Blog rolled

Judge Primeaux annotates his blogroll of Mississippi law-related blogs, including one "enigmatic, eccentric and quasi-anonymous" blogger who really is not worth reading "almost daily." But there are others worth checking out.

Audrey Tomason -- the woman who kept al-Masri locked up? UPDATED

A "mystery woman" appears in the published photos of Obama's entourage in the White House situation room during the Obama raid: one Audrey Tomason, "director for counterterrorism," whatever that means.


Could she be the woman who headed the Al-Qaeda Unit and kept that German citizen Khalid al-Masri locked up for weeks because she had "a gut feeling he was bad"? Who was reported this year as someone who "regularly briefs Panetta"?

... If it wasn't sufficiently obvious that this is a wild-assed guess, let me spell that out. Google doesn't show any connection, other than this blog post (man, it's a little scary how fast the Google is).

... The AP article our earlier post was based on provides some details:

At the Counterterrorism Center, some had doubts that el-Masri was a terrorist, current and former U.S. officials said. But Frances, a counterterrorism analyst with no field experience, pushed ahead. She supported el-Masri's rendition — in which the CIA snatches someone and takes him to another country. The AP agreed to the CIA's request to refer to Frances by her middle name because her first is unusual.

Assuming that to be true, then Tomason's middle name would be either dispositive or good as dispositive. (Is "Audrey" unusual?)

Even before the el-Masri case, station chiefs had complained to top CIA officials raising concerns about Frances' operational judgment. But she was one of the few analysts who had a deep knowledge of al-Qaida before 9/11, working in a former unit known as Alec Station created to track down Osama bin Laden.

In the nascent war on terrorism, Frances and her team were essential and had racked up successes.

Which, to be fair, is important. Fucking up on el-Masri could be outweighed by some really good stuff we can't know about. Maybe.

Frances now runs the CIA's Global Jihad unit, the counterterrorism squad dedicated to hunting down al-Qaida worldwide. She regularly briefs Panetta, making her an influential voice in Obama's intelligence circle.

Certainly sounds like someone who'd be in the Situation Room.

... BINGO:

Audrey F. Tomason Profile

Director for Counterterrorism, Executive Office of the President

Okay, that's her until someone tells me it isn't.

... Details on development of story as of 5/5/11 here. Basically, a UK newspaper article and a Wikipedia entry have been spun out of an anonymous, half-assed blog post. Weird.

Osama fought the law, and the law won -- with a little help from the SEALs

Regarding the legality of killing OBL in our midnight raid, I seem to be getting away with the following summation in an LGM thread:

(1) A “kill order” would be illegal if there was a practical alternative, such as capturing OBL. (I don’t mean “pragmatic” in the sense of do we want to try him etc., but “practical” in the sense of what the troops could reasonably do on the spot.)

(2) If OBL clearly surrendered when troops encountered him — hands in the air, say — and his capture was a practical alternative, then the troops had a duty to offer quarter.

(3) Troops have no duty to negotiate a surrender with someone who doesn’t immediately offer one, particularly in circumstances like this raid into Pakistan.

(4) Whether OBL was a civilian or not is not terribly important here. He’s a terrorist, hostis humani generis or however one spells that, and not entitled to avail himself of a soldier’s means when convenient, then hop back onto the civilian side when convenient. He was owed minimum protections under CA3, but no more.

And I agree with a VC commenter that, if international law or the laws of war hold that what we did was illegal, then that indicates a problem with the law.

The best objection is that we trespassed on Pakistani sovereignty, but that still isn't a strong objection. Either (1) Pakistan was harboring OBL, or (2) Pakistan is so dysfunctional that rogue army/ISI elements could harbor OBL, and warn him of any raid. In the former case, that's practically undeclared war on the U.S. In the latter, Pakistan is not a state whose rights we are bound to respect; it's a glorified Afghanistan, a failed state whose corpse hasn't begun to stink yet. Where normal legal processes don't obtain, other powers have the right to use military force. Obviously, had OBL been hiding in a London flat without the UK's knowledge, we wouldn't have sent in the SEALs -- we would've told the Brits and let them pick him up. That wasn't an option here.

Finally, Yglesias has a good point: if OBL really wanted to give the U.S. a problem, he should've walked into the U.S. embassy in Islamabad and turned himself in. Yow.

The evidence trail

Emptywheel has several interesting posts on the OBL search, and she discusses this report on the intel leading us to the courier who led us to OBL. Her encyclopedic recollection in this area allows Emptywheel (can I call her Marcy?) to integrate such reports into their larger context.

She breaks down the trail as the story reports it:

•Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, months after he was waterboarded and via “standard” interrogation, admits he knows someone named Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, but denies he has anything to do with al Qaeda.
•Hassan Ghul, who was captured in Iraq in 2004, reveals that Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti was an al Qaeda courier
•Under CIA interrogation, Abu Faraj al-Libi admits he learned he was replacing KSM through a courier, but denied knowing al-Kuwaiti so strenuously CIA figured he must be important
•Via still unclear means, CIA learns Abu Ahmed’s real name
•US picks up Abu Ahmed talking to someone else it was monitoring, speaking from a location away from the compound
•US tracks Abu Ahmed back to compound

And observes:

Further, the narrative the AP tells now makes it even more clear how ineffective the CIA program was. The AP’s sources specify that KSM did not admit he knew al-Kuwaiti while being waterboarded. But that sort of dodges the whole issue: in response to his torture, according to KSM, he made up false locations for OBL. At the same time he was shielding information that could lead to OBL–and he continued to shield it under “standard” interrogation (again, it’s a pity FBI’s KSM expert never got to interrogate him). And then al-Libi, when he was in the CIA’s interrogation program, managed to shield information that same information even after the CIA recognized it was important.

The CIA program failed to do one of the most important things it set out to do, break through detainees’ efforts to hide OBL.

None of this of course is stopping the usual suspects from trying to claim that torture works. (And we tortured prisoners in other ways than waterboarding.)

Osama links

Some more OBL links:

-- Via Laura Rozen, the January arrest of a Qaeda financier in Abbottabad.

-- Steve Coll on NPR was acid in wondering how Pakistan would explain OBL's hideout. Emptywheel thinks along same lines.

-- Obama considered bombing the compound in March, but was concerned lest there be no hard proof of OBL's death.

-- The Twitter posts of an Abbottabad resident who saw the raid happening, tho of course he didn't know what it was until later. "Uh oh, now I'm the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it." Via.

-- Last night's midnight briefing at the White House.

-- Here is Steve Coll expanding on those thoughts he expressed on the radio this a.m.

It stretches credulity to think that a mansion of that scale could have been built and occupied by bin Laden for six years without it coming to the attention of anyone in Pakistan’s Army.

The initial circumstantial evidence suggests the opposite is more likely--that bin Laden was effectively being housed under Pakistani state control. Pakistan will deny this, it seems safe to predict, and perhaps no convincing evidence will ever surface to prove the case. If I were a prosecutor at the United States Department of Justice, however, I would be tempted to call a grand jury. Who owned the land on which the house was constructed? How was the land acquired, and from whom? Who designed the house, which seems to have been purpose-built to secure bin Laden? Who was the general contractor? Who installed the security systems? Who worked there? Are there witnesses who will now testify as to who visited the house, how often, and for what purpose? These questions are not relevant only to the full realization of justice for the victims of September 11th. They are also relevant to the victims of terrorist attacks conducted or inspired by bin Laden while he lived in the house, and these include many Pakistanis as well as Afghans, Indians, Jordanians, and Britons. They are rightly subjects of American criminal law.

Yes, I'm sure DOJ will get right on that. Coll also points out that Obama's heavy emphasis on nailing OBL had real effects at CIA.

-- Jukeboxgrad, possibly the World's Greatest Volokh Conspiracy Commenter, has assembled some lovely quotes from conservative reptiles mocking Obama for his campaign pledge to attack OBL in Pakistan if need be.

-- OBL reported to've been the one using a woman -- his wife -- as a human shield, resulting in her death. Hey, what's the big deal -- that's why Allah lets you have four! [Rimshot]

-- Did WikiLeaks blow the name of OBL's courier? Good thing they were sooooo voluminous. See Emptywheel.

5/1

Bin Laden dead, we're told. Supposedly killed by "a U.S. military asset" in mansion outside Islamabad; body in our possession. (CNN.)

... Most informative updating I've seen is at the Atlantic (not Sullivan, oddly).

11:10 p.m. May 1st is eight years to the day from President Bush's famed announcement of the end of major combat operations in Iraq while standing before a "Mission Accomplished" banner.

11:06 p.m. CNN is reporting that Osama bin Laden was killed in a mansion outside of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.

Updated 11:02 p.m. CNN is reporting that the United States now has the body of Osama bin Laden. The news was first reported by Jill Jackson of CBS News and by the chief of staff to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

That last is rather an odd note. Who's our military working for?

... CNN says it's told op wasn't a Predator strike. Pakistani ISI telling CNN it cooperated in the op.

... OBL was actually in Abbottabad (named after Major James Abbott of the British Army), some ways north of Islamabad and close to Kashmir. What was he doing there -- had he been making prior visits that led to his being tipped off? Was he http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifplanning something with Kashmiri terrorists?

... Abottabad compound built in 2005; property worth $1M but no internet/TV, residents burned trash rather than putting on curb; things like this attracted attention. Obama said to've approved the hit Friday morning while royal wedding going on. Helicopter raid by Navy Seals, took 40 minutes.

I'm a little tired of the "huh, he wasn't in a cave!" reaction. I doubt he was living there permanently, and obviously he was more likely to be hit when traveling outside the NW Province. But who the hell knows, maybe he's been there for years.

... Fox reports as a fact (no "sources say") that Obama just lied to the world:

The architect of the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil was killed a week ago inside Pakistan by a U.S. bomb.

Nice.

... Glenn Reynolds picked a bad moment to be a jackass:

Carter blew it with Iran, encouraging the Iranian armed forces to stay in their barracks, while Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's radical Islamists (whom Carter thought of as "reformers") took power, and then approved the ill-conchttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifeived hostage rescue mission that ended with ignominious failure in the desert. Obama, by contrast, could only wish for such success.

April 30. "Wingnut FAIL," says one commenter.

... It *is* beginning to seem that OBL was hiding out there for some time, which contradicts my thought and Bergen's suspicion about the Predators' influence:

This home, U.S. intelligence analysts concluded, was "custom built to hide someone of significance."http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Besides the two brothers, the U.S. "soon learned that a third family lived there, whose size and makeup of family we believed to match those we believed would be with bin Laden. Our best information was that bin Laden was there with his youngest wife."

The same report says that Osama's body will be handled according to Islamic law, which is prudent. (Buried at sea, says WaPo?)

... Okay, OBL dead or not I still hafta get up at 5:30, so I'll leave with this.

Wittgenstein notebooks rediscovered

Wittgenstein died 60 years ago today. The Guardian reports some rediscovered notebooks:

... the only known handwritten version of Wittgenstein's Brown Book – notes from his Cambridge lectures in the mid-1930s. There are an additional 60 pages of manuscript for the Brown Book with a revised opening and other changes.

Gibson also believes that a pinkish Norwegian school exercise book in the archive, which has a complete and previously unknown narrative, may in fact be a missing Wittgenstein gem – something talked about but never seen. "This may or may not be the missing item called the Pink Book or Yellow Book that scholars have long been hoping for." There is also a series of thousands of mathematical calculations in which Wittgenstein examines Fermat's little theorem.

Check the sell-by date!

In a rare reversal, my wife was the one visiting Walmart yesterday, and she sent me a picture of one of her acquisitions:

Your reaction -- "huh?" or "oh yeah!" -- tells something about your age.

According to Wikipedia -- amazing, aren't they? -- this actually came out late 2010, but I guess it's only just now filtering down to the provinces. Apparently the Taco flavor was phased out around 1977.

Numerous impromptu online support groups have sprung up over the years among devoted fans who miss the original Taco Doritos flavor formula. Reincarnations and relaunches of the Taco Doritos, including the recent "Back By Popular Demand" campaign, did not recreate the original Taco flavor. The Taco chips included in the Zesty Taco/Chipotle Ranch "Collisions" bags were very close to the original, but were since discontinued in most of the country.[8]In late 2010 the Taco flavor recipe that was used in the 1980's returned in a limited edition "retro" styled bag incorporating the original Doritos logo, and in early 2011 the company announced that this incarnation would remain in the permanent product line-up.

The Taco flavor was pretty awesome, so I'm glad to see it return, though not to the extent that I regret having omitted to join any online support groups.

... From the article, an interesting Daubert "angle" (heh):

The company was sued in 2003 by Charles Grady, who claimed that his throat had been damaged because of eating Doritos. According to him, the shape and rigidity of the chips made them inherently dangerous. Grady attempted to admit into evidence a study by a former chemistry professor that calculated how best to safely swallow the chips. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court later ruled that the study did not meet scientific standards and could not be presented as evidence.

Fortunately for most of America, they're clustered where I live

Obama's long-form birth certificate has provided yet more empirical evidence for ... the crazification factor:

A new SurveyUSA poll finds that of those who have seen President Obama's newly-released detailed birth certificate, 71% are satisfied that he was born in the United States but 18% still have doubts and another 10% say the document released by the White House is a forgery.

28%. It's like the blackbody curve. Plus, the 18/10 split suggests we may be able to pin down the Special/General crazification values.

John: Objectively crazy or crazy vis-a-vis my own inertial reference frame for rational behaviour? I mean, are you creating the Theory of Special Crazification or General Crazification?

Tyrone: Hadn't thought about it. Let's split the difference. Half just have worldviews which lead them to disagree with what you consider rationality even though they arrive at their positions through rational means, and the other half are the core of the Crazification -- either genuinely crazy; or so woefully misinformed about how the world works, the bases for their decision making is so flawed they may as well be crazy.

So the core value is around 10%.

Doctors in the torture chambers

Of course, nothing will happen to these people.

We reviewed GTMO medical records and relevant case files (client affidavits, attorney–client notes and summaries, and legal affidavits of medical experts) of nine individuals for evidence of torture and ill treatment and documentation by medical personnel. In each of the nine cases, GTMO detainees alleged abusive interrogation methods that are consistent with torture as defined by the UN Convention Against Torture as well as the more restrictive US definition of torture that was operational at the time. The medical affidavits in each of the nine cases indicate that the specific allegations of torture and ill treatment are highly consistent with physical and psychological evidence documented in the medical records and evaluations by non-governmental medical experts. However, the medical personnel who treated the detainees at GTMO failed to inquire and/or document causes of the physical injuries and psychological symptoms they observed. Psychological symptoms were commonly attributed to “personality disorders” and “routine stressors of confinement.” Temporary psychotic symptoms and hallucinations did not prompt consideration of abusive treatment. Psychological assessments conducted by non-governmental medical experts revealed diagnostic criteria for current major depression and/or PTSD in all nine cases.

Conclusion

The findings in these nine cases from GTMO indicate that medical doctors and mental health personnel assigned to the DoD neglected and/or concealed medical evidence of intentional harm.

Of course, they didn't have to inquire -- they knew damn well what was happening. As Sullivan says, "the psychologists were part of the torture." Where's Robert Jay Lifton when you need him?

... Not to let my snark mislead, Lifton has been active in his condemnation of medical assistance in American torture.

Weird

Gates to leave, Panetta to Defense, Petraeus to CIA?

We knew Gates was ready to leave, but this suggests a grave lack of talent in Democratic ranks. Panetta's inability to reform CIA does not bode well for his taking over the Pentagon. And Petraeus at CIA is simply, well, weird.

Someone break the news to Jon Chait

Depriving at least one liberal blogger of the chance to write "Boss Hogg" posts for the next year and a half, Haley Barbour has announced he won't run for president.

Objectively, it's sensible. It's a long-shot race, he doesn't have the health for it, and he would do much better to run virtually unopposed for Thad Cochran's Senate seat in 2014, assuming Cochran doesn't step down sooner and give Barbour's (presumably GOP) successor the chance to appoint Barbour.

Attacking the lawyers, not the clients

Via Sullyblog, we see that the law firm hired by the House to defend the Defense of Marriage Act (which, recall, DOJ said it would not defend in court) has backed out, apparently under gay-rights pressure.

I'm with Sullivan on this one. I thought it was wrong, wrong, wrong to attack law firms who provided counsel to Gitmo prisoners. That doesn't stop being wrong when you flip the +/- signs.

"Remedy is the guts of the judicial power. The rest is book reports."

Per CharleyCarp's suggestion in comments, here is Sabin Willett on what the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court have done to his clients and to the rule of law. A snippet:

In the end it wasn’t about enemies at all. For it was the Uighurs, of all people, upon whom the court house door at last was shut. With so much talk of Palau, people forget that when Judge Urbina ruled — when the stay entered, when Kiyemba I was decided — there was no Palau. And that decision is reinstated. So the options are irrelevant. No judge can order release in any place where his orders have effect. Whatever his view of the law of war, a reader of this blog must wince, a little, at the idea that the judicial power consists of being reassured by the jailer that the jailer will attend to his own unlawful act — at the idea that what controls a judicial remedy is not law, but the politics of Yemen, of Bermuda, of Obamacare, of the New Hampshire Primary. The court can do no more than accept the President’s representation that he is attempting to arrange an “appropriate” resettlement. Imagine that representation from, say, President Trump. Will we call that a judicial remedy?

Read the whole thing. If "Uighurs" makes you go "huh?" try Wikipedia.

A blog post of great social and political import

Eugene Volokh has an analytical post on vibrators, tho from a sociological perspective not a legal one. But as that's was always a TBA preoccupation (moreso perhaps in earlier incarntions of this blog, before the 5th Circuit legalized 'em), we link to it nonetheless.