Case against 3 SEALs weakens Hitting captive to be denied

By Rowan Scarborough

Cracks are beginning to appear in the military’s prosecution of three Navy SEALs accused of striking a most-wanted terrorism suspect they had captured in Iraq.

Maj. Gen. Charles Cleveland last week signed grants of immunity for five Navy colleagues of the accused.

Some of those five, three enlisted men and two officers, are expected at trial to flatly contradict the prosecution’s key witness, according to a Navy source close to the case, which centers on the September 2009 capture of Ahmed Hashim Abed.

The witness, the master-at-arms at the base in Anbar province where the captured terrorist was brought, told investigators that he saw Abed being struck by one SEAL. One of the immunized witnesses identified by the master-at-arms for corroboration is not expected to support his testimony. The military has not released witness statements.

In addition, the defense has requested that the judge order the government to turn over the name of the Army officer who interrogated Abed once he was brought to Baghdad, where he remains in custody on order of an Iraqi judge. The disclosure would mean that defense attorneys may call him as a witness to testify about Abed’s appearance after he left the SEALs’ custody.

A judge has ruled that the military must produce Abed as a witness for courts-martial, scheduled to be conducted in Baghdad perhaps as early as next month. Defense attorneys, in front of a military jury, can expose Abed’s history as the suspected mastermind of the 2004 Fallujah atrocity that left the bodies of U.S. contractors hanging mutilated on a bridge.

The master-at-arms told investigators that Abed was punched in the gut by Special Operations Petty Officer 2nd Class Matthew McCabe. Petty Officer McCabe denies hitting Abed.

“We’re pleased about the immunity grants,” said Neal Puckett, Petty Officer McCabe’s attorney. “They allow witnesses who have favorable testimony to testify.”

At some point during Abed’s captivity that first day, blood appeared inside his lip. The Navy source said, “All these al Qaeda guys are trained to injure themselves and claim they were tortured.”

Two other SEALs on the mission, Petty Officer 1st Class Julio Huertas and Petty Officer 2nd Class Jonathan Keefe, are charged with providing false statements, as is Petty Officer McCabe.

In another win for the defense, a military judge ruled last week that the prosecution may not use Petty Officer Keefe’s statement that he did not see Abed struck. The judge said investigators did not advise Petty Officer Keefe that he could remain silent.

U.S. Central Command, where Gen. Cleveland oversees special operations forces, filed official charges in October. The assault charge against Petty Officer McCabe stated that the SEAL did “unlawfully strike Ahmad Hashim Abed in the midsection with his fist.”

The false statement charge states that Petty Officer McCabe told a Petty Officer McCabe “I did not assault nor did I see anyone assault or abuse” Abed.

Petty Officer McCabe says that statement is true. At a rally Saturday in Scottsdale, Ariz., to raise legal funds, he announced that he had passed an independent lie-detector test on the question, “Did you strike Abed?”

A statement on Mr. Puckett’s Web site says, “These terrorists are trained to claim abuse despite no physical evidence of such. More importantly, they know the powerful influence of our mainstream media and legal system and are using these facets as tools against us. This tactic with resulting media attention is effective in causing our heroes to question their training and decisions, placing their missions, lives and our security in jeopardy.”

The military’s decisions to charge the SEALs who took a suspected terrorist off the streets has stirred protests from some members of Congress and ordinary Americans.

A Facebook page, “Support the Navy SEALs who Captured Ahmed Hashim Abed,” has attracted nearly 120,000 members. Another Facebook page, “Americans United Against the Prosecution of 3 Navy SEALs,” has nearly 265,000 members.

When the SEALs brought the captured Abed back to Camp Schwedler in September, they had executed a perfect mission. Based on an intelligence report on Abed’s whereabouts, they surprised him while he slept in his bed, marched him back to their helicopter and evacuated the area without firing a shot.

The U.S. command in Iraq has refused to provide details on Abed except to say that he is being held.

Gen. Cleveland wrote to members of Congress saying his decision to charge the SEALs was influenced by evidence that they tried to cover up a suspected assault.

Read the original article Washington Times

EDITORIAL: Save the SEALs

You’re for the SEALs, or you’re for the terrorists.

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Rep. Dan Burton, Indiana Republican, and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, California Republican, yesterday renewed a call for

charges to be dropped against three Navy SEALs charged with the unspeakable crime of roughing up a terrorist.

The charges grew from circumstances surrounding the capture of Ahmed Hashim Abed, a terrorist mastermind who organized the killing, burning and mutilating of four American contractors in Fallujah, Iraq, in March 2004. Insurgents strung up the blackened remains on a box-girder bridge over the Euphrates River, a grisly event that made global headlines. Abed was brought in by the SEALs in September 2009.

Abed told Iraqi authorities that Special Operations Petty Officer 2nd Class Matthew McCabe punched him in the gut. That sailor is charged with unlawfully striking Abed “in the midsection with his fist” and with lying to a Naval Criminal Investigative Service officer about the incident. Petty Officers Julio Huertas and Jonathan Keefe are charged with impeding the investigation and dereliction of duty in failing to safeguard a detainee. Trials for these two sailors are set to begin in Iraq in April, and Petty Officer 2nd Class McCabe will be tried in Norfolk in May.

Public support for the three SEALs has grown steadily since the case came to light. Petitions circulated by Mr. Burton and the newspaper Human Events have collected more than 150,000 signatures. Combined Facebook pages supporting the SEALs have over 350,000 fans. Betty Kilbride, one of the organizers of the Facebook support groups, announced with Father’s Press Publishing that they would donate $4 per copy from the sale of her book, “Soul of American Warriors,” to the Navy SEALs Defense Fund.

Little evidence has been produced to substantiate Abed’s abuse claim, and a planned deposition of the detained terrorist was cancelled. Whether anything he says can be believed is highly doubtful anyway. Al Qaeda terrorists are trained to charge prisoner abuse whenever possible to create exactly this kind of situation. For Abed, a U.S. military court simply would be another front in his personal jihad.

Some in the SEAL community believe that dropping charges is the wrong approach because it would deny the defendants an opportunity to clear their names. The SEALs originally had been given the option of accepting administrative punishment but demanded a court martial for this reason. Jack Lynch, former president of the UDT-SEAL Association, who passed away in February, wrote that since a court martial has commenced, “it must be followed through.” He believed that if the charges were dropped, “there would always be doubt in some folks’ minds that we are hiding something. This could be a media fiasco no one needs. There is no choice but to go forward.”

This argument would carry more weight if the SEALs could get a fair trial. But in the current politicized atmosphere and with an administration that goes out of its way to placate Muslim sentiment, it’s not a sure thing that the accused would be vindicated. Having the charges dropped is preferable to seeing these young men railroaded to serve the political designs of the White House. That would be a fiasco indeed.

Read the original editorial on Washington Times

Hanson:The Tragic Truth of War

Victor Davis Hanson

Victory has usually been defined throughout the ages as forcing the enemy to accept certain political objectives. “Forcing” usually meant killing, capturing, or wounding men at arms. In today’s polite and politically correct society we seem to have forgotten that nasty but eternal truth in the confusing struggle to defeat radical Islamic terrorism.

What stopped the imperial German army from absorbing France in World War I and eventually made the Kaiser abdicate was the destruction of a once magnificent army on the Western front — superb soldiers and expertise that could not easily be replaced. Saddam Hussein left Kuwait in 1991 when he realized that the U.S. military was destroying his very army. Even the North Vietnamese agreed to a peace settlement in 1973, given their past horrific losses on the ground and the promise that American air power could continue indefinitely inflicting its damage on the North.
When an enemy finally gives up, it is for a combination of reasons — material losses, economic hardship, loss of territory, erosion of civilian morale, fright, mental exhaustion, internal strife. But we forget that central to a concession of defeat is often the loss of the nation’s soldiers — or even the threat of such deaths.

A central theme in most of the memoirs of high-ranking officers of the Third Reich is the attrition of their best warriors. In other words, among all the multifarious reasons why Nazi Germany was defeated, perhaps the key was that hundreds of thousands of its best aviators, U-boaters, panzers, infantrymen, and officers, who swept to victory throughout 1939–41, simply perished in the fighting and were no longer around to stop the allies from doing pretty much what they wanted by 1944–45.

After Stalingrad and Kursk, there were not enough good German soldiers to stop the Red Army. Even the introduction of jets could not save Hitler in 1945 — given that British and American airmen had killed thousands of Luftwaffe pilots between 1939 and 1943.

After the near destruction of the Grand Army in Russia in 1812, even Napoleon’s genius could not restore his European empire. Serial and massive Communist offensives between November 1950 and April 1951 in Korea cost Red China hundreds of thousands of its crack infantry — and ensured that, for all its aggressive talk, it would never retake Seoul in 1952–53.

But aren’t these cherry-picked examples from conventional wars of the past that have no relevance to the present age of limited conflict, terrorism, and insurgency where ideology reigns?

Not really. We don’t quite know all the factors that contributed to the amazing success of the American “surge” in Iraq in 2007–08. Surely a number of considerations played a part: Iraqi anger at the brutish nature of al-Qaeda terrorists in their midst; increased oil prices that brought massive new revenues into the country; General Petraeus’s inspired counterinsurgency tactics that helped win over Iraqis to our side by providing them with jobs and security; much-improved American equipment; and the addition of 30,000 more American troops.

But what is unspoken is also the sheer cumulative number of al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists that the U.S. military killed or wounded between 2003 and 2008 in firefights from Fallujah to Basra. There has never been reported an approximate figure of such enemy dead — perhaps wisely, in the post-Vietnam age of repugnance at “body counts” and the need to create a positive media image.

Read the rest on National Review Online pg 2

Pelosi stopped one CIA operation. So why not waterboarding?

By Marc A. Thiessen
In mid-2004, then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi learned something from a CIA briefing that made her blood boil. Pelosi reportedly “came unglued” at the revelation and had “strong words” with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, demanding that the CIA abandon its plans. As a result, a top-secret finding that President George W. Bush signed to authorize the CIA’s activities was revised. Pelosi succeeded in stopping the agency from moving forward with the controversial operation.

What drove Pelosi to action? Not the CIA’s waterboarding of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists. In a 2009 interview, a former senior Bush administration official directed me to a little-noticed item from Time magazine. According to this 2004 report, Pelosi objected to a CIA plan to provide money to moderate political parties in Iraq ahead of scheduled elections, in an effort to counter Iran, which was funneling millions to extremist elements. “House minority leader Nancy Pelosi ‘came unglued’ when she learned about what a source described as a plan for ‘the CIA to put an operation in place to affect the outcome of the elections,’ ” Time reported. “Pelosi had strong words with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in a phone call about the issue. . . . A senior U.S. official hinted that, under pressure from the Hill, the Administration scaled back its original plans.” (Her role was also reported on this page by David Ignatius in 2007.)

Why is this important? Because on May 14, 2009, Pelosi, now speaker of the House, declared in a Capitol Hill news conference that she had opposed CIA waterboarding but was powerless to stop it. A former senior intelligence official told me in 2009 that he was shocked by Pelosi’s claim because, he said, “Speaker Pelosi herself has stopped covert action programs that she has been briefed on by going to the White House. In that very same time frame [after she learned about waterboarding] Pelosi had gone back to the White House [over] a separate covert action program, expressed strong opposition to it. And the remarkable part to me, the White House backed off the program, changed one aspect of the program . . . she was particularly opposed to. And literally, the finding was pulled back and revised.” If Pelosi had truly opposed waterboarding, he said, she had numerous ways to stop it — but she didn’t try.

At the time of her press briefing, Pelosi had been forced to acknowledge that she had learned in February 2003 that waterboarding was being used. Why, reporters asked, did she not object? Flustered, Pelosi claimed that it was not her place to complain because she was no longer the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee. “A letter raising concerns was sent to CIA general counsel Scott Muller by the new Democratic ranking member of [the] committee [Jane Harman], the appropriate person to register a protest.” She made this claim five times during the briefing.

In fact, Harman’s letter, since declassified, did not “register a protest”; it asked “what kind of policy review took place” and urged the agency not to destroy interrogation tapes. Moreover, when Pelosi made this claim, she knew that in 2004, when she was no longer the committee’s ranking member, she had personally intervened with the White House to stop different covert action. She did not defer to Harman; she herself took action. Why was it “appropriate” for her to intervene then but not in the case of waterboarding?

Pelosi was asked by a reporter, “Do you wish now that you had done more? Do you wish it had been your own letter?” Pelosi replied, “No, no, no, no, no, no . . . No letter or anything else is going to stop them from doing what they’re going to do.” She made this claim three times during the briefing. All the while knowing that her phone call to Rice in 2004 had stopped the CIA from “doing what they were going to do” in a different covert operation.

As one of the top four leaders on Capitol Hill, Pelosi had numerous tools at her disposal if she had truly wanted to block waterboarding. She could have threatened to put a hold on funding for the CIA interrogation program, or held up funding for other administration priorities, or worked with her Senate counterparts to hold up nominees for senior CIA positions, or simply called the national security adviser — as she reportedly did in the case of the Iraq program. Pelosi did none of those things when she learned about waterboarding. By her silence, Pelosi gave her consent — and then misled the media by claiming she was powerless to act.

Journalists did not question Pelosi’s claims — and then they stopped questioning her. Pelosi announced that she would not take more questions on the topic, and the media complied. Reporters who relentlessly chased the Valerie Plame leak let the story drop. Pelosi’s role in stopping another covert operation gives lie to her claims that she was powerless to stop waterboarding — but the Washington press corps failed to “connect the dots.” Now that the truth is out, will they continue to let her get away with not answering questions? We’ll learn the answer at her next press briefing.

Read the original article  Washington Post

The Butt Bomb..Al Qaeda’s hidden weapon

Michael Crowley

In the wake of the failed bombing attempt by Nigerian al Qaeda operative Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, airport security experts are wringing their hands over how to stop the next underwear bomber. X-ray machines don’t detect the type of explosive, known as PETN, that Abdulmutallab carried. Only a careful pat-down around Abdulmutallab’s crotch, where the explosive had been sewn into his undies, would have detected his deadly cargo. But Abdulmutallab’s al Qaeda handlers knew that pat-downs are rare and that social mores make highly intrusive, crotch-fondling searches almost unheard of.  

In the wake of the Abdulmutallab episode, however, standards will change. Pat downs will become more common—and more intrusive. We may not see the famous vision of the crazed dictator from Woody Allen’s Bananas—“Underwear shall be worn on the outside!”—but those searches by hand are likely to get a little more, shall we say, intimate.

Even a pat-down thorough enough to simulate foreplay, however, won’t protect us completely—not from a threat that sounds even more absurd than an underwear bomb and that is also more alarming: the butt bomb.

The concept is simple. Rather than sew explosives into his underwear, a terrorist might actually plant a bomb, which can weigh as little as a pound, inside his anal cavity. Like drug mules, would-be butt bombers could store the explosives inside a condom.

Sound crazy? Perhaps. But security experts initially believed that a terrorist’s derriere nearly killed a top Saudi Arabian counterterrorism official last fall. Back in August, an al Qaeda-connected militant named Abdullah Assiri offered to turn himself into Saudi authorities and enlist in a state-run terrorist rehabilitation program. Exhibiting a healthy skepticism, the Saudis reportedly subjected Assiri to two airport-style X-ray scans and other security checks. Finding no weapons or explosives on his body, security agents ushered Assiri into the palace of the counterterrorism chief, Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef, who is also the son of a likely heir to the Saudi throne.

Instead of surrendering, however, Assiri exploded. Nayef survived the blast, but the Saudis were bewildered by this incredible breach of their security. At first, they were convinced the explosive had been hidden in Assiri’s anal cavity—a scenario that other security experts didn’t discount. After further investigation, the Saudis concluded that Assiri didn’t have a butt bomb after all, but rather that he stashed the explosive in his underwear much like Abdulmutallab. (The device may have been detonated by a text message sent to Assiri’s cell phone; exactly how the phone triggered the bomb is unclear. Like Abdulmutallab, incidentally, Assiri appears to have gotten his assignment and materials in Yemen.)

Prince Nayaf himself flew to Washington to warn Obama administration officials about this new underwear bomb threat, according to Newsweek—which also recently disclosed a joint report produced by the National Counterterrorism Center, in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security and the CIA, on the threat of both underwear and butt bombs. That report had both good and bad news about the alarming concept of explosive al Qaeda asses. On the downside, the report found that even full-body-image scanners at airports might not detect anally stashed explosives. The upside is that much of the blast from such a rear-end bomb would be absorbed by the terrorist’s body—perhaps enough of the explosion that the airplane would not crash.

But don’t exhale just yet. It stands to reason that a terrorist who wants to down a plane needs only to smuggle his PETN onboard, much like a drug mule with a cocaine-stuffed rectum. After that, he can excuse himself to the lavatory and extract his cargo, then return to his seat to detonate the explosive outside his body.

Fortunately this scenario remains speculative; if it were easy and reliable, Abdulmutallab might have tried it. But if a terrorist does succeed in detonating a butt bomb, airport security might be in for a radical change. You think taking off your shoes is bad? Try bending over for a TSA worker wearing green surgical gloves.

Read the original article on The New Republic

Underwear Bomb Revealed as Terror Suspect Warns More Attacks Coming

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

FOX NEWS

The bomb, seen for the first time, is reported to have contained a six-inch pack of highly-explosive powder called PETN sewn into the briefs, weighing about 80 grams.

According to ABC News, a government test with 50 grams of PETN blew a hole in the side of an airliner — the same amount carried by so-called shoe bomber Richard Reid over Christmas in 2001.

A global search for accomplices in the Detroit airliner plot is under way after an Al Qaeda group based in Yemen claimed responsibility for the operation and the would-be bomber was reported to have said that more attacks were being planned.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a terrorist cell led by a former personal secretary to Usama bin Laden, issued a statement saying that the failed attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a response to American-backed airstrikes on the group in Yemen this month.

Yemeni government forces, acting on U.S. intelligence and using what officials have admitted was American military hardware, launched air raids on suspected militants in the east of the country on December 17 and again on December 24. At least 60 people were believed to have been killed.

Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian who set himself alight in a packed Northwest jet approaching Detroit on Christmas Day, bought his one-way ticket from a KLM office in Accra, the Ghanaian capital, on December 16, indicating that his attack was planned well before these latest air raids. A U.S. military effort to deny Al Qaeda a stronghold in Yemen has been under way for at least a year.

The fresh-faced engineering graduate was transferred yesterday from hospital in Detroit to a federal prison in Milan, Michigan, where agents questioning him said he told them that he was one of many bombers being groomed by the Yemeni Al Qaeda affiliate to attack American-bound aircraft, according to ABC News.

Yemeni authorities confirmed Monday that Abdulmutallab had been in the country since August.

Read the original article on FOXNews.com

Leave It to the Generals

Judges should not undermine our military detention policy in Afghanistan.

By Stephanie Hessler
As the debate over whether to send more American troops to Afghanistan intensifies, our war efforts could be hindered by an unlikely source: the U.S. judicial branch. Federal judges are considering whether foreign al-Qaeda and Taliban supporters captured by the U.S. military and held at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan can sue the U.S. government to be released from custody. On October 30, Fadi al Maqaleh, a Yemeni citizen currently detained in Afghanistan, argued in a brief to the D.C. circuit court that he has the right under our Constitution to challenge his confinement in U.S. federal court. Despite his campaign promises to abandon the detention policies of his predecessor, President Obama has adopted the same position as President Bush and is trying to block al Maqaleh’s law suit from proceeding. On Monday, the Obama Administration filed a brief urging the D.C. circuit court to dismiss the case. Permitting enemy militants to sue their U.S. captors would overhaul the military’s entire detention system and severely disrupt the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. But one judge has already ruled in favor of al Maqaleh. In a stunning decision this spring, Judge John D. Bates of the D.C. district court declared that al Maqaleh has a constitutional right to bring a claim challenging his custody. The Obama administration immediately appealed to the D.C. circuit court, where the case is currently pending.

Read the rest of the article at NRO.com

Hoyer Says Conservatives Agree With Him and Holder That Terrorists Should Be Tried in Civilian Courts

By Matt Cover

Krauthammer:Young Hamlet's Agony

WASHINGTON — The genius of democracy is the rotation of power, which forces the opposition to be serious — particularly about things like war, about which until Jan. 20 of this year Democrats were decidedly unserious.

When the Iraq War (which a majority of Senate Democrats voted for) ran into trouble and casualties began to mount, Democrats followed the shifting winds of public opinion and turned decidedly anti-war. But needing political cover because of their post-Vietnam reputation for weakness on national defense, they adopted Afghanistan as their pet war.

I was part of the 2004 Kerry campaign, which elevated the idea of Afghanistan as ‘the right war’ to conventional Democratic wisdom,” wrote Democratic consultant Bob Shrum shortly after President Obama was elected. “This was accurate as criticism of the Bush administration, but it was also reflexive and perhaps by now even misleading as policy.”

Which is a clever way to say that championing victory in Afghanistan was a contrived and disingenuous policy in which Democrats never seriously believed, a convenient two-by-four with which to bash George Bush over Iraq — while still appearing warlike enough to fend off the soft-on-defense stereotype.

Brilliantly crafted and perfectly cynical, the “Iraq War bad, Afghan War good” posture worked. Democrats first won Congress, then the White House. But now, unfortunately, they must govern. No more games. No more pretense.

So what does their commander in chief do now with the war he once declared had to be won but had been almost criminally under-resourced by Bush?

Perhaps provide the resources to win it?

You would think so. And that’s exactly what Obama’s handpicked commander requested on Aug. 30 — a surge of 30,000 to 40,000 troops to stabilize a downward spiral and save Afghanistan the way a similar surge saved Iraq.

That was more than five weeks ago. Still no response. Obama agonizes publicly as the world watches. Why? Because, explains national security adviser James Jones, you don’t commit troops before you decide on a strategy.

No strategy? On March 27, flanked by his secretaries of defense and state, the president said this: “Today I’m announcing a comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” He then outlined a civilian-military counterinsurgency campaign to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan.

And to emphasize his seriousness, the president made clear that he had not arrived casually at this decision. The new strategy, he declared, “marks the conclusion of a careful policy review.”
Read the rest on Page 2- Townhall.com

It Looks Like GIs Are on Their Own

It Looks Like GIs Are on Their Own

By JENNIFER LOVEN

WASHINGTON — President Obama appears unlikely to accept his top Afghanistan commander’s recommendation for a surge of 40,000 troops, and is inclined to send only as many more forces as needed to keep al Qaeda at bay, a senior administration official said yesterday.The sharpened focus by Obama’s team on fighting al Qaeda above all other goals, while downgrading the emphasis on the Taliban, comes in the midst of an intensely debated administration review of the increasingly unpopular eight-year war.Though aides stress that the president’s final decision on any changes is still at least two weeks away, the emerging thinking suggests that he would be very unlikely to favor a large military increase of the kind being advocated by the top US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

McChrystal’s troop request is said to include a range of options, from adding as few as 10,000 combat troops to — the general’s strong preference — as many as 40,000.

Obama’s developing strategy on the Taliban will “not tolerate their return to power,” the senior official said in an interview with The Associated Press.

But the United States would fight only to keep the Taliban from retaking control of Afghanistan’s central government — something it is now far from being capable of — and from giving renewed sanctuary in Afghanistan to al Qaeda, the official said.

Obama has conferred nearly every day this week on the war, and was continuing that yesterday with Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

On Wednesday, the eighth anniversary of the war launched by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Obama and more than a dozen officials in his war council met for three hours to focus on Afghanistan’s neighbor, Pakistan.

Read the rest of the story at New York Post