These warnings of a worsening al-Qaeda threat coincide with key
congressional votes on whether to restrict the Bush administration’s
claimed authority to conduct warrantless wiretaps of Americans and to
subject prisoners to “coercive interrogation techniques,” which have
included simulated drowning from “waterboarding.”
One
administration goal appears to be to soften up Democrats with the
suggestion that they are going “soft on terror” if they try to impose
some court oversight of Bush’s wiretapping or if they prohibit
interrogation tactics that may cross the line into torture.
Already,
some Democrats have joined Republicans in transforming a bill designed
to put some constraints on Bush’s wiretapping authority into
legislation that gives Bush another major concession, legal immunity
for U.S. telecommunications companies that cooperated with Bush’s
earlier warrantless wiretapping.
Administration officials also
are making clear to Congress that limiting CIA interrogations to
standards set for the Army and the FBI could leave the United States
more vulnerable in a future crisis.
At the Intelligence
Committee hearing, CIA Director Michael Hayden stated publicly for the
first time that waterboarding had been used against three senior
al-Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003 – and that aggressive techniques
were employed against about 30 detainees in total.
Though Hayden
did not spell out these additional techniques, they are known to
include forced nudity, putting detainees in painful “stress positions,”
subjecting detainees to extremes of hot and cold, long-term sensory
deprivation and denial of sleep.
Hayden told the senators that
if they prohibited the CIA’s harsh tactics, interrogators would not
risk violating the congressionally approved standards, whatever the
future emergency.
- “We will play to the edges of the box that
the American political process gives us,” Hayden said. “If the American
political system draws the box making it equivalent to the Army Field
Manual [prohibiting abusive interrogations], we will play inside the
box…
- “One should not expect them [CIA interrogators] to play
outside the box because we’ve entered a new period of threat or danger
to the nation. There’s no wink and nod here. If you create the box, we
will play inside the box, without exception.”
Revived Specter
This
revived specter of a worsening U.S. vulnerability to a major terrorist
attack will surely hover over the congressional debate on reining in
Bush’s assertion of unlimited presidential authority, but it may well
spook the presidential campaign, too.
On the Republican side, as
frontrunner John McCain begins to position himself for the November
general election, the terror fear should help him since he has embraced
Bush’s Iraq War even if the U.S. occupation of Iraq lasts 100 years or
more. The Arizona senator also has vowed to wage an open-ended war
against Islamic militants, calling it the key “ideological struggle” of
this era.
So, assuming that Americans still take Bush's terror
warnings seriously, McCain could get an advantage. However, the
administration’s stoking up fears about another 9/11 represents a more
difficult challenge to Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Both
Democrats have argued that Bush’s diversion of U.S. forces from the
Afghanistan theatre to Iraq contributed to the continued U.S.
vulnerability to al-Qaeda’s terrorism and they have advocated direct
military retaliation against al-Qaeda. But they have differed
significantly in their personal reactions to Bush's “war on terror.”
Sen.
Clinton generally has finessed Bush’s bellicosity rather than challenge
the premises of his arguments. Her desire to “look tough” often has
drawn her into political alliances with congressional neoconservatives
like Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut.
In 2007, for instance,
Clinton voted for a Lieberman-sponsored resolution calling on Bush to
designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a “terrorist” organization. Her
vote drew criticism from other Democratic presidential hopefuls as
indicating that she had not learned much from her 2002 vote to
authorize Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
Many Clinton critics suspect
that if she secures the Democratic nomination, she would start tacking
again toward a neocon-lite position on national security, and that if
she wins the White House, she would pursue a foreign policy course not
that much different from the belligerent one that Bush has followed.
She would never want to look “weak.”
Obama Test
For Sen.
Obama, the administration’s ramped-up rhetoric about an impending
terrorist threat on U.S. soil represents a different kind of challenge.
He has argued for a revolutionary rethinking of how the United States
conducts its foreign policy – and might have to defend that position
amid a climate of fear.
- “I don’t want to just end the war” in
Iraq, Obama said at the Jan. 31 debate in Los Angeles. “I want to end
the mindset that got us into war in the first place.”
Obama’s
reference was to his advocacy of unconditional negotiations with
enemies, as opposed to Bush’s approach of issuing ultimatums to
unfriendly states and demanding major concessions before negotiating
with them.
If Obama means what he says, he would be pointing the
way toward a very different kind of U.S. foreign policy, one that
relies more on American “soft power” influence than on “hard power”
military might.
While sounding fairly radical after nearly three
decades of escalating military buildups -- and neoconservative dreams
of permanent U.S. hegemony around the globe -- Obama’s position
actually harkens back to presidential goals from the early 1960s.
Obama
is echoing Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about the undue influence of the
“military-industrial complex” as well as John F. Kennedy’s appeal for a
world peace that is “not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by
American weapons of war.” [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “
Where
Would Obama Take the Nation?”]
But that could be a tough sell if
Americans are fearful again about another 9/11. Already, Hillary
Clinton has mocked Obama’s call for direct talks with enemy states as
naïve and proof of his inexperience.
Should the new terror
warnings gain traction with the American public, Obama’s reaction could
be a test of his mettle, whether he can stand up to the extraordinary
pressures – sometimes bordering on hysteria – that have dominated the
U.S. political process since the late summer of 2001.
Writings 
As Campaign 2008 reaches a critical point, George W. Bush’s top intelligence officials are raising new alarms about a revitalized al-Qaeda recruiting Westerners, possibly including Americans, to carry out terror attacks inside the United States.
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