It's no surprise that Bush's strenuous defense of "tough" interrogation methods for terror detainees found a fan in the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. On Friday, the page accused the anti-Bush crowd of endangering civil liberties by objecting to the administration's sanctioning of "aggressive questioning" to obtain information. You may be asking yourself: Huh? Well, the argument was limited to the endangerment of Americans’ civil liberties as opposed to human beings’ civil liberties. But the last time I checked, freedom from cruel and inhumane treatment was for all, not just Americans. And the comparison of the legally-questionable domestic surveillance program and - incredibly - "the unhappy experience of airport security" to waterboarding is fairly ridiculous.

According to the WSJ, Bush's explanation of how the CIA's interrogation techniques led us from Abu Zubaydah to the discovery of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's alias, "Muktar," and to his accomplice, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, showed "quite clearly [that] the interrogations are a major reason there have been no further terrorist attacks on American soil in the past five years." The problems with this statement are two-fold: First – to beat a dead horse – we all know that all of this talk about how well we've protected ourselves from terrorist attacks is only good until the next attack. Second, as Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times wrote on Friday, the 9/11 commission report and Zacarias Moussaoui's December 2001 federal grand jury indictment show that the government was aware of this information before Abu Zubaydah's 2002 capture. Both problems call for more caution before the U.S. adopts aggressive interrogation as the standard.

The White House just announced that John Bolton, the most controversial U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in history, will step down within weeks when his temporary appointment is up. So, who is in line to replace him? FP recently considered the contenders to fill Bolton's shoes. 

My only question about the outgoing U.S. ambassador's tricked-out bullet-proof vest is, will he take it with him when he leaves Iraq?

His replacement in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, doesn't seem like quite the self-aggrandizing type.

At the very least, the Bush administration has done wonders for the careers of constitutional scholars. Nary a month goes by when there isn't some sort of controversy about what the White House can or can't assert, who they can or can't lock up, and which laws they do or don't have to respect. Behind many of these constitutional dust-ups lurks Vice President Dick Cheney, either as the person in question, or as the architect of administration policy.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

Which is why it's laughable that the most powerful veep in U.S. history claims that he has a particularly unique perch—part of both the executive and legislative branches—that allows him to essentially do whatever he wants. His special status makes him immune to pesky things like executive orders, particularly those that might dent his penchant for secrecy. The latest outrage: In response to a 2003 executive order that requires all entities within the executive branch "that come into the possession of classified material" to report how much information they are keeping secret, Cheney simply hasn't complied. He hasn't reported for years the number of documents his office is stamping confidential, and he's gone so far as to suggest that the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), charged with keeping track of the information classified by the government, be abolished.

The 2003 executive order in question clearly gives the ISOO the authority to conduct on-site inspections (which Cheney wouldn't allow) and to demand annual reports on how many documents were being classified (which Cheney wouldn't file). The order gives classification powers to the veep that are identical to those of the president—as long as the veep is acting "in the performance of executive duties." So, why doesn't Cheney comply with the order?

The obvious answer is that Cheney simply considers his actions above public purview. And he's the extreme end of a larger problem: Since 1996, the number of federal documents stamped secret each year has nearly tripled, even if you don't count the OVP's double-secret files.

It's a dangerous trend. As Jacob Shapiro, a fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, argues in the latest issue of FP, the dramatic rise in government secrecy over the past few years leaves some of the country's best minds—security analysts, professors, and researchers outside the government—in the dark. So, while Cheney's office argues that secrecy keeps us safe by preventing information from falling into the wrong hands, classifying such an extraordinary amount leaves us more vulnerable. At the very least, Cheney should be letting us know how many secrets he's actually keeping.

SHAUN HEASLEY/Getty Images News

It was January 20, 2005, a heady time. U.S. President George W. Bush had just won reelection and believed the Bush Doctrine had handed him a powerful mandate. And he intended to run with it:

Today America speaks anew to the peoples of the world: All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you."

Oh, how times have changed. This was White House Press Secretary Dana Perino speaking to reporters yesterday:

I have a statement by the President on Burma that I will read out for him," she said, "and then a statement about the FAA.... I call on all nations that have influence with the regime to join us in supporting the aspirations of the Burmese people and to tell the Burmese Junta to cease using force on its own people who are peacefully expressing their desire for change."

In case you missed it, that was the vaunted "freedom agenda" lumped in with airport delays. To the tens of thousands of Burmese risking life and limb to demand freedom from their oppressors, Perino essentially said: We aren't really going to stand with you, but we'll definitely put a call in to China and Russia to see what they can do.

The hope of the Bush administration is apparently that increased sanctions—or the threat of them—and travel restrictions on a half dozen or so top junta leaders will bring the regime in Yangon crumbling down.

But just ask a Cuban how effective these kinds of sanctions are at toppling dictatorial regimes. The increased sanctions Bush announced at the United Nations on Wednesday are little more than symbolic. They will likely have almost no impact on the political situation, and the same goes for Europe's existing sanctions. As one European observer put it, "Stopping European companies from investing in a pineapple juice factory is laughable."

As for the now apparently universal belief that China can somehow be shamed into pressing the junta for democratic reforms, that's a joke—as Bill Overholt pointed out here on Wednesday. But let's step back for a second here: Is the United States really prepared to stake the hopes of freedom on the Chinese Communist Party? Is this what the Bush Doctrine has come to? 

The danger of the Bush Doctrine was always that people in places like Burma, Sudan, or Zimbabwe might take it seriously. That they would literally stand up for their freedom, expecting Team Bush to stand with them. "We either go to democracy or back to military dictatorship," one Burmese citizen wrote to the BBC this week. The Bush administration, apparently believing it has done enough, is prepared to sit back and watch the latter happen. More than 100,000 Burmese citizens a day are standing, and the Bush administration is sitting down.

That may be the saddest comment yet on the Bush Doctrine.

Sen. Dick Lugar, the senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, isn't the kind of guy who goes around spouting invectives. So when he says something like this, it's worth paying attention:

I'm not certain we have a plan for Afghanistan."

The comment came at a Capitol Hill hearing yesterday where Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher insisted the war in Afghanistan is being won. Boucher visited Afghanistan last week and told senators, "Nobody can tell me it's not going in a positive direction." That was enough to prompt Sen. Chuck Hagel to ask the obvious: "If we are making so much progress, why are we putting in 3,200 more Marines?"

Hagel's question can be answered in one word: Europe. Sec Def Bob Gates is betting that if NATO's European members see more U.S. Marines on the ground, they will be emboldened to send more of their own boys. Gates has reportedly sent stern letters to Franz Josef Jung, the German defense minister, and his other European counterparts asking for more troops. A peeved Jung turned down the U.S. request today, saying Germany's 3,100 troops, stationed mainly in Kabul, are "doing important, useful work."

Now the question is whether the other European NATO members will also fail to heed the warnings detailed in three independent reports this week, including one led by Gen. James Jones, the former chief U.S. commander in Afghanistan, that the war in Afghanistan is being lost. "Make no mistake," the Jones report says (pdf), "NATO is not winning in Afghanistan."

Will Europe sit idly by as Afghanistan is lost? It can't have helped to have Boucher painting a rosy picture on the Hill yesterday. Public opinion in Europe remains staunchly anti-war. A majority of Germans, for instance, say they oppose the continued deployment of German troops in Afghanistan. Now many will ask why their soldiers must remain if things are going so well. To Lugar's point, it doesn't appear the Bush administration has thought this out very well.

But the real blame here is at the feet of the Europeans. There is a broad split between America and Europe on what to do in Afghanistan. Two European diplomats had to be expelled from the country at the behest of U.S. officials after they allegedly held secret talks with the Taliban behind the alliance's back. Reasonable nations can disagree on how and when to negotiate with elements such as the Taliban. But if NATO members cannot support the military effort in Afghanistan, you have to wonder what it is that these countries stand for. A failure in Afghanistan will be judged by history as pure cowardice, and NATO will have been rendered the 21st century's most useless organization.

Via Andrew Sullivan, some very harsh words from Antonio Taguba, the now-retired general who investigated the Abu Ghraib abuses in 2004:

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

I can't speak to the legalities here, but I have a question for readers on the politics. Does throwing around charged phrases like "war crimes" help or hurt Taguba's cause?

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.”

The last few days have been tough for Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The Washington Post splashed a story Monday suggesting that US and European officials doubt Karzai has the moxie to stabilize the country. The article spurred Condoleezza Rice into a public affirmation of support and an aggressive denunciation of the anonymous officials casting stones.

Who are they? For whom do they speak? And what level do they speak?" Rice asked. "I have not heard this from my counterparts. Steve Hadley doesn't hear this from his counterparts. The president doesn't hear this from his counterparts."

The recent reporting about Karzai's shortcomings has suggested that his failures to combat drugs and warlords, on the one hand, and his government's fight against Taliban insurgents, on the other, are of a piece. But several informed observers have told me that, in some areas of the country at least, the struggles pull in opposite directions. So, a corrupt local governor with a hand in the opium jar may be quite effective at mobilizing local militias to combat the Taliban. Fire the governor for his sins and security quickly deteriorates. Afghanistan is still very much a pick-your-poison world. Unfortunately, outsiders impatient for results have little time for that game.  

George Will gets it right today. This anecdote from Woodward's new book would be hilarious were it not about war:

While leading the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the summer of 2003, David Kay received a phone call from "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, who wanted a particular place searched: "The vice president wants to know if you've looked at this area. We have indications -- and here are the geocoordinates -- that something's buried there." Kay and his experts located the area on the map. It was in the middle of Lebanon.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice inadvertently revealed her media favorites Thursday when she said:

My Fox guys, I love every single one of them.

Her gushing comment about Fox News's correspondents was overheard on an open microphone between television interviews. She also said she'd like to do an interview with CBS anchor Harry Smith, adding, "He's a decent guy. I know they are, like, 55 in the ratings, but I like him."

Everyone seems to want to compare the 2008 election to 1960. I guess the analogy is that, if Democrats can make 2008 a referendum on Iraq, just as John F. Kennedy made 1960 about America falling behind in the Cold War, then victory is in the bag. Jennifer Ruben made the case in the New York Observer on Tuesday:

It has been over 45 years since John F. Kennedy campaigned against Richard Nixon, an inveterate anticommunist with impressive foreign-policy credentials, on the 'missile gap'.... It has taken over four decades, but the time may once again have come for the Democratic Party to run on defense and foreign policy.... It's 1960 all over again.

Let's set aside for a moment the fact that Kennedy was as wrong about the missile gap as George W. Bush was about WMDs in Iraq. In the end, I'm fearful the better analogy might be to 1976. All of the candidates in the field so far—from both sides of the aisle—look more like foreign-policy lightweights such as Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter than they do John F. Kennedy.

I'll get to the Republicans in a later post. For now, what I want to know is: What foreign policy, exactly, do the Democrats plan to run on in 2008?

Until yesterday, I thought the policy was withdrawal from Iraq, an idea that resonates with the Democratic base, many independents, and an increasing number of Republicans. But it took Democrats about 12 hours from the time of Bush's veto to drop their insistence on a timeline for bringing troops home. That didn't look very Kennedy-like to me. But it didn't stop House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from trying to remain indignant, saying, "But make no mistake: Democrats are committed to ending this war."

But how? Sure, as Blake's post suggests, upcoming appropriations bills will provide some opportunities. But what's to say Bush won't veto those too, and that he won't still have the votes to block an override? And after the troops have come home, the terrorist threat won't have gone away—merely modifying terminology won't change that. What's the Democrats' plan for keeping Americans safe?

I'm hardly the first to ask this question. When the Democrats took control of Congress, I remembered a 2004 article by Peter Beinart—who, like Kennedy, is a liberal hawk— in which he posited that the fundamental failure of the Democrats is their inability to formulate a foreign policy consisting of anything other than criticisms of Bush:

When liberals talk about America's new era, the discussion is largely negative--against the Iraq war, against restrictions on civil liberties, against America's worsening reputation in the world.

Beinart has gotten many things wrong, particularly when it comes to Iraq and the war on terror. But here he's got a point. And three years later, the Democrats still haven't convinced the U.S. public that they are anything but "not Bush." Is that good enough to win? We'll find out in 2008.

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

The U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has become a huge thorn in the White House's side, both at home and abroad.

But it looks like Vice President Dick Cheney might have found an unexpected ally in his quest to keep its doors open: Algerian detainee Ahmed Belbacha has been fighting to be allowed to stay at Gitmo. And while a U.S. federal judge rejected his motion to stop his transfer last week, his lawyers are not ready to give up.

So what could possibly be so great in there? Is it the 22 hours each day in an all-steel isolation cell with no windows and no contact with other inmates? Michael Moore might insist that it's the great healthcare.

But actually, it's what Belbacha fears is waiting for him upon his return home. Zachary Katznelson, his lawyer, says:

Even though the Americans say he poses no threat, Ahmed fears that he has the stamp of Guantanamo Bay on him and he will be treated by the authorities as a terrorist if he is returned to Algeria. It is a bizarre situation because the reason he left in the first place was because the Islamist terrorists were threatening to kill him.

A U.S. military spokesman reassures us that the United States requires countries receiving detainees from Guantánamo to pledge that they will treat them humanely. Groups like Human Rights Watch have plenty to say about how far these empty "diplomatic assurances" will get you. For men like Ahmed Belbacha, suddenly Gitmo doesn't look all that bad.

In this post last Friday, we asked U.S. foreign service officers to send their thoughts on Embassy Baghdad and the possibility that they might be forcibly deployed there. A couple of the responses we've received thus far are posted below. And we'd like to hear more. E-mail us with your views.

I have mixed feelings on the directed assignments to Iraq. I believe fundamentally in worldwide availability and in serving at hard-to fill and hardship posts.... I'm not afraid of danger -- I served two years in Pakistan. I accepted the daily risk of a terrorist attack on my home, office or vehicle because I thought our mission there was important and my work made a difference....

So why haven't I volunteered yet? For starters, I'm not an Arabic speaker. I have no desire to learn Arabic, and that comes from my impressions of how women are treated in the Arab world.... I've served in three other Muslim countries and found meaningful ways to promote  U.S. policy and programs, but I'm just not interested in learning Arabic unless I am told I have to.

However, had I been on the list of Prime Candidates, I would have contacted my CDO [Career Development Officer] and taken my assignment. Immediately. Without all the fuss. I think the "death sentence" comment was a bit dramatic.  We haven't lost diplomats in Iraq (versus six FS deaths in Karachi in the last decade-- and I would happily serve in Karachi).... Worldwide availability means worldwide, and if the Secretary deems this a policy priority, we signed up to support that mission.

And the second: 

I have twice volunteered for Iraq Service, but not been selected.... It is pointless to argue whether or not the United States should be in Iraq; we are there and must be constructive if possible.... In my opinion, Ambassador Crocker's staffing requests are absurd and purely based on the politics of looking like you are trying. I do not believe there is enough work -- that can feasibly be accomplished -- for 40 mid-level political, economic, and public affairs officers at Embassy Baghdad....

The Secretary has failed to bring our Service along with her. She was quoted as being disappointed with the staff in Baghdad after a trip there. She calls on the service, on Embassies around the world, to make sacrifices to give the Administration's adventure in Iraq a prayer of succeeding. But at the same time she demonstrates neither the courage nor the effort to seek adequate resources -- not before from a Republican Congress, and not now with Democrats....

The Foreign Service has been painted into a corner, and watch what happens next: we will be again criticized as unpatriotic elitist cowards.... We will come out looking lousy, even if only because we did not sign up, get trained, prepare, or develop skills to serve in a war zone. Perhaps it is giving the Secretary and [Director General Harry Thomas] too much credit to suggest this is done on purpose; to throw the Foreign Service under the bus.... It was particularly disgraceful when DG Thomas asked about a time when "88 percent of people thought slavery was fine." At a minimum, this official should never speak in public if he cannot stay near the message. His defensiveness before the "Human Resources" he allegedly manages suggests that his first priority is policy. Not people. The contrast to Secretary Powell's time, when we were his "troops," is stunning.

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