This was reported in dozens of blogs and online publications as a chink in the tea party armor, an admission from Bachmann that she, despite being one of the more aggressive conservatives in Congress, was willing to scrap amendments like the one defunding Planned Parenthood if it meant averting a government shutdown. Here’s what Bachmann actually said, via a (partial) transcript:

That’s why, today, I voted no on the bill, because we heard from President Obama this morning, he was going to vote no on the Republican bill. Knowing that, I think it’s important that we do what I think 100 percent of Congress should be able to vote for, and that’s ensure full paycheck protection for all of the military.

We need to do that bill alone. That’s just a policy bill, it’s not even a continuing resolution. We should pass that bill and at least take the troops off the table. From there, we can go back and fight about all the other portions of this appropriations, but I think the troops should not be a political football. That should not be a game.

Bachmann, therefore, was saying the opposite of what’s reported: She’s all for upholding the budget impasse so that the policy riders can eventually get pushed through, but she wants an entirely separate bill that would fund only military salaries so that they’re not affected by the shutdown.

Other Republicans, however, have come out and said exactly what Bachmann was inaccurately quoted as saying. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) conceded:

I’d like to defund Planned Parenthood, but I understand that Republicans don’t have complete control of the elected government. I think what we should do is cut spending as much as we can, get the policy changes that we can, but move on, because there are other, bigger battles that we are fighting.

Meanwhile, the staunchly anti-abortion, avowedly conservative Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said to MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan:

My recommendation to my friends in the House is, you know, it’s highly unlikely that many riders are going to get passed with a Democrat president and a Democrat Senate, so why don’t you take the spending and let’s get on to the budget?

Of course, all budget provisions must originate in the House, so no matter how conservative a given senator is, his or her words have little impact on what will actually happen with the continuing resolution. But as the shutdown looms, senators like Toomey and Coburn will need some allies in the House if the government is to run at full capacity after Friday night.

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.”

Collins has been the prime negotiator for moderate Republicans to possibly cross the aisle to support the repeal. Other Republicans, such as Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (D-Alaska), had previously indicated that they may support ending the ban on openly gay service members.

Collins was engaged in extensive discussions with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) over how to bring the bill to the Senate floor. Those conversations hit a wall when Reid refused Collins’ request that the bill be open subject to full debate without a limit on amendments. Reid was concerned that would allow conservative Republicans to hijack the debate and delay the vote.

Collins may have supported the measure today, but she was visibly displeased throughout the process. Washington Independent alum Elise Foley reported for the Huffington Post:

Her vote came after she angrily roamed the Senate floor, rolling up text of the legislation and waving it around, smacking it on Sen. Dick Durbin’s desk and hitting him on the arm with it.

“I’m extremely disappointed that the Senate majority leader walked away from negotiations,” Collins said in a press conference held with Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) following the vote. But there may still be hope for the bill to pass during the lame-duck session if Reid can negotiate favorable debate terms with the Republicans who support the bill.
“I am convinced there are 60, or even 61 or 62 votes to repeal ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’” Collins said. In addition, Lieberman tweeted on Thursday afternoon after the failed vote that the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal will be brought up as a standalone bill during the lame-duck session.

Polls have consistently shown that Americans support repealing the policy, with two-thirds of Americans favoring the rights of gays and lesbians to serve in the military, according to a Gallup poll released Thursday. At the request of Congress, the Obama administration recently completed a year-long review on the impacts of repealing the policy, and the report indicated there would be almost no risk in ending the discriminatory policy, with the majority of service members believing repeal would either have positive or no impacts on their units.

Afghan relatives wait outside a hospital in Kandahar. (EPA/ZumaPress.com)

A very disturbing — and disturbingly vague — announcement came early this morning from the U.S. military command in Afghanistan. According to Army Lt. Col. Joseph “Todd” Breasseale, a command spokesman, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division is investigating whether an unknown number of American soldiers are responsible for the “unlawful deaths” of “as many as three” Afghan civilians.

[Security1]Breasseale’s statement leaves many key details vague, including how many soldiers are involved in whatever incident CID is investigating; specifically where it took place; and when it occurred. But whatever occurred was serious enough to get additional soldiers from the same unit to come forward to their chain of command with knowledge of the incident earlier this month. The statement makes it sound as if the potential criminal act was planned in advance of its commission, as allegations of “illegal drug use, assault and conspiracy” are involved, although it isn’t clear if those allegations have to do with the incident or with the cohort of soldiers under investigation more generally.

One of the soldiers in question is being held in pre-trial detention. No charges have been filed yet.

Breasseale said in an email that he couldn’t discuss further detail about the case right now. “The bottom line is that we are executing this investigation by the numbers and will not compromise our ability to gather and maintain evidence,” he said. He added that more specificity about the case will probably be available “once the charges are preferred,” an indication that CID’s investigation has progressed to the point where it is more likely than not that the soldiers involved will face charges.

It is unfortunately difficult to infer what incident this case involves. Over the past few months, despite the restrictions on rules of engagement that Gen. Stanley McChrystal issued last year to minimize civilian casualties, there have been several high-profile cases of civilian deaths at the hands of NATO forces. A so-called “night raid” earlier this month in Nangahar Province left locals saying 11 civilians were killed by U.S. troops, even though NATO considers all to be insurgents, and their anger led to a violent protest in which Afghan police killed someone. On February 12 in Gardez, also in Afghanistan’s east, U.S. Special Forces killed two men and three women — two of whom were pregnant — during a house raid, and had to correct an initial mistaken announcement that attributed the women’s deaths to insurgents. And although this incident doesn’t sound like the one under investigation, a misunderstanding at a Kandahar checkpoint led soldiers to open fire on a passenger bus, leaving four civilians dead.

Before McChrystal took command in Afghanistan, he said that the perceptions of the Afghan people that the NATO coalition is interested in protecting them from harm and the Afghan government is interested in enriching their lives would be “strategically decisive” in the nearly nine-year war. His counterinsurgency guidance instructs his troops to assume additional risk to their own lives in the interest of preventing civilians from being accidentally killed. After the Paktia incident, McChrystal consolidated his hold over Special Operations Forces operating in Afghanistan.

In September 2008, a U.S. military judge ruled that Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan arrested as an adolescent in 2002, imprisoned at Bagram and then at Guantanamo Bay, had been subjected to “cruel and inhuman treatment” by the U.S. military.

Specifically, Judge Stephen Henley, a U.S. Army colonel, found that the military had subjected Jawad to the so-called “frequent flyer” program: he’d been “moved from cell to cell 112 times from 7 May 2004 to 20 May 2004, on average of about once every three hours.” Jawad was shackled but not interrogated; “the scheme was calculated to profoundly disrupt the his mental senses.” Jawad was accused of throwing a hand grenade at U.S. soldiers, though a court later found there was no reliable evidence to support the charge.

The alleged purpose of the “frequent flyer” program, Judge Henley wrote, was “to create a feeling of hopelessness and despair in the detainee and set the stage for successful interrogations.” But by the time Jawad was subjected to it, he “was of no intelligence value to any government agency,” Judge Henley ruled. “The infliction of the ‘frequent flyer’ technique upon the Accused thus had no legitimate interrogation purpose.” (It’s worth noting that interrogation experts say sleep deprivation doesn’t help interrogations even if the subject does know something.)

This 13 consecutive days of sleep deprivation, the judge concluded, constituted “abusive conduct and cruel and inhuman treatment.”  Judge Henley also acknowledged that it violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture, to which the United States is a signatory.

What’s more, 13 days of “frequent flying” also violates the rules set out by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. As I’ve pointed out before, those allowed anywhere from 48 hours to 180 hours of sleep deprivation on “high-value” detainees. But OLC memos never condoned 13 days straight of sleep deprivation on anyone, let alone someone like Jawad, who was at best an al-Qaeda or Taliban foot soldier.

In fact, as the Senate Armed Services Committee report on the treatment of detainees by the U.S. military notes, the “frequent flyer” program “was not on the list of 24 techniques OLC advised the DoD General Counsel were permitted.” The report added: “The Committee is unaware of a request from DoD to OLC for legal guidance on whether that technique comported with techniques on that list of 24 approved by the Secretary.”

Last week, Walter Pincus wrote in The Washington Post about the case of Lt. Col. Allan West, who allowed his soldiers to beat up an Iraqi police officer and threaten him with a knife and a gun to convince him to give up information. The CIA is now reportedly outraged that Attorney General Eric Holder would authorize an investigation of its agents for crossing the lines of permissible interrogations while the military guys are getting away with it.

Walter Pincus and his CIA source were right: the Department of Defense violated the rules just like the CIA did.  When it comes to whether the attorney general should prosecute, the difference may simply be that soldiers are subject to the military’s own disciplinary system rather than the usual criminal laws.

Jawad’s case is actually worse than the West case, since the military knew by the time they abused Jawad that he was of no intelligence value; so with Jawad, it was cruel and inhuman treatment just for the sake of it.

But what if the military didn’t discipline or prosecute anyone, or even investigate? The military judge’s ruling in Jawad’s case was only for the purpose of deciding whether his military commissions case should be dismissed or the evidence of his confessions under torture suppressed. (The judge chose the latter.)

Yesterday I spoke to Eric Montalvo, Jawad’s former military defense lawyer who’s now in private practice and plans to represent Jawad in a lawsuit against the U.S. government. He said that during the military commission proceedings, Jawad’s defense team “asked for an investigation that was never conducted.” He’s not aware of any investigation conducted since then.

If the military refuses to investigate, should the Department of Justice step in?  Or if it’s beyond the DOJ’s jurisdiction, how about a commission inquiry?  The military judge’s ruling in the Jawad case would seem to provide even more support for the argument that a broader investigation is necessary.

“They [the Pakistani military] are struggling to come to grips with the fact that the threat is really within and it is really a threat they helped build and now it has turned against them,” the senior Defense official said.

Although it is not clear what Mullen offered Kayani, he did outline Washington’s plans to dramatically ramp up aid.

“The message has been consistent: We are ready to help in any way you think we can,” the military officer said.

Right now, the Pakistanis appear to want the U.S. to provide it with equipment, like helicopters, night-vision goggles, light weaponry. That’s not necessarily inappropriate, since, as Barnes notes, the Pakistani military has a whole lot of heavy stuff that’s more useful for fighting India’s big military than for conducting counterinsurgency operations. But it’s also insufficient, because the United States has a number of counterinsurgency-experienced officers who can train the Pakistanis in best practices for how to use all this stuff. And the Pakistanis don’t appear so eager to expand the 70-dude U.S. trainer contingent. So what assurance will the United States have that Pakistani units are using the equipment we’d provide them the right way? That’s not to say that increasing the number of U.S. trainers guarantees a better outcome, but providing equipment alone guarantees much less.

President George W. Bush (WDCpix)

A wealth of new details emerged Tuesday about how techniques designed to help captured U.S. troops resist torture formed the basis for the post-9/11 interrogation policies of the Bush-era Pentagon.

Instructors of those techniques proved to be eager in 2002 and 2003 to disseminate them to an emerging crop of inexperienced military interrogators facing the prospect of wresting information out of new captives. “I believe our niche lies in the fact that we can provide the ability to exploit personnel based on how our enemies have done this type of thing over the last five decades,” said Joseph Witsch, an instructor for the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), a component of U.S. Joint Forces Command that oversees the so-called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Evasion (SERE) program for U.S. special forces, during a 2002 training session for U.S. military interrogators, according to a newly released report.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Details like these came to light when an unclassified version of a Senate Armed Services Committee report on the Pentagon’s treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism (pdf) was made public late Tuesday. An unclassified executive summary of the report, released in December, gave the outlines of the narrative, an account of how extreme interrogation techniques never before considered legal for U.S. personnel to apply became widespread within the military. But the full extent of the story was unclear from the 21-page summary of the 200-page report.

JPRA, a previously obscure outpost inside the military command responsible for making the U.S. military services fight as a single entity, first emerged last year in committee hearings as a key element in the United States’ embrace of physical interrogation methods. Responsible for overseeing the SERE program around the military services, in which instructors in very controlled conditions teach U.S. troops how to endure and resist torture in enemy captivity. Such techniques, used by the Chinese and North Korean communist regimes, include waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and forced exposure to extremes of temperature — all of which were recommended by JPRA and SERE officials to U.S. interrogators.

Instructors in the SERE program and their overseers in JPRA are not trained interrogators. Before 9/11, SERE and JPRA never focused on applying their resistance training to interrogate captured enemies. “SERE instructors are not selected for their roles based on language skills, intelligence training, or expertise in eliciting information,” the committee report specifies.

Yet after 9/11, with President Bush’s declaration that the Geneva Conventions would not apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban captives, the Pentagon’s then-general counsel, Jim Haynes, began asking JPRA how SERE’s expertise could assist U.S. interrogators, a relatively small U.S. military cohort. JPRA officials, eager to help with U.S. military efforts against al-Qaeda, sought to help with minimal prompting. Col. John “Randy” Moulton proposed in February 2002 that JPRA send a team to the newly established detention and interrogation facility to create a “short course” about “interrogation from the resistance side.” It would be the first of several such courses developed throughout 2002 and 2003, in which JPRA and its SERE “resistance” experts helped U.S. military and, in some cases, CIA interrogators, “reverse-engineer” SERE procedures for use on detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, Iraq and, perhaps, the network of CIA secret prisons where the agency held “high-value” al-Qaeda captives.

A key figure is a SERE psychologist named Bruce Jessen. The chief psychologist frequently advised officials at Guantanamo Bay and the emerging cadre of U.S. interrogators in techniques designed to break U.S. soldiers. In April 2002, he created a Guantanamo Bay “exploitation draft plan” to provide SERE training to Guantanamo interrogators under his direction. He proposed the creation of an “exploitation facility” at Guantanamo that would be “off limits to non-essential personnel,” such as the press, the International Committee of the Red Cross, or foreign observers. He advised that “the “the only restricting factor” on what techniques interrogators ought to be permitted to employ “should be the Torture Convention,” though he defended the use of physical force in interrogations. He repeated that message to interrogators and Guantanamo officials throughout 2002.

The influence of Jessen and SERE was not limited to military interrogations. In July 2002, the Senate report discloses, he was sent to “another government agency” to offer advice; and a JPRA team assisted a squad from “another government agency” during the first six months of 2002 that would be “sent to interrogate a high level al Qaeda operative.” “Another government agency” is a widespread euphemism for the CIA. The month after Jessen went to advise the undisclosed agency, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a secret memorandum, disclosed last week, instructing the CIA as to what interrogation techniques it considered to fall short of statutory prohibitions on torture. It summarized what the CIA proposed for its interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, considered to be the highest-ranking al-Qaeda member in U.S. custody. “Zubaydah will have contact only with a new interrogation specialist, whom he has not met previously, and the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (“SERE”) training psychologist who has been involved with the interrogations since they began,” wrote Jay Bybee, the head of OLC, in an August 1, 2002 memorandum. It is unclear but likely that Jessen is the psychologist to which Bybee refers.

JPRA and SERE officials thought of themselves as a unique trove of information and training for U.S. interrogators. The report quotes one official as saying, “JPRA has the sole repository of the required skill set” for interrogating detainees, even though the FBI has interrogated criminals for over 100 years. At an interrogation training session in the summer of 2002, with Guantanamo officials present, SERE officials “drafted a memo proposing the use of physical and psychological pressures at [Guantanamo], including some pressures … that do not follow the Geneva Conventions,” according to the report.

Around that time, an aide to Pentagon chief lawyer Haynes, David Shiffrin, requested JPRA’s deputy commander to send him memoranda outlining what techniques SERE graduates had to endure. The response included “the facial slap, walling, the abdomen slap, use of water, the attention grab and stress positions.” One attached memo used the phrase “physical and/or psychological duress” interchangeably with “torture,” the report says.

By September 2002, Pentagon officials and Guantanamo interrogators had grown “frustrated” with their inability to collect as much useful intelligence from interrogations as they had expected from Guantanamo detainees, according to the report. A JPRA-sponsored training session for interrogators that month introduced the concept of exploiting “phobias” and playing off cultural sensitivities of Arabs and Muslims. JPRA instructor Joseph Witsch warned a superior, “We are out of our sphere when we begin to profess the proper ways to exploit these detainees,” but the training continued. Witsch later acknowledged to a Pentagon working group on interrogations, “The physical and psychological pressures we apply in training violate national and international laws. … I hope someone is explaining this to all these folks asking for our techniques and methodology!”

Several Pentagon officials were asking for precisely that. A “Behavioral Science Consultation Team” established at Guantanamo and in frequent contact with SERE advisers counseled a Guantanamo working group on whether the interrogators had “authorization to use interrogation approaches that had not been taught to interrogators” at the U.S. Army’s intelligence center and were not contained in its Field Manual on interrogations. One SERE adviser told the BSCT, “Bottom line: the likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the delivery of accurate information from a detainee is very low.” Yet the working group approved a decision — over some BSCT and SERE reservations — to recommend the use of expanded techniques on a high-value detainee named Mohammed al-Qatani that were “influenced by SERE,” according to the report.

That request went up through the chain of command in October, ultimately reaching Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in December 2002. The report documents Haynes’ ability to stop a review of the techniques’ legality by a legal adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after representatives of the uniformed military made it clear that they considered the techniques to be illegal. As has been documented in numerous Pentagon inquiries stretching back to 2004, Rumsfeld ultimately recommended in April 2003 the use of several extreme interrogation techniques, including stress positions, dietary manipulation, “long time standing” and other techniques that are now revealed to have originated from SERE. Similarly, while Rumsfeld declared that those techniques were applicable only to “military and civilian interrogators assigned to Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” the extreme pressure for intelligence in Iraq later that year sent Guantanamo Bay’s commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, to Iraq, where he delivered a list of Guantanamo-approved techniques to the Iraq war commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, with the explicit instruction to “Gitmo-ize” intelligence operations. A 2004 report by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger found that instruction to be a central cause of the torture at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in late 2003.

The release of the Senate Armed Services Committee report comes on the heels of Thursday’s disclosure of four long-secret Justice Department documents outlining CIA interrogation techniques. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the committee, explained in a statement that the two rounds of disclosure were coincidental. The Defense Department had been combing through the report since November 20 and only now approved it for release, Levin said, with some significant redactions of operational and other detail.

“The record established by the Committee’s investigation shows that senior officials sought out information on, were aware of training in, and authorized the use of abusive interrogation techniques,” Levin said. “Those senior officials bear significant responsibility for creating the legal and operational framework for the abuses. As the Committee report concluded, authorizations of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials resulted in abuse and conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody.”

CNN reports that U.S. District Court Judge Gerald Bruce Lee rejected CACI’s claims that the company was immune from liability for abuse, war crimes and conspiracy because it was under contract with the federal government.

The four Iraqi detainees in the case, represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, alleged that interrogators on contract from CACI beat and abused them, and destroyed documents and videotapes of the interrogations to mislead officials about their tactics.

Although 11 U.S. soldiers who worked with CACI at Abu Ghraib were eventually court-martialed for their role in the abuses and implicated company workers in the crimes, none of the contractor’s workers have faced criminal charges.

CACI had claimed, as defense contractors often do, that it was not responsible for its workers’ actions because they were acting under orders of the U.S. military and that the courts lack authority to judge military actions, which are inherently political questions.

The judge disagreed.

“While it is true that the events at Abu Ghraib pose an embarrassment to this country, it is the misconduct alleged and not the litigation surrounding that misconduct that creates the embarrassment,” wrote Judge Lee. “This court finds that the only potential for embarrassment would be if the court declined to hear these claims on political questions grounds. Consequently, the court holds that plaintiffs’ claims pose no political question and are therefore justiciable.”

The four Abu Ghraib detainees were released between 2004 and 2008 and were never charged with any crimes.

Well, here’s Andrew Exum of the counterinsurgency blog Abu Muqawama:

I found a lot to like in this report, though.

Oh snap who called that?

These two things cannot coexist: the McCain-Palin insistence on deferring to ground commanders in war and the McCain-Palin insistence that the “surge strategy,” as Palin put it, is necessary in Afghanistan.

As I reported after Gen. David McKiernan’s Wednesday press conference, McKiernan, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, unambiguously rejects the idea of an Afghanistan surge and of a “Pashtun Awakening.”

If they’re for a surge in Afghanistan, they’re arguing against the explicit recommendations of the commanding general. Which they’re free to do! They just can’t say any longer that it’s the ground commanders who best understand the strategy.