The system is almost dizzying in scale, and the people who work there spend an inordinate amount of time not on terrorism but on issues such as street crime. In addition, much of the work is handled by private contractors, which means that the government money is even harder to track.

A fusion center. (SOURCE: Dept. of Homeland Security)

Dilanian’s article about fusion centers echoes some of the criticisms of the homeland security system that appeared in The Washington Post’s “Top Secret America” series. The three-article, 13,000-word Washington Post series shed light on “a bureaucratic behemoth, substantially privatized but awash in public money,” as Hendrick Hertzberg wrote in a Talk of the Town piece in The New Yorker.

Indeed, the federal homeland-security money has gone to some strange projects: Several years ago, I was writing a piece about the Amish in Wisconsin for Nerve magazine, and one of the local officials told me that they had used some of the funds  to set up an outreach program for the Amish who lived in the area.

The Washington Post series,  and the article about fusion centers by Los Angeles Times’ Ken Dilanian, show that there is  waste and abuse of federal funds  in the world of homeland security.

The articles also show that some of the best stories are hidden in plain sight. Luckily, journalists spend time looking for them.

Yet she is a folk hero in Pakistan, as I was discovered during a recent visit to a newspaper office in Islamabad. The editor-in-chief sat me in his office and berated me for the imprisonment of Siddiqui, telling me that she had been victimized by Americans and that she was just a slight thing and could not be guilty of the crimes that had sent her to prison. “They said she picked up a large rifle – this big,” said the editor, holding his arms up high as he stared across the room at me. “And she’s no bigger than you!”

I did not feel like it was the time or place to defend the U.S. justice system or the conviction of Siddiqui. Besides, I felt nowhere near as confident as the editor-in-chief about the subject. He is not alone in his anger over her conviction. In cities and towns throughout Pakistan, Siddiqui is celebrated, and the U.S. is vilified for the court’s decision to imprison her.

Recently, this nationwide wrath has taken on a new turn. Not only is the U.S. government being blamed for Siddiqui’s imprisonment, but so is the Pakistani government, as Foreign Policy reports.

Pakistani officials are furious: They say that they have worked hard to represent Siddiqui in the United States. Indeed, the Pakistani government reportedly paid $2 million for her legal defense in New York, as Dawn reported.

Pakistani officials say that they have fought hard for justice for Aafia Siddiqui, and they are now defending themselves against the accusations of her sister, Fauzia.

“We have made sincere efforts to help her legally and diplomatically and will continue to do so. We understand Fauzia Siddiqui’s grief but it is sheer fantasy to believe that Aafia’s imprisonment is because of the Pakistani government’s inaction or that the Pakistani government could somehow spring her from prison in the U.S.,” wrote Husain Haqqan, Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., in an email to Foreign Policy.

The fact that Pakistanis have shifted the blame for Siddiqui’s sentence from the U.S. government to the Pakistani government shows how difficult the situation is for officials in Pakistan. During my visit to Islamabad, one high-ranking official told me that he and his colleagues strongly prefer that American officials keep important communications secret, rather than dealing with issues in the public arena. For Pakistani officials, the more distance they have from U.S. officials, the better, and the less said publicly, the better.

The U.S. government is deeply unpopular in Pakistan, and its policies are criticized on a daily basis. This puts Pakistani officials in a tough position. Chances are they will eventually get blamed for whatever Americans do – and will be harassed by people in Pakistan. The case of Siddiqui is only the most recent example. The conflict within Pakistan over her case has a ripple effect: It makes negotiations between U.S. and Pakistani officials, and overall the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, even more volatile and dangerous.

It is impossible to say at this point what will become of the charges against Ahmed — or of Ahmed himself — but it is clear that a handful of Pakistani-Americans are becoming more radical in their views.  Faisal Shahzad, for instance, had received training in explosives in Waziristan before trying to blow up his car in Times Square in the Spring.

Here, Pakistani government officials are also concerned about radicalization: The government’s public-relations campaign in Rawalpindi, the headquarters of the Pakistani military, is blunt: “Love Pakistan,” said a government sign posted on the road to the media offices of the Pakistani military, as I saw when I visited earlier this week. Last year, the Taliban set of an explosion not far from the military offices that I visited. Thirty people were killed in the attack, according to an article in the Guardian. The “Love Pakistan” road sign would seem to suggest “don’t blow it up.”

I spoke with the Pakistani military officials about U.S. Special Operations and U.S.-Pakistani relations and in that conversation — just as in every conversation I’ve had in Pakistan this week — the specter of terrorism came up. No one really knows how to tamp down radicalization, either in Pakistan or in the U.S., but a Norwegian-Pakistani scholar, Laila Bokhari, has studied the issue for years. Her new book,  Holy Wrath: My Journey Through Pakistan, is based on years of research and interviews with about 60 people, including a significant number who have either left a radical group or have a family member who has been part of an extremist group in Pakistan.

“They talk about the attraction of being part of something,” she told me during an interview in Islamabad. “They talk about getting their pride — their honor back.”

Bokhari set out to explore “what are the roads to becoming radicalized,” as she explained, but she — better than anyone — knows that there are no easy answers. One of the most troubling aspects of the research, she explained, was that she would meet people who believe so deeply that the had found “the truth” in these movements. “You see people who are so convinced,” she said, and often they have tremendous charisma. “You know that they convince others,” she said.

]]> http://nationalsecurityzone.medill.northwestern.edu/blog/2010/10/19/convering-guantanamo/ Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:29:16 +0000 http://nationalsecurityzone.medill.northwestern.edu/site/?p=3417 Continue reading →]]> The Pentagon has enforced strict rules for journalists writing about Guantanamo, making the job of covering the prison difficult. Luckily, a series of books has provided a valuable look at what has taken place inside:  Erik Saar’s book, Inside the Wire : A Military Intelligence Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of Life at Guantanamo, exposed a sordid side of the prison, showing how female interrogators used sex techniques in an effort to elicit information from the prisoners. (As he explained in an interview with me, it didn’t work.)

Karen Greenberg, the executive director of New York University Law School’s Center on Law and Security, visited the camp; in her book, The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days, she provided a measured, and fascinating, account of the early days of the prison and chronicled the lives of the men who tried to set up a just system for the prisoners, placing the story of Guantanamo into a larger context.

A book entitled Guantanamo, My Journey by David Hicks (Random House — just out on Kindle) offers an even more intimate look at the place. In January 2002, he was placed in a cell at Guantanamo and spent five years there. A wayward soul, he had become “obsessed with Afghanistan as ‘a romantic last frontier,’ with information gleaned from Lonely Planet,” while he was living in Australia, as The Sydney Morning Herald reported, and he ended up hanging out with the wrong people in Afghanistan in 2001. A Northern Alliance soldier grabbed him and then handed him over to the Americans. His book shows the dreary, everyday life for prisoners at Guantanamo and sheds light on a corner of the world that is largely hidden from view.

Some people in the publishing world have complained. “It appears Random House does think crime pays,” a representative of a publishing house, Strategic Book Group, said, accusing Hicks of lying in his book about his experiences at the prison. As The Sydney Morning Herald reported, Strategic Book Group has its own version of the story: They will soon come out with a book, Saving Grace at Guantanamo Bay: A Memoir of a Citizen Warrior, by Montgomery Granger, who is a  U.S. army reserve major.

]]> http://nationalsecurityzone.medill.northwestern.edu/blog/2010/10/15/al-qaeda-by-the-german-numbers/ Fri, 15 Oct 2010 13:21:50 +0000 http://medillnsj.org/?p=3314 Continue reading →]]> The New York Times reports on the accuracy of an official tally of potential terrorists in Germany. In “Germany, Unscathed, Remains a Hub of the Terrorism Scare,” on Oct. 12, federal Michael Slackman reported that security services found that over two decades:

• About “215 citizens or legal residents of Germany received or intended to receive paramilitary training.”
• 65 completed the training.
• Of the total group, 105 are in Germany.
• Of those in Germany, 15 were in prison.

The accounting is echt German in its precision, and yet, as counterterrorism experts have pointed out, these kinds of figures can be deceptive. Many experts, for example, believe that there are between 50 and 1,000 Al Qaeda fighters around the world. The problem with the figures about terrorists is the way that these numbers are sometimes interpreted. Once the number of potential terrorists is cited, the next stop seems obvious: Deal with them – either by killing or capturing them, and as quickly as possible. If only it were that easy. One New York-based legal expert who studies terrorism cases in the U.S. cautions that the issues regarding the Al Qaeda network and other extremist groups are much more complex than they seem.

“I would get away from quantification,” he told me. “The strength of Al Qaeda is the strength of commitment; it’s not a temporal concept. It’s not about time. It’s not about numbers.” As he explained, analysts and counterterrorist experts should not jump to the conclusion that these groups are easy to get rid of – even when the number of members is relatively small.

]]> http://nationalsecurityzone.medill.northwestern.edu/blog/2010/10/11/aid-workers-and-journalists/ http://nationalsecurityzone.medill.northwestern.edu/blog/2010/10/11/aid-workers-and-journalists/#comments Mon, 11 Oct 2010 17:04:47 +0000 http://medillnsj.org/?p=3276 Philip Gourevitch wrote in a provocative New Yorker article entitled “Alms Dealer,” describing how “journalists too often depend on aid workers – for transportation lodging, food, and companionship as well as information.” In his essay about humanitarian aid, focusing on a book entitled “The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong With Humanitarian Aid?” by Linda Polman, Gourevitch argues that journalists are biased toward humanitarian aid workers. Just as journalists embed with the military in Iraq and Afghanistan – and occasionally lose perspective on the military or the war itself, as Michael Massing described in his article in The New York Review of Books – journalists may become too close to aid workers and fail to report on their shortcomings and mistakes. Continue reading →]]>

Gourevitch

Journalists and humanitarian-aid workers tend to get along: Often, they went to the same schools, and they end up hanging out together when on assignment or working in the field. In conflict zones, especially, they stick together, staying at each other’s houses, drinking together and sharing thoughts about the world around them. In this way, journalists embed with humanitarian workers when doing stories, as Philip Gourevitch wrote in a provocative New Yorker article entitled “Alms Dealer,” describing how “journalists too often depend on aid workers – for transportation lodging, food, and companionship as well as information.”

Linda Polman

In his essay about humanitarian aid, focusing on a book entitled “The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong With Humanitarian Aid?” by Linda Polman, Gourevitch argues that journalists are biased toward humanitarian  aid workers. Just as journalists embed with the military in Iraq and Afghanistan – and occasionally lose perspective on the military or the war itself, as Michael Massing described in his article in The New York Review of Books – journalists may become too close to aid workers and fail to report on their shortcomings and mistakes.

The close relationship between journalists and humanitarian workers may be even more troubling than the one between soldiers and journalists. The military and the media have long held each other in mutual suspicion, but that is not the case with journalists and aid workers. They see eye-to-eye on so many things: Both humanitarian workers and journalists have a certain idealism, and perhaps hubris, about their vocation, and they both look at the military with skepticism. This is part of the problem, says Gourevitch, who believes journalists should be more critical of humanitarian aid. Good advice – and, for many journalists, hard to follow.

[field name=iframe] The Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke in the spring of 2004 as photos of the mistreatment of prisoners were broadcast on television networks, and years later the scandal still casts a pall over the U.S. military. The similarities between the Abu Ghraib scandal and the accounts of Gibbs’ unit in Afghanistan are disturbing: Aside from drug use, some of the officers in the unit were accused of horrific crimes against Afghans, including murder, and there were attempts at a coverup. Gibbs allegedly tried to silence members in the unit by threatening to kill them if they told people about what had transpired.

Six years after the Abu Ghraib scandal, the damage continues to haunt the United States, as images of the hooded man and others from the prison are used by al-Qaida leaders to recruit new suicide bombers. For the victims of the crimes at the Abu Ghraib prison, there has been little accountability for the crimes or compensation for what they endured. None of the compensation payments – once promised by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – have been paid out, as Associated Press Writer Pete Yost’s award-winning article, “Promises, Promises: Waiting for Abu Ghraib amends,” demonstrates.

Meanwhile, the scandal of Gibbs’ unit in Afghanistan continues to unfold as details about the crimes emerge in the media. It may be months, or even years, before the full story is revealed, and the perpetrators are held accountable.

Anthony Shaffer

Anthony Shaffer’s new book is called “Operation Dark Heart,” but it could be called Operation Blabbermouth. In his memoir, Shaffer, who once served as a Defense Intelligence Agency officer, describes many of the once-secret missions that he was involved in during his tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2003 as he and other members of his unit fought against the Taliban. It may seem surprising that a military officer would reveal these kinds of secrets, but in fact he is following in a long tradition of kill-and-tell memoirs by ex-officers who describe their exploits in the military’s black operations.

Other examples include “Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander’s Account of the Hunt for the World’s Most Wanted Man,” which was written by an ex-Delta Force officer under the psydonymn of Dalton Fury; in addition, Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin, another former Delta Force officer who once served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Pentagon, wrote a memoir entitled “Never Surrender: A Soldier’s Journey to the Crossroads of Faith and Freedom,” that also pulled the official curtains away and exposed some of the inner workings of the military’s secret units.  And in his memoir, “Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack,” Marc Thiessen, a former White House speechwriter, described details about CIA detention policies that, as one former White House official told me, belonged to a category that she once believed would never be revealed to the public.

Unlike these books, though, Shaffer’s memoir has attained a special status: It has been heavily redacted by Pentagon reviewers and, as a result, Amazon.com was forced to post a notice to potential buyers that they would receive a version of the book that had passages expunged. The differences between the un-redacted version and the redacted version sheds light on the uneven process of official censorship. The offensive material, as The New York Times has reported, includes such non-earth-shattering information such as the fact that the National Security Agency is often referred to as the Fort. In this way, the Pentagon reviewers appear to be diligent and tone-deaf — at least when it comes to what constitutes a state secret — and consequently they undermine their own work. Close readers can now compare the two versions of Shaffer’s book and identify where state secrets may have actually appeared in the original text — and they have an advantage in trying to ferret out any secrets that the text once contained.

The Pentagon reviewers may have done more harm than good when it comes to protecting national secrets, particularly since much of the material in the book that has been expunged is available through Wikipedia and other online sites, but the reviewers have done wonders for sales. Last week, as The Times reported, “Operation Dark Heart” was No. 4 on the Amazon bestseller list.

Petraeus told the reporters who had gathered at a military base in Kabul, “We have never had the granular understanding of local circumstances in Afghanistan that we achieved over time in Iraq.” Yet that is not the way things started out. At one time, Americans had a much deeper understanding of Afghanistan, including its power brokers and its internal dynamics, than of the local culture and the military in Iraq.

“Intelligence gathering in Afghanistan started in 1989 or 1990,” Henry Crumpton, who used to head up the CIA’s covert actions in that country, told me. Over time, he explained, they “had [intelligence] collection in all parts of Afghanistan, and we understood it as a very fragmented place; you could learn all you want about Kabul but it didn’t matter if you had to chase someone down in Helmand Province.” As he recalled, the CIA had about one hundred people in Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 — and considerably fewer in Iraq.  “We didn’t have the relationships in Iraq as we did in Afghanistan,” he said.

Theoretically, it would have been possible to build on that impressive accumulation of knowledge about Afghanistan in order to develop an even clearer picture of what was happening in that country over time. Instead, U.S. efforts shifted to Iraq — and, at least according to critics of the Bush administration claim, many of the gains in Afghanistan, both in intelligence gathering and in other areas, were lost.