America’s strength is being challenged by “a strategy of the weak,” a Pentagon document says, listing diplomatic and legal challenges in international forums in the same sentence with terrorism.“Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak focusing on international fora, judicial processes and terrorism,” it says. It does not go into detail.[...]
“We need to think broadly about diplomatic lines of attack, legal lines of attack, technological lines of attack, all kinds of asymmetric warfare that various actors can use to try to constrain, shape our behavior.”
Asked to clarify what a “legal line of attack” meant, [Douglas Feith] acknowledged it could include the International Criminal Court, a body vehemently opposed by the Bush administration, that began operations in The Hague in 2003.[...]
The document also accents needs for allies to provide bases for U.S. forces and to search their own countries for extremists who intend to attack the United States.
Still, the document leaves open the possibility the United States would act preemptively and alone. “We will act with others when we can,” it says.
The document will be used to help shape the Quadrennial Defense Review, a far-reaching project now under way that will try to outline what military capabilities the United States needs to meet the goals of this strategy.[...]
Other vulnerabilities include inconsistent or less-capable allies and resentment of U.S. influence in world affairs, the document says. In a town-hall meeting at the Pentagon earlier Friday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld complained about one of those allies, calling Spain’s abrupt withdrawal of 1,300 troops from Iraq last year “not impressive.”
Overall, the document confirms Rumsfeld’s policies in the broadest terms: It is impossible to know when and where the next threat to U.S. security will come — what Pentagon planners call “strategic uncertainty” — so the U.S. military needs to be able and flexible enough to deploy anywhere in the world in short order.
MSNBC article
The latest Pentagon report on the abuse of captives, delivered to Congress last week by Vice Admiral Albert Church III, doesn't point a finger of blame at Miller or any other high-ranking official. It concludes that while detainees in Iraq, Guantanamo, and elsewhere were brutalized by military or CIA interrogators, there was no formal policy authorizing such abuse. (On occasion it was even condemned -- in December 2002, for example, some Navy officials denounced the Guantanamo techniques as ''unlawful and unworthy of the military services.")
But surely, Church was asked at a congressional hearing, someone should be held accountable for the scores of abuses that even the government admits to? ''Not in my charter," the admiral replied.[...]
The Bush administration and the military insist that any abuse of detainees is a violation of policy and that abusers are being punished. If so, why does it refuse to allow a genuinely independent commission to investigate without fear or favor? Why do Republican leaders on Capitol Hill refuse to launch a proper congressional investigation? And why do my fellow conservatives -- those who support the war for all the right reasons -- continue to keep silent about a scandal that should have them up in arms?
Boston.com article
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