Intelligence-gathering in America

Reporter Ken Dilanian has a fascinating story in today’s Los Angeles Times about intelligence-gathering fusion centers in the United States that are designed to combat terrorism,  showing how they gather huge amounts of data – and yet a considerable portion of the data is irrelevant to the people in this country who are actually fighting homegrown terrorists. Dilanian reports that the  72 U.S.-based fusion centers  have,  over the past six years, received $426 million in federal funds.

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.
Continue reading →

The trouble with U.S.-Pakistani relations

Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, 38, a Pakistani neuroscientist, may be a criminal in New York – she was found guilty in September of the attempted murder of U.S. servicemen in Afghanistan and was sentenced to 86 years in prison.

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. Continue reading →

View from Islamabad on a terrorist plot in suburban Washington

ISLAMABAD – I was in my guest house here on Thursday morning when I read in the New York Times that Farooque Ahmed, a Pakistani-American, has been charged with trying to help plot a terrorist attack on the Washington, D.C.-area Metro and it reminded me of what the stakes are in U.S.-Pakistan relations and in their cooperative military efforts.

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. Continue reading →

Covering Guantanamo

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, Continue reading →

Al Qaeda by the German numbers

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. Continue reading →

Aid workers and journalists

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.”
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 →

The new Abu Ghraib

For the soldiers in Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs’ unit in Afghanistan, the drug of choice was hashish – use of the drug was widespread among the soldiers in that unit, according to The New York Times. In a similar manner, soldiers who worked in Tier 1A, the notorious wing of Abu Ghraib in Iraq, in the fall of 2003 had their own shared, druggy experience: Robotripping, which was cough syrup, chased it down with Vivarin tablets At night, these soldiers would party in a prison cell at Abu Ghraib; during the day, they would beat up on prisoners.

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 Continue reading →

The Pentagon and censorship

Anthony Shaffer’s new book is called “Operation Dark Heart,” but it could be called Operation Blabbermouth. Continue reading →

How to fight Al Qaida

Nine years after the September 11 attacks, a key question remains unclear: How, exactly, should the United States fight Al Qaida? Killing its leaders seems to be an obvious answer – though actually getting rid of them is not as easy as it sounds. Osama bin Laden is, of course, still free, and many of the other top leaders have been equally elusive. And once you kill them, it is not clear whether it does much good. Terrorist groups are not like mob families that are wrecked when their leaders are captured or killed, as studies have shown. When a terrorist group loses its leader, the organization dissolves in only one out of five cases.

Al Qaida in Iraq seemed to be one of those cases – at least for a while. As Steven Lee Myers reported in The New York Times in an article entitled, “The ‘Wanted Dead’ Option in the War on Terror,” Al Qaida in Iraq had been losing ground, partly because of the Continue reading →

Intelligence gathering in Afghanistan

Gen. David H. Petraeus told journalists on Thursday that the United States was trying to improve its efforts to gather intelligence in Afghanistan.Gen. David Petraeus told journalists on Thursday that the United States was trying to improve its efforts to gather intelligence in Afghanistan, as reported by The New York Times. The fact that the U.S. had been doing badly was hardly a surprise, particularly since the top U.S. intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, had slammed U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts in a report, “Fixing Intel,” that was issued earlier this year.

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 Continue reading →