For the first time, alleged al Qaeda members are being charged by U.S. prosecutors on narcoterrorism charges. Oumar Issa, Harouna Toure and Idriss Abelrahman were arrested in Ghana last week in a sting operation coordinated by the Drug Enforcement Agency and Ghanaian authorities and were hoping to move hundreds of kilograms of cocaine through West Africa to finance al Qaeda and its North African offshoot, Al Qaeda in the Maghreb. 

U.S. attorney Preet Bharara says the arrests "reflect the emergence of a worrisome alliance between al Qaeda and transnational narcotics traffickers," but if these guys represent the vanguard of a new generation of narcoterror, we probably don't have too much to worry about:

The operation took shape in August, when a paid DEA informant posing as a Lebanese radical encountered Issa, an alleged fixer for a criminal organization that operated in Togo, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Mali, according to a sworn statement from veteran DEA agent Daria Lupacchino.

The two met in September in Ghana. The informant said he represented members of FARC, which has targeted U.S. citizens with bombings, kidnappings and other violence in recent years. Issa told the informant, in a conversation recorded by authorities, that his associates had circumvented customs agents and could ensure "safe passage" through the African desert, the affidavit said.

The informant later met with Toure, identified by Issa as "the main guy," and verified Toure's identity using a passport he mistakenly left at a hotel that served as the meeting site, the DEA agent wrote.

"Toure stated that he has worked with al Qaeda to transport and deliver between one and two tons of hashish to Tunisia and that his organization and al Qaeda have collaborated in the human smuggling of Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian subjects into Spain," the Lupacchino affidavit said.

Toure also allegedly described efforts to kidnap European citizens and to obtain foreign visas, the court papers said.

Granted we don't many details, but I doubt that most serious high-volume traffic drug smugglers -- even if they got taken in by the agent's Lebanaese radical/FARC story -- would brag about all of the other nefarious criminal enterprises they're involved with or be sloppy enough to leave their passport behind when meeting with a cocaine supplier.

A large contingent of American bands have joined the Close Gitmo Now campaign in direct protest of the use of their music during torture practices at Guantanamo Bay. The new campaign is led by two retired generals: Lieutenant General Robert Gard and Brigadier General John Johns. Robert Gard has spoken out in defense of the musicians, stating:

"The musicians' music 'was used without their knowledge as part of the Bush administration's misguided policies'."

Popular artists such as REM, Pearl Jam, Bonnie Raitt, Tom Morello, Billy Bragg, Michelle Branch, Jackson Browne, and The Roots have signed an open letter to Congress requesting the declassification of government records concerning how music was utilized during "futility" interrogation tactics - making the prisoner feel hopeless while exploiting his psychological, moral, and sociological weaknesses.

Tom Morellon of Rage Against the Machine fame has expressed his peronsal rage against Dick Cheney:

"Guantanamo is known around the world as one of the places where human beings have been tortured - from water boarding, to stripping, hooding and forcing detainees into humiliating sexual acts - playing music for 72 hours in a row at volumes just below that to shatter the eardrums. Guantanamo may be Dick Cheney's idea of America, but it's not mine.  The fact that music I helped create was used in crimes against humanity sickens me - we need to end torture and close Guantanamo now."

But don't except every rock band to jump on board, some view the use of their music at Gitmo as an honor.

Above, Zach de la Rocha of Rage Against The Machine performs during the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC) at the Target Center September 3, 2008 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Eric Thayer/Stringer/Getty Images

Near Geneva, Switzerland sits a 27-kilometer particle accelerator, the largest the world has ever seen. When it is finally switched on and makes it past the warm-up stages, it will create conditions that haven't existed since the beginning of the universe. This, naturally, scares the bejesus out of people, some taking it to the courts to stop its activation. Foreign Policy reported one group's fears:

"There is a real possibility of creating destructive theoretical anomalies such as miniature black holes, strangelets and deSitter space transitions. These events have the potential to fundamentally alter matter and destroy our planet." -Walter Wagner, LHCDefense.org

The Large Haldron Collider (LHC) at the CERN Lab has yet to reach full operation, but it will later this year. That is, unless something crazy happens...like, for instance, a CERN researcher being arrested for suspected links to al-Qaeda!

This is pretty scary to begin with, but even scarier is the fact that the man's brother was also arrested; he works at the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

The suspect has been linked to the Algerian chapter of al-Qaeda, and suggested targets in France. After being under surveillance for 18 months, the French decided to bring him down, luckily before the Death Star LHC was turned on.

CERN says the suspect was never involved with any elements that could be used for terrorist purposes; he mainly worked on data analysis.

FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images

In a talk given this afternoon at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, retired Gen.  John Abizaid outlined his view of U.S. involvement in the Middle East. He argued that it is foolish to approach issues on a country-by-country basis, complaining that "we look at Iraq through a soda straw. We look at Afghanistan through a soda straw." Instead, says Abizaid, the United States must develop a regional strategy that accounts for the roles of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

For the same reason, he suggested, the debate over whether or not to send more troops to Afghanistan has been over-simplified; the discussion should be broadened to include the relative demands of Iraq, Afghanistan and the region at large.

Abizaid also emphasized the ideological nature of the conflict, and the need for soft power to address the root causes of radicalism. He noted that Baitullah Mehsud, the top Taliban leader, is referred to as "the commander of the faithful."

"While we may chuckle at that title," Abizaid said, "the people fighting for him do not." When asked whether there should be a shift to a counter-terrorism approach in Afghanistan that relies more upon targeted strikes than nation-building, Abizaid responded that such a plan is impractical. Stabilization in Afghanistan and Iraq is a precondition for effective counter terrorist operations, he argued, because it provides the infrastructure needed to develop the "superb, superb intelligence" needed.

The theme of the talk was that instability anywhere in the region is a serious threat to surrounding countries. With our "ground forces spread thin" and "our 24-7 forces totally engaged," the United States must more fully incorporate diplomatic, political and economic plans to get a handle on the region. A number of questions were directed to the resources required for such a broad regional approach, and towards the end of the talk, the retired general was asked if the situation would be better in Afghanistan had the United States not invaded Iraq.

"All's I know is that we did what we did, and we are where we are," he answered.

Over on the AfPak Channel and Stephen Walt's blog, a fight is brewing over the U.S. recommitment of troops and resources to war in Afghanistan.

Here's the battle in a nutshell. The Obama administration -- despite questions raised by eminences grises on Afghanistan, such as Harvard's Rory Stewart -- has chosen to double-down.

Walt argues that Obama's contention --"left unchecked the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans" -- is a myth. Therefore, realists should recognize it hardly justifies remaining in Afghanistan.

Not so, argue the AfPak Channel's Peter Bergen and NYU fellow Paul Cruickshank -- the Taliban do and would provide cover for al Qaeda, justifying the U.S. presence. (Here's a one-time tag for responses from within FP.)

We'll post more replies from other bloggers as they come in -- here's Windy security reporter Spencer Ackerman, for starters. If you've blogged it, leave it in comments!

Washington Independent blogger Spencer Ackerman -- read his reporting on the torture issue, seriously -- follows up on Laura Rozen's post on John Kiriakou.

In 2007, Kiriakou famously went on television to describe waterboarding, and discussed the single incidence in which Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded. After just 30 or 35 seconds, Kiriakou said, Zubaydah started singing and never needed to be tortured again. 

But Kiriakou wasn't there for the waterboarding -- he was half a world away, in Langley -- and Zubaydah was waterboarded more than 80 times. The New York Times first noted the difference in the two stories.

I remember wondering at the time why Kirkiakou was allowed to come forward and talk about interrogations so sensitive the Bush administration created a special "top secret" designation for them. Why didn't the CIA revoke his pension and prosecute him for leaking? 

The New York Times writes:

The C.I.A., which considered legal action against Mr. Kiriakou for divulging classified information, said last week that he "was not - and is not - authorized to speak on behalf of the CIA."

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said: "This agency did not publicly disclose the frequency with which the waterboard was used, noting only that it was employed with three detainees. If reporters got that wrong, they weren't misled from here."

The CIA didn't do much to repudiate or discredit Kiriakou at the time, despite the fact that he broke a central covenant of his profession. Here's the CIA response, as reported by ABC News: 

The former CIA intelligence official who went public on ABC News about the agency's use of waterboarding in interrogations, John Kiriakou, apparently will not be the subject of a Justice Department investigation, even though some CIA officials believe he revealed classified information about the use of waterboarding.

"They were furious at the CIA this morning, but cooler heads have apparently prevailed for the time being," a senior Justice Department official told the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

Gen. Michael Hayden, the CIA director, did sent out a classified memo this morning warning all employees "of the importance of protecting classified information," a CIA spokesperson told ABCNews.com.

Had they wanted to silence or punish him, surely they could have. It all seems a bit strange to me, and leads to one obvious possibility: John Kiriakou -- telegenic and well-spoken John Kiriakou, who never went to jail for blasting state secrets on television -- was told the story to tell and released onto an unsuspecting public. It's an impression the CIA will have difficulty dulling now. 

For, Kirkiakou went on to act as a "paid consultant" for ABC news after the interview, Laura reports.

Torture: it's a byzantine tale that unraveled over the course of eight years, and is only reaching its denouement this week. There are two strands, both vitally important, to follow. One's the story of what happened and when (for that, see FP's torture timeline). The other is the story of when we knew it.

Indeed, this week, it seems like the torture story's just breaking through. But, allegations of abuse and even prisoner death started emerging as soon as the United States had prisoners in custody. And reporters have doggedly covered it since then.

One of the first Washington Post stories on the treatment of detainees from the War on Terror arrived in January 2002, just months after 9/11 and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Already, there were 158 detainees from 25 different countries held in Guantanamo Bay, and two congressional delegations had traveled there to review conditions. The detainees were getting 2,400 calories a day, the Post story reported. "Some of them are getting medical attention for the first time in their lives," Senator Bill Nelson proudly noted.

There were also already allegations of prisoner abuse. Photos showing bound, blindfolded, and shackled detainees on their knees appeared as soon as prisoners arrived in Gitmo -- the International Committee of the Red Cross censured the U.S. for the photos, which violated the Geneva Conventions.

The following month, in February, President George W. Bush issued an executive order denying detainees the privileges and protections of the Geneva Conventions. The United States started down the road that culminated in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram, and the black sites -- secret overseas prisons, in countries like Egypt, where prisoners were sent via "extraordinary rendition" and the worst detainee abuse may have happened.

Reports of U.S. soldiers abusing persons they detained in Afghanistan emerged that winter as well -- kicking and beating them after they'd already been shackled. The military went on the defensive. "I don't believe that any of the detainees...were subject to beatings or rough treatment after they were taken into custody," General  Richard B. Myers told the New York Times. "All 27 detainees were medically screened upon arrival in Kandahar, and there were no issues of beatings or kickings or anything of that sort."

Over the next year, the trickle became a stream. The military admitted using harsh techniques on Abu Zubayda and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, high-ranking al Qaeda operatives we now know were repeatedly waterboarded.

At the time, officials told the New York Times "physical torture would not be used against Mr. Mohammed...They said his interrogation would rely on what they consider acceptable techniques like sleep and light deprivation and the temporary withholding of food, water, access to sunlight and medical attention."

It took the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, broken by veteran reporter Seymour Hersh and CBS News, to blow the door open -- that happened in April 2004.

It spawned a glut of media attention, as well as congressional hearings and a series of governmental reports: the Taguba report (on the Abu Ghraib scandal), the Schlesinger report (which described how harsh techniques from Afghanistan crept into Iraq), the Fay Jones report (on the Army personnel responsible for prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib), the Church report (71 cases of abuse, six deaths). Over the next years came the Schmidt report (which said treatment at Guantanamo was humane, in 2005, after the waterboarding of Abu Zubayda and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), as well as the Senate Armed Services Committee Report released this week. 

So, most of the foundational reporting on torture happened in late 2003, 2004, and 2005 -- by reporters like Dana Priest of the Washington Post and Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, describing extraordinary rendition and the black site prisons.

But it's crucial to remember that a small group of reporters -- at the New York Times, McClatchy, the Washington Post, Time magazine, Newsweek magazine, and the New Yorker -- had the story before it was a story. They worked with a slight and growing handful of congressional, White House, military, Justice Department, legal, and other sources. They used a list-serv started by lawyers working on detainee cases to learn information. And they opened the door for Abu Ghraib to open the door further.  

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

There's been a wealth of information released on the treatment and torture of detainees in U.S. custody in the past days. Here's a capsule of the new news:

• The Senate Armed Services Committee released a declassified report, written in November, 2008.  The report describes how the Pentagon used SERE techniques, meant to help captured soldiers resist foreign interrogators, to break down U.S. detainees.

• A New York Times story pointed out that the CIA did no due diligence on the history of SERE techniques before using them on detainees.

• The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a narrative history of the harsh treatment of detainees like Abu Zubayda. It works through the myriad overlapping Office of Legal Counsel opinions pertaining to detainee treatment.  

• Last week, the Obama administration released four memos, requested by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act, detailing the Bush administration's legal case for torture. The memos, which had few redactions, described in intricate detail what happened to detainees during interrogations -- including forced nudity, forced wakefulness, beatings and slappings.  

• A blogger parsing released memos found that Abu Zubayda and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, two of the three people waterboarded at the hands of CIA interrogators, were waterboarded 266 times. 

• Questions arose about whether the brutal treatment of detainees ever led to actionable intelligence. To this end, in a Fox News interview, former Vice President Dick Cheney asked for the release of memos showing that waterboarding worked. Marc Thiessen, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, took to the pages of the Washington Post's editorial section to argue that enhanced interrogation prevented terrorist attacks.

• President Obama went forward and back about the prosecution for the CIA agents who tortured detainees; ultimately the decision belongs to Attorney General Eric Holder. Top torture reporter Jane Mayer at The New Yorker started to deconstruct the "invisibility cloak" President Obama cast last week. 

One of the most interesting things about the four newly released Bush administration memos on the “enhanced interrogation” of detainees in overseas secret CIA prisons has been what isn’t in there, rather than what is. The truly grotesque caterpillar revelation aside, the memos weren’t very revelatory. We already knew about the SERE techniques. We knew that medical professionals attended them -- and that Jay Bybee, then an administration lawyer, now a federal judge, felt the presence of medical professionals meant it wasn’t torture.

But Tom Malinowski, of Human Rights Watch, pointed me to one truly new detail, in a footnote in the May 2005 memo from Steven Bradbury to John Rizzo, a CIA lawyer. Here’s footnote 28:

“This is not to say that the interrogation program has worked perfectly. According to the IG Report, the CIA, at least initially, could not always distinguish detainees who had information but were successfully resisting interrogation from those who did not actually have the information….On at least one occasion, this may have resulted in what might be deemed in retrospect to have been the unnecessary use of enhanced techniques. On that occasion, although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be compliant, elements within CIA headquarters still believed he was withholding information. [REDACTED PORTION.] At the direction of CIA Headquarters, interrogators therefore used the waterboard one more time on Zubaydah.”

Which marks the first time a memo has admitted that waterboarding was “unnecessary.”

Geography Professor Thomas Gillespie of UCLA has employed a technique typically used for tracking endangered species in order to pinpoint the most likely location of the world's most wanted terrorist. In a paper (pdf) published in the MIT International Review Gillespie describes how he used biogeographic data including bin Laden's last known location, cultural background, security needs, declining health, limited mobility and height to create a mathematical model that he claims will show where the terror mastermind is hiding.

According to Gillespie, Osama is riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight about here:

More specifically, he found a 90 percent chance that bin Laden is in Kurram province in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, most likely in the town of Parachinar which gave shelter to a larger number of Mujahedin during the 1980s. Here's a closer look at the region with Osama probabilities shown:

Gillespie even identified three buildings in Parachinar that would make the most likely shelters for Bin Laden and his entourage. Here's one of them:

The exact coordinates are N. 33.901944° E.70.093746°. Anyone want to go check it out?

Images: The MIT International Review

I see that senior U.S. counterterrorism officials are bragging to NPR that al Qaeda is getting whipped in the rural wilds of Pakistan:

CIA-directed airstrikes against al-Qaida leaders and facilities in Pakistan over the past six to nine months have been so successful, according to senior U.S. officials, that it is now possible to foresee a "complete al-Qaida defeat" in the mountainous region along the border with Afghanistan.

The officials say the terrorist network's leadership cadre has been "decimated," with up to a dozen senior and midlevel operatives killed as a result of the strikes and the remaining leaders reeling from the repeated attacks.

"The enemy is really, really struggling," says one senior U.S. counterterrorism official. "These attacks have produced the broadest, deepest and most rapid reduction in al-Qaida senior leadership that we've seen in several years." [...]

"In the past, you could take out the No. 3 al-Qaida leader, and No. 4 just moved up to take his place," says one official. "Well, if you take out No. 3, No. 4 and then 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, it suddenly becomes a lot more difficult to revive the leadership cadre."

If you take these claims at face value, it's a pretty impressive achievement.

But here's the problem: At the same time as al Qaeda appears to be getting its collective ass kicked, native Pakistani and Afghan militants appear to be getting stronger, not weaker, just as Pakistani analysts have been warning for months.

Just today, militants in Pakistan's Khyber Agency cut the chief supply route to U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The Obama team appears to be shocked at how bad the situation in the region has gotten. Fareed Zakaria is talking about Obama's Vietnam. And in what is either desperation or brilliant diplomacy, NATO is reportedly considering turning to Iran -- Iran! -- for logistical help.

Is this victory?

UPDATE: John McCreary, of NightWatch, comments on the Iran story:

Iran and Pakistan have a common interest in combating extremists, and they can improve the situation in their region by enhancing political and economic ties, according to Fars news agency today, citing Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Head of Iran's Expediency Council. Iranian-Pakistani cooperation is the most vital issue in resolving the Afghanistan situation, Rafsanjani said, and foreign forces there cannot fight extremists without the partnership of those two countries. Cooperation on the exchange and supply of energy is the best area for Iranian-Pakistani relations, he added. Rafsanjani made the comments at a meeting with Mohammad Bakhsh Abbasi, the new Pakistani ambassador to Iran.

Rafsanjani made a decent point about the need for partnership with adjacent countries in stabilizing Afghanistan. The significance is that he seems to be offering it. Iran, for example, has not dismissed or discouraged media speculation or the NATO suggestion that Iran could become an alternate supply route for international forces in Afghanistan.

Naturally, Rafsanjani did not mention Iran's terms. Iran always has terms.

An interesting article by Alan Cowell and Mark McDonald in today's New York Times reveals an inconvenient truth about analysts who study terrorism: they often have wildly divergent views about the same events.

Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims and not linked to Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba, another violent South Asian terrorist group.

There’s absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it,” she said of the attack. "Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don’t do hostage-taking and they don’t do grenades." By contrast, Mr. Gohel in London said "the fingerprints point to an Islamic Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group."

Fair goes on to make the point that India has a lot of angry Muslims of its own, and has a history of telling the world, "Our Muslims have not been radicalized."

I would point out that the two main competing theories -- a domestic group and outside involvement -- are not mutually exclusive. Extremist groups have been known to share logistical networks (for safehouses, weapons procurement, etc.), and there aren't always bright lines between them. So, it could be that domestic perpetrators of the attack conceived and executed the idea, but operatives turned to Lashkar-e-Taiba or some other group for logistical help and expertise.

UPDATE: Here's a pretty strong clue that points to Kashmir:

A militant holed up at the center phoned an Indian television channel to offer talks with the government for the release of hostages, but also to complain about abuses in Kashmir, over which India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars.

"Ask the government to talk to us and we will release the hostages," the man, identified by the India TV channel as Imran, said, speaking in Urdu in what sounded like a Kashmiri accent.

"Are you aware how many people have been killed in Kashmir? Are you aware how your army has killed Muslims. Are you aware how many of them have been killed in Kashmir this week?"

On the other hand, a senior Indian military official seems pretty confident the militants are from Faridkot, Pakistan. One captured terrorist had a Punjabi accent.

It's become a cliché, but I think we can now officially say that the financial crisis has been worse than 9/11 for the United States:

The Commerce Department said Friday that retail sales fell by 2.8 percent last month, surpassing the old mark of a 2.65 percent drop in November 2001 in the wake of the terrorist attacks that year.

Back in October, al Qaeda-linked groups were taking credit for getting the United States into a quagmire that had "exhausted its resources and bankrupted its economy." That's rank economic illiteracy -- America's current woes have a lot more to do with subprime mortgages than overextension abroad. If anything, credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations have proven to be the true weapons of mass destruction of our age.

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux has give us permission to post the following excerpts from After 9/11: America's War on Terror (2001- ), by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón. A self-described "work of graphic journalism" by the same folks who put together the visual adaptation of the 9/11 report, the book is a very cool way to look at what's happened over the past seven years.

Below is a vignette from the book, which shows the Bush administration shifting its focus from Afghanistan to Iraq:

Click here to see the rest of this series.