Quotulatiousness

January 3, 2012

Security Theatre: “So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:51

Charles C. Mann visits the airport with security guru Bruce Schneier:

Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent more than $1.1 trillion on homeland security.

To a large number of security analysts, this expenditure makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as “security theater”: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe.

[. . .]

From an airplane-hijacking point of view, Schneier said, al-Qaeda had used up its luck. Passengers on the first three 9/11 flights didn’t resist their captors, because in the past the typical consequence of a plane seizure had been “a week in Havana.” When the people on the fourth hijacked plane learned by cell phone that the previous flights had been turned into airborne bombs, they attacked their attackers. The hijackers were forced to crash Flight 93 into a field. “No big plane will ever be taken that way again, because the passengers will fight back,” Schneier said. Events have borne him out. The instigators of the two most serious post-9/11 incidents involving airplanes — the “shoe bomber” in 2001 and the “underwear bomber” in 2009, both of whom managed to get onto an airplane with explosives — were subdued by angry passengers.

[. . .]

Terrorists will try to hit the United States again, Schneier says. One has to assume this. Terrorists can so easily switch from target to target and weapon to weapon that focusing on preventing any one type of attack is foolish. Even if the T.S.A. were somehow to make airports impregnable, this would simply divert terrorists to other, less heavily defended targets — shopping malls, movie theaters, churches, stadiums, museums. The terrorist’s goal isn’t to attack an airplane specifically; it’s to sow terror generally. “You spend billions of dollars on the airports and force the terrorists to spend an extra $30 on gas to drive to a hotel or casino and attack it,” Schneier says. “Congratulations!”

September 3, 2011

US troops allegedly handcuffed and executed children in 2006

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

Wikileaks may have been sitting on a particularly disturbing report:

A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks suggests that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks’ website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.

But Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.

Claims of American troops committing atrocities were very common, but few of them appear to have been anything other than Al Qaeda propaganda exercises. This may well be another case of this, but the initial investigation implied otherwise:

The original incident report was signed by an Iraqi police colonel and made even more noteworthy because U.S.-trained Iraqi police, including Brig. Gen. Issa al Juboori, who led the coordination centre, were willing to speak about the investigation on the record even though it was critical of American forces.

Throughout the early investigation, U.S. military spokesmen said that an Al Qaeda in Iraq suspect had been seized from a first-floor room after a fierce fight that had left the house he was hiding in a pile of rubble.

But the diplomatic cable provides a different sequence of events and lends credence to townspeople’s claims that American forces destroyed the house after its residents had been shot.

July 17, 2011

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch on a libertarian foreign policy

Filed under: Government, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:31

The third part of an interview with Gillespie and Welch, covering libertarian foreign policy ideas:

July 5, 2011

Would-be terrorists advised to pretend to be gay

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

A link from Jon, my former virtual landlord, discussing a document that fell into the hands of the Sunday Mirror:

al-Qaeda fanatics in Britain are being taught to avoid detection — by pretending to be gay.

A new terror training manual tells Islamic extremists to lie about their sexuality if a woman approaches them in case she is a “honeytrap” spy sent by security services.

The handbook, which was uncovered by a Sunday Mirror ­investigation, says: “Many hotels — especially in busy UK cities — have women hanging around the lobby areas in order to attract men.

“A young beautiful woman may come and talk to you. The first thing you do to protect yourself from such a ­situation is to make dua (prayers) to Allah for ­steadfastness.

“The second thing is to find an excuse to get away from her that is realistic and sensible, such as you having a girlfriend for the past few years and you are loyal to her or you are ­homosexual.”

The suggestion is one of many tips in the manual, called Class Notes From The Security and ­Intelligence Course.

Of course, if they were drawing their recruits from Pashtun tribesmen, they might not have to pretend much.

May 15, 2011

US had prepared to fight Pakistan over Bin Laden raid

Filed under: Asia, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

Strategy Page reports that the US military had made contingency plans to cover Pakistani military intervention in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden:

On May 2nd, the United States was prepared to go to war with Pakistan. The American raid on that day, which killed Osama bin Laden and seized a huge mass of al Qaeda data from his Pakistani hideout, was carried out without informing Pakistan beforehand. Although Pakistan had years earlier agreed that the U.S. could enter Pakistani territory in hot pursuit of terrorists fleeing Afghanistan, or to grab high ranking al Qaeda leaders, it was always assumed that the U.S. would let the Pakistani military know what was coming. But because the Pakistani government was full of bin Laden fans, the U.S. did not inform Pakistan about the raid until it was underway. Apparently, that message included a reminder that if the U.S. troops in the bin Laden compound were attacked by Pakistani forces, there would be instant, and far-reaching, consequences.

The extent of those consequences have since been pieced together, from unclassified information. By May 2nd, the U.S. had assembled a huge naval and air force in the region, that was pointed at Pakistan. This force would attack any Pakistani troops or warplanes that went after the U.S. forces in the bin Laden compound, or who might be able to do so. The U.S. had assembled three aircraft carriers, hundreds of air force aircraft in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, and dozens of helicopters, and thousands of troops, in Afghanistan. Most of these troops didn’t know what they were alerted for. Such alerts happen all the time, often for no reason (as far as the troops are concerned.) But this time, as word of the bin Laden raid got out, it became obvious (at least to those who know how these things work) that the alerts throughout the region were to prepare for the possible need to quickly get the American raiders out, and destroy any Pakistani forces that sought to interfere.

May 5, 2011

Confused about the details of the Bin Laden raid? So’s the White House

Filed under: Government, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:34

Jon sent me this link which is a systematic attempt to draw together all the information/misinformation/disinformation about the Abbotabad raid:

Usually when governments use misinformation, they use it to make themselves look good. The Obama Administration gets points for originality, insofar as it’s been using disinformation and misinformation to make itself look arbitrary, unlawful, helpless and stupid. Here’s jj’s great summary:

Okay, what do we have here:

1) There was a firefight.
2) There was no firefight.
3) Bin Laden was “resisting.”
4) Bin Laden wasn’t armed. (Makes the concept of “resisting” interesting.)
[4.a) And the newest one: the SEALS thought bin Laden was reaching for a weapon.]
5) He used his wife as a shield.
6) His wife was killed too.
7) He didn’t use his wife as a shield. She ran at a SEAL who shot her in the leg, but she’s fine.
8 ) Some other woman — the maid? — was used as a shield. By somebody. Downstairs.
9) That other woman — downstairs — was killed.
10) Maybe not. She was killed unless she wasn’t — and who was she, anyway?

That’s less than half the list.

Stay on message? They’d have to have agreed on what the actual message is first.

Back to the original post, which has been updated a few times:

When people say “something is wrong here,” they’re sort of right. The “here” in which the wrongness resides isn’t this specific news story. Instead, it’s an overarching pathology that we’re talking about.

That is, the SEALS did what they did. What’s driving everyone bonkers is that this administration is incapable of being straightforward. Serpentine deceit is its MO, regardless of the topic, whether birth certificates, health care debates, or sanctioned assassinations. Everything is wrapped in a web of lies and confusion because of the paranoia, personality disorders, narcissism, and sociopathy that walk the White House halls.

“The operation was at this time effectively unknown to President Barack Obama”

Filed under: Government, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:54

If this line of investigation is borne out, we can expect to see some interesting times in Washington:

The operation was at this time effectively unknown to President Barack Obama or Valerie Jarrett and it remained that way until AFTER it had already been initiated. President Obama was literally pulled from a golf outing and escorted back to the White House to be informed of the mission.

I have no idea how solid this line of reasoning is, but if Clinton and Panetta had to force the President’s hand by initiating the strike on Bin Laden’s safe house, the American government is well and truly divided.

H/T to Adam Baldwin for the link.

May 2, 2011

Radley Balko: “He won”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:58

A distressing round-up of the lifetime achievements of the late Osama Bin Laden:

We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we’ve changed since September 11 . . .

  • We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.
  • We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.
  • In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.
  • We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.
  • The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are complicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.
  • The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens.
  • Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president’s designation of them as an “enemy combatant,” essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I’d also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn’t have been tolerated before September 11.)

The list, unfortunately goes on.

Yes, bin Laden the man is dead. But he achieved all he set out to achieve, and a hell of a lot more. He forever changed who we are as a country, and for the worse. Mostly because we let him. That isn’t something a special ops team can fix.

Location of Bin Laden’s hideaway difficult for Pakistan to explain away

Filed under: Asia, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

From the BBC News website:

More details are emerging of how al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was found and killed at a fortified compound on the outskirts of Abbottabad in north-west Pakistan.

The compound is a few hundred metres from the the Pakistan Military Academy, an elite military training centre, which is Pakistan’s equivalent to Britain’s Sandhurst, according to the BBC’s M Ilyas Khan who visited the area.

Earlier reports put the distance at about 200 yards (182 metres). Pakistan’s military says the compound is 4km (2.4 miles) away from the academy.

But it lies well within Abbottabad’s military cantonment — it is likely the area would have had a constant and significant military presence and checkpoints.

Pakistan’s army chief is a regular visitor to the academy for graduation parades.

Someone very well placed in Pakistan’s army or intelligence organizations had to have been aware of, and actively protecting Bin Laden’s hideout. There’s no way he could have lived that close to high security military establishments without active collusion with high-ranking officers or intelligence chiefs.

February 7, 2011

Blameshifting, subcontinental style

Filed under: Asia, India, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

Strategy Page talks about the common belief in Pakistan that suicide attacks are not really the fault of other Muslims:

While the Islamic terrorist attacks in Pakistan have created a lot of hatred against Islamic militants, many Pakistani government officials, and media executives, blame non-Moslem foreigners for all the Islamic violence. To Westerners, this is bizarre, but to more than half the population of Pakistan, blaming India and Israel (and the West in general), for Islamic suicide bombers killing Pakistanis, has some traction. The basic theme is that India, with the assistance of those clever and diabolical Israelis, are deceiving Moslems to become suicide bombers. In some cases, where there are no bodies left behind, the Indians or Israelis can be blamed for doing the deed themselves. This sort of thing is regularly reported in Pakistan.

Since India and Pakistan (literally, “the land of the pure.”) were created out of British India in 1947, Pakistan has seen India as preparing to invade and conquer them. There followed four wars with India, all of which [were] started by Pakistan. While many Pakistanis have figured out that India has never had any interest in taking over Pakistan, especially as Pakistan slid into a malaise of corruption and economic decline. But those who ran the Pakistani government (a very small group, be they politicians or generals) found it convenient to blame someone else, and India was always a convenient scapegoat. Israel was added when because Israel has long been considered the archenemy of Moslems, and especially since Israel became a close ally of India. The West is blamed because their economic success must have, somehow, come at the expense of the morally superior Islamic world.

On the national level, as at the personal level, having a shadowy “nemesis” to blame for your misfortune allows you to avoid looking for the actual root causes of your situation.

Update: A writer at The Economist reports on revisiting Pakistan after five years away:

Much of the news we read from Pakistan is a grisly catalogue of suicide-bombs, sectarian slaughter, political assassination, grinding insurgency and collateral damage from the war in Afghanistan.

So, on a first visit to Islamabad and Lahore in nearly five years, my initial response was to think how the relentless tide of such reporting obscures another truth about the country: how pleasant it can be; how helpful and hospitable the people; how many well-informed, articulate and enlightened cosmopolitans there are to talk to. In the past I have always argued that Pakistan has a tolerant, flexible core that is far more resilient than it is often given credit for. Surely, that remains true.

A second response, however, was to acknowledge how much worse things had got in those five years. Three sorts of decline stand out—the linked problems of worsening security and the spread of Islamist extremism, and the economy.

[. . .]

One of the commonplaces of analysis in Pakistan is that the roots of extremism lie not just in the war in Afghanistan and the “Islamisation” of public life introduced by General Zia ul-Haq a generation ago, but in economic hardship and lack of opportunity. The economy is lurching along on IMF-provided crutches, just a few months from the next crisis. Most people also agree about some of the basic reforms needed—in particular a broadening of the tax base. But the political parties want to make sure that it is the other parties whose voters’ pockets will suffer from the broadening. So reform is deadlocked.

Pakistan is indeed still not as bad as you might think from the newspaper headlines. And when Mr Hoodbhoy, for example, talks of an impending bloodbath it is still possible to think he exaggerates. But Pakistan is bloody enough already, and it is for now a depressing and frightening place. It is not just that the decline seems unimpeded by the end of Pervez Musharraf’s inept, corrupt military dictatorship and the advent of Asif Ali Zardari’s inept, corrupt and army-reliant civilian administration. It is that the arguments of those who claim the trend is remorseless and heading for disaster seem more persuasive than those I have deployed over the years to refute them.

March 12, 2010

Striking at the enemy’s head

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:44

Strategy Page looks at the relative success of both intelligence and implementation in attacks directed at Taliban leaders:

The American campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan continues, mainly because it works. Since this “decapitation” (of key terrorists) program began in 2008, about 120 attacks have been made, killing about a thousand people. Some 30 percent of the dead were civilians, as the terrorists try to surround themselves with women and children. They believe that the American ROE (Rules of Engagement) will not permit missiles to be fired at them when there are obviously civilians nearby. But most of the missiles hit buildings at night. The Taliban and al Qaeda don’t like to discuss these attacks, even to score some media points by complaining of civilian casualties. But the U.S. and Pakistani intelligence services do monitor radio and email in the area, and believe that about 700 terrorists, including two dozen senior al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, and nearly a hundred mid-level ones, have died from the UAV missile attacks. Civilian deaths are minimized by trying to catch the terrorists while travelling, or otherwise away from civilians.

[. . .]

While the terrorist groups are concerned about the losses, especially among the leadership, what alarms them the most is how frequently the American UAVs are finding their key people. The real problem the terrorists have is that someone is ratting them out. Someone, or something, is helping the Americans find the terrorist leaders. That would be Pakistani intelligence (ISI), which promptly began feeling some heat when the civilians were back in power in 2008. After the purge of many Islamic radical (or pro-radical) officers, the information from the Pakistani informant network began to reach the Americans.

This Hellfire campaign is hitting al Qaeda at the very top, although only a quarter of the attacks so far have taken out any of the most senior leaders. But that means over half the senior leadership have been killed or badly wounded in the last two years. Perhaps even greater damage has been done to the terrorist middle management. These are old and experienced lieutenants, as well as young up-and-comers. They are the glue that holds al Qaeda and the Taliban together. Their loss is one reason why it’s easier to get more information on where leaders are, and why rank-and-file al Qaeda and Taliban are less effective of late.

November 10, 2009

QotD: “It’s not that the FBI is merely incompetent”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:11

You know the scariest thing about this? It’s not that the FBI is merely incompetent. It is that, apparently, so many American Muslims in sensitive positions make contact with Al Qaeda that the FBI is forced to conduct investigatory triage and evaluate whether, in their minds, the emails are merely innocent-for-now banter or something demanding a more urgent response.

Otherwise, why the blow-off? I don’t understand how the FBI could possibly deem any chatter with Al Qaeda harmless and not worth investigating unless so much of this was going on that they had decide which illegal chatter with a hot-war enemy was worth their limited let’s-take-a-looksie-at-this resources.

Ace, “FBI: Hassan’s Al Qaeda Emails Were Probably Just Some Research and Social Chatter and Stuff”, Ace of Spades, 2009-11-10

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