a shockingly Trump-like dad, and even some family secrets.
.. He in a tux; she in a $100,000 Dior dress that laborers’ hands had toiled upon for a legendary 550 hours, affixing 1,500 crystals—jewels fit for private citizens like them.
.. In this respect, she is just like her husband. She’s alluringly opaque. She makes meaningful eye contact and emphatically repeats affirmative, folksy banalities—she “has a thick skin,” she takes things “day by day,” she follows the news “from A to Z”—until the interviewer either is transported into a supra-verbal understanding or decides it’s pointless to press for specifics.
.. This image of a retiring homebody, of course, is not the one that Trump’s enemies present when they conjure her in the White House. Ahead of Utah’s primary, allies of Ted Cruz posted a photo from a shoot for a 2000 issue of British GQ in which a naked Melania is lying on her stomach on a white bearskin rug. “Meet Melania Trump. Your next First Lady,” read the ad, aimed at conservative Mormon voters. “Or, you could support Ted Cruz on Tuesday.”
The Case for Mosque Surveillance
The vast majority of U.S. mosques presently serves no such role, and their members would utterly reject radicalism, extremism, or violence. Even where there is an extremist presence, that would be absolutely contrary to the wishes of the mainstream in the congregation. The main thing the imams in those places want is to have the police help them kick out the extremists, and not to be too gentle doing so.
But any terrorist Islamist presence in the U.S., present or future, does and will use mosques in this way. If you do not maintain such mosques under surveillance—and particular “certain mosques” already leaning in radical Salafist directions—you might as well abandon any and all pretense of trying to limit or suppress terrorism on U.S. soil.
“Surveillance” in this instance emphatically means human intelligence within the mosque. That means recruiting informants within it, and trying to bring radicals over to your own side, to see what extremists are going to do before they do it. Just how and where is radicalization being undertaken? Who are the key militants? Are there weapons present? What are the overseas connections? And if that means recruiting and controlling imams and religious teachers, all the better.
These tactics are absolutely fundamental to European counter-terrorism approaches, and nobody has the slightest doubt of that fact. That fact is public knowledge, and effectively beyond political criticism. If U.S. agencies claim that they are not doing the same things right now, in American mosques, they are simply deluding the public. They will worry about the freedom of religion lawsuits later.
So, God help me on this, in this instance, Trump is right. The only thing he is doing wrong is talking about it publicly.
Postscript: Ahmad Chalabi
“I think Chalabi and the I.N.C. were very shrewd,” Larry Wilkerson, the chief of staff to Colin Powell, who was then the Secretary of State, told me. “I think Chalabi understood what people wanted, and he gave it to them.”
That, it seems to me, was Chalabi’s sin—helping to justify a decision that officials in the Bush Administration were inclined to make anyway.
The CIA’s Torture Defenders
The seven men who contributed to the book (George Tenet, Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, John McLaughlin, Michael Morell, Jose Rodriguez, John Rizzo, and Philip Mudd) are, with the exception of Mudd, quite likely guilty of war crimes, so it is completely understandable that they would want to either set the record straight or redirect the narrative, depending on how one views their actions..
.. It is also interesting to note some of the evidence for malfeasance that the authors chose not to address. In 2004, the Agency’s own inspector general John Helgerson produced a Top Secret report that concluded that there had been a failure in leadership at CIA relating to nearly every aspect of the enhanced interrogation program. He reported that it was difficult to determine when and if certain techniques (i.e. torture) actually resulted in information that might not have been produced otherwise, that the procedures used themselves were more brutal than what was authorized in Department of Justice legal guidelines, that the program was poorly administered, and that some prisoners were tortured when there was no good reason to do so in terms of the information that they might have had access to.
.. We, of course, have the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts as well as the Authorization to Use Military Force and a new Pentagon manual that defines journalists as potential “unprivileged belligerents” subject to killing on or near a battlefield.
.. Recent media reports reveal that 52 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command and Defense Intelligence Agency have filed a formal complaint with the Pentagon inspector general claiming that reports on the war against ISIS have been routinely altered by senior officials to make them more optimistic. They describe their work environment as “Stalinist” and if what they allege is true, it confirms that even the White House doesn’t know what the Defense Department is actually doing in Syria.