Ohiocore

"What remains objectionable -- what looms as more objectionable than ever, now that the government has acknowledged Mr. Hamdi's unimportance -- is the unnecessary assault on civil liberties that the administration led in his case. For three years the administration insisted that Mr. Hamdi be held incommunicado and without any semblance of normal legal process or rights despite his citizenship. For most of his detention he was prevented from meeting with his lawyer."

"In 2002 the government contended in court that merely allowing him to meet with counsel 'jeopardizes compelling national security interests' and would 'interfere with if not irreparably harm the military's ongoing efforts to gather intelligence.' Mr. Hamdi, it warned, might even 'pass concealed messages through unwitting intermediaries.'"

"The government insisted that the courts authorize Mr. Hamdi's detention purely on the basis of a two-page affidavit from a mid-level Defense Department bureaucrat who claimed no personal knowledge of the case. An American citizen could be plucked out of all of the protections of the civilian justice system with no significant judicial review and no opportunity to rebut the facts behind the decision, the administration argued."

The following are direct quotes from a BBC NEWS report on their country's continued military presence, "Basra: British troops in Iraq's 'peaceful' city":

• Last month, British troops fired 100,000 rounds of ammunition in southern Iraq.
• The base in Amara sustained more than 400 direct mortar hits.
• The British battalion there counted some 853 separate attacks of different kinds: mortars, roadside bombs, rockets and machine-gun fire.
• They say that no British regiment has had such intense 'contact' since Korea...
• Five cleaning ladies at a British base were murdered on their way to work.
• Two local translators for the army disappeared. Their severed heads were found outside the front gate.
• But perhaps the most worrying development of the August fighting was that none of Basra's 25,000 police officers came to the aid of the British soldiers.
• Some even helped the gunmen...
• Eighteen months after arriving in Iraq, [UK troops] are still recruiting new police officers and giving them basic training. The main qualification seems to be that you haven't been in the police before.

But perhaps most damning of all:

• in local elections in the British sector this week, turnout was just 15 per cent.

The release agreement requires Hamdi, once he arrives in Saudi Arabia, to renounce any claim he has to U.S. citizenship and to abide by strict travel restrictions, according to the Justice Department statement. Sources familiar with the agreement said it restricts Hamdi from leaving Saudi Arabia for a certain period of time and restricts him from traveling to the United States.

Off the record conversations with intelligence chiefs in five major European countries -- each with multiple assets in Iraq -- showed remarkable agreement on these points:

• The neo-con objectives for restructuring Iraq into a functioning model democracy were a bridge too far. They were never realistic.
• The plan to train Iraqi military and security forces in time to cope with a budding insurgency before it spun out of control was stillborn.
• The insurgency has mushroomed from 5,000 in the months following the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime to an estimated 20,000 today, which is still growing. Insurgents are targeting green Iraqi units and volunteers for training and some have already defected to the rebels.
• Iraqi soldiers trained by the United States are complaining that the equipment ordered by the U.S. from the Ukraine that is being assigned to them gives them "2nd class status."
• To cope with the insurgency, the United States requires 10 times the rebel strength -- or some 200,000 as a bare minimum. Short of that number, the insurgency will continue to gain momentum. The multiple is based on the British experience in Northern Ireland for a quarter of a century as well as France's civil war in Algeria (1954-62), when nationalist guerrillas were defeated militarily, but won the war diplomatically. France deployed half a million men to defeat the fellaghas in Algeria.
• The U.S. occupation has lost control of large swathes of Iraq where the insurgency operates with virtual impunity.
• Iraq was a diversion from the war on a global movement that was never anchored in Baghdad.
• Iraq does not facilitate a solution to the Mideast crisis. And without such a solution, the global terrorist movement will continue to spread.
• Iraq has become a magnet for would-be Muslim jihadis the world over; it has greatly facilitated transnational terrorism.
• Charting a course out of the present chaos requires an open-ended commitment to maintain U.S. forces at the present level and higher through 2010 or longer.
• The once magnificent obsession about building a model Arab democracy in Iraq now has the potential of a Vietnam-type quagmire.
• Everything now undertaken in Iraq is palliative to tide the administration over the elections.
• What is urgently needed, whether a Bush II administration or a Kerry White House, is for the world's great democracies to meet at the summit to map a common strategy to confront a global challenge. The war on terrorism -- on the terrorists who have hijacked Islam -- is only one part of a common approach for (1) the defense of Western democracies and (2) the gradual transformation of an Arab world that must be assisted out of poverty, despair and defeat.
• A war on terrorism without a global strategy, which must include the funding of major educational reforms in poor countries like Pakistan, where wannabe jihadis are still being churned out by the hundreds of thousands, could only lead to the gradual erosion of Western democratic structures.
• The "war on terror" is a misnomer that is tantamount to rhetorical disinformation. One can no more fight terrorism than one could declare war on Hitler's Panzers in World War II or Dreadnoughts in World War I. Terrorism is a weapons system that has been used time and again for the last 5,000 years. The root causes are the problem, not the weapon.
  To ignore the causes is to guarantee escalation -- to weapons of mass destruction.

So... who's with us, again?