Another vital counterterrorism tool discarded

IN THE NEWS
Whenever Seymour Hersh publishes a new article on counterterrorism or Iraq, it's a must-read. This article is no exception.

A lot of blogs and op-ed pieces are going to focus on the chain of command and "who knew what when" issues, so I don't need to pile on. I just want to add some background that, if you haven't been following defense and intelligence matters for a while, you might miss.

The core of today's article is how the special access program (SAP), a tool crafted during the Cold War. SAPs have been used only when the deepest secrecy and "plausible deniability" were required. As you might expect, the US government didn't use SAPs very often--both because of the riskiness of the operations they sanctioned, and the possibilities for abuse.

The important details I'll add on top of what Hersh has to say about SAPs is how they played a part in submarine espionage. In these SAP-sanctioned operations, American submariners were ordered to sneak into Murmansk harbor, the chief bastion of the Soviet navy. Sneaking under the hulls of some of the most heavily-armed warships in the world, these specially-fitted subs would maneuver over an underwater communications cable. Divers would then swim out from the sub, attach a bulky tapping device to the cable, and then return to the ship. The submarine would then stealthily leave the harbor, with the crew praying that the formidable anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capabilities of the Soviet navy would continue to miss them until they were home free in the open ocean.

Obviously, one misstep might have unthinkable consequences. The submarine crews were therefore under orders to scuttle the vessel--killing themselves in the process--if they were detected.

If Hersh's account of what happened in Iraq is true, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, and Major General Geoffrey Miller are jointly responsible for squandering a dangerous but necessary tool in America's secret wars. They cavalierly misused SAPs so that untrained reservists would have greater license to interrogate petty criminals, the relatives of suspected insurgents, and luckless people just picked up by the military.

I'm not kidding. I wish I were. I commend you to read the article and draw your own conclusions.

As I've argued in other posts--such as this one about declarations of war, and this one about the notion that we're fighting "a war like no other"--we have the Constitution, international conventions, US laws, and a basic moral compass for good reasons. All of these are supposed to help us in the times of greatest urgency; we're not supposed to be chucking them aside because they momentarily seem inconvenient. I'm tired of having to make this same point over and over again, but apparently, far too many people in the US government and electorate need to keep hearing it, if it ever reaches them.

Comments

[ff14rmt]

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[ff14rmt]

rmtなどがそうだ。rmt リネージュ2これらMMORPGといわれるオンラインゲームは、リネージュ2 rmt1つのサーバーに数千人のプレイヤーが同時にログインしゲームを行なっている。ここでいうサーバーとは、物理的なサーバーではない。MMORPGでは、rmt とはサーバーやワールドと呼ばれる単位で複数の同じ世界が存在する。アトランティカ RMT3万人が同時に1つのサーバへアクセスすると処理が重くなってしまうrmt aion