Does putting an arsonist into prison only create more arsonists? What about car jackers? Then why does detention for terrorists only propel them to commit terrorism upon their release? It’s an absurd proclamation, yet it is exactly what the Washington Post has spent the past weekend arguing on their front page.

The story regards Abdallah Saleh al-Ajmi, a Kuwaiti captured on the Afghanistan battlefield in 2002, held in Guantanamo until 2005. He was eventually released to Kuwait, but crossed into Iraq and detonated an explosive-laden truck on Easter Sunday, 2008, that killed 13 Iraqi soldiers and wounded 42 others. Thus, the argument goes, recidivist detainees are created by us.

Sunday, February 22, 2009; A01
From Captive To Suicide Bomber;
Accused of Being Little More Than a Low-Level Taliban Fighter, Abdallah al-Ajmi Was Held by the U.S. for Nearly Four Years. After His Release, He Blew Up an Iraqi Army Outpost. Did Guantanamo Propel Him to Do It?

Monday, February 23, 2009; A01
A ‘Ticking Time Bomb’ Goes Off
When Abdallah Al-Ajmi Returned to Kuwait After Nearly Four Years at Guantanamo, His Family Tried to Get Him to Move On. But He Didn’t Want to Let Go.

Both reports are filled with inaccuracies, misnomers and outright falsehoods.

They are also filled with apologies for terrorism, such as, my favorite, a defense that in Afghanistan Al-Ajmi “fired his weapon only one time…” Or, “Before he went to Afghanistan, he was a normal teenager…” So “normal,” that he hung out at firebrand mosques, twice attempted to follow the calling of Jihad, first in January 2001 to try to fight Russians in Chechnya. Then again in March 2001 to try to fight the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. This “normal teenager” thus twice tried to join Jihad months before the world had heard of 9-11. Thank heavens your local neighborhood kids aren’t so “normal.”

There’s, next, the misnomer “that the United States shouldn’t be holding people incommunicado and that even terrorism suspects should have the right to defend themselves.”

“But there is also a view in some quarters of the U.S. government that cases such as Ajmi’s are the inevitable result of locking up 779 foreigners in an austere military prison, without access to courts or consular representation, and subjecting them to interrogation techniques that detainees say amount to torture.”

The above paragraph is falsehood after falsehood. The fact that of the 800 original detainees there are only 200 remaining in Guantanamo proves that they are not held indefinitely or incommunicado. Every single detainee is given representation and military trials (parole hearings basically). Because it is the military establishment that conducts these — and not our civil law system — the Washington Post feels it can mislead its readers through a technicality into thinking that these detainees are just held in secret forever, throw away the key, with no due process. It’s a lie.

It lacks all context as well. For example, how many Axis POWs were held indefinitely during the Second World War, and in Midwestern work camps no less? The answer: 400,000 German and Italian POWs held in some 500 U.S. work camps. Note: work camp, and no trials, no representation, no parole. The Second World War detainees had even fewer civil rights than our War on Terror detainees.

From this same context, then, U.S. officials had had no idea when the Second World War would end, so was their detention of Germans and Italians likewise abuse or inhumane or torture? This is an important point because the critics demand POW status for detainees, even while the detainees are in fact, right now, being treated exactly as POWs! What’s in a name? It’s the acts that matter. We may not call them POWs, but in fact they are exactly that because we are treating them as such (I would argue against our better judgment).

Regarding representation, there are multi-million dollar law firms lining up to provide Guantanamo detainees with free representation. Try getting such a deal in Kuwait should you pick up an AK and combat the government.

The allegations of torture are pure libel and slander, too. Period. Guantanamo is a military facility, not CIA. The U.S. military has never even waterboarded an individual (torture debatable), as the CIA was the institution that did (not at Guantanamo, and only to three senior members of al Qaeda, all before 2003, and all producing actionable intelligence).

And so we see the watering down, no pun intended, of the definition of torture. Thus, barking dogs (often used in civilian prisons), or disincentives to detainees who injure the prison guards are labeled by the critics as torture.

The bleeding hearts all cite Guantanamo treatment even as they are totally ignorant of our civilian penitentiary system. For example, this related Washington Post article cites the solitary confinement of (only the most dangerous) detainees as harsh or abusive.

“Prisoners in Camp 6 and the highly secret Camp 7 — which holds such high-value detainees as Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed organizer of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — can be held in windowless cells for up to 22 hours a day.”

The article also complains about forced-feeding of detainees starving themselves, even though were the military to take no action and allow the detainee to die while in their care they would be legitimately vilified for it.

Ironically, those who demand the closure of Guantanamo offer as an alternative federal facilities such as Supermax in Colorado, which houses such notorious individuals as the 1993 WTC bomber (Ramzi Yousef), and the Unibomber (Theodore Kaczynski), and prior to his execution, Tim McVeigh, the 1995 Oklahoma City bomber.

This is my favorite aspect to the anti-Guantanamo champions: they don’t realize that the worst of the worst at Supermax are isolated in windowless cells for 23 hours a day! Indeed, a 1999 Justice department report found “that more than 30 states are operating a Supermax-type facility with 23-hours-a-day lockdown and long-term isolation.”

Thus, by this “isolation” standard our CIVILIAN prison system is less humane than Guantanamo. But this should be no surprise, as it rivals even European models. The deputy head of Brussels’ federal police anti-terrorism unit praised Guantanamo in 2006. And from descriptions of Guantanamo officials including the commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, former JAG officers (Kyndra Rotunda), and retired high-ranking military visitors, the detainees enjoy treatments better than in most civilian prison models.

Indeed, the only persons being tortured at Guantanamo are the prison guards. A 2006 Pentagon report found some 440 separate attacks on guards by detainees including using “broken toilet parts, utensils, radios and even a bloody lizard tail into makeshift weapons.”

But these truths are not known to the vast majority of the American public because the media machine has its agenda. That agenda includes painting Guantanamo as something it isn’t, no matter how dangerous that agenda is to the next innocent victims of recidivist detainees. Last time it was in Iraq, perhaps next time it will be within the U.S.

Here’s Fred Hiatt:

But is [President] Obama really contemplating a less ambitious mission? Pretty much everyone agrees that if you want to deny al-Qaeda a haven, you have to defeat or defuse the Taliban. That requires whittling away at the opium fields and narco-trafficking that fuel the insurgency. They won’t diminish until farmers and traders have other, more legitimate opportunities. Such opportunities won’t emerge unless there is a taming of the nation’s virulent corruption. For that, you need to train police, encourage the rule of law, and build roads and other infrastructure. You need improved governance. Pretty soon, you are back to nation-building.

Without using that phrase, Central Command chief David Petraeus, the general who oversees the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan, acknowledged the breadth of the task in a recent talk at a conference in Munich. In addition to more intense combat efforts, he said, “a surge in civilian capacity is needed . . . to help our Afghan partners expand their capabilities in key governmental areas, to support basic economic development and to assist in the development of various important aspects of the rule of law, including initiatives to support the development of police and various judicial initiatives.”

If you’re engaged in nation-building, are there reasons not to say so? Well, yes, there might be. At a time of economic implosion, the nation can hardly afford, and Americans rightly will not support, highflying adventures overseas. Many are tired of what they saw as President George W. Bush’s overreaching; that certainly applies to Democrats in Congress, and to plenty of Republicans, too, who only pretended to join in Bush’s post-election conversion to an activist foreign policy. Allied leaders, many of whom fancy themselves above naive American pretensions to spread freedom to backward nations, welcome what they see as a return to reality.

But there are risks in such a public relations strategy, and not only that you may fool yourself into believing that the job is not so hard. The bedrock requirement for defeating the Taliban is the support of the Afghan people — their continued belief, even as civilians get killed and war drags on, that our fight is their fight; that our enemy is their enemy; that foreign troops are helpmates, not occupiers. Is such support likelier if we acknowledge that we are hoping to help them achieve a better life — or if we say we are roaming their country only to protect ourselves from another Sept. 11?

What we learned from President Herbert Hoover is that the worst thing one can do when in an economic slump, especially a big one such as the 1929 market crash, is to raise taxes. Raising taxes discourages growth, expansion, spending and most importantly, hiring. So, one must wonder what’s going to be the result of this policy:

Obama’s First Budget Seeks To Trim Deficit
Plan Would Cut War Spending, Increase Taxes on the Wealthy
By Lori Montgomery and Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 22, 2009; A01

President Obama is putting the finishing touches on an ambitious first budget that seeks to cut the federal deficit in half over the next four years, primarily by raising taxes on businesses and the wealthy and by slashing spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, administration officials said.

In addition to tackling a deficit swollen by the $787 billion stimulus package and other efforts to ease the nation’s economic crisis, the budget blueprint will press aggressively for progress on the domestic agenda Obama outlined during the presidential campaign. This would include key changes to environmental policies and a major expansion of health coverage that he hopes to enact later this year.

That’s the “side of Clinton” in the post title — Clinton cut defense spending from about 4.6% of gross domestic product in 1992 to just over 3%. That’s the only way they achieved any surplus, and the notion that Clinton’s tax increase did that is a bald-faced myth. Indeed, the economy under Clinton didn’t make its greatest jumps until he signed the Gingrich House Republicans capital gains tax cut in 1997.

So, Obama seems to be warming up his go-back machine, except with some new wrinkles: Free health care, curb energy consumption but we’ll slash the military budget to do that.

Crazy. At least Bill Clinton had some history on his side. The Cold War was finally over. That’s what the Reagan defense build up purchased Clinton, the opportunity to spend less on defense and create a surplus the only way Democrats knew how. But Obama isn’t going to get the grace Clinton received. 9-11 changed everything. Or did it? Apparently it didn’t change a thing for some.

Amazing story about PBS’ Bill Moyers. And, it should be added, that were it discovered that a conservative pundit engaged in such abuses, he’d be packing a cardboard box with his personal possessions and clearing the office by the end of that day.

One of the darker periods of modern American history was J. Edgar Hoover’s long reign over the FBI, as we have learned since he died in 1972. So it is more than a historical footnote to discover new records showing that prominent public television broadcaster Bill Moyers participated in Hoover’s exploits.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Washington Post has obtained a few of the former FBI director’s secret files. According to a Thursday front-page story, Hoover was “consumed” with exposing a (nonexistent) relationship between a gay photographer and Jack Valenti, the late film industry lobbyist who was then an aide to Lyndon Johnson. Hoover’s M.O. was to amass incriminating personal information as political blackmail.

But as the Post reports in passing, the dossier also reveals that Mr. Moyers — then a special assistant to LBJ — requested in 1964 that Hoover’s G-men “investigate two other administration figures who were ‘suspected as having homosexual tendencies.’”
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This isn’t the first time Mr. Moyers’s name has come up in connection with Hoover’s abuse of office. When Laurence Silberman, now a federal appeals judge, was acting Attorney General in 1975, he was obliged to read Hoover’s secret files in their entirety in preparation for testimony before Congress — and as far as we know remains one of the only living officials to have done so. “It was the single worst experience of my long governmental service,” he wrote in these pages in 2005.

Amid “bits of dirt on figures such as Martin Luther King,” Judge Silberman found a 1964 memo from Mr. Moyers directing Hoover’s agents to investigate Barry Goldwater’s campaign staff for evidence of homosexual activity. A few weeks before, an LBJ aide named Walter Jenkins had been arrested in a men’s bathroom, and Mr. Silberman wrote that Mr. Moyers and his boss evidently wanted leverage in the event Goldwater tried to use the liaison against them. (He didn’t, as it happened.)

When that episode became public after Mr. Silberman testified, an irate Mr. Moyers called him and, with typical delicacy, accused him of falling for forged CIA memos. Mr. Silberman offered to study the matter and, should Mr. Moyers’s allegations pan out, he would publicly exonerate him. “There was a pause on the line and then he said, ‘I was very young. How will I explain this to my children?’ And then he rang off.”
The Opinion Journal Widget

Memories are short in Washington, and Mr. Moyers has gone on to promote himself as a political moralist, routinely sermonizing about what he claims are abuses of power by his ideological enemies. Since 9/11, he has been particularly intense in criticizing President Bush for his antiterror policies, such as warrantless wiretapping against al Qaeda.

Yet the historical record suggests that when Mr. Moyers was in a position of actual power, he was complicit in FBI dirt-digging against U.S. citizens solely for political purposes. As Judge Silberman put it in 2005, “I have always thought that the most heinous act in which a democratic government can engage is to use its law enforcement machinery for political ends.”

Mr. Moyers told us through a spokeswoman that he “never heard of the Valenti matter until this story and had nothing to add to it.” He also pointed to a 1975 Newsweek article in which he wrote that he learned of the LBJ-Hoover relationship in “the quickly fading days of my innocence.” In the Nixon days, this was called a nondenial denial.

Talk about rewarding incompetence: Today General Motors ask for an additionally $16 billion on top of the $30 billion it received in December. Paul Ingrassia notes that this amount “doesn’t count the $8 billion it wants to develop fuel-efficient cars, and another $6 billion it’s soliciting from foreign governments.” All the while their “foreign” competitors — a misnomer considering the number of Toyota and Nissan factories in America filled with American workers — need not one dollar of bailout money. Rewarding the unprofitable practices of our Detroit automakers won’t solve a problem, whereas bankruptcy would.

That’s on top of this ridiculous expense that would drive any business into the red:

That was a couple years before Detroit agreed to let auto workers retire with full pension and benefits after 30 years on the job, regardless of their age. In practice, that meant a worker could start at age 18, retire at 48, and spend more years collecting a pension and free health care than he or she actually spent working.

Wouldn’t every American love such a golden deal?

The trend to reward incompetence gets worse. Our latest stool-leg of the Obama-proposed economic recovery package includes $400 billion to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, arguably the two institutions most responsible for starting the credit crisis and the first domino to fall.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg folks. It’s going to get worse. Much worse.

[George Will] Rep. Henry Waxman, the California Democrat, practiced law for three years, then entered elective office at 29 and has never left, so when he speaks about a world larger than a legislature, and about entities more enmeshed in life’s grinding imperatives, he says strange things. Objecting to General Motors, Ford and Chrysler opposing more severe fuel-economy and emissions standards, he says: “They have not yet stopped being controlled by their own self-interest.”

There is something piquant about a congressman summoning others up from self-interestedness, and it is mysterious whose interests, other than those of their shareholders, corporations are supposed to be controlled by. And although Waxman seems to concede that more stringent standards would injure the companies’ interests, he supports those standards, as he supported giving billions of taxpayers’ dollars to preserve the companies. He surely will support the next installment of auto subsidies, which, like the previous installment, will not be the last installment. In last year’s second quarter, GM lost $118,000 a minute, and the next plan for its salvation until the next crisis will require more government money to prevent bankruptcy, which would require more government money.

Talk about trillions of dollars has become so commonplace that billions seem minuscule — even though a billion minutes ago Plutarch (46-120 A.D.) was alive — and it is hardly worth mentioning mere millions, such as the $50 million for stimulus through the National Endowment for the Arts. But those millions elated Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), co-chairwoman of the Congressional Arts Caucus: “If we’re trying to stimulate the economy and get money into the Treasury, nothing does that better than art.” Nothing? Is Slaughter correct about what we’re trying to do? Is the point of the government’s stimulus spending to get more money into the government — “into the Treasury”? She is not the first politician to desire prosperity for the people so that they could be more bountiful taxpayers.

“Never,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said when voting against the stimulus, “have so few spent so much so quickly to do so little.” Three of his contentions are correct. The $787 billion price tag is probably at least two-thirds too low: Add the cost of borrowing to finance it, and allow for the certainty that many “temporary” programs will become permanent, and the price soars far above $2 trillion.

But Cole’s last contention is wrong. The stimulus, which the Congressional Budget Office says will, over the next 10 years, reduce GDP by crowding out private investment, already is doing a lot by fostering cynicism in the service of opportunism.

Andrew McCarthy is, to say the least, “disappointed” with Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele’s bland retort to President Obama’s stimulus package. McCarthy calls the latest GOP releases “self-inflicted wounds that read like self-parody.”

I think the jury is still out on this one, and after all, it’s only been a few weeks since Steele became the chairman. But it does not bode well that it’s just more of the same vanilla reactionary responses that the GOP had under Mike Duncan. There are strong arguments to be made that the stimulus bill isn’t actually stimulus, is geared towards industries that do the least amount of job creation, that it won’t take effect fast enough to be stimulating, and that, at best, it robs Peter to pay Paul (wealth redistribution, not wealth creation), but thus far not many Republicans are making those arguments effectively.

I’ve heard Steele fill in for Bill Bennett on his morning radio show, and the guy is very smart and capable of making quick, logical and effective arguments. I hope he starts to do that soon.

Republicans have to get better at striking while the iron is hot. Clearly, with just 3 Republicans out of the 200+ in the House and Senate voting for the stimulus it goes to show one how Obama may have miscalculated. Bill Kristol points that out at about the 6:00 minute mark in the video below. A more “deft” stimulus bill, as Kristol terms it, could have split the Republican party instead of unifying them. GOP leaders like Steele need to take advantage of that miscalculation.

One of the New York Times’ two token non-liberals, David Brooks (the other being Bill Kristol), takes on the arrogance of the notion of government spending as a cure-all in his weekly debate with fellow columnist Gail Collins:

The correct position is the one held by self-loathing intellectuals, like Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Burke, James Madison, Michael Oakeshott and others. These were pointy heads who understood the limits of what pointy heads can know. The phrase for this outlook is epistemological modesty, which would make a fine vanity license plate.

The idea is that the world is too complex for us to know, and therefore policies should be designed that take account of our ignorance. Whether the Obama administration understands this is an open question.

Geithner seems to. He designed the outlines of a bank bailout plan on the supposition that government can’t accurately price toxic assets, or effectively run banks. That was nicely modest, though the infants on Wall Street, who are seeking a savior, panned the idea.

On the other hand, the stimulus package was designed by people who have complete faith in government technocrats, who think an agency can triple its size overnight and still be managed efficiently, who think government knows enough about business to set salaries. Some people think government officials know enough to run the auto industry.

There’s nothing more dangerous than a propeller head who doesn’t know his limitations… As for the broader point that capitalists can be pretty dumb. Granted. But the market does have a mechanism for educating itself: prices, and in some cases bankruptcy. Government lacks a self-correction mechanism, or at least a good one.

It has been widely noted that 2009 will have the first “trillion-dollar deficit” in American history. Actually it’s the second. In fiscal 2008, the national debt increased from $9 trillion to slightly over $10 trillion. Yet the budget deficit in the last fiscal year was officially reported as being $455 billion. How could the national debt have increased by considerably more than twice the “deficit”? Simple. Just call the money borrowed from the Social Security trust fund an “intragovernmental transfer” and exclude it from the calculation of the deficit.

Corporate managers have gone to jail for less book cooking than that.

– John Steele Gordon, author of “Hamilton’s Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt.”

SANTA FE, N.M. – Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the moon and once served New Mexico in the U.S. Senate, doesn’t believe that humans are causing global warming.

“I don’t think the human effect is significant compared to the natural effect,” said Schmitt, who is among 70 skeptics scheduled to speak next month at the International Conference on Climate Change in New York.

Schmitt contends that scientists “are being intimidated” if they disagree with the idea that burning fossil fuels has increased carbon dioxide levels, temperatures and sea levels.

“They’ve seen too many of their colleagues lose grant funding when they haven’t gone along with the so-called political consensus that we’re in a human-caused global warming,” Schmitt said.

Dan Williams, publisher with the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which is hosting the climate change conference, said he invited Schmitt after reading about his resignation from The Planetary Society, a nonprofit dedicated to space exploration.

Schmitt resigned after the group blamed global warming on human activity. In his resignation letter, the 74-year-old geologist argued that the “global warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making.”

A more fundamental question is: Should Washington be guided by the Constitution? In explaining the Constitution, James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist Paper 45: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce.” Has the Constitution been amended to permit Congress to tax, spend and regulate as it pleases or have Americans said, “To hell with the Constitution”?

– Walt Williams.