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Jamal Baadani was driving home from work outside Washington on November 5 when a friend called to tell him a gunman had shot up the Army base at Ft. Hood, Tex. It didn’t take long for Baadani to learn that the suspect, Nidal Malik Hasan, was an Arab-American, a Muslim, and a member of the U.S. military. In other words, nothing like him and everything like him, all at once.

“I was just praying, man,” recalled Baadani, 45, a sergeant in the Marine Corps Reserve. “That’s just been my worst nightmare.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

But Baadani and some of his Arab and Muslim friends in uniform consider it, in President Obama’s occasional phrase, a teachable moment. They are muting their frustration at having to demonstrate their patriotism in public, preferring to answer uncomfortable questions in order to promote cross-cultural unity, something they consider an opportunity that comes with the uniform they wear. After all, Colin Powell cited a New Yorker photo essay of the crescent-engraved headstones of American Muslim troops who died in Iraq and Afghanistan as an example of the national unity he hoped to inspire by voting for Obama last year.

“If we’re looking to heal divides and bridge gaps, I’m out there every day educating people about our history, culture and contributions to America,” said Baadani, the founder of the Association of Patriotic Arab Americans in Military, the support and outreach group he formed after 9/11. “We don’t have to prove we’re not terrorists. We have to prove we’re willing to work to educate our fellow countrymen.”

APAAM is an informal network Baadani put together both to provide support for other Arab and Muslim-American service personnel and to show other American communities that their communities eagerly serve in the military. It takes no money and has only as many as 200 members — active and retired military — around the country representing the group. Its outreach efforts, Baadani said in an interview, are mostly centered on the group’s website, which features stories of prominent Arab and Muslim American officers like Gen. John Abizaid, who served as commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East from 2003 to 2007. Baadani is an eager proponent of not letting even minor slights go unanswered. He replied to a derogatory email forward by writing respectfully to its author, “As a Muslim American Marine, I have lead Marines in combat on numerous occasions and since 9/11, I participated in counter-terrorism operations to pursue those terrorist bastards who attacked our country … The attachments I sent you will give you some other information regarding Muslim patriotism in helping defend our country.”

The military does not keep statistics on how many Arab-Americans or Muslims serve in its ranks. APAAM’s website estimates that 3,500 Arab-Americans and 6,000 Muslims currently serve in the military. It’s a sensitive subject. Baadani even said that he was a Methodist before his first deployment overseas, to Lebanon in 1984, explaining that he “didn’t want to attract attention to myself.” Post-Ft. Hood, the military has shown additional signs of apprehension about discussing Arab and Muslim Americans in the ranks. Although an Air Force sergeant based in Florida named Bassel Noori expressed interest in commenting for this piece, Noori’s chain of command denied a request for an interview. The Air Force, explained a public-affairs officer for Nouri’s unit, did not want to appear to be expressing a perspective on what it considered an internal Army matter.

That sensitivity makes APAAM all the more important to its members. One of Baadani’s first recruits was Ace Montasser, a Marine from Brooklyn, N.Y., whom Baadani met when both were stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C., shortly after the 9/11 attacks. “I was just a Marine under his wing,” remembered Montasser, an Iraq veteran and a 27-year-old radio DJ in Detroit. Baadani got in touch the old fashioned way: he knew Montasser’s cousin, and so placed a phone call asking if the young Marine would be interested in helping form a support organization for servicemembers like them. The organization grew from there, through family contacts and emails to friends. Media appearances soon followed, as reporters called for feature pieces about American Muslim military service.

Like several interviewed for this article, Montasser said his fellow Marines “never had an issue” with his heritage. Nidal Allis, a former Air Force intelligence expert who served in the Pentagon on 9/11, said the worst he has experienced was ignorant comments on his Facebook page from non-servicemembers. Indeed, it has been notable how in the wake of Ft. Hood, the most prominent military voices have been those like Gen. George Casey, the Army’s chief of staff, who said in a televised interview that the Army had to take care not to indicate an unwelcomeness to Arabs and Muslims. Baadani said the Marine Corps reached out to him in 2006 to help advise the service on Middle East culture while Marines serve in Iraq. Many APAAM non-online events, accordingly, come at the military’s behest, like the post-Iftar feasts hosted either at the Pentagon or at military events in Muslim countries.

Baadani hastened to add that he has not received additional accounts about internal military discrimination against Arabs and Muslims after Ft. Hood. But Allis said that he felt as if Hasan’s alleged crimes have cast a dark cloud over him. “Personally, it’s been a little challenging,” said Allis, 34, who owns his own technology company in Colorado. “I have the same first name as him. He comes from the same village my family comes from, which is in Palestine. There’s definitely been some pressure. You see it on CNN, ‘can you truly trust Muslims,’ but they forget Muslims have been fighting for this country since the Revolutionary War.”

Montasser feared for his mother, whose headscarf, he worried, might make her a target. “It’s bad enough what the media is doing to us right now, but he made it worse,” Montasser said of Hasan. “He just ruined and trampled our reputation even more. He’s made it so much harder. Arabs are not going to feel safe on the street.”

Some writers have suggested after Ft. Hood that Muslim soldiers should receive exemptions from serving in Muslim countries after accounts emerged of Hasan’s distress of a possible deployment to Afghanistan. In 2004, the Army convicted a sergeant named Abdullah Webster of violating a lawful order after Webster said his religious beliefs prevented him from serving in Iraq. But Allis blasted the idea of Muslims opting out for service in Muslim countries for the impact it would have on military discipline.

“If you’re signing up to defend this country as I did, you take on that uniform with the risk you may have to go in and fight,” Allis said. “If you have problems with that, you shouldn’t sign up.”

While the military has not indicated that it will place additional scrutiny on Arabs or Muslims, some senators at a Government Reform Committee hearing last week endorsed the creation of guidelines for the military to recognize Islamic extremism. But the hearing was light on details on what “warning signs” might be part of those guidelines, although Jack Keane, an influential retired senior Army general who helped spearhead a crackdown on white supremacists in the Army, said it would be helpful for the military to create them.

Baadani declined to comment on developments in the Senate, saying he wanted to focus on engaging and educating those who distrust Arabs and Muslims, rather than appearing political. “I approach it from the perspective of tearing down a wall, and the only way to do that is to respect one another,” he said. “I just ask people [to] hear me out. That’s the approach I always take, and the example I set. You can’t change someone’s mindset by calling someone a racist — they get defensive, draw lines, dig their heels in.”

Instead, Baadani said, he hoped APAAM would continue to provide information on its website about Arab and Muslim contributions to America. But he added that he felt the environment for Arab and Muslim-Americans is much better now than after 9/11, even in the aftermath of Ft. Hood.

“The backlash towards our community is nowhere even close,” Baadani said. “I attribute that to the intellect and the resiliency of the American people. And that’s why I’m proud to be an American.”

Today’s announcement by the Government of Israel helps move forward toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We believe that through good-faith negotiations the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements. Let me say to all the people of the region and world: our commitment to achieving a solution with two states living side by side in peace and security is unwavering.

Clinton created a great deal of outrage in the Arab world after she called a previous offer from Netanyahu that came far short of a total freeze “unprecedented.” This reply is far more restrained.

The ACLU, meanwhile, has identified an important point about the chronology of the CIA’s internal communications about the tapes. Although the communications remain classified, the dates and summaries of their content provided by the government reveals that a request to destroy the 92 tapes were  made just days after The Washington Post reported on the existence of secret overseas CIA prisons known as “black sites.” Another request was made on the day The New York Times reported that the CIA inspector general had issued a report questioning the legality of the agency’s interrogation methods.

The tapes were destroyed that same day.

Defending America is a number one responsibility and money’s not the first consideration. The first consideration is winning….

But we have always, one way or the other, raised the money to defend America, and in this case to defend America from a different kind of war, the war on terrorism. And it will be done.

He’s right on one account. You fight a war because you must, and the budget concerns should be immaterial. But the original question was, effectively, “Why aren’t lawmakers willing to ask Americans to pay for the costs of protecting the homeland, either through tax hikes or spending cuts elsewhere in the government?”

Grassley ducked it, and his argument that Congress has “always … raised the money to defend America” ignores the truth that, since 2001, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been funded primarily by borrowing from abroad — a particularly curious whitewash in the context of Republican criticisms that health care reform will break the federal budget.

The costs of that failure to ask for shared sacrifice have been tangible. When George W. Bush was elected to the White House in 2000, the nation’s debt was $5.7 trillion. Eight years later — after several rounds of tax cuts and two unfunded wars — the number had jumped to $10.0 trillion.

It’s worth noting that most of the Republicans now criticizing the costs of health care reform, Grassley included, also supported those mid-war tax cuts.

Today, prosecutors in the Office of Military Commissions announced they intend to ask the convening authority to refer new charges under the recently-enacted Military Commissions Act of 2009 against Ahmed Mohammed Ahmed Haza al Darbi, in connection with his alleged involvement in an al Qaeda conspiracy to attack military and commercial shipping in the Port of Aden and the Straits of Hormuz.

This announcement follows the attorney general’s determination on Nov. 13, 2009, that a military commission was the appropriate forum for prosecution of al Darbi.

al-Darbi has apparently not actually committed an act of terrorism, but if prosecutors are correct about his attendance at an al-Qaeda training camp, they have more than enough to convict him for conspiracy. So why try him in a military commission and not a civilian court? Even if the Obama administration has a compelling answer, don’t look for an answer today, as it’s right before Thanksgiving, an ideal time to drop a controversial decision without explaining it.

While conceding that “Torture is illegal under federal law, and the United States government repudiates it”, even now the Solicitor General stops short of acknowledging that torture directed, approved and implemented by officials of the United States is so repugnant that it also violates fundamental rights; no less so when hidden from public view at Guantánamo Bay. Respondents appear willing to let the final word on torture and religious abuse at Guantánamo be that government officials can torture and abuse with impunity and will be immune from liability for doing so. Yet whether United States officials are free to engage in despicable acts in a place wholly controlled by the United States is the pre-eminent constitutional issue of our time, and it is squarely presented to this Court for decision in this case.

Rasul v. Rumsfeld, as I’ve explained before, is one of the first lawsuits brought by victims of the Bush administration’s torture and abuse policies. The plaintiffs claim they were in Afghanistan to do humanitarian relief work when they were captured by the Northern Alliance and turned over (or sold for bounty) to U.S. authorities. They were eventually shipped to Guantanamo Bay, where they were imprisoned in cages and, they claim, tortured and humiliated, forced to shave their beards and watch their Korans desecrated. All of these claims are backed up by the legal memos that have since been produced from the Department of Justice that authorized such techniques as part of “enhanced” interrogations. The men were returned home to the UK without charge in 2004.

Many other victims of the Bush administration’s abuse policies have been precluded from suing because in 2006, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction over claims challenging the “detention, transfer, treatment, or conditions of confinement” of detainees who were considered “enemy combatants” by the U.S. military and detained abroad. (That provision of the law is being challenged in another lawsuit filed recently, which I describe here.) The plaintiffs in the Rasul case, however, were never even deemed “enemy combatants” by the U.S. military.

Still, the Obama administration is arguing, as it is in other cases, that it was not clear that foreigners picked up in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo Bay had a right not to be tortured by the U.S. government. But more than that, it’s arguing — as the lawyers in the Rasul case emphasize in the excerpt from their brief I quoted above — that there is no right under the Constitution not to be tortured at Guantanamo Bay, or at any offshore American-run prison.

As the Department of Justice recently wrote in another torture case: The “Fifth and Eighth Amendments do not extend to Guantánamo Bay detainees.”

In other words, it’s not just that former detainees can’t sue Bush administration officials for torture because the law wasn’t clear back in 2002 or 2003, but the Obama administration is arguing also that there is no fundamental right not to be tortured, and therefore any government official in the future could similarly claim to be immune from a lawsuit for torture.

Eric Lewis and the Center for Constitutional Rights, who represent the four British men in the Rasul case, are now pleading with the U.S. Supreme Court to say it isn’t so, and accept their appeal from a D.C. Circuit Court ruling that dismissed the case.

The government seeks “to leave the law unsettled and to pull a cloak of immunity, now and in the future, over government torturers,” they write in their brief.

It is essential that this Court lay down a strong and clear message that officially ordered torture is abhorrent and always a violation of fundamental rights. Without this Court’s guidance, the court of appeals’ studied indifference to the torture of Guantanamo detainees remains the final word on the issue and, indeed, could provide further cover for a claim of qualified immunity in the future in the unfortunate event that the specter of torture recurs.

The first bracket, which covers joint returns with a liability of up to $22,600, roughly corresponds with households earning up to $150,000. In this case a 1 percent surtax is levied so the maximum additional cost would be $226.

The second bracket applied to tax liability between $22,600 and $36,400 or roughly equivalent to joint returns for couples earning between $150,000 to $250,000, The third bracket applies to those earning over $250,000 with a tax liability of $36,400 or higher.

The rates in the second and third brackets would vary depending on how much needs to be raised to cover the prior year’s war expenditures. But as a rule, the added surtax above $250,000 would be twice the percentage added onto taxes incurred between $150,000 and $250,000.

So, basically, upper-middle-class families and more would be asked to pay for the war. Yglesias comments that it’s a “clear signal” from the House Democratic leadership that any “backbencher who feels like jumping on this bandwagon is safe to do so.”

What will the Republicans say? A new loyalty oath for GOP elected officials and candidates demands support for “military-recommended troop surges” but also for, of course, lower taxes, the catechism of the conservative movement. Which GOP impulse will prove to be stronger?

President Barack Obama met Monday evening with his national security team to finalize a plan to dispatch some 34,000 additional U.S. troops over the next year to what he’s called “a war of necessity” in Afghanistan, U.S. officials told McClatchy.

Obama is expected to announce his long-awaited decision on Dec. 1, followed by meetings on Capitol Hill aimed at winning congressional support amid opposition by some Democrats who are worried about the strain on the U.S. Treasury and whether Afghanistan has become a quagmire, the officials said.

The U.S. officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly and because, one official said, the White House is incensed by leaks on its Afghanistan policy that didn’t originate in the White House.

As TWI’s Spencer Ackerman reported last week, an escalation of this size could test the military’s ability to fulfill the president’s request.

If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002.

Spotted in the official White House photo of Monday night’s war council meeting on Afghanistan and Pakistan in the White House’s situation room: Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag.

His name was not included in a list of participants the White House released earlier Monday, but there has been increasing talk in recent days of the cost of stepping up the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan. A quick search of previously-released attendees at the meetings did not disclose Orszag’s attendance.

“Every 10,000 troops would entail a fiscal-year cost of about $10 billion, very roughly speaking,” Orszag said earlier this month at a conference sponsored by Bloomberg News. That comes out to approximately $1 million per soldier per year.

Gerstein’s colleague Ben Smith also made the same play. (Press Secretary Robert Gibbs confirms Orzsag’s presence in the meeting to Gerstein here.) And just so I can hit the trifecta on linking to Politico writers, Mike Allen reports that President Obama plans to roll out a revised Afghanistan strategy next Tuesday, Dec. 1.

One of the concerns raised by the military intelligence source is that some Blackwater personnel are being given rolling security clearances above their approved clearances. Using Alternative Compartmentalized Control Measures (ACCMs), he said, the Blackwater personnel are granted clearance to a Special Access Program, the bureaucratic term used to describe highly classified “black” operations. “With an ACCM, the security manager can grant access to you to be exposed to and operate within compartmentalized programs far above ’secret’–even though you have no business doing so,” said the source. It allows Blackwater personnel that “do not have the requisite security clearance or do not hold a security clearance whatsoever to participate in classified operations by virtue of trust,” he added. “Think of it as an ultra-exclusive level above top secret. That’s exactly what it is: a circle of love.” Blackwater, therefore, has access to “all source” reports that are culled in part from JSOC units in the field. “That’s how a lot of things over the years have been conducted with contractors,” said the source. “We have contractors that regularly see things that top policy-makers don’t unless they ask.”

One thing Jeremy might have added is that JSOC’s current commander, Adm. William McRaven, has emerged as a serious player in Afghanistan-Pakistan strategymaking.