Greenwald on the Arrar Ruling
Glenn Greenwald has a good post about Arrar v. Ashcroft, an appeals court ruling that came down the other day. Here’s an excerpt:
Maher Arar is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen of Syrian descent. A telecommunications engineer and graduate of Montreal’s McGill University, he has lived in Canada since he’s 17 years old. In 2002, he was returning home to Canada from vacation when, on a stopover at JFK Airport, he was (a) detained by U.S. officials, (b) accused of being a Terrorist, (c) held for two weeks incommunicado and without access to counsel while he was abusively interrogated, and then (d) was “rendered” – despite his pleas that he would be tortured — to Syria, to be interrogated and tortured. He remained in Syria for the next 10 months under the most brutal and inhumane conditions imaginable, where he was repeatedly tortured. Everyone acknowledges that Arar was never involved with Terrorism and was guilty of nothing. I’ve appended to the end of this post the graphic description from a dissenting judge of what was done to Arar while in American custody and then in Syria.
Read the whole thing. Also, the ACLU has put together a short film about the experiences of some prisoners released from Guantanamo.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General; Law and Civil Liberties
9/11: All the PSA We Needed
Right on the heels of my post the other day discussing the error in inviting terrorism reporting, here’s another video (and suspicious-activity-reporting Web site) produced by the Los Angeles Police Department.
The production values in this video are hipper, and L.A. appears to have its share of actors willing to look concerned about terrorism. But really, the attacks of September 11, 2001 were all the Public Service Announcement we needed to encourage reporting of genuine suspicions.
Asking amateurs for tips about terrorism will have many wasteful and harmful results, like racial and ethnic discrimination, angry neighbors turning each other in, and—given the rarity of terrorism—lots and lots of folks just plain getting it wrong. People with expertise—even in very limited domains—can discover suspicious circumstances in their worlds almost automatically when they find things “hinky.”
My impressions of the LAPD were formed up in the late 80’s and early 90’s when I lived in southern California. To encourage reporting, what that department needs most is to make the community confident of its own fairness and competence. Reporting of meritorious suspicions will naturally follow that. There’s no need for it to artificially gin up crime or terrorism reporting.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Emanuel on TV and Filkins on McChrystal
A. It’s encouraging to see Rahm Emanuel and John Kerry saying that we shouldn’t up force levels in Afghanistan without a reliable partner. But if we shouldn’t send 40,000 more troops to prop up a crooked government, why keep the 68,000 we have there? A focused counter-terrorism mission would require far less than that.
B. According to Dexter Filkins’ article in the New York Times Magazine, the war in Iraq taught General Stanley McChrystal the following:
No situation, no matter how dire, is ever irredeemable — if you have the time, resources and the correct strategy. In the spring of 2006, Iraq seemed lost. The dead were piling up. The society was disintegrating. One possible conclusion was that it was time for the United States to cut its losses in a country that it never truly understood. But the American military believed it had found a strategy that worked, and it hung in there, and it finally turned the tide.
What’s interesting about this claim is its utter confidence in the potential efficacy of US military power — it is not just necessary to solving Iraq’s problems, but sufficient. If this view is right, Iraqis themselves, and their civil war, were unnecessary to the limited political reconciliation that occurred there.
Filkins, surprisingly, seems to agree, depicting the evolution of the war this way:
For four years, the American military had tried to crush the Iraqi insurgency and got the opposite: the insurgency bloomed, and the country imploded. By refocusing their efforts on protecting Iraqi civilians, American troops were able to cut off the insurgents from their base of support. Then the Americans struck peace deals with tens of thousands of former fighters — the phenomenon known as the Sunni Awakening — while at the same time fashioning a formidable Iraqi army. After a bloody first push, violence in Iraq dropped to its lowest levels since the war began.
Note the use of the word “then” preceding the sentence about peace deals. It carries a heavy load. Filkins wants to say that the hearts and mind theory of counterinsurgency caused the Anbar Awakening. But he offers no real causal story about how they are connected; he just says that one happened and then the other.
Another view, one that leaves Iraqis some agency, is that the growth of the al Qaeda Iraq and the progress of the civil war changed the Sunni insurgents’ strategic calculus, such that they decided to cooperate with Americans to gain locally. And that in turn, limited violence. U.S. forces had a role in this — the covert killing campaign that McChrystal led and Filkins chronicles probably pressured insurgents and weakened AQI, for one. But the deals — the awakening — began well before the troop surge and before David Petraeus took command and tried to implement a new counterinsurgency doctrine. The key American decision was willingness to play ball with insurgent groups. This decision had little to do with winning hearts and minds via population security and increased troop levels. And by empowering forces at odds with the central government, it contradicted the goal of state-building in Iraq, at least in the short-term.
I obviously agree with the latter view. Our dependence on local politics limits what we can accomplish in counterinsurgency. We can certainly affect what happens in Afghanistan, but it is hubris to think we control it.
Filkins also quotes McChrystal on Afghanistan’s effect on Pakistan:
“If we are good here, it will have a good effect on Pakistan,” he told me. “But if we fail here, Pakistan will not be able to solve their problems — it would be like burning leaves on a windy day next door.
It’s sensible to conclude chaos nearby is unhelpful to stability in Pakistan, but it goes way too far to say that Afghanistan’s stability is necessary to Pakistan’s, which has been fairly stable for long periods while Afghanistan was not. What’s more, as Robert Pape argues, it is likely that U.S. forces are a cause of insurgency in both countries.
Good Athelete, Not a Good Terrorist Hunter
The leading theory about this video is that John Elway would say anything for a buck. That’s fine for him to do, of course. But the producers of the video below inadvertently illustrate the difficulty of generating suspicion about terrorists (or any other thing) artificially.
The video goes through eight signs of terrorism, on which they say “experts agree.” They are signs of terrorism, in a sense, but they are signs of lots of other things too. If Coloradans contacted authorities as instructed in the video, they would inundate law enforcement with false reports, possibly obscuring truly suspicious information. I wrote about properly generated suspicion and my testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee touching on these issues a couple of years ago.
Asking amateurs for tips about suspicious behavior will have many wasteful and harmful results, like racial and ethnic discrimination, angry neighbors turning each other in, and lots and lots of folks just plain getting it wrong. But people with expertise—even in very limited domains—can discover suspicious circumstances, almost automatically, when they find things “hinky.”
Given the rarity of terrorists and terrorism planning in this country, hunting terrorists using the list of “signs” in this video would cause people to be wrong about 100% of the time. Americans have much of the knowledge and all the incentive they need to report truly suspicious activity without videos encouraging them to see terrorism in every shadow.
Supremes to Hear PATRIOT ‘Material Support’ Challenge
As I mentioned in passing in my post yesterday, one of the reforms in Russ Feingold’s JUSTICE Act involves tweaking the USA PATRIOT Act’s definition of “material support” for terrorism to ensure that it doesn’t cover things like humanitarian aid or legal assistance. Today, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case concerning that very issue:
The key plaintiff in the current appeal is the Humanitarian Law Project, a Los Angeles, California-based non-profit that says its mission is to advocate “for the peaceful resolution of armed conflicts and for worldwide compliance with humanitarian law and human rights law.” HLP sought to help the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a group active in Turkey. Known as PKK, the party was founded in the mid-1970s and has been labeled a terror organization by the United States and the European Union. Its leaders have previously called for militancy to create a separate Kurdish state in parts of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran, where Kurds comprise a population majority. [...]
Another plaintiff is an American physician who wanted to help ethnic Tamils in his native Sri Lanka. Much of the island nation is controlled by the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which has also fought for decades to carve an independent state. The government claims the Tamil Tigers have “used suicide bombings and political assassinations in its campaign for independence, killing hundreds of civilians in the process.”
HLP and a group of Tamil doctors say they merely wanted “to provide their expert medical advice on how to address the shortage of medical facilities and trained physicians” in the region but “they are afraid to do so because they fear prosecution for providing material support.”
A federal appeals court agreed with the groups that the statute as written is unconstitutionally vague; the government wants to preserve the current broad language. Arguments won’t take place until early next year, but if you can’t wait for a preview, check out this exchange between David Cole and Paul Rosenzweig on PATRIOT’s material support provision, part of a highly illuminating series of debates on aspects of the law (as originally written) hosted by the American Bar Association.
Limited Options in Dealing with Iran
The revelation last week of a second secret Iranian nuclear facility, and Iran’s test firings over the weekend of its short and medium range missiles, bring a new sense of urgency to the long-scheduled talks between Iran and the P-5 + 1 beginning on Thursday in Geneva. Many in Washington hope that a new round of tough sanctions, supported by all of the major powers including Russia and China, might finally convince the Iranians to abandon their nuclear program.
Such hopes are naive.
Even multilateral sanctions have an uneven track record, at best. It is difficult to convince a regime to reverse itself when a very high-profile initiative hangs in the balance, and Iran’s nuclear program clearly qualifies. It is particularly unrealistic given that the many years of economic and diplomatic pressure exerted on Tehran by the U.S. government have only in emboldened the regime and marginalized reformers and democracy advocates, who are cast by the regime as lackeys of the United States and the West.
But whereas sanctions are likely to fail, war with Iran would be even worse. As Secretary Gates admitted on Sunday, air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities would merely degrade and perhaps delay, not eliminate, Iran’s program. Such attacks would inevitably result in civilian casualties, allowing Ahmadinejad to rally public support for his weak regime. What’s more, the likelihood of escalation following a military attack — which could take the form of asymmetric attacks in the Persian Gulf region, and terrorism worldwide — is not a risk worth taking.
The Iranian government must be convinced that it does not need nuclear weapons to deter attacks against the regime. It is likely to push for an indigenous nuclear-enrichment program for matters of national pride, as well as national interest.
The Obama administration should therefore offer to end Washington’s diplomatic and economic isolation of Iran, and should end all efforts to overthrow the government in Tehran, in exchange for Iran’s pledge to forswear a nuclear weapons program, and to allow free and unfettered access to international inspectors to ensure that its peaceful nuclear program is not diverted for military purposes.
While such an offer might ultimately be rejected by the Iranians, revealing their intentions, it is a realistic option, superior to both feckless economic pressure and stalemate, or war, with all of its horrible ramifications.
The Zazi Case: Spread the Good News!
As has been widely reported, federal authorities believe an Aurora, Colorado man named Najibullah Zazi was preparing to commit acts of terrorism in the United States. Ben Friedman has provided some insight into the charge against him.
I don’t know how the case will come out, of course. I take it for what it is: an alleged terror plot. Terrorism is an acute security challenge because people who look like nincompoops to us might be activated by a capable leader and used as “muscle” in a real attack. If authorities act too early, it looks like there was never a threat. If they act too late, they might fail to prevent an attack.
Putting aside the merits, the press reaction to this case seems different from many past cases. Take this story from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Along with reporting the possibility of this being the first Al Qaeda cell in the United States since 9/11, it says:
Hundreds of terrorism-related prosecutions, many for far more serious charges than lying to investigators, have been filed by U.S. authorities since the 9/11 attacks. On numerous occasions, U.S. officials have made startling allegations about terrorism suspects, only to later significantly dial back their rhetoric.
I was interested also by the tone of this USA Today story which focused as much on the U.S. government’s issuance of terror alerts as on their number and validity. “Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the FBI and DHS have issued hundreds of similar bulletins,” the story said. It’s easy to see a reporter’s skepticism in that sentence, and his signal to readers that they shouldn’t get too agitated.
My sense — and it is only impressionistic — is that the media are starting to get their feet under them. After eight years of parroting official fear-mongering, serious reporters (I say mostly to exclude cable “news”) are prepared to question what officials tell them. That can only be good. The press plays an important role in digesting information and equipping society to address terrorism along many dimensions, including girding against unnecessary fear and overreaction.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Afghanistan = Bottomless Pit of Massive Social Engineering
Obsidian Wings echoes my frustrations about the debate surrounding the war in Afghanistan. Publius notes, “The goal of preventing Taliban control isn’t a sufficient reason to stay.”
That analysis is absolutely right. As I mention in my forthcoming white paper (co-authored with TGC), Escaping the Graveyard of Empires: A Strategy to Exit Afghanistan, the resurrection of the Taliban’s fundamentalist regime doesn’t threaten America’s sovereignty or physical security. The Taliban is a guerilla-jihadi Pashtun-dominated movement with no international agenda or shadowy global mission. Even if their parochial fighters took over a contiguous fraction of Afghan territory it is not compelling enough of a rationale to maintain an indefinite, large-scale military presence in the region, especially since our presence feeds the Pashtun insurgency we seek to defeat (as Publius also acknowledges) and our policies are pushing the conflict over the border into nuclear-armed Pakistan, further destabilizing its already shaky government.
Even if the Taliban were to reassert themselves amid a scaled down U.S. presence, it is not clear that the Taliban would again host al Qaeda. In The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright, staff writer for New Yorker magazine, found that before 9/11 the Taliban was divided over whether to shelter Osama bin Laden. The terrorist financier wanted to attack Saudi Arabia’s royal family, which, according to Wright, would have defied a pledge Taliban leader Mullah Omar made to Prince Turki al-Faisal, chief of Saudi intelligence (1977–2001), to keep bin Laden under control. The Taliban’s reluctance to host al Qaeda’s leader means it is not a foregone conclusion that the same group would provide shelter to the same organization whose protection led to their overthrow.
Moreover, America’s claim that the Taliban is its enemy seems less than coherent. After all, although some U.S. officials issued toothless and perfunctory condemnations of the Taliban when it controlled most of Afghanistan from September 1996 through October 2001, during that time the United States never once made a substantive policy shift toward or against the Taliban despite knowing that it imposed a misogynistic, oppressive, and militant Islamic regime onto Afghans. For Washington to now pursue an uncompromising hostility toward the Taliban’s eye-for-an-eye brand of justice can be interpreted as an opportunistic attempt to cloak U.S. strategic ambitions in moralistic values.
On a side note, another conservative joins George Will for getting out of Afghanistan.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General
Meghan Cox Gurdon: Doesn’t Understand Terrorism
In goading victim states to overreact, one of the things terrorists seek is confirmation of their ideological narrative. The story Islamist terrorists tell themselves and others is that the United States is a wicked power, an occupier, a Crusader, and an exploiter of Muslims. Terrorists are energized, and they have an easier time with recruiting and maintaining support, when the United States does things that make these charges look true.
Lacking this insight, Washington Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon interprets recent events wrongly in almost every respect. Her column is called “These are Good Times for Terrorists.”
Rather than scoring a terrorist “win,” the compassionate release of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi doesn’t square with Western cruelty. Thus—to the extent it matters to terrorists—it confounds their version of events. Terrorists don’t really do a “how much time will I serve” calculation, so the release probably doesn’t matter much. In terms of individual justice, it may have been wrong, but not in terms of counterterrorism strategy.
Gurdon cites flagging U.S. will in Afghanistan as a sign of terrorist success, and it would provide short-term gains to the Taliban if the United States exited the field. But with lessened U.S. violence in the area, and with the recent election giving a stronger toehold to legitimate government, U.S. military caution stands to deal terrorism strategic setbacks.
Where Gurdon really gets it wrong—and purposefully so—is in her interpretation of Attorney General Holder’s move to investigate allegations of torture by U.S. authorities: “[M]ilitants now know that, should they be apprehended, American interrogators cannot so much as wave a loaded gun or blow cigar smoke in their faces lest they face the disciplinary wrath of their own authorities.”
These slights are not the gravamen of the torture allegations, and Gurdon undoubtedly knows that. What she may not know is that abuse of terror suspects is good for terrorism: It confirms the ideological narrative holding that the United States is an evil, abusive power. Meticulous fair treatment of terror suspects, on the other hand—as ordinary criminals—is the fate terrorists loathe. This robs them of their claim on moral authority and makes their struggle boring.
Recall that the first of the “five demands” in the 1981 IRA hunger strike was the right not to wear a prison uniform. Treating them as ordinary criminals would sap their legitimacy and the strength of their challenge to incumbent power in the eyes of key audiences.
It would have been far, far better for the United States and CIA interrogators not to have lost their cool after the 9/11 attacks. We handed terrorism many swords with our responses. But exposing error to light and punishing proven wrongdoing confirms our ideology: fealty to the rule of law.
Meghan Gurdon doesn’t understand terrorism. And she takes a real header with her flabby attempt to associate alleged CIA torture and other missteps with the constitution:
The Republic rests on the Constitution, but the reverse is also true; the Constitution and all the benign and enlightened principles it embodies rest on the continued strength and moral will of the Republic.
No, Meghan. The republic, its strength, and its moral will all rest on the constitution.
David Frum Analyzes Why ‘The Crazies’ Are Running the GOP
In a discussion on Bloggingheads, David Frum offers his thoughts on the sad state of the GOP these days:
He blames the predicament, in part, on the “conservative entertainment-industrial complex,” a term coined by Andrew Sullivan. In Frum’s telling, this complex has “distorted conservative dialogue to suit the wishes of the Fox audience.” He says that drawing on such a group, “you can get seriously rich out of that, but you can’t govern a country with that kind of voter base, it’s a tiny minority-within-a-minority.”
This is an interesting thesis. Frum was the coauthor of a seemingly successful, widely discussed foreign-policy book titled An End to Evil, which posited that terrorism posed a “threat to the survival of our nation,” and in foreign policy, “there is no middle way for Americans. It is victory or Holocaust.” Are these the sorts of carefully considered judgments on which the GOP is going to ride back into office?
It’s probably true that pushing the American nationalist button over and over from 2002 forward contributed to getting Bush reelected in 2004, but the results after then have been rather less encouraging. John Boehner colorfully remarked recently that the GOP “took it in the shorts with Bush-Cheney, the Iraq War, and by sacrificing fiscal responsibility to hold power.” I’m not sure that my preferred foreign policy is the key to political success, but I’m pretty sure that the zany world view that Frum has traded on isn’t the way forward either.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics
Tom Ridge on the Bush Administration’s War on Terror
Former congressman, governor, and secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Tom Ridge is a long-time GOP loyalist. But he apparently doesn’t have good things to say about the Bush administration on its vaunted war on terrorism.
A new report on his upcoming book warns:
Tom Ridge, the first head of the 9/11-inspired Department of Homeland Security, wasn’t keen on writing a tell-all. But in The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege…and How We Can Be Safe Again, out September 1, Ridge says he wants to shake “public complacency” over security.
And to do that, well, he needs to tell all. Especially about the infighting he saw that frustrated his attempts to build a smooth-running department. Among the headlines promoted by publisher Thomas Dunne Books: Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.
This confirms widespread suspicion that the Bush administration’s terrorism initiatives were highly political. It also undercuts the claim that we should trust government to protect us by sacrificing our liberties and giving trustworthy public servants greater discretion.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics
Maybe Europe Isn’t Lost to Islamic Terrorism
Europe has come into a lot of criticism lately. Much of it is justified. For instance, cutting military forces while expecting the U.S. to maintain security guarantees is more than little irritating for Americans facing trillions of dollars in deficits and tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities for various bail-outs and social programs.
However, predictions of a radical Islamic takeover of Europe look less realistic these days. Forecasting the future is always risky. Nevertheless, the feared growing population of Islamic extremists hasn’t appeared. Reports the Guardian:
A district of derelict warehouses, red-brick terraces, and vibrant street life on the canals near the centre of Brussels, Molenbeek was once known as Belgium’s “Little Manchester”. These days it is better known as “Little Morocco” since the population is overwhelmingly Muslim and of North African origin.
By day, the scene is one of children kicking balls on busy streets, of very fast, very small cars with very large sound systems. By night, the cafes and tea houses are no strangers to drug-dealers and mafia from the Maghreb.
For the politically active extreme right, and the anti-Islamic bloggers, Molenbeek is the nightmare shape of things to come: an incubator of tension and terrorism in Europe’s capital, part of a wave of “Islamisation” supposedly sweeping Europe, from the great North Sea cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam to Marseille and the Mediterranean.
The dire predictions of religious and identity-based mayhem reached their peak between 2004 and 2006, when bombs exploded in Madrid and London, a controversial film director was shot and stabbed to death in Amsterdam, and angry demonstrators marched against publication of satirical cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad.
For Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept, the continent’s future was to “tamely resign itself to a gradual transition to absolute sharia law”. By the end of the century, warned Bernard Lewis, the famous American historian of Islam, “Europe will be Islamic”. The Daily Telegraph asked: “Is France on the way to becoming an Islamic state?” The Daily Mail described the riots that shook the nation in the autumn of 2005 as a “Muslim intifada”.
Yet a few years on, though a steady drumbeat of apocalyptic forecasts continues, such fears are beginning to look misplaced. The warnings focus on three elements: the terrorist threat posed by radical Muslim European populations; a cultural “invasion” due to a failure of integration; and demographic “swamping” by Muslim communities with high fertility rates.
A new poll by Gallup, one of the most comprehensive to date, shows that the feared mass radicalisation of the EU’s 20-odd million Muslims has not taken place. Asked if violent attacks on civilians could be justified, 82% of French Muslims and 91% of German Muslims said no. The number who said violence could be used in a “noble cause” was broadly in line with the general population. Crucially, responses were not determined by religious practice – with no difference between devout worshippers and those for whom “religion [was] not important”.
“The numbers have been pretty steady over a number of years,” said Gallup’s Magali Rheault. “It is important to separate the mainstream views from the actions of the fringe groups, who often receive disproportionate attention. Mainstream Muslims do not appear to exhibit extremist behaviour.”
Obviously, the future is uncertain. Terrorism will remain a threat to both America and Europe. However, we must reduce the number of those hostile to the the U.S. and allied countries as well as stop those already determined to do us ill. So far, thankfully, the news from Europe in this regard appears to be good.
Schneier and Friends on Fixing Airport Security
Security guru Bruce Schneier comes down on the strictly pragmatic side in this essay called “Fixing Airport Security.” Because of terrorism fears, he says, TSA checkpoints are “here to stay.” The rules should be made more transparent. He also argues for an amendment to some constitutional doctrines:
The Constitution provides us, both Americans and visitors to America, with strong protections against invasive police searches. Two exceptions come into play at airport security checkpoints. The first is “implied consent,” which means that you cannot refuse to be searched; your consent is implied when you purchased your ticket. And the second is “plain view,” which means that if the TSA officer happens to see something unrelated to airport security while screening you, he is allowed to act on that. Both of these principles are well established and make sense, but it’s their combination that turns airport security checkpoints into police-state-like checkpoints.
The comments turn up an important recent Fourth Amendment decision circumscribing TSA searches. In a case called United States v. Fofana, the district court for the southern district of Ohio held that a search of passenger bags going beyond what was necessary to detect articles dangerous to air transportation violated the Fourth Amendment. “[T]he need for heightened security does not render every conceivable checkpoint search procedure constitutionally reasonable,” wrote the court.
Application of this rule throughout the country would not end the “police-state-like checkpoint,” but at least rummaging of our things for non-air-travel-security would be restrained.
I prefer principle over pragmatism and would get rid of TSA.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Morozov vs. Cyber-Alarmism
I’m no information security expert, but you don’t have to be to realize that an outbreak of cyber-alarmism afflicts American pundits and reporters.
As Jim Harper and Tim Lee have repeatedly argued (with a little help from me), while the internet created new opportunities for crime, spying, vandalism and military attack, the evidence that the web opens a huge American national security vulnerability comes not from events but from improbable what-ifs. That idea is, in other words, still a theory. Few pundits bother to point out that hackers don’t kill, that cyberspies don’t seem to have stolen many (or any?) important American secrets, and that our most critical infrastructure is not run on the public internet and thus is relatively invulnerable to cyberwhatever. They never note that to the extent that future wars have an online component, this redounds to the U.S. advantage, given our technological prowess. Even the Wall Street Journal and New York Times recently published breathless stories exaggerating our vulnerability to online attacks and espionage.
So it’s good to see that the July/ August Boston Review has a terrific article by Evgeny Morozov taking on the alarmists. He provides not only a sober net assessment of the various worries categorized by the vague modifier “cyber” but even offers a theory about why hype wins.
Why is there so much concern about “cyber-terrorism”? Answering a question with a question: who frames the debate? Much of the data are gathered by ultra-secretive government agencies—which need to justify their own existence—and cyber-security companies—which derive commercial benefits from popular anxiety. Journalists do not help. Gloomy scenarios and speculations about cyber-Armaggedon draw attention, even if they are relatively short on facts.
I agree.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
U.S. Presence in Afghanistan Feeds Pakistan’s Insurgency
Yesterday’s attack on Peshawar’s Pearl Continental Hotel was the latest signal of Pakistan’s growing Islamist insurgency.
Since the raid by the Pakistani government on the Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) in Islamabad in July 2007, a wave of revenge attacks against the army and the government has been launched by loose networks of suicide bombers. It’s possible, depending on the culprit, that the recent attack in Peshawar might have been retribution for the Pakistan army’s month-long offensive against extremists in the country’s northwest districts.
While the United States hopes to eliminate the threat from extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the knock-on effects from U.S.-NATO efforts to stabilize Afghanistan destabilize Pakistan. America’s presence in the region feeds Pakistan’s insurgency. If America’s interests lie in stabilizing Pakistan, and ensuring that the virus of anti-American radicalism does not infect the rest of the country, the fundamental objective should be to get out of Afghanistan in a reasonable time frame.
How to Encourage Terrorists
The news yesterday that a Guantanamo detainee has been moved to New York to stand trial struck me with bemusement.
The Obama administration has apparently determined that it can roll over opposition to bringing detainees into the country for trial and imprisonment. Arguments against doing so are fear-based pap, and political losers.
House Minority Leader John Boehner has not failed to provide. He said in a statement:
This is the first step in the Democrats’ plan to import terrorists into America. . . . . There are more than 200 of the world’s most dangerous men held at the Guantanamo Bay prison. Does the Administration plan to transfer all of them into our nation in this way?
Boehner’s apparent aim was to make political gains by appealing to the fears of a domestic U.S. audience, suggesting that President Obama is not safeguarding the country. He – and most U.S. politicians today – are “on tilt” about terrorism, playing to a “base” of caterwauling Islamophobes while the bulk of the American public looks on bewildered and disappointed.
But put aside domestic audiences. Think of what Boehner’s comment signals to international audiences, particularly, say, disaffected men in the Middle East: Americans are scared to death of terrorists. Just sitting in Guantanamo can make you “one of the world’s most dangerous men” to U.S. political leaders. Swathe yourself with the Al Qaeda brand and you can become a global menace. Boehner’s fear of terrorists encourages opponents of the U.S. to adopt terrorism as a tool against us.
Over the long haul, exhibiting bravery in the face of terrorism will tend to discourage it. Being brave is desirable and politically popular. Minority Leader Boehner has Republicans looking weak and scared in the face of terrorism and – having been ignored by Obama – politically weak too.
Cyber Security “Facts”
National Journal’s “Expert Blog” on National Security asked me late last week to comment on the question, “How Can Cyberspace Be Defended?” My comment and others went up yesterday.
My response was a fun jaunt through issues on which there are no experts. But the highlight is the response I drew out of Michael Jackson, the former #2 man at the Department of Homeland Security.
It does little to promote serious discourse about the truly grave topic of cyber security threats to begin by ridiculing DHS and DOD as “grasping for power” or to suggest that President Obama has somehow been duped into basing his sensible cyber strategy on “a lame and corny threat model called ‘weapons of mass disruption.’” It shows ignorance of the facts to deny that cyber vulnerabilities do indeed present the possibility of “paralyzing results.”
Jackson neglects to link to a source proving the factual existence of “paralyzing” threats to the Internet — he’d have to defeat the Internet’s basic resilient design to do it. (Or he has collapsed the Internet, the specific way of networking I was talking about, with “cyber” — a meaningless referent to everything.) But the need for tight argument or proof is almost always forgiven in homeland security and cyber security, where the Washington, D.C. echo-chamber relentlessly conjures problems that only an elite bureaucracy can solve.
In another comment — not taking umbrage at mine, but culturally similar to Jackson’s — Ron Marks, Senior Vice President for Government Relations at Oxford-Analytica, says, “Cyberterrorism is here to stay and will grow bigger.” The same can be said of the bogeyman, but the bogeyman isn’t real either.
(To all interlocutors: Claiming secrecy will be taken as confessing you have no evidence.)
Jackson’s close is the tour de force though: “Good people are working hard on these matters, and they deserve our unwavering financial and personal support. For now and for the long-term.”
A permanent tap on America’s wallets, and respect on command? Sounds like “grasping for power” to me.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Robert Wright at Cato Unbound
This month’s Cato Unbound features Robert Wright, who offers us an excerpt from his new book, The Evolution of God. He looks at the possibility of religious tolerance from a game theoretic and evolutionary psychology perspective: Is there a fundamental “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West? Or just a communication failure? Wright argues that we can work toward understanding by realizing the limits and biases of human moral reasoning:
You might not guess it to read the headlines, but by and large the relationship between “the West” and “the Muslim World” is non-zero-sum. To be sure, the relationship between some Muslims and the West is zero-sum. Terrorist leaders have aims that are at odds with the welfare of Westerners. The West’s goal is to hurt their cause, to deprive them of new recruits and of political support. But if we take a broader view—look not at terrorists and their supporters but at Muslims in general, look not at radical Islam but at Islam—the “Muslim world” and the “West” are playing a non-zero-sum game; their fortunes are positively correlated. And the reason is that what’s good for Muslims broadly is bad for radical Muslims. If Muslims get less happy with their place in the world, more resentful of their treatment by the West, support for radical Islam will grow, so things will get worse for the West. If, on the other hand, more and more Muslims feel respected by the West and feel they benefit from involvement with it, that will cut support for radical Islam, and Westerners will be more secure from terrorism.
This isn’t an especially arcane piece of logic. The basic idea is that terrorist leaders are the enemy and they thrive on the discontent of Muslims—and if what makes your enemy happy is the discontent of Muslims broadly, then you should favor their contentment. Obviously. Indeed this view has become conventional wisdom: if the West can win the “hearts and minds” of Muslims, it will have “drained the swamp” in which terrorists thrive. In that sense, there is widespread recognition in the West of the non-zero-sum dynamic.
But this recognition hasn’t always led to sympathetic overtures from Westerners toward Muslims. The influential evangelist Franklin Graham declared that Muslims don’t worship the same god as Christians and Jews and that Islam is a “very evil and wicked religion.” That’s no way to treat people you’re in a non-zero-sum relationship with! And Graham is not alone. Lots of evangelical Christians and other Westerners view Muslims with suspicion, and view relations between the West and the Muslim world as a “clash of civilizations.” And many Muslims view the West in similarly win-lose terms.
So what’s going on here? Where’s the part of human nature that was on display in ancient times—the part that senses whether you’re in the same boat as another group of people and, if you are, fosters sympathy for or at least tolerance of them?
It’s in there somewhere, but it’s misfiring. And one big reason is that our mental equipment for dealing with game-theoretical dynamics was designed for a hunter-gatherer environment, not for the modern world. That’s why dealing with current events wisely requires strenuous mental effort—effort that ultimately, as it happens, could bring moral progress.
Denying ‘Terrorists’ the Label
The killing of abortion docter George Tiller is an interesting microcosm of how terrorism works — and how it can be suppressed. I wrote here the other day denying that Tiller’s killer is a terrorist. Refusing to call him a terrorist will deny him strategic gains and reduce violence in the future.
Now the AP reports the killer’s claim from jail that similar violence is planned across the nation. This kind of statement is not likely prediction, but rather an appeal to like-minded people to join him. Like terrorists, he has a strong ideological commitment but almost no way to advance his cause other than by inducing missteps on the part of his opponents.
Letting Dr. Tiller’s killer wear the mantle of terrorism would enthuse people who might be inclined to join his cause and carry out future attacks on abortion providers. The best strategic response is to downplay his claims, refuse to call him a terrorist, and let the criminal process run its course.
Fusion Centers
Most people don’t care about government surveillance — just so long as they are not affected by it. We want the police to be on lookout for trouble — so some surveillance is necessary for the work they do. But how much?
After 9/11, state officials said they had difficulty “connecting all the dots.” Fusion centers are supposed to remedy that problem. Police departments around the country are creating databases (”fusion centers”) and the objective is to link them together so that the police can spot patterns of behavior so that crimes or terrorist attacks can be thwarted.
The goal seems sensible and worthwhile but as the details emerge on how fusion centers operate, the concept gets controversial fast. Who will be monitored? What kind of information will be collected? And who decides when pieces of information should be discarded or entered into a massive database? If false information about, say, YOU, goes into the database, will you ever learn about it? Have an opportunity to erase it or correct it?
Fusion centers are springing up all over the country and they are coordinating the efforts of some 800,000 American law enforcement officers to collect information about anyone deemed suspicious. One problem is that terrorists are not of a monolithic character. Terrorists can be extremely religious or secular; they may be Arab, white, black or any other race; terrorists come from both rich and poor backgrounds; they come from the far right, the far left — and some are simply against society generally. And when criminals are added to the mix, the potential dragnet for this casual government surveillance potentially covers scores of people.
Behaviors that make someone eligible for government monitoring are quite broad. As noted by Bruce Fein in his testimony before Congress in April, citing a July 2008 ACLU report on fusion centers, such suspicious behaviors in one LAPD directive include “using binoculars,” “taking pictures or video footage “with no apparent aesthetic value,” “drawing diagrams,” and “taking notes,” among others.
Former vice-president Cheney might argue that the monitoring is not extensive enough. He recently said (pdf): “When just a single clue goes unlearned … can bring on a catastrophe — it’s no time for splitting differences. There is never a good time to compromise when the lives and safety of the American people are in the balance.” National security, it seems, requires that we get everyone into the central database for scrutiny. We can’t afford any ”gaps” in the surveillance matrix.
I will be moderating a Cato event about fusion centers on Thursday, June 11, at noon. The panel will include attorney Bruce Fein, the ACLU’s Mike German (who co-authored the report linked above), and Harvey Eisenberg, Chief of the National Security Section in the Maryland Division of the U.S. Attorney’s office.
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