But There is No Pirate-Terrorist Nexus

David Axe at War is Boring critiques the latest Navy strategy document for conflating piracy, terrorists and national insurgents.

There are no proven links between Somali pirates, based in northern Somalia, and the major, “terroristic” insurgent groups operations based in southern and central Somalia. Anyway, Shabab and pirates are separate, even conflicting, entities. Shabab even promised to fight pirates who last year seized a Saudi oil tanker carrying $100 million in crude. Wider, more entrenched Islamic control in Somalia could actually decrease piracy, as it did during the previous Islamic rule three years ago. Piracy thrives in the absence of law and order, and law and order happen to be exactly what Islamists are good at.

He's right, as far as I can tell. In fact I just sat on a panel at ISA where three separate paper authors made this point.

In addition to the facts-on-the-ground that Axe mentions, there's also the basic distinction in the strategic and moral logic of the two types of actors. Jihadist networks are attempting to disrupt and overthrow the global trading system; pirates rely on it for profit. Jihadist networks aim for spectacular media coverage; piracy works best when it's under the radar. Jihadist networks aim to kill as many people as they can with each attack; pirates, at least in the Gulf of Aden, are after ransom and make every effort to spare lives.

Given the difference in the preferences of both sets of actors, it stands to reason (at least from a strategic choice perspective) that very different policy approaches are needed to deal with them.

[cross-posted at Current Intelligence]

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Ronald Reagan: Soft on terrorism

Scott Horton interviews Will Bunch about his book Tear Down This Myth. Bunch's most interesting contention is that, on terrorism-related issues such as torture, "collateral damage," and treating terrorism within the confines of the ordinary criminal justice system, Reagan was far to the left of the contemporary GOP (Bunch doesn't put it this way but, if his description of Reagan's positions is accurate, he was also to the left of Barack Obama on these issues).

5. Ronald Reagan signed the Convention Against Torture, and his Justice Department indicted and prosecuted a Texas sheriff for waterboarding. How can his views about torture be reconciled with the current Republican pro-torture dogma?

It’s important not to nominate Reagan for sainthood in the arena of human rights. His “Reagan Doctrine” in Central America, leaving the fight to anti-Communist thugs and death squads that the then-president called “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers,” is arguably the gravest moral failing of his tenure. That said, back on U.S. soil, Reagan was far to the left of the 2010 Republican Party on issues such as torture. The convention that he signed in 1988 holds that there is no circumstance of any kind that permits torture, which certainly would include the 9/11 aftermath and related anti-terror efforts today.

But it goes even deeper than that. As I noted in an early 2010 blog post: “Reagan would not have approved of drone-fired missile attacks aimed at killing terrorists; as president, he several times rejected anti-terrorism operations for the sole reason that civilians would have been killed by collateral damage. In 1985, he surprised aides such as Pat Buchanan by ruling out a military response to a Beirut hijacking for fear of civilian casualties; Lou Cannon reported then in the Washington Post that Reagan called retaliation in which innocent civilians are killed “itself a terrorist act.” And the idea of trying terrorists in military tribunals as opposed to a civilian court of law? The Reagan administration was completely against that. Paul Bremer (yes, that Paul Bremer) said in 1987, “a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are — criminals — and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law, against them.”

It’s almost tragic—when you go back to the very recent history of the 1980s—when you realize how seriously an American consensus on human rights and the power of our criminal-justice justice system has been trashed by the modern conservative movement. It’s going to take a long time to get that back—although the words that Reagan and his aides left behind could help America get past this.

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QDR Blogging: Domestic IEDs

This is odd, from page 20 of the QDR:

Enhance domestic counter-lED capabilities: To better prepare the Department to support civil authorities seeking to counter potential threats from domestic improvised explosive devices (IEDs). DoD will assist civil authorities with counter-IED tactics, techniques, and procedures (TIPs) and capabilities developed in recent operations.

This is the first I've heard of serious concern about domestic IEDs. Something that intel picked up? On the one hand, the idea that some notional domestic terror cell (whether Islamic, right wing, or otherwise) might utilize IEDs is a good deal more believable that the usual stuff about taking down a jetliner with a Stinger or cutting down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches. On the other hand, good IED production does require skill and some resources, and I don't imagine that successfully blowing up a couple of SUVs on I-70 would really be worth the time and risk to any domestic terrorist org.

UPDATE: To be clear, I appreciate that Timothy McVeigh's Ryder truck and the aircraft used on 9/11 were technically "IEDs." However, the QDR isn't using the term in this sense; it's fairly clear from context that the more road-specific meaning of the term in intended (with the inclusion of car bombs possible, but not necessary.)

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International Criminal Court Redux

Later this year, state parties will get together to revisit the Statute for the International Criminal Court. Definitely on the agenda is clarifying the crime of aggression, which was left hanging in 1998 in order to bring discussions to a close. But governments also have the opportunity to add new crimes to the list of those under the court's jurisdiction (as well as suggest procedural changes). So far proposals relating to jurisdiction include:

1) A proposal by Trinidad and Tobago to try drug traffickers at the ICC. (If in 1989 you suggest a court for this specific purpose, and if nine years later states construct that very court while tabling the issue for which you originally suggested it, instead making it a court to try genocidaires and war criminals, try try again.)

2) A proposal by Belgium to extend the list of prohibited conventional weapons. (Roger Clark has an interesting essay on Article 8 in a Special Double Issue of the New Criminal Law Review organized by Opinio Juris' Kevin Jon Heller.)

3) A proposal by the Netherlands to include terrorism in the court's jurisdiction alongside aggression, war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. (Unlike the drug trafficking proposal, which actually aims to define the crime, Netherlands only proposes to include the crime of terrorism hypothetically, pending an agreed definition. Smart. Also somewhat meaningless.)

4) A proposal by Mexico to include the use of nuclear weapons under the definition of war crimes. (Good luck with that.)

Apparently no "States Parties" have taken up suggestions that piracy be added to the list of crimes under ICC jurisdiction.

[cross-posted at Current Intelligence]

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Two questions for Glenn Reynolds

(1)If Massoud Ali Mohammadi was killed by the Iranian government because he was reportedly sympathetic to opponents of it, would that terrorism?

(2) If on the other hand he was working an an atomic weapons program for the Iranian government, and was as a consequence quietly killed by the CIA, would that be terrorism?

This is an open book exam. Please be sure to support your answer with specific references to the relevant legal texts and doctrines.

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It's not personal, it's business

Kevin Drum likes the idea of not getting hysterical over every terrorist incident, but he's got practical and theoretical objections to an approach that emphasizes the risk from terrorism is statistically negligible:

This line of argument — that terrorism is statistically harmless compared to lots of other activities — will never work. For better or worse, it just won't. So we should knock it off.

Second, even in the realm of pure logic it really doesn't hold water. The fundamental fear of terrorism is that it's not just random or unintentional, like car accidents or (for most of us) the threat of homicide. It's carried out by people with a purpose. The panic caused by the underwear bomber wasn't so much over the prospect of a planeload of casualties, it was over the reminder that al-Qaeda is still out there and still eager to expand its reach and kill thousands if we ever decide to let our guard down a little bit.

So even if you agree with Campos, as I do, that overreaction to al-Qaeda's efforts is dumb and counterproductive, it's perfectly reasonable to be more afraid of a highly motivated group with malign ideology and murderous intent than of things like traffic accidents or hurricanes. Suggesting otherwise, in some kind of hyperlogical a-death-is-a-death sense, strikes most people as naive and clueless. It's an argument that probably hurts the cause of common sense more than it helps.

Whether statistically-based arguments help or hurt on the whole in this context seems largely unknown (we don't have good stats on that). I concede they're not nearly as effective as people who have a preference for evidence-based arguments -- pointy-headed professors etc., -- often imagine they are. As Drum points out, most people consider those sorts of arguments naive, and prefer "common sense."

Unfortunately in this context Drum seems to be one of those people. His common sense argument is that it makes more sense to be afraid of terrorists than hurricanes because death by hurricane is random and death by terrorism is a product of malign ideology and murderous intent. Even ordinary homicide, he says, is not like that for most of us.

As to the homicide point it's clearly wrong. The percentage of homicide victims whose killers were random strangers -- serial killers, mass murderers, and the like -- is quite small. Indeed if you're a woman (which statistically includes most of us), the odds are far higher that you will murdered by a current or former intimate partner -- as I point out in the WSJ piece there are several such murders in the US every single day -- than by any other single class of killer.

But even when it comes to things like hurricanes and traffic accidents I think Drum is off track. If anything, getting blown up by a terrorist on a plane is about as impersonal a death as a person can suffer. It's comparable, in this regard, to getting blown up by Predator drone while attending a wedding in a Pakistani village.

The notion that terrorists want to kill "us" -- me and you specifically, or even Americans as a class -- because they hate us personally, or if you prefer "hate our freedoms," is pure narcissism. It's very much like imagining the the US military actually wants to kill Iraqi or Afghani civilians. From a logistical and political standpoint killing civilians is a pain in the ass for the US military and I'm quite sure they would very much prefer to avoid it altogether if they could, all ethical considerations aside. From a logistical and political standpoint trying to kill US civilians by blowing yourself and the plane you're on is a pain in the ass (sometimes literally) for terrorists and they no doubt would prefer to pursue their goals in a less unpleasant manner, again all ethical considerations aside.

I also think Drum should be a little more cautious about making arguments framed around the idea that "al Qaeda is still out there and eager to expand its reach and kill thousands." Whether al Qaeda even exists as a coherent organization any more is far from clear. Naturally Islamic terrorists in Iraq and on the Arabian peninsula are eager to engage in geopolitical equivalent of knock-off branding, but that hardly means we should assume that the Jihadist equivalent of Emanuel Goldstein is still lurking behind every conspiracy.

I'm not drawing a moral equivalence here between terrorism and "collateral damage" in arguably legitimate military operations. What I'd like to insist on is that both kinds of death are highly impersonal and essentially random.

Now this doesn't mean that the loved ones of the victims of these sorts of death will consider the deaths impersonal and random. Civilian deaths due to terrorism and warfare both fill people with rage and a thirst for revenge. But there's nothing personal about either one.

Update: The increasingly unhinged Maureen Dowd, by contrast, is annoyed with Obama for not recognizing that "we" are really scared right now, and therefore need a big strong daddy to make the bad guys go away:

No Drama Obama is reticent about displays of emotion. The Spock in him needs to exert mental and emotional control. That is why he stubbornly insists on staying aloof and setting his own deliberate pace for responding — whether it’s in a debate or after a debacle. But it’s not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.

Our professorial president is no feckless W., biking through Katrina. He is no doubt on top of the crisis in terms of studying it top to bottom. But his inner certainty creates an outer disconnect.

He’s so sure of himself and his actions that he fails to see that he misses the moment to be president — to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders, who reassures and instructs the public at traumatic moments.

He’s more like the aloof father who’s turned the Situation Room into a Seminar Room.

You really can't make this stuff up.

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The politics of cowardice

I think it's a positive sign that the WSJ published this.

On a related note, in the last two days fighter jets have been scrambled twice to "accompany" flights on which passengers became fractious in some unspecified but ultimately non-terroristic way.

Does it really make everybody feel better that the USAF is apparently primed to shoot down commercial airliners at the drop of a hat?

Also, how much does that sort of nonsense cost?

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Terrorball

I’m quite sure I could beat LeBron James in a game of one on one basketball. The game merely needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and as soon as I score I win. Such a game might last several hours, or even a week or two, and James would probably score hundreds and possibly thousands of points before my ultimate victory, but eventually I’m going to find a way to put the ball in the basket.

Our national government and almost all of the establishment media have decided to play a similar game, which could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts until there are no longer any terrorists, and;
(2) If terrorists manage to ever kill or injure or seriously frighten any Americans, they win.

How else can one explain the extreme and ongoing over-reaction to last week’s botched attempt to blow up Northwest flight 253? Commentators from Glenn Greenwald to David Brooks have pointed out that demands that the government keep us completely safe from the risk of terror attacks are both absurdly infantile, and very helpful to terrorists, since such demands place the bar for what counts as successful terrorism practically on the ground.

Meanwhile, in the week that began with a terrorist incident in which no one other than the pathetically incompetent aspiring terrorist was hurt, approximately 47,000 Americans died. Around 13,000 of these people never reached old age, including nearly one thousand children.

Indeed over the past seven days approximately 350 Americans were murdered. About twenty of these murder victims were women killed by their husbands and boyfriends, while something like 35 were children who died as a result of abuse. Several hundred Americans committed suicide between Christmas and New Year’s Day and several hundred others died as a direct consequence of not having any medical insurance.

All of this is considered completely natural and normal and therefore not in the slightest bit newsworthy. At the same time, President Obama is being criticized for not rushing back to Washington from his holiday vacation because a wannabe terrorist managed to set his own underwear on fire.

On one level, Terrorball can be understood as a product of straightforward cynicism: Both politicians and media moguls know that fear can be exploited for power and profit. But the rules of the game have another source as well.

In the more than eight years since the 9/11 terror attacks, I’ve often been struck by inability or unwillingness of Al Qaeda to carry out occasional small-scale terror attacks within the United States. Given the climate of hysterical nationalism and rampant paranoia that continues to grip much of America in the wake of 9/11, setting off a car bomb once or twice a year on some big city street would probably whip up enough panic to satisfy the ambitions of any terrorist organization.

So why do Islamic terrorists continue to try to blow up commercial jetliners, rather than focusing their efforts on more vulnerable targets? Besides the most obvious reason – that there are very few such terrorists, and their destructive abilities are in fact extremely limited – it appears these terrorists understand the psychology of our political and media elites quite well.

That psychology dictates a third rule of Terrorball: destroying a commercial jet is the most terrifying form of terrorism, and if (when) terrorists once again manage this feat, in the face of all the elaborate steps taken to stop them, then they will have truly “won.”

Now why should this be? Part of the reason is that the normal conditions of airline travel, which create feelings of claustrophobia, helplessness, and a general loss of control, are ripe for exploitation by those who want to use fear as a political weapon, i.e., terrorists and those eager to enhance and manipulate the fear of terrorism.

Another reason has to do the imaginative capacities of our elites. The typical Congressional subcommittee chairman or cable news anchor or syndicated columnist can’t really imagine not being able to afford to take his child to a doctor, or being wrongly convicted of a crime, but he is quite capable of imagining being on a Paris to New York flight that’s blown out of the sky. And while it’s true the risk he faces of suffering this fate are very close to zero, they are not, as they are for a poor person, literally zero.

Terrorball, then, is an elaborate political game that seems irrational on its face – after all, it’s certain that more than 2.4 million Americans will die this year, and fairly likely that not even one of those deaths will be caused by terrorism -- but which features its own peculiar logic. That logic reflects the anxieties of those who have created its rules, and serves the interests of both terrorists and those who profit from exploiting the fear of terrorism.

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NW 253 Redux

Rob covers most of the points on 253 that I would have touched upon (as well as some I hadn't considered), but there are a few I want to add. First, as a preface, I've flown AMS-DTW six or eight times, and been on that very flight, and I'm happy to report that this experience doesn't affect my observation or the validity of my opinion (which is always questionable at any rate).

My instinct when hearing about it was "it's about time". As Jeff Fecke comments to Rob's post, "you're 99% safe everywhere, but you're not 100% safe anywhere." Probability suggest that this will happen, and it will happen again, and if this is the best that they can do, we're in pretty good shape overall. When one considers the sheer number of passenger / flights that occur daily, let alone annually, and by my (possibly unreliable) count there have only been three incidents of note on US or US-bound carriers post 9/11 (the shoe bomber, the British liquid bombers, and Detroit guy) I am not terribly concerned. Two amateur attempts, and one that MI-5 were all over.

Additionally, as commenter Hanspeter points out, this was not a TSA fault:

"Lagos airport technically passes some standard level of security competency, which is why planes leaving there are allowed to land here. Amsterdam airport also screwed the pooch, though, since that airport is supposed to be very good at security."

Schiphol Amsterdam indeed has excellent security; even pre-9/11, flying an American carrier from AMS to wherever in the US (typically NW) involved an additional "interview" at the gate for every passenger (they ask for all manner of ID, including frequent flyer membership cards, thumb through your passport and inquire about certain trips, etc.); post 9/11, they added an additional security checkpoint at every gate for American-bound US carriers. (Oddly enough, these measures didn't apply to KLM flights to the US). However, I'm not sure how Schiphol screwed the pooch; if the technology to stop this guy wasn't installed, it wasn't installed.

Furthermore, to my knowledge there are no direct flights from Nigeria to the US, because security is not up to standard. (UPDATE: a commenter points out that Delta fly a couple direct flights between Lagos and the US).
Lagos to Amsterdam was a KLM flight. Indeed, to my knowledge passengers connecting through AMS from Lagos have to go through an additional layer of security because Nigeria security is not considered adequate by the EU. If a pooch was screwed here, it wasn't that security at Schiphol allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board the DTW flight, rather it was a simple old fashioned intelligence failure.

My rather sanguine attitude expressed above does not place me in the 'don't violate my privacy dammit' camp, however. I have no problem that Schiphol is installing the very machines that may have prevented the Detroit thing; I'm comfortable with some random stranger noting that I'm probably carrying around ten post-holiday extra pounds than I should be. As AMS is one of my primary transit hubs (indeed, my flights back to England in early January take me through Schiphol) I'm certain to experience this new technology in any event.

But I'm not going to freak out about the Detroit thing. It may have been professionally conceived, but it was rank amateur in execution. If this is the best that they can do given our widely assailed security vulnerabilities, I'm fairly relaxed about it.

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Various Flight 253 Thoughts

Briefly, regarding the Detroit-Failure-to-Explode-Thing:

• The successful destruction of Flight 253 might not have threatened American power, or the material foundation of American life, but it certainly would have sucked; any plausible conception of national security would expect that the government take reasonable measures to prevent such attacks.
• It is nevertheless pretty lame that this is apparently the best that Al Qaeda could manage at this late date; any self-respecting terrorist organization should have been embarrassed to claim responsibility for this pathetic failure.
• It's not clear to me that "the system worked"; it seems, in fact, that the system failed at some key point, if only in its inability to recognize someone who (to the admittedly untrained eye) really seemed like a serious threat.
• That said, there is no way to reform the system to eliminate all such threats; reforms may result in additional false positives, or may results in holes in different areas. Such are the trade-offs of intelligence and law enforcement work.
• That said, not all intelligence failures are the result of trade-offs. Sometimes people screw up to the extent that they should be fired, and some procedures produce distinctly suboptimal outcomes. Unfortunately, determining whether the problem is in the trade-off or the bad procedure is hard;it's often bloody difficult to tell the difference between a .400 hitter having a bad day and a .200 hitter having a normal day. My guess in this case is that there's a bit of both; there seems to have been sufficient evidence to have kept this guy off of a flight to the US.
• However, difficulties associated with the coordination of information across agencies or division are probably the most common kind of problem associated with intelligence and law enforcement work. There really is no over-arching solution; bureaucratic divisions are necessary for a variety of reasons, yet invariably cause difficulties of communication, jurisdictional overlap or underlap, and so forth.
• Finally, Law Prof pointed out to me that the one major positive (other than the failed bomb) is that dude's dad felt strongly enough about the threat dude posed to go to the US embassy and inform on his own son. I have no idea what his thinking was, but just maybe there's a tiny upside to treating the rest of the world as if it exists and has feelings.

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But Bob Kaplan Said that Europeans Have Lost Their Will to Live!

Quick question: Did the news that a Dutchman was the first to tackle Shoebomber #2 remind anyone of how, in United 93, the appeasement-minded coward was clearly European?

Me neither.

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Small Boats, Weak States, Dirty Money

I have a review of Martin Murphy's Small Boats, Weak States, Dirty Money up at ID. Long story short, it's the best single volume introduction to modern piracy and maritime terrorism that I've read.

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Obstruction of justice

It's always difficult to figure out what's going on from news reports regarding a criminal investigation, but this story raises a lot of questions.

First, why isn't Zazi being charged under one of several very broadly-worded federal anti-terrorism statutes? If, as the FBI asserts, Zazi admitted attending courses "at an al-Qaeda training facility in the FATA (tribal) region of Pakistan" and that "he received instruction from al-Qaeda operatives on subjects such as weapons and explosives," those are very serious crimes -- far more serious than giving false statements to investigators.

Second, the crime with which Zazi, his father, and the NYC informant have been charged with is essentially a form of obstruction of justice. But the federal statute that supposedly criminalizes this conduct is a textbook example of a law that's subject to abuse by overzealous prosecutors. Obstruction of justice at its core involves acts like witness tampering, intimidation, and the like. But a catch-all provision in the statute allows making false statements to an investigator to be treated as a free-standing crime.

Note that when they agreed to submit to questioning none of these people were under oath, or had been charged with anything. The "crime" they have supposedly committed is that of giving inaccurate statements to investigators. Meanwhile the investigators are free to lie with impunity to the people they interview.

Third, this kind of case appears to illustrate how easily civil libertarian and due process concerns can get tossed out the window when the magic word "terrorism" is invoked. From what's been reported there appears to be no solid evidence of an actual plot of any sort, or the existence of real weapons, or indeed anything beyond some suspicious movements and conversations. This probably explains why the suspects haven't been charged with any crime other than that of failing to cooperate appropriately with their interrogators. (Note too the absurdly transparent pretext that Zazi's rental car was stopped by the NYPD as part of a "random drug stop.").

Now of course it's always possible that Zazi is part of an actual Al Qaeda cell of some sort, as opposed to say a clownish amateur who hasn't done enough to be charged with a real crime. But then he ought to be charged with one.

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