Arms and influence

Baptism of excrement

With each passing month, we learn about more executive branch employees complicit in the Bush Administration's worst policies. The latest inductee is Richard Myers, former Air Force general and Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman:

In late 2002, documents show, officials from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps all complained that harsh interrogation tactics under consideration for use at the prison in Guantánamo Bay might be against the law. Those military officials called for further legal scrutiny of the tactics. The chief of the Army's international law division, for example, said in a memo that some of the tactics, such as stress positions and sensory deprivation, "cross the line of 'humane treatment'" and "may violate the torture statute."

Myers, however, agreed to scuttle a plan for further legal review of the tactics, in response to pressure from a top Pentagon attorney helping to set up the interrogation program for then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Apparently, to work in the higher echelons of the Bush national security team, you had to accept the baptism of excrement. Once you show that you're willing to participate in things you know to be wrong, you're a made man (or woman, such as Condoleeza Rice, Karen Hughes, or Harriet Miers). Not only have your superiors learned exactly how compliant you're willing to be, but they also have the power over to you that  the secret knowledge of shameful actions can grant.

I suspect that the baptism of excrement was a consideration in setting up the meetings among Bush's top advisers to approve the CIA's handling of prisoners. You didn't need Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet, Rice, and Ashcroft in the same room, just to determine which tender mercies the CIA could use on someone who might have a real connection to Al Qaeda. Some other motive was at work.

Similarly, Myers knew that people in the Defense Department were raising reasonable concerns. Had he listened to them fully, he might have had to deliver an unwanted message to the civilian leadership. Therefore, he didn't listen to them. Myers also knew that the few in uniform who did manage to voice their objections, such as General Tony Taguba, were not isolated crackpots.

In April of 2003, the DoD held a press briefing featuring experts on the treatment of enemy prisoners. At the time, the concern was how the US military would handle irregulars like the Saddam Fedayeen, or any other soldier who tried to fade into the civilian population. Here's a quote from W. Hay Parks, an assistant to the Army's Judge Advocate General:

PARKS: When someone is captured, they go through a process of being taken from the capturing unit back to a collection unit and ultimately to the higher-level theater prisoner-of-war camps. And Article V of the Prisoner of War Convention, it specifies that if there is any doubt as to the status of a person, that person is entitled to prisoner-of-war protection until his or her status has been determined. That determination can be done by an Article 5 tribunal, which is a tribunal, set up by the military to look at the facts and circumstances of the capture and any other information. They then make a determination or recommendation. Our past practice, in Vietnam as well as in the first Gulf War, was that if at any time there remains any doubt, that person will be entitled to prisoner-of- war status.

Had Myers wanted to hear, he could have listened to his own employees--but, of course, it would have made his own role untenable.

Now hear this

Some excellent podcasts recently that deserve your attention:

• From This American Life, the most screwed-up terrorism prosecution imaginable. It's so screwed up that it's hard to figure out exactly what happened.
• Also from This American Life, a journalist discovers that he's the target of a warrantless wiretap.
• From Spycast, the International Spy Museum's podcast, a veteran counterterrorism professional talks about the nature of the terrorist threat and the self-imposed problems the United States has in fighting it.

There's a common theme among these three podcasts. Whoever the next President will be, whatever the face of the next Congress, the question people will be asking in 2009 is, "How on earth did we waste eight years combating terrorist groups? And how do we hold people accountable for screwing around?"

Leviathan in Afghanistan

I guess Scalia wasn't kidding when he said that the Guantanamo Bay prisoners should count their lucky stars that they weren't in a different US facility, such as Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, the kind that's used to corral livestock.

The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment.

The theme du jour here at Arms and Influence is the price we pay when we play games with the Constitution. Nothing about the 9/11 attacks, or anything that has happened since, has merited a revision of over 200 years of Constitutional interpretation. For example, as I said in the earlier post about Scalia's dissent in the Bournediene decision, the justices who arguing that the executive branch can make up any  criminal procedures it damn well pleases, when handling foreign prisoners in foreign lands, won't find any support in the Constitution itself. Nor will Scalia find support, in the Constitution or Federalist papers, for his peculiar argument that, if the Congress and President agree on how to treat these prisoners, the judiciary has no right to review and possibly overturn these policies.

We need these restraints in place to protect us from ourselves. During frightening times, the laws should keep us from doing stupid things. During wartime, the Constitution still applies, and the Supreme Court still has a role to play, other than stepping aside to let the President do anything he deems necessary to protect American lives.

Often, these measures to protect Americans do exactly the opposite. You can go back to Hobbes and Locke for the Ur-arguments about how, without "civil society," people are bad judges of cases in which they have been wronged. We're not in a state of nature today--nor should we construct one, in the name of defending ourselves. We should be preventing the mistreatment of Americans as prisoners. We should be robbing our adversaries of arguments that the United States is a brutal, imperialist power. And we should be preventing another terrorist attack on the United States. These are all compatible objectives.

Swaggering know-nothings who like to cite books they have not read will often pull out Machiavelli's famous dictum that it is better to be feared than loved. However, it's important to read hos whole argument, which Machiavelli, being a good writer, summarizes in the concluding paragraph of that section of The Prince:

Returning to the question of being feared or loved, I come to the conclusion that, men loving according to their own will and fearing according to that of the prince, a wise prince should establish himself on that which is in his own control and not in that of others; he must endeavour only to avoid hatred, as is noted.

Which is why the title of the book is The Prince, not The Thug.

[Thanks to Steve Taylor for the original link to this news story.]

Our Britannic cousin

There's a good post over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money about British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's woes in passing a new counterterrorism law. Because the British have a long and painful history of grappling with terrorism from both domestic and foreign sources, they have a lower tolerance for BS.

Scaliaaaaaa, I just met a thug named Scalia...

The Bournediene decision may have restored habeas corpus, but it is not the end of the argument over how the US government should be treating prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other prisons around the world. For example, there are still the four Supreme Court justices who didn't agree with the Court's decision. It's worth understanding what's on their minds in any future national security cases before the Court.

Rather than read about the Bournediene decision, go read it. Analyses like this one are interesting, but there's no substitute for reading the Court's own ruling, including Scalia's dissenting opinion. Some of Scalia's assertions include the following:

• Habeas corpus has never extended to people who are not US citizens.
• Many former prisoners, soon after release, return to the battlefield.
• The prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were lucky to be there, instead of a worse facility in Afghanistan or wherever the US military grabbed them.
• If we give prisoners a fair trial, we risk exposing "sources and methods" during legal discovery.
• Congress and the executive branch already decided that things like indefinite detention and military courts are necessary, so who is the Supreme Court to say otherwise?

It's tempting to knock down each of these points, one by one. For example, there's no substantiation that 30 former "detainees" went straight back to killing Americans. (The Washington Post article cited, for example, identifies only 10 former prisoners.) And if recidivism were a reason to keep people in prison forever, the number of prisoners in American jails would explode even more than it has already.

Unfortunately, a point-by-point refutation can't possibly fit into one blog post, and in any case, we can focus on at least one of Scalia's most egregious and frightening Constitutional misreadings. The Bournediene case includes the latest in a series of Scalia assertions that the judicial branch has no right to check the actions of the executive during wartime.

Here's Scalia in full sneer:

But so long as there are some places to which habeas does not run—so long as the Court’s new “functional” test will not be satisfied in every case—then there will be circumstances in which “it would be possible for the political branches to govern without legal constraint.” Or, to put it more impartially, areas in which the legal determinations of the other branches will be (shudder!) supreme. In other words, judicial supremacy is not really assured by the constitutional rule that the Court creates. The gap between rationale and rule leads me to conclude that the Court’s ultimate, unexpressed goal is to preserve the power to review the confinement of enemy prisoners held by the Executive anywhere in the world.

Leaving aside the absurd claim in that last sentence, the rest of the paragraph demands serious rebuttal. I can think of no better person to refute Scalia than James Madison:

It is agreed on all sides, that the powers properly belonging to one of the departments ought not to be directly and completely administered by either of the other departments. It is equally evident, that none of them ought to possess, directly or indirectly, an overruling influence over the others, in the administration of their respective powers

That quote from the Federalist Papers establishes the principle of overlapping powers. But how does that apply to jury trials? Happily, another author of the Federalist papers, Alexander Hamilton, addresses just this point:

A power to constitute courts is a power to prescribe the mode of trial; and consequently, if nothing was said in the Constitution on the subject of juries, the legislature would be at liberty either to adopt that institution or to let it alone. This discretion, in regard to criminal causes, is abridged by the express injunction of trial by jury in all such cases; but it is, of course, left at large in relation to civil causes, there being a total silence on this head. The specification of an obligation to try all criminal causes in a particular mode, excludes indeed the obligation or necessity of employing the same mode in civil causes, but does not abridge THE POWER of the legislature to exercise that mode if it should be thought proper. The pretense, therefore, that the national legislature would not be at full liberty to submit all the civil causes of federal cognizance to the determination of juries, is a pretense destitute of all just foundation.

In other words, the other branches of the government, both state and federal, might decide to change the civil courts. They cannot, however, change the nature of the criminal courts. The argument in Bournediene, Rasul, and Hamdan is not over the right of the executive branch to implement whatever criminal courts it wants, because that right does not exist. Instead, these cases are, according to the Constitution and  supporting documents like The Federalist Papers, the conformity of these courts to basic Constitutional principles.

Yo ho yo ho, a prison hulk for me

There are many things you just assume don't exist any more. Imagine your surprise if you round a corner and bump into a triceratops, or a trubechet, or a priest of Baal.

That's pretty much the feeling that I had yesterday, reading about the US government's use of warships as temporary prisons. in other words, the US government has revived the old practice of keeping people locked up in prison hulks, a contemptible practice that we thought disappeared with the Age of Sail.

To be fair, the story so far is about temporary imprisonment, not the years that prisoners spent on prison hulks in past centuries. Still, the practice makes sense. The US government need ways to move prisoners from point A (Afghanistan) to point B (Diego Garcia, near the Bay of Bengal), preferably in ways that concealed their identities, numbers, and locations.

Many elements of the story make a perverse sense. The two ships cited, the USS Peleliu and the USS Bataan, are amphibious assault ships, built to transport large numbers of people. Moving these ships into international waters may confuse the legal strictures on the treatment of these prisoners, in the same fashion that the Department of Justice argued to the Supreme Court that Guantanamo Bay was holding people who were not prisoner of war in a place that wasn't within US jurisdiction.

Rather than saying, "imagine your surprise," perhaps I should have started this post with, "If we exercised our imaginations a little bit, we wouldn't be surprised." The course of the Bush Administration's counterterrorism policies leads naturally to a ship full of prisoners, floating in the vastness of the Pacific.

Softies

There are two levels to this news story about US interrogators at Guantanamo Bay "softening up" Uighur prisoners before handing them over to the Chinese. First, of course, there's the fact that we are handing them over to the Chinese, even though we know that the majority of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay shouldn't be there in the first place.

Second, there's the equally uncomfortable question, if the Chinese were not holding a huge amount of the US government's staggering debt, would US officials be transferring these prisoners into Chinese custody at all? If US foreign policy is at all being distorted by this debt burden, the next President and Congress need to make the reduction of this debt a high priority.

Bad trip

The excellent Washington Post series about the medical mistreatment of foreign prisoners continues. Today, we hear details about the regular injections of psychotropic drugs to keep prisoners sedated during transport.

Such episodes are among more than 250 cases The Washington Post has identified in which the government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003 -- the year the Bush administration handed the job of deportation to the Department of Homeland Security's new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE.

The Post first published a related story a couple of weeks ago. Rumors of these techniques have been around for a few years. Eventually, perhaps, we'll hear about the qualifications of the people who developed the "cocktail" and administered it.

If A then B then C

Patrick Radden Keefe's article in The New Yorker, "State Secrets," is a must-read. Even if the case of Pete Seda and the Al Haramein charity were not representative of federal prosecutions of people with "links" to terrorist groups, their story raises some important points:

• How many Americans are aware that the US government is claiming these powers? While I was at the Newseum this week, I enjoyed the displays that tested your knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The punchline, of course, was that the average American has a weak grasp of Constitutional protections and imperatives. How many Americans, therefore, know the Constitutional details that the executive branch may be violating through its counterterrorism policies, let alone the policies themselves?



• How much backlash are these policies creating? Even if you buy into the Cheneyesque "1% solution" approach to counterterrorism, anecdotes like the Al Haramein case may be raising the risk of terrorist attack beyond that 1%.

It's worth chewing on that second question a bit more. Federal prosecutors are pursuing the same maximalist strategy as other members of the executive branch. (And for many of the same reasons, which have as much to do with ass-covering as genuine fear of terrorist attack.) The natural result is the aggressive suspicion of "links":

In designating Al Haramain Oregon, Treasury Department officials cited “direct links” with Al Qaeda, but have never revealed the precise nature of those links. Stinebower, the former Treasury lawyer, said she was unaware of any internal definition of “direct links.” She wouldn’t discuss the particulars of the Al Haramain designation, but did say, “It wouldn’t have been sufficient that A picks up a phone and calls B, and B picks up a phone and talks to C, therefore A knows C. There would have to be more of a connection than that.”

There's another way of looking at these links: If federal prosecutors seize the assets and indefinitely imprisons A because B knows C, then there's a risk, however small, that A will actually look at C more sympathetically.

According to the Administration's own 1% logic, that's a risk that the nation should not bear.

"Dogs get better care"

The next President of the United States needs to earn some international goodwill fast. It's going to take a while to clean up the messes from the current Administration.

The latest example is the medical treatment--or lack thereof--of detainees in the custody of the Division of Internee Health Services (DIHS), a branch of the lobotomized giant, the Department of Homeland Security. According to today's Washington Post, prisoners jammed into a variety of prison facilities scattered across the United States are, surprise surprise, don't get adequate medical care. Some prisoners have died for want of simple, inexpensive treatment.

Secrecy can be just a veil disguising incompetence, corruption, and failure. (Immigrants from the former Soviet Union can tell you a thing or two about this topic.) In this case, the increased strictures for detainees--more limited access to lawyers, or anyone on the outside--has helped hide the lack of medical care for people we casually keep in indefinite custody. And, of course, we're not talking about people who are major threats to US national security:

But they are not terrorists. Most are working-class men and women or indigent laborers who made mistakes that seem to pose no threat to national security: a Salvadoran who bought drugs in his 20th year of poverty in Los Angeles; a U.S. legal U.S. resident from Mexico who took $50 for driving two undocumented day laborers into a border city. Or they are waiting for political asylum from danger in their own countries: a Somalian without a valid visa trying to prove she would be killed had she remained in her village; a journalist who fled Congo out of fear for his life, worked as a limousine driver and fathered six American children, but never was able to get the asylum he sought.

As with all longer news articles, you have to read far beyond the first paragraph to find the important details. For example, it's worth doing a quick calculation of how much per capita this part of DHS is spending on these prisoners' medical care, and then compare it to how much US prisons spend on their prisoners:

• For people who are not guilty of any crime other than being in the United States illegally: about $286 per prisoner. (That's the size of expenditures cited in the article, divided by 311,000 prisoners.)
  
• For prisoners in US state facilities, guilty of everything from petty theft to murder: between $1,000 and  $4,000 per prisoner, depending on the state. (Those numbers come from a 2001 Department of Justice report.)

Unfortunately for American prestige, people in other countries can do the math, too.

And, of course, there's the tragically familiar story of an under-qualified person in charge of a government agency with life-and-death responsibilities. 

The new boss is LaMont W. Flanagan, who brought with him the credential of having been fired in 2003 by the state of Maryland for bad management and spending practices supervising detention and pretrial services. An audit found that Flanagan had signed off on payments of $145,000 for employee entertainment and other ill-advised expenditures. His reputation was such that the District of Columbia would not hire him for a juvenile-justice position.

If those details don't worry you, click here for an article critical of Flanagan's handling of Baltimore prisons.

It won't be easy to fix the DIHS. The US government could save a lot of money, simply by releasing prisoners...But, of course, there are the inevitable political repercussions. The federal officials might try to bring up the level of funding and staffing for the DIHS, but where will they find the money? And where will they find a better-qualified person willing to take on the thankless job of heading the DIHS?

Mister or Madame President-To-Come, godspeed to you.

Watt the heck?

The bad news: A security consultant found it absurdly easy to hack into a power company network, gaining enough control to shut down the grid.

Ira Winkler, a penetration-testing consultant, says he and a team of other experts took a day to set up attack tools they needed, then launched their attack, which paired social engineering with corrupting browsers on a power company's desktops. By the end of a full day of the attack, they had taken over several machines, giving the team the ability to hack into the control network overseeing power production and distribution.

The good news: There probably aren't all that many people out there attempting these types of attacks. Plus, it's unlikely that foreign terrorists would have the same social engineering savvy, and other required skills, to pull off this sort of attack. (Domestic terrorists, on the other hand...)

Remember a few years ago, when we were all supposed to be quaking with fear about cyberterrorists bent on trashing our banks, military networks, and, yes, the power grids? Certainly, cyberterrorism does exist, but not at the scale, or perhaps of the type, that many initially feared. For a recent example, see the hacking of web sites supporting the Tibetan protests.

State-sponsored cyberterrorism might be a much-bigger threat than Al Qaeda hackers. For example, the Chinese army has been increasing investment in its information warfare units. It's hard to gauge the real size of the threat, or how seriously the PLA contemplates using it. However, it's a lot more plausible than the sort of Islamist cyberterrorism that, thankfully, is confined to bad thrillers like 24.

Still, about those security vulnerabilities in the power industry...Yikes.

The FBI's NSL FUBAR

To no one's surprise, the FBI abused the expanded powers for domestic surveillance granted by the PATRIOT Act.

In a review focusing on FBI investigations in 2006, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine found numerous privacy breaches by the bureau in its use of national security letters, or NSLs, which allowed the FBI to obtain personal information on tens of thousands of Americans and foreigners without approval from a judge.

Why NSLs are a BFD
If you need a refresher, NSLs gave the FBI the ability to poke around your personal information, such as finances, e-mail, and telephone calls, without the approval of a judge, grand jury, or even a prosecutor. Worse, if you are involved in this collection--for example, as an employee of a phone company turning over your cell phone records--you could not discuss the NSL with anyone. No asking your supervisor or lawyer whether this request was proper and legal, and most of all, no telling the target about the records search.

In 2007, a federal judge struck down the NSL portion of the PATRIOT Act. However, the decision dealt with the principle behind NSLs; it did not answer the question, How often did the FBI abuse this power?

The Inspector General's report expands the story beyond the less-than-credible internal FBI investigation:

According to Fine's report, the FBI continued to rely heavily on national security letters in counterterrorism, counterintelligence and cybercrime investigations, issuing nearly 50,000 of the documents in 2006 alone. Nearly 200,000 were issued from 2003 through 2006, the report said, and were used in a third of all FBI national security probes during that time.

Even more important than the scope of abuse is its cause:

The pattern persisted in 2006, Fine concluded in the report issued today, in part because the FBI had not yet halted the shoddy recordkeeping, poor oversight and other practices that contributed to the problems. He also said it was unclear whether reforms enacted by the Justice Department and FBI last year will address all the issues identified by his investigators.

So much for technology
It's worth digging into some details of that "shoddy recordkeeping." A few years ago, you probably skipped any articles about the FBI's problems implementing a "case management system." However, this story, which got no attention outside a few journals that cover computer technology in the federal government, is perhaps one of the best examples of how things went horribly wrong with counterterrorism during the Bush years.

Since most people haven't heard of a case management system before, here's a quick explanation of what it is. Many legal and government jobs are all about opening and closing cases. For example, a lawyer needs an efficient way to collect and organize the information about a particular court case. At the same time, that lawyer's boss is scrutinizing how quickly and effectively the lawyer handles the case, so the case management has an important managerial function as well. The case management system, for everyone from trial lawyers to FBI agents, is where that person spends a large, important amount of time each day. (If you want more information about what these applications do, click here for the American Bar Association's ratings for various case management systems.)

For several years, the FBI tried, and ultimately failed, to implement a case management system. The following headlines from Government Computer News give a nice summary of what happened:

• FBI plans to build new case management system from scratch (12/30/04)
• Senators fume as FBI admits Trilogy foul-ups (02/04/05)
• Cold case (03/07/05)
• FBI takes another swing at case management with Sentinel system (05/24/05)
• Report: FBI ‘scrambling’ to launch case file system (06/06/05)
• Justice, FBI to overhaul fingerprint and case management systems (08/29/05)

As the FBI's case management project crashed into a brick wall, the FBI kept on issuing NSLs at a furious rate--200,000 between 2003 and 2006, according to the Inspector General's report.

Last year, the FBI finally announced that it was ready to launch the new system, six years after the 9/11 attacks. The old case management system, based on 1970s-era technology, was already a failure, since many FBI employees avoided spending time entering data into it. (That's a familiar problem, by the way, with many systems that ask people to stop what they're doing and type up their notes.) All talk about "service-oriented architecture features that facilitate information exchange among law enforcement systems" aside, there's still an open question about getting people in the FBI to use any system, new or old.

If this were the only example of information technology (IT) projects in the FBI that went south, you might chalk it up to bad luck, peculiar difficulties with this sort of system, or the team working on that particular project. However, the FBI has fumbled many IT projects, including the useless terrorist watch list database. In 2007, another Justice Department IG report found that the FBI was losing laptops at a rate of 2.6 per month.

So, let's summarize:

• The Bush Administration pushed to expand the warrantless surveillance powers of the executive branch.
• The "point of the spear," the FBI, has depended on antiquated systems to store, secure, and analyze this information--when FBI employees were using these systems at all.
• A major overhaul of the case management system, needed to track sensitive information collected via NSLs and other mechanisms, was a long, expensive failure.
• There's no evidence that the White House put pressure on the Justice Department to fix these problems.

Should the results be a surprise?

There are certainly people to blame, such as the Chief Information Officer of the FBI, Zalmai Azmi. However, as implied in the bulleted list above, it's also up to the President and his staff to pay attention to these details. It's also important for the US public to mind these details more carefully. Millions of taxpayer dollars spent, thousands of breaches of privacy, and not one terrorist attack stopped.

World of Spycraft, sort of

Yes, terrorist cells are very creative in their use of Internet and communications technology. That doesn't mean that Al Qaeda has infiltrated Azeroth:

Be careful who you frag. Having eliminated all terrorism in the real world, the U.S. intelligence community is working to develop software that will detect violent extremists infiltrating World of Warcraft and other massive multiplayer games, according to a data-mining report from the Director of National Intelligence.

I really, really hope that this is just some cutesy disinformation campaign. Otherwise, someone in the US government needs to be slapped hard.

If terrorists are using Second Life and World of Warcraft to hook up, by all means, let them. Not only would they have to create accounts, using valid e-mail addresses, but in the case of WoW, terrorists have to give a credit card number, too. They'd have to connect to proprietary software to specialized servers, making anonymity and untraceability that plus harder. Downloading the bulky software needed to run these "massively multiplayer" games would add even more electronic breadcrumbs. Plus, game administrators regularly monitor what players are doing online.

Given how well they already use anonymous web sites, discussion forums, and instant messaging chat rooms, what would terrorist gain from Second Life or World of Warcraft that they don't have already? Here are a few ideas, which unlike the news story linked above, are not meant to be taken seriously:

• World of Warcraft guilds teach the value of cooperation. Why not form one and name it something like Jaish-e-Azeroth or The Orcish Fedayeen?
• On the other hand, disruptive, anti-social 10 year-olds can demonstrate techniques certain to disrupt any social order, even a fictional one populated by elves and dwarves.
• Taking a queue from Chinese entrepreneurs, terrorist organizations could raise money by selling magic weapons to other WoW players.
• Given the amount of flirtation, simulated sex, and billboard-sized porn in Second Life, jihadists could gird their loins against the temptations of Western culture through hours and hours of time online.

At least now, I have a better idea why this TSA employee is playing WoW.

The real counterinsurgency era

It's easy to lose track of why John F. Kennedy was a beloved president. Often caricatured for his skirt-chasing, or derided for failures like the Bay of Pigs, the current generation often overlooks his accomplishments, or takes them for granted. However, it's worth looking at Kennedy's personal crusade to make counterinsurgency a national priority to see what could have happened after the 9/11 attacks, but didn't.

Let me say, in advance, that this big topic can't really be covered adequately in a blog posting. I'm going to allude to important events during Kennedy's tenure; to really understand them, you should read about them in more depth. At the end, I'll give a few book recommendations.

The Kennedy strategy
Kennedy took office with the firm belief that the USSR and the PRC were exploiting what Khrushchev termed "wars of national liberation" for their own benefit. While scholars have been debating ever since how well the Soviets and Chinese could manipulate these movements in their favor, it was a threat that Kennedy  decided to address. Counterinsurgency and counterterrorism may have been Cold War priorities, but they were also humanitarian ones. As he said in one line of his inaugural address that resonated powerfully with the American public:

Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.

Since the political and economic defects of other societies led to the kinds of violence that threatened American interests and challenged American ideals, the changes Kennedy set into motion were not purely military, though there was an important military dimension:

• The push for revised military doctrines aimed directly at defeating guerrilla movements.
• The expansion of American special operations forces, seen as important players in counterinsurgency campaigns.
• The creation of economic and technical aid organizations, such as the Agency for International Development, the Peace Corps, and the Alliance for Progress, designed to address the societal problems that generated political violence.
• Overt and covert participation in wars against Communist forces, such as the secret war in Laos.

Failures and successes
Kennedy's broad campaign met with, at best, mixed success. The US military resisted the doctrinal reforms, and the special operations forces remained marginalized. (It wasn't until the late 1980s that they received the kind of support Kennedy had envisioned, and only because an impatient Congress forced the Pentagon to make important reforms to the SOF command structure and budget.) Some counterinsurgency campaigns, such as Laos, were failures. Military and intelligence aid often went to authoritarian governments who jailed, tortured, and murdered their political opponents (not just Communists).

However, there were successes. While the impact of foreign aid is hard to measure, it expanded good will. As a result, the United States could become an energetic participant in many internal and regional struggles without sacrificing its reputation. A generation of US military officers understood what Kennedy thought should happen, felt the resistance of the services to these changes, and experienced first-hand the disastrous results. While the US lost the Vietnam War, the Vietnam-era military and intelligence professionals were ready to do better a generation later, if needed and given the chance.

One of the Kennedy-era accomplishments accidentally helped counterterrorism, but it was an important step forward nonetheless. The Kennedy Administration's decision to turn the FBI's efforts against organized crime gave it vital experience identifying, infiltrating, and dismantling secretive, disciplined, and violent organizations. Had the FBI remained focused on suspected American Communists, it would not have the skills needed to combat terrorism domestically as it does today.

The Bush presidency
How does Bush compare against Kennedy? There is no unifying vision, with its doctrinal and organizational corollaries, that compares to Kennedy's "twilight struggle." While Kennedy may have lost temporarily some political capital because of the bungled Bay of Pigs invasion, he quickly recovered and maintained it through other actions. Unlike Bush, alliances were not strained, and the perception of the United States in the world did not steadily decline. While the Vietnam War was, ultimately, a grand failure, at the very least the United States was actually fighting the right enemy. Among the manifold failures in the Iraq war, the overarching, cataclysmic mistake was that, when the US invaded in 2003, there was no connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi Ba'athists. In the 1960s, the wiretapping of Americans, as execrable as it was, occurred at nothing like the scale that exists today, and certainly not with the intiation and encouragement of the President. Organizations that Kennedy created, such as AID and the Peace Corps, continue working effectively through today. In contrast, Bush's one organizational reform, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, is an embarrassment, botched in execution, and not even Bush's idea in the first place. 

Perhaps the biggest difference between the counterinsurgency era of the 1960s and the counterterrorism era today is the lack of a Presidential legacy. Kennedy inspired a generation, from Peace Corps workers to US Special Forces captains. Bush will leave behind no great organizational or doctrinal reforms, and not even any inspiring rhetoric to compare to the Kennedy inaugural speech. Compared to Kennedy's mixed legacy, during much more time in office, Bush has achieved much less.

Recommended reading
Here are a few books on various topics discussed in this post:

• Douglas Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era
• Andrew Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam
• Burton Hersh, Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America

Won't you be my special informant friend?

When you do something in a panic, you do it badly.

As always, take this Washington Post story with a grain of salt. It's hard to tell, from one short account, whether Mohammed Mansour Jabarah was a really good liar, or his jailers really wanted to believe in his cooperation.

The gullibility of FBI agents, or the guile of someone with serious Al Qaeda connections, may not be the most revealing part of the story. Instead, the year US officials took Jabarah into custody, 2002, is telling. That's when American military and intelligence forces in Afghanistan were vacuuming up a dubious collection of "enemy combatants," to be dumped at Guantanamo Bay for the indefinite future. Most of those jailed were no threat to the United States, not being part of Al Qaeda or the Taliban at all. However, given the climate of the times, US officials clearly thought it was better to err--massively, inhumanely err--on the side of "caution."

Meanwhile, someone willing to talk, like Jabarah, got special attention, got rock star treatment, by comparison. Unfortunately, while he was enjoying life in a minimum security facility and glad-handing his captors, he was also collecting home-made weapons and planning to kill his new-found FBI friends.

Mull that over for a moment: while innocent captives in Guantanamo Bay couldn't even speak to a lawyer, a nasty piece of work like Jebarah gets a dangerous degree of special treatment. That's how the United States kicked off the "War on Terror." Six years later, Guantanamo Bay is still in business.

The waste list, part II

[Warning: This post includes a lot of information about modern computer systems. I’ve written it for the average person, but you may not be interested in it at all. It’s important to understand why the US government should not have a useless Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB) four years after the project officially started in 2003, six years after the 9/11 attacks. If you find your eyes glazing over, just skip ahead to the next post in this series. I find this topic interesting, but you may not.]

The obstacles to building the terrorist watch list are the same facing private corporations during mergers and acquisitions. When company A acquires company B, two organizations must now merge incompatible storehouses of information. If company A uses a particular piece of software to manage customer information, and company B uses a different application, the two sets of information won’t match.

Different definitions of "important"
Nowhere is this pain felt more keenly than the customer database—or, more accurately, databases. Without a standard way to describe customers, the two companies’ customer relations management (CRM) systems will have different “data models.” There will be overlap in obvious places: for example, everyone needs the name of a customer. However, the two systems will have many key differences: one CRM application might record detailed information about marketing campaigns; the other CRM application might provide a far sketchier picture of marketing effectiveness.

To complicate matters, no company ever leaves critical applications (CRM, accounting, HR, etc.) untouched. Because these systems manage important information, they need to include the information that’s important to that company. No application ever perfectly describes that information for every possible organization, so some “customization” is necessary to add or modify information. Companies often spend millions of dollars to perform these customizations, so you can see how important they are.

Therefore, mergers and acquisitions immediately create an information management crisis. Day-to-day business operations depend on information that is now stored in incompatible systems. The business and legal costs of leaving the information in this Balkanized form are too high, but the scope of the problem—potentially, millions of records in incompatible databases—is daunting.

Hired guns to the rescue
At this point, corporations look to a combination of software and specialists for help. Many software companies exist purely to provide tools for merging different databases. Each of these software vendors usually has its own specialization, such as reconciling product catalogues, or migrating data from one popular accounting system to another.

However, these software tools are never going to provide a “pushbutton” solution. Company A won’t be able to install the software, click a button, and Voila! the problem disappears.

One obstacle is customization: it’s extremely difficult to preserve the customizations as you move information from system X to system Y, or from both systems into some separate, combined data repository. The software might be able to follow your instructions for handling the added information. However, unless you are dangerously overconfident about the software’s reliability (or, for that matter, your own instructions), you’ll have to double-check the results.

Therefore, another major obstacle to reconciling databases is “quality assurance.” All too frequently, migrated information is garbled, duplicated, or missing. It’s the way of the electronic world, so you’ll need to roll up your sleeves and start digging through a staggering amount of information about sales opportunities, customers, financial transactions, and everything else in these different databases.

To increase the chances of success, while ensuring that the project doesn’t drag on forever, companies hire “systems integrators” (SIs). Most corporations don’t have these kinds of experts permanently on staff, waiting to be called. Better to hire people who handle these projects every day, have a deep understanding of the systems in question, and know the do’s and don’ts that can be learned only through hard experience.

Not all problems are technical
Now that you have the software and specialists in place, these projects may still fail, not for any technical reason. The corporation itself may sabotage the project. Without clear project goals—what data must be preserved, what might be discarded to simplify matters, how quickly does the project need to be done, etc.—expensive systems integration projects might grind on for months or years without completion.

The people within the corporation who really understand the data models might be reluctant to add to the other work they need to perform their participation in the messy, difficult, and lengthy quality assurance process. For example, only the sales managers really know what some of the information about business opportunities really means, so the project can’t succeed without their help. Unfortunately, the sales managers are usually backing towards the door, unwilling to get so tied up in this project that they can’t do their day jobs, making money for the company.

When these problems arise, you’ll inevitably hear a favorite corporate buzzword, “ownership.” Who owns this project? Who owns the data model? Who owns the reports that need to be generated, once the information is finally available?

“Ownership” has two facets, assigning and assuming these responsibilities. A high-level decision-maker has to appoint someone to be responsible. If that person’s duties and authority aren’t clear, there’s no real “ownership” possible, and the project will fail. If you pick the wrong person to assume responsibility, the project will fail. If the importance and urgency of the project isn’t clear to everyone, and not phrased in ways that will motivate them, the project will fail.

When companies hire specialists to handle these projects, they’re often looking for people who can advise them how to handle these all-too-human failings. However, even the best advice will go unheeded if there isn’t a person with real clout—usually someone high in the organization chart—keeping a careful eye on the project.

“Hard” does not mean “impossible”
These projects might sound Herculean, but they’re hardly impossible. The work may take months or even years, but it does get done in hundreds of corporations every year. Feeling the competition snapping at their heels, companies find a way to make these projects successful.

Therefore, you might expect the US government, facing the terrorist threat, would also find a way to make the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB) and its by-product, the terrorist watch list, successful. A TSDB with 755,000 entries is, by definition, a failure, since its purpose is to identify and track the members of small but dangerous terrorist cells. So what happened?

Next: Some possible reasons for the TSDB’s failure.

The waste list, part I

The Department of Homeland Security’s terrorist watch list is practically useless. Now bulging at 755,000 names, 20,000 new records names are added to the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB) each month. With the 1,000,000 mark close at hand, the watch list is now unreliable.

The signal-to-noise ratio is enormous, since terrorist organizations are very small. Al Qaeda in 2001 had only 200 members. Larger terrorist organizations, such as Hezbollah, may only have a few thousand “fighters,” many of whom are soldiers and militia, not terrorists. Just so that we don’t forget the threat of domestic terrorism, only a handful of people were responsible for the horrific Oklahoma City bombing, the most lethal act of terrorism in the United States before the 9/11 attacks. Tragically, for every new Mohammed Atta on the list, there are hundreds of people who should not be included at all, and only confuse efforts to deal with any real terrorist threats.

The problems with the list are infuriating on many levels, not least of which is that they are preventable. The challenges of building the watch list are the same “information management” problems that private corporations face every day. Through a combination  of widely-available software, technical veterans who have experience solving the problems, and a generous amount of leadership and urgency, corporations clean up their databases of “mission critical” information far more quickly and successfully. Since the terrorist watch list is at least as important as the customer data for AT&T and Cingular, the American public should be demanding an answer to the question, “What the hell happened?”

Making a list
The terrorist watch list is, to use a tired but accurate phrase, “the first line of defense” in counterterrorism. The Atta cell succeeded because its opponent, the US government, failed to put together a complete picture of its activities (or, in some cases, even its existence). Those who did have key pieces of information either did not recognize their significance, or lacked the ability to get the right people to act on it.

To avoid future terrorist attacks, the watch list is the critical product of knowing who are terrorist leaders and operatives, where they are, and what they are doing. To avoid another 9/11, we don’t necessarily need to broaden the federal government’s license to eavesdrop (which can create a different form of information overload), or invade any more countries. We do need key decision-makers to recognize that this person who learned how to fly a plane, but not how to land, has a real connection to that person, who belongs to an organization that tried to crash an airliner into the Eiffel Tower.

Checking it twice
The watch list is, obviously, stuffed with “false positives,” people who should not have been identified as terrorists. They’re on the list for a variety of reasons: they have names similar to real terrorists; they have some glancing social, professional, or familial connection to a suspected terrorist; someone falsely accused them of being a member of a terrorist organization, or “linked” to it in some vague fashion. These errors feed off each other: people connected to a person falsely accused of being a terrorist fall under the same cloud of suspicion.

Tragically, the list has also omitted people who should have been on it. During the tedious review of just 2,686 records, workers from the FBI’s new Terrorist Screening Center found eight people who should have been flagged as high risk. (They also found 2,118 who should never have been on the list in the first place.) Twenty terrorists were missing from a key report generated for the decision-makers who need to act immediately on any possible terrorist threat. The risk of “omission by confusion” is high, since the decision-makers who receive the list are naturally skeptical of it.

Who’s naughty or nice?
So why is the list a mess? One of the main problems is the novelty of having a single list.
The 9/11 attacks demonstrated, in the worst possible way, that the era of data Balkanization, in which every government agency maintained separate information needed to combat terrorism, had to come to an end. The FAA, FBI, NSA, and other agencies might still have their separate databases, which were needed for more than just identifying and tracking suspected terrorists. At a minimum, these agencies needed to contribute their pieces of the counterterrorism puzzle to someone who would assemble it, and make sure that the right people were looking at it.

That responsibility fell to the Justice Department. In 2003, George W. Bush directed Attorney General to “establish an organization to consolidate the Government's approach to terrorism screening and provide for the appropriate and lawful use of Terrorist Information in screening processes.” Confusingly, the Department of Homeland Security also had a role, to “develop guidelines to govern the use of such information to support State, local, territorial, and tribal screening processes, and private sector screening processes that have a substantial bearing on homeland security.”

Something obviously went very, very wrong with this arrangement. Six years after the 9/11 attacks, the US government has not built a single, reliable database of suspected terrorists. While we spend billions of dollars each month in Iraq, the real “first line of defense” has collapsed.

NEXT: How private corporations handle information management challenges faster and better than the US government.

As if Guantanamo weren't shameful enough

Here's a softball for the press and the Democrats:

Politically motivated officials at the Pentagon have pushed for convictions of high-profile detainees ahead of the 2008 elections, the former lead prosecutor for terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay said last night, adding that the pressure played a part in his decision to resign earlier this month.

Senior defense officials discussed in a September 2006 meeting the "strategic political value" of putting some prominent detainees on trial, said Air Force Col. Morris Davis. He said that he felt pressure to pursue cases that were deemed "sexy" over those that prosecutors believed were the most solid or were ready to go.

Hey, batter batter, swing, batter batter...

Hooked on a feeling

Let's make the imaginative leap into alternate history, where a different person was in the Oval Office on September 11, 2001. Later, a different person becomes the top official in the newly-created Department of Homeland Security--or maybe, it's still Michael Chertoff, under different management.

However you want to fill in the specifics of this alternate history, it'd be hard to imagine the counterfactual Secretary of Homeland Security saying something more antithetical to his job than, "We don't have specific intelligence about an attack, that is, a particular attack against the homeland, that is imminent or scheduled for the summer," but "we are entering a period this summer of increased risk," based on little more than Chertoff's own "gut feeling."

Chertoff made these statements a few weeks ago, but the story should not be dead. After all, Chertoff is still DHS Secretary. Here's the "mission statement" for the DHS, from the Homeland Security Act of 2002:

SEC. 101. EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT; MISSION.

      (a) There is established a Department of Homeland Security, as an
executive department of the United States within the meaning of title 5,
United States Code.

      (b)(1) The primary mission of the Department is to-

                 (A) prevent terrorist attacks within the United States;

                 (B) reduce the vulnerability of the United States to
           terrorism; and

                 (C) minimize the damage, and assist in the recovery, from
           terrorist attacks that do occur within the United States.

            (2) In carrying out the mission described in paragraph (1), and
      as further described in this Act, the Department's primary
      responsibilities shall include-

                 (A) information analysis and infrastructure protection;

                 (B) chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and
           related countermeasures;

                 (C) border and transportation security;

                 (D) emergency preparedness and response; and

                 (E) coordination (including the provision of training and
           equipment) with other executive agencies, with State and local
           government personnel, agencies, and authorities, with the
           private sector, and with other entities.

            (3) The Department shall also be responsible for carrying out
      other functions of entities transferred to the Department as provided
      by law.

In effect, that's Chertoff's job description. As anyone with even minimal experience with counterterrorism knows, tasks like "information analysis" and "coordination with other executive agencies" require a sober appraisal of the risks of terrorist attack. Too many false alerts, and our collective guard drops. Too little response, when merited, and we might end up with another 9/11-scale attack.

Just as importantly, counterterrorism professionals don't want to abet the work of terrorists: generating panic and despair. "Preventing terrorism" has two faces: (1) stopping attacks; and (2) curbing the terror that both actual and threatened attacks create. Terror, not casualties, is the currency that terrorist groups convert into their desired political outcomes.

Therefore, by definition, the person responsible for the ROY G. BIV risk barometer needs to be very, very careful about what he says. Warnings need to be based on something other than "chatter," "past terrorist patterns," or--God help us--"gut feelings."

Chertoff's sloppy analysis isn't just a stupid statement that the electorate should just let slide. The whole chain of national security logic since 9/11--terrorism is now a central concern; we must do all we can to prevent the terrorists from winning; we can't afford even marginal risks that terrorists might get what they want--shatters with one blow, if the person assessing the risks is relying on his large intestine as his Muse.

I'm suddenly more sympathetic with the characters in 1950s B-movies who, when confronted with alien invaders, giant ants, or teenage werewolves, inevitably said something like, "We have to keep the lid on this crisis. The consequences of a mass panic are inconceivable!" Maybe it's time for another revival of nostalgia for the Fifties, when Americans sought in the movies and TV a temporary escape from justified anxieties about hundreds of nuclear weapons pointed at them.

The authority to whack

Naturally, the details in Seymour Hersh's latest piece for The New Yorker that have caught people's attention are (1) the further details about the abuse and torture of prisoners, and (2) the shoddy treatment of Major General Antonio Taguba. However, we knew that there were more horror stories from Abu Ghraib to come, and other articles (including some by Hersh) have already described how badly Taguba's superiors treated him for doing his job professionally and honorably.

Therefore, the more newsworthy part of Hersh's article appears in the middle:

The former senior intelligence official said that when the images of Abu Ghraib were published, there were some in the Pentagon and the White House who “didn’t think the photographs were that bad”—in that they put the focus on enlisted soldiers, rather than on secret task-force operations. Referring to the task-force members, he said, “Guys on the inside ask me, ‘What’s the difference between shooting a guy on the street, or in his bed, or in a prison?’ ” A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the “basic strategy was ‘prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.’ ”

A recently retired C.I.A. officer, who served more than fifteen years in the clandestine service, told me that the task-force teams “had full authority to whack—to go in and conduct ‘executive action,’ ” the phrase for political assassination. “It was surrealistic what these guys were doing,” the retired operative added. “They were running around the world without clearing their operations with the ambassador or the chief of station.”

J.S.O.C.’s special status undermined military discipline. Richard Armitage, the former Deputy Secretary of State, told me that, on his visits to Iraq, he increasingly found that “the commanders would say one thing and the guys in the field would say, ‘I don’t care what he says. I’m going to do what I want.’ We’ve sacrificed the chain of command to the notion of Special Operations and GWOT”—the global war on terrorism. “You’re painting on a canvas so big that it’s hard to comprehend,” Armitage said.

Just for a moment, let's leave aside the constitutional, legal, and moral problems with this approach to counterterrorism. From a purely practical level, this means that the people responsible for theater-level strategy--the chief US diplomat in Iraq, the CinC of CENTCOM, and the senior US Army and Marine officers in Iraq--were not part of the decision to assassinate Iraqi targets. The "authority to whack" may have not helped the war effort in Iraq. To the extent that assassinations lead to retributions, and that the exact source of an assassination isn't always known, these operations might have deepened Iraq's political crisis.

Depending on the details that aren't provided in Hersh's article, the situation might be even worse--again, from a purely practical perspective.  Many US officials have confused counterterrorism, primarily directed against Al Qaeda since 2001, with counterinsurgency in Iraq. If "direct action" operations, planned to defeat Al Qaeda, were being conducted against Iraqi insurgent groups,
the "authority to whack" was directed against entirely the wrong people.

Now, let's bring back the constitutional, legal, and moral problems, and you can see exactly how bad this program really is.

European report on secret prisons

Here's a link to the Council of Europe's report on secret US detention facilities in Poland and Romania. It's worth clicking around for interesting tidbits, like this summary of the history of disclosures about renditioning from the governments of Canada, Romania, and other countries.