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Adam Serwer got at all this yesterday, but Kori Schake manages to ignore all the real questions one could raise about Baradar’s capture in favor of the ones most likely to appear in a memo to Mitch McConnell:
Americans were involved in the capture; does permitting Pakistan’s ISI to have possession constitute a rendition?
I guess, but it’s not a problematic “extraordinary” one. Dude is in Pakistan. Pakistan captures him with U.S. assistance. Pakistan has custody of him. There are responsibilities the U.S. still has toward ensuring his humane treatment, but this is a different beast than capturing someone and then sending him to a third country to be tortured in a see-no-evil fashion. People should think harder about the practices contained in the word “rendition” before using it in a boogedy-boogedy sense.
Is the administration confident the procedures applied to other terrorists, say, Christmas bomber Abdulmutallab, are adequate to attain the information that could save lives?
Yes. Because the real interrogators say so. Next question.
Will the rules not apply because of the high value of this particular individual?
They should!
Will he seek to have him extradited to the United States for trial?
Now you just sound stupid.
Will he get offered a deal in return for information?
Given the diplomatic stakes here, that’s not really the right way to understand what’s happening, but I’ll be charitable and say it’s close enough — and wouldn’t necessarily be problematic if so, if the goal is to see whether the Taliban can be brought to the negotiating table. Or does Schake think instead we should be fighting forever? That would be weird, considering she favored giving up in Afghanistan last year. Maybe she hasn’t thought about any of this very hard.
Does he fall into the acceptable 20 percent return to the fight rate for al Qaeda and Taliban that Special Assistant to the President John Brennan said we should not be concerned about last week?
Now you sound extremely stupid.
My guess is that the Obama administration will try and treat the case of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar as sui generis
Why is that problematic? This is a sui generis capture. The precedent is whom, exactly? And don’t say Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, because he didn’t fit into any negotiating context, nor could his capture possibly compel al-Qaeda to change its calculations as to the cost of continued fighting.
But their every decision in the Baradar case will be a precedent and a proving ground for administration policies on detention, rendition, interrogation, and ultimately dispensation of captured terrorists.
Well, it’ll be a precedent for similar captures. Overblown invective can’t disguise that.
Vice President Biden’s argument from last Sunday’s talk shows came very close to claiming the Obama administration is doing little different than the Bush administration had in fighting terrorism. That’s unlikely to be a satisfying answer for many of the president’s supporters.
No, what Biden said was that conservatives were criticizing Obama for civilian trials for terrorists that Bush pursued. What satisfies supporters of Obama — and, for that matter, most thoughtful Americans — is the fact that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar is in custody. That’s something Bush never pulled off, as I recall. Sure was a lot of torture, unprovoked war and only three military prosecutions, though.
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In all honesty Spencer, it’s not clear these are all completely nuts questions. They may be stupid, but it’s not completely obvious to me. If you want to make someone look stupid, the preferred methodology is to demonstrate that they’re saying stupid shit. Just calling them stupid doesn’t really get that done.
I mean, isn’t this a proving ground for the administration’s stated policies on interrogations, etc? Haven’t you been making that point repeatedly?
Abdulmutallab is, but Baradar is a much different case. If you think I’m over the line, I’ll dial it back, but so many of these questions just struck me as in bad faith.
Don’t do nuthin’ on my account, just letting you know how it read to me. I have a general aversion to Shadow Gov’t that probably exceeds yours considerably, but when I clicked over and read it on its own, I found it to be among the less hackish things I’ve seen over there. She seems to be placing some at least formally earnest questions. Though the more I look at them, the more I tend to come around to your view of the more tendentious ones. But it seems, for example, at least fair to pose the question of what would have happened to a lower-level guy we captured on our own power in Pakistan and took into our custody. Might he have gone to Guantanamo, or at least Bagram, where considerable voices on our side would be urging due process? That doesn’t get you all the way to asking whether we’d seek extradition, but there’s at least a kernel of a point there. Which doesn’t, at the same time, get you over the stupid bar, so I get your response too.
A. If he was captured in Pakistan then he was already within Pakistani jurisdiction -there is no “rendering” to another jurisdiction so very clearly NO, “allowing” the forces of a sovereign nation within that nation’s territorial boundaries to exercise control is not “rendition.”
B. Is any idiot “confident” that torture saves lives? Care to examine the upshot of the al-Libi torture-to-order? Are the Republicans “confident” torture hasn’t killed Americans? If we can be confident of anything, it’s that it has killed Americans.
C. Does she think Pakistan should or would extradite to a torture regime nation that will not use a courts and law, but only black sites and depravity?
Sorry, but someone who is in a foreign country’s detention, an ally’s detentino, is not “a proving ground for administration policies on detention, rendition, interrogation, and ultimately dispensation of captured terrorists” for the US administration, it’s a proving ground for Pakistan’s policies.
Is sovereignty a foreign concept?
See, she’s looking stupider by the minute, even though the word doesn’t appear!
Not to mention the fact that Baradar is not a terrorist plotting attacks against US civilians, but a so9ldier combating the US army in his own homeland. Sort of makes all the questions irrelevant. Unless they try to make Obama mean that all captured Talebs should get civilian trials in the US.
Thing is, we have plenty of just “soldier combating the US army in his own homeland”s in captivity at this time, and not just correctly labeled POWs at Bagram, but at Guantanamo as well, and plenty of folks have called for their trials on terrorism charges and oppose giving them the status of warriors. In fact, we consider everyone who has launched an attack on a U.S. soldier or a local civilian since the final abdication of the Republican Guard both an (unlawful) enemy combatant and a criminal terrorist. Baradar’s history shows he was among the more directly welcoming and supportive of all Taliban to Usama bin Laden before 9/11, which would presumably put him near the top of the United States’ most-wanted-terrorists-in-the-world list. The reason he’s getting the treatment he’s getting (Pakistani custody, house arrest, possible eventual exile in Saudi Arabia, etc.) is a) because it was a condition of his surrender and b) because he holds in his poker hand the ace of retaining significant influence over the outcome of peace negotiations to a war we know we can’t win outright militarily. So Mary i think is right to point to the simple fact that he is quite pointedly not in U.S. custody and doesn’t look to be as the reason that the question of a trial for him is out of order. Correct me if I am wrong on any of that.
Not that I think that means Schacke’s not pushing it to suggest we’d seek his extradition, only that such questions do raise issues that are quite worth covering in detail, and hence are somewhat mitigated in their stupidity.