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Wizbang Podcast #65
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Closing Guantanamo? - Why We Can't
One of the most persistent rumors in Washington these days is that we are just about to close the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It usually starts by someone demanding that we should just shut down the center and try all the prisoners in criminal courts in the U.S. That leads to a question to some high ranking official asking if we are going to close it. For example, the following clip from a press conference June 29 in which Secretary Gates is asked about Gitmo.
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In truth the issue is much more complex than just sensitive intelligence sources. It's also about the methods of capture. Many of the prisoners were seized on the battlefield, where normal criminal police procedures were not on the minds of our soldiers. There was no CSI Miami crew that descended on the crime scene to scrub it for evidence when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured. And what would they be charged with? Is it really a crime for a citizen of Afganistan to wage jihad against an American soldier? Of course not, it's a war. The Pentagon detainee policy was the subject of a blogger's conference call on June 26 that I participated in. Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard has a good writeup of the call. There's another from UPI. I'm going to play a few clips from the call that explain why we are not going to close Guantanamo any time soon. The first clip is me asking about the difference between criminals and combatants.
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Grim from Blackfive asked next about what's next for the detainees. Later, I ask about the rumors of closure that periodically surface.
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I think Liotta captured the reason this rumor keeps coming up: Some people allow their wishes to get ahead of their ears.
Those Busy Iranians in Iraq - with the Hezbollah Connection
Last February, some officers in Iraq, lead by Major General Caldwell, put on a show of Iranian weapons seized in Iraq. The press conference was highly criticized because of some over the top remarks about how much the Iranian government was involved in the activity. I covered this in my podcast at the time. Since that time there has been tremendous intelligence efforts made to make the case that Iran is highly unhelpful in Iraq. On July 2, Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner took another run at exposing Iranian involvement in Iraq. He was exceptionally well prepared. No offense to Major General Caldwell, but General Bergner blew the doors off this issue. They have documents, interrogation results, and network connections back to Hezbollah in Lebanon that show how deep the Iranian connection goes. I'm going to play several clips from his presentation. Thanks to the Pentagon for the transcript and the audio. At this point he begins talking about the Iranian connection to what are called Special Groups .
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This description of Daqduq is just one of the Iranian directed bad guys seized or killed in Iraq. General Bergner described others in his talk. The Q&A that followed his presentation was good also. Here's Lara Logan of CBS, and Michael Ware of CNN asking some great questions.
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Of course the next question is what to do about Iran. Anybody have any ideas? Senator Lieberman on Face the Nation on June 10 had one:
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New Progress on Reconciliation in Iraq - Calm After the latest Samarra Bombing
I was invited to another bloggers conference call set up by the Pentagon on June 21 with Colonel Michael Hoyt, who is the senior chaplain officer in Iraq. He was on to talk about a little noticed religious summit held the previous week that drew top leaders of Sunni, Shi'a, Christian, Yezidi, and the Kurds to a conference on religious reconciliation. The conference was the first in many ways, as the Colonel described on the podcast. You can read the transcript of it on a link on my web site. The first excerpt talks about tangible results of the meeting, which by coincidence concluded on the same day that the minarets at the Golden Mosque in Samara were bombed. As Time Magazine wrote: It is a measure of how warped things have become in Iraq these days that attacks on nearly a dozen mosques over three days qualifies as good news. That's because it could have been so much worse in the wake of this week's bombing of the Shi'ite Askari mosque in Samarra.
When the same shrine was bombed in February 2006, more than 100 Sunni mosques were damaged or destroyed by rampaging Shi'ite mobs in the weeks that followed, and thousands of people from both communities were killed in tit-for-tat attacks. The locus of this violence was Baghdad, the stronghold of Moqtada al-Sadr's Shi'ite militia known as the Mahdi Army. When the carnage began, American troops in and around the Iraqi capital had been mostly in what the military calls "force protection" mode. They were largely confined to their bases and doing relatively little patrolling, instead counting on the newly formed Iraqi Army and police to keep the peace. But Iraqi security forces could only look helplessly on -- and in some instances join in -- as the Mahdi Army began a systematic campaign of sectarian cleansing from mixed neighborhoods. Listen to the Colonel talk about what changed this time, thanks in part to the conference that he organized in Iraq. The first question was from Andrew Lubin of On Point.
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Later on I asked if more of the conferences were planned.
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A way ahead for a committed public action by religious leaders to denounce violence. That beats the alternative, I guess. It just doesn't seem like that will be enough to calm the pull out now crowd in Washington.
The Army is not Breaking - Applying Lynch's Rules of War
One of the most persistent claims is that the Battle in Iraq in the War on Terror is stressing the U.S. Army to the breaking point. That was one of the reasons that Senator Richard Lugar gave in his most recent call for reducing our troop surge in Iraq. His speech on the floor of the Senate outlining his concerns was widely quoted to show that we need to have a new strategy in Iraq, one that pulls our troops back from the front lines and lets the Iraqi's assume more of the war fighting. His key point is that domestic political pressure will force a disastrous withdrawal, unless we find a middle ground between surge and withdrawal. Here is a section of his speech where he, like Jack Murtha before him, talks about breaking the Army. Thanks to the lefties at Americablog for the transcript, and C-SPAN for the audio.
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To a military man, those are fighting words. Picking up the call to battle, I'll play a clip from the end of Major General Rick Lynch's recent press conference from Iraq. General Lynch is in command of Operation Marne Torch, which is the surge in southeastern Baghdad. He was asked what would happen if we pulled back as Lugar recommended. I expected him to back down from the question, but he took it head on.
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He closed his press conference with the following admonition to those like Senator Lugar who say the Army is broken.
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We do have great soldiers. Thank you, general, for that reminder.
That's it for now podcatchers. I'm Charlie Quidnunc reporting from the Passat Studio in hot, hot, hot, Mercer Island, WA.
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