DOUBLE STANDARD? When John Cusack bombards his girlfriend's home with music, it's cute. When the CIA uses a boombox, it's torture.

So, a pretentious group of musicians is upset that their music is being used to torment America’s most dangerous enemies?

And now they want the U.S. government to release an official song list?

I can’t imagine that such a document actually exists. Are we supposed to believe that CIA and Pentagon interrogators around the world were issued official playlists by some audio-torture DJ?

It’s a safe bet that the music choices used to keep terrorists awake 24/7 were straight from a gazillion different iPods.

However, there WAS an official songlist when the U.S. Army flushed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega out of hiding in 1989. The psychological warfare guys surrounding the Vatican Embassy during “Operation Just Cause” called in their requests to Army Radio.

How retro.

Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" made this dictator's skin crawl!

THE OFFICIAL 1989 MUSIC TORTURE SONG LIST FOR NORIEGA

Straight from U.S. Army records, here is a portion of the radio playlist used to annoy Manuel Noriega.

1. (You’ve Got) Another Thing Coming — Judas Priest
2. All I Want is You — U2
3. Big Shot — Billy Joel
4. Born to Run — Bruce Springsteen
5. Bring Down the Hammer — Georgia Satellites
6. Don’t Look Back — Boston
7. Don’t Fear the Reaper — Blue Oyster Cult
8. Eat My Shorts — Rick Dees
9. Feel a Whole Lot Better (When You’re Gone) — Tom Petty
10. Give It Up — KC and the Sunshine Band
11. Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down — Paul Young
12. Guilty — Bonham
13. Hang ‘Em High — Van Halen
14. Hanging Tough — New Kids on the Block
15. I Fought The Law and the Law Won — Bobby Fuller
16. Judgment Day — Whitesnake
17. Never Gonna Give You Up — Rick Astley
18. No More Mister Nice Guy — Alice Cooper
19. Panama — Van Halen
20. Paranoid — Black Sabbath
21. Stay Hungry — Twisted Sister
22. The Party’s Over — Journey
23. The Star Spangled Banner — Jimi Hendrix
24. They’re Coming to Take Me Away — Henry VIII
25. Time is on My Side — Rolling Stones
26. Wanted Dead or Alive — Bon Jovi
27. We Didn’t Start the Fire — Billy Joel
28. We Gotta Get Out of This Place — The Animals
29. Who Will You Run To? — Heart

Who knew that Billy Joel and New Kids on the Block would ever serve their country so effectively?

Wanna see the full list of Noriega torture tunes?  CLICK HERE.

A U.S. combat outpost in the endless mountains of Afghanistan

President Obama said in his campaign that he would shift U.S. attention to the war in Afghanistan and rethink American strategy there.  It’s clear he intends to do just that.  But according to a New York Times story sourced to “senior administration officials,” in a somewhat surprising move, Obama plans to take a “tougher line” toward Afghan President Hamid Karzai and “put more emphasis on waging war than on development.”

Mr. Karzai is now seen as a potential impediment to American goals in Afghanistan, the officials said, because corruption has become rampant in his government, contributing to a flourishing drug trade and the resurgence of the Taliban.

All that development and “nation building” stuff will be left to NATO, most of which shows little interest in contributing more troops or engaging in combat:

They said that the Obama administration would work with provincial leaders as an alternative to the central government, and that it would leave economic development and nation-building increasingly to European allies, so that American forces could focus on the fight against insurgents.

“If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who served under Mr. Bush and is staying on under Mr. Obama, told Congress on Tuesday. He said there was not enough “time, patience or money” to pursue overly ambitious goals in Afghanistan, and he called the war there as “our greatest military challenge.”

The U.S. is shifting its strategic focus away from lofty goals for Afghanistan’s future and protection for — who has been called the “Mayor of Kabul” because he doesn’t wield authority beyond the capital — so the planned doubling of U.S troop levels by this summer can be used to battle the Taliban in the countryside and ratchet up the military pressure on Qaeda in hiding across the Pakistani border.

As the “senior official” (I get the feeling it’s Gates) put it:

“What we’re trying to do is to focus on the Al Qaeda problem. That has to be our first priority.”

A report by Stratfor, the private intelligence service, sees U.S. policy evolving quickly along lines similar to those suggested by the Times’ source.

Stratfor for believes that the counter-insurgency war to defeat the Taliban and defend the Afghan central government is essentially not winnable, even with a half million U.S. troops, and that the U.S. interest in Afghanistan is the suppression of al Qaeda, not the governance of that sprawling, divided and inhospitable “nation.”

Accordingly, Stratfor believes that U.S. strategy will wind up looking something like this:

“[T]he search for al Qaeda and other Islamist groups is an intelligence matter best left to the covert capabilities of U.S. intelligence and Special Operations Command. Defeating al Qaeda does not require tens of thousands of troops — it requires excellent intelligence and a special operations capability. That is true whether al Qaeda is in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Intelligence, covert forces and air strikes are what is needed in this fight, and of the three, intelligence is the key.

Sounds like a plan.  Tell us what you think in the comments.

(Visit me at The Purple Center)

I honestly don’t think he meant to say that because the administration said time and time again that al Qaeda was in Iraq and that they had operational ties to Saddam and since they were the group responsible for 9/11, well, we could go there.

Because remember…what if Saddam gives al Qaeda WMDs and they use them against us? We don’t want the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

Folks, Bush may have been thinking about our safety, but the guy is clearly a liar. I don’t think that’s up for debate anymore. So many different reasons have been given and then contradicted at this point, that even his supporters can no longer credibly defend this doublespeak.

Only a little more than a month left…

This is Lagan from ANP,

We sat down with James Risen, the New York Times national security corespondent who broke the domestic wiretapping stories, to talk about the dilemmas Obama faces with the unparalleled executive power he will inherit.

Dick Cheney recently said that Obama would appreciate all of the power they are handing over, but Obama has railed against some of the Bush administration’s policies such as the warrantless wiretapping that Risen helped uncover.

A few days after this interview was filmed, one of Risen’s key sources, Thomas Tamm, was featured on the cover of Newsweek as “The Fed Who Blew the Whistle.” Risen spoke with us about the rise in executive power during Bush’s tenure and how the media failed to be vigilant in the wake of 9/11.

From his perch at the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist James Risen has been at the forefront of uncovering some of the Bush administration’s worst abuses of power. As a result, he has been hauled before a grand jury and pressured by the government to name his anonymous sources.

A new report from the Senate Armed Services Committee places significant blame for abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay on former Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

The report’s executive summary, made public by the committee’s Democratic chairman Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan and its top Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, said Rumsfeld contributed to the abuse by authorizing aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay on December 2, 2002.

He rescinded the authorization six weeks later. But the report said word of his approval continued to spread within U.S. military circles and encouraged the use of harsh techniques as far away as Iraq and Afghanistan.

The report concluded that Rumsfeld’s actions were “a direct cause of detainee abuse” at Guantanamo and “influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques … in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The report concluded that the abuses were not merely a case of a few soldiers acting on their own but the result of decisions made at the highest levels within the Department of Defense. The report also faults President Bush for signing a memorandum in February of 2002 that stated the Geneva Convention did not apply to the U.S. war with al Qaeda.

While I know there are still plenty of people who view torture as an acceptable means of extracting information from terrorists, I have long argued that we damage the deepest principles of America and compromise our moral authority when we resort to abuse — even when we do so in the name of our own defense. The “but our enemies are worse” argument holds no water for me. Yes, they are much, much worse. That doesn’t matter. We can’t let our enemies set the standards for morality.

Careful observers have long known that the instances of detainee abuse were not just the result of a few “overzealous” soldiers but the result of an administration that overreached in its quest for victory. I’m glad the Senate Armed Services Committee was willing to place the blame where it belongs: at the top.

I’m sure Mark Halperin and right wingers don’t want this kind of ally in their “pro Obama media bias” campaign, and I want to be clear that this post in no way discounts their claims (although I think it’s bunk). Still, the following “support” has to sting…

From Counterterrorism Blog:

Global reactions to Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri’s controversial condemnation of U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama as a “House Slave” (or, alternatively, “House Negro”) have begun to pour in — including via the top jihad web forums used by Al-Qaida to disseminate its propaganda. Though hardcore Al-Qaida supporters have predictably dismissed any criticism of Dr. al-Zawahiri and are fiercely backing his choice of words, there is a rather ironic (if not entirely unfamiliar) twist to this issue.

After observing international press reporting on the incident, these same supporters are now bitterly attacking the media for its “unfair” pro-Obama bias and for deliberately “confusing” the meaning of al-Zawahiri’s message.

Al-Qaida’s standard operating procedure in the past 10 years is to kill people and they want unbiased media coverage?

Trust is indeed stranger than fiction.

Al Qaeda has purportedly released a new message addressing President-elect Barack Obama:

In the video, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s No. 2, castigated Obama’s foreign policy stances on Afghanistan and Israel and ridiculed the president-elect’s worldview. Al-Zawahiri compared Obama unfavorably to the late Malcolm X, an African-American militant who adopted Islam. [...]

Al-Zawahiri can be heard saying, “In you and in Colin Powell, [Condoleezza] Rice and your likes, the words of Malcolm X (may Allah have mercy on him) concerning ‘house Negroes’ are confirmed.”

I’m not sure what al Qaeda hopes to achieve with that nasty bit of race politics, but I imagine Al-Zawahiri was just looking for a way to insult our new President. I wonder if he knows about the intense African-American support Obama generated? Not that reality and logic have ever been al Qaeda strong suits.

I’m sure we’ll get a few more of these missives as Obama’s foreign policy becomes clearer. If there was ever one sure thing about this past election, it was that, no matter who we elected, al Qaeda would still hate us.

In other news, it sounds like Saudi Arabia is brokering a peace deal between the Taliban and Afghanistan…

Taliban leaders are holding Saudi-brokered talks with the Afghan government to end the country’s bloody conflict — and are severing their ties with al Qaeda, sources close to the historic discussions have told CNN.

The militia, which has been intensifying its attacks on the U.S.-led coalition that toppled it from power in 2001 for harboring Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network, has been involved four days of talks hosted by Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, says the source.

The talks — the first of their kind aimed at resolving the lengthy conflict in Afghanistan — mark a significant move by the Saudi leadership to take a direct role in Afghanistan, hosting delegates who have until recently been their enemies.

They also mark a sidestepping of key “war on terror” ally Pakistan, frequently accused of not doing enough to tackle militants sheltering on its territory, which has previously been a conduit for talks between the Saudis and Afghanistan.

More as it develops…

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Surprisingly enough, Christopher Hitchens thinks Obama has the right plan when it comes to Pakistan…

Sen. Barack Obama has, if anything, been the more militant of the two presidential candidates in stressing the danger here and the need to act without too much sentiment about our so-called Islamabad ally. He began using this rhetoric when it was much simpler to counterpose the “good” war in Afghanistan with the “bad” one in Iraq. Never mind that now; he is committed in advance to a serious projection of American power into the heartland of our deadliest enemy. And that, I think, is another reason why so many people are reluctant to employ truthful descriptions for the emerging Afghan-Pakistan confrontation: American liberals can’t quite face the fact that if their man does win in November, and if he has meant a single serious word he’s ever said, it means more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less.

This is a good point. If Obama is true to his word about going into Pakistan to fight al Qaeda, and if that could lead to a deeper conflict with Pakistan, does he risk it? Especially since Pakistan is a nuclear power?

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I’m sure you’ve heard the reports of what this process actually feels like (a slow drowning), so I’ll spare you Hitchens’ explanation.

Instead, let’s look at the aftermath…

The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it.

Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass.

As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured.

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

He then cites two of the biggest reasons why any sort of torture is just a bad policy…

3. It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. [...] To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” Just put a pencil line under that last phrase, or commit it to memory.

4. It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.

Good to see Hitchens “gets it.”

Too bad many Republicans, including McCain, still don’t.

A new Pentagon report says the Taliban has regrouped after its initial fall from power in Afghanistan. The new report offers a rather dim view of progress in the nearly 7-year-old war, declaring that the Taliban has “coalesced into a resilient insurgency.”

Noting that insurgent violence continues to climb, the report said that despite efforts to capture and kill key leaders, the Taliban is likely to “maintain or even increase the scope and pace of its terrorist attacks and bombings in 2008.”

A reminder…last month the number of American military casualties in Afghanistan were actually more than we had in Iraq.

Not surprisingly, I found this news in a story about an attack by the Taliban that freed hundreds of inmates from an Afghan prison:

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – U.S. and NATO troops aided Afghan forces with reconnaissance in a hunt Saturday for 870 inmates who escaped prison after a sophisticated Taliban assault that even NATO conceded was a success for the militants.

A roadside bomb, meanwhile, killed four U.S. Marines sent to southwestern Afghanistan to help train the country’s fledgling police. The deadliest attack on American forces this year came one day after the U.S. defense secretary highlighted the fact that more American and allied troops were killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq last month.

Here are some numbers from the AP to chew on…

By the Pentagon’s count, 15 U.S. and two allied troops were killed in action in Iraq last month, a total of 17. In Afghanistan it was 19, including 14 Americans and five coalition troops. One month does not make a trend, but in this case the statistics are so out of whack with perceptions of the two wars that Gates could use them to drive home his point about Afghanistan. [...]

However, I think the AP’s math is off when comparing the amount of forces in Afghan and Iraq:

The comparison is even more remarkable if you consider that there are about three times more U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq than in Afghanistan. Since the Iraq war began in March 2003, there have been just under 4,100 U.S. deaths — including more than 3,300 killed in action — according to the Pentagon’s count. In the Afghan campaign, which began in October 2001, the U.S. death total is just over 500, including 313 killed in action.

If I remember correctly, there are about 155,000 US troops in Iraq, and that’s not even counting the 180,000 private security contractors who operate as defacto soldiers in many ways. And since many of the “coalition” troops are gone, adding them to the total Iraq mix would only make a nominal difference.

So if the number of troops in Afghanistan is around the levels they were last November (26,000), then there are nearly 6 times more U.S troops in Iraq than in Afghanistan and not the 3 times the AP claims.

Given these realities, don’t we think it’s time to refocus our attention on the Afghanistan/Pakistan region, especially since we know it has a specific area set aside as a safe haven for terrorists?

More as it develops…

From Reuters:

U.S. troop deaths in Iraq fell to their lowest level last month since the 2003 invasion and officials said on Sunday improved security also helped the country boost oil production in May to a post-war high.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Iraq’s oil minister credited better security for the two milestones, which illustrated a dramatic turnabout in the fortunes of a country on the brink of all-out sectarian civil war just 12 months ago.

“We’ve still got a distance to go but I think lower casualty rates are a reflection of some real progress,” Gates told reporters in Singapore. “The key will be to continue to sustain the progress we have seen.”

Also of note, the civilian casualty rate has dropped:

The number of Iraqi civilians killed in May also fell, to 505, after reaching a seven-month high of 968 in April, figures compiled by the interior, defence and health ministries showed.

Again, all good news, but where is the upside for us? How is this making us safer? Because with al Qaeda now retreating, Iraq is no longer the breeding ground for terrorists the President has claimed. Shouldn’t we refocus on Afghanistan so that country doesn’t slip further down the hole?

As if this any surprise, but seriously…how many of these stories will we have to endure? And I have to think that even more will be coming out after Bush and company leave office.

From Reuters:

The former chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals testified on Monday that the tribunals were tainted by political influence and evidence obtained through prisoner abuse.

Air Force Col. Moe Davis, who quit the war court last year, said political appointees and higher-ranking officers pushed prosecutors to file charges before trial rules were even written.

A supposedly impartial legal adviser demanded they pursue cases where the defendant “had blood on his hands” because those would excite the public more than mundane cases against document forgers and al Qaeda facilitators, Davis said.

He said the pressure ramped up after “high-value” prisoners with alleged ties to the September 11 plot were moved to Guantanamo from secret CIA custody shortly before the 2006 U.S. congressional elections and amid the ongoing U.S. presidential campaigns.

“There was that consistent theme that if we didn’t get this thing rolling before the election it was going to implode,” Davis testified in the courtroom at the remote Guantanamo naval base in Cuba.

It seems like it’s all about politics with this administration and its surrogates. And folks, $#!+ doesn’t roll uphill so these highly partisan marching orders aren’t just appearing out of thin air.

Given this, is it any wonder why so many in this country have open, daily disdain for their War on Terrorism strategy? Because it seems designed to maximize only one thing: votes for Republicans.

I’m so done with these jokers.

And while some on the left and the right have been trying to make hay out of this, the segment does have my wondering why, if our highest priority targets are in Afghanistan, that we’re not trying to destroy them.

I understand we think we have an obligation to the Iraqi people, but after Maliki’s recent U.S. aided power grab last week, it seems like we’re wasting our time and we need to start going after al Qaeda again. Because as Confederate Yankee points out…

what Crocker actually told Biden is that our military had severely damaged the operational capabilities of al Qaeda in Iraq (by 75-percent in the last year alone, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry) and knocked it into a defensive posture where it is far less of a threat.

How much less of a threat?

According to StrategyPage.com, Osama bin Laden admitted defeat in Iraq on Oct 22, 2007, a sentiment that Marine Colonel Richard Simcock shared contemporaneously as it related to al Qaeda’s former strongholds in al Anbar in specific. Battered, tattered, and lethally-harassed by coalition soldiers at night and former Sunni Iraqi allies during the day, al Qaeda’s morale in Iraq is crushed, along with most of it’s capabilities.

Thanks to Iraqi and coalition efforts, Al Qaeda in Iraq is beaten, fragmented, and on the verge of a final collapse, according to the terror organization itself. With this enemy almost defeated, it is only common sense that Crocker would select the remaining al Qaeda hiding along the Afghan-Pakistani border as being the greater threat.

This is GREAT news, and what it means is we should shift focus, yes? I doubt Confederate Yankee would agree with this conclusion, but if we’ve “won” in Iraq what are we still doing there?

Simply put, if this really is a war on terrorism, we need to target the terrorists…not take part in one nation building exercise after another. I know many are concerned with Iran, but that’s a diplomatic mission and I think everybody knows this by now. Having troops in a neighboring country doesn’t do anything for us at this point. Actually, I think it only exacerbates any ill will because the threat is always, “You’re next.” It can’t be all stick and no carrot. The world knows we can organize our forces in a matter of weeks and pound nearly any country into oblivion.

Iraq is won. Time to shift back to Afghanistan.

From NY Times:

EVEN if American and Iraqi forces are able to eliminate Al Qaeda in Iraq, there are still three worrisome possibilities of new forms of fighting that could divide Iraq and deny the United States any form of “victory.”

One is that the Sunni tribes and militias that have been cooperating with the Americans could turn against the central government. The second is that the struggle among Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen and other ethnic groups to control territory in the north could lead to fighting in Kirkuk, Mosul or other areas.

The third risk — and one that is now all too real — is that the political struggle between the dominant Shiite parties could become an armed conflict.

Fighting is now occurring in southern Iraq and parts of Baghdad between the Mahdi Army, which is under the control of the populist cleric Moktada al-Sadr, and a coalition of forces led by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s Dawa Party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a powerful party led by a Maliki ally, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. This latter coalition has de facto control of much of the Iraqi security forces, and Mr. Hakim’s group has its own militia, called the Badr Organization.

Much of the reporting on this fighting in Basra and Baghdad — which was initiated by the Iraqi government — assumes that Mr. Sadr and his militia are the bad guys who are out to spoil the peace, and that the government forces are the legitimate side trying to bring order. This is a dangerous oversimplification, and one that the United States needs to be far more careful about endorsing.

Want to know something more disturbing? To get al-Sadr to cooperate, Iraqi officials went into Iran to talk to him. Again, we backed this move by being involved…al-Maliki’s folks going into Iran to negotiate…with the Iranian controlled al-Sadr. And this is just the start of what is sure to be an incredibly complicated and convoluted political mess in Iraq…which will no doubt result in a strong Iraq/Iran tie one way or another. We can’t stop it.

Hell, even Allahpundit doesn’t like what he’s seeing…

I cringe every time I write about Basra since it’s impossible anymore to tell who’s allied with whom and why: Maliki, Sadr, the JAM, the “rogue” JAM, SCIRI, the Iraqi police, and, possibly in cahoots with all of them, Iran.

So what makes more sense…stay in there and be pulled into more power struggles over the upcoming elections or start to draw back forces so al-Maliki knows that he shouldn’t misuse our help?

I think the answer is obvious, because our men and women should NEVER be used to wage intra-Shia wars. Again, this isn’t al Qaeda we’re talking about here, so the threat to our national security is completely nonexistent.

Enough of this nonsense. Time to go.