When the 112th Congress convened on January 3rd, the new Republican leadership made a great show of respecting the Constitution. In the House, the text of the Constitution was read, with a handful of curious emendations. Today, we can see just how serious the new Congress is about its constitutional duties. In a breathtaking abdication of constitutional responsibility, they are allowing the 60-day period under the War Powers Act to expire without taking any action, either affirmative or negative, with respect to U.S. military operations in Libya.

No responsibility weighs more heavily on the nation’s leaders than the power to make war. In the course of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, how this power was to be divided between the executive and the Congress was a matter of intense discussion. Virginian George Mason seemed to grasp the sense of the delegates: the president was “not to be trusted” with war-making powers. Like his compatriot James Madison, Mason believed that a president with unfettered war-making powers would soon emerge as an autocrat. Neither, he felt, could the power simply be balanced with the requirement of Senate approval, because the Senate was not structured in a way to do this. Rather, Congress as a whole needed to act in order to force a full and proper vetting of the question of whether war should be waged. As Mason explained, “he was for clogging rather than facilitating war.” And so, to be sure, is the Constitution, properly construed. [MORE . . .]

To be fair, there may also be people in President Obama’s Cabinet who need to have their heads examined. Hillary Clinton best expressed the administration’s increasingly delusional thinking when she suggested that bin Laden’s execution will help the war effort: “In Afghanistan, we will continue taking the fight to al-Qaida and their Taliban allies. . . . Our message to the Taliban remains the same, but today it may have even greater resonance. You cannot wait us out. You cannot defeat us. But you can make the choice to abandon al-Qaida and participate in a peaceful political process.” [MORE . . .]

In Shabqadar, Pakistan, two men approached a group of paramilitary cadets and blew themselves up, riddling the crowd with ball bearings and killing sixty-six members of the Frontier Constabulary, many of whom had recently graduated. The Taliban took responsibility for the attack, calling it retribution for the assassination of Osama bin Laden.¹ Five days after Israelis celebrated their independence day, Palestinian protesters in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and the West Bank commemorated the Nakba, or catastrophe, the displacement of Palestians from their land. In Syria, the Nakba protests briefly overshadowed uprisings against the Assad regime, which continued its campaign of violent crackdowns and mass arrests. “We don’t know where we’re going,” said one Syrian dissident. “We don’t know what’s next.”^{2 3 4 5} For the first time in nearly four decades, officials in Louisiana opened the Morganza Spillway, a network of locks and levees, hoping to prevent flooding in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and other cities farther down the swollen Mississippi River. It was estimated that more than four-fifths of the land in Yazoo County, Mississippi, would be inundated at a time when the region’s cash crops—soy, cotton, corn, and rice—are already in the ground. “I’m staying here until water comes up the driveway,” said Bob Cato, a retired civil engineer. “I’m too old to start over.”^{6 7} [MORE . . .]

Journalist turned foreign-affairs analyst Anatol Lieven has Pakistan in his bones. Descended from civil servants and officers in British India, one of whom fought in the rugged North-West Frontier, he cut his journalistic teeth in the subcontinent. His new book, Pakistan: A Hard Country, offers a unique blend of historical, political, and anthropological insight into the country. I put six questions to Lieven about the book.

1. The death of Osama bin Laden, in a villa located in the military town of Abbottabad, a half mile from Pakistan’s military academy, and in an area filled with retired officers, has again focused attention on relations between the country’s military establishment and terrorists. Are the Americans right to ask what Pakistani military leaders knew? [MORE . . .]

Yesterday, the Senate Ethics Committee released the fruits of its long-anticipated investigation into senator John Ensign (R., Nev.), who resigned last month in order to avoid being deposed by the committee’s counsel.

The report makes clear that Ensign’s resignation served another purpose: had he stayed on, he would have been the first senator since Indiana’s Jesse D. Bright in 1862 to face expulsion for ethics infractions. The committee has composed a compelling, well-written, and meticulously documented indictment of the abuse of power by a man who was once frequently mentioned as a presidential prospect. Its account is also striking for its bipartisanship, something Congress has managed only very rarely in ethics matters the past few decades. [MORE . . .]

Our congratulations to Scott Horton, whose piece “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides’,” from the March 2010 issue of Harper’s Magazine, won the National Magazine Award for Reporting last night.

You can find coverage of the win here and here, via Andrew Sullivan and The New York Post. Our friends at Foreign Policy have also posted an interview with Scott here. [MORE . . .]

President Barack Obama’s decision not to release photographs of Osama bin Laden’s corpse has been justified in practical terms, as well as in terms of military honor. “It is very important for us to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence [or] as a propaganda tool,” the president stated. “That’s not who we are. You know, we don’t trot out this stuff as trophies.” According to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the decision was made in consultation with allies in the Middle East.

Arguments raised in favor of release have covered a broad political spectrum. Sarah Palin, apparently nostalgic for the days when the heads of fallen adversaries were put up on pikes, tweeted: “Show photo as warning to others seeking America’s destruction.” Others have argued that in a democracy the presumption should be in favor of public access to records, even those involving blood and gore. Comedian Jon Stewart argued that images that show the horrors of war should not be censored, because that leads to a sanitization of warfare–an argument widely made by pacifists like Erich Maria Remarque at the end of World War I. [MORE . . .]

The wire master and his puppets, 1875.

President Barack Obama announced that the government would not release pictures of Osama bin Laden's mutilated corpse, saying, “We don't need to spike the football.”¹ The Associated Press filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all photos and video shot during the raid on the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where bin Laden was hiding, and reporters discovered cabbage, potatoes, and marijuana growing around the property. ² Sarah Palin tweeted that President Obama was “pussy-footing around,” and the White House released footage found in the compound showing bin Laden watching himself on television, as well as propaganda-video outtakes. ^{3 4} A Kuwaiti newspaper published a document purporting to be bin Laden’s will, in which he apologized to his children for not spending enough time with them, commanded them not to join Al Qaeda, and ordered his four wives not to remarry. ^{5 6} Bin Laden’s twenty-nine-year-old widow told Pakistani investigators the two had not left their house in five years, and Native Americans criticized the U.S. military for giving bin Laden the code name Geronimo, after the Apache warrior whose fabled ability to walk without leaving footprints allowed him to evade capture. ⁷ The Dalai Lama suggested that the assassination was justified. “Forgiveness doesn't mean forget what happened,” His Holiness said. “If something is serious and it is necessary to take counter-measures, you have to take counter-measures.” ^{8 9} After researchers in Texas simulated schizophrenia in a computer, the machine spontaneously took responsibility for a terrorist bombing.¹⁰ [MORE . . .]

Readings, December 2010

From a February 2010 Facebook chat between Christopher Winfield and his son Adam, an Army specialist with a Stryker Brigade Combat Team in Afghanistan. According to Army investigators, two more Afghan civilians were murdered by Spc. Winfield’s platoon after the chat took place. In September 2009, Winfield was arrested along with eleven other platoon members; he was later charged with murder in connection with the third civilian death. The conversation was obtained through Winfield’s lawyer. [MORE . . .]

By Bill Wasik, from the December 2001 issue

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In my article “Owned by the Army” in the May issue of Harper’s Magazine, I contend that in publicly second-guessing President Obama’s Afghanistan policy, and overselling American counterinsurgency success there, General David Petraeus has impinged on the president’s strategic authority. At first blush, Obama’s nomination of Petraeus to become director of the CIA looked like an agreeably Machiavellian solution to this problem. Given Petraeus’s outsize prestige and the fact that Obama had already removed two generals from command in Afghanistan (McKiernan and McChrystal), Petraeus was not fire-able from a political standpoint. But getting Petraeus out of Afghanistan by kicking him upstairs gives Obama more flexibility in Afghanistan without damaging his relations with the Pentagon. The president might be clearing the way for a needed adjustment of the Afghanistan policy more in line with Vice President Joe Biden’s sensible “counterterrorism plus” prescription, whereby troops on the ground are kept to a minimum and Al Qaeda is suppressed by surgical counterterrorism operations much like the one that killed Osama bin Laden earlier this week. Certainly U.S. Marine Corps General John R. Allen, Obama’s choice as Petraeus’s replacement, supports such an interpretation: he is highly competent but not flamboyant, unlikely to grandstand for political effect and more apt to adhere closely—in public as well as in the field—to what the president has established as policy.

But it might not be that simple. As CIA director, Petraeus will control an agency that has become more militarized since 9/11. In particular, CIA officers are the trigger-pullers in the drone war against Pakistan-based jihadists, and intelligence operatives apparently accompanied the Navy SEAL team that took down bin Laden. Petraeus’s testy relationship with the Pakistani military could make it diplomatically harder to sustain the drone strikes, and, therefore, perhaps harder to implement “counterterrorism plus.” The more general worry is that Petraeus would use the considerable force of his personality to impose his military disposition on the agency, marginalizing analysis in favor of operations and looking askew at intelligence assessments that didn’t jibe with his own instincts and biases. Sadly, this would continue rather than buck the trend of politicizing intelligence that began during the Bush Administration, when both Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld started their own intelligence channels to counter CIA views that displeased them, and CIA director George Tenet catered to the president’s own wishful thinking, sometimes disregarding CIA analysts’ reports. [MORE . . .]

Below is the text of a speech delivered by Arnaud Nourry, chair and chief executive officer of Hachette Livre, one of the world’s largest publishing houses, at the PEN Literary Gala, which took place at the American Museum of Natural History in New York on April 26. “Still today, in our digital age,” Nourry said, “[books] are the sparks that light the process of change.”

A Christian martyr.

Osama bin Laden was reported to have been killed during a joint mission by U.S. Navy SEALs and CIA agents in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Crowds gathered to celebrate in front of the White House, and at Times Square and the World Trade Center site in New York. “I don’t know if it will make us safer,” said one reveler, “but it definitely sends a message.” “If this means there is one less death in the future, then I’m glad for that,” said Harry Waizer, who was in the center’s north tower on 9/11, “but I just can’t find it in me to be glad one more person is dead, even if it is Osama bin Laden.”^{1 2} Libya's government claimed that Muammar Qaddafi survived a NATO airstrike for the second time in seven days. The Russian foreign ministry criticized the strike, which reportedly killed Qaddafi’s son and three grandchildren, claiming it “aroused serious doubts about coalition members’ statement that the strikes in Libya do not have the goal of physically annihilating Mr. Qaddafi.” The day of the attack, Qaddafi had appeared on national television vowing to stay in Libya. “Qaddafi doesn’t have the power, he doesn’t have the position to leave,” he said, referring to himself. “With my rifle, I will fight for my country.” ³ Libyans continued to flee the country, many of them crossing the border into Tunisia, where an estimated 30,000 refugees have settled in the past month.^{4 5} In Yemen, tens of thousands took to the streets in protest after President Ali Abdullah Saleh refused to sign a deal that would see him step down in exchange for immunity from prosecution, and in Tajikistan, firefighters complained of anonymous prank calls coming from Afghanistan. ^{6 7} [MORE . . .]

On March 17, 2009, Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as Colin Powell’s right-hand at the State Department, penned a short piece for the Washington Note. “There are several dimensions to the debate over the U.S. prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that the media have largely missed and, thus, of which the American people are almost completely unaware,” Wilkerson wrote. He noted that prisoners had been seized and shuffled quickly off to Guantánamo without the process of vetting and review that had characterized earlier military operations, adding:

Several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.

But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces.

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The MOMA exhibition devotes an entire wall to 50 prints by Dix titled “Der Krieg” (“The War”). These terrifying pictures — the hideously wounded, a skull invaded by worms, monstrously disfigured faces, the dead and the living dead — confront the viewer with the fact that war’s impact stretches far beyond physical damage to buildings and flesh. Dix’s genius is in depicting the destruction of the human spirit that results from decisions made by politicians who never experience the direct effects of war. I applaud Rolling Stone magazine for publishing photos of Afghan civilians murdered by leering American soldiers (also Paris Match for its photo of two Libyan soldiers torn to pieces by NATO bombs), but Dix’s prints surpass photojournalism in their emotional reach. [MORE . . .]

Sunday evening, WikiLeaks published a number of new Guantánamo-related government documents, putting the spotlight back on detention policies at the military prison, and on the unsettled questions surrounding the deaths of three prisoners in June 2006 that I wrote about in the March 2010 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The New York Times’s coverage of the release included an article on suicide at Guantánamo that linked online to my Harper’s piece, in reference to “skeptics” who believe the June 2006 deaths might have been homicides.

Below the print article, the paper ran excerpts from some of the released documents, including three comments from the file of Yasser Talal Al Zahrani, one of the deceased. In keeping with the rest of the Times’s reportage, which focused on the suspicious and dangerous characters among the prisoners, the Al Zahrani excerpts emphasized his hostile behavior at Gitmo. However, the paper failed to note that another of the released documents, dated March 20, 2006, establishes that Al Zahrani had been cleared for release. The text reads, “If a satisfactory agreement can be reached that ensures continued detention and allow access to detainee and/or to exploited intelligence, detainee can be Transferred Out of DoD Control.” (The Times did post the full set of Al Zahrani documents online.) [MORE . . .]