t ending, despite what Barack Obama preaches:

President Obama announced on Friday that all 41,000 U.S. troops currently in Iraq will return home by December 31. “That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end,” he said. Don’t believe him.

Now: it’s a big deal that all U.S. troops are coming home. For much of the year, the military, fearful of Iranian influence, has sought a residual presence in Iraq of several thousand troops. But arduous negotiations with the Iraqi government about keeping a residual force stalled over the Iraqis’ reluctance to provide them with legal immunity.

But the fact is America’s military efforts in Iraq aren’t coming to an end. They are instead entering a new phase. On January 1, 2012, the State Department will command a hired army of about 5,500 security contractors, all to protect the largest U.S. diplomatic presence anywhere overseas.

The State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security does not have a promising record when it comes to managing its mercenaries. The 2007 Nisour Square shootings by State’s security contractors, in which 17 Iraqi civilians were killed, marked one of the low points of the war. Now, State will be commanding a much larger security presence, the equivalent of a heavy combat brigade. In July, Danger Room exclusively reported that the Department blocked the Congressionally-appointed watchdog for Iraq from acquiring basic information about contractor security operations, such as the contractors’ rules of engagement.

That means no one outside the State Department knows how its contractors will behave as they ferry over 10,000 U.S. State Department employees throughout Iraq — which, in case anyone has forgotten, is still a war zone. Since Iraq wouldn’t grant legal immunity to U.S. troops, it is unlikely to grant it to U.S. contractors, particularly in the heat and anger of an accident resulting in the loss of Iraqi life.

It’s a situation with the potential for diplomatic disaster. And it’s being managed by an organization with no experience running the tight command structure that makes armies cohesive and effective.

You can also expect that there will be a shadow presence by the CIA, and possibly the Joint Special Operations Command, to hunt persons affiliated with al-Qaida. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has conspicuously stated that al-Qaida still has 1,000 Iraqi adherents, which would make it the largest al-Qaida affiliate in the world.

So far, there are three big security firms with lucrative contracts to protect U.S. diplomats. Triple Canopy, a longtime State guard company, has a contract worth up to $1.53 billion to keep diplos safe as they travel throughout Iraq. Global Strategies Group will guard the consulate at Basra for up to $401 million. SOC Incorporated will protect the mega-embassy in Baghdad for up to $974 million. State has yet to award contracts to guard consulates in multiethnic flashpoint cities Mosul and Kirkuk, as well as the outpost in placid Irbil.

“We can have the kind of protection our diplomats need,” Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough told reporters after Obama’s announcement. Whether the Iraqi people will have protection from the contractors that the State Department commands is a different question. And whatever you call their operations, the Obama administration hopes that you won’t be so rude as to call it “war.”

Seriously:

A fascinating investigation by Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone – this is one journalist (and friend) with a fine record of uncovering secrets – on the internal American dialogue over military intervention in Libya. A key theme, repeated over and over again by various officials, is the desire by elements within the Obama administration to be on the supposed right side of history and not be seen as backing dictators (the default Washington position):

It is still debatable whether Libyan civilians ever faced a genocidal threat. But unlike the false accusations of WMDs leveled against Saddam Hussein, which were intentionally manufactured by the Bush administration to justify its invasion of Iraq, the concerns about atrocities by Qaddafi seemed all too real at the time. According to multiple sources who attended the meeting in the Situation Room, Obama quickly concluded that a no-fly zone wouldn’t be enough to stop the feared massacre: NATO would need to bomb Qaddafi’s tanks and missile sites as well.

“You’re telling me that Benghazi could be overrun this week, but you’re not giving me any options that stop it,” the president said after two hours of discussion. “I want real options.” Obama ordered his team to develop plans that would go “beyond a no-fly zone.” Then he ended the meeting, instructing those present to reconvene at 9 p.m. Donilon and McDonough peeled off to set up a smaller meeting with the national security staff, while Rice put out feelers at the U.N.

At nine, Obama returned from a dinner with Pentagon commanders and entered the Situation Room. (Because it was 3:30 a.m. in Cairo, Clinton was not present.) It was a contentious evening, according to sources familiar with the meeting. When Rice reported that she believed she could get U.N. support for a broader intervention, Gates butted heads with her, seemingly unwilling to relent. Rice argued that the credibility of the U.N. Security Council was at stake. Another senior adviser disagreed, pointing out that though Qaddafi was a horrible person, we had lived with him for decades. Why risk going down a road that could lead to a wider conflict, especially when there were plenty of worse atrocities elsewhere? Obama, as usual, listened without reacting. “He was invariably extremely calm,” said one official who attended the meeting. “He doesn’t get riled up.”

Gates offered a last-ditch case against intervention, arguing that Libya had little strategic value. He warned that the U.S. often ended up “owning” what happened, pointing to Kosovo and the no-fly zone over Kurdistan in Iraq. He said he was wary of getting involved in a third Muslim country, and feared “a stalemate.”

The president answered these arguments himself. According to one participant’s summary, Obama said: Look, the question of who rules Libya is probably not a vital interest to the United States. The atrocities threatened don’t compare to atrocities in other parts of the world, I hear that. But there’s a big “but” here. First of all, acting would be the right thing to do, because we have an opportunity to prevent a massacre, and we’ve been asked to do it by the people of Libya, their Arab neighbors and the United Nations. And second, the president said, failing to intervene would be a “psychological pendulum, in terms of the Arab Spring, in favor of repression.” He concluded: “Just signing on to a no-fly zone so that we have political cover isn’t going to cut it. That’s not how America leads.” Nor, he added, is it the “image of America I believe in.”

The debate was over. The president ordered Rice to go back to the U.N. and “lean forward” on a resolution that would authorize NATO to strike targets on the ground and take “all necessary measures.” The humanitarian argument for intervention had carried the day. “The media makes as if this was an esoteric discussion on a foreign-policy website about intervention versus realism,” says a White House official. “That’s crap when you’re sitting in the Situation Room and a city of 700,000 is facing indiscriminate slaughter. That’s what moved the president.”