This hearing was previewed recently. Here is the transcript.

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
LAKHDAR BOUMEDIENE, ET AL.
Petitioners
v.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, ET AL.;

and

KHALED A. F. AL ODAH, NEXT FRIEND OF FAWZI KHALID ABDULLAH FAHAD AL ODAH, ET AL.,
Petitioners
v.
UNITED STATES, ET AL.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Washington, D.C.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007

The above-entitled matter came on for oral argument before the Supreme Court of the United States at 10:01 a.m.

Boumediene v. Bush, U.S. Supreme Court Oral Argument

This book came out in September.

Here's an excerpt:

While on our second patrol in Iraq, a civilian candy truck tried to merge with a column of our armored vehicles, only to get run over and squashed. The occupants were smashed beyond recognition. Our first sight of death was a man and his wife both ripped open and dismembered, their intestines strewn across shattered boxes of candy bars. The entire platoon hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours. We stopped, and as we stood guard around the wreckage, we grew increasingly hungry. Finally, I stole a few nibbles from one of the cleaner candy bars. Others wiped away the gore and fuel from the wrappers and joined me.

As Thomas Ricks says:

Staff Sgt. Bellavia brings it. This is life in the infantry, circa right now.

Who needs hard-boiled when you've got real-life?

House to House: An Epic Memoir of War

In 2004, to inform the drafting of memos on US policy against torture, Daniel Levin, who replaced Jack Goldsmith at the Office of Legal Counsel, underwent waterboarding at a DC-area military base. He found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning.

The White House was not pleased, and when Gonzales become AG, sources say Levin was "forced out."

ABC offers its own video of simulated waterboarding. (It seems these things are a dime a dozen, nowadays.)

White House Blocked Waterboarding Critic

Decius wrote:

How LED signs become a national emergency.

The story here doesn't strike me as particularly novel. The underlying lesson is that security is all about incentives. We've been talking about that here for a long time now. Let's take a walk through the archives:

Workshop on Economics and Information Security, from January 2002:

Many system security failures occur not so much for technical reasons but because of failures of organisation and motivation. For example, the person or company best placed to protect a system may be insufficiently motivated to do so, because the costs of system failure fall on others. Such perverse incentives raise many issues best discussed using economic concepts such as externalities, asymmetric information, adverse selection and moral hazard. They are becoming increasingly important now that information security mechanisms are not merely used to protect against malicious attacks, but also to protect monopolies, differentiate products and segment markets. There are also interesting security issues raised by industry monopolization and the accompanying reduction in product heterogenity. For these and other reasons, the confluence between information security and economics is of growing importance.

This workshop continued; in 2004 I cited the Third Annual Workshop on Economics and Information Security, which posed such questions as:

Can market forces ensure that firms will act to improve security?

Later that year, we enjoyed Old-school British anti-piracy ads, including one that encourages you to rat out your school teachers for cash.

Earlier this year I recommended Anderson's 2001 paper about Why Information Security is Hard. This is always worth reading, and now seems like as good a time as any. I'm still loving the quote from 1849, about first-class and third-class carriage service:

Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

Bruce's "CYA decisions" are the superfluous trappings of the rich. Fear is the new Comfort.

Also, I note another recommendation, from last year, about Costs and Consequences of Transformation and Transparency:

The economics of ‘information-rich’ environments inherently inspire perverse incentives that frequently generate unhappy outcomes.

The context is slightly different but the message is quite applicable:

Any objective review of private sector experiences with digital transformation offers RMA champions evidence more sobering than inspiring. The potentially enormous benefits of net-centric transformation should be valued only in the context of their potentially enormous costs. These cost-benefit ratios have not been adequately assessed. The fundamentalist dogma of the RMA transformation ideology recalls the aphorism, “Be careful of what you want because you’re sure to get it.”

There is also Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his Black Swans:

Many hedge fund managers ... are just picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. And sometimes the steamroller accelerates.

In a world of Black Swans, the first step is understanding just how much we will never understand.

Fear is the new Comfort

For three decades Vice President Dick Cheney conducted a secretive, behind-closed-doors campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power. Finally, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department and the White House made a number of controversial legal decisions. Orchestrated by Cheney and his lawyer David Addington, the department interpreted executive power in an expansive and extraordinary way, granting President George W. Bush the power to detain, interrogate, torture, wiretap and spy -- without congressional approval or judicial review.

FRONTLINE: cheney's law | PBS

Despite all the claims of victory by NATO, the Taliban has managed to become far more effective in widening its networks of support and in building its operational and propaganda capacity.

If the Karzai government enters a coalition with the Taliban, it will not only amount to the defeat of what the United States and its allies have been promising in support of building a secure, stable and democratic Afghanistan, but also runs the risk of igniting a savage ethnic conflict in the country.

No one should underestimate the wider regional implications of such a scenario.

In the zero-sum game that is the management of US Army deployments, the consequences of The Surge are as predictable as a game of Whac-A-Mole.

Don't cave in to the Taliban

In a nutshell: last month, SITE used its access to Obelisk to obtain a "screener" of the latest Osama bin Laden video. They got excited, and, perhaps seeing an opportunity to boast, handed it off to top officials, who (according to Katz) promptly fumbled it into the national news media. Katz feels double-crossed and plays at revenge by naming names to the aforementioned national news media. (Mike also cites the coverage at the Sun.)

She claims that "a years-long surveillance operation" was compromised by the officials' early release of the video. If true, this reflects rather poorly on SITE's tradecraft.

If, at the time of the leak, Katz was embargoing this video from her regular subscribers, then why did she rely on SITE's basic Internet distribution mechanism? This sort of thing ought to be on a separate limited-access network. For that matter, she could have hand-couriered it over to Leiter at NTC. And why does the file remain online after Fielding, Bagnal, and Leiter had pulled their copies? They could have been given separate one-time-use URLs, each pointing to a separate watermarked copy of the video.

Venzke, her competitor at IntelCenter, is taking cheap shots at her expense, but he has a point: "It is not just about getting the video first. It is about having the proper methods and procedures in place ..."

It's possible this is a ruse. From the Bury the Lead Dept:

Al-Qaeda supporters, now alerted to the intrusion into their secret network, put up new obstacles that prevented SITE from gaining the kind of access it had obtained in the past, according to Katz.

"Oh, damn. Now I'm locked out."

It's also possible this is a deliberate disruption, akin to JIEDDO forcing bombers "back on the wire."

In either case, the infighting over the "leak" makes for good cover.

Note to early birds: the Shachtman story has been updated. See additional analysis at Captain's Quarters. Pundita was talking about Obelisk on Monday.

Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda's Secrets

This essay is excellent and should be considered required reading. Now it is even more heartbreaking than it was last month, as two of its authors were KIA on Monday.

What soldiers call the “battle space”... is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army ...

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear ...

The War as We Saw It

Those damned camera phones.

What kind of nihilistic monsters see a benefit to murdering and maiming hundreds of innocent men, women and children?

Women were killed at market; children were buried as clay and mud houses collapsed.

Entire neighborhoods were flattened.

Scores of families were obliterated in the attack, which wiped out a market and a bus station.

"We've always said al-Qaeda would try to carry out sensational attacks this month in particular," said Petraeus.

Petraeus and Crocker have the reputation of being independent-minded and frank. But at a time like this, such qualities are not primarily what the White House wants.

Faced with what looks from afar like a Hobbesian war of all against all, if not a descent into hell itself, the normal instinct of human beings to exercise their moral faculties grows numb.

Poor families in the Yazidi community often crowd as many as 30 people in one home.

Rescuers dug through the rubble throughout Wednesday in scenes reminiscent of an earthquake zone. Bodies covered by blankets were laid in the street.

"I'm calling on the government and the officials to remove those bodies and bury them because they will cause diseases that could be worse than the results of the explosions themselves," he said.

"We are thirsty. We have had no water for days."

"Families are now wandering in the wilderness."

"We've transitioned through to a clean-up phase."

"We didn't hear them calling out for help until moments before a bulldozer would have killed them as it cleared the rubble." The freed youngsters began running through the streets begging for food and water.

Many believe that the suicide blasts were the culmination o... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Al Qaeda is stronger now than at any time since 9/11, say some; it is less strong than it could have become, answers the administration. Congressional Democrats say that instead of catching Bin Laden, Bush took his eyes off the ball and got mired in an irrelevant war in Iraq; the White House replies that if we don’t fight the jihadis in Iraq, we will have to do so in Manhattan.

And so American politicians argue in what seems to remain a cognitive vacuum, confusing the public and producing inane statements from our elected leaders. Had Al Qaeda consciously planned how to thoroughly confuse the infidels, this would have been the ideal result. It is all the persistent and inevitable outcome of executive delusions (jihadis are “a small minority”) and Democratic flippancy (“the war on terrorism is a bumper sticker,” Sen. John Edwards has charged) against a background of popular ignorance and an oversupply of lawyers and human rights activists. The result is that six years after 9/11 we (and the Europeans are generally worse) are still fighting a war in a conceptual fog —— and not getting any closer to winning it.

In reality, the nature and goals of the enemy, albeit complex, should be quite clear, as should the ways to defeat it. Until we understand a few key realities, we will continue to tread water and remain on the defensive.

How to Think about Jihad