On this anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we’ve got to ask ourselves: Did the terrorists win? Or did America win? And what did those attacks do to us? Considerations after the jump. [Read more...]
News & updates
April 25, 2013 By 17 Comments
Somebody hacked into the Twitter account of the Associated Press, no less, and put out word that there were explosions in the White House that injured the president. That sent the stock market into a tailspin, but it recovered when the story turned out to be a hoax.
Charges have been dropped for the Elvis impersonator who was accused of sending ricin-laced letters to the president, a senator, and a judge. Investigators have another suspect, a rival of the first one.
The surviving Boston Marathon bomber was charged for the federal crime of using weapons of mass destruction. He will not be treated as an enemy combatant. He was read his rights. The charge indicated that he may face the death penalty. (Massachusetts does not have the death penalty–though state legislators unsuccessfully tried to re-instate it for the bomber–but the federal government can still execute people.)
CSI, Boston
April 22, 2013 By 38 Comments
Here is a fascinating account of the police work that led to the identification and apprehension of the Boston Marathon bombers: Police, citizens and technology factor into Boston bombing probe – The Washington Post.
The legal issue now is whether “Jahar,” the surviving terrorist, should be considered an “enemy combatant” or whether he should be given all of the legal rights to which he is entitled as an American citizen, including the right to remain silent. What do you think?
Getting bin Laden: The Movie
January 14, 2013 By 6 Comments
I saw Zero Dark Thirty, the film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Earlier, the word was that it would be released just before the election, which had conservatives up in arms, fearing that a cinematic treatment of President Obama’s victory was Hollywood’s plot to get him re-elected. But there is nothing triumphalistic about this movie. Opponents of the war on terrorism will find lots of material in scenes of torture and brutality (as in killing terrorists in front of their children as they cry). And yet supporters of the war on terrorism will also find lots of material in the opening recording of phone calls from World Trade Center victims right before their deaths (talk about 911 calls), the continuing acts of terrorism throughout the movie, and in the heroism of both the troops and the CIA operatives who brought Osama bin Laden to justice. I think Zero Dark Thirty is what an objective treatment of a controversial issue by a work of art looks like. [Read more...]
Ten more years of the drone war
October 26, 2012 By 48 Comments
The war in Iraq is pretty much over and the war in Afghanistan is winding down, bringing to an end our wars sparked by 9/11–right? Well, not exactly. It turns out the drone war may go on for at least another ten years. The Obama administration has put together a systematic, on-going kill list. But in an Orwellian touch, it’s not called a kill list; rather, it’s called a “disposition matrix.” From Greg Miller of the Washington Post:
Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix.”
The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the “disposition” of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.
Although the matrix is a work in progress, the effort to create it reflects a reality setting in among the nation’s counterterrorism ranks: The United States’ conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.
Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight.
“We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us,” a senior administration official said. “It’s a necessary part of what we do. . . . We’re not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying, ‘We love America.’ ”
That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism. Targeting lists that were regarded as finite emergency measures after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are now fixtures of the national security apparatus. The rosters expand and contract with the pace of drone strikes but never go to zero.
Meanwhile, a significant milestone looms: The number of militants and civilians killed in the drone campaign over the past 10 years will soon exceed 3,000 by certain estimates, surpassing the number of people al-Qaeda killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.
With that milestone, if we practiced the old “eye-for-an-eye” collectivist revenge codes, we could call it even and declare peace. But the killings are going to go on and on for another ten years! I am astonished that it’s liberal Democrats who are doing this. George McGovern, who passed away this week, took the Democratic party, for better or for worse, in the direction of peace. Aren’t any of you Democrats bothered by Obama’s drone war? I wish the moderator at the last debate had asked about this topic. I’d be curious if Romney would continue this “disposition matrix” or if he really is the peace candidate. I mean, it’s good to protect America against our enemies and all, and drone strikes don’t put our military men and women in danger. But while we are attacking people overseas with these weapons, we are at war and not peace.
Conning the government
February 24, 2011 By 16 Comments
Thanks to tODD for pointing me to this story:
A onetime biomedical technician with a penchant for gambling, Mr.[Dennis] Montgomery is at the center of a tale that features terrorism scares, secret White House briefings, backing from prominent Republicans, backdoor deal-making and fantastic-sounding computer technology.
Interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials and business associates and a review of documents show that Mr. Montgomery and his associates received more than $20 million in government contracts by claiming that software he had developed could help stop Al Qaeda’s next attack on the United States. But the technology appears to have been a hoax, and a series of government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the Air Force, repeatedly missed the warning signs, the records and interviews show. . . .
Justice Department officials declined to discuss the government’s dealings with Mr. Montgomery, 57, who is in bankruptcy and living outside Palm Springs, Calif. Mr. Montgomery is about to go on trial in Las Vegas on unrelated charges of trying to pass $1.8 million in bad checks at casinos, but he has not been charged with wrongdoing in the federal contracts, nor has the government tried to get back any of the money it paid. He and his current lawyer declined to comment.
The software he patented — which he claimed, among other things, could find terrorist plots hidden in broadcasts of the Arab network Al Jazeera; identify terrorists from Predator drone videos; and detect noise from hostile submarines — prompted an international false alarm that led President George W. Bush to order airliners to turn around over the Atlantic Ocean in 2003.
The software led to dead ends in connection with a 2006 terrorism plot in Britain. And they were used by counterterrorism officials to respond to a bogus Somali terrorism plot on the day of President Obama’s inauguration, according to previously undisclosed documents. . . .
C.I.A. officials, though, came to believe that Mr. Montgomery’s technology was fake in 2003, but their conclusions apparently were not relayed to the military’s Special Operations Command, which had contracted with his firm. In 2006, F.B.I. investigators were told by co-workers of Mr. Montgomery that he had repeatedly doctored test results at presentations for government officials. But Mr. Montgomery still landed more business.
In 2009, the Air Force approved a $3 million deal for his technology, even though a contracting officer acknowledged that other agencies were skeptical about the software, according to e-mails obtained by The New York Times.
Hints of fraud by Mr. Montgomery, previously raised by Bloomberg Markets and Playboy, provide a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of government contracting. A Pentagon study in January found that it had paid $285 billion in three years to more than 120 contractors accused of fraud or wrongdoing.
via Government Tries to Keep Secret What Many Consider a Fraud – NYTimes.com.
This fiasco raises a number of issues: (1) The blind faith in technology on the part of people who don’t know that much about it. (2) How the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing in our government, including in its anti-terrorism activities that were supposed to get all co-ordinated after 9/11 (3) Why the government thinks it’s competent to run health care or the financial system when it’s so cumbersome as to fall for scams like these.
Is a major terrorist attack imminent?
September 29, 2010 By 24 Comments
Something seems to be brewing among jihadist terrorists, with officials in Europe and the United States on high alert.
US and European officials said Tuesday they have detected a plot to carry out a major, coordinated series of new terror attacks in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and possibly the United States.
A senior US official said that while there is a “credible” threat, no specific time or place is known. President Obama has been briefed about the threat, say senior US officials.
Intelligence and law enforcement authorities in the US and Europe said the threat information is based on the interrogation of a suspected German terrorist allegedly captured on his way to Europe in late summer and now being held at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.
US law enforcement officials say they have been told the terrorists were planning a series of “Mumbai-style” commando raids on what were termed “economic or soft” targets in the countries. . . .
The captured German reportedly said several teams of attackers, all with European passports, had been trained and dispatched from training camps in Waziristan and Pakistan. Officials say the German claimed the attack plan had been approved by Osama Bin Laden.
via ‘Credible But Not Specific’ Threat of New Terrorist Attack – ABC News.
But it may be that the plot has been disrupted to the point that the plans will not be carried out. In the meantime, there are sure lots of nervous law enforcement officers, as we see in Georgia: “A team of federal agents has been stopping tractor-trailers on Interstate 20 just west of Atlanta, inspecting each truck as it passed through a weigh station, and Channel 2 has learned its part of a counter-terrorism operation.”
The jihadi elite
January 13, 2010 By 24 Comments
Anne Applebaum notes that the terrorists we are seeing lately are from the upper crust. She discusses the widow of the suicide bomber who killed the CIA agents in Afghanistan, a woman who is a well-known author in the Arab world, having written, among other things, a book comparing Osama bin Laden to Che Guevara:
Bayrak is a shining example of what might be called the international jihadi elite: She is educated, eloquent, has connections across the Islamic world — Istanbul, Amman, Peshawar — yet is not exactly part of the global economy. She shares these traits not only with her husband — a doctor who was the son of middle-class, English-speaking Jordanians — but also with others featured recently in the news. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, for example, grew up in a wealthy Nigerian family and studied at University College London before trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Day. Ahmed Saeed Omar Sheikh (“Sheikh Omar”) was born in Britain and studied at elite high schools there and in Pakistan and dropped out of the London School of Economics before murdering American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan was born in Arlington, graduated from Virginia Tech and did his psychiatric residency at Walter Reed before killing 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood.
These people are not the wretched of the Earth. Nor do they have much in common, sociologically speaking, with the illiterate warlords of Waziristan. They haven't emerged from repressive Islamic societies such as Iran, or been forced to live under extreme forms of sharia law, as in Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, they are children of ambitious, “Westernized” parents who sacrificed for their education — though they are often people who, for one reason or another, didn't “make it,” or didn't feel comfortable, in their respective societies. Perhaps it sounds strange, but they remind me of the early Bolsheviks, who were also educated, multinational and ambitious, and who also often lacked the social cachet to be successful. Lenin's family, for example, clung desperately to its status on the lowest rung of the czarist aristocracy.
With that bin Laden and Che association and the Bolshevik comparison, could radical Islam be the new Communism? That is to say, a revolutionary ideology to challenge that of Western democracy?
via Anne Applebaum – We need a smarter way to fight the jihadi elite – washingtonpost.com.
Special airport security for passengers from terror-prone nations
January 5, 2010 By 32 Comments
Airport security is finally narrowing down the passengers who will get special scrutiny. Passengers from 14 nations will all get pat-downs and luggage searches: “Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen are on the list as countries of interest. Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria are listed because they have long been identified as "state sponsors of terrorism" by the United States, NBC reported.”
But some international airports–both of some of the singled-out countries and the major airports of Europe–are refusing to implement the new measures.
Incoherent terrorism policy
January 4, 2010 By 92 Comments
Charles Krauthammer says that President Obama and his administration are confused and inconsistent when it comes to dealing with terrorism:
The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration's response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to play down and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism "man-caused disasters." Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11 counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York — a trifecta of political correctness and image management.
And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term "war on terror." It's over — that is, if it ever existed.
Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately, al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term "asymmetric warfare."
And produces linguistic — and logical — oddities that littered Obama's public pronouncements following the Christmas Day attack. In his first statement, Obama referred to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as "an isolated extremist." This is the same president who, after the Fort Hood, Tex., shooting, warned us "against jumping to conclusions" — code for daring to associate the mass murder there with Nidal Hasan's Islamist ideology. Yet, with Abdulmutallab, Obama jumped immediately to the conclusion, against all existing evidence, that the would-be bomber acted alone.
More jarring still were Obama's references to the terrorist as a "suspect" who "allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device." You can hear the echo of FDR: "Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — Japanese naval and air force suspects allegedly bombed Pearl Harbor."
Obama reassured the nation that this "suspect" had been charged. Reassurance? The president should be saying: We have captured an enemy combatant — an illegal combatant under the laws of war: no uniform, direct attack on civilians — and now to prevent future attacks, he is being interrogated regarding information he may have about al-Qaeda in Yemen.
Instead, Abdulmutallab is dispatched to some Detroit-area jail and immediately lawyered up. At which point — surprise! — he stops talking.
This absurdity renders hollow Obama's declaration that "we will not rest until we find all who were involved." Once we've given Abdulmutallab the right to remain silent, we have gratuitously forfeited our right to find out from him precisely who else was involved, namely those who trained, instructed, armed and sent him.
This is all quite mad even in Obama's terms. He sends 30,000 troops to fight terror overseas, yet if any terrorists come to attack us here, they are magically transformed from enemy into defendant.
The logic is perverse. If we find Abdulmutallab in an al-Qaeda training camp in Yemen, where he is merely preparing for a terror attack, we snuff him out with a Predator — no judge, no jury, no qualms. But if we catch him in the United States in the very act of mass murder, he instantly acquires protection not just from execution by drone but even from interrogation.
“Lawyered up.” Good word. The point is, we need to decide whether to treat terrorists as unlawful (because they are not fighting under a lawful chain of command as soldiers of a nation do) enemy combatants or as criminals. If the former, they can be interrogated (which does NOT have to include torture) and indefinitely detained. If the latter, they have the right to remain silent! Nor may they or their camps be searched or their communications tapped without a warrant. Nor should they be subject to use of force when they are not in the process of committing a crime, as in having Hellfire missiles from a drone strike their camps. Instead, they would need to face extradition. We are trying to have it both ways at different times.
UPDATE: The administration has confirmed that it will try the Underwear Bomber in federal court. The president’s chief counterterrorism advisor John Brennan said that although he is now exercising his right to remain silent, we can still extract information from him by plea bargaining. Which means that the more he talks, the more he gets off!
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