Novelist and Fordham law professor Thane Rosenbaum:
With President Bush-bashing still a national pastime, it’s notable how much international terrorism has been forgotten, and how little credit the president has received for keeping Americans safe.
This is a difficult issue for me. I didn’t vote for President Bush – twice. And as a human-rights law professor, the events at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, along with various elements of the Patriot Act and the National Security Agency’s wiretapping of Americans, are all greatly troubling to me.
Yet I live in Manhattan and I was present on Sept. 11, 2001 – admittedly 100 blocks from the murder scene, but I was here, trembling along with the rest of America. Remember those days?
…Other cities around the world became targets: Madrid, Glasgow, London and Bali; the entire nation of Denmark; and, of course, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Here in America, however, the focus moved from concerns over counterterrorism measures and the abuse of presidential authority to the war in Iraq, the subprime mortgage crisis, the failing economy, the public meltdown of Britney Spears, and now, the presidential elections.
All this time Americans have been safe from suicide bombers, biological warfare and collapsing skyscrapers, while the rest of the world has been on red alert. And yet President Bush is regarded as the worst president in American history? Sorry, I must be missing something here.
…when a professed enemy succeeds as wildly as al Qaeda did on 9/11, and seven years pass without an incident, there are two reasonable conclusions: Either, despite all the trash-talking videos, they have been taking a long, leisurely breather; or, something serious has been done to thwart and disable their operations. Whatever combination of psychology and insanity motivates a terrorist to blow himself up is not within my range of experience, but I’m betting the aggressive measures the president took, and the unequivocal message he sent, might have had something to do with it.
Americans, admittedly, have short time horizons and, perhaps, even shorter attention spans. Our collective memory has historically been poor. But had there been another terrorist attack or, even worse, a dozen more in cities all over America – a fear that would not have been exaggerated on 9/12 – would we have allowed ourselves the luxury of quarreling over legally suspect counterterrorism measures, even though such internal debates are credits to our liberal democracy and constitutional freedoms?
Terrorism is now largely off the table in the minds of most Americans.
But in gearing up to elect a new president, we are left to wonder how, in spite of numerous failed policies and poor judgement, President Bush’s greatest achievement was denied to him by people who ungratefully availed themselves of the protection that his administration provided.
One sometimes gets the feeling that our policy debates over national security and the journalism that travels with them float, as it were, at 30,000 feet above the reality of the threat on the ground.
Good analysis by Daniel Henninger:
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain brought their presidential campaigns to the Petraeus-Crocker hearings on Iraq this week. An Iraq-based reporter appearing on one of the cable networks in the evening said the hearings struck him as oddly decoupled from the daily reality of war for the Iraqi people and U.S. troops there. Yup, never hurts to pinch yourself hard on entering presidential campaign space right now.
The three candidates addressed Gen. David Petraeus in tones of high gravitas equal to the thin altitude of the American presidency. Sen. Obama colloquied with Gen. Petraeus about the status of al Qaeda in Iraq – asking whether the terrorist organization could “reconstitute itself” and said that he was looking for “an endpoint.”
Here’s another hypothetical: Would this conversation be different today if in August 2006 seven airliners had taken off from Terminal 3 at Heathrow Airport, bound for the U.S. and Canada and each carrying about 250 passengers, and then blew up over the Atlantic Ocean?
It is a hypothetical because, instead of the explosions, British prosecutors this week presented their case against eight Muslim men arrested in August 2006 and charged with conspiring to board and blow up those planes.
The details emerging from that case are quite remarkable and will be summarized shortly. Pause to reflect on the ebb and flow of public debate that has occurred over how free societies should order themselves after two airliners full of passengers knocked down the World Trade Center Towers on Sept. 11 in 2001.
The view that 9/11 “changed everything” did not hold up under the weight of our politics. Divisions re-emerged between Democrats and Republicans, in office and on the streets. These fights reignited over the Patriot Act, Guantanamo and the warrantless wiretap bill (or “FISA” revision). These arguers stopped to stare momentarily at their televisions when Islamic terrorists committed mass murder in the 2004 Madrid train bombing and the 2005 London subway bombing.
…
Here in the U.S., our politics has spent much of the year unable to vote into law the wiretap bill, which is bogged down, incredibly, over giving retrospective legal immunity to telecom companies that helped the government monitor calls originating overseas. Even granting there are Fourth Amendment issues in play here, how is it that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama cannot at least say that class-action lawsuits against these companies are simply wrong right now?
Philip Bobbitt, author of the just released and thought-provoking book, “Terror and Consent,” has written that court warrants are “a useful standard for surveillance designed to prove guilt, not to learn the identity of people who may be planning atrocities.” Planning atrocities is precisely the point.
“Atrocity” is a cruel and ugly word, but it has come to define the common parameters of the world we inhabit. It is entertaining to watch the candidates trying to convince the American people of their ability to be presidential. It would be more than nice to know, before one of them turns into a real president this November, what they will do – or more importantly, will never do – to stop what those eight jihadists sitting in the high-security Woolwich Crown Court in London planned for seven America-bound airliners over the Atlantic Ocean.
Some of the technical facts of the gels/liquids threat is beginning to emerge in the U.K. trial of the eight jihadis:
Two thousand passengers would have died in the plot by eight fanatics working “in the name of Islam”, the jury was told.
It could have involved up to 18 suicide bombers. And they were almost ready to strike.
…Liquid explosives disguised with food colouring and mouthwash would be smuggled past security and on to the flights.
There they would be hooked up to homemade detonators powered by tiny camera batteries and set off to cause mid-air carnage, the court heard.
After the alleged plot was uncovered, in August 2006, the authorities banned passengers from carrying most liquids on board aircraft.
The main ingredient of the homemade bombs was said to be hydrogen peroxide, commonly used as hair bleach and easily available on the high street, mixed with other chemicals which the Daily Mail is not naming.
The plan was to drill small holes in the bottom of 500ml plastic bottles of Oasis and Lucozade and pour away the drinks, the jury heard.
Then the conspirators would use a syringe to inject the ready-mixed explosive liquid into the bottles. Prosecutor Peter Wright QC said the hole would be closed with glue to give the appearance of a “factory sealed” bottle.
Once on board the aircraft, the improvised bombs would be hooked up to a detonator disguised as a standard AA 1.5-volt battery, containing a substance known as HMTD - produced from a mixture of household and commercial ingredients which are freely available.
The detonator would be ignited using metal wire, a small bulb or the flash from a disposal camera, said Mr Wright.
He said improvised bombs using similar ingredients had been used in other terrorist attacks.
I’ve not read the referenced Obama speech — but I’ve found Amir Taheri to be a reliable source on Middle East and Iranian affairs.
The American presidential election campaign took a bizarre theological turn recently when Barack Obama accused John McCain of not being able to distinguish Sunnis from Shiites.
The exchange started when Sen. McCain suggested that the Islamic Republic in Iran, a Shiite power, may be helping al Qaeda, a Sunni outfit, in its murderous campaign in Iraq and elsewhere. Basing its position on received wisdom, the Obama camp implied that Sunnis and Shiites, divided as they are by deep doctrinal differences, could not come together to fight the United States and its allies.
[more]
We get too little real journalism about these subjects and too much “churnalism”, in which a single sometimes misleading wire report is repeated by thousands of commentators while nobody bothers to read the source document.
The Federation of American Scientists has made available the just-released report by the Iraqi Perspectives Project, Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents. The report comprises five volumes, totaling some 200MB of PDF downloads. It is a formidable document to digest. Predictably no big media analysis has emerged so far — based on actually reading the report.
That said, reliable source Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian, has had a go, resulting in the best analysis I’ve come across so far. Best to read the entire article, half being devoted to an interview with visiting Israeli cabinet minister Isaac Herzog. Here’s just the last paragraphs on the captured documents report:
…the new report details a dizzying promiscuity in Saddam’s terrorist operations and support for terrorists in many parts of the world. Saddam tried to kill the wife of French president Francois Mitterrand. He targeted Western journalists directly.
One of the most wry and unconsciously amusing exchanges involves a complaint by Iraqi embassies that they cannot dispose of the vast quantities of weapons and explosives that they have transported in part by diplomatic pouch and accumulated across the globe. There are Iraqi terrorist training schools with dozens of non-Iraqi Arabs. There is support for Pakistani terror groups. An agent is sent to the Philippines to look for opportunities. There is a close relationship with Hamas, which boasts of its armed cells in France, Sweden and Denmark. There is a call for Iraqi authorities to find recruits willing to undertake suicide missions. There is the desire to kill Americans in different parts of the world. And all this comes from translated official Iraqi government documents.
The Bush administration, and its coalition allies in Britain and Australia, never, ever claimed that Iraq was responsible for 9/11.
They said something else entirely. The then US deputy secretary of state, Rich Armitage, said to me at the time of the Iraq invasion that Saddam’s connections with terrorists was “at the top of our concerns”.
That was just exactly where they should have been
The Iraqi Perspectives Project was originally referred to as “The Harmony Database” [which I first wrote about here in 2006]. It has taken three years to assemble some preliminary conclusions — I understand largely due to the severe shortage of Arabic linguists. A glimpse of the value of the work can be gleaned from the table of contents:
Executive Summary ES-l
Terror as an Instrument of State Power 1
Infrastructure for State Terrorism l
State Sponsorship of Suicide Operations 7
State Relationships with Terrorist Groups 13
Managing Relationships 13
Nurturing Organizational Relationships 15
Outreach Program 20
“Quid Pro Quo” 24
Iraq and Terrorism: Three Cases 27
The Abu aI-Abbas Case 27
Attacks on Humanitarian Organizations 30
Destabilizing Saudi Arabia and Kuwait 35
The Business of Terror 41
Venture Capitalists for Terrorists .41
The Terror “Business” Model of Saddam Hussein 42
Conclusion
Technorati Tags: Saddam
All of these factors combined to create a paralyzing culture of risk-averse legalism in the military and, especially, intelligence establishments before 9/11.
I encourage you to hop directly over to Tigerhawk’s post on Jack Goldsmith’s new book, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration. I agree with the points made there, and just want to note that the author of Tigerhawk knows whereof he speaks regarding the impact of Sarbox on competitiveness. One of Goldsmith’s themes is similar — how over-lawyering is strangling decision-making in the executive branch.
…My opinions out of the way, I submit for your discussion a long (but fair-use!) excerpt regarding “retroactive discipline,” the second-guessing by lawyers of executive branch actions thought to be lawful ex ante but arguably unlawful ex post:
<snip excerpted paragraphs from The Terror Presidency…>
Before you jump in to what I know will be a robust comment thread, consider two supplemental thoughts. First, the fight over whether the telecom corporations should get immunity from civil lawsuits for having helped the NSA monitor communications involving potential jihadis is really about the application of “retroactive discipline,” albeit by tort lawyers rather than prosecutors. Second, Goldsmith’s interpretation of the bureaucratic dynamic will resonate forcefully with anybody who has worked as a public company director, CEO or CFO in the last seven years. The increasing criminalization of business decisions is having a huge influence on such people. Anybody in such a job without a bodyguard of lawyers is a fool, and that is having precisely the same influence on the American businessman’s proclivity for risk as Goldsmith says prevails in the various national security agencies.
For other posts on this theme, please see here and also the Glenn and Helen show interview with Dr. Goldsmith. Remember all this when you are reading the NYT reports from some future “Next 9/11 Commission” hearings. The indignant senators will want to know “Why didn’t you do what was so obviously necessary to prevent this attack?”. These are the same legislators who have smothered the executive, indeed the country, in a paralyzing spiderweb of laws. Again from Goldsmith:
…”I know from my work on this Committee for the past 10 years that lawyers at CIA sometimes have displayed a risk aversion in the advice they give their clients,” Senator Bob Graham, the distinguished Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, complained one year after 9/11, during the confirmation hearings of Scott Muller for the General Counsel of the CIA. Senator Graham and many others on the Senate and House intelligence committees in both parties were furious about what Graham called “cautious lawyering” at the CIA.
Technorati Tags: Lawyering, Legal, Sarbox
…British authorities foiled the summer 2006 liquid explosive aviation plot thanks in large part to critical financial intelligence.
Matthew Levitt offers a useful survey of progress and success in financial counter-terror:
And while following the money will not stop all plots, it can disrupt terrorist activity and complicate the efforts of logistical and financial support networks. At a minimum, it makes it harder for terrorists to travel, procure materials, provide for their families, and radicalize others. Denying terrorists easy access to financial tools forces them to use more costly, less efficient, less secure, and less reliable means of financing.
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