If you get a chance watch the C-SPAN segment of Marc Sageman speaking at the New America Foundation about terrorists. Sageman studies them as a social scientist and has made many useful observations about terrorists. His most recent work focuses on Muslims who live in the West. At one point he put up a slide showing that while 60 people have been arrested as Muslim terrorists in the United States by contrast 2400 have been arrested in Europe. He also says the 60 in the US were not hard core guys for the most part (can you say "entrapment"? sure). Why the difference? Europe has more Muslims. But also, and more importantly, the European welfare state gives young Muslims lots of time to sit around bored and grumbling. As my grandmother used to say "Idle hands are the devil's workshop".
Sageman says that the biggest state sponsors of terrorism are therefore the Western European welfare states. They pay most of the incomes for most of the terrorists active in the West.
There's an obvious conclusion here: We need to invade the European Union and overthrow all the welfare states. We could take over Europe and make it a colony. We could hire British former Hong Kong administrators and tell them to run Europe just as they ran Hong Kong: Low taxes and little in the way of welfare programs. Make everyone work like mad. That'll greatly reduce the terrorist threat.
Our occupation administration could also rid Europe of Muslim terrorists by deporting the Muslims. That would greatly reduce the terrorist threat from Western countries. We could even tell the Europeans that once we deported all the Muslims we'd allow them to restart their welfare states and then we'd withdraw.
If we did all that we'd still face one problem: Canada. What to do about Canada?
I'm thinking it might be time to force the break-up of Canada. In order to dilute the power of the Anglophone whites the French in Quebec have supported the multiculturalist claptrap that has made possible the large scale immigration of many Muslims to the Canadian welfare state. So the French north of our border are a root cause of the Muslim terrorist threat.
Rudy Giuliani wants foreigners to carry biometric ID cards while in the United States.
EVERY foreigner in America, including British visitors, would be required to carry an ID card bearing photograph and fingerprints under plans drawn up by Rudolph Giuliani, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.
Giuliani is hoping to cement his status as the Republican favourite by promising to enforce immigration and border controls, drawing on expertise in combating crime from his time as mayor of New York. He announced last week that all foreigners, including holiday-makers, would be obliged to carry a “tamper-proof” biometric card, which could be issued at ports of entry.
“If you don’t have that card, you get thrown out of the country,” Giuliani said. He intends to call it a Safe card (for secure authorised foreign entry).
Um, how is this going to help? Think about it. Suppose you are a terrorist. You want to move around inside the US. You manage to get a driver's license. Maybe it has your real name on it. Maybe it has a fake name. A cop pulls you over for speeding. He asks for your "Safe" card. You reply "But I have US citizenship! I have no need for a Safe card". Well, how can the cop know? Only if initial issuance of a driver's license includes an entry in a database that marks the person as a visitor would the cop know for sure that a claim of citizenship was false.
If we can know someone is a foreigner then what? Millions of foreigners are living and moving around inside the United States. Few will come into contact with law enforcement personnel and few of those contacts will provide law enforcement personnel any reason to suspect a person is a Muslim terrorist.
Yet pollster Scott Rasmussen finds that an overwhelming majority of the American public favor a universal ID card for foreign visitors.
Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters nationwide favor cutting off federal funds for “sanctuary cities” that offer protection to illegal immigrants. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 29% are opposed. Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney proposed such a plan earlier this week.
By a 71% to 16% margin, voters also favor a proposal that would require all foreign visitors to carry a universal identification card as proposed by another GOP Presidential hopeful, Rudy Giuliani. Seventy-four percent (74%) also favor the creation and funding of a central database to track all foreign visitors in the United States.
Lots of illegal alien Mexicans are driving around without a drivers license or car insurance. A "Safe" card would then become just another document they don't have that doesn't keep them from living here for months and years. We need real border control. We need aggressive efforts to round up the illegals who are already here.
Our problem with terrorism comes from Muslims. It doesn't come from atheistic Europeans or Hindu Indians or Zoroastrians or Buddhists or Chinese engineers or Japanese business executives. We do not need Muslim immigrants. Letting in Muslim immigrants or Muslim visitors does not improve our society. If we didn't let in Muslims we wouldn't need to worry about their overstaying visas. Until we adopt immigration and visa policies aimed at keeping out the Muslims proposals like a visitor ID card will be just another political gimmick sold by political candidates to the rubes.
Newt would rather end our reliance on Saudi oil as a more effective way to fight terrorism.
Washington — Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Thursday the Bush administration is waging a "phony war" on terrorism, warning that the country is losing ground against the kind of Islamic radicals who attacked the country on Sept. 11, 2001.
A more effective approach, said Gingrich, would begin with a national energy strategy aimed at weaning the country from its reliance on imported oil and some of the regimes that petro-dollars support.
"None of you should believe we are winning this war. There is no evidence that we are winning this war," the ex-Georgian told a group of about 300 students attending a conference for collegiate conservatives.
We need technological innovations to end our need for oil. The development of ways to power cars without use of fossil fuels would yield many benefits including cleaner air and less cash for the Saudis to use to spread Wahhabi Islam. Better battery technology that can power cars long distances will reduce the threat from terrorism.
Update: We also need to simply keep Muslims out of the West. If they weren't living among us they couldn't try to set off car bombs, bus bombs, train bombs, and airplane bombs. But this simple and effective response is beyond the pale as far as the gatekeepers of political correctness are concerned.
UK transport officials are said to be considering introducing passenger profiling on grounds including ethnic origin and religion.
Supporters say it could cut the delays caused by universal security checks after the uncovering of a possible plot to bring down planes - others say it will cause resentment and improving technology is more important.
A British Muslim high ranking police officer opposes profiling.
Chief Superintendent Ali Dizaei said plans to profile air passengers would create an offence of "travelling while Asian".
Current policy hassles everyone and so we are all guilty of the offense of "travelling while human". The opponents of profiling want to make everyone suffer inconveniences that are necessary for only a small subset of the total population. They expect us to believe the little old Christian lady from Des Moines is just as likely to be a terrorist as a young Muslim from London. This is absurd.
European Union ministers are discussing the idea of using profiling throughout Europe. They ought to use profiling when deciding who to allow in as immigrants.
BRUSSELS, August 18, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Increasing interest in "ethnic profiling" at airports is one of the upshots of a high-level EU antiterror meeting that took place in London on August 15-16.
Although the issue was not formally discussed at the meeting featuring interior ministers from a number of EU countries, ministers and officials in their private comments acknowledged it is considered by some as a promising way to help prevent future terrorist attacks.
Yes, of course it is a promising way to prevent terrorist attacks. Young Muslim males are most likely to carry out terrorist attacks.
A British YouGov survey found that 55% of the British public wants profiling. The question they were asked was "Passenger profiling is a recent term used to describe the process of selecting passengers based on their background or appearance. Would you like to see 'passenger profiling' introduced?"
Profiling seems eminently sensible. A person is orders of magnitude more likely to be a terrorist if young, male, and with Middle Eastern or south Asian appearances. People who attend a mosque are orders of magnitude more likely to be terrorists. Why waste police resources on the vast majority who do not fit terrorist profiles? Those same resources could produce much better results if common sense is applied to sizing up potential threats.
Robert Spencer argues that profiling is necessary.
Profiling, of course, is imperfect. Islam is not a race. Adherents of the jihad ideology can be found among all races: as John Walker Lindh, Jose Padilla, Richard Reid, Ismail Royer, and Hasan Akbar can attest. All those men have in common is that they are converts to Islam -- a phenomenon that doesn't necessarily have any outward signs. Nonetheless, the fact remains that young Middle Eastern males have committed a disproportionate amount of violent terror attacks in recent years. Accordingly, it is simply a waste of resources to subject all airline passengers, from grandmothers to toddlers, to equal scrutiny, while refusing to spend more time investigating passengers who come from the group from which most terrorists spring nowadays.
Over at View From The Right Lawrence Auster points to an article which reports on US officials going so far to oppose profiling that they gave a behind-the-scenes tour of security operations at O'Hare airport in Chicago to members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
In a meeting, Brian Humphrey, Customs and Border Patrol’s executive director of field operations, assured CAIR officials that agents do not single out Muslim passengers for special screening and that they must undergo a mandatory course in Muslim sensitivity training. The course teaches agents that Muslims believe jihad is an “internal struggle against sin” and not holy warfare.
Customs agents involved in the CAIR tour at O’Hare tell WorldNetDaily they were outraged that headquarters would reveal sensitive counterterrorism procedures to an organization that has seen several of its own officials convicted of terror-related charges since 9-11.
How disgusting.
A Sunday Times of London editorial entitled "The enemy within" shows how far along the debate about Muslim terrorism has moved in Britain.
Peter Clarke, deputy assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, says at least three other serious plots by home-grown terrorists have been disrupted since last year’s July 7 attacks on the London Underground. The danger seems ever present.
It is now self-evident that there is an enemy within Britain who wants to destroy our way of life. Most of this relatively small group of fanatics are British-born Muslims who have been educated here and brought up within our tolerant democracy.
But the Times editorialists come up short in their attempts to explain why so many British Muslims are hostile to the host society.
Why is Britain such a breeding ground for these young men, for that is what most of them are? Much can be ascribed to timidity on behalf of the authorities, wedded as they are to a multiculturalism that isolates many young men in ghettos and a reluctance to espouse British values through our schools and institutions. That appeasement was epitomised by the sanctuary offered to extremist Islamic groups in Britain — “Londonistan” — in the pathetic hope that it might offer some form of immunity from violence.
Appeasement is certainly part of the problem. Multiculturalism is part of the problem. But do the Brits get bombed by Hindus? Why aren't Hindus a threat as a result of multiculturalism? Or Buddhists? Or atheists? Easy answer: They all are not Muslims. Islam is the root problem. Islam and Western civilization are not compatible.
The rest of us should not have to deal with the consequences of Muslim desires to make us all submit to their backward religion.
Mark at Western Survival argues Muslims who come to the West behave as colonists, not immigrants.
An immigrant comes to a new country willing to become part of that country, to adopt its way of life, customs, language, even religion.
A colonist comes to a new land to pursue economic opportunities and/or to escape persecution in his homeland. A colonist is perfectly happy with his people's language, religion, culture, and way of life. He is not coming to become part of the native people, but to establish or expand an outpost for his people in new territory. This was exactly the situation of the pilgrims here in North America.
Perhaps the most quoted social philosopher of our time famously asked:
"Can we all get along?"
Well, when it comes to Muslims and Westerners, the answer is:
No, we can't.
So, deal with it. When we get in each other's faces, we get on each other's nerves. It's time to get out of each other's faces.
Westerners and Muslims don't agree on the basics of social order and don't want to live under the same rules. That shouldn't be a problem because that's what separate countries are for. We should stop occupying their countries and stop letting them move to ours.
Makes sense to me.
Steve also argues for a buyout of citizenship of Western Muslims where Muslims will get cash offers to return to Muslim countries. Good idea.
The map was of huge interest to U.S. border guards, who grilled Canadian truck driver Ahmad El Maati for hours about it. So, too, did interrogators in Syria and Egypt, where Mr. El Maati says he was tortured and repeatedly asked about the map's provenance.
The Globe and Mail has learned that the map -- scrawled numbers and all -- was in fact produced and distributed by the Canadian federal government. It is simply a site map, given out to help visitors to Tunney's Pasture, a sprawling complex of government buildings in Ottawa, find their way around.
"All my problems started with that map," says Mr. El Maati, who was interrogated about the document while held in filthy prisons in Syria and Egypt, where he says he was tortured to extract information for Canadian authorities.
Next time you read about evidence for a supposed terrorist plot keep in mind the threshold of evidence can be pretty low.
Yet in the past four years, the "terrorist map" has taken on almost mythic qualities. It has figured in various leaked accounts describing thwarted al-Qaeda plots to blow up targets in Ottawa, including the Parliament Buildings and the U.S. embassy.
Read the whole thing. This would be Keystone Kops funny if it didn't get a guy tortured and held for a couple of years.
Update: Jody Neel paints a more complicated picture of El Maati. Also see here for more. Not sure what to make of this story.
A New York Times article reports that a company called Aero Contractors now provides the air transport services for the US Central Intelligence Agency that the legendary Air America provided until 1976. Since 9/11 Aero Contractors has expanded.
Behind a surprisingly thin cover of rural hideaways, front companies and shell corporations that share officers who appear to exist only on paper, the C.I.A. has rapidly expanded its air operations since 2001 as it has pursued and questioned terrorism suspects around the world.
An analysis of thousands of flight records, aircraft registrations and corporate documents, as well as interviews with former C.I.A. officers and pilots, show that the agency owns at least 26 planes, 10 of them purchased since 2001. The agency has concealed its ownership behind a web of seven shell corporations that appear to have no employees and no function apart from owning the aircraft.
"When the C.I.A. is given a task, it's usually because national policy makers don't want 'U.S. government' written all over it," said Jim Glerum, a retired C.I.A. officer who spent 18 years with the agency's Air America but says he has no knowledge of current operations. "If you're flying an executive jet into somewhere where there are plenty of executive jets, you can look like any other company."
Some of the C.I.A. planes have been used for carrying out renditions, the legal term for the agency's practice of seizing terrorism suspects in one foreign country and delivering them to be detained in another, including countries that routinely engage in torture. The resulting controversy has breached the secrecy of the agency's flights in the last two years, as plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements.
A jet also arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from Dulles on May 31, 2003, after the killing in Saudi Arabia of Yusuf Bin-Salih al-Ayiri, a propagandist and former close associate of Mr. bin Laden, and the capture of Mr. Ayiri's deputy, Abdullah al-Shabrani.
Flight records sometimes lend support to otherwise unsubstantiated reports. Omar Deghayes, a Libyan-born prisoner in the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has said through his lawyer that four Libyan intelligence service officers appeared in September in an interrogation cell.
Aviation records cannot corroborate his claim that the men questioned him and threatened his life. But they do show that a Gulfstream V registered to one of the C.I.A. shell companies flew from Tripoli, Libya, to Guantánamo on Sept. 8, the day before Mr. Deghayes reported first meeting the Libyan agents. The plane stopped in Jamaica and at Dulles before returning to the Johnston County Airport, flight records show.
The same Gulfstream has been linked - through witness accounts, government inquiries and news reports - to prisoner renditions from Sweden, Pakistan, Indonesia and Gambia.
The NY Times article several of the front companies associated with Aero Contractors: Pegasus Technologies, Tepper Aviation, Premier Executive Transport Services, Crowell Aviation Technologies, and Stevens Express Leasing (and most or all of these companies do not appear to have web sites - unless a reader can find one?). Well guess what? Tepper Aviation needs C-130 pilots.
Comments: Tepper Aviation, Inc is an air cargo company operating 3 L-382G-30 (civilian C-130) aircraft worldwide out of our home base in the panhandle of Florida. We are looking for pilots with C-130 experience for full time employment. Since we recently acquired the third aircraft we are increasing our crew complement. We presently have sufficient Flight Engineers and loadmasters but are looking for pilots and mechanics. Mechanics are required to have C-130 experience and an A&P license. All positions require relocation to the Florida panhandle area. Any interested parties should submit a resume to Tepper Aviation, Inc ATTN: Bobby Owens P.O. Box 100 Crestview, FL 32536.
As the article mentions, just as there are train spotters who watch for various models of trains so there are aircraft spotters. Check out this page of Tepper Aviation aircraft spotted at various commercial and military airports in Europe.
The US Department of Homeland Security has written up 12 terrorist attack scenarios and 3 natural disaster scenarios in a document entitled National Planning Scenarios which showed up on a Hawaii state government web site.
WASHINGTON — A truck driven by terrorists goes down the streets of five large cities over two weeks quietly spraying anthrax spores, ultimately exposing 328,000 people and killing 13,300 while costing the economy billions of dollars.
It's a chilling possibility, one of 15 doomsday scenarios that Homeland Security authorities developed at the request of President Bush to better focus funding and to help state and local officials plan for terrorism and natural disasters.
The three most deadly scenarios outlined iin this report are explosion of a liquid chlorine tank (17,500 dead), a truck that sprays anthrax in 5 cities (13,500 dead - that is the NY Times figure), and the obvious nuclear bomb. Note that out of those three the one that is most avoidable is probably the attack on the chlorine tank. If chlorine processing plants were sited in very low population density areas and heavily automated to boot then blowing one up couldn't kill very many people. So what is the cost of moving a chlorine processing plant?
The problem with avoiding deaths from anthrax is that a lot of people would develop advanced infections before even a single patient was properly diagnosed. That would give the anthrax in their bodies time produce a lot of toxins. If anthrax diagnoses can be made earlier then very few people would have to die. The pathogen is easily killed off by a wide range of antibiotics and antibiotics delivered in the first few days of infection would prevent the bulk of the toxin production. The ability to detect an attack in its early states could greatly reduce the death toll. Though if a truck was driving from city to city to spray anthrax the challenge would become to figure out for which cities to do massive administration of antibiotics and to have enough drugs to use for this purpose. Obviously, sensors developed to detect an anthrax attack and deployed in cities would make that job much easier. The death toll from an anthrax attack could be greatly reduced by development of drugs that neutralize anthrax toxins and some promising preliminary work to develop anti-toxins has been done. Another possibility is the development of a really cheap and fast test that could be easily performed in emergency rooms. That would likely lead to detection of an attack at an earlier stage.
There are lots of ways to kill people and generate huge economic costs.
By contrast, terrorists using a small aircraft to spray chemical blister agent over a packed college football stadium would leave 150 dead and 70,000 taken to hospital, costing $500 million (£261 million).
...
If terrorists released sarin gas into the ventilation systems of three large office buildings, it would kill 6,000 and cost $300 million.
Note that so far Al Qaeda has been a combination of too dumb and too damaged by US and allied intelligence and law enforcement operations to carry out any big attacks post-9/11.
The report also included 3 natural disaster scenarios.
To ensure that emergency planning is adequate for most possible hazards, three catastrophic natural events are included: an influenza pandemic, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake in a major city and a slow-moving Category 5 hurricane hitting a major East Coast city.
I am personally worried more about getting killed in the outbreak of a new deadly strain of flu than I am about any of the terrorist scenarios. If avian flu establishes itself in human populations we'd all be in danger of dying.
Oops, release of the report was a mistake.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Wednesday it was a mistake for Hawaii to post a confidential report on its Web site, but the department will continue to communicate openly with state and local authorities about potential terror threats.
The released report was on Hawaii's web site for over three months before it was noticed by the mainstream press. My guess is there are enough radical Islamic hot heads out there trolling the internet that they managed to get a copy before it got pulled. There is an obvious lesson from all this: We ought to try harder to keep terrorists from crossing our borders.
State officials claim the report was not marked as secret or confidential or anything that suggested it not be released to the public. But Chertoff makes it sound like the report was pulled simply because it was not a finished product.
''My understanding is that this was an error,'' Chertoff said.
Noting the report was still in draft stages, Chertoff said Homeland Security wanted ''a finished product out there. So that's unfortunate. But it's not going to deter us from working closely with our state and local partners in fashioning these plans.''
Any discussion of our greatest vulnerabilities and what to do to lessen those vulnerabilities inevitably tips off our enemies as to what those vulnerabilities are and how best to exploit them. But in most cases the public discussion seems necessary. In the cases where reducing vulnerabilities will cost a lot of money a public airing is necessary to be able to form a consensus on whether some cost must be incurred. Also, some of the outlined methods of attack are pretty obvious and have been discussed publically on other occasions.
One reason terrorism is so attractive to terrorists is that terrorist attacks can be so visually dramatic. Fear of a chlorine tank's exploding and killing tens of thousands of people is a small thing compared to the threat of natural mutations in influenza viruses producing a strain that could kill tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of people. Yet there are far smallers effort under way to develop protections against a killer flu strain than against various terrorist attack scenarios.
On the StrategyPage site a blurb about difficulties in scaling up the special forces has a hidden lesson. (my bold emphasis added)
The "operators," Special Forces troops qualified to go out into the field and deal with terrorists, or any other situation, are not numerous. Three years ago, there were 3,850 of them. Special Forces training schools turned out about 350 new ones each year. Soon after September 11, 2001, it was decided to double the number of operators, but in three years, the number has only increased to 3,950. The Special Forces schools are turning out 620 new operators a year. The major cause for the inability to increase the number of Special Forces is not casualties. Losses from death and disability have been less than a hundred. Most of the losses have been from experienced operators retiring (if they have at least 20 years of service), or just quitting (if not) to take better paying civilian jobs.
Well stop and ask yourself: What are these better paying civilian jobs? My guess is the vast bulk of those jobs are in Iraq for security of Western contractors working there doing rebuilding. So the invasion of Iraq is causing the draining of special forces into the private sector. Plus, there are no doubt special forces soldiers tied down in Iraq who are still serving in the US military. Therefore the number of "operators" available for use outside of Iraq is lower now than it was before 9/11. Next time someone claims that Iraq has not been a distraction from the war against terrorists here's another reason to cite for why it has been.
If anyone comes across any articles on the number of ex-Special Forces serving in Iraq as private contractors please post in the comments.
Update: The original source for this story appears to be a Rowan Scarborough article in the Washington Times (same article here) and it is about the Green Berets specifically.
The Army is producing slightly more Green Berets as the chiefs of U.S. regional commands, called combatant commanders, place increased mission demands on the commandos. The five groups boast 3,950 Special Forces-qualified soldiers today, compared with 3,850 three years ago.
I've previously read reports that a similar pattern is happening with other elite forces such as SEALs and Delta Force. If anyone comes across information about the staffing levels of those other elite units please post links in the comments.
Update II: The Navy SEALs are not able to keep staffed at full strength.
In addition, the Pentagon's 2006 budget proposal calls for increasing the current special forces by 1,200 military and 200 civilians. There are about 49,000 people in U.S. special forces today.
Yet some special operations branches already can't meet their authorized strength. The Navy SEALs have only 89 percent of the enlisted personnel they're supposed to have, Raines said, while an Army spokesman said the Green Berets are running at about 98 percent of expected strength.
Note that contrary to the argument of one person in the comments the military itself refers to all the soldiers in the special operations branches as "special forces".
In the Winter 2005 edition of City Journal Heather Mac Donald says that in response to the Abu Ghraib abuses of prisoners by prison guards even previously acceptable interrogation techniques were ruled off-limits in the US government. Even before the Abu Ghraib scandal the existing approved and accepted interrogation techniques were totally failing against Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners.
The interrogation debate first broke out on the frigid plains of Afghanistan. Marines and other special forces would dump planeloads of al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners into a ramshackle detention facility outside the Kandahar airport; waiting interrogators were then supposed to extract information to be fed immediately back into the battlefield—whether a particular mountain pass was booby-trapped, say, or where an arms cache lay. That “tactical” debriefing accomplished, the Kandahar interrogation crew would determine which prisoners were significant enough to be shipped on to the Guantánamo naval base in Cuba for high-level interrogation.
Army doctrine gives interrogators 16 “approaches” to induce prisoners of war to divulge critical information. Sporting names like “Pride and Ego Down” and “Fear Up Harsh,” these approaches aim to exploit a detainee’s self-love, allegiance to or resentment of comrades, or sense of futility. Applied in the right combination, they will work on nearly everyone, the intelligence soldiers had learned in their training.
But the Kandahar prisoners were not playing by the army rule book. They divulged nothing. “Prisoners overcame the [traditional] model almost effortlessly,” writes Chris Mackey in The Interrogators, his gripping account of his interrogation service in Afghanistan. The prisoners confounded their captors “not with clever cover stories but with simple refusal to cooperate. They offered lame stories, pretended not to remember even the most basic of details, and then waited for consequences that never really came.
The US military interrogators in Afghanistan were expected to follow Geneva Convention rules in their treatment of prisoners even though the Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters did not qualify to be treated according to Geneva rules.
The Geneva conventions embody the idea that even in as brutal an activity as war, civilized nations could obey humanitarian rules: no attacking civilians and no retaliation against enemy soldiers once they fall into your hands. Destruction would be limited as much as possible to professional soldiers on the battlefield. That rule required, unconditionally, that soldiers distinguish themselves from civilians by wearing uniforms and carrying arms openly.
Obedience to Geneva rules rests on another bedrock moral principle: reciprocity. Nations will treat an enemy’s soldiers humanely because they want and expect their adversaries to do the same. Terrorists flout every civilized norm animating the conventions. Their whole purpose is to kill noncombatants, to blend into civilian populations, and to conceal their weapons. They pay no heed whatever to the golden rule; anyone who falls into their hands will most certainly not enjoy commissary privileges and wages, per the Geneva mandates. He—or she—may even lose his head.
I personally see no advantage to the US in forgoing the practice of torture against terrorists. The only reason I'd hesitate would be in the cases where the prisoners might not really be terrorists. I would have imposed tough criteria for identifying someone as a potential Al Qaeda member. However, once such an identification was made with a high degree of certainty then I do not see a moral reason for refraining from torture. Though there is a practical reason to refrain from torture. See my previous post about Mark Bowden's writings on torture for an explanation of why the infliction of pain should be refrained from as long as possible. In a nutshell: some people who fear pain will be unbearable find that they can bear it once it is inflicted. So best to hold off on inflicting pain. But the possibility of infliction of pain has to be made credible for the fear of it to be effective.
US military terrorist interrogators decided that anything the US Army inflicted on US soldiers was acceptable to do to terrorists. This decision provided a fairly large set of unpleasant and stressful interrogation techniques.
Even so, terror interrogators tried to follow the spirit of the Geneva code for conventional, uniformed prisoners of war. That meant, as the code puts it, that the detainees could not be tortured or subjected to “any form of coercion” in order to secure information. They were to be “humanely” treated, protected against “unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind,” and were entitled to “respect for their persons and their honour.”
The Kandahar interrogators reached the following rule of thumb, reports Mackey: if a type of behavior toward a prisoner was no worse than the way the army treated its own members, it could not be considered torture or a violation of the conventions. Thus, questioning a detainee past his bedtime was lawful as long as his interrogator stayed up with him. If the interrogator was missing exactly the same amount of sleep as the detainee—and no tag-teaming of interrogators would be allowed, the soldiers decided—then sleep deprivation could not be deemed torture. In fact, interrogators were routinely sleep-deprived, catnapping maybe one or two hours a night, even as the detainees were getting long beauty sleeps. Likewise, if a boot-camp drill sergeant can make a recruit kneel with his arms stretched out in front without violating the Convention Against Torture, an interrogator can use that tool against a recalcitrant terror suspect.
Did the stress techniques work? Yes. “The harsher methods we used . . . the better information we got and the sooner we got it,” writes Mackey, who emphasizes that the methods never contravened the conventions or crossed over into torture.
It says something about the Geneva Convention that what the US Army can legally do to US soldiers is, strictly speaking, a violation of the Geneva rules.
Under a strict reading of the Geneva protections for prisoners of war, probably: the army forbids interrogators from even touching lawful combatants. But there is a huge gray area between the gold standard of POW treatment reserved for honorable opponents and torture, which consists of the intentional infliction of severe physical and mental pain. None of the stress techniques that the military has used in the war on terror comes remotely close to torture, despite the hysterical charges of administration critics. (The CIA’s behavior remains a black box.) To declare non-torturous stress off-limits for an enemy who plays by no rules and accords no respect to Western prisoners is folly.
One has to wonder what the CIA is up to. Heather quotes one source that claims Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to dunking under water and that is supposedly the most extreme measure being used by the CIA in conducting interrogations.
The most important point that Heather makes is that what military police did at Abu Ghraib is unrelated to the rules that were governing interrogators at Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. But the political reaction to Abu Ghraib caused further restrictions on real interrogators working on real Al Qaeda terrorists.
The idea that the abuse of the Iraqi detainees resulted from the president’s decision on the applicability of the Geneva conventions to al-Qaida and Taliban detainees is absurd on several grounds. Everyone in the military chain of command emphasized repeatedly that the Iraq conflict would be governed by the conventions in their entirety. The interrogation rules that local officers developed for Iraq explicitly stated that they were promulgated under Geneva authority, and that the conventions applied. Moreover, almost all the behavior shown in the photographs occurred in the dead of night among military police, wholly separate from interrogations. Most abuse victims were not even scheduled to be interrogated, because they were of no intelligence value. Finally, except for the presence of dogs, none of the behavior shown in the photos was included in the interrogation rules promulgated in Iraq. Mandated masturbation, dog leashes, assault, and stacking naked prisoners in pyramids—none of these depredations was an approved (or even contemplated) interrogation practice, and no interrogator ordered the military guards to engage in them.
The invasion of Iraq, by leading to the events of Abu Ghraib and the resulting political fall-out and further restrictions on interrogators, has hampered the fight against terrorists. Of course the invasion of Iraq has also harmed US interests in other ways related to the battle against terrorists. Also, even without Abu Ghraib the rules controlling interrogators were far too limiting. So the Iraq invasion made a bad situation even worse.
Restrictions on interrogation techniques in Iraq are surely costing many American lives and Iraqi lives as well.
That experiment is over. Reeling under the PR disaster of Abu Ghraib, the Pentagon shut down every stress technique but one—isolation—and that can be used only after extensive review. An interrogator who so much as requests permission to question a detainee into the night could be putting his career in jeopardy. Even the traditional army psychological approaches have fallen under a deep cloud of suspicion: deflating a detainee’s ego, aggressive but non-physical histrionics, and good cop–bad cop have been banished along with sleep deprivation.
Can the US government stop terrorism without getting useful information from terrorists via interrogation? I guess we are going to find out.
In the City Journal Heather Mac Donald has a long and excellent article about the restrictions on religious and ethnic profiling and how those obstacles are making it difficult for law enforcement personnel to prevent terrorist attacks. Among the many stupid policies of the United States government are legal actions by the US Department of Transportation against airlines for alleged discrimination against Arabs and other Muslims.
The anti-discrimination hammer has hit the airline industry most severely—and with gruesome inappropriateness, given the realities of 9/11 and the Islamists' enduring obsession with airplanes. Department of Transportation lawyers have extracted millions in settlements from four major carriers for alleged discrimination after 9/11, and they have undermined one of the most crucial elements of air safety: a pilot's responsibility for his flight. Because the charges against the airlines were specious but successful, every pilot must worry that his good-faith effort to protect his passengers will trigger federal retaliation.
The DoT action against American Airlines was typical. In the last four months of 2001, American carried 23 million passengers and asked ten of them (.00004 percent of the total) not to board because they raised security concerns that could not be resolved in time for departure. For those ten interventions (and an 11th in 2002), DoT declared American a civil rights pariah, whose discriminatory conduct would "result in irreparable harm to the public" if not stopped.
On its face, the government's charge that American was engaged in a pattern of discriminatory conduct was absurd, given how few passenger removals occurred. But the racism allegation looks all the more unreasonable when put in the context of the government's own actions. Three times between 9/11 and the end of 2001, public officials warned of an imminent terror attack. Transportation officials urged the airlines to be especially vigilant. In such an environment, pilots would have been derelict not to resolve security questions in favor of caution.
Somehow, DoT lawyers failed to include in their complaint one further passenger whom American asked not to board in 2001. On December 22, airline personnel in Paris kept Richard Reid off a flight to Miami. The next day, French authorities insisted that he be cleared to board. During the flight, Reid tried to set off a bomb in his shoe, but a stewardess and passengers foiled him. Had he been kept from flying on both days, he too might have ended up on the government's roster of discrimination victims.
Heather says the government "civil rights" (and I quote that since they aren't really defending civil rights) establishment doesn't want to admit that, hey, Muslim terrorism is commited by (are you ready for this?) Muslims. No, Muslim terrorism is not carried out by Zoroastrians. Nope, it is not perpetrated by worshippers of Kali or Vishnu or even of Mahasamatman (and will anyone even get that reference?). Nor is planned and executed by Mormons. None of those guys. Its the Muslims stupid.
Any discussion about how the government should identify Muslim terror suspects has been couched as a referendum on "racial profiling." But "racial profiling" is irrelevant. What is at issue is religious profiling. By definition—by Usama bin Ladin's own definition when he called on all Muslims to kill Americans wherever they can find them—Muslim terrorists must be Muslim. Because religious identity is not always apparent, however, national origin or ethnic heritage should be available as surrogates. Needless to say, Muslim identity should be at most only one factor in assessing someone's security risk. Unfortunately, the much-heralded 9/11 Commission report, while correctly naming the nation's primary threat as "Islamist terrorism," contains not one word about what the proper role of Muslim identity should be in locating such terrorists, a topic evidently too hot to touch.
Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta and some of Satan's Helpers at the American Civil Liberties Union are major players in the evil quest to prevent Americans from being properly defended against Muslim terrorism. But of course George W. Bush bears the blame for appointing Mineta and allowing him to act like such an evil moron. At the same time, all of Lucifer's minions who donate money to the ACLU help to fund the Devil's work in this realm. So there is a big cast of morally defective supporting characters who will some day take their places in various of Dante's circles in hell.
Transportation Department secretary Norman Mineta bears much of the responsibility for the government's irrationality regarding airline security. He infamously maintained in an interview that a grandmother from Vero Beach, Florida, should receive the same scrutiny at the airport as a young Saudi male, and he constantly warns that domestic internment—as in World War II—may be just around the corner. And behind Mineta stands a permanent civil rights bureaucracy fixated on American racism. The same Transportation Department lawyer, for example, who complained in 1997 that the early prototype of CAPPS I might pull out "too many" people of the same ethnicity—Sam Podberesky—led the recent discrimination actions against the airlines. Without strong intervention from Mineta, DoT's anti-discrimination machine, like most of those in the government, would run on autopilot, even though its priorities have been proved disastrously wrong.
In the government's wake, the private civil rights bar, led by the ACLU, has brought its own airline discrimination suits. An action against Northwest Airlines is seeking government terror watch lists, Northwest's boarding procedures, and its cabin training manual. If these materials got loose, they would be gold to terrorists trying to figure out airline security procedures.
Norm should be interned for dereliction of duty. No, wait, that is not right. He didn't just neglect his duty. He betrayed it and worked against it.
Be sure to read Heather's full article if you want to learn more reasons to be enraged at the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of modern liberalism in both its left-liberal and Trotskyite neocon variants.
Hey, the French government has no problem with "do as we say, not as we do".
PARIS -- In many countries of Europe, former inmates of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been relishing their freedom. In Spain, Denmark and Britain, recently released detainees have railed in public about their treatment at Guantanamo, winning sympathy from local politicians and newspapers. In Sweden, the government has agreed to help one Guantanamo veteran sue his American captors for damages.
Not so in France, where four prisoners from the U.S. naval base were arrested as soon as they arrived home in July, and haven't been heard from since. Under French law, they could remain locked up for as long as three years while authorities decide whether to put them on trial -- a legal limbo that their attorneys charge is not much different than what they faced at Guantanamo.
This is the same government that has been so vocal in criticizing the United States for holding Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo. In spite of their hypocrisy I actually admire their pragmatism. They are quite willing to defend their interests and the interests of their own citizens. Good for them.
The US government keeps those detainees in Guantanamo in order to keep them outside of the jurisdiction of US courts, the due process clause of the US constitution, other relevant clauses, and of course the court rulings which have legislated various other rights. This sort of tactic seems necessary for the US government when fighting asymmetric warfare.
The French make heavy use of ethnic profiling. How politically incorrect. And of course how admirable and productive.
France has embraced a law enforcement strategy that relies heavily on preemptive arrests, ethnic profiling and an efficient domestic intelligence-gathering network. French anti-terrorism prosecutors and investigators are among the most powerful in Europe, backed by laws that allow them to interrogate suspects for days without interference from defense attorneys.
The US government uses immigration law to preemptively lock up possible terrorists on immigration law violations since most terrorists in the US are not US citizens. But there are very likely many French citizens of Arab descent who are involved in terrorist activities. So the French government needs to be more blatant (and the French constitution apparently makes this easier to do) in how it runs roughshod over the rights of individuals in order to prevent terrorist attacks. Of course, if the threat becomes large enough in the United States (i.e. if terrorists manage to launch some new attacks that kill thousands of people) Guantanamo and immigration law violations will be seen as insufficient to deal with the threat. Then I predict some way will be found to get around constitutional rights of both US citizens and foreigners here legally.
Update: Also see my related posts Heather Mac Donald: Government Panel Opposes Google Searches By Spies and Privacy Concerns Block Response To Terrorist Threat.
Seymour Hersh has a new book coming out Chain of Command : The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
But the interrogations at Guantánamo were a bust. Very little useful intelligence had been gathered, while prisoners from around the world continued to flow into the base, and the facility constantly expanded. The CIA analyst had been sent there to find out what was going wrong. He was fluent in Arabic and familiar with the Islamic world. He was held in high respect within the agency, and was capable of reporting directly, if he chose, to George Tenet, the CIA director. The analyst did more than just visit and inspect. He interviewed at least 30 prisoners to find out who they were and how they ended up in Guantánamo. Some of his findings, he later confided to a former CIA colleague, were devastating.
"He came back convinced that we were committing war crimes in Guantánamo," the colleague told me. "Based on his sample, more than half the people there didn't belong there. He found people lying in their own faeces," including two captives, perhaps in their 80s, who were clearly suffering from dementia. "He thought what was going on was an outrage," the CIA colleague added. There was no rational system for determining who was important.
Two former administration officials who read the analyst's highly classified report told me that its message was grim. According to a former White House official, the analyst's disturbing conclusion was that "if we captured some people who weren't terrorists when we got them, they are now".
Mark Bowden (of Black Hawk Down fame) has written that experts on interrogation say that infliction of pain can be counter-productive and should be resorted to only as a last resort. One reason for this is that subjects of torture fear the threat of pain but that once they actually experience the pain manyfind they can handle it better than expected. Another reason to hold back on delivering pain is that patient and talented interrogators sometimes manage to turn the interrogatee to shift his loyalties so that he begins to provide accurate information voluntarily. Read all his links at that post of mine. One conclusion I reached from reading them is that if some facility is inflicting pain on large numbers of its inmates then it is a very unprofessonal operation. Well, that is what Donald Rumsfeld has set up and defended in Guantanamo Bay.
I am disgusted by the Bush Administration because they are more interested in inflicting pain out of a macho desire to get even than they are in actually defending us from future attacks. Take the most expert and experienced advice on how to set up professional interrogation facilities? That just doesn't feel tough enough to them - and who wants to do all the mental work required to think through complex arguments anyway? Or seal the Mexican border to prevent entry of terrorists? That flies in the face of Bush's quixotic and foolish gambit to get Hispanic voters.
Bush is not acting in our interests. I don't know that John Kerry would be any better. But even if you are a very partisan Republican for the sake of your country recognize just how many ways the Bush Administration's policies are harmful for our country and our security.
The 9/11 Commission's recommendations on visa and immigation policy represent a good starting point for a rational and effective response to the terrorist threat. Better immigration and border control policies would not only reduce the risk of future attacks but reduce the crime rate, reduce the demands for social spending, raise living standards for America's poorest, and reduce crowding and pollution.
An article in the Washington Post discusses various facets of the car and truck bomb threat and how easy it is to make a very powerful vehicle bomb.
On April 19, 1995, disillusioned Persian Gulf War veteran Timothy J. McVeigh and Army washout Terry L. Nichols blew the face off the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City with a 5,000-pound mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, killing 168 people.
The bomb was instructive in its power and ease of assembly. Equivalent to 4,100 pounds of dynamite, the blast damaged 312 buildings, cracked glass as far as two miles away and inflicted 80 percent of its injuries on people outside the building, up to a half-mile away. ATF officials had never studied the effects of a vehicle bomb larger than about 1,200 pounds, an ATF explosives expert said.
The components came largely from a Kansas co-op. Nichols bought two tons of fertilizer in 50-pound sacks starting seven months before the attack. McVeigh also was careful to avoid detection, renting a Ryder truck from a Junction City, Kan., body shop one state away from his target.
Today, it remains difficult to detect similar activity. Nearly 5 million tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer are sold each year in the United States. None of it is regulated, although its explosive properties are used in mining and construction and by armies around the world. Government controls are resisted by farm and chemical lobbies, who say they would burden law-abiding citizens and not thwart terrorists. U.S. law permits farmers to mix it with fuel oil for personal demolition uses.
The US government is erecting blast barriers near a fairly small number of government buildings and is going to place larger spaces between streets and newly constructed buildings in the future. But lots of large buildings already exist that are very close to streets. Also, most buildings have roads leading right up to them for underground parking lots and docks for unloading supplies. So barrier defenses against truck bombs are of fairly limited use.
Note hat McVeigh and Nichols didn't have to commit suicide in order to carry out a deadly attack. If Muslim terrorists can make it inside the United States with sufficient money and training to carry out vehicle bomb attacks they would face pretty favorable odds of succeeding in killing a lot of people. The resulting fear and the ways people would respond to that fear would exact large economic costs beyond the economic and human costs of the actual attacks.
What we do not know at this point is just how effective intelligence and law enforcement agencies are being at disrupting Al Qaeda operations. Only time will tell as to whether the tempo o terrorist attacks is headed upward or downward in Western countries. So it is hard to calculate the cost-benefit ratios of various potential defenses against terrorism.
Should a wave of vehicle bomb attacks begin in the United States then one response to consider would be the implemention of a registry for purchasers of ammonium nitrate with required proof of citizenship or legal residence. Every place that sells fertilizer could install a biometric identifier system to scan retinas or other physical features to verify identity. All purchases could be tracked and large purchasers could be required to seek a permit for making a purchase. There would be real economic costs to such a system. Therefore its implementation seems unlikely in advance of domestic bombing attacks.
In my view it makes sense to implement more effective border control, immigration, and visa policies to make it more difficult for terrorists to enter the United States in the first place. However, at this point the elites still oppose more effective control of who gets into the United States and we are probably going to have to wait until more attacks happen in the United States before public anger forces the hands of the politicians.
Editors Philip Giraldi, Kara Hopkins, and Scott McConnell of The American Conservative have scored with an absolutely great interview of the anonymous CIA agent author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terrorism. The anonymous agent (who really needs a neat pseudonymous name) says Al Qaeda is an insurgency, not a conventional terrorist group.
TAC: I was interested in your analysis of terrorism versus insurgency …
ANON: I worked on the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and watched the organizational structure and the ability of the Afghan insurgent groups to absorb tremendous punishment and survive, and then I worked for the next period of my career on terrorism, where the groups were much smaller. Their leadership is more concentrated, and if you hurt them to a significant degree, they cease to be as much of a threat. They are lethal nuisances, not national-security risks. Al-Qaeda is not a terrorist group but an insurgency with an extraordinary ability to replicate at the leadership level. When Mr. Johnson was executed in Saudi Arabia, the Saudi authorities killed four al-Qaeda fighters, one of them named Mukrin. Within four hours, al-Qaeda’s media enterprise had issued a statement acknowledging the death of Mukrin, appointing his successor, and providing a brief résumé.
TAC: You suggest that al-Qaeda would be delighted to have George Bush stay in the White House because nothing could be better for their international objectives. How do you see this playing out in terms of—this is totally hypothetical—a potential terrorist incident, somewhat like the bombing in Spain?
ANON: I said that al-Qaeda itself has said that it could not wish for a better government than the one that is now governing the U.S. because, on the policies of issue to Muslims, al-Qaeda believes this government is wrong on every one and thus allows their insurgency to grow larger to incite other groups to attack Americans.
He provides a list of things the United States either does or is perceived as doing that motivate Muslims to support Al Qaeda. If you click through and read the interview come back and post in the comments about what, if anything, we should do to change US foreign policy on each of those items. Also, before accusing him of being an appeaser note his absolute willingness to cause major collateral damage that kills a lot of Muslims as part of any operation to attack Al Qaeda. He's no dove. Yet he sees major errors in Bush Administration policy against Al Qaeda and in dealing with the Muslims.
The whole interview is intriguing as all get-out. Go click through and read the whole thing.
Also see my previous post that links to a Spencer Ackerman interview of this same CIA agent.
Update: In a USA Today interview the anonymous intelligence agent an unwillingness to face the religious nature of Islamic terrorists is hampering our ability to think clearly about Bin Laden.
Q: When you talk about the mind-set of the country on the war on terror, where do you think the misconceptions come from? The media, politicians? A: It's trite to say, but the idea of political correctness is very, very important in terms of the performance of the intelligence community. How many times has USA TODAY, or The New York Times or The Washington Post discussed the role of Islam as a motivating factor in bin Laden's appeal in the Muslim world? I can't remember it very frequently. The director of intelligence and the president say al-Qaeda represents the lunatic fringe of the Muslim world, which, on the face of it, is absurd. But there is no one talking about Islam as a motivating factor for war.
There were times when our ancestors went to war to defend their faith. So, the debate is very constricted, not only in America but certainly within the intelligence community. We do a lot of analysis by assertion rather than by reality. Somehow the argument that someone is fighting for his faith is seen as a negative. So we assert that only gangsters do that. We make bin Laden into a gangster. But it doesn't get you anywhere.
That interview is also worth reading in full.
The Boston Phoenix has revealed Anonymous's identity as CIA agent Michael Scheuer.
Nearly a dozen intelligence-community sources, however, say Anonymous is Michael Scheuer — and that his forced anonymity is both unprecedented and telling in the context of CIA history and modern politics. "The requirement that someone publish anonymously is rare, almost unheard-of, particularly if the person is not in a covert position," says Jonathan Turley, a national-security-law expert at George Washington University Law School. "It seems pretty obvious that the requirement he remain anonymous is motivated solely by political concerns, and ones that have more to do with the CIA..."
Click through and read that article as well. Very insightful.
Kevin Drum says Anonymous thinks democracy promotion is not going to help much if at all.
As he adds in our interview, “My argument, I think, taken from the whole book, is that we've left ourselves with no option but the military option, and our application of military force against our foe, whether it's Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else, has not been particularly intimidating. They've ridden out two wars. They're on the offensive at the moment. What are we left with? If we don't use our military power, we really just sit and take it.”
Since he doesn’t see much promise in an ideological (read: democracy promotion) campaign, or in trying to alleviate the “hopelessness” of the Muslim world (which he calls “cant” in the section quoted above), the military option is the one he relies the heaviest on, and his conception of what’s militarily necessary is very wide-ranging. The prospect of energy self-sufficiency and foreign disengagement (He writes, “There is no greater duty today’s Americans can perform for their nation and posterity than to finally abandon the sordid legacy of Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism, which soaked the twentieth century in as much or more blood as any other “ism”) can do something to diminish the need for war to an unspecified degree, but can’t substitute for it.
There is an important point that Drum alludes to: US policy options have become so circumscribed by the narrow way so many policy issues have been framed that Anonymous is trying to shock us by arguing that the US has no option left other than the Shermanesque scorched Earth approach of killing lots of people with large amounts of collateral damage of innocents. Why is he trying to shock us? In part so we won't repeat the timidity of the Clinton and early Bush Administrations in terms of constraints upon military actions. But he's also trying to stun us into reexamining the assumptions underlying a broad assortment of policy areas and debates.
In an interview with Andrea Mitchell Anonymous (who I'll henceforth call "Mike") makes the point that, yes, as long as we won't reexamine our policies ruthless war is our only option.
Mitchell: "And what are you going to say to those who say that this is anti-American and that this is a really prejudiced approach? What do you say to those who say that your call for a war against Muslim people, is really only going to make the situation worse?"
Anonymous: "I wonder how much worse the situation can be, in the first instance. We continue to believe that somehow public diplomacy or words will affect the anger and hatred of Muslims. And I'm not advocating war as my choice. What I'm advocating is, in order to protect the United States, it is our only option. As long as we pursue the current policies we have, until we have a debate about those policies, there's not a lot we can do. We won't talk them out of their anger, we won't convince them we're an honest broker between the Israel and the Palestinians. We won't convince that we're not supporting tyrannies in the Arab world from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.
"It's the only option. It's not a good option; it's the only option. And I'm not saying we attack people who aren't attacking us. But in areas where we realize our enemies are, perhaps we have to be more aggressive."
"Mike" is a very reasonable guy in my estimation.
Some experienced CIA experts have been reassigned to the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, or TTIC. The unit, formed after Sept. 11, combines specialists from numerous agencies to fuse domestic and foreign information on terrorist threats. It has no direct role in killing or capturing terrorists overseas.
"You drain all of these experienced officers away from the organization that is doing the most to defend you and put them in the TTIC, which is basically an analytic domestic organization which will not do anything in Pakistan, Afghanistan or anywhere else," he said.
"Mike" says the jihadists will be flocking to Iraq for a long time to come.
"We have waged two failed half-wars and, in doing so, left Afghanistan and Iraq seething with anti-U.S. sentiment, fertile grounds for the expansion of al-Qaida and kindred groups," he wrote in one passage in the book.
In an interview this week, Mike, said Monday's transfer of authority in Iraq is likely to do little to curtail insurgent attacks.
"Iraq, with or without a transfer of power, will be a mujahadeen magnet as long as whatever government is there is dependent on America's sword," he said.
"Mike" says we are in a lose-lose situation with Iraq and Afghanistan.
Currently we're in a lose-lose situation both in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we stay we bleed. If we go, the problem festers even worse. The United States, I believe, needs to have a debate about its policies in the Middle East. All a set of policies that have been on autopilot for about 25 years. Before you can draft a policy to defeat Bin Laden you have to understand that our policies are, in part, what drives him and those who follow him.
An excerpt from Mike's book includes his list of US policies that tick off Bin Laden.
While important voices in the United States claim the intent of U.S. policy is misunderstood by Muslims, they are wrong. America is hated and attacked because Muslims believe they know precisely what the United States is doing in the Islamic world. They know partly because of Osama bin Laden's words, partly because of satellite television, but mostly because of the tangible reality of U.S. policies. We are at war with an al Qaeda-led, worldwide Islamic insurgency to defend those policies -- and not, as President Bush mistakenly has said, "to defend freedom and all that is good and just in the world."
Keep in mind how easy it is for Muslims to hate the six U.S. policies bin Laden repeatedly refers to as anti-Muslim:
• U.S. support for Israel that keeps Palestinians in the Israelis' thrall.
• U.S. and other Western troops on the Arabian Peninsula.
• U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
• U.S. support for Russia, India and China against their Muslim militants.
• U.S. pressure on Arab energy producers to keep oil prices low.
• U.S. support for apostate, corrupt and tyrannical Muslim governments.
Only when U.S. leaders stop believing that bin Laden and his allies are attacking us for what we are and what we think can we put aside our ill-advised and hallucinatory crusade for democracy -- our current default response.
What notably is missing from this list? Things people do in the United States: Sinful dancing, pre-marital sex, mini-skirts, recreational drug use. Bin Laden is parochial in a sense. He cares about what happens in Muslim countries more than what happens in non-Muslim countries. He care about what happens in Arab countries more than what happens in non-Arab yet Muslim countries. He cares more about what happens in Saudi Arabia in particular - in part because he is from there and in part because Mecca and Medina are located on Saudi territory. Bin Laden is most angry and driven to change conditions in the places he cares most about. With that as a starting point and his Muslim religious beliefs as a source of his political desires a different view of his motives emerges. The US is first and foremost a target because of US involvement with the House Of Saud and secondarily with other neighboring countries.
Of course the Taliban government which Bin Laden propped up in Afghanistan was corrupt and tyrannical. So it is really the "apostate" part about various Arab governments that ticks off Bin Laden. He is a firm supporter of Islamic theocracy. Bin Laden is very enthusiastic about Islam and Islamic political rule. Islam has no place for the separation of church and state and neither does Bin Laden.
The theory that democracy will "drain the swamps" of support for Islamic terrorism is based on the assumption that democracy will produce such better government that people will feel more justly treated and their living standards will rise so they feel less aggrieved and resentful. Well, the lack of democracy is not the biggest obstacle to economic advance in the Middle East or elsewhere. But higher incomes are a necessary precondition to successful democracy anyhow. Plus, there are lots of other reasons democracy isn't in the cards for the Middle East.
Given that the threat from Al Qaeda is long term the United States would greatly benefit from an immigration and border control policy that enables us to far better keep out Muslim terrorists. Also, as "Mike" agrees, we need an energy policy aimed at the reduction of world demand for oil.
Regular ParaPundit readers are aware that I consider it a big mistake for the US military to deploy soldiers to Afghanistan and Iraq with so little training in local language and culture. Well, the US military appears to be aware of the seriousness of this deficiency. A New York Times report has brought to my attention a research program by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Defense Advanced Project Research Agency (DARPA) to build a local language and culture training game for the Special Operations Command of the US military.
Sergeant Smith is not a real soldier, but the leading character in a video game being developed at the University of Southern California's School of Engineering as a tool for teaching soldiers to speak Arabic. Both the game's environment and the characters who populate it have a high degree of realism, in an effort to simulate the kinds of situations troops will face in the Middle East. Talle is modeled on an actual Lebanese village, while the game's characters are driven by artificial-intelligence software that enables them to behave autonomously and react realistically to Sergeant Smith. The Tactical Language Project, as it is called, is being developed at U.S.C.'s Center for Research in Technology for Education, in cooperation with the Special Operations Command. From July 12 to 16, real Special Forces soldiers at Fort Bragg in Northern California will test the game and put Sergeant Smith through his paces.
The characters in the game respond to the game-players actions by increasing or decreasing their trust in him.
One of their most critical beliefs is their trust level, Ms. Si said. If Sergeant Smith behaves appropriately, he will gain the characters' trust and they will help him; if not, he is likely to cause suspicion.
A USC press releases provides a lot more detail. (worth reading in full if this sounds interesting)
Part of the system, the “Mission Skill Builder,” resembles an intensive version of the language laboratory programs that have been in use for generations. in these students imitate and practice words and phrases pronounced by native speakers.
“While our system is similar to drill-and-practice language programs that have been in use for some time, the Skill Builder incorporates some important innovations,” Johnson said.
These include:
- speech recognition technology that is able to evaluate learner speech and detect common errors;
- pedagogical agent technology that provides the learner with tailored feedback on his performance; and
- a learner model that dynamically keeps track of what aspects of the language the learner has mastered and in what areas the learner is deficient.
The game sounds like it is structured in ways very much like conventional adventure games with the added complexities that the game player must be able to speak Arabic into language recognition software and the simulated agents are written by experts in artificial intelligence to embody a lot of Arabic culture in their values and behavior
The examination or application part of the training system, the "Mission Practice Environment," is still more innovative. It is designed to give students an unscripted, unpredictable, and therefore challenging test of their mastery of these elements.
In this segment, students wearing earphones and microphones control a uniformed figure moving through a Lebanese village, complete with outdoor coffee bar. They meet animated Arabic speakers, who (thanks to artificial intelligence driven voice recognition programs) can carry on free-form conversations.
"These AI figures can understand what the students say, if it's said correctly - or won't, if it isn't. And they will respond appropriately," said Johnson.
In the exercise, after exchanging greetings the student learns the names of locals, the name of the place, the identity of the local headman and the location of his house, and must follow these directions through the game interface to get there.
"In typical videogame fashion, the idea is to get to the next level," said Johnson. "In this game, in order to get to the next level, the learner has to master the linguistic skills."
The program already has features to adapt it to each individual user, noting consistent errors or difficulties, which can be targeted for extensive or remedial practice.
So far, researchers have completed approximately seven hours of the program. The full program will have about 80 hours of instruction, and introduce perhaps 500 carefully chosen words of the "Levantine" Arabic spoken in Lebanon to learners. If all goes as planned, the system may be deployed next year.
Computer automation is the future of education in general. Computers are cheap and their patience unlimited. Computer games that correct your errors and automatically record and report on progress are needed across a large range of domains of knowledge unrelated to the US military. This is a sign of things to come.
The committee demands that counterterrorism analysts seek court approval to mine the Pentagon's own lawfully acquired intelligence files, if there is a chance that they might contain information on U.S. citizens or resident aliens -- basically all intelligence files. Eyeball scrutiny of those same files, however, requires no such judicial oversight. This rule suggests a bizarre conceit that the automation of human analysis, which is all data mining is, somehow violates privacy more than the observation of those same items by a person. In fact, the opposite is true. A computer has no idea what it is "reading," but merely selects items by rule.
The advisory committee's technophobia does not end with intelligence analysis. It would also require the defense secretary to give approval for, and certify the absolute necessity of, Google searches by intelligence agents. Even though any 12-year-old with a computer can freely surf the Web looking for Islamist chat rooms, defense analysts may not do so, according to the panel, without strict oversight.
Well, there goes any fantasy I ever had about becoming a secret agent for the US government in the war against Islamic terrorists. There is no way I would give up Google searches. If government spies are not going to be allowed to use Google then what technologically savvy person is going to want to become a spy?
A Google ban would lead to some interesting questions. Could a CIA agent use Google from his home? Also, just how far would the Google ban reach? Would it extend to all Defense Department employees? Would all the .mil readers who find my blog via Google (and there are some just about every day - are they spying on me? Am I a threat?) no longer be able to do so? Should the ban be extended to all of government? After all, regular government workers could potentially be recruited to do computer searches for DIA or CIA agents. Best to err on the side of privacy protection if you are a privacy extremist.
Also, if intelligence agents are going to be banned from doing computer searches for information then should Ctrl-F be disabled in their copies of Microsoft Word? Also, the Windows Explorer utility for file management has a search function for searching all the files on a disk. Should Microsoft make special national security version of Windows and Office that disable all searching functionality? Heck, why should spies be allowed to have computers at all? The privacy extremists say all this automation is encroaching on our liberties somehow or other. So then is the solution simply to outlaw government use of computers?
As Heather points out, the commercial databases of purchases and other economic activity are routinely bought and sold between companies with few restrictions. Searches through those databases with computers will not violate our privacy any more than it is already routinely violated by private industry.
I wonder how many people will have to die before intelligence agents will be allowed to fully utilize modern technology in their attempts to protect us. I guess we will find out.
See my previous post about Heather's writings on privacy and the response to the growing terrorist threat: Privacy Concerns Block Response To Terrorist Threat.
Spengler says the West and Islam have different emotions that give each a specific Achilles Heel. (strongly recommended to read in full)
Radical Islam has risen against the West in response to its humiliation - intentional or not - at Western hands. The West can break the revolt by inflicting even worse humiliation upon the Islamists, poisoning the confidence of their supporters in the Muslim world.
But radical Islam yet may horrify the West into submission, not only by large-scale acts of terrorism against Western countries, but also by provoking the West into mass destruction of life in the Islamic world. By operating in the midst of civilian populations, Islamist radicals put Western counter-insurgency in a delicate position. The Western response must be harsh enough to humble its adversaries, without turning the stomach of the Western population itself. To do this requires intelligence precise enough to target enemy resources without killing too many civilians.
Basically, Spengler is arguing that the West must carry out even more precise killings of its enemies. This will make Islam seem powerless in the face of a more technologically advanced non-Islamic civilization. Spengler's argument for a Western aversion to horror sounds right. Though if the terrorists ever manage to attack the West with weapons that kill hundreds of thousands or millions that horror will dissipate for a time.
Spengler also argues that Israel is actually an asset to the United States because simply by existing so successfully Israel is "an ever-present source of humiliation to the Muslim sense of self-worth."
Seen in Spengler's terms the problem with the Iraq invasion and occupation is that allows Islam and tribal insurgents in Iraq to force US military to respond in ways that end up killing civilian bystanders. This invokes both Muslim anger and Western horror. However, if the US can very selectively kill the Islamic jihadis in Iraq then the humiliation of the Islamists will weaken the faith of many Muslims and reduce the appeal of terrorism.
The United States needs both excellent intelligence in Iraq and weapons systems developed to allow more precise killings. On the latter count what is needed most of all are ways for soldiers down on the ground in urban environments to rapidly identify the sources of small arms fire and to more precisely respond exactly to the shooters. Robots and very small flying Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) could both help to solve this problem. The US Army is already beginning to deploy a sound processing system mountable on Humvees that quickly locates the direction and distance of sniper fire. Imagine tying that to cameras that rapidly find the shooter and that direct a gun to precisely target return fire.
Spengler is right to see the limited intelligence gathering capability of the CIA as an Achilles Heel. Certainly the CIA needs more agents and far more talented agents who are out in the world penetrating Islamic terrorist organizations. But the CIA is just one part of the US intelligence establishment and that establishment as a whole is hobbled by a combination of the legacy of the 1970s Church Committee investigation and modern day Luddite privacy fanatics. The best person to read on that is Heather Mac Donald. See my previous post Privacy Concerns Block Response To Terrorist Threat and click through on the links in that post to read arguments on how information technology can make a decisive difference in the battle against terrorist networks.
For more on what ought to be done to respond to the Islamic terrorist threat see Andrew McCarthy's essay in Commentary entitled The Intelligence Mess: How It Happened, What to Do About It
As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has observed, weakness is provocative. The fecklessness of meeting terrorist attacks with court proceedings—trials that take years to prepare and months to present, and that, even when successful, neutralize only an infinitesimal percentage of the actual terrorist population—emboldened bin Laden. But just as hurtful was the government’s promotion of terrorism trials in the first place. They were a useful vehicle if the strategic object was to orchestrate an appearance of justice being done. As a national-security strategy, they were suicidal, providing terrorists with a banquet of information they could never have dreamed of acquiring on their own.
Under discovery rules that apply to American criminal proceedings, the government is required to provide to accused persons any information in its possession that can be deemed "material to the preparation of the defense" or that is even arguably exculpatory. The more broadly indictments are drawn (and terrorism indictments tend to be among the broadest), the greater the trove of revelation. In addition, the government must disclose all prior statements made by witnesses it calls (and, often, witnesses it does not call).
Update: Again, read Spengler's full essay. One of his most striking points is to question the value of attempting to avoid offending Muslim sensibilities. If his argument is correct then excessive deference to Muslim sensibilities (e.g. the British government's recent decision to exempt Muslim women from having their photos taken for ID cards) is counterproductive. My own intuition is that Spengler is correct.
Heather MacDonald observes in a Wall Street Journal article entitled "The 'Privacy' Jihad" that there are privacy Luddites who disapprove of all use of computers for identifying and tracking terrorists. (note: the WSJ article is adapted from a longer article originally written for the City Journal)
The privacy advocates -- who range from liberal groups focused on electronic privacy, such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center, to traditional conservative libertarians, such as Americans for Tax Reform -- are fixated on a technique called "data mining." By now, however, they have killed enough different programs that their operating principle can only be formulated as this: No use of computer data or technology anywhere at any time for national defense, if there's the slightest possibility that a rogue use of that technology will offend someone's sense of privacy. They are pushing intelligence agencies back to a pre-9/11 mentality, when the mere potential for a privacy or civil liberties controversy trumped security concerns.
Heather reviews the computer systems projects that were being developed for use against terrorists (e.g. Total Information Awareness) that have been cancelled and also identifies a number of projects that are currently threatened. The privacy fanatics have gone so far as to cause a battlefield information system to be cancelled.
Arnold Kling argues that the basic moral outlook of liberals about how to raise children colors their view of terrorism in a way that hobbles their ability to effectively respond to the threat it poses.
Fundamentally, the "nurturance" model has no mechanism for coping with terrorism. It is easy and comfortable for liberals to express anger at President Bush, who represents the opposite "strictness" model. However, liberals are empty-handed when it comes to providing meaningful, constructive suggestions for policy. There simply is little or nothing within the "nurturance" paradigm that is useful for dealing with murderous fanatics.
Kling points out tha the conservative "strictness" style of punishing children to make them do good also has problems when translated into a response against the terrorist threat. Speaking as a hawk myself I can say that while the willingess of hawks to use military force to go after enemies is a needed impulse it is not by itself sufficient and, if used indiscriminately, can backfire. We need a number of approaches. Neither the gut instinctual responses of liberals or of conservatives are sufficient to handle the Muslim terrorist threat.
Kling is reluctant to embrace David Brin's proposal in Brin's book Transparent Society to allow all the public access to all electronic surveillance equipment. Brin believes the death of privacy is inevitable but that freedom can be protected by allowing that universal access to surveillance equipment. Kling worries that people are not ready to responsibly use their ability to watch each other with electronic surveillance technology.
My concern with Brin's approach is that I think that it requires a citizenry that is well educated and adapted to the environment that he envisions. Before we reach that point, an elite could have used surveillance technology to install a permanent tyranny. Perhaps eventually we will evolve to the transparent society that Brin proposes. For now, however, I believe we need a formal structure to preserve liberty -- a constitution of surveillance, if you will.
Kling argues for a constitutional amendment to create a domestic intelligence agency with a parallel agency to oversee and investigate its activities. Liberal critics of the Patriot Act and other Bush Administration responses to terrorism who cite Richard Clarke as an expert on what the Bush Administration should have done ought to take note that Richard Clarke also supports creation of a domestic intelligence agency.
My own take on the need for surveillance to counter the terrorist threat is that the response to terrorism differs from the response to regular crime in one very important way: with regular crime it is more acceptable to identify and catch criminals after they have committed crimes whereas with terrorism the emphasis is on catching the perpetrators before they carry out attacks. Since we can't read minds (at least not yet) there seems an obvious need for computer systems that detect patterns in behavior that will identify terrorists. We can't look through enough data to pick up signs of terrorist preparations unless we use automation. The automation even has advantages in that computers can be programmed to be more selective in what they pay attention to. Human surveillers are inevitably going to pay attention to aspects of behavior that we'd just as soon not have law enforcement personnel watching (like law enforcement personnel who, say, watch a sex act through a window during a stake-out).
The trend toward the surveillance society is already well underway in any case. See, for example, my FuturePundit post, Most Surveillance Cameras In NYC Privately Owned and Cell Phone Cameras And Personal Privacy. I agree with David Brin on the inevitability of the death of privacy. See my FuturePundit Surveillance Society category archive for more on the technological trends that make that outcome inevitable. The opposition to the use of computers and surveillance devices to fight terrorism really is a form of modern Luddism.
Greater domestic surveillance will eventually come about in response to future terrorist