Annie Lowrey's blog

Last night, the popular blog Gawker and a few other sources reported that Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, participated in advising the White House on the transition via a George Washington University think tank on homeland security.

It turns out, it was all wrong. Last night, I spoke with Frank Cilluffo, the director of G.W.'s Homeland Security Policy Institute and a Foreign Policy contributor, who explained the errors.

The Institute had authored an advisory paper -- not because the White House commissioned it, but because that's what think tanks do. 

How was Hasan "affiliated"? Cilluffo notes that G.W. lists everyone who RSVPs to Institute events in the meeting booklets (common practice in D.C. think tanks). Hasan was just a member of the public who attended a HSPI event. He never had any affiliation at all. 

Cilluffo remembered calling on Hasan during a Q&A session. The Institute director recalled cutting Hasan off when he wouldn't stop talking, and recognized him when the television started broadcasting his picture yesterday. But, that was it. They have no relationship; the think tank has no relationship with Hasan. 

Gawker has since corrected its post, which is good to see; other blogs (see Spencer Ackerman, for one) have debunked the rumor. But the lie peppered the Internet last night, and continues to today. The media and the public, of course, want answers about this senseless crime. I hope the media waits until it really has them to publish.

There are breaking reports of a deadly massacre at a massive U.S. military base, Fort Hood, 60 miles north of Austin, Texas.

One or three perpetrators -- reports differ -- killed at least 12 and injured dozens more inside the base. One alleged shooter is dead, Major Malik Nadal Hasan, age 39; two other people are in custody. The shooter or shooters allegedly used handguns in a facility for soldiers preparing to head to Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is just a horrifying, tragic situation. 

At the end of his New York Times column today, Nick Kristof offers a, frankly, adorable apology to the country of Slovenia.

In several columns, I've noted indignantly that we have worse health statistics than Slovenia. For example, I noted that an American child is twice as likely to die in its first year as a Slovenian child. The tone -- worse than Slovenia! -- gravely offended Slovenians. They resent having their fine universal health coverage compared with the notoriously dysfunctional American system.

As far as I can tell, every Slovenian has written to me. Twice. So, to all you Slovenians, I apologize profusely for the invidious comparison of our health systems. Yet I still don't see anything wrong with us Americans aspiring for health care every bit as good as yours.

So true! And, we noted in FP's office, Slovenia is a total Central European jewel: beautiful, prosperous, calm, safe, wealthy, and Mediterranean (tucked between Italy and Croatia, with access to the ocean and the Alps) -- plus, apparently, with universal health care to boot.

Flickr user Ah_Zut

Today, an Italian court convicted 23 U.S. citizens, 22 of them acknowledged as CIA agents, for the daylight abduction and "extraordinary rendition" of cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, better known as Abu Omar.

The CIA snatched Abu Omar off of a street in Milan in 2002, sending him to the U.S. base in Ramstein, Germany, and then to Egypt, where he was allegedly tortured.

Adam Serwer at the American Prospect asks: "This case has always puzzled me -- Italy is an ally. Why was extraordinary rendition necessary? Such methods are usually reserved for apprehending individuals in countries that are not friendly to the United States precisely because those countries won't cooperate."

It's a good question, with a somewhat queasy answer: the CIA did it, I presume, because it was the most efficient way to do it, and, at the time, the CIA operated in extralegal channels with impunity. (The case that always confused me most was that of Ahmed Agiza -- human-rights respecting U.S. ally Sweden actually participated in that one.)

And it seems the Italian court is ensuring the CIA knows there's no impunity now, even if the only real effect is that former Milan station chief Robert Lady needs to cancel his European vacations. 

Say someone asked you what the world's biggest economy was. The United States, of course, you'd surely answer -- maybe throwing in that China would beat it in a decade or so. The chance that you'd answer with a country from across the pond, like France? Miniscule.

But if you said the European Union, you'd also be, well, right. It's a politically, economically, and financially unified bloc -- and a big one. It has nearly 200 million more people than the United States and bests the U.S. economy by billions.

In that light, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's address to a joint session of U.S. Congress today seems a bit more weighty. She's not just the leader of the biggest economy in Europe. She is, at least until the EU presidency is figured out, the most important leader in the EU. And during her speech on the Hill, she pushed the United States to sign on to the Copenhagen treaty next month, arguing that there's "no time to lose" on climate change.

Alas, she told it to the U.S. political institution that cares about her entreaties least. No member of the House or Senate will get voted out or censured because Europe enacts trade measures against a United States intransigent on the carbon issue -- no matter how deep the EU and United States' ties. But a representative certainly might get voted out because of how he or she decides on cap-and-trade. 

It makes me wonder if, at some point, the world's biggest economy might consider slapping tariffs on, well, world's other biggest economy -- with the EU, in effect, pricing in carbon on U.S. goods, rather than the United States doing it itself. It's actuallyjust what Congress proposed to do with developing nations with lower environmental standards than the United States, in the Waxman-Markey bill...

I've been enjoying the public back-and-forth between Rachel Maddow, host of the eponymous MSNBC show, and Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president and founder of Keep America Safe, a hawkish PAC.

In the past weeks and months, Cheney has appeared on television, in print, on the Web -- just about everywhere -- talking up her hard-line foreign-policy PAC and asserting that Obama's "‘radical' policies are placing us all at risk." A rhetorical question she posed, which appeared in the New York Times: "Mr. President, in a ticking time-bomb scenario, with American lives at stake, are you really unwilling to subject a terrorist to enhanced interrogation to get information that would prevent an attack?" (Putative White House answer: Yes.) The former State Department official and lawyer instead vocally advocates for policies more in line with the hard right, interventionist, neo-con fringe in the past administration.

This earned the PAC, well, a bit of flack from the left and center, along with slews of plain-old publicity (during its major fundraising drive, natch). Apparently, the push-back rubbed Cheney the wrong way -- and in response Keep America Safe put an advertisement up on its website, criticizing MSNBC for its negative coverage and asking "Why don't they want to talk substance" and "Why don't they want to debate the issues?"

Enter Maddow. As it turns out, the liberal television host had invited Cheney on her show dozens of times, and Cheney had always declined. So, Maddow called Cheney out, publicly offering to have the neo-con on the popular show to talk shop. Alas, it seems Cheney is more chicken than hawk -- she said she would appear on Hannity instead.

I felt a twinge of disappointment, as I would have loved to have seen the Maddow vs. Cheney debate -- particularly because Maddow is the talking head with the best handle on foreign-policy and security issues. In short: She is a wonk. Before her show hit the big time, she was planning to write a book on the military's effects on Washington politics, a project now shelved. She loves talking about the GI bill. She regularly hosts military and defense policy experts. In a quick scan of her shows and Keith Olbermann's over the past month, she devotes something like twice the time to defense and foreign policy issues. And I'd love to see more figures from across the aisle speak with her.

Getty Images

"She Loves You," yeah, yeah, yeah.

Plus, lots more great detail in the third part of David Rohde's New York Times articles on his time as a hostage in Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

We're two installments into New York Times writer David Rohde's five-part epic on the seven months he spent as a hostage of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And I can't recommend it enough to anyone interested in the country. Here's one fascinating excerpt, from the first part:

Over those months, I came to a simple realization. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of "Al Qaeda lite," a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan.

Living side by side with the Haqqanis' followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.

Rohde's revelations about his kidnappers themselves are even more interesting. The Times reporter, his driver, and his translator were on their way to interview a Taliban leader, Abu Tayyeb, when their car was hijacked. They were taken hostage by one Atiqullah, who said he had never heard of Abu Tayyeb. A few weeks into his detention, Rohde finds:

In conversations when our guards left the room, Tahir and Asad each separately whispered to me that Atiqullah was, in fact, Abu Tayyeb. They had known since the day we were kidnapped, they said, but dared not tell me. They asked me to stay silent as well. Abu Tayyeb had vowed to behead them if they revealed his true identity. Abu Tayyeb had invited us to an interview, betrayed us and then pretended that he was a commander named Atiqullah. I was despondent and left with only one certainty: We had no savior among the Taliban.

It's gripping, cinematic stuff -- and all the better knowing there's at least something of a happy ending. (Though Rohde is getting raked over the coals in his New York Times Q&A.) 

With detail like this, the articles show the Taliban in all its diversity. Rohde notes that many members of the Taliban are far more religious and radical than they were 8 years ago. But the movement has fragmented and atomized. Rohde notes that his captors were in essence common thieves, not ideological warriors, driven by and even obsessed with money.

That's why initiatives to bribe and negotiate with Taliban leaders, paying them in exchange for security, seem so attractive to me. The sums of money wouldn't need to be great -- there's not much to buy in Afghanistan anyway. Plus, there are only around 10,000 members of the Taliban remaining in Afghanistan, only 3,000 of whom are full-time militants. (Note, for a sense of scale there: Afghanistan is a good-sized country with a population of 33 million.) And the strategy has worked well elsewhere.