In that spirit, consider some newly-declassified information from the so-called Combatant Status Review Tribunals — a now-abandoned procedure to determine if a detainee posed a threat to U.S. interests — at Guantanamo Bay of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah. KSM:

“I make up stories,” Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation probably administered by the CIA concerning the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. “Where is he? I don’t know. Then, he torture me,” Mohammed said of his interrogator. “Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area.’ “

Abu Zubaydah:

“They told me, ‘Sorry, we discover that you are not Number 3, not a partner, not even a fighter,’ ” said Abu Zubaida, speaking in broken English, according to the new transcript of a Combatant Status Review Tribunal held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Now, according to former Vice President Dick Cheney — and, just so we don’t get distracted, I AM NOT SAYING DICK CHENEY IS AS BAD AS MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD — there are two CIA documents from 2004 and 2005 wherein the CIA vouched for the accuracy of information it obtained from torturing Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah. It would be nice to see those documents. But what could they possibly indicate other than that the agency told Cheney what he wanted to hear about a cherished interrogation program? Or are we to believe that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is lying about having lied? His diabolical skills of deception are just that good? Waterboarding him 183 times, denying him sleep for a week by contorting his body into unnatural positions, restricting his diet to between 1000 and 1500 calories a day — that’s the stuff that works, not any of the rapport-building crap that trained interrogators like Ali Soufan of the FBI advocate because of, like, their experience.

On Friday, the CIA will release a 2004 report on interrogations and detentions written by former inspector general John Helgerson, a report referenced in the recently declassified Office of Legal Counsel documents from 2005. Read it and ask: what would we say about this behavior if another country performed it?

To identify and achieve additional savings, I am also open to your ideas about giving special consideration to the recommendations of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), a commission created by a Republican Congress. Under this approach, MedPAC’s recommendations on cost reductions would be adopted unless opposed by a joint resolution of the Congress. This is similar to a process that has been used effectively by a commission charged with closing military bases, and could be a valuable tool to help achieve health care reform in a fiscally responsible way.

The significance here could be enormous. MedPAC’s 17 members are appointed by the U.S. Comptroller General to serve three-year terms. They represent doctors, hospitals and other medical industries, but also patients, elderly groups consumer advocates and health policy researchers. Importantly, they aren’t elected and therefore their positions wouldn’t be reliant on financial backing from the same industries they’re charged with regulating.

Waiting for Congress’ reply…

J Street commends President Barack Obama on restating today his commitment to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and his serious intent to pursue a viable and sustainable resolution to the broader Arab-Israeli conflict.

Peace and security for Israel and the Middle East will require more than half-steps and further process. It requires the United States to, as the President said, “roll up our sleeves” and be seriously engaged in the diplomatic process.

J Street hopes that Prime Minister Netanyahu will act boldly and wisely in partnership with President Obama to make peace not simply with the Palestinians but with the entire Muslim and Arab worlds, as discussed by both leaders today.

Progress will require serious American leadership, full Israeli and Palestinian commitment, a regional approach and international engagement. As the President made clear, progress toward Israeli-Arab peace will help Israel, the United States and our allies to deal seriously with the threat posed by Iran.

Today’s meeting was a first step on a difficult road that must be navigated skillfully and quickly before time runs out on the two-state solution and Israel is forced to choose between its democratic nature and its Jewish heritage.

President Obama should know that the majority of American Jews support the direction he outlined and his commitment to actively pursue peace and security. We welcome as well his forceful statements that settlements must be stopped, Palestinian violence and weapons smuggling must end and the humanitarian situation in Gaza must be addressed.

But the Amelekites will KILL US ALL!!!1!

Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who’s practically commuting to Islamabad, mentioned during Senate testimony yesterday that he recently observed “some fairly effective counterinsurgency training” that his Pakistani counterpart, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, has put into place. That seemed to suggest Pakistan was going to take a distinctly Pakistani take on COIN.

Maybe not. Yochi Dreazen and Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal break the story that a small additional contingent of Special Forces are going to Pakistan:

The Special Forces personnel are being deployed to new training camps in Quetta and Baluchistan, Taliban strongholds that lie close to the porous Afghan-Pakistani border, the officials said. The moves bring U.S. personnel deeper into Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions than before.

Senior U.S. officials familiar with the plan said the 25 to 50 Special Forces personnel will focus on training Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force responsible for battling the Taliban and al Qaeda fighters who cross freely between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Watch to see if the distinction between “training” and “fighting” remains a hard and fast one. Administration officials have consistently maintained that it’s better to have an imperfect but counterinsurgency-capable Pakistani military than an expanded U.S. mission. But, as they say, things happen in the street.

It’s telling how a Republican politician thinks he can get his people to ignore an anti-Semitic remark by dogwhistling something about Obama.

(h/t Kleefeld.)

1. Paying off tribal elders won’t work. Gen. David Petraeus’ strategy in Iraq of exploiting and deepening fractures in both the Iraqi insurgency and its base of support provoked study in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The tactician says that Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command, can try it in Afghanistan, but he should just expect to be throwing money around. “We know our Afghans,” he says. “They will take the money from Petraeus, but they will not be on his side. There are so many people working with the Afghans and the Americans who are on their payroll, but they inform us, sell us weapons.”

2. The drone strikes actually work, to a degree. In Pakistan, the CIA’s missile strikes from pilotless drones have caused controversy, both within Pakistan, where civilian casualties are fuel for the insurgency, and among American strategists, who debate their utility both within that context and against the stark fact that U.S. combat troops largely can’t operate in Pakistan. The tactician gives the drones their due, saying they’re “very effective,” and that they’ve thinned the ranks of al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership. (All of which suggests the United States has a significant intelligence base within Pakistan after all. Otherwise, the drones wouldn’t know what to hit.) But:

The drone attacks simply prompted Taliban fighters to spend more time in Afghanistan, or to move deeper into Pakistan, straddling both theaters of a widening conflict. The recruits were prepared to fight where they were needed, in either country, he said.

Within this framework, the drones appear to be the newest hammer with which to play whack-a-mole, which is an unsustainable and insufficient long-term strategy. In Wana, he says, “the gossip has finished,” meaning people don’t gather in large groups for fear of being blown up by drones.” The tactician apparently views that as a win for the United States, but in the longer term, it poses a clear risk to U.S. or Pakistani efforts to cleave the populace from the Taliban.

3. The Taliban is not al-Qaeda. The goals of the Taliban in what The Times says the tactician sees as “one fluid and sprawling war” are to drive the United States out of Afghanistan and to take over Pakistan. What they’re not is to attack the United States at home. The Times describes the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban as “respectful but distant.” Al-Qaeda’s operatives don’t “tell us their activities,” he said. While he respects al-Qaeda’s “ambitions,” he said the Taliban will be “content in capturing Afghanistan and throwing the Americans out,” and destabilizing the Pakistani government. But when al-Qaeda needs a suicide bomber, the Taliban supplies the recruits.

4. The Taliban is in your village already. The tactician’s spent the last month moving about 80 fighters from Pakistan into Afghanistan to combat the American troop increase. They move into Afghan villages and spend four to six months getting to know the locals, who become the Taliban support base. By contrast, how much time do U.S. troops and development workers, who rarely speak the language, spend with the villagers?

5. It’s not hard to get over on the Pakistani Frontier Corps. Meet the force that the U.S. is relying on to conduct counterinsurgency operations in Pakistan.

The Taliban tactician said getting his fighters over the border was not a problem. The Pakistani paramilitary soldiers from the Frontier Corps who guard the border were too busy looking after their own survival, he said.

6. The near-term Taliban goal in Afghanistan is to control the Kabul-Kandahar highway. It’s Afghanistan’s major artery for transportation of people and commerce, and the United States has long known its strategic importance to both the Afghan government and the insurgency. That’s why the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division was ordered to deploy to the Logar-Wardak region late last year — so it could sit on that highway. The Taliban intends to harass and inflict as much damage along that highway to U.S. forces as it can. “We want to inflict maximum trouble, to lower their morale, to destabilize,” the tactician says. That includes making movies. They’re increasing their propaganda strategic communication efforts, bringing “cameramen instructed to capture video of faltering American soldiers” alongside their operations in order to make and distribute DVDs.

That in turn raises the question of why the tactician is bothering to talk to a reporter at all. Clearly he sees value in spreading this message. Perhaps what he’s saying is interspersed with false statements; it certainly can’t represent a complete account of the situation. But dismissing the report carries its own attendant risks, not least of which is willful blindness. Jane Perlez and Pir Zuzbair Shah of The Times deserve a tremendous amount of credit for what must have been an arduous report to put together, to say nothing of the personal danger they probably faced in doing so.

But curiously enough, the large student loan firms’ eagerness to protect their turf hasn’t yet prompted them to hike lobbying spending. During the first three months of this year, Sallie Mae — the nation’s largest private lender — spent $1.28 million on lobbying, according to a Washington Independent analysis of first quarter reports filed this week. That’s nearly $400,000 less than the company paid for lobbyists during the same period last year.

Meanwhile, Nelnet, another huge private lender, spent exactly as much on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009 as it did during the first quarter of 2008: $170,000.

Could it be that student lending’s private sector players just have less to work with this year? Sallie Mae’s stock lost more than half its value last year as the global financial meltdown crippled the market. Even its political action committee has contributed less to members of Congress during early 2009 than in a similar stretch of 2008.

But Nelnet appears to have exceeded analysts’ expectations with its performance even after the economy fell into crisis. Why aren’t these companies mobilizing with lobbying spending to match the Obama administration’s promised threat to their interests? We may have to wait until K Street next opens its books in July to know the full story.

Imagine how the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation must feel these days. The same agency that now says it needs to borrow $500 billion in emergency funds to take over failed banks collected no insurance premiums from most banks for nearly an entire decade, The Boston Globe reports.

The practice lasted from 1996 to 2006, according to The Globe.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures deposits up to $250,000, tried for years to get congressional authority to collect the premiums in case of a looming crisis. But Congress believed that the fund was so well-capitalized – and that bank failures were so infrequent – that there was no need to collect the premiums for a decade, according to banking officials and analysts.

Now with 25 banks having failed last year, 17 so far this year, and many more expected in the coming months, the FDIC has proposed large new premiums for banks at the very time when many can least afford to pay. The agency collected $3 billion in the fees last year and has proposed collecting up to $27 billion this year, prompting an outcry from some banks that say it will force them to raise consumer fees and curtail lending.

This practice doesn’t look too smart these days, now does it? Here’s how FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair explains what happened:

Last week, Bair wrote to Senate Banking Committee chairman Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, that her agency could need more money because the existing fund “provides a thin margin of error” given the government’s responsibility “to cover unforeseen losses.” The March 5 letter, provided to the Globe, said the additional borrowing authority is necessary to “leave no doubt” that the FDIC can “fulfill the government’s commitment to protect insured depositors against loss.”

Bair said yesterday that the agency’s failure to collect premiums from most banks “was surprising to me and of concern.” As a Treasury Department official in 2001, she said, she testified on Capitol Hill about the need to impose the fees, but nothing happened. Congress did not grant the authority for the fees until 2006, just weeks before Bair took over the FDIC. She then used that authority to impose the fees over the objections of some within the banking industry.

“That is five years of very healthy good times in banking that could have been used to build up the reserve,” Bair, a former professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said in an interview. “That is how we find ourselves where we are today. An important lesson going forward is we need to be building up these funds in good times so you can draw down upon them in bad times.”

Yes, a very “important lesson.” Although, I think it’s a bit of an understatement, considering the FDIC — whose primary mission is to provide insurance for bank deposits — failed to, you know, collect insurance premiums from the banks it insures. Oh, well. Live and learn.

And we should probably hope that not too many more banks need to be taken over by the FDIC.

(Via Balloon Juice)

Chilling.

A Senate panel pressed the Federal Reserve on that very point Thursday. even threatening to cut off future bailout funds (god forbid AIG comes back yet again) if the Fed doesn’t cough up some answers, The New York Times reports.

Tens of billions of those dollars have merely passed through A.I.G. to its derivatives trading partners, shielding them from losses. The Fed has refused to provide the names of those financial institutions, and senator after senator, Democrat and Republican, said that was an outrage.

“We need to know who benefited, and we’re going to find out,” said Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama and the ranking member of the committee. “The Fed can be secretive for a while but not forever.”

If only that were true.  Consider this little nugget, from Bloomberg:

The Federal Reserve Board of Governors receives daily reports on bailout loans to financial institutions and won’t make the information public, the central bank said in a reply to a Bloomberg News lawsuit.

The Fed refused yesterday to disclose the names of the borrowers and the loans, alleging that it would cast “a stigma” on recipients of more than $1.9 trillion of emergency credit from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Bloomberg sued the Fed in November, trying to find out who is getting all that bailout money. Now, at least Congress seems to be joining the effort to press the Fed to open up. Federal Reserve officials are digging in, saying it would cause more turmoil in the financial system to release the names of companies getting the money, because they would be reluctant to do business with the Fed.

Well, all that money those companies are gettting comes straight from the taxpayers. And after those repeated bailouts to AIG, taxpayers have a legitimate right to question where their billions are going — and what they are getting in return. The Fed clearly believes the free flow of information is a low priority. It might have gotten away with this back when the crisis started, but that belief has no legitimacy now. The right of the taxpayers to know that their money is being spent wisely — in the face of repeated bailouts of troubled institutions that seem to be little more than utterly insolvent — should probably be a higher government priority than shielding firms that receive federal money from a “stigma.”  If Thursday’s hearing is any indicator, that’s not going to change any time soon.