Tag: terrorism

Physician, Heal Thyself

By
Jim Harper

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Commerce Department will soon come forth with a ”stepped-up approach to policing Internet privacy that calls for new laws and the creation of a new position to oversee the effort.”

Meanwhile, with nearly 22 months in office, President Obama has still not named a single candidate to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that Congress established to review the government’s actions in response to terrorism. Had he appointed a board, it would have issued three public reports by now, and we would be awaiting a fourth.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Law and Civil Liberties, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Cutting the Fuse

By
Christopher A. Preble

I’m thrilled to be participating in a day-long conference on Capitol Hill next week to coincide with the release of a new book from the University of Chicago, Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It. Co-authored by Robert Pape and James Feldman, the book builds on Pape’s earlier pioneering work, including here and here, into the causes of terrorism. Drawing on data compiled by the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism (CPOST), the book includes chapters on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, Chechnya and Sri Lanka.

The authors’ concluding observations offer some hope for those of us who have been calling for a new narrative pertaining to counterterrorism, one that begins with the presumption that fear is the terrorists’ true weapon. A strong, resilient society retains the ability to kill or capture those who would harm innocents to make a political point, as the United States has done since 9/11. But a country of more than 300 million people shouldn’t cower before a few hundred individuals with delusions of world domination, but who are too frightened and weak to show their faces for years.

I think that the book’s conclusions might be a bit too optimistic as far as the politics of counterterrorism goes. There are still ample incentives for people to hype the threat of terrorism, and not enough competing pressures to dial back the most extreme claims of impending doom. But perhaps we are approaching a “period of understanding” as Pape and Feldman claim?

I certainly hope so.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

Woodward, Resilience, and Virtues of Partisan Foreign Policy

By
Benjamin H. Friedman

On the National Interest’s Skeptics blog, I have a new post about my lack of outrage over the revelations in Bob Woodward’s new book about Obama and Afghanistan.

Unlike John Bolton and Heritage, I don’t think that the President’s comment that we can withstand another terrorist attack like 9-11 is offensive. After all, we can, and saying so doesn’t mean you want to try it.

As I put it there:

What’s truly outrageous is the notion that the only valid response to terrorism is cowering fear at home and endless warfare abroad. Somehow, for much the right, crediting our enemies with the ability to wreck our society is required, and it is verboten to say that we are something other than a pathetic, brittle nation that cannot manage adversity.

I also fail to get upset about the President’s worry that expanding the war in Afghanistan would alienate his base. Politics not only doesn’t stop at the water’s edge; it shouldn’t. I’m not sure exactly when popular checks on the war-making power went out of style, but I think we could use more of that in Afghanistan, not less. If pandering to the base can get us out of there one of these years, pander away.

The solution to bad policies is better politics, not no politics, to paraphase.

*I also recommend Paul Pillar’s post on the same subject. He says that the real news here is the Pentagon’s refusal to offer the President a policy alternative between population centric counter-insurgency and exit.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, General

Ted Koppel on Terrorizing Ourselves

By
Christopher A. Preble

Today’s Washington Post contains a smart piece by Ted Koppel on how U.S. actions since 9/11 have handed Osama bin Laden a great victory. I think that goes too far. Bin Laden and his tiny band are still on the defensive. His grandiose goals are ridiculous, and we should stop pretending that they are plausible. But Koppel makes a good point about how a society’s reaction to terrorism does most of the work of terrorism. The solution? Stop terrorizing ourselves.

Read Koppel’s op-ed; and if you like what he has to say, read our book, which includes contributions from a number of leading counterterrorism experts.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

The Strategic Dimension of the Mosque Debate

By
Jim Harper

There are many facets to the debate about the Muslim community center and mosque proposed for the site of a former Burlington Coat Factory near Ground Zero in southern Manhattan. My colleague David Boaz’s observation on the United States pluralist founding tradition was a delight. Important as they are, I’m put off by the domestic political ramifications (1, 2, 3, 4), if only because of the crassness and opportunism that inhabit all politics.

There is a strategic dimension to the story. This episode is signaling to audiences around the world the current relationship between the United States and Islam. These audiences might support or oppose the United States and act accordingly to undermine or support terrorist groups. For these people, knowledge of a Muslim community, active in New York and proximate to Ground Zero, would help put the lie to the “clash of civilizations” narrative sought by al-Qaeda and its franchises, undercutting their support.

The debate itself sends signals: If the United States were predominantly anti-Muslim, this debate wouldn’t be happening. If our political leaders had the power to decide matters of religious observance, this debate wouldn’t be happening. The debate is helping to show Muslim populations around the world—who might not know otherwise—that we think and debate about these things, that we are a functioning democratic republic, and that our country is undecided about the position of Muslims in the United States or, at worst, weakly anti-Muslim. 

In the video clip after the jump, conservative icon Ted Olson expresses well, I think, how standing by our constitutional values is good counterterrorist signaling.

These strategic considerations may not be dispositive, but my preference is for this project to go forward and communicate to worldwide audiences that we are still the pluralistic, welcoming, confident society we have been in the past.

Islam did not attack the United States on 9/11. It is simple collectivism—the denial of individual agency that libertarians reject—to believe that the tiny band of thugs who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks speak for an entire religion, culture, or creed. Our sympathy to families of 9/11 victims and our vestigial fears should not allow us to indulge gross and wrong generalizations about individuals of any faith.

A recent Cato Capitol Hill briefing is relevant to all this. You can review “Strategic Counterterrorism: The Signals We Send” on the Cato web site. Cato’s recent publication, “Terrorizing Ourselves: Why U.S. Counterterrorism Policy Is Failing and How to Fix It,” addresses many dimensions of the terrorism and homeland security problems, including the strategic logic of terrorism, to which we respond (whether we mean to or not) during debates about Muslims in America.

Topics: 
Cato Publications, Foreign Policy and National Security, Law and Civil Liberties

Terror Threat: The Calamity Is the Reporting

By
Jim Harper

Early this year, the New York Times published a story entitled “Senators Warned of Terror Attack on U.S. by July.”

America’s top intelligence official told lawmakers on Tuesday [Feb. 2] that Al Qaeda and its affiliates had made it a high priority to attempt a large-scale attack on American soil within the next six months.

The assessment by Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, was much starker than his view last year, when he emphasized the considerable progress in the campaign to debilitate Al Qaeda and said that the global economic meltdown, rather than the prospect of a major terrorist attack, was the “primary near-term security concern of the United States.”

At Tuesday’s hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked Mr. Blair to assess the possibility of an attempted attack in the United States in the next three to six months.

He replied, “The priority is certain, I would say” — a response that was reaffirmed by the top officials of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.

One can draw any number of conclusions from the fact that it is August, and no attack has materialized. I’m inclined to focus on the role of the Times and reporter Mark Mazzetti in misconstruing what officials said, while writing a technically accurate account of events.

Read again the blockquoted paragraphs: Officials told lawmakers that al Qaeda and its affiliates had made it a high priority to follow up on the failed attack of December 25th. Asked to assess the probability of attack, DNI Dennis Blair said: “The priority is certain”—whatever that means.

Intentions or priorities are quite distinct from capability, which is an essential prerequisite of committing any attack. Were intelligence officials obscuring this difference? Why didn’t any Senator challenge Blair’s evasive answer? Mark Mazzetti and the Times didn’t tell us.

Instead, the Times reported it as though it were a warning of terror attacks within six months. Mazzetti—a professional writer of English—didn’t investigate the flag Blair sent up with his contorted language.

In our book Terrorizing Ourselves, an excellent group of contributors analyze many different dimensions of the terrorism problem. In this case, I think we have an example of how different segments of our own society—intelligence officials, senators, a major newspaper, and a national security reporter at that newspaper—combined to maintain public fears in the aftermath of the Dec. 25th failed attack.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

TSA Behavioral Screening

By
David Rittgers

Behavioral screening is a useful tool in deterring and preventing terrorist attacks. As I noted in this piece at Politico, a border patrol agent successfully used behavioral screening to stop the would-be Millennium Bomber. She noticed something “hinky” about a man driving south across the Canadian border. That “hinky” – fidgety and nervous behavior when asked routine customs questions – exposed a car full of explosives intended for the passenger terminal of Los Angeles International Airport.

Two items from the USA Today travel section highlight some mixed results with TSA behavioral screening. Today’s edition reports that behavioral screening, applied by Behavioral Detection Officers (BDOs) missed at least 16 people later linked to terror plots. On the other side of the equation, false positives can impose burdens on those who are nervous or upset for reasons other than terrorism aspirations.

The TSA Blog defended the program: “If you’re one of those travelers that gets frazzled easily (not hard to do at airports), you have no reason to worry. BDOs set a baseline based on the normal airport behavior and look for behaviors that go above that baseline. So if you’re stressing about missing a flight, that’s not a guaranteed visit from the BDOs.”

That would be reassuring if yesterday’s travel section hadn’t revealed that TSA screeners are keeping a list of those who get upset at intrusive screening procedures. “Airline passengers who get frustrated and kick a wall, throw a suitcase or make a pithy comment to a screener could find themselves in a little-known Homeland Security database.”

Of course, we can take comfort from the words of a TSA screener to security expert Bruce Schneier. “This isn’t the sort of job that rewards competence, you know.”

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

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