Los Angeles Times
June 16, 2008

Bush Never Lied To Us About Iraq

By James Kirchick

Touring Vietnam in 1965, Michigan Gov. George Romney proclaimed American involvement there "morally right and necessary." Two years later, however, Romney -- then seeking the Republican presidential nomination -- not only recanted his support for the war but claimed that he had been hoodwinked.

"When I came back from Vietnam, I had just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get," Romney told a Detroit TV reporter who asked the candidate how he reconciled his shifting views.

Romney (father of Mitt) had visited Vietnam with nine other governors, all of whom denied that they had been duped by their government. With this one remark, his presidential hopes were dashed.

The memory of this gaffe reverberates in the contemporary rhetoric of many Democrats, who, when attacking the Bush administration's case for war against Saddam Hussein, employ essentially the same argument. In 2006, John F. Kerry explained the Senate's 77-23 passage of the Iraq war resolution this way: "We were misled. We were given evidence that was not true." On the campaign trail, Hillary Rodham Clinton dodged blame for her pro-war vote by claiming that "the mistakes were made by this president, who misled this country and this Congress."

Nearly every prominent Democrat in the country has repeated some version of this charge, and the notion that the Bush administration deceived the American people has become the accepted narrative of how we went to war.

Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House "manipulation" -- that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction -- administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.

In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments." The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found "no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

Contrast those conclusions with the Senate Intelligence Committee report issued June 5, the production of which excluded Republican staffers and which only two GOP senators endorsed. In a news release announcing the report, committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV got in this familiar shot: "Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretenses."

Yet Rockefeller's highly partisan report does not substantiate its most explosive claims. Rockefeller, for instance, charges that "top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11." Yet what did his report actually find? That Iraq-Al Qaeda links were "substantiated by intelligence information." The same goes for claims about Hussein's possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons program.

Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don't get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats wish to contend they were "misled" into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA.

In 2003, top Senate Democrats -- not just Rockefeller but also Carl Levin, Clinton, Kerry and others -- sounded just as alarmist. Conveniently, this month's report, titled "Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information," includes only statements by the executive branch. Had it scrutinized public statements of Democrats on the Intelligence, Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees -- who have access to the same intelligence information as the president and his chief advisors -- many senators would be unable to distinguish their own words from what they today characterize as warmongering.

This may sound like ancient history, but it matters. After Sept. 11, President Bush did not want to risk allowing Hussein, who had twice invaded neighboring nations, murdered more than 1 million Iraqis and stood in violation of 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions, to remain in possession of what he believed were stocks of chemical and biological warheads and a nuclear weapons program. By glossing over this history, the Democrats' lies-led-to-war narrative provides false comfort in a world of significant dangers.

"I no longer believe that it was necessary for us to get involved in South Vietnam to stop communist aggression in Southeast Asia," Romney elaborated in that infamous 1967 interview. That was an intellectually justifiable view then, just as it is intellectually justifiable for erstwhile Iraq war supporters to say -- given the way it's turned out -- that they don't think the effort has been worth it. But predicating such a reversal on the unsubstantiated allegation that one was lied to is cowardly and dishonest.

A journalist who accompanied Romney on his 1965 foray to Vietnam remarked that if the governor had indeed been brainwashed, it was not because of American propaganda but because he had "brought so light a load to the laundromat." Given the similarity between Romney's explanation and the protestations of Democrats 40 years later, one wonders why the news media aren't saying the same thing today.

James Kirchick is an assistant editor of the New Republic.

Wall Street Journal
July 3, 2008
Pg. 10

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has departed for summer vacation, but what a mess he's left behind, especially for the U.S. military. His 5-4 decision requiring habeas corpus review for foreign terrorists is already creating confusion and problems about how to handle these dangerous enemies.

The Bush Administration is currently debating how to respond to Mr. Kennedy's war-fighting ukase in Boumediene v. Bush, with President Bush set to make a decision soon. Some in the Administration want Mr. Bush to abolish not merely Guantanamo but even military commissions, the special tribunals set up to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others for their war crimes. This would compound the mistake of Boumediene, and do away with what has long been a useful tool of military justice.

It is already clear to nearly everyone in the Administration that it will be impossible for the U.S. to hold most detainees from now on. That's true not merely at Gitmo, but even in Afghanistan, Iraq and other foreign battlefields. Earlier this month, lawyers filed a lawsuit on behalf of a detainee held at the U.S. military prison at Bagram air base near Kabul. It's only a matter of time before suits are filed demanding habeas writs for anyone captured and held by GIs for any length of time anywhere in the world.

Regrettably, the Administration will now have to let most enemy fighters go. The burden of gathering enough evidence to meet the habeas standards of U.S. federal courts is simply too great under battlefield conditions – and in any case is far too dangerous. This week a panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the enemy combatant status of a Gitmo detainee captured after training in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. The press has reported this as if the Bush Administration had invented a case against an innocent shepherd. But the truth is that in the fog of battle it is impossible to gather evidence the way a Manhattan cop can. There's no "CSI: Kandahar."

While GIs gathered shell casings or interviewed witnesses to meet a U.S. judge's habeas standard, they would leave themselves open to counterattack or sniper fire. No commander – and no Commander in Chief – can ask his troops to put themselves in danger to satisfy Justice Kennedy's legal afflatus. This is what Justice Antonin Scalia meant when he wrote that Americans will die as a result of Boumediene.

Justice Kennedy won't want to hear this, but this means that some enemy combatants will be shot on the battlefield rather than captured. Most who are captured will be interrogated for a brief time and released. Some will be set free entirely, while others will be handed over to the tender mercies of our allies on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The U.S. will still require some kind of detention for the worst combatants – such as KSM, and others we will want to put on trial. But if Gitmo is no longer a prison, some U.S. domestic prison will have to house these men while they await a habeas hearing and trial. If a habeas court finds the evidence against them unpersuasive, they can then be held only for six months under immigration law before they are deported. If no country will accept them, the possibility exists that they will be released here. It will be fascinating to watch the Congressfolk who cheered Boumediene now saying "not in my backyard." What does Pat Leahy think about a Vermont destination?

That still leaves the issue of trials for those who are found to be enemy combatants. The State Department is arguing that Mr. Bush should now cashier the entire post-9/11 system, including Gitmo and military commissions. The argument is that the U.S. will get no diplomatic benefit from refusing to hold future detainees as long as the commissions continue. In any case, State's legal sages say, the Supreme Court will eventually declare military commissions unconstitutional too.

But we doubt even Justice Kennedy would disallow commissions, which have existed throughout American history. After the Civil War, they were even used against the KKK's attempts to defeat Reconstruction of the South. After six long years, about 20 enemy combatants (including KSM) are now set for the tribunals, and multiple trials are under way. If Mr. Bush shuts down the commissions at this late date, the military justice process would have to start over.

It would insult the 9/11 families if justice for KSM and the others who planned those attacks is delayed once again. Assuming they are convicted, they will have the right of appeal. But would five Supreme Court Justices really set free the men who plotted the murders of 3,000 Americans? As for diplomacy, those who dislike America won't bother to distinguish between military commissions and courts martial. They'll find any military trials unfair.

The killers of 9/11 need to be put on trial, and soon. Americans need to hear them revel in their jihad, boasting that they would kill again if they get the chance. Justice Kennedy needs to hear it too.

Wall Street Journal
June 17, 2008
Pg. 23

By John Yoo

Last week's Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush has been painted as a stinging rebuke of the administration's antiterrorism policies. From the celebrations on most U.S. editorial pages, one might think that the court had stopped a dictator from trampling civil liberties. Boumediene did anything but. The 5-4 ruling is judicial imperialism of the highest order.

Boumediene should finally put to rest the popular myth that right-wing conservatives dominate the Supreme Court. Academics used to complain about the Rehnquist Court's "activism" for striking down minor federal laws on issues such as whether states are immune from damage lawsuits, or if Congress could ban handguns in school. Justice Anthony Kennedy -- joined by the liberal bloc of Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer -- saves his claims of judicial supremacy for the truly momentous: striking down a wartime statute, agreed upon by the president and large majorities of Congress, while hostilities are ongoing, no less.

First out the window went precedent. Under the writ of habeas corpus, Americans (and aliens on our territory) can challenge the legality of their detentions before a federal judge. Until Boumediene, the Supreme Court had never allowed an alien who was captured fighting against the U.S. to use our courts to challenge his detention.

In World War II, no civilian court reviewed the thousands of German prisoners housed in the U.S. Federal judges never heard cases from the Confederate prisoners of war held during the Civil War. In a trilogy of cases decided at the end of World War II, the Supreme Court agreed that the writ did not benefit enemy aliens held outside the U.S. In the months after the 9/11 attacks, we in the Justice Department relied on the Supreme Court's word when we evaluated Guantanamo Bay as a place to hold al Qaeda terrorists.

The Boumediene five also ignored the Constitution's structure, which grants all war decisions to the president and Congress. In 2004 and 2006, the Court tried to extend its reach to al Qaeda terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay. It was overruled twice by Congress, which has the power to define the jurisdiction of the federal courts. Congress established its own procedures for the appeal of detentions.

Incredibly, these five Justices have now defied the considered judgment of the president and Congress for a third time, all to grant captured al Qaeda terrorists the exact same rights as American citizens to a day in civilian court.

Judicial modesty, respect for the executive and legislative branches, and pure common sense weren't concerns here either. The Court refused to wait and see how Congress's 2006 procedures for the review of enemy combatant cases work. Congress gave Guantanamo Bay prisoners more rights than any prisoners of war, in any war, ever. The justices violated the classic rule of self-restraint by deciding an issue not yet before them.

Judicial micromanagement will now intrude into the conduct of war. Federal courts will jury-rig a process whose every rule second-guesses our soldiers and intelligence agents in the field. A judge's view on how much "proof" is needed to find that a "suspect" is a terrorist will become the standard applied on the battlefield. Soldiers will have to gather "evidence," which will have to be safeguarded until a court hearing, take statements from "witnesses," and probably provide some kind of Miranda-style warning upon capture. No doubt lawyers will swarm to provide representation for new prisoners.

So our fighting men and women now must add C.S.I. duties to that of capturing or killing the enemy. Nor will this be the end of it. Under Boumediene's claim of judicial supremacy, it is only a hop, skip and a jump from judges second-guessing whether someone is an enemy to second-guessing whether a soldier should have aimed and fired at him.

President Bush has declared, rightly, that the government will abide by the decision. No American lives are yet imperiled, as the courts will have to wrestle with the cases for months, if not years. But the upshot of Boumediene is that courts will release detainees from Guantanamo Bay, or the Defense Department will do so voluntarily, in the near future.

Just as there is always the chance of a mistaken detention, there is also the probability that we will release the wrong man. As Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion notes, at least 30 detainees released from Guantanamo Bay -- with the military, not the courts, making the call -- have returned to Afghanistan and Iraq battlefields.

The Boumediene majority has two hopes for getting away with its brazen power grab. It assumes that we have accepted judicial control over virtually every important policy in our society, from abortion and affirmative action to religion. Boumediene simply adds war to the list. The justices act like we are no longer really at war. Our homeland has not suffered another 9/11 attack for seven years, and our military and intelligence agencies have killed or captured much of al Qaeda's original leadership. What's left is on the run, due to the very terrorism policies under judicial attack.

Justice Kennedy and his majority assume that terrorism is some long-term social problem, like crime, so the standard methods of law enforcement can be used to deal with al Qaeda. Boumediene reflects a judicial desire to return to the comfortable, business-as-usual attitude that characterized U.S. antiterrorism policy up to Sept. 10, 2001.

The only real hope of returning the Supreme Court to its normal wartime role rests in the November elections. Sometimes it is difficult to tell Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain apart on issues like campaign finance or global warming. But they have real differences on Supreme Court appointments. Mr. Obama had nothing but praise for Boumediene, while Mr. McCain attacked it and promised to choose judges like Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, both dissenters.

Because of the advancing age of several justices (Justice Stevens is 88, and several others are above 70), the next president will be in a position to appoint a new Court that can reverse the damage done to the nation's security.

Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He was an official in the Justice Department from 2001-03.

Washington Post
June 14, 2008
Pg. 4

By Juliet Eilperin and Michael D. Shear, Washington Post Staff Writers

PEMBERTON, N.J., June 13 -- Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) on Friday forcefully sided with President Bush in condemning the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to grant access to federal courts for the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, potentially muddying his reputation as a critic of the administration's approach to treatment of suspected terrorists.

"We made it very clear these are enemy combatants," he told more than 1,000 supporters at a town hall meeting here, echoing the president's criticism of the court decision. "They have not, and never have been, given the rights of citizens of this country."

The presumptive GOP nominee then read from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s dissent in the case and predicted the courts will now be "flooded" with lawsuits from terrorism suspects.

"We are going to be bollixed up in a way that's terribly unfortunate," he said. "Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation and the men and women who defend it. This decision will harm our ability to do that."

At a time when McCain is eager to distance himself from Bush on a variety of issues, the Supreme Court decision forces a public discussion in an area where he and the president fully agree: that allowing detainees access to U.S. courts will undermine the fight against global terrorism.

That discussion has the potential to be politically damaging for McCain, who has strongly opposed the administration on the separate issue of how detainees should be treated. Moderates who are key to McCain's strategy for winning the presidency may be taken aback by what they perceive as a softening of the senator's stand against Bush's torture policy.

Tom Malinowski, who serves as Washington advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said voters will probably see a contradiction between McCain's efforts to prevent torture and close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and "his continued support for the underlying legal principle that Guantanamo stands for, namely that detainees should not have access to a normal judicial process."

Democrats, who use the president's treatment of terror suspects as a way to motivate the liberal base, sought Friday to tie McCain to Bush. The liberal Center for American Progress criticized McCain for opposing the court decision merely because "it isn't what the Bush administration wanted."

For several years, McCain has bolstered his reputation as a maverick by challenging the president's approach to the treatment and disposition of people suspected of terrorism.

He was the chief architect of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, a law that arose out of the revelations of detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay. McCain, who was tortured after he was captured in Vietnam, took a hard line against the Bush administration, wanting to ban aggressive interrogation techniques and set a moral standard for the rest of the world.

His POW status gave him instant credibility on the issue, which was followed around the world. In the often tense legislative battle with Bush, McCain repeatedly cast the treatment issue as one of respect for human rights.

"Weakening the Geneva protections is not only unnecessary, but would set an example to other countries with less respect for basic human rights that they could issue their own legislative 'reinterpretations,' " he said at the time.

But there have always been two issues at stake in the debate over detainees: how to interrogate them and how to try them. On the issue of trying them, McCain has pushed for trials, but, like President Bush, he has rejected calls from human rights groups and detainee lawyers to allow them in U.S. courts.

McCain visited Guantanamo Bay in late 2003 with Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and John W. Warner (R-Va.), then the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and the three wrote a letter to then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld asking him to start military commissions because some detainees had been held for two years without any judicial process. The letter indicates that McCain and his colleagues wanted the detainees to be tried or sent home, but it also endorsed the president's original military commissions, which the Supreme Court later found to be unconstitutional.

"A serious process must be established in the very near term either to formally treat and process the detainees as war criminals or to return them to their countries for appropriate judicial action," the senators wrote on Dec. 12, 2003.

That letter put McCain at odds with the Bush administration, which decided at the time that it had the right to hold detainees indefinitely. But the senator and the president now agree on how detainees should be tried.

McCain told reporters he would seek to narrow the implications of the decision in Congress. When asked if he would seek to overturn the ruling through a constitutional amendment, McCain replied, "Frankly, we should try to exhaust our legislative options" and "try to more narrowly refine" the decision.

Two Senate allies of McCain, Graham and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), said they would join McCain in seeking to mitigate the court ruling. Graham, who also serves as a reserve military judge, has long sought to limit detainee access to U.S. courts.

Lieberman cited the decision as a reason voters should back McCain for president over Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who applauded the Supreme Court decision Friday. "The consequences are going to be quite different, depending on who you vote for," he said.

Staff writers Josh White and Michael Abramowitz contributed to this report.

Washington Post
June 16, 2008
Pg. 19

By Jackson Diehl

It's easy to imagine the gloating smirk on the face of Pervez Musharraf. The autocratic ruler of Pakistan from October 1999 until February 2008 still sits in the sprawling home reserved for the country's army commander, though he gave up the post last year. He is still president, though he has lost much of his power to an elected civilian government. For years, Musharraf resisted pressure from Washington to allow this return to democracy, arguing that only he could serve as a reliable partner in the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Now he might point to democracy's result: a fractious parliamentary coalition all but paralyzed by byzantine political struggles; rebellious lawyers and judges, who last week marched on the capital; and soaring food prices and power shortages, which threaten to trigger mass unrest.

Meanwhile, Pakistan's army and security forces are refraining from action against Taliban and al-Qaeda havens in the tribal territories along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. Those bases are being used for attacks on American troops in Afghanistan and are the most likely launching pad for a new terrorist strike against the United States. A confused firefight on the border last week, in which U.S. forces may have killed Pakistani soldiers, only illustrated how far the countries are from cooperating effectively against the looming threat.

"You see?" the old general might say. "This is what your demand for democracy in Pakistan has brought about."

The question is serious -- even if Musharraf has refrained from raising it in public. Has the push for Pakistani democracy exposed the United States to greater risk of another 9/11? Has it made an already-volatile Muslim country with a nuclear arsenal even more vulnerable to an Islamic revolution or collapse into a failed state?

The need for a response helps explain the speed with which Husain Haqqani has been shuttling around Washington. The former adviser to assassinated People's Party leader Benazir Bhutto presented his credentials as Pakistan's new ambassador in Washington on June 6. Within hours he was rushing to and from the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department and Congress in an attempt to buy tolerance -- and time -- for his fragile government.

"The legacy of the past," Haqqani points out, is that "democratic governments in Pakistan have been set up for failure." The generals act without consulting them -- like the corps and intelligence commanders, appointed by Musharraf, who struck a truce with the notorious Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud and then allowed him to hold a news conference at which he promised to intensify attacks on Americans in Afghanistan. Musharraf has caused much of the political turmoil in Islamabad by refusing to resign as president, triggering a debate over whether he should be impeached, ousted through a restoration of the supreme court he dismissed last year, or gradually coaxed into retirement.

"All of this is sapping a lot of energy and taking attention away from a lot of other things," Haqqani argues. For example, the new government has developed a five-point plan for combating extremism in the tribal areas that includes economic development, political reforms and negotiations with tribal leaders who might be turned against the Taliban. It has suspended negotiations with Mehsud and announced that it will not agree to any cease-fires that do not include a halt to attacks in Afghanistan as well as in Pakistan and the expulsion of foreign fighters -- which means al-Qaeda.

Haqqani's pitch is that the United States ought to invest in the success of a civilian government that might look weak and divided now but that, if consolidated, would deliver more than Musharraf ever did. "While it's difficult for people to get used to, in the end it will be better for the United States to work with a Pakistani democracy rather than a single general," he said in a visit to The Post. "Instead of having one person who makes commitments he doesn't live up to" -- Musharraf's record in a nutshell -- "you have multiple power centers that come to a consensus, then implement it."

The ambassador says the Bush administration is playing along, in some ways. It is trying to route military and intelligence communications through civilians in the government, for example, rather than talking directly to military commanders. The problem is that each day that al-Qaeda is allowed a haven on Pakistani soil raises the threat it poses to Pakistan and the United States.

I asked Haqqani if he and his new ministers in Islamabad had thought about what would happen to Pakistan and its newly reborn democracy if a major al-Qaeda attack against the United States succeeded and was traced back to the tribal areas. "What do you think keeps me up at night?" he answered. "We want to make sure that it doesn't come to that." Then he was off to the next stop on his tour, and his next plea for patience.

New York Times
June 15, 2008
Pg. 1

By David D. Kirkpatrick

About a year after his release from a North Vietnamese prison camp, Cmdr. John S. McCain III sat down to address one of the most vexing questions confronting his fellow prisoners: Why did some choose to collaborate with the North Vietnamese?

Mr. McCain blamed American politics.

“The biggest factor in a man’s ability to perform credibly as a prisoner of war is a strong belief in the correctness of his nation’s foreign policy,” Mr. McCain wrote in a 1974 essay submitted to the National War College and never released to the public. Prisoners who questioned “the legality of the war” were “extremely easy marks for Communist propaganda,” he wrote.

Americans captured after 1968 had proven to be more susceptible to North Vietnamese pressure, he argued, because they “had been exposed to the divisive forces which had come into focus as a result of the antiwar movement in the United States.”

To insulate against such doubts, he recommended that the military should teach its recruits not only how to fight but also the reasons for American foreign policies like the containment of Southeast Asian communism — even though, Mr. McCain acknowledged, “a program of this nature could be construed as ‘brainwashing’ or ‘thought control’ and could come in for a great deal of criticism.”

Now a senator who is the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee, Mr. McCain often points to his nine months at the War College as the time that crystallized his views toward foreign conflicts like the war in Iraq. He has talked about his studies as a tutorial in the hows-and-whys of America’s involvement in Southeast Asia. But the 40-page final paper he produced was limited to an evaluation of the military code of conduct through the prism of his “narrow, but personal, viewpoint.”

It was in many ways a first draft of his political autobiography, recounting the ennobling stories of resistance that he and his co-author, Mark Salter, would later retell in his 1999 memoir, “Faith of My Fathers.”

Mr. McCain’s 1974 thesis, though, also revealed a welter of other emotions about his years as a prisoner of war, including a deep anger at those he considered collaborators, a tough-minded disdain for public hand-wringing about captives like himself, and a sharp impatience with the American government for failing to “explain to its people, young and old, some basic facts of its foreign policy.” But at the same time, Mr. McCain also urged that any military survival training should include lessons in what he called “the necessity to forgive.”

Mr. McCain’s paper sheds new light on the experience that first brought him national attention and remains a staple of his campaign commercials. His conclusions hint at themes of his career, like his habit of making peace with former enemies. And his arguments that the government and the military should have done more to convince the voters and the troops about the case for the war in Vietnam echo in current debates about Iraq as well.

Asked if he still had those views, Mr. McCain said in an e-mail message that he still believed the antiwar movement had hurt the morale of some prisoners, although he added the vast majority “performed their duty with courage and resolve irrespective of how controversy about the war influenced their view of it.”

Historians, though, say his assertion that the antiwar movement weakened the resistance of Americans captured late in the war is misleading, in part because almost all the most cooperative prisoners were captured early and in part because many other cultural shifts contributed to differences in the later war captives. And some of his fellow prisoners also question the connection between the war protests and the camp collaborators.

“Don’t connect those guys with the antiwar movement,” said Orson Swindle, a prisoner who became a friend of Mr. McCain. “It was the guy in the next cell who was the reason we were trying so hard to uphold the code and our honor, and those guys just betrayed everything we stood for.”

But others say it is easy to see how Mr. McCain’s dismay at prisoners’ propaganda statements could feed his current impatience with calls for a withdrawal from Iraq. In the crucible of the camps, it was easy to see the collaborators — broadcasting antiwar statements over prison loudspeakers, smiling for Jane Fonda and visiting peace activists, enjoying the rewards of better food and less torture — as embodiments of the war protesters that the North Vietnamese counted on to wear down the American war effort.

“Just like the ‘pull-out movement’ today, as I call it, the peace movement would give them something to hang their hats on,” said Richard A. Stratton, another former prisoner incarcerated with Mr. McCain. “You are being tortured and all you have to do to get them to stop is say the same thing that Bobby Kennedy is saying. The same thing that George McGovern is saying. You don’t even have to make anything up.”

Determination Redoubled

Mr. McCain, then a Navy lieutenant commander, was by all accounts what the American prisoners called a “tough resister.” He was nicknamed Crip for the severity of the injuries he sustained — a shoulder, both arms and his knee broken, with a bayonet wound near the groin — when his fighter plane was shot down in October 1967. Military rules only allowed P.O.W.’s to go home in the order of their capture, but some senior officers said his medical condition justified accepting an offer of release from the North Vietnamese. Mr. McCain, the son of a prominent admiral, did not want to be part of North Vietnamese propaganda, so he chose to endure years of torture instead.

At times, Mr. McCain seemed to court punishment, noisily cussing out his captors while giving “thumbs up” signs to his fellow prisoners. “No matter what he did, he always played to the bleachers,” Robert Coram, a military historian, wrote in a book about the camps.

All of the prisoners acknowledged that everyone had a breaking point. Mr. McCain’s came 10 months after he arrived. With his father taking command of the Pacific Fleet, the North Vietnamese were determined to coerce the son into denouncing the war. For four days they tied him with ropes, beat him every few hours, re-broke his arm, and left him in a pool of his own blood and refuse. Finally, he signed and tape-recorded a war crimes confession.

His fellow prisoners say his capitulation only redoubled his determination to provoke his captors. “Acts of defiance felt so good that I felt they more than compensated for their repercussions,” he wrote, “and they helped me keep at bay the unsettled feelings of guilt and self doubt my confession had aroused.”

Others responded differently. Initially unable to feed or clean himself, Mr. McCain was nursed back to health by his cellmate, Maj. Norris Overly of the Air Force. Mr. McCain has often credited Mr. Overly with saving his life, calling him “a very fine man.”

Returning from an interrogation in February 1968, however, Mr. Overly told his cellmates he was going home. He said, as he later testified to Congress, that he had given his captors nothing and could not explain their decision.

Mr. McCain said in his e-mail message that he had never been angry with Mr. Overly. In his memoir, he recalls only a fear his friend was making a mistake. “I couldn’t stand in judgment of him,” he wrote.

But his fellow prisoners say he felt betrayed. After a goodbye ceremony staged for North Vietnamese cameras — Mr. McCain arrived on a stretcher — he and the others began referring to the departures as the “fink release program” and “the slimies.”

Mr. Overly declined to comment.

By the end of 1972, a dozen of the roughly 400 American prisoners of war in the North had accepted offers to be freed, only one with the permission of the senior American officers. All were required, at the very least, to sign letters requesting “amnesty” and thanking the North Vietnamese.

Some went further. As early as 1969, Mr. McCain began hearing three American officers denouncing the war over camp loudspeakers. The first two, Robert Schweitzer and Edison Miller, became known as “The Bob and Ed Show.” Walter Eugene Wilber soon joined.

They were followed by as many as a dozen others: enlisted infantrymen captured in South Vietnam early in the war and later brought to the northern prisons. They had not received the same training in survival strategies and the code of conduct as the pilots who made up the rest of the prisons in the North. The cooperators called themselves the “peace committee” and enjoyed treats from their captors, including beer, ice cream, Vietnamese dinners, and front-row seats at a local circus. They lived in fear of retribution from the tough resisters.

Mr. Miller and Mr. Wilber, the officers, said in interviews that they considered it pointless to resist after they had surrendered. “I think our duty as senior officers is to get these men home as healthy emotionally and physically as we can, and I don’t intend to play politics,” Mr. Miller, a Marine lieutenant colonel, said he told the others.

Some members of the peace committee said that watching the destruction of Vietnamese villages had turned them against the war, arguing that the pilots did not see the carnage. Others said they were beaten down. “We said what we had to say to get through it,” Michael Branch, one of the enlisted men, said in an interview.

Mr. McCain was as enraged as any of the tough resisters by what they considered the treason of the two officers and enlisted men, his friends said. “He thought this was ‘terrible, terrible, terrible,’ they should all be shot,” said John Dramesi, a fellow prisoner.

In his memoirs, Mr. McCain addressed only briefly what he called “the camp rats.” During a stint in solitary confinement, he had caught a glimpse of two other American officers acting friendly with their guards and enjoying delicacies like eggs and bananas, Mr. McCain and his co-author wrote. Assuming that contact with a fellow American would restore their nerve, Mr. McCain called out: “Hey, guys, my name’s McCain. Who are you?” They called the guards, who beat him again.

Those two were Mr. Miller and Mr. Wilber. They denied the exchange took place, but in his e-mail message Mr. McCain said, “I would have been astonished if they admitted it.”

Willingness to Forgive

But Mr. Schweitzer, who died in a car crash soon after the war, became an example of what Mr. McCain later called “the necessity to forgive.” Confronted by a senior officer, Mr. Schweitzer renounced his participation in the propaganda and resumed his place in the American ranks.

“It is neither American nor Christian to nag a repentant sinner to his grave,” the senior Americans taught.

“John McCain has lived by that his whole life,” Mr. Swindle said. Others have observed the pattern as Mr. McCain has embraced former adversaries from antiwar activists and North Vietnamese prison commanders to the critics who charged him with corruption in the Keating Five scandal.

Mr. McCain was one of about a half-dozen former prisoners of war who spent the year after their release at the National War College, an elite academy for future admirals or generals.

Some officers fresh from Vietnam questioned the premise of the war. “The vast majority of generals who had experience in Vietnam will tell you we should never have gone past the advisory level,” said John H. Johns, a retired Army general and a student at the college that year. But in Mr. McCain’s paper, he instead focused on the failure to sustain public support for the fight. The paper was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and provided to The New York Times by Matt Welch, an author of a book about Mr. McCain.

He cast a cold eye on the public sympathy for prisoners like himself. “Two and a half million American fighting men served in the Vietnam conflict, and more importantly 46,000 sacrificed their lives,” Mr. McCain wrote. “Yet in the latter stages of that war millions of people were more actively concerned about the plight of 565 P.O.W.’s in Hanoi than in any bigger issue of the war.”

American elected officials, he argued, had fostered a myopic focus on the prisoners by forsaking the goal of unconditional surrender in favor of a negotiated peace, enabling the North Vietnamese to turn their hostages into a bargaining chip. “Many Congressional resolutions, favorable to the enemy, were based solely on the guaranteed return of Americans from North Vietnam,” he wrote.

With prisoners returned, he argued, ambivalence about the war was protecting the minority of American prisoners “who did not keep faith with their country or their fellow prisoners.”

Court-martial charges were filed against two officers and seven enlisted men, he noted. “Probably more would have been charged if the Vietnam War had been like other wars in which this country has engaged,” Mr. McCain wrote. (Top military leaders quickly quashed charges against those nine.)

Mr. McCain reserved his fiercest criticism for what he called “the evils of parole and amnesty,” returning repeatedly to the importance of teaching recruits to reject such offers as he did. The prospect of early release had tempted and demoralized the other captives while providing the North Vietnamese “a maximum of favorable publicity and propaganda value from these ‘humane acts,’ ” he wrote.

“Probably the greatest shock to great numbers of the P.O.W.’s was to find, on returning to the U.S., that P.O.W.’s who were released early had not been court-martialed but in fact had received choice assignments and early promotions,” he added, calling their warm welcome “inexcusable.”

Mr. McCain’s proposal that the military teach U.S. foreign policy to its recruits may be his most notable recommendation. “Too many men in the armed forces of the United States do not understand what this nation’s foreign policy is,” Mr. McCain wrote, adding he did not propose a Soviet-style “indoctrination,” but “a simple, straightforward explanation of the foreign policy of the United States.”

In his e-mail message, Mr. McCain stood by the idea. “It is important, not just for P.O.W.’s, but all Americans serving in combat to understand the purpose and reason for the sacrifices they are asked to make for our country,” he said.

Such instruction, though, sounds close to heretical to some military officers because it risks instructing the troops in the foreign policy of either one president or another, a prospect that particularly troubles Mr. McCain’s contemporaries who came to opposite conclusions about the Vietnam War.

“It gets to be partisan political positioning and regime support,” said Merrill McPeak, a retired Air Force general and another War College classmate of Mr. McCain. (Both Mr. Johns and Mr. McPeak are supporting the Democratic presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama.)

But Prof. Richard H. Kohn, a historian of civil-military relations at the University of North Carolina who has taught at the War College, suggested that Mr. McCain’s recommendation was more of a “time warp” back to the 1950s, when he came of age at the Naval Academy. It was an era of staunchly anti-communist foreign policy consensus that was shattered by the debates over the Vietnam War while Mr. McCain was in prison, Professor Kohn said.

Mr. McCain’s public statements when he returned from the war suggested that he saw a similar consensus emerging again. “I see more of an appreciation of our way of life,” he wrote in a 1973 article for U.S. News & World Report. “There is more patriotism. The flag is all over the place.”

“Some of my fellow prisoners sang a different tune, but they were a very small minority,” he added. “I ask myself if they should be prosecuted, and I don’t find that easy to answer. It might destroy the very fine image the great majority of us have brought back from that hellhole.”

Wall Street Journal
June 14, 2008
Pg. 9

By Mary Anastasia O'Grady

Bogotá--"We are ready for a humanitarian exchange. But we are not ready to serve as idiots to the proposal of FARC to use the hostages as a way to regain criminal power in Colombia."

Sitting in the elegant Casa de Nariño – the official residence of the head of state – Colombian President Álvaro Uribe is talking about one of the hottest political issues of the day: to what lengths his government should go to win the release of some of the kidnap victims held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). These hostages include three American contractors and the French-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt, who has been held for more than six years and whose plight has become a cause célèbre in Paris.

Mr. Uribe, a man of boundless energy, can have trouble staying in one place for very long. But at the moment he is still and looking me straight in the eye as he emphatically states that he will not give in to terrorist demands.

I first met Álvaro Uribe in 1997, when as governor of the state of Antioquia he had a reputation for standing up to the FARC and inspiring hope among a war-weary population. More than a decade later, his physical appearance hasn't much changed – save the new gray hairs. At age 55 he is trim, and a noticeable limp, he explains, is only a minor injury sustained while jumping rope in a hotel room this morning.

His views about governance are also much the same: "You have to have permanent contact with the people," he says. "It's not a matter of showing up for a one-day celebration. It has to be a permanent dialogue so that they know what to expect from government and government assumes accountability everyday."

Mr. Uribe has been for Colombia what Churchill was for Britain and Reagan was for the U.S. He took office in 2002 when the FARC's reign of terror had brought his nation to its knees. In six years he has reversed the slide into anarchy and today, half-way through his second four-year term, most of the country is pacified. Murders and kidnappings are down sharply; FARC defections and battlefield defeats are mounting; the economy is booming.

With an approval rating of around 80%, so too are Mr. Uribe's political fortunes. And as I listen to his views on governance, it occurs to me that this has come to pass not only because of his bravery and moral clarity, but also because he came along when his country most needed him.

In 1998, four years before he became president, Colombia had engaged in a so-called peace process with the FARC. This included ceding a chunk of territory the size of Switzerland to the rebels as a sign of good faith.

That special zone was supposed to be off-limits to Colombian authorities for only three months – but more than three years later it was still a guerrilla safe haven, on the grounds that the "dialogue" was ongoing. Meanwhile, the FARC used the area to hide weapons and hostages, prepare new assaults on civilians, and gain the upper hand in the conflict. By the time Mr. Uribe ran for office, the nation was near despair.

I ask the president to recollect that time. He pauses for a moment, as he often does before he speaks. Then he tells me of three observations he made during the 2002 campaign that shaped his thinking. The first came during a series of visits to universities, where he would ask how many students wanted to leave Colombia with "no return ticket." He says the "vast majority" always raised their hands.

The second was that in many regions of the country "people wanted to solve their problems by themselves, without resorting to our institutions. For them our institutions did not exist or they did not trust them." The third observation, he says, came during a meeting with World Bank officials who told him that they were beginning to worry that Colombia "was going to the point of a failed state."

"I knew we had to create confidence," he says, and that it had to be done fast. "We had to try to produce short-term results in order to convince the people that we were able to produce long-term victories." He built a plan not only to return law and order, but also to boost the economy and build the wealth necessary to address the social problems of poverty. To this day, that plan rests on three pillars: "security, investment and social cohesion."

Investment has been pouring into Colombia in recent years; absent the FARC thugs, it is a prime location for doing business. The Uribe government has also been beavering away at deregulating and improving the commercial climate.

The results are impressive: The investment rate as a percentage of GDP in the first nine months of 2007 was 27.5%, compared to less than 15% in 1999. Yet Mr. Uribe is no market liberal. His economics are closer to those of Tony Blair than to Margaret Thatcher's, and if you give him the chance, he loves to talk about his government's social programs.

Nevertheless, the FARC and its sympathizers here and in Washington, D.C., detest the man because of his commitment to defend Colombian liberty. What they hate even more is his successful military strategy against what he calls "the nightmare of terrorism."

I ask Mr. Uribe how he has managed the civilian relationship with the military. "Our army has never had any willingness for coup d'état," he tells me. "But in the past they have tacitly expressed a need for leadership from the civilian government. In this, there has been one change. The president," he says, referring to himself in the third person, "is committed to security and from the very first soldier, the very first policeman, the president assumes all the political responsibility of military operations. Therefore our armed forces have seen a president committed to their task, supporting their task, leading their task, instead of firing generals." Mr. Uribe doesn't say it directly, but he is the first president to shun the practice of hanging generals out to dry whenever it suits politically.

A recent example: "When we made the decision to bombard [guerrilla leader] Raúl Reyes in Ecuador, it created diplomatic problems," he says. "And I could have said that it was a mistake committed by the military and I could have sacked some generals. I would have harvested the success of taking down Reyes and at the same time I would have avoided the diplomatic problems." Instead, he says, "I accepted the responsibilities."

Documents stored on computers captured in the Reyes raid revealed a close working relationship between Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and the FARC. But so far Colombia has received almost no moral or diplomatic support from the democracies around the region. I ask why, but he dodges the question.

He will only say that in the past Colombia had not "strongly" requested that its neighbors not harbor guerrillas, which suggests to me that the problem predates the Uribe government. He says that his administration is the first to make such a request. The only country that has ever given the Colombian democracy "practical solidarity," he notes, is the U.S., "which put in place Plan Colombia."

That effort has provided important U.S. aid to the Colombian military, and no one understands its effects better than the FARC propagandists who've spent years trying to pin allegations of corruption and human-rights violations on Mr. Uribe in the hopes that the funding will be discontinued. The president doesn't bring this up. But he does remind me that, three times since last fall, the rebels have accused his government of deceit and three times, when the truth was revealed, they were caught in their own lies. "Colombia has proven its transparency," he says.

In Washington, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has repeatedly claimed that Mr. Uribe's government bears some responsibility for the murders of Colombian labor leaders. On these grounds she has blocked a vote on the U.S.-Colombian Free Trade Agreement, which is crucial for the country to continue attracting investment. The fact that the murder rate among union leaders has dropped sharply during the Uribe administration is an inconvenient truth for Mrs. Pelosi.

I ask if he is frustrated with the U.S. relationship. "I cannot get frustrated," he says softly, "because we have to work as hard as we can every day. We have received a lot of support from the U.S. – from the government, from Congress, from the media and from many sectors of public opinion." He is keenly aware of the November elections. "It is very important to remember in this moment that Colombia has always had a bipartisan approach to our U.S. relationship" and he says that when it comes to correcting the country's mistakes, the FTA will be helpful. But Colombia also wants "the recognition of what we have achieved. I hope that any day the FTA will be approved."

Not that he's depending on that as his only option for progress. Mr. Uribe keeps a punishing schedule, traveling the country every week to some of the most remote municipalities, where he spends hours listening to the locals. Colombians regularly remind me that never has a president known the country the way he does or connected with the people the way he has.

"Modern democracies need both representation and participation. If you appeal exclusively to representation you run the risk of distorting reality," Mr. Uribe says. Translation: He is not willing to let special-interest politics in Colombia's Congress block his agenda; he takes his message straight to the people.

This has added to his popularity. In the center of Bogotá the day before we talked, I passed some of his supporters collecting signatures for a referendum that would allow him to run for a third term. But what about claims that he has replaced Colombian institutions with himself, and that efforts to change the law so he can run again for president prove it?

"Our institutions are strong and we have checks and balances," he replies. "But in the past the country has never had the right policies with the determination to defeat criminals and attract investment. My concern is that these policies continue."

There is a lot of work to be done before his current term ends in August 2010. For one, FARC hostages are still rotting in the jungle. I ask him whether anything can be done to break the deadlock. "Of course," he says, proceeding to rattle off the efforts his government has already made – from the June 2007 release of rebel leader Rodrigo Granda at the request of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and the unilateral release of 127 members of the FARC, to granting Mr. Chávez a mediator role in October. More recently, he adds, "We have allowed delegates from Spain, France and Switzerland to have contact with the FARC and we have accepted the idea of a meeting zone proposed by the Catholic Church."

The trouble is that the key rebel demand is a demilitarized zone such as they enjoyed during the last dialogue for peace. For Mr. Uribe this is not negotiable.

So will he run for a third term in order to preserve his policy agenda for another four years? I don't get a yes or no, only this: "I want the country to have strong leaders who will prolong our policies. I want many strong leaders. But," he says standing briefly and looking down at me, "I won't abandon our people."

Ms. O'Grady writes the Americas column for The Wall Street Journal.

Washington Post
June 13, 2008
Pg. 23

By Charles Krauthammer

In his St. Paul victory speech, Barack Obama pledged again to pull out of Iraq. Rather than "continue a policy in Iraq that asks everything of our brave men and women in uniform and nothing of Iraqi politicians, . . . [i]t's time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future."

We know Obama hasn't been to Iraq in more than two years, but does he not read the papers? Does he not know anything about developments on the ground? Here is the "nothing" that Iraqis have been doing in the past few months:

1. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sent the Iraqi army into Basra. It achieved in a few weeks what the British had failed to do in four years: take the city, drive out the Mahdi Army and seize the ports from Iranian-backed militias.

2. When Mahdi fighters rose up in support of their Basra brethren, the Iraqi army at Maliki's direction confronted them and prevailed in every town -- Najaf, Karbala, Hilla, Kut, Nasiriyah and Diwaniyah -- from Basra to Baghdad.

3. Without any American ground forces, the Iraqi army entered and occupied Sadr City, the Mahdi Army stronghold.

4. Maliki flew to Mosul, directing a joint Iraqi-U.S. offensive against the last redoubt of al-Qaeda, which had already been driven out of Anbar, Baghdad and Diyala provinces.

5. The Iraqi parliament enacted a de-Baathification law, a major Democratic benchmark for political reconciliation.

6. Parliament also passed the other reconciliation benchmarks -- a pension law, an amnesty law, and a provincial elections and powers law. Oil revenue is being distributed to the provinces through the annual budget.

7. With Maliki having demonstrated that he would fight not just Sunni insurgents (e.g., in Mosul) but Shiite militias (e.g., the Mahdi Army), the Sunni parliamentary bloc began negotiations to join the Shiite-led government. (The final sticking point is a squabble over a sixth cabinet position.)

The disconnect between what Democrats are saying about Iraq and what is actually happening there has reached grotesque proportions. Democrats won an exhilarating electoral victory in 2006 pledging withdrawal at a time when conditions in Iraq were dire and we were indeed losing the war. Two years later, when everything is changed, they continue to reflexively repeat their "narrative of defeat and retreat" (as Joe Lieberman so memorably called it) as if nothing has changed.

It is a position so utterly untenable that John McCain must seize the opportunity and, contrary to conventional wisdom, make the Iraq war the central winning plank of his campaign. Yes, Americans are war-weary. Yes, most think we should not have engaged in the first place. Yes, Obama will keep pulling out his 2002 speech opposing the war.

But McCain's case is simple. Is not Obama's central mantra that this election is about the future, not the past? It is about 2009, not 2002. Obama promises that upon his inauguration, he will order the Joint Chiefs to bring him a plan for withdrawal from Iraq within 16 months. McCain says that upon his inauguration, he'll ask the Joint Chiefs for a plan for continued and ultimate success.

The choice could not be more clearly drawn. The Democrats' one objective in Iraq is withdrawal. McCain's one objective is victory.

McCain's case is not hard to make. Iraq is a three-front war -- against Sunni al-Qaeda, against Shiite militias and against Iranian hegemony -- and we are winning on every front:

*We did not go into Iraq to fight al-Qaeda. The war had other purposes. But al-Qaeda chose to turn it into the central front in its war against America. That choice turned into an al-Qaeda fiasco: Al-Qaeda in Iraq is now on the run and in the midst of stunning and humiliating defeat.

*As for the Shiite extremists, the Mahdi Army is isolated and at its weakest point in years.

*Its sponsor, Iran, has suffered major setbacks, not just in Basra, but in Iraqi public opinion, which has rallied to the Maliki government and against Iranian interference through its

Sadrist proxy.

Even the most expansive American objective -- establishing a representative government that is an ally against jihadists, both Sunni and Shiite -- is within sight.

Obama and the Democrats would forfeit every one of these successes to a declared policy of fixed and unconditional withdrawal. If McCain cannot take to the American people the case for the folly of that policy, he will not be president. Nor should he be.

Give the speech, senator. Give it now.

Wall Street Journal
June 17, 2008
Pg. 22

Nearly seven years after 9/11, the U.S. homeland hasn't been struck again and American civil liberties remain intact. So how does Congress say "thank you"? By trying to ruin the men who in good faith set the legal rules that have kept us safe.

That's the political story unfolding in Washington, as Democrats fire up their latest round of "torture" hearings. Prevented from trying to impeach President Bush by cooler heads, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers has resorted to issuing subpoenas to assail current and former officials for allowing aggressive interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other murderers. About 60 Democrats, including Mr. Conyers, are demanding that Attorney General Michael Mukasey appoint a "special prosecutor" to investigate.

Meanwhile, the Senate's Captain Ahab -- Michigan's Carl Levin -- will rage at a hearing today against former Pentagon General Counsel William Haynes. Mr. Haynes has felt obliged to retain an attorney, though on the evidence his only offense was following President Bush's directive to prevent another terror attack. Democrats are spinning darkly that Mr. Haynes, former Justice official John Yoo (who has an op-ed nearby), Vice Presidential aide David Addington and others could be legally liable for "waterboarding" and other interrogation techniques.

Mr. Conyers recently went so far as to showcase Philippe Sands, a British professor who suggested that U.S. officials are guilty of "war crimes" and should be subject to international arrest. Mr. Conyers applauded Mr. Sands's assertions -- which amounts to a Member of Congress goading foreigners to arrest American officials if they dare to set foot on foreign soil.

The political motive here is transparent, if deeply cynical. Having failed to force a withdrawal from Iraq and with Iraq now turning into a success, Democrats need a different line of attack to please their antiwar supporters. The "torture narrative" has become a left-wing favorite, playing into the MoveOn.org-New York Times fantasies that Dick Cheney has been running a conspiracy to hijack the Constitution.

Impeaching President Bush is too politically risky, so the next best thing is to attack his aides by throwing around loose and unsubstantiated charges of criminal behavior. Even better, if Europeans can be encouraged to file charges against Republican officials, Democrats don't have to take any overt responsibility for whatever might happen. Call it political outsourcing.

The interrogations were lawful in any case, undertaken on the basis of legal memos produced by the Justice Department in the aftermath of 9/11. The intelligence committees in both the House and Senate have been briefed on the specific contents of those memos, including the legal rationale for using harsh interrogation techniques in certain circumstances, as well as the techniques that were in fact used.

Seven years later, Democrats claim to be especially offended by "waterboarding," which the CIA says was done to only three of the worst al Qaeda suspects. But both Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Intelligence Chairman Jay Rockefeller knew all about waterboarding at the time, and didn't object. Democrats have every right to outlaw specific interrogation methods, but they continue to refuse to do so lest they be held accountable after a future terrorist attack. It's so much easier to denounce "torture" in general.

In a message to CIA employees earlier this year, CIA Director Michael Hayden wrote that "The agency's decision to employ waterboarding in the wake of 9/11 was not only lawful, it reflected the circumstances of the time. In reply to a question at the [February 2008] Senate hearing, I said: 'Very critical to those circumstances was the belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were imminent. In addition to that, my agency and our community writ large had limited knowledge about al Qaeda and its workings. Those two realities have changed.'"

On other occasions, General Hayden has said that information gathered from aggressive interrogations has saved American lives. His two immediate CIA predecessors have said the same thing. Mr. Levin, who used to sit on the Intelligence Committee, hasn't leaked any of that secret testimony.

Instead, in an election year and with political hindsight, anti-antiterror Democrats want to criminalize these policies. Their goal is to so tar anyone associated with those policies that no American official would dare to do anything similar ever again. In addition to smearing these loyal public servants, Democrats want to change U.S. interrogation policy without having to take responsibility for passing a law to do it.

When the threat seemed imminent after 9/11, Democrats were only too happy to keep quiet and let the Bush Administration and CIA do whatever it took to prevent another attack. But in the seemingly safer present, they want to subject every one of those decisions to the political retribution of MoveOn.org. If this is how Democrats intend to govern if they run the entire government next year, we are in for a very rough ride.

Wall Street Journal
June 19, 2008
Pg. 14

In its storied history the U.S. Navy has defeated German U-boats and the British and Japanese Imperial navies, but we are about to find out if it can be whipped by whales and activist judges. Welcome to the new world of lawsuits as antiwar weapons.

The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether to take the case, National Resources Defense Council v. Donald Winter. For the sake of the U.S. military and the Constitution's separation of powers, this one deserves its day before the High Court.

Mr. Winter is Secretary of the Navy. The NRDC, a left-wing activist group that specializes in lawsuits, has sued him for conducting training exercises off the coast of California, as the Navy has done for 40 years. The NRDC claims the use of medium-frequency active sonar – a type of sonar especially useful for antisubmarine warfare – might harm whales, or at least confuse them.

When the issue was first raised eight years ago, the Bush Administration went out of its way to allay the concerns – though the Navy says that it has never harmed a whale with sonar, as far as it knows. It asked the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to study the issue under the Endangered Species Act. NOAA gave the Navy a permit to continue to train. Just to be sure, the Navy asked for another study, under the Marine Mammals Protection Act. NOAA replied that this would take time but granted the Navy permission to continue the exercises, noting that the Navy had adopted 29 separate measures to minimize any impact on marine mammals.

None of this was good enough for the litigious greens, who sued again in March 2007 to stop the training – in the middle of a war. Enter federal judge Florence Cooper, who ordered the Navy to halt the exercises while the suit is pending. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a rare moment of sanity, stayed the injunction "on the grounds that the district court had failed to consider the 'public interest' in having a trained and effective Navy." Talk about understatement.

This bout of clarity didn't last long. In January, Judge Cooper issued another partial injunction, allowing the exercises to proceed as long as no whales came swimming through. This time, the Ninth Circuit concurred. In response, President Bush, citing "emergency circumstances" and the "paramount interests of the United States," and implementing alternative safeguards, asked the judge to reconsider. Judge Cooper declined, saying there was no emergency. The appeals court affirmed.

The last time we checked, the executive branch was responsible for national security and the President is Commander in Chief. Having unelected judges order our troops to stand down in response to a phantom threat to whales is bad enough. But the laws at issue in this case are mere "paperwork" statutes. The Navy and Bush Administration are accused of having failed merely to complete an environmental impact statement on the possible threat to whales. Under the substantive laws intended to protect the whales, NOAA has already given the Navy the approval it needs.

Judge Cooper is a major culprit here, arbitrarily preventing the Navy from maintaining its military readiness training for the sake of compliance with a purely procedural law. But the larger problem is the culture of environmental law and litigation, which puts the speculative threat to whales above U.S. national security. The Supreme Court should leap at the chance to slap these activist litigants and judges down.

Washington Times
June 20, 2008
Pg. 23

By Michelle Malkin

Yet another U.S. Marine, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, had charges dropped Tuesday in the so-called Haditha massacre - bringing the total number of Marines who've been cleared or won case dismissals in the Iraq war incident to seven.

"Undue command influence" on the prosecution led to the outcome in Col. Chessani's case. Bottom line: That's zero for seven for military prosecutors, with one trial left to go.

I repeat: Haditha prosecution goes 0-7. But you won't see that headline in the same Armageddon-sized font the New York Times used repeatedly when the story first broke.

The Times, Rep. John Murtha, Pennsylvania Democrat, and the rest of the antiwar drum-pounders who fueled the smear campaign against the troops two years ago should hang their heads in shame. They won't, of course. Perpetuating the "coldblooded Marines" narrative means never having to say you're sorry.

It means never having to look Col. Chessani (charges dismissed), Lt. Andrew Grayson (acquitted), Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum (charges dismissed), Capt. Lucas McConnell (charges dismissed), Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt (charges dismissed), Sgt. Sanick Dela Cruz (charges dismissed), Sgt. Frank Wuterich (awaiting trial) and their families in the eyes and apologize for the pre-emptive character assassination they faced at the hands of a hyperventilating, noose-hanging press.

Murtha and company applied Queen of Hearts ("Off with their heads!") treatment to our own men and women in uniform while giving more benefit of the doubt to foreign terror suspects at Gitmo. It is worth recalling, because the press won't do it for you, what they concluded about the now-crumbling Haditha case in the summer of 2006 before a single formal charge had been filed.

MSNBC hangman Keith Olbermann, who couldn't wait to define the entire war in Iraq by a single moment about which he knew nothing, inveighed that the incident was "willful targeted brutality." Due process? For convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, of course. For our military? Never mind.

The Nation, a far-left magazine, railed: "Enough details have emerged ... to conclude that ... members of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment perpetrated a massacre." The publication also judged the event "a willful, targeted brutality designed to send a message to Iraqis." Not content with hanging the troops, the Nation pinned blame on the president and a so-called "culture of impunity" that supposedly permeates the world's most accountable military .

Singing the same tune as the Nation, the New York Times spilled a flood of Page One ink on the case and took things a step further in a lead editorial blaming not just President Bush, but also top Pentagon brass for the "nightmare" killings in Haditha. Times reporter Paul von Zielbauer filed more than 30 stories on the case, which the paper wishfully called the Iraq war's "defining atrocity."

Hoping to facilitate a self-fulfilling prophecy, media tools around the world likened Haditha to the Vietnam War's most infamous atrocity - from The Guardian ("My Lai on the Euphrates?") to the Daily Telegraph ("Massacre in Iraq just like My Lai") to the Los Angeles Times ("What happened at the Iraqi My Lai?") to the New York Times' Maureen Dowd ("My Lai acid flashback") and the Associated Press, which reached into its photo archives to run a 1970 file photo of My Lai to illustrate a Haditha article.

And, of course, there's the permanent stain from Mr. Murtha's slanderous propaganda - the stab in the Marines' backs heard round the world: "Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."

Relatives of the Haditha Marines have called for Congress to censure Mr. Murtha, who cuts and runs to the nearest elevator when questioned about the Haditha dismissals. He and the Haditha smear merchants have skated while the men and their families suffered global whippings on the airwaves and eternal demonization in print. Whose "culture of impunity"?

Michelle Malkin is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of "Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild."