Thoughts & Commentary on the Obama Administration

[Lemur]

Either way, it's fallacious to try and dismiss someone's criticisms or praise simply because they "always" criticize or praise. The arguments stand on their own, yes?

Point taken, but there's a certain hypnotic monotony to the way you're willing to attack the current president on any and every point that I find silly. Your insistence that he is killing too many terrorists is a particularly ironic example, especially given the attack you would obviously make on him if he were not killing so many terrorists.

[Xiahou]

Point taken, but there's a certain hypnotic monotony to the way you're willing to attack the current president on any and every point that I find silly. Your insistence that he is killing too many terrorists is a particularly ironic example, especially given the attack you would obviously make on him if he were not killing so many terrorists.

Well, IIRC, you posted some link about the GOP criticizing him for assassinating terrorists. I posted a link to a WaPo story, in an attempt to show that the concern isn't limited to far-right lala land. Some people are legitimately concerned that Obama may be authorizing assassination in favor of capture due to the fact that the administration has no coherent detention/interrogation system in place. The CIA's interrogation unit has been shut down, and as we learned during the underwear bomber saga, it's replacement is not yet operational. You also have to take Obama's unfullfilled promise to close the Gitmo detention center into consideration. The fear is that the assassinations are being carried out for political expediency.

Personally, I think it's great for Obama to order assassinations of known terrorists. However, I hope it's not being done at the expense of valuable intelligence assets because Obama wants to avoid having to figure out what to do with them once they're captured. If they can be captured instead of killed, it may sometimes be better to detain and interrogate them. I think it's a valid concern.

[Lemur]

Let's unpack the host of unspoken assumptions and Fox News-style elisions in the latest:

Obama may be authorizing assassination in favor of capture due to the fact that the administration has no coherent detention/interrogation system in place.

Which implies that there has ever been a coherent detention/interrogation system in place, which demonstrably there hasn't. Even George W. Bush was declaring how he'd like to close Gitmo down for the latter half of his presidency, torture was sorta-renounced in 2004, an ad hoc system has been letting people out of Gitmo since 2005, etcetera. The entire system of detention/enemycombatant status was a fudge from the beginning. The incoherent policies we have now are either a continuation of or an improvement on the policies we've had since 2001. But you state this as though some sort of well-oiled machine has been stripped out by the new kids who don't know what they are doing. As per usual, your argument lacks anything resembling good faith.

The CIA's interrogation unit has been shut down

Every single CIA interrogation unit has been shut down? Do tell. Or are you conflating the Cheney/Bybee/Yoo torture system with all interrogation?

and as we learned during the underwear bomber saga, it's replacement is not yet operational.

What's replacement? And how exactly did the undie bomber demonstrate that we don't know how to interrogate terrorists? You state this flatly, without backup, as though we're all reading NewsMax and Breitbart and nodding our heads to Drudge. It's the blank assertion of rightwing talking points like this that really rob your arguments of credibility. You're taking the assertions of political operatives and accepting them as given truth, utterly ignoring what, say, the FBI has to say on the matter. At the very least you should concede that there is "controversy" over how well the FBI's methods work; I'd cut you slack for that. But to just flat-out declare that the black-site torture system worked and the FBI interrogations didn't indicates that you are either privy to the deepest levels of CT intel, or that you're talking out your posterior orifice.

[Xiahou]

The entire system of detention/enemycombatant status was a fudge from the beginning.

I would agree. I often criticized the Bush administration's handling of the enemy combatant situation. They seemed to want a 'make it up as we go and take our word for it' approach with no clear delineation on who was an enemy combatant and who was a domestic criminal. That lack of clarity rightly earned Bush much criticism. I support being able to detain enemy combatants, but we should be very clear about where and under what circumstances we do so.

Rather than casting to broad a net, it seems that Obama may be unwilling to cast a net at all. The concern voiced is that rather than figuring out how to handle detainees, it's much easier politically to not capture any alive. I certainly think that terrorist leaders are better off dead than running free- but I would hope that we wouldn't miss out on intelligence gather just because Obama doesn't want to face the problem. We may never know if that's the case.

What's replacement?

I was referring to this(from Newsweek):

Earlier this year, Obama administration intelligence officials came under heavy criticism from Capitol Hill Republicans for not deploying the HIG to question Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian terrorist suspect who tried to blow up a Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with a bomb hidden in his underpants. At the time, it was unclear, based on signals coming out of the administration, whether the HIG was sufficiently well organized to participate in the underpants-bombing suspect's questioning, which ended up being conducted by the FBI. (The HIG is supposed to be an interagency unit composed of top intelligence and interrogation experts from across the government.)

and from the AP- How U.S. botched interrogation of Christmas Day plane bomb suspect

There was no effort to call in the elite federal High-Value Interrogation Group, a special unit of terror specialists that the Obama administration said early last year it would create to deal with terror suspects captured abroad.

Last week, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said the unit should have been called in after Abdulmutallab’s arrest. But even if federal officials wanted to expand its use to domestic cases, the special team was not ready for action, FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress last week.

Notice- no FoxNews, no Breitbart, no Drudge. Indeed, I think you'd find I never link to any of those sources and generally stick to mainstream news outlets. You just seem to automatically assume everything I post is from the Free Republic for some reason. Pretty much anytime I'm going to post something in the Backroom, I attempt to verify it via other news outlets- if I can't, I usually keep it to myself. If I may pat myself on the back, I think that's a good practice.

[Lemur]

I was referring to this(from Newsweek):

A fair-minded article that does nothing to support your flat assertion that the current administration has no method for interrogating terrorists. From your link:

The suspect spoke openly, said one official, talking in detail about what he’d done and the planning that went into the attack. Other counterterrorism officials speaking on condition of anonymity said it was during this questioning that he admitted he had been trained and instructed in the plot by al-Qaida operatives in Yemen.

The interview lasted about 50 minutes. Before they began questioning Abdulmutallab, the FBI agents decided not to give him his Miranda warnings providing his right to remain silent. [...] Investigators are allowed to question a suspect without providing a Miranda warning if they are trying to end a threat to public safety. [...]

Based on the instructions from Washington, the second interview was conducted by different FBI agents and others with the local joint terrorism task force.

Such a move is not unusual in cases where investigators or prosecutors want to protect themselves from challenges to evidence or statements.

By bringing in a so-called “clean team” of investigators to talk to the suspect, federal officials aimed to ensure that Abdulmutallab’s statements would still be admissible if the failure to give him his Miranda warning led a judge to rule out the use of his first admissions.

Even if Abdulmutallab’s statements are ruled out as evidence, they still provided valuable intelligence for U.S. counterterrorism officials to pursue, officials said.

So the suspect was interrogated and he gave up intel which the FBI claims was worthwhile. Please state the nature of your objection.

[KukriKhan]

Please state the nature of your objection.

Not to put words in Xiahou's mouth, but: with more than 50 minutes, and without Miranda, maybe they'd have gotten more. Names of contacts in Yemen, Britain, Nigeria, rumors of other planned attacks, and the like.

[Xiahou]

Please state the nature of your objection.

It was the AP that said the interrogation was botched. I only brought up the underwear bomber because it was during the hearings in the aftermath of the attempted bombing that it was revealed that the HIG was not yet up and running. Further, the Newsweek article says the HIG is now up and running, but still isn't being used.

The links were only to answer your question "Whats replacement?". I probably should have included this snippet from the Newsweek article as additional background:

Last summer, the Obama administration announced that, as a replacement for the Bush administration's secret CIA terrorist detention and interrogation program, it would create a SWAT-style team of interrogation experts to travel the world squeezing terrorist suspects for vital information

The article itself isn't directly about the assassination/detention debate, I only referenced it because it had information on what you seemed to be confused about.

[Louis VI the Fat]

You don't hold political opinions based on rational consideration. Your political convictions are a function of physiological reactions.

In particular, Conservatives are ruled by fear, and are less capable of creative response to changing challenges.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the impact that politicians' facial appearance has on voters' choices. Another big predictor of electoral success is the policies of the candidate's party. Is it possible to predict which policies will be attractive to voters?

Stereotypes suggest that different types of people are drawn to different ideologies. The liberal is a beard-wearing, sandal-sporting, yoghurt-eating wimp. The hawkish conservative is made of sterner stuff. But do actual voters conform to the mould?

To find out, a group in America invited voters with strong political beliefs to their lab for some tests. On the basis of a questionnaire, they split the volunteers into two groups. The first group wanted to increase political protections, and typically wanted more military spending, warrantless searches, and the death penalty. The second group were more likely to be pacifists and open to immigration.

The scientists then set about scaring the participants and measuring the results. In the midst of a series of innocuous pictures, they showed them a large spider on a terrified face, and a maggot-infested wound. They startled the volunteers with sudden blasts of loud noise.

To find out how successful they'd been at frightening their participants, the scientists measured two things. When we're faced with a threat we sweat a little, and this increases the conductance of our skin. We also blink more when we're startled. On both of these measures, the volunteers who had stronger support for protective policies frightened more easily. It was those with the more liberal outlook who had a smaller fear response.

This isn't the only study which found that conservatives and liberals react differently to surprises. David Amodio and colleagues asked students to play a game of 'Go / No Go' whilst their brains were scanned. In this game, a signal telling the player to quickly hit a button is repeatedly flashed on a screen.

Occasionally, an alternative message is shown instead, and when this happens, players must resist hitting the button. This isn't as easy as it sounds, and the button was hit about two-fifths of the time when it shouldn't have been. But the students who described themselves as being more liberal were better at playing the game than the conservatives, and their anterior cingulate cortices (a bit of the brain which, amongst other things, has a role in overriding automatic responses) were more active when the 'No Go' signal was displayed.

Rather than being solely determined by cold, rational thought, our political views are influenced by our physiological reactions and automatic brain responses. But it's the liberals rather than the conservatives that seem better at coping with shocks. Perhaps it takes a certain toughness to go out in public with sandals and a beard.

http://timesonline.typepad.com/scien...eally-wet.html