“As a member of the Armed Services Committee,” Loebsack told The Iowa Independent by phone Thursday, “I take my oversight role very seriously. So, as a member of that Committee I was invited to come and view the photos.”

Only a short time before speaking with The Iowa Independent, Loebsack had traveled to CIA headquarters to see the pictures for himself. He did not have any doubts about bin Laden’s death before seeing the photos, but felt obligated to view them as a part of his oversight duties.

President Barack Obama has decided not to release the photos publicly, a move backed by a majority of Americans, according to a recent NBC poll. Loebsack said he agrees with the decision even more after seeing the pictures firsthand.

“I will say that my initial judgment about our President’s decision and our military leaders’ recommendations not to release the photos was confirmed once I saw the photos,” he said. “Obviously, I cannot go into any details about the specifics of the photos.”

“I remained concerned about our nearly 3,000 Iowa National Guard troops stationed in Afghanistan at this time, and I worry about how potential reaction [to the release of the photos] could impact them. I worry about our American citizens who are traveling and working abroad as well. Al Qaeda has a worldwide network. So, there has to be concern if these photos were released that there would be a reaction against Americans.”

U.S. troops, he said, did “a fantastic job” carrying out the operation against bin Laden, and the intelligence community “did a wonderful job” providing military leaders the information they needed to set a plan in motion.

The ultimate decision to release any proof of bin Laden’s demise — such as DNA evidence — should be a decision made by the White House, Loebsack said.

“I’m going to leave it up to the administration,” he said. “I believe the [Obama] administration have used good judgment in all of this. I defer to our Commander in Chief and to our military leaders in deciding what will pose a threat to our country and our troops. … For me, this is about the safety of our country and the security of our troops.”

MSNBC reports:

Fifty-two percent said they strongly believe the Obama administration should not release the photos, and an additional 12 percent agreed, although not as strongly.

By comparison, 24 percent said they strongly believe the photos should be released, and 5 percent more agreed not so strongly.

The complete results of the poll will be released later today.

The news may come as a surprise to public figures like Sarah Palin who have pandered to the so-called “deather” conspiracy holding that last weekend’s raid on bin Laden’s Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound was somehow faked. Last week, Palin used her Twitter account to command Obama to release the photos. She contended that releasing the images would scare would-be terrorists from tangling with the U.S. “No pussy-footing around, no politicking, no drama,” she said. “[I]t’s part of the mission.”

Other Republicans, including Sen. Lindsay Graham (S.C.) and Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), have also come out in favor of releasing the photos, though they both said it was out of concern that conspiracy theories surrounding bin Laden would create political fallout at home and abroad. DNA tests and an al Qaeda statement have since confirmed bin Laden’s death at the hands of the U.S. military.

The software would allow military personnel to “control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world,” each with “a convincing background, history and supporting details,” reports The Guardian.

Guardian reporters explain how the program would work:

“Centcom spokesman Commander Bill Speaks said: “The technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US.”

He said none of the interventions would be in English, as it would be unlawful to “address US audiences” with such technology, and any English-language use of social media by Centcom was always clearly attributed. The languages in which the interventions are conducted include Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto.

Once developed, the software could allow US service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with any number of co-ordinated Facebook messages, blogposts, tweets, retweets, chatroom posts and other interventions. Details of the contract suggest this location would be MacDill air force base near Tampa, Florida, home of US Special Operations Command.”

The story includes a link to the actual text of the contract between Centcom and Ntrepid, available online via the Freedom of Information Act. It unambiguously details how the software would generate fake personas and conceal their actual origins.

The new program is part of Centcom’s ongoing Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), a $200 million operation aimed at countering the online presence of extremist groups like Al Qaeda. General David Petraeus, who once headed up Centcom, made a statement to the Senate Armed Forces Committee a year ago yesterday in which he argued that OEV ensured that the U.S. armed forces would always be “first with the truth.”

It is clear that the threat of al Qaeda-style terrorism is not limited to the al-Qaeda core  group, or organizations that have close operational links to al Qaeda. While al Qaeda continues to threaten America directly, it also inspires its affiliates and other groups and individuals who share its violent ideology and seek to attack the United States claiming it is in the name of Islam – a claim that is widely rejected.

One of the ways DHS is approaching this threat is by beefing up the country’s network of fusion centers — groups that fuse local law enforcement work with national-level intelligence. Napolitano has made the centers a major focus of the department’s FY11 grant cycle. The idea is, as Napolitano said today, is that “in an environment where operatives may not have close links to international terrorist organizations – and where they may, in fact, be based within this country – these levels of law enforcement may be the first to notice something suspicious.”

Fusion centers don’t have the strongest records of keeping their focus on international terrorist organizations, though. As G.W. Schulz reports for the Center for Investigative Reporting:

One of the nation’s oldest fusion centers, known as the El Paso Intelligence Center, accidentally caused a California couple that owns a flight training school to be falsely held at gunpoint by police for the second time. Twice now EPIC has failed to clean up incorrect data that led authorities to believe a plane owned by the pair was stolen.

In Maryland, a fusion center and DHS ended up labeling a peace group as terrorists. Anti-abortion activists have also come under suspicion.

Despite these sorts of missteps, the number of fusion centers is only growing: there are currently 72 scattered across the country.

Gohmert argued with host Anderson Cooper, who asked him to provide proof to back up his claims about the phenomenon. He said “the evidence abounds” but failed to produce a source for his information, other than an anonymous former FBI agent. (Watch the video here.)

Observers note the argument is a convenient one, politically, because it can’t really be proven right or wrong in the short term. The effects of the supposed phenomenon are too far in the future: If “terror babies” are being born in the U.S., we won’t know it for about 20 years. The delayed impact of such measures is one of the main reasons Gohmert’s argument is unfounded, according to Ruben Navarrette Jr. He argued at CNN today that Gohmert and other Republicans are relying on fear-mongering to obscure the immigration debate:

If the supporters of SB1070 really believe in the merits of their cause, they should be able to win the argument on the natural, without relying on hocus-pocus or scare tactics or radical makeovers. And if they can’t do that, if they have to portray babies as terrorists and immigrants as drug mules in order to win support for their side, then this should tell them loud and clear that they’re on the wrong side of this issue — not to mention, on the wrong side of history.

Republican statements on the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship are numerous, but they’re also all over the place — and Gohmert seems to be on the radical edge his party’s leaders are trying to avoid. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republican National Committee have made a point of steering clear of claims of “terror babies” and racially-charged statements about border-crossers. Instead, they have focused on a Washington Post article on “birth tourism,” a proven, if not especially prevalent, practice of Chinese women paying to come to the U.S. to have citizen babies.

Gohmert tried to back up his claims about the 14th Amendment and terror risks using the Washington Post article, too. But “birth tourism” seems to be a separate concern: the article does not mention terrorism.

Should Obama fire McChrystal, it’s an opportunity to reorient Afghanistan strategy. Ironically, Hastings recounts Biden thinking McChrystal’s adjusted plan for Kandahar is “CT-plus,” meaning something closer to the counterterrorism-and-Pakistan-centric alternative Biden advocated last fall. I confess I don’t quite understand how he sees it that way. But it might convince Obama that McChrystal came around to Biden’s way of thinking anyway. And that no matter what, Afghanistan’s endgame is a political settlement with a Taliban divorced from al-Qaeda — a consensus view within the administration, including the senior military leadership — with Pakistan providing the political guarantees of Taliban compliance. That’s so Biden!

And if McChrystal ends up keeping his command, he’s in a chastened political and bureaucratic position. Hastings quotes an anonymous McChrystal aide musing about “a possibility we could ask for another surge of U.S. forces next summer if we see success here.” If there’s one thing McChrystal’s remarks to the magazine killed, it’s that. The barely concealed compromise within the Obama strategy for Afghanistan is that after the July 2011 transition to Afghan security control, McChrystal and counterinsurgency get phased down over time, and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell’s training mission for Afghan security forces gets phased up — as does Biden’s desired counterterrorism missions and emphasis on Pakistan. McChrystal and his allies will not be in any position to undo that bargain even if they want to.

Regardless of whether McChrystal should be fired — there’s, frankly, a compelling case to be made when considering the Uniform Code of Military Justice’s penalty of court martial for “any commissioned officer [using] contemptuous words” against the civilian chain of command — my guess is that he won’t be. Obama summoned McChrystal back to Washington pretty much immediately after the story hit, which suggests that he’s not thinking about a wholesale revision of his strategy. What’s more, if he does fire McChrystal, he’ll have the arduous task of finding new leadership for the war while the clock to July 2011 ticks, introducing new uncertainty among allies and enemies and NATO troops and dealing with another big round of strategy-in-disarray stories. All of which points to McChrystal having to learn to live with Biden — and the new influence that the general inadvertently gave the vice president.

In a somewhat heated exchange with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — Petraeus at one point told Graham that he preferred “more nuance” than Graham was willing to provide when describing the state of governance in Afghanistan — Petraeus said there are “probably very small numbers, certainly” of al-Qaeda in the country, somewhere in the “double digits.” Asked to assess the numerical strength of al-Qaeda in its safe havens across the border in the tribal areas of Pakistan, Petraeus answered, “Now we’re into the hundreds.”

He qualified: “This is a question of how you talk about symbiotic relationships.” When factoring in those “symbiotic relationships” between al-Qaeda and the Afghan or Pakistani Taliban, the Haqqani network and other extremist forces — considering that al-Qaeda operatives marry into families and tribes of other extremist groups to entrench alliances, etc. — the total falls in the “thousands.”

Graham didn’t draw out the strategy implications of those numbers. And “single digits” could mean ten or it could mean 99. But given that there was a brief shock when it was reported in December that President Obama was raising U.S. troop levels to 98,000 to secure Afghanistan against merely 100 al-Qaeda operatives in the country, it’s possible that Petraeus’s assessment will provoke some reconsideration of the administration’s strategy.

“We are in the midst of re-thinking and re-drafting our counterterrorism strategy,” Flournoy said in response to an audience question. “And one of the discussions we’re having in that context is what are the root causes of extremism, and what are the historical conditions that gave rise to this. How do we understand the cycle of radicalization?” She anticipated work continuing on that study for “the next several months.” So much for “the terrorists hate us for our freedom.”

Consider it tomorrow’s political headache today. Led by counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, the administration has aggressively denied any linkage between al-Qaeda-like extremism and Islam, out of a stated desire to prevent playing into the terrorist group’s rhetorical frame. It’s earned Obama scorn from the right. So will any effort in the forthcoming strategy document to say that U.S. policy has any role, however inadvertent, in contributing to radicalization — despite reams of evidence indicating that to be the case.

Michele Flournoy, left, created the Office for Rule of Law and International Humanitarian Policy, which is led by Rosa Brooks. (ZUMA, Bloggerama)

For the first time, the Department of Defense has established an office to guide policy on emerging non-traditional military activities like compliance with the rule of law, humanitarian emergencies and human rights. It’s a bureaucratic change that effectively frames international legitimacy as a security issue, a reflection of the legacy of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars among some policymakers. And the office’s first test may be its perspective on the thorny questions surrounding how the department handles al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees.

[Security1] Announced within the Pentagon in late May, the Office for Rule of Law and International Humanitarian Policy is being led by Rosa Brooks, a senior adviser to Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy and a former director of Georgetown Law School’s Human Rights Center. It endeavors to ensure that the broad strategic aims of the Obama administration regarding adherence to a rules-based international order don’t get lost in the pressures of military contingencies. It will also advise senior Pentagon officials on their contributions to interagency planning and White House requests for advice on rule-of-law compliance, and will work with Congress and non-governmental organizations focusing on its host of issues.

The office — created by Flournoy with support from Defense Secretary Robert Gates and run by a staff that will eventually number 20 people — reflects a recent recognition that the legitimacy of the U.S. military in combat plays its own battlefield role, especially in conflicts like Afghanistan, where perceptions by civilians about whether to support America’s allies or its adversaries are considered decisive. “The counterinsurgency and counterterrorism doctrine has really moved in the direction of saying that these issues are not luxuries,” Brooks explained in a Monday interview at the Pentagon. “These issues are absolutely central to achieving our military objectives in a counterinsurgency or a counterterrorism environment, where the name of the game is ‘Do you have credibility? Do you have legitimacy? Are you building the structures that support long-term stability?’”

Many of the office’s emerging responsibilities will center on entrenching respect for the rule of law and human rights as a core focus within the Defense Department. Previously, Pentagon officials who worked on those issues were spread throughout the policy directorate, in bureaus as disparate as Counternarcotics and Detainee Affairs, a reflection of the secondary — Brooks called it “ad hoc” — treatment the department has traditionally provided to humanitarian concerns. Karen Greenberg, the director of New York University’s Center on Law and Security, said the office needs to “restore the notion that the rule of law is there on the table no matter what.” Matthew Waxman, a deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs at the end of the Bush administration, added that “sometimes important strategic issues can fall into bureaucratic seams, and redrawing parts of the organizational map can help address that.”

That contrasts with the previous administration’s perspective that human rights and the rule of law were impediments to effective military operations. President Bush famously judged in 2002 that al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees ought to be treated humanely “to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity.”

While building a staff and a budget means that Brooks anticipates the office’s agenda will take shape over the next several months, she said some early priority “areas to look at” include the Defense Department’s security assistance and training for partner militaries — to ensure it “not inadvertently undermin[e]” the U.S. interest in promoting the rule of law — and the effectiveness of department support to judicial systems.

Developing broader policy guidance to protect civilians during combat is another likely focus for the office, Brooks said, citing Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s guidance to his troops in Afghanistan about the need to secure civilian support for NATO military operations. “Reducing civilian casualties supports achieving military objectives,” Brooks said. “If the population is furious at you because bombs keep falling on schools, it’s harder to achieve your objectives.” She added that the propriety of “a global directive of that sort” required further study, but anticipated that any such study would have “potential consequences” for crafting military doctrine on protecting civilians.

“The goal would be to see if we need to make changes,” Brooks said, stressing that her agenda is still preliminary. “It’s a moral goal, and it is a tactical and strategic goal, to minimize civilian casualties. Are we doing it as effectively as we could? Do we have the systems in place, the doctrine in place, the training in place, to do as well as we could, while recognizing that doctrine, training, et cetera matters?”

In some cases, like U.S. compliance with treaty obligations, Brooks said she expects her office to serve in a supporting role to other agencies, while taking the lead on issues where the military has the greatest stake. “The State Department can’t determine whether DOD needs to revise its doctrine to better protect civilians,” she said.

Some human-rights advocates greeted the establishment of the new office with optimism. “To the extent the Pentagon is engaging directly with foreign governments, having a human rights voice in that room is extremely important, so the U.S. speaks with a single voice,” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. “You don’t want the State Department coming in one day with a broad policy agenda [including] respect for human rights and humanitarian principles and the Pentagon coming in the next day talking about basing rights without the two being coordinated.”

Greenberg said the big test for the office will be its ability to help influence the emerging shape of detainee policy. Administration officials and congressional leaders have discussed the creation of frameworks for indefinite detention without charge, an idea that found its way into the National Security Strategy under the rubric of creating an “approach that can be sustained by future Administrations, with support from both political parties and all three branches of government.” Malinowski cautioned against viewing detainee policy as a crucible for the new office, but said he hopes the office can “guard against the tendency of the Pentagon as an institution to reflexively defend the expanded powers that it received in the last administration.”

Brooks said that her office “will work very closely” with Col. William Lietzau, the deputy assistant secretary for detainee affairs, but did not specify any programmatic agenda. “Bill Lietzau is someone who’s already attuned to those issues anyway, so those are the kinds of conversations that we’re always having,” Brooks said, concerning how to “make sure that as we try to work through these thorny inherited detainee issues that we’re doing it in a way that buttresses our broad commitments to rule-of-law norms.”

“And it’s not easy on those issues,” she added. “The briar patch we started out with has been a tough one to get ourselves out of without sustaining a lot of little scratches.”

Waxman wrestled with those issues while he ran detainee policy for the Rumsfeld Pentagon. He hailed Brooks’ office as a step toward integrating law and strategy. “Often those issues are thought of as separate spheres: The lawyers in the general counsel’s office and the military judge advocates say what the legal bounds are and the policy advisers and military planners and operators decide within those bounds what the strategy is,” Waxman said. “That’s too simplistic and risks missing the many ways in which the two operate in tandem, and this new office looks like it’s intended to help ensure they do so effectively. For example, the United States may have a strategic interest in abiding by certain standards, because we want to promote those standards abroad among foreign forces or because it’s believed to strengthen counterinsurgency efforts to win hearts and minds.”

Brooks herself will continue to wear several hats in the Pentagon. In addition to becoming the first deputy assistant secretary of defense for Rule of Law and International Humanitarian Policy, she’ll remain Flournoy’s senior adviser and helm the policy directorate’s Global Strategic Engagement Team. “Rosa is an excellent person to do this job,” Malinowski said. “I’m happy to hear the position has been created and happy to hear she’s filling it.”

John Brennan (UPPA/ZUMApress.com)

“We will destroy al-Qaeda.”

That’s how John Brennan capped his presentation Wednesday morning on counterterrorism’s role in the forthcoming National Security Strategy, and the often intense White House senior counterterrorism adviser smiled a bit as he said it. His exploration of the administration’s pathway for getting there was mostly familiar. “A broad, sustained integrated campaign” making use of “every tool of American power: military, civilian, kinetic and diplomatic, and indeed, the power of our values and partnerships,” will sustain “pressure” on al-Qaeda in “Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond” while addressing the “political, economic and social forces” that can create either demand for extremism among populations or acquiescence to it. Judge for yourself how that fits within the broader National Security Strategy.

[Security1] But Brennan did highlight a new development the Obama administration faces — and subtly defended a controversial tactic that he says contributed to it. Al-Qaeda and its affiliates have entered a “new phase” of their campaign against the United States, relying on operatives with “little training” who don’t fit “the traditional profile of a terrorist” for attacks of “little sophistication but with very lethal intent.” English-speaking al-Qaeda allies like California metalhead-turned-extremist Adam Gadahn and Yemen-based radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, both American citizens, seek to inspire people already in America to execute their own independently planned terrorist attacks.

All of these moves, Brennan said, are tactical responses from al-Qaeda to a successful pressure campaign from the U.S. and its allies abroad to reduce its safe havens and to hardened U.S. homeland security measures by law enforcement and at ports of entry, for which the Bush administration deserves some credit. And in only the vaguest terms, without making an explicit reference, he suggested that the drone strikes the administration has accelerated and exported in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan are a principle reason for al-Qaeda’s adjustment. Limited by an ability to speak publicly about a classified program, Brennan signaled as well that the administration is concerned that blowback from civilians killed by the drones could turn tactical success into strategic failure — but thinks the problem is under control.

In all efforts, we will exercise force prudently, recognizing that we often need to use a scalpel and not a hammer. When we know that terrorist networks are plotting against us, we have a responsibility to take action to defend ourselves, and we will do so. At the same time, an action that eliminates a single terrorist but causes civilian casualties can in fact inflame local populations and create far more problems. A tactical success but a strategic failure. So we need to ensure that our actions are more precise and more accurate than ever before. This is something that President Obama not only expects but demands.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to independently verify Brennan’s claims. Anecdotal reporting indicates that the drone program is expanding beyond precisely targeted top extremist leaders to mid-level operatives and below. There’s also a low-level rumbling in intelligence circles that the CIA’s drone strikes cause fewer civilian casualties than those executed by the military, particularly in Afghanistan, and the agency doesn’t like the media conflating two different programs. But any differences in impact on local populations are extraordinarily difficult to verify.

Brennan’s forecast of success against al-Qaeda rested on another foundation: It’s in America’s power to determine how it will react to terrorism. Al-Qaeda’s enduring strategy is to get America to “overextend” itself and compromise its values, thereby weakening the sources of its strength and isolating it internationally, until it retracts its overall global posture. “We must be honest with ourselves,” Brennan warned. “No nation, no matter how powerful, can prevent every attack from coming to fruition.” But just as the U.S. has an obligation to destroy al-Qaeda proactively, he said, it also has a responsibility not to overreact in the event of a successful attack.

“Al-Qaeda can sew explosives into their clothes, and can place explosives in an SUV, but it is our choice how to react,” he said. “They can seek to recruit people already living among us but it is our choice to treat those communities with suspicion or to support those communities.”

I asked Brennan if the Obama administration was counterproductively compromising American values by retaining policies of indefinite suspension without charge at Guantanamo Bay and beyond. “When this administration came in, in January of last year, we dealt with a number of legacy situations that we wanted to make sure we were able to deal with appropriately without compromising the security of the American people,” Brennan said.

I think as everybody recognizes, on both sides of the political spectrum, the situation at Guantanamo is a very, very difficult and challenging one. I think that even as the president said he was determined to close Guantanamo within one year, it still remains open because the president is determined not to do anything that would compromise America’s security. It is something that we are working very closely with the Congress on. We are trying to do things in a very thoughtful manner. We have transferred about 50 of those detainees over the past year and a half, and we’re continuing to look at their situations there. But this is a challenge that we need to look at from a policy perspective, from a legal perspective as well as from a security perspective.