On February 23

On this day in ...

... 2010, Letitia Long (right) was named the next director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. At the time she was the deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. She had 3 decades of engineering and intelligence experience, serving in other positions including deputy director of Naval Intelligence and coordinator of intelligence community activities at the Central Intelligence Agency. Upon taking over at National Geospatial last August, Long became the "the first woman to be a leader at a major intelligence agency" in the United States.

(Prior February 23 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

RTF?

Last week's Executive Order to close the Guantánamo detention camp by this time next year -- about which IntLawGrrl Kristine A. Huskey's posted above -- has touched off a flurry of debate in government and the media. Particularly noted is a resurgence of a phenomenon here labeled RTF, for "returned to the fight."

There've been occasional allegations over the years that a smattering of the 500 or so men freed from Guantánamo subsequently "returned to the fight." It was scarcely a surprise that such allegations intensified just as President Barack Obama made good on his campaign promise and set in motion closure of the camp.

Page 1 of Friday's New York Times thus told of an RTF-er now said to be an al Qaeda deputy in Yemen. The story appeared about a week after release of at of a pre-inauguration Pentagon report classifying fully 11% of all men and boys freed from GTMO as RTF.

But as CNN reported this weekend, "security experts" are "skeptical." (Video of a segment of the Rachel Maddow show, in which Seton Hall Law Professor Mark Denbeaux debunks the Pentagon's numbers, is here.) And though the head of the Pentagon -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the only holdover from the prior Cabinet -- did not dispute the numbers, CNN reported that he saw no cause for alarm:

'It's not as big a number if you're talking about 700 or a thousand or however many have been through Guantanamo.'

But these responses overlook a more fundamental problem at play in all RTF reports.

As my New York Times' Room for Debate blog post details, resort to the RTF catchphrase requires acceptance not only that a former detainee's now in the fight, but also that he was a fighter before his capture. All agree that was not the case with all GTMO detainees. (image credit)

Here's hoping that the new administration follows through on its commitment to undertaking a careful and concrete case-by-case analysis, rather than casting easy yet overbroad aspersions on a diverse detainee population.

(To GTMOre news, check out Karen J. Greenberg's Washington Post op-ed on how, in the early days of detention, Pentagon civilians thwarted uniformed military lawyers' efforts to operate within the bounds of legal due process.)

A gender-balanced natsec sextet

A photo montage is worth a whole lot of words: For the 1st time in history, the President's national security leadership is about to comprise an equal number of women and men. (photo credit)

Yesterday President-Elect Barack Obama announced that he'd seek the Senate's confirmation of the 6 persons above as his key advisors on issues of national and global importance.

Most media attention has been paid to Obama's appointment of his chief rival for the Democratic nomination, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) (top row, middle) to be Secretary of State. It's an audacious, inspired choice. On account of both her years in the Senate and her years as 1st Lady, Clinton's been to and met with many of the leaders who're soon to be the object of her diplomatic endeavors. At home, it must be noted, Clinton's immediate (Condoleezza Rice) and recent (Madeleine Albright) predecessors are women. The same may be said of counterparts abroad: today women serve as the Foreign Minister in 24 countries besides the United States.

Among those slated to join Clinton in the Cabinet is Gov. Janet Napolitano (D-Ariz.) (bottom row, left), tapped to be the new Secretary of Homeland Security. As we've posted, she's also served as U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona and as Arizona's Attorney General. She'll inherit the daunting task of bringing to maturation a department birthed post-9/11 as an amalgamation of agencies in charge of counterterrorism, disaster relief, and border control, among many other bailiwicks.

Dr. Susan E. Rice (bottom row, right) is set to become U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, thus heading the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York. Rice will be the 3d American woman to hold the post; the others were Madeleine Albright and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick. And she'll follow a legion of women who've been their country's chief U.N. representative. During the tenure of U.S. President Bill Clinton, Rice served both in the State Department, as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and at the White House, as the National Security

Council's Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs and as Director for International Organizations and Peacekeeping. As we've posted, she was a key foreign policy advisor to Obama during his campaign. A onetime Rhodes Scholar who earned her Ph.D. in international relations from Oxford University, Rice has also been a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy and Global Economy and Development Programs at the Brookings Institution.

Rounding out the natsec team: Eric Holder (top row, left), nominated to be Attorney General; retired U.S. Marine Corps General Jim Jones (top row, right), to be National Security Advisor; and Dr. Robert Gates (bottom row, center), the subject of another IntLawGrrls post today, slated to remain as Secretary of Defense.

On December 2

On this day in ...

... 1823 (185 years ago today), in his 7th annual message to Congress, U.S. President James Monroe declared:

[T]he occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers ...

This Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed with respect not only to the United States but also to countries throughout North and South America, has persisted as a tenet of U.S. foreign policy. A contemporary invocation occurred in December 1984, when Dr. Robert Gates, the current Secretary of Defense, who's slated to remain so in the next administration (as posted above), but then Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, wrote a letter to his superior in which he cited the doctrine to justify U.S. support for the contras who were fighting Nicaragua's Sandinista government.

... 1977, the chief magistrate of Pretoria accepted findings that South African security forces were not to blame for the death of Steve Biko, 30, the leader of the Black Consciousness Movement who "died of extensive brain injuries sustained" 5 days after "a scuffle with police" who were interrogating and detaining him. No trial ever has been held respecting the apartheid-era incident, described in jarring detail in Donald Woods' book Biko (1978) and depicted in the film Cry Freedom (1987).

... and counting ...

(Occasional sobering thoughts.) Where to start in reviewing war news since our last post on August 21? As we await a planned 1st Presidential debate this evening -- the focus of which is supposed to be foreign policy/national security -- a review of events seems very much in order.

Pakistan
Begin, perhaps, with what appears to be the uncovering of a 3d front for armed conflict involving the United States. It's in Pakistan, where, as IntLawGrrl Naomi Norberg posted on Sunday, a terrorist bomb so devastated part of downtown Islamabad that media there were calling it the country's 9/11. (Excellent posts on same may be found at Steve Coll's blog at The New Yorker website, which I've just discovered. Coll, as IntLawGrrls posted a while back, is the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of a masterful book on U.S.-Pakistan operations pre-9/11.). Today's news from that troubled part of the world, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times: "U.S., Pakistan troops exchange fire on Afghanistan border. The Pentagon calls it a misunderstanding and denies that U.S. helicopters crossed the border into Pakistan's tribal regions." One fears the need soon for a website chronicling casualties there.
(Must say, too, that the man who replaced Pervez Musharraf does not instill confidence that things in Pakistan will improve. This week's flirting by President Asif Ali Zardari -- widower of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto -- with GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin was beyond creepy. (photo credit))

Afghanistan
Move, then, to Afghanistan. A core concern of this recurring feature, civilian casualties, continue to mount:

This year is on pace to be the deadliest for civilians since the Taliban were toppled by the American-led invasion in 2001. More than 1,445 civilians have been killed so far in 2008, and slightly more than half of those deaths, tallied by the United Nations, are attributed to insurgent forces.

This month Robert Gates, U.S. Secretary of Defense, "express[ed] his 'sincere condolences'" to the Afghan people "and promis[ed] speedier compensation and investigation after such casualties." The apology came not long after Afghan leaders demanded a SOFA, or status of forces agreement, spelling out troops' responsibilities. They called for an end to aerial attacks as well. As for average Afghans, it's reported that "As Crime Increases in Kabul, So Does Nostalgia for Taliban." And in Washington, a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate in the works is said to be so "grim" on prospects in Afghanistan that the government plans to keep it secret till after the November 4 election.

Iraq

Shift to Iraq. Violence is by no means over, yet remains less than before. In the United States mainstream media attribute this to "the surge" of added U.S. troops. We've posted in the past that events before the surge might be the major cause. A newly released UCLA study supports that view, "suggesting that ethnic cleansing by rival Shiites may have been largely responsible for the decrease in violence for which the U.S. military has claimed credit." At the negotiating table, meanwhile, it seemed that the United States had reached an agreement that would allow its troops to remain with the Iraqis' OK -- on the condition that plans for eventual withdrawal be included in the agreement. That's stalled, however. Yesterday U.S. officials blamed Iran for the impasse in its talks with Iraq.

The Count

With this news in mind, we move, finally, to the casualty count. According to Iraq Body Count, between 87,643 and 95,664 Iraqi women, children, and men have died in the conflict in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. That's an increase of between 982 and 1,107 deaths in the last 4 weeks. According to the U.S. Defense Department, 4,172 American servicemembers have been killed in Iraq. Total coalition fatalities: 4,486 persons. That's 27 servicemember deaths in the last 4 weeks, all but 1 of them Americans. On the other established front, military casualties in Afghanistan stand at 605 Americans and 376 other coalition servicemembers. That's an increase of 27 and 16, respectively, in the last 3 weeks, and a total servicemember casualty count just shy of 1,000.