Also, monkeys might fly out of my butt

Bruce Schneier is not impressed with recent warnings about attacks on the NYC transit system:

I have no specific details, but I want to warn everybody today that fiery rain might fall from the sky. Terrorists may have discussed this sort of tactic, and while there is no evidence yet that it's in the process of being carried out, I want to be extra-cautious this holiday season. Ho ho ho.

Related: "Feds warn of terror plotting against NYC subways" (Associated Press, 26 Nov 2008)

Wikipedia for breaking news

The footnotes and references are a treasure trove.

November 20o8 Mumbai attack (Wikipedia)

Hat tip: Sepia Mutiny, where I also found this Google Map showing all of the different attack locations.

India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan

Robert Kaplan, writing in The Atlantic:

The India-Pakistan rivalry is often misconstrued by Americans. For average Indians and Pakistanis, the hatred is far milder than that between Arabs and Jews. Pakistanis speak openly of their high regard for India's democracy and hope that they can emulate it. And especially now, with regular Pakistani troops moved away from the Indian frontier to deal with the terrorist-infested Afghanistan border, there is the false perception that the India-Pakistan rivalry belongs to the past. It doesn't—not because of the attitudes of the general public in each country, but because of the subculture of those manning the intelligence services in New Delhi and Islamabad.

In the mind of the ISI, India uses its new consulates in Afghanistan to back rebels in Pakistan's southwestern province of Baluchistan, whose capital, Quetta, is only a few hours' drive from Kandahar. When India talks of building dams in Kunar, the ISI thinks that India wants to help Afghanistan steal Pakistan's water. Karzai's open alliance with India is nearly a casus belli for the ISI. So elements of the ISI have responded in kind; they likely helped in the recent assassination attempt against the Afghan president.

In the midst of all this, both Bush and Barack Obama talk simplistically about sending more American troops to Afghanistan. The India-Pakistan rivalry is just one of several political problems in the region that negate the benefit of more troops. As in the past in both Afghanistan and Iraq, we are in danger of conceiving of war in narrow military terms alone, and thus getting the politics wrong.

Behind The Indian Embassy Bombing (The Atlantic, Dispatches, 1 August 2008)

(via Sepia Mutiny)

Everything's relative

The US “war on terror” has restricted the freedom of individual Americans – but to a lesser degree than in previous conflicts, a study said on Monday.

Freedom House, a US group best known for its work overseas, expresses “grave concern” at measures such as extraordinary rendition, “mistreatment of those in US custody” and warrantless wiretaps.

But it says: “The war on terrorism has resulted in ­significantly fewer violations of individual freedom than previous conflicts.”

The other incidents it cites include the mass detention of Japanese-Americans during the second world war, and Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency investigations of thousands of US ­citizens opposed to the Vietnam war.

Report warns of threats to freedom in US (Financial Times, 5 May 2008)

Related:

• Freedom House
  
• "Today's American: How Free?" at Freedom House
  

Tribal logic

Via Chap, a review of a book that looks well worth reading:

Arab tribesmen are preoccupied with maintaining deterrence and prepared to use force preemptively, if necessary--rather like über neocons. The ironic but very real parallel is a function of the de facto stateless anarchy in which Arab Bedouin live--and the de facto global anarchy that hawkish conservatives rightly believe to be the underlying reality of the international system. Saddam Hussein's interest in being taken to possess WMDs, whether or not he actually had them, makes sense in light of the link between deterrence and reputation. The emboldening effects of America's pre-9/11 retreats in Somalia, Lebanon, and elsewhere show the reverse of the medal. Although this is a familiar litany, I'd argue that the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the rage against the Muhammad cartoons, the killing of Theo van Gogh, and a host of related acts of intimidation ought to be placed under the heading of pro-active deterrence as well.

The swift and seemingly disproportionate resort to retaliatory force against apparently trivial offenses is an effective technique for suppressing future challenges. Most of the feuds Salzman describes, however weighty and enduring, break out over seemingly petty and inconsequential matters, like the mistaken appropriation of some palm trunks. Rifle shots, intentionally off the mark, are used to intimidate, as are calculated threats of murder. The careful use of targeted force and credible threats against Western critics of Islamism shows genuine mastery of the technique of deterrent intimidation. Here as elsewhere, an overtly religious action is actually shaped by a hidden tribal template.

Knowingly or unknowingly, American liberals and conservatives highlight sections of the tribal template, though for their own preferred uses. The implicit dovish take on tribalism notes that our own use of force actually serves to unite the foe. By hitting back at terrorist-harboring states, doves remind us, we create the impression of an infidel war against Muslims, thus figuratively recruiting every Muslim lineage into bin Laden's civilizational war party. This danger is real, yet the doves omit the rest. Failure to strike back creates an impression of weakness that invites further attacks.

"I and My Brother Against My Cousin" - Stanley Kurtz reviews Philip Carl Salzman's Culture and Conflict in the Middle East in The Weekly Standard

Review: "Leaderless Jihad"

In the Washington Post, David Ignatius reviews Marc Sageman's latest book, Leaderless Jihad.

Politicians who talk about the terrorism threat -- and it's already clear that this will be a polarizing issue in the 2008 campaign -- should be required to read a new book by a former CIA officer named Marc Sageman. It stands what you think you know about terrorism on its head and helps you see the topic in a different light.

[...]

...The first wave of al-Qaeda leaders, who joined Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, is down to a few dozen people on the run in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. The second wave of terrorists, who trained in al-Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan during the 1990s, has also been devastated, with about 100 hiding out on the Pakistani frontier. These people are genuinely dangerous, says Sageman, and they must be captured or killed. But they do not pose an existential threat to America, much less a "clash of civilizations."

It's the third wave of terrorism that is growing, but what is it? By Sageman's account, it's a leaderless hodgepodge of thousands of what he calls "terrorist wannabes." Unlike the first two waves, whose members were well educated and intensely religious, the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action. Like young people across time and religious boundaries, they are bored and looking for thrills.

David Ignatius - The Fading Jihadists (Washington Post, 28 Feb 2008)

Related:

Virtues requiring caveats are not virtues

TWENTY-SEVEN years ago, in the final days of the Iran hostage crisis, the C.I.A.’s Tehran station chief, Tom Ahern, faced his principal interrogator for the last time. The interrogator said the abuse Mr. Ahern had suffered was inconsistent with his own personal values and with the values of Islam and, as if to wipe the slate clean, he offered Mr. Ahern a chance to abuse him just as he had abused the hostages. Mr. Ahern looked the interrogator in the eyes and said, “We don’t do stuff like that.”

Today, Tom Ahern might have to say: “We don’t do stuff like that very often.” Or, “We generally don’t do stuff like that.” That is a shame. Virtues requiring caveats are not virtues. Saying a man is honest is a compliment. Saying a man is “generally” honest or honest “quite often” means he lies. The mistreatment of detainees, like honesty, is all or nothing: We either do stuff like that or we do not. It is in our national interest to restore our reputation for the latter.

Unforgivable Behavior, Inadmissible Evidence (17 February 2008, New York Times, Guest Op-Ed, Morris Davis. The author, an Air Force colonel, was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from 2005 to 2007.)

Bruce Schneier: The War on the Unexpected

We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.

This isn't the way counterterrorism is supposed to work, but it's happening everywhere. It's a result of our relentless campaign to convince ordinary citizens that they're the front line of terrorism defense. "If you see something, say something" is how the ads read in the New York City subways. "If you suspect something, report it" urges another ad campaign in Manchester, UK. The Michigan State Police have a seven-minute video. Administration officials from then-attorney general John Ashcroft to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff to President Bush have asked us all to report any suspicious activity.

The problem is that ordinary citizens don't know what a real terrorist threat looks like. They can't tell the difference between a bomb and a tape dispenser, electronic name badge, CD player, bat detector, or a trash sculpture; or the difference between terrorist plotters and imams, musicians, or architects. All they know is that something makes them uneasy, usually based on fear, media hype, or just something being different.

Even worse: after someone reports a "terrorist threat," the whole system is biased towards escalation and CYA instead of a more realistic threat assessment.

Schneier on Security: The War on the Unexpected (1 November 2007)

---

Updated and bumped because Doc has responded (extensively) at They Rode On. Short version: "Schneier can kiss my sweet ass."

More detailed version here: Flag on the play: Schneier gets it all wrong (They Rode On)

The Department of Everything Else

As Ken Burns' fascinating documentary on World War II recently reminded us, nothing teaches like early failures in a long war. So as this global struggle against radical extremism unfolds, it's important to recognize progress where it occurs.

In my 2004 book, "The Pentagon's New Map," I argued that our military would inevitably split into a Leviathan-like combat force and a "system administrator" force optimized for everything else: postwar stabilization and reconstruction, nation-building, crisis response, and counter-insurgency.

The sysadmin's capabilities emerge today in response to America's lengthy postwar stints in Afghanistan and Iraq. A good example would be the new Army-Marine counter-insurgency manual that argues for less "kinetics" ( i.e., blowing stuff up) and more effort in economic development and political capacity building. A long slog? You bet. But that's how our military finally overcomes the Vietnam syndrome.

Thomas P.M. Barnett: How our military evolves in this long war

(To learn about the Department of Everything Else, keep reading.)

Al-Qaeda Intranet goes dark after leak

For years, the private terror-hunters at the SITE Institute have been infiltrating jihadist chat rooms, and spying on the extremists congregating online. Now, the [group's] digital cover has been blown -- and Al-Qaeda online communications channels have gone dark -- thanks to a ham-handed move by the Bush administration, it seems. "Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," SITE's Rita Katz told the Washington Post.

[...]

As we've noted before, today's jihadists don't just use the Internet, occasionally. "They don't exist without the Web," says Naval Postgraduate School professor John Arquilla. Everything from recruiting to training to propaganda is handled online. According to the New York Sun, the video disclosure effectively shut down the window into those activities.

Al-Qaeda "Intranet" Goes Dark After Leak (Updated) - Danger Room, Wired Blog Network

The bending of definitions and the turning of blind eyes

In every war, information is a weapon. In a “war against terrorism”, where the adversary wears no uniform and hides among the civilian population, information can matter even more. But does that mean that torture can sometimes be justified to extract information?

The answer in international law is categorical: no. As laid down in treaties such as the Geneva Conventions, the UN Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the ban on torture or any cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is absolute, even in times of war. Along with genocide, torture is the only crime that every state must punish, no matter who commits it or where. Defenders of this blanket prohibition offer arguments that range from the moral (torture degrades and corrupts the society that allows it) to the practical (people will say anything under torture so the information they provide is unreliable anyway).

The September 11th attacks have not driven any rich democracy to reverse itself and make torture legal. But they have encouraged the bending of definitions and the turning of blind eyes. There is a greater readiness among governments that would never practise torture themselves to use information which less squeamish states have obtained—through torture.

Terrorism and civil liberty: Is torture ever justified? (The Economist, 20 September 2007)

What are our objectives? What are theirs?

We have created in Iraq the exact type of scenario Bin Laden was hoping (but failed) to lure us into in Afghanistan—an unwinnable war where we're isolated from the world, our troops are walking targets for guerilla terrorists, and our only options are bad (pull out and hope for minimal carnage) and worse (stay in, where our troops will continue to die, and where there's no prospect for stability in the near future).

A loosely-connected, (relatively) poorly funded, backward-thinking organization like Al-Qaeda could never inflict significant harm on the United States, at least not in a straightforward war. Their best hope is to scare us into rash, ill-considered actions like overextending our military, alienating our allies, and doing away with the open society and civil liberties that define who we are.

Six years have passed since Sept. 11. That's enough time and distance for us to take a couple of steps back, look at that horrible day with some perspective, and reevaluate if the course we've charted is the correct one. We should bear in mind that Al-Qaeda could never defeat us on its own. It can only frighten and trap us into defeating ourselves.

Six Years Later: Bin Laden Still Free, U.S. Mired in Iraq (Radley Balko, September 12, 2o07, FoxNews.com)

Wonder how long Radley's going to be able to keep that commentary gig at Fox. (I've been reading him in Reason and at The Agitator for quite some time now.)

Middle management ranks senior management... in the U.S. Army

Followup to an earlier post:

On Aug. 1, Gen. Richard Cody, the United States Army’s vice chief of staff, flew to the sprawling base at Fort Knox, Ky., to talk with the officers enrolled in the Captains Career Course. These are the Army’s elite junior officers. Of the 127 captains taking the five-week course, 119 had served one or two tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, mainly as lieutenants. Nearly all would soon be going back as company commanders. A captain named Matt Wignall, who recently spent 16 months in Iraq with a Stryker brigade combat team, asked Cody, the Army’s second-highest-ranking general, what he thought of a recent article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling titled “A Failure in Generalship.” The article, a scathing indictment that circulated far and wide, including in Iraq, accused the Army’s generals of lacking “professional character,” “creative intelligence” and “moral courage.”

[...]

General Cody looked around the auditorium, packed with men and women in uniform — most of them in their mid-20s, three decades his junior but far more war-hardened than he or his peers were at the same age — and turned Captain Wignall’s question around. “You all have just come from combat, you’re young captains,” he said, addressing the entire room. “What’s your opinion of the general officers corps?”

Over the next 90 minutes, five captains stood up, recited their names and their units and raised several of Yingling’s criticisms. One asked why the top generals failed to give political leaders full and frank advice on how many troops would be needed in Iraq. One asked whether any generals “should be held accountable” for the war’s failures. One asked if the Army should change the way it selected generals. Another said that general officers were so far removed from the fighting, they wound up “sheltered from the truth” and “don’t know what’s going on.”

Challenging The Generals (Fred Kaplan, New York Times Magazine, 26 August 2007)

"The legacy of a director who never said no to anybody"

On September 17, 2001, President Bush signed a secret Presidential finding authorizing the C.I.A. to create paramilitary teams to hunt, capture, detain, or kill designated terrorists almost anywhere in the world. Yet the C.I.A. had virtually no trained interrogators...

[...]

The C.I.A. knew even less about running prisons than it did about hostile interrogations. Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of European operations at the C.I.A., and the author of a recent book, “On the Brink: How the White House Compromised U.S. Intelligence,” said, “The agency had no experience in detention. Never. But they insisted on arresting and detaining people in this program. It was a mistake, in my opinion. You can’t mix intelligence and police work. But the White House was really pushing. They wanted someone to do it. So the C.I.A. said, ‘We’ll try.’ George Tenet came out of politics, not intelligence. His whole modus operandi was to please the principal. We got stuck with all sorts of things. This is really the legacy of a director who never said no to anybody.”

Many officials inside the C.I.A. had misgivings. “A lot of us knew this would be a can of worms,” the former officer said. “We warned them, It’s going to become an atrocious mess.” The problem from the start, he said, was that no one had thought through what he called “the disposal plan.” He continued, “What are you going to do with these people? The utility of someone like [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] is, at most, six months to a year. You exhaust them. Then what? It would have been better if we had executed them.”

"The Black Sites," The New Yorker, August 13 2007

After the battle for Gaza

Hamas now definitively controls the Gaza Strip.

''Today everybody is with Hamas because Hamas won the battle. If Fatah had won the battle they'd be with Fatah. We are a hungry people, we are with whoever gives us a bag of flour and a food coupon,'' said Yousef, 30. ''Me, I'm with God and a bag of flour.''

Streets Are Calm Day After Hamas Takes Hold (AP via New York Times, June 15, 2007)

War Fears Turn Digital After Data Siege in Estonia

When Estonian authorities began removing a bronze statue of a World War II-era Soviet soldier from a park in this bustling Baltic seaport last month, they expected violent street protests by Estonians of Russian descent.

They also knew from experience that “if there are fights on the street, there are going to be fights on the Internet,” said Hillar Aarelaid, the director of Estonia’s Computer Emergency Response Team. After all, for people here the Internet is almost as vital as running water; it is used routinely to vote, file their taxes, and, with their cellphones, to shop or pay for parking.

What followed was what some here describe as the first war in cyberspace, a monthlong campaign that has forced Estonian authorities to defend their pint-size Baltic nation from a data flood that they say was set off by orders from Russia or ethnic Russian sources in retaliation for the removal of the statue.

[...]

“It turned out to be a national security situation,” Estonia’s defense minister, Jaak Aaviksoo, said in an interview. “It can effectively be compared to when your ports are shut to the sea.”

War Fears Turn Digital After Data Siege in Estonia - New York Times

A deterrent against nuclear terrorism?

Clearly, this has been discussed behind closed doors (or at least I hope so) for many years now, but the U.S. is finally going public with some highly relevant musings:

Every week, a group of experts from agencies around the government — including the C.I.A., the Pentagon, the F.B.I. and the Energy Department — meet to assess Washington’s progress toward solving a grim problem: if a terrorist set off a nuclear bomb in an American city, could the United States determine who detonated it and who provided the nuclear material?

A guy I know poses this problem a little more bluntly and pungently: "Say we wake up one morning and Houston's gone. Okay, what's our next move?"

U.S. Debates Deterrence For Nuclear Terrorism (New York Times, May 8, 2007)

Strange bedfellows

Here are a couple of sites set up to generate grassroots opposition to the Real ID Act, which essentially requires states to turn their drivers' licenses into de facto national ID cards.

This one is from the ACLU, which sees the national ID card as a gross invasion of privacy that won't do anything significant to deter terrorism:

The Real ID Act of 2005 would turn our state driver’s licenses into a genuine national identity card and impose numerous new burdens on taxpayers, citizens, immigrants, and state governments – while doing nothing to protect against terrorism. As a result, it is stirring intense opposition from many groups across the political spectrum. This Web site provides information about opposing Real ID.

And this one is from Endtime Ministries, which views the national ID card as the Mark of the Beast:

There is a prophecy in the Bible that foretells a time when every person will be required to have a mark or a number, without which he or she will not be able to participate in the economy. The prophecy is 2,000 years old, but it has been impossible for it to come to pass until now. With the invention of the computer and the Internet, this prophecy of buying and selling, using a number, can now be implemented at any time. Has the time for the fulfillment of this prophecy arrived?

And the libertarians shall lay down with the loons.

• RealNightmare.org (ACLU)
• NoNationalID.com (Endtime Ministries)

P.S. Ah, the benefits of a good old-fashioned parochial school education: Here are the hair-raising relevant bits from the Book of Revelation, chapter 13, King James translation.

11 And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon.

12 And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.

13 And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men,

14 And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.

15 And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

"And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads..."

I dunno, dude. Even allowing for the archaic English, that sounds more like implantable RFID chips to me.

A fool, advising liars

WFB on George Tenet:

The testimony reveals the CIA run by a man who cannot think straight, advising the national security adviser, who went on to make false allegations, and the vice president, who made more false allegations, and the president, who took ill-considered action.

Torture on 60 Minutes, William F. Buckley, May 2, 2007

WFB on GOP

The political problem of the Bush administration is grave, possibly beyond the point of rescue. The opinion polls are savagely decisive on the Iraq question. About 60 percent of Americans wish the war ended — wish at least a timetable for orderly withdrawal. What is going on in Congress is in the nature of accompaniment. The vote in Congress is simply another salient in the war against war in Iraq. Republican forces, with a couple of exceptions, held fast against the Democrats’ attempt to force Bush out of Iraq even if it required fiddling with the Constitution. President Bush will of course veto the bill, but its impact is critically important in the consolidation of public opinion. It can now accurately be said that the legislature, which writes the people’s laws, opposes the war.

The Waning of the GOP (William F. Buckley, Jr. writing in National Review, April 28, 2007)