Former West Wing executive producer Lawrence O’Donnell and Liz Cheney squared off on Good Morning America this morning.
Late Update: One point: I don’t have any objection to the cable nets carrying Cheney’s speech yesterday live. He’s still newsworthy, and the juxtaposition of his speech and Obama’s was dramatic if not quite momentous. But the idea that there’s now a debate in this country in which Obama and Cheney represent the two sides, as Chris Cuomo claims in the GMA segment, is simply wrong.
Those who subscribe to the Cheney view were marginalized even within the Bush Administration five years ago. They lost that debate. Obama, on the other hand, has taken, as should now be obvious, a much less forceful stance on these issues than many of his supporters had hoped. You might call it a more centrist position (though I’m resistant to that characterization for several reasons). But in any event, it’s not necessarily representative of the progressive point of view. Cheney is an outlier. He doesn’t represent “one side” of this debate. But if you frame it as a debate between Cheney’s extreme position and Obama’s very moderate position, you’ve suddenly dictated an outcome to this so-called debate that is considerably to the right of where the political center is right now on this issue.
As you can see in our news feature, we’ve got a run-down of the four guys who made up the Newburgh Four, the ones arrested Tuesday night for attempting to blow up a synagogue in Riverdale, New York.
I have a fascination with the ne’er-do-wells and grifters and mental patients and would-be tough guys who get picked up in these D-Team terrorist stings like this and the Liberty Eight case from a couple years ago. In any case, it’s a fascinating read, so I strongly recommend it to you. But there’s one thing that jumped out at me. The sting was put together by a Pakistani immigrant who got arrested back in 2002 for helping immigrants cheat on their drivers’ tests. (Yes, there are several novels in this one.) And he’s been working as government informant since then to stay out of the slammer. But here’s the thing. This isn’t this guy’s first score.
A few years back he posed as a terrorist arms dealer and busted two guys from Albany, Mohammed Hossain and Yassin Aref. I don’t think it necessarily means anything one way or another. But you’d think that once you’d pulled off your first major counter-terrorism sting, your usefulness as a CI would be sort of compromised and the feds would put you out to pasture. But apparently not.
Given the sophistication of these dudes, his target audience doesn’t seem to be a really sharp bunch.
From TPM Reader B …
First WTC the guy went back for the security deposit for the truck they blew up…McVeigh did everything short of driving into a police car fleeing the scene…Atta and the boys could only have achieved what they did with the most mind numbingly incompetent executive branch ever. The master plan?
I’ll give you the Tylenol tamperer had some talent but that was a lone nut…In anything with multiple people there has been an extraordinary lack of competence…This was the screw up that helped let 9/11 happen – they were looking for the exotic hollywood terrorists taking over missile silos with Hollywood action figures
I MIGHT be able to give you the attempted take over in South Africa nuke facility was an “A-team” but those guys seemed clearly gov’t backed…So can’t really count em…
Not that I’m arguing the point these guys were not pathetic in the NY case – I’m just saying in history we’ve rarely had a terrorist in the field that wasn’t.
It’s always a balance when reporting out these kinds of cases. It’s certainly true that you don’t need to be a genius to kill a lot of people. I’m not sure I agree with all of B‘s examples. Whatever you can say about 9/11, it was ingenious in its conception and pretty well pulled off. But successful terrorist operations frequently have ‘grunts’ if not the planners who are garden variety morons. So, it’s definitely true you don’t have to be a genius to kill a lot of people.
That said, I don’t think ‘lack of competence’ quite captures the Newburgh crew.
This out from MSNBC …
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on tonight’s “Countdown” pledged to donate $10,000 to charity after disc jockey Erich “Mancow” Muller was waterboarded today on live radio, in an attempt to prove the technique was “not torture.” After six seconds Muller said it was “absolutely torture” and that were he to be interrogated by the use of waterboarding he would “confess to anything.” Olbermann promised to donate $10,000 to the charity Veterans of Valor, founded by Sgt. Klay South, who administered the waterboarding to Muller today, and withdrew his offer to Sean Hannity to make a donation to the charity of his choice if he followed through on his offer to undergo waterboarding.
If you haven’t seen the Mancow waterboarding, you can see the full video here. It’s powerful on a number of different levels.
The upshot is that the guy goes into it in cocky Hannity mode and then after maybe 5 or 6 seconds he struggles up and he’s converted, claiming it’s “absolutely torture”, that he never realized it was that bad, etc.
Now, here’s the thing. I’m genuinely surprised that he was was surprised that it was that bad. I’m not saying that for effect. Muller really seemed to think it was like getting dunked by your friend in a pool or something. Just factually, everyone who knows anything about this says that it’s horrific and you pretty much instantly feel like you’re drowning and at the edge of death. And it’s a physiological response. So even if you’ve gone through it ten times and know rationally that you don’t die, it doesn’t matter. You’re instantly put back into the mental space of drowning and being at the edge of death.
I must confess that when I see Hannity or the rest of these guys saying it’s no big deal and it’s not torture, I kind of figured they’re playing semantic games and essentially saying ‘I don’t care what we do to evil Muslim terrorist bad guys.’ Hang them from them toes, waterboard them, whatever, who cares? I don’t agree with that. It’s hideous. But I understand it. But here it turns out they’re just completely ignorant, just haven’t been paying attention. Just in the purest factual sense have no idea what they’re talking about.
I know, I know … why am I surprised?
(ed.note: When does Hannity get waterboarded? That may be waterboarding I can believe in.)
Why is Dick Cheney’s daughter the only person he can find to go on TV to defend him?
You can’t keep a good man down. Former Vice President Dick Cheney is reportedly shopping for a book deal — and wants an advance of over $2 million to tell his story. That and other political news in today’s TPMDC Saturday Roundup.
Girlfriends of two of the ‘Newburgh Four’ have come forward now — in articles in the Daily News and New York Post. And while, as you’d expect, they’re putting their men in the best light, suggesting they were tricked into the plot, it does seem clear that cash gifts, free rent and bags and bags and bags of weed may have been a stronger enticement for these goofballs than Islam.
David Williams is the one of the four who’d recently moved to Newburgh to help his mom care for his brother, who reportedly has terminal cancer. His mom says that “Maqsood”, the name the informant was using, promised to pay for the brother’s hospital bills.
These are all, of course, claims from highly interested sources. So we’ll have to watch closely what gets borne out in court proceedings. But it bears watching.
I’m still trying to decide what I think about this question. But given how much strategic focus we’re giving to Afghanistan, I’m confident we haven’t given the question enough collective thought. Matt Yglesias had a post a couple months ago asking a basic question: how much does it really matter if al Qaida has safe havens in Afghanistan?
To be clear, no one’s saying it doesn’t matter at all. But does it matter enough, relative to other threats, to make Afghanistan — and specifically, the escalation of our involvement in Afghanistan — close to the focus of our whole foreign policy? Ethnic Afghans have played little or no role in any of the major terrorist incidents of the last decade. And most were planned and organized either in Europe, the US or in other Arab or majority Muslim countries. The training camps we hear a lot about mainly focused on light combat training and maybe car-jackings. As Matt puts it, the ‘safe havens’ in Afghanistan were neither necessary (the training could be and often was done elsewhere) nor sufficient (you still needed cells in the target countries) conditions for any of the major terrorist attacks. So why is this such a critical focus of our policy?
On the other side of the spectrum, I’d put the following considerations. If al Qaida types get plugged in in the thriving opium trade in Afghanistan that’s clearly a source of money. And one of the best counter-terrorism strategies seems to be just keeping the members of terrorist organizations under pressure and threat everywhere. So you wouldn’t want one country where bin Laden and his pals could live more or less unmolested and in the open — though given what happened and how many drones we have on patrol, it’s not really credible to me that quite that would ever be allowed again.
Then there’s the question of Pakistan. On really every front, money, safe havens, weaponry, even nuclear weapons, Pakistan has everything that Afghanistan has, only ten-fold, though there’s probably a decent argument that the two countries are umbilical when it comes to counter-terrorism policy.
And let me finish on two further points. Through much of the last decade, I’ve been in the group of people saying that Iraq was a distraction and that Afghanistan was the place we really needed to be focusing on. So this is in conflict with much I’ve said before. Furthermore, if you look at the history, the role of Afghanistan going back over the last few decades, wasn’t so much that it allowed for safe havens but that the guerilla, semi-irregular wars there spun off thousands of violent, highly-trained and religiously intoxicated extremists who later spread out around the world spreading terror right and left. And that makes intensifying the conflict in Afghanistan to prevent the growth of safe havens a logically questionable proposition.
Like I said up top, I’m not sure where I come down on this one. But given how central a role ‘safe havens’ play in current policy and how much focus we’re giving to this policy, it really requires more scrutiny. Let me know your thoughts. I’m curious what others have to say.