As the Western world again debates the roots of Islamist attacks on Britain and the United States, the question often posed is “Why do they hate us?” The conventional wisdom is that alienated youth, suffering prejudice and unemployment, migrate to suicide bombings to help redress the grievious injuries suffered by uncaring European societies that offer them no way out. Also mentioned are the broader political issues of Palestine, Iraq and recently, Hezbollah.
But the real answer is not so simple or so trite. There are certainly push factors: undoubtedly Northern Africans, Pakistanis and others suffer prejudice and social isolation. Many are angry at geopolitical issues.
The quetions is why the isolation, and that leads to the pull factors, which are just as strong and perhaps more important. The primary pull factor resides in a small number of easily identifiable and identified mosques. Most of the religious institutions are part of the Muslim Brotherhood network.
What is taught in these mosques, to young people already feeling aggrieved, is not new. They are told that assimilation is wrong and that the more alienated one feels, the closer one is to Allah. Western civilization is degenerate, filthy and full of sin. Rejection of the non-Muslim society in which one lives is a duty, and alienation and hatred a sign of favor from Allah.
Those who are open to this teaching are often then offered special classes and other teaching and opportunities to expand on this concept.
Much of the social isolation surrounding those in these mosques, particularly the UK and the Netherlands, is self imposed. Why integrate or seek to accomodate yourself to the world you live in when alienation is a mark of piety and devotion? How far of a step is it from that to the next logical conclusion? True piety is demonstrated by attacking the oppressive infidel who persecutes Muslims worldwide.
It is time to stop seeing suicide bombers as somehow innocent victims driven by acts of injustice to seek retribution in societies where they are abused. Every society has the stain of prejudice, and it is never right or pretty. But few who feel that way are told that their alienation is Allah’s will and that destroying the societies that may have wronged them is the divinely-approved solution.
This teaching is part of a strategy, outlined by the Brotherhood in its own writings, with the aim of establishing the Muslim caliphate across Europe and the rest of the world. This ideology and theology of hatred and alienation is not taught by a few isolated and repudiated imams. It is the core teaching of a major component of political Islam, and shared by wahhabi Islamists and Salafists.
Listening to commentators on cable television since the UK plot was uncovered, it is striking how little the pull factors are discussed, rather than solely the easy to identify push factors that make the killers appear to be victims. The enemy has a pretty clear plan and a solid message. We cannot even define who the enemy is.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Friday, August 11, 2006
Iran is Threatening Terror Attacks Against the West by Olivier Guitta
Hossein Shariatmadari, the president of the conservative Iranian Kayhan newspaper, wrote in his newspaper on July 31, 2006 an article where he asked "young Muslims to attack Zionists, Zionist centers as well as the embassies of the countries supporting Israel such as the U.S., the U.K., etc." and nobody really cares.
Shariatmadari is a mouthpiece for the regime in Tehran, and is appointed personally by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini. Iran usually acts on its threats by using proxies to perfom attacks on the West. For example, in 1986 Hezbollah on Tehran's orders terrorized Paris for a few months placing bombs in public places on a very regular basis; in 1992 and 1994 in Buenos Aires, the attack against the Israeli embassy and in 1994 the Jewish center; in 1996 the attack against the Khobar Towers.
In a related and very unreported story, Iran has litterally taken hostage two European citizens: one French and one German. In fact on November 29, 2005 they were sailing from Um Al Quwain, in the United Arab Emirates for a fishing trip. When they approached the island of Abu Mussa - which is legally in UAE territory but Iran claims it's theirs, they were right away arrested by Iranian authorities for illegally entering "Iranian waters". They were sentenced to eighteen months in jail and are starting their ninth month in the famous Evin prison. Whtat's most interesting about this is that just before them two English sailors were arrested in the same spot but were released after ten days.
Why would the French and German citizens get such a harsher sentence?
Could it be that France and Germany part of the EU 3 who have been trying to negotiate with Iran on the nuclear issue, have been tougher on Iran than expected?
Iran will use any means to get their nuclear program up and running including attacking asymetrically any nation standing in its way. Western nations should be fully aware that the Hezbollah war on Israel is just the beginning.
Shariatmadari is a mouthpiece for the regime in Tehran, and is appointed personally by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini. Iran usually acts on its threats by using proxies to perfom attacks on the West. For example, in 1986 Hezbollah on Tehran's orders terrorized Paris for a few months placing bombs in public places on a very regular basis; in 1992 and 1994 in Buenos Aires, the attack against the Israeli embassy and in 1994 the Jewish center; in 1996 the attack against the Khobar Towers.
In a related and very unreported story, Iran has litterally taken hostage two European citizens: one French and one German. In fact on November 29, 2005 they were sailing from Um Al Quwain, in the United Arab Emirates for a fishing trip. When they approached the island of Abu Mussa - which is legally in UAE territory but Iran claims it's theirs, they were right away arrested by Iranian authorities for illegally entering "Iranian waters". They were sentenced to eighteen months in jail and are starting their ninth month in the famous Evin prison. Whtat's most interesting about this is that just before them two English sailors were arrested in the same spot but were released after ten days.
Why would the French and German citizens get such a harsher sentence?
Could it be that France and Germany part of the EU 3 who have been trying to negotiate with Iran on the nuclear issue, have been tougher on Iran than expected?
Iran will use any means to get their nuclear program up and running including attacking asymetrically any nation standing in its way. Western nations should be fully aware that the Hezbollah war on Israel is just the beginning.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Expert: Iran Poised to Be 'Mother of All World Threats' by Dave Eberhart
For anyone who still thinks the Israeli-Lebanon war is just a border scuffle, one Middle East expert shouts a dire warning:
"As soon as a cease-fire occurs, the 'Hezbollah Blitzkrieg' will crumble the 'Lebanese Republic of Weimar' and install its own 'Khumeinist Republic' on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. The consequences of such a development are far beyond imagination for the region and the world. Hezbollah would have paved the way for Iran to create the mother of all world threats since Hitler."
So cautions Professor Walid Phares, author of "Future Jihad," a visiting fellow with the European Foundation for Democracy in Brussels and a senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.
In an exclusive interview with NewsMax, the Lebanese-born Phares likens the current Hezbollah offensive in Lebanon to a "putsch" – with the convoluted aims of re-establishing a pro-Syrian-Iranian regime in Lebanon, reconstructing a third wing to the Tehran-Damascus axis, re-animating the Arab-Israeli conflict, rejuvenating Syrian dominance, isolating Jordan, reaching out to Hamas, crumbling Iraq, and unleashing Iran's nuclear programs.
The author also sees half-measures and premature truces as catalysts to even bloodier future conflicts:
"If Israel takes 40 kilometers [into the southern belly of Lebanon] and sits, Hezbollah and its allies will take the rest of the country and eliminate the Cedars Revolution [the Lebanese democracy movement]. That is a certainty. Then the two camps will clash in a wider war in few more months."
As a corollary, however, the expert advises that if Israel gets even more aggressive and moves instead through the Bekaa (a fertile valley in Lebanon and Syria, located about 19 miles east of Beirut), it would shut down the Syrian-Lebanese borders (a major supply line for war materials flowing to Hezbollah).
But such a definitive move, says the author, would bring Syria into the conflict, and Israel would then have to engage the Assad regime (Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria).
Meanwhile, Phares suggests, under the scenario outlined above, Iran would not sit still but would intervene in a more covert way than has been seen thus far.
However, he advises, Iran doesn't have a land passage to Syria, so it would strike back by igniting an "intifada" in Iraq.
"But this will put Iran on the path of the U.S. coalition, leading the region to global confrontations," Phares predicts. "Israel could also reach the Syrian borders, but instead of a war with Damascus, Assad would accept a MNF [Multi-National Force] at this time to save his regime, which sounds the most realistic."
Phares then projects that a MNF in control of the borders would isolate Hezbollah from Syria and Iran – enabling a new Lebanese army to slowly take back control of the country, leading Israel to withdraw behind the borders.
Neighboring Jordan will try to remain neutral – unless Iranian forces try to link up with Syria via Iraq, says Phares. Jordan, he adds, will in the end most likely side with NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization).
For its part, Egypt will face increasing domestic Jihadism but will refrain from cross-border activities, he predicts.
The Risk of an Explosion
The author forecasts some bad outcomes.
If the Lebanon conflict persists too long or if Hezbollah takes over, Jihadi forces in Jordan and Egypt will explode, he predicts.
"In short, if Lebanon falls to Jihadism, all Arab countries will experience similar moves. If the free-Lebanese regain control, democracy forces will move forward in the region. It is a geopolitical crossroad," Phares says.
Phares emphasizes that the old parameters of a "buffer zone" don't work anymore.
He sees as the key for everyone in the region finding security, stability, freedom, and eventually peace – the stopping of the flow of weapons and support from Iran to Hezbollah.
"Israel can establish all the security zones," Phares instructs, "the U.S. and the U.N. can issue all the resolutions, and the Lebanese army can be sent to any area – as long as the Lebanese-Syrian borders are open between the Assad regime and Nasrallah's [Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the current secretary-general of the Lebanese Islamist party Hezbollah] militia, the war will go on."
The Issue of the Lebanese Army
Along with reciting the reams of regional history necessary to understand the origins of the quagmire, Phares tells NewsMax what he sees as intriguing subplots, including a draconian one to rid Hezbollah of the Lebanese army.
The author argues that no changes were made inside the Lebanese army to bring it in harmony with the Cedars Revolution (discussed below).
"So, what you have there is an army of which 80 percent of its officer corps and about 65 percent of its ranks dislike the Baathists, Iranians and Hezbollah – but it is still chained to a pro-Syrian president and paralyzed by [Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad] Seniora's unwillingness to disarm Hezbollah."
But despite the mixed allegiances of the Lebanese army, Hezballoh still wants it out of the way.
Phares opines that Nasrallah wants to move units of the Lebanese army southbound. Hezbollah would then trigger yet more violence with Israel, leading to the latter having to take on the whole Lebanese army.
"Nasrallah is pushing Siniora to send the army to southern Lebanon to be slaughtered," says Phares. "He wants Israel to destroy the Lebanese army – the institution which in the long term could dismantle the deep terror roots of Hezbollah, once a multinational force deploys and all borders are secured."
Phares pauses for a moment in his analysis of what could come to pass in the near term and looks out to a distant and perhaps hopeful future:
"If democracies allow Jihadism to crush the civil societies of the region, it would take at least two generations to begin another democratic revolution in the Middle East," the author opines. "So, by the end of this century, in this case, you have two scenarios: either bloody war in the region, with greater genocide than ever – and also possibly a number of nuclear blast spots ...
"However, if the international community focuses on assisting the peoples of the region to get rid of the Jihadi-fascism and the remnants of Baathism, in one hundred years you'll be able to ski in Lebanon, enjoy pastries in Damascus, and watch the clever female prime minister of Iran discussing environment issues with her colleague in Afghanistan.
"Jihadists would be looked at as the weird small fractions in the secular multiparty parliaments of the region who are still arguing how they lost the opportunity to re-establish a caliphate in the early century ..."
Lost Horizons
But whether the international community rises to its finest hour remains to be seen, says Phares.
Look back at the Cedar Revolution, he suggests.
The so-called Cedar Revolution was the chain of demonstrations and popular civic action in Lebanon triggered by the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on February 14, 2005.
Following the demonstrations, Syrian troops completely withdrew from Lebanon on April 27, 2005. The pro-Syrian government was also disbanded. History in the region since that time has been defined mostly by Hezbollah wanting to undo the progress toward democracy.
Since the Cedars Revolution, says Phares, no single event has shown the international community greater expression from Lebanon. And that is what Hassan Nasrallah wants to destroy, he maintains.
"His [Nasrallah's] real war waged at his own timing against Israel aims in fact at destroying the Cedar Revolution, the single most dangerous popular resistance against terrorism in the history of Lebanon and the region," argues the scholar.
Continuing, the author says: "The U.S. and Europe loved the images of youth and women chanting freedom in Beirut for many days and thought this was Eastern Europe all over again. They were right, but they missed the point.
"These masses were desperately calling on the international community for help. 'We showed you that we want freedom despite the threats of the most oppressive regimes (Syria and Iran) and of a terrorist organization; we've displayed all the courage of the world, alone and without weapons, responding to the calls of spreading democracy,' said the leaders of the Cedar Revolution's NGOs [non-governmental organizations]."
Poignantly, Phares says that the people of Lebanon were begging, in fact, "Now come and protect us – at least as you did for the Afghan and Iraqi voters."
Meanwhile, the author says, Hezbollah and its masters were watching the Western response: "Lots of celebrations and powerful speeches on both sides of the Atlantic. But inside Lebanon, the old wolves were back to work."
The long story short, says the expert: Syria, Iran and Hezbollah outmaneuvered the Lebanese politicians, as well as the West, by, among other things, keeping pro-Syrian Emile Jamil Lahoud, president of the Republic of Lebanon, at the helm.
"It was terrible how the Lebanese politicians lost all the opportunities provided by the Cedar Revolution," laments Phares, "but it is worse that the bureaucrats in the U.S. and Europe didn't understand what Hezbollah was doing."
Phares says he regrets that no one policy regarding the Cedar Revolution was ever put forth. Billions of dollars were spent on the War of Ideas and Iraq while requests by Lebanese NGOs, small media and civil society groups ready to resume the Cedar Revolution were left unheard, he adds.
Roots of Crisis
Phares argues that Washington and Brussels relied too much on a Lebanese Cabinet that had been penetrated by Hezbollah.
"How can you have U.S. officials sitting with the Lebanese Cabinet in the presence of Hezbollah ministers and talk about the Lebanese army disarming this organization? The naivete with which Hezbollah's offensive was dealt with is stunning."
"As soon as a cease-fire occurs, the 'Hezbollah Blitzkrieg' will crumble the 'Lebanese Republic of Weimar' and install its own 'Khumeinist Republic' on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. The consequences of such a development are far beyond imagination for the region and the world. Hezbollah would have paved the way for Iran to create the mother of all world threats since Hitler."
So cautions Professor Walid Phares, author of "Future Jihad," a visiting fellow with the European Foundation for Democracy in Brussels and a senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.
In an exclusive interview with NewsMax, the Lebanese-born Phares likens the current Hezbollah offensive in Lebanon to a "putsch" – with the convoluted aims of re-establishing a pro-Syrian-Iranian regime in Lebanon, reconstructing a third wing to the Tehran-Damascus axis, re-animating the Arab-Israeli conflict, rejuvenating Syrian dominance, isolating Jordan, reaching out to Hamas, crumbling Iraq, and unleashing Iran's nuclear programs.
The author also sees half-measures and premature truces as catalysts to even bloodier future conflicts:
"If Israel takes 40 kilometers [into the southern belly of Lebanon] and sits, Hezbollah and its allies will take the rest of the country and eliminate the Cedars Revolution [the Lebanese democracy movement]. That is a certainty. Then the two camps will clash in a wider war in few more months."
As a corollary, however, the expert advises that if Israel gets even more aggressive and moves instead through the Bekaa (a fertile valley in Lebanon and Syria, located about 19 miles east of Beirut), it would shut down the Syrian-Lebanese borders (a major supply line for war materials flowing to Hezbollah).
But such a definitive move, says the author, would bring Syria into the conflict, and Israel would then have to engage the Assad regime (Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria).
Meanwhile, Phares suggests, under the scenario outlined above, Iran would not sit still but would intervene in a more covert way than has been seen thus far.
However, he advises, Iran doesn't have a land passage to Syria, so it would strike back by igniting an "intifada" in Iraq.
"But this will put Iran on the path of the U.S. coalition, leading the region to global confrontations," Phares predicts. "Israel could also reach the Syrian borders, but instead of a war with Damascus, Assad would accept a MNF [Multi-National Force] at this time to save his regime, which sounds the most realistic."
Phares then projects that a MNF in control of the borders would isolate Hezbollah from Syria and Iran – enabling a new Lebanese army to slowly take back control of the country, leading Israel to withdraw behind the borders.
Neighboring Jordan will try to remain neutral – unless Iranian forces try to link up with Syria via Iraq, says Phares. Jordan, he adds, will in the end most likely side with NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization).
For its part, Egypt will face increasing domestic Jihadism but will refrain from cross-border activities, he predicts.
The Risk of an Explosion
The author forecasts some bad outcomes.
If the Lebanon conflict persists too long or if Hezbollah takes over, Jihadi forces in Jordan and Egypt will explode, he predicts.
"In short, if Lebanon falls to Jihadism, all Arab countries will experience similar moves. If the free-Lebanese regain control, democracy forces will move forward in the region. It is a geopolitical crossroad," Phares says.
Phares emphasizes that the old parameters of a "buffer zone" don't work anymore.
He sees as the key for everyone in the region finding security, stability, freedom, and eventually peace – the stopping of the flow of weapons and support from Iran to Hezbollah.
"Israel can establish all the security zones," Phares instructs, "the U.S. and the U.N. can issue all the resolutions, and the Lebanese army can be sent to any area – as long as the Lebanese-Syrian borders are open between the Assad regime and Nasrallah's [Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the current secretary-general of the Lebanese Islamist party Hezbollah] militia, the war will go on."
The Issue of the Lebanese Army
Along with reciting the reams of regional history necessary to understand the origins of the quagmire, Phares tells NewsMax what he sees as intriguing subplots, including a draconian one to rid Hezbollah of the Lebanese army.
The author argues that no changes were made inside the Lebanese army to bring it in harmony with the Cedars Revolution (discussed below).
"So, what you have there is an army of which 80 percent of its officer corps and about 65 percent of its ranks dislike the Baathists, Iranians and Hezbollah – but it is still chained to a pro-Syrian president and paralyzed by [Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad] Seniora's unwillingness to disarm Hezbollah."
But despite the mixed allegiances of the Lebanese army, Hezballoh still wants it out of the way.
Phares opines that Nasrallah wants to move units of the Lebanese army southbound. Hezbollah would then trigger yet more violence with Israel, leading to the latter having to take on the whole Lebanese army.
"Nasrallah is pushing Siniora to send the army to southern Lebanon to be slaughtered," says Phares. "He wants Israel to destroy the Lebanese army – the institution which in the long term could dismantle the deep terror roots of Hezbollah, once a multinational force deploys and all borders are secured."
Phares pauses for a moment in his analysis of what could come to pass in the near term and looks out to a distant and perhaps hopeful future:
"If democracies allow Jihadism to crush the civil societies of the region, it would take at least two generations to begin another democratic revolution in the Middle East," the author opines. "So, by the end of this century, in this case, you have two scenarios: either bloody war in the region, with greater genocide than ever – and also possibly a number of nuclear blast spots ...
"However, if the international community focuses on assisting the peoples of the region to get rid of the Jihadi-fascism and the remnants of Baathism, in one hundred years you'll be able to ski in Lebanon, enjoy pastries in Damascus, and watch the clever female prime minister of Iran discussing environment issues with her colleague in Afghanistan.
"Jihadists would be looked at as the weird small fractions in the secular multiparty parliaments of the region who are still arguing how they lost the opportunity to re-establish a caliphate in the early century ..."
Lost Horizons
But whether the international community rises to its finest hour remains to be seen, says Phares.
Look back at the Cedar Revolution, he suggests.
The so-called Cedar Revolution was the chain of demonstrations and popular civic action in Lebanon triggered by the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on February 14, 2005.
Following the demonstrations, Syrian troops completely withdrew from Lebanon on April 27, 2005. The pro-Syrian government was also disbanded. History in the region since that time has been defined mostly by Hezbollah wanting to undo the progress toward democracy.
Since the Cedars Revolution, says Phares, no single event has shown the international community greater expression from Lebanon. And that is what Hassan Nasrallah wants to destroy, he maintains.
"His [Nasrallah's] real war waged at his own timing against Israel aims in fact at destroying the Cedar Revolution, the single most dangerous popular resistance against terrorism in the history of Lebanon and the region," argues the scholar.
Continuing, the author says: "The U.S. and Europe loved the images of youth and women chanting freedom in Beirut for many days and thought this was Eastern Europe all over again. They were right, but they missed the point.
"These masses were desperately calling on the international community for help. 'We showed you that we want freedom despite the threats of the most oppressive regimes (Syria and Iran) and of a terrorist organization; we've displayed all the courage of the world, alone and without weapons, responding to the calls of spreading democracy,' said the leaders of the Cedar Revolution's NGOs [non-governmental organizations]."
Poignantly, Phares says that the people of Lebanon were begging, in fact, "Now come and protect us – at least as you did for the Afghan and Iraqi voters."
Meanwhile, the author says, Hezbollah and its masters were watching the Western response: "Lots of celebrations and powerful speeches on both sides of the Atlantic. But inside Lebanon, the old wolves were back to work."
The long story short, says the expert: Syria, Iran and Hezbollah outmaneuvered the Lebanese politicians, as well as the West, by, among other things, keeping pro-Syrian Emile Jamil Lahoud, president of the Republic of Lebanon, at the helm.
"It was terrible how the Lebanese politicians lost all the opportunities provided by the Cedar Revolution," laments Phares, "but it is worse that the bureaucrats in the U.S. and Europe didn't understand what Hezbollah was doing."
Phares says he regrets that no one policy regarding the Cedar Revolution was ever put forth. Billions of dollars were spent on the War of Ideas and Iraq while requests by Lebanese NGOs, small media and civil society groups ready to resume the Cedar Revolution were left unheard, he adds.
Roots of Crisis
Phares argues that Washington and Brussels relied too much on a Lebanese Cabinet that had been penetrated by Hezbollah.
"How can you have U.S. officials sitting with the Lebanese Cabinet in the presence of Hezbollah ministers and talk about the Lebanese army disarming this organization? The naivete with which Hezbollah's offensive was dealt with is stunning."
Israeli Cabinet Votes to Push Deeper into Southern Lebanon by Bill Roggio
The Israeli Cabinet vote on the authorization for the Israeli Defense Force to expand ground operations in southern Lebanon highlights the government's lack of a cohesive plan at the war's outset and the hesitation to take the fight directly to Hezbollah on the ground. At the start of the war, the initial plan was to establish a 1-2 kilometer buffer zone and patrol southern Lebanon via air. This morphed into a 6-8 kilometer buffer, which was basically the posture of the Israeli Defense Force up to the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2002. Hezbollah's continuous shelling of northern Israel has shown the limitations of these limited incursions.
Haaretz reports the plan authorizes "troops to push at least up to the Litani River some 30 kilometers from the Israel-Lebanon border," and in some cases to operate beyond the river boundary. The Israeli government is looking for relief from the short range Katyusha rockets. The Israelis have learned there are limitations with using an air campaign to defeat a well trained, entrenched and motivated enemy. Israeli forces are having difficulties with Hezbollah missile teams just a few kilometers from the border after 4 weeks of fighting.
But the proposed expanded ground offensive in southern Lebanon is still on hold. The Israeli government is signaling it is seeking a diplomatic solution, and is delaying back the ground offensive to allow diplomacy to run its course. "The offensive would not begin for two or three days so as not interfere with ongoing efforts to broker a cease-fire at the United Nations, said one minister in the meeting," according to Haaretz.
I respectfully disagree with Zeyno Baran's assessment that "Israel has finally gotten over its 'Lebanon trauma'" and is prepared to move into Lebanon in force, and that "Israel destroyed most of Hizbollah’s weaponry through its superior air force." Although the cabinet vote approved the extended incursion, the Israeli leadership still wavers over sending troops en masse deep into southern Lebanon, and Prime Minister Olmert is said to be very concerned with taking casualties in the fighting. Hezbollah has been launching short range rockets at northern Israel at a steady rate of 100 - 200 per day, and there are serious questions within the U.S. intelligence community about the Israeli Air Force's claims that Hezbollah's assets have been seriously degraded. Hezbollah's command and control is intact, coordinated rocket attacks are launched regularly, the IAF has yet to kill a senior Hezbollah political or military leader, and estimates that up to two-thirds of Hezbollah's long range rockets are just that.
As the Israeli government puts the ground offensive on hold while waiting for a unlikely diplomatic solution, the IDF and Hezbollah continue to engage in fierce skirmishes in villages that have been battlegrounds since the conflict began. A look at the battle map will show that little has changed over the past week. The towns of Bint Jubayl, Ayta al-Shaab and now Dibil have been the scenes of intense battles. Hezbollah anti-tank teams have taken their toll on the IDF Merkava main battle tanks as well as Israeli armored fighting vehicles. The IDF Withdrawal from the Hezbollah stronghold of Bint Jubayl was a serious tactical error and a strategic propaganda defeat that Israeli troops are paying for with their lives. Hezbollah is said to have suffered anywhere from 30 to 40 killed in action, while the IDF suffered 15 killed and 37 wounded in fighting along the border.
Four weeks after the open of the war with Hezbollah, the Israeli government has finally decided to do what should have been done from the start - put boots on the ground deep into southern Lebanon and directly engage Hezbollah's well trained military. But there is little talk of dealing Hezbollah a decisive military defeat, which would require a ground engagement in the Bekaa Valley.
A diplomatic solution at this stage in the fighting benefits Hezbollah, not Israeli, as Hezbollah would retain its military assets and gain stature from standing up to the Israelis. As long as the Syrian-Lebanese border remains open and Hezbollah bases in the Bekaa valley remain operational, Hezbollah will retain its power and threaten the security of the Lebanese and Israeli states.
Haaretz reports the plan authorizes "troops to push at least up to the Litani River some 30 kilometers from the Israel-Lebanon border," and in some cases to operate beyond the river boundary. The Israeli government is looking for relief from the short range Katyusha rockets. The Israelis have learned there are limitations with using an air campaign to defeat a well trained, entrenched and motivated enemy. Israeli forces are having difficulties with Hezbollah missile teams just a few kilometers from the border after 4 weeks of fighting.
But the proposed expanded ground offensive in southern Lebanon is still on hold. The Israeli government is signaling it is seeking a diplomatic solution, and is delaying back the ground offensive to allow diplomacy to run its course. "The offensive would not begin for two or three days so as not interfere with ongoing efforts to broker a cease-fire at the United Nations, said one minister in the meeting," according to Haaretz.
I respectfully disagree with Zeyno Baran's assessment that "Israel has finally gotten over its 'Lebanon trauma'" and is prepared to move into Lebanon in force, and that "Israel destroyed most of Hizbollah’s weaponry through its superior air force." Although the cabinet vote approved the extended incursion, the Israeli leadership still wavers over sending troops en masse deep into southern Lebanon, and Prime Minister Olmert is said to be very concerned with taking casualties in the fighting. Hezbollah has been launching short range rockets at northern Israel at a steady rate of 100 - 200 per day, and there are serious questions within the U.S. intelligence community about the Israeli Air Force's claims that Hezbollah's assets have been seriously degraded. Hezbollah's command and control is intact, coordinated rocket attacks are launched regularly, the IAF has yet to kill a senior Hezbollah political or military leader, and estimates that up to two-thirds of Hezbollah's long range rockets are just that.
As the Israeli government puts the ground offensive on hold while waiting for a unlikely diplomatic solution, the IDF and Hezbollah continue to engage in fierce skirmishes in villages that have been battlegrounds since the conflict began. A look at the battle map will show that little has changed over the past week. The towns of Bint Jubayl, Ayta al-Shaab and now Dibil have been the scenes of intense battles. Hezbollah anti-tank teams have taken their toll on the IDF Merkava main battle tanks as well as Israeli armored fighting vehicles. The IDF Withdrawal from the Hezbollah stronghold of Bint Jubayl was a serious tactical error and a strategic propaganda defeat that Israeli troops are paying for with their lives. Hezbollah is said to have suffered anywhere from 30 to 40 killed in action, while the IDF suffered 15 killed and 37 wounded in fighting along the border.
Four weeks after the open of the war with Hezbollah, the Israeli government has finally decided to do what should have been done from the start - put boots on the ground deep into southern Lebanon and directly engage Hezbollah's well trained military. But there is little talk of dealing Hezbollah a decisive military defeat, which would require a ground engagement in the Bekaa Valley.
A diplomatic solution at this stage in the fighting benefits Hezbollah, not Israeli, as Hezbollah would retain its military assets and gain stature from standing up to the Israelis. As long as the Syrian-Lebanese border remains open and Hezbollah bases in the Bekaa valley remain operational, Hezbollah will retain its power and threaten the security of the Lebanese and Israeli states.
Al-Qaida's Use of "Liquid Bombs" Targeting Airliners by Evan Kohlmann
Though for some, news of a reported Al-Qaida plot to down multiple commercial airliners with liquid explosives may sound exotic and unusual, in fact, U.S. authorities have been aware of such a threat from Al-Qaida affiliates for over a decade.
In 1995, when U.S. and Philippine security services uncovered a plot by 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and his uncle 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to bomb over a dozen U.S. airliners simultaneously over the Pacific Ocean [Operation Bojinka], they quickly moved in and arrested their co-conspirators. One of the detained men, trained commercial pilot Abdel Hakim Murad, described Ramzi Yousef's plans in detail -- including his intention to travel to "France, Egypt, and Algeria after the activities here in the Philippines. The purpose was to train those Muslim brothers thereat, on using a Casio watch as a timing device, chemical mixtures to compound bombs, and to share his expertise in eluding detection on an airport's x-ray machine, and eventually smuggling [onboard] this liquid chemical bombs. Furthermore, France has a lot of Algerians staying and that these Egyptians and Algerians ha[ve] no experience on making these bombs and [do] not know the basics of smuggling liquid bombs through the airport."
Eleven years later, we once again return to the same threat to commercial aviation posed by liquid explosives. Only now, it would appear that the fabrication of such high-tech terrorist weapons by Al-Qaida operatives inside Western Europe is no longer an insurmountable challenge.
In 1995, when U.S. and Philippine security services uncovered a plot by 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and his uncle 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to bomb over a dozen U.S. airliners simultaneously over the Pacific Ocean [Operation Bojinka], they quickly moved in and arrested their co-conspirators. One of the detained men, trained commercial pilot Abdel Hakim Murad, described Ramzi Yousef's plans in detail -- including his intention to travel to "France, Egypt, and Algeria after the activities here in the Philippines. The purpose was to train those Muslim brothers thereat, on using a Casio watch as a timing device, chemical mixtures to compound bombs, and to share his expertise in eluding detection on an airport's x-ray machine, and eventually smuggling [onboard] this liquid chemical bombs. Furthermore, France has a lot of Algerians staying and that these Egyptians and Algerians ha[ve] no experience on making these bombs and [do] not know the basics of smuggling liquid bombs through the airport."
Eleven years later, we once again return to the same threat to commercial aviation posed by liquid explosives. Only now, it would appear that the fabrication of such high-tech terrorist weapons by Al-Qaida operatives inside Western Europe is no longer an insurmountable challenge.
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
A Fight Against Terrorism -- and Disorganization by Karen DeYoung
Early this summer, a new strategy for combating terrorism, described by its authors as "revolutionary" in concept, arrived on President Bush's desk. The highly classified National Implementation Plan for the first time set government-wide goals and assigned responsibility for achieving them to specific departments and agencies.
Written by officials at the National Counterterrorism Center, under a directive signed by the president last winter, the 160-page plan aspires to achieve what has eluded the Bush administration in the five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: bringing order and direction to the fight against terrorism.
In the years since Bush stood atop the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center and pledged retaliation against "the people who knocked down these buildings," the federal government has undergone an unprecedented expansion and reorganization.
Yet the counterterrorism infrastructure that resulted has become so immense and unwieldy that many looking at it from the outside, and even some on the inside, have trouble understanding how it works or how much safer it has made the country.
Huge amounts of money have been spent -- $430 billion so far on overseas military and diplomatic counterterrorism operations, according to the U.S. comptroller general, a tripling of pre-9/11 expenditures for domestic security programs to an estimated $50 billion to $60 billion this year, and untallied billions more in state and local money.
Institutions historically charged with protecting the nation have produced a new generation of bureaucratic offspring -- the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) and Joint Intelligence Task Force for Combating Terrorism (JITF-CT), the Treasury Department's Office of Intelligence and Analysis (OIA), and the FBI's National Security Service (NSS), to name a few -- many with seemingly overlapping missions.
New laws have broadened domestic enforcement powers, and the Justice Department has been radically restructured to emphasize counterterrorism. The FBI, where counterterrorism now accounts for half of all investigations, has nearly doubled its budget to $6 billion since 2001 and added 7,000 employees. Twenty-two domestic agencies have been combined under the new Department of Homeland Security, while separate counterterrorism divisions now exist in virtually every nook and cranny of the federal government, from the Transportation Department to the Food and Drug Administration.
Outside Washington, 42 states have established intelligence "fusion centers" -- centralized locations where local, state and federal officials operate joint information-gathering and analysis operations.
The proof that it is all working, White House officials often say, is that there has been no attack on U.S. soil since 2001.
But critics say that after nearly five years, the fight against terrorism often seems like a chaotic work in progress.
"It's as if we're at 2002 and not 2006 in terms of where we are," Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said in an interview.
The ad hoc construction, adding layer upon layer with none taken away, has left intelligence and security agencies competing for turf. Deadlines for priorities have been missed. DHS, for example, has repeatedly delayed supplying a congressionally mandated list of the nation's critical infrastructure, and a blueprint for information-sharing among federal, state and local entities has been slow to get off the ground.
Continuity and coherence have been undercut by rapid turnover among top officials, particularly in the institutions responsible for domestic security and preparedness.
DHS's cybersecurity division has been run by an acting director since the last full-time appointee -- the third person to leave the post in a year -- resigned in October 2004. In April, the FBI's sixth counterterrorism chief since 2001 tendered his resignation after 10 months on the job. Many with government training and security clearances resign or retire, only to sign on at far higher salaries with the burgeoning private-sector security industry.
At the state and local front lines, officials complain of limited input in the development of homeland security policies and impenetrable layers of federal secrecy -- including as many as 90 categories of "sensitive but unclassified" information -- that limit the usefulness of terrorism alerts they receive from Washington, according to separate surveys this spring by the National Governors Association and the Government Accountability Office.
On paper, at least, the man in charge of much of the counterterrorism effort is Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte. His office was created last year under the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act to fix two widely acknowledged problems. The first was the intelligence community's pre-9/11 failure to collect and share information that might have warned of the al-Qaeda attacks. The second problem was the confusion and competition spawned by post-9/11 attempts to fix the first.
Negroponte supervises the 16 agencies that make up the federal intelligence community and is the president's chief intelligence adviser. Directly under him, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) is the central repository for terrorism information collected throughout the community. Its several hundred analysts integrate intelligence, figure out what it means and redistribute it across the government. The center's strategic planning division provides what NCTC Director John Scott Redd has called "the missing piece" between White House policy decisions and the operational departments and agencies that carry them out.
"We've done a great deal" in the years since 9/11, said one of a number of counterterrorism officials interviewed for this article, all of whom agreed to speak only if their names were not used. "There's a lot more we need to do. A lot more."
The official added: "The American people ought to have some faith that we're working on it."
Beyond the Military Approach
It was only natural that the military would take the lead in fighting terrorism after Sept. 11. In Afghanistan and other al-Qaeda locales, U.S. forces produced victories that were substantive and quantifiable, as well as politically useful to the administration.
Other parts of the government had important roles. But the Defense Department, buttressed by its intrinsic organizational skills, its traditional role as the recipient of the lion's share of the intelligence budget, and the zeal and policymaking influence of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, quickly grew to dominate much more than the war-fighting effort.
The Pentagon has clashed repeatedly with the CIA and the State Department as it has sought to expand its counterterrorism mission. Last year, both protested a secret Pentagon program that sends Special Forces units in plain clothes on intelligence-gathering missions to countries where no war is in progress and with which the United States has friendly diplomatic relations.
The Pentagon argued that troops report to their commanders and the defense secretary, not the secretary of state or the CIA director, and do not need to seek permission from or even to inform local U.S. ambassadors or CIA station chiefs. And, it said, the military needs its own "situational awareness" of possible future combat areas.
When the level of animosity peaked last summer, Rumsfeld and then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss were prodded by Michael V. Hayden, then deputy director of national intelligence, to negotiate an agreement to delineate intelligence-gathering responsibilities. Under a separate memorandum of understanding, the Pentagon and the State Department agreed that ambassadors would be informed of all military activity in their countries and given the opportunity to object.
Beyond the turf battles, however, counterterrorism officials grew concerned that U.S. strategy needed to expand beyond what one called the "whack, capture, interrogate and whack again" approach of the military. "Our thinking has matured radically since 2001," he said. "Then, it was looked at as the al-Qaeda network. Now, it is seen as looser, more diffuse, and also in our own country, in Western Europe and Canada."
"The military can't be the big hammer" anymore, he said, because al-Qaeda and its affiliates "are not the nail."
"You'll never win unless you can get to the sources of radicalization," he added. ". . . As the threat has changed, we've tried to adapt. But it's taken some time. As an American taxpayer, I wish we could have gotten it right in October 2001."
The "changing paradigm" applies at home as well as overseas, said a senior FBI official. The FBI operated on the assumption that "al-Qaeda was 'The Sopranos,' with a boss, an underboss, the consiglieri and the captains who ran the cells," the official said. "It was comfortable for us to understand."
New initiatives such as the National Implementation Plan were launched to eliminate overlap and set priorities for what the administration now calls the "long war." Beyond drawing sharper lines of responsibility, officials said, the plan is designed to drag the nation's counterterrorism strategy back from military dominance, better balancing the military "whack" with diplomacy and the "hearts and minds" campaigns that are now seen as critical to long-term victory.
Bush was briefed on the plan on June 26. A White House official said the plan reflects Bush's feeling that the terrorism fight is "all-encompassing," including military attacks but also "the war of ideas and the softer side, the long-term battle."
Within half a dozen broad objectives, the document designates lead and subordinate agencies to carry out more than 500 discrete counterterrorism tasks, among them vanquishing al-Qaeda, protecting the homeland, wooing allies, training experts in other languages and cultures, and understanding and influencing the Islamic psyche.
Achieving agreement among more than 200 department and agency representatives over 10 months of often-torturous negotiations was "a heroically ambitious exercise," said a senior administration official who participated in the process. "A couple of months ago, everybody was still shaking their heads."
The plan is expected to prompt a rewrite of the president's February 2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, which emphasized the physical elimination of terrorist networks while making largely symbolic bows to international partnerships and addressing the "underlying conditions that terrorists seek to exploit."
Eventually, officials acknowledged, it will also require a reconfiguration of the intelligence budget, now heavily weighted toward the military. No one expects that to happen overnight -- early proposals to shift spending brought a sharp protest from Rumsfeld.
But even at the Pentagon there are signs of turf-war fatigue. "Two years ago, we didn't have anything," said Brig. Gen. Robert Caslen Jr., who until June was the Joint Chiefs of Staff's deputy director for the terrorism fight. "Every department of government had its own idea on who was the enemy. Now we have a strategy and a plan that gives specific tasks and responsibility," he said.
Others are guardedly optimistic that the plan can be implemented. "It's going to alleviate a lot of the turf tensions and the growing pains," said one senior counterterrorism official. "But they're not going to go away."
The Overlaps Persist
In the lead-up to this year's Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, eight of the 16 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community independently produced assessments of possible terrorist threats to the Games. The "finished intelligence products," a counterterrorism official said, all concluded exactly the same thing -- that the threat was minimal.
"They posted them internally to their own organizations and sent them out to share" with other community members as the authoritative bottom line, the official said. "They would all argue, 'We had to do it for our principal, our Cabinet member' or whatever." Watching the competing agencies, he said, "is like watching 7-year-olds play soccer -- you've got 20 kids all following the ball."
Avoiding such duplication and wasted effort, he said, "was the whole point" of setting up the NCTC as the sole provider of integrated intelligence analysis. Yet neither congressional mandates nor presidential directives have been enough to eliminate the overlap.
Before the Intelligence Reform Act, the CIA was in charge of bringing together "all-source" intelligence and analyzing it for the larger intelligence community, the White House and policymakers. It was the CIA that chaired the daily interagency meeting at 5 p.m. to discuss real-time terrorism information and what to do about it. The agency drew up the daily "threat matrix" and the CIA director briefed the president each morning.
But the Sept. 11 commission found that long-standing tensions within and among the CIA, the FBI and the rest of the community, along with institutional firewalls constructed during the Cold War, meant that "information was not shared" and "analysis was not pooled" that might have warned of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.
The CIA's responsibilities for integrating and analyzing all-source intelligence have now been transferred to the DNI and the NCTC. All members of the intelligence community -- including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and other Defense Department agencies and the FBI -- are restricted to analyzing only what they need to accomplish the "tactical missions" specific to their own assignments. For the CIA, that means concentrating on building the clandestine network and human resources that Congress and a series of outside studies have found lacking, especially in the Middle East.
But the DNI-NCTC structure remains vastly outweighed in power, personnel and tradition by the growing bureaucracies it hopes to tame. While the number of NCTC analysts is scheduled to double to 400 by 2008, the FBI alone has tripled its analytic staff since 2001 to more than 2,700. The DIA has nearly 8,000 employees collecting and analyzing intelligence, and the CIA has twice that many.
On July 11, Negroponte signed an internal document titled "Analytic Framework for Counterterrorism" for distribution among the 16 agencies. In a cover note, he pointedly wrote that while he recognized each "must continue to support its agency leadership and unique operational activities, as well as to provide a robust analytical capability and reliable steam of diverse viewpoints," both Congress and the president had given him the authority and "fully empower the NCTC" to "reduce unnecessary duplication of effort."
The framework, said one counterterrorism official, directs operational agencies such as the CIA "to focus their analytical resources" on "penetrating and eliminating known terrorist organizations," leaving the NCTC to provide comprehensive threat analyses for the government as a whole.
Although Hayden's appointment as CIA director in May is likely to hasten the agency's acceptance of what is known in the community as "the lanes in the road," intelligence officials have not been shy about expressing skepticism and resentment.
Many see themselves as demoted to mere intelligence-gatherers, stripped of their rightful roles as strategic analysts and forward-looking policy advisers. An internal CIA study, declassified last month a year after it was written, criticized the NCTC model as promoting "watered-down analysis, duplication, confusion, and misuse of scarce resources." Separating those who collect intelligence from those who analyze it would result in a weaker product, the study said, and was likely to lead to more strategic failures like those in Iraq.
The addition of new non-operational layers to integrate, analyze and share information "has made the organizational picture more, not less, confusing," Paul R. Pillar, a former national intelligence officer for the Middle East and South Asia, said recently. The question of "who's in charge of intelligence, when it comes to counterterrorism, is harder to answer now than it was before."
Teamwork at the NCTC
Three times each day -- at 8 a.m., 3 p.m. and 1 a.m. -- representatives from across the intelligence community meet to update the nation's threat matrix. The meetings -- held most days via videoconference -- are chaired at NCTC headquarters, a nondescript, unlabeled office building in Northern Virginia, around a massive, football-shaped wooden table. The table, designed as neutral ground, has 16 seats, pop-up computer terminals and ceiling-mounted screens that can show al-Jazeera broadcasts as well as highly classified graphics.
Participants include representatives of the CIA and FBI; the Defense Intelligence Agency and others under the Pentagon umbrella; the departments of State, Homeland Security, Treasury and Energy; and other subsidiary agencies such as the Drug Enforcement and Transportation Security administrations. Topics include individual suicide bombers, movements of groups and people, potential targets, reliability of information on specific threats, and actions being planned or already taken.
Material for the meetings is gathered by the 24-hour operations center deep within the ultra-secure building. The room is dark, with a high ceiling, drop-down video screens and sound-muffling walls; its carpeted floor is covered with desks where integrated intelligence teams examine and share incoming data from their separate agencies in 12-hour shifts. At opposite ends of the room, the CIA and FBI counterterrorism divisions have satellite offices representing their own headquarters.
The thrice-daily meetings are the substantive and symbolic core of NCTC's melding of the intelligence community. But most of the center's activities take place in offices and cubicles where officials plumb 28 databases of raw and processed intelligence from across the community.
The analysts turn out reports, adding context and information about response actions already taken, that are disseminated to more than 5,500 policy and intelligence officials with the security clearances required to read them.
Even within the NCTC, however, access to information is not easy. Most desks are stacked high with half a dozen or more computer processing units connected to various intelligence agencies that still cannot, or will not, communicate with one another electronically.
Negroponte deputy Dale Meyerrose, a retired Air Force major general and expert in creating and integrating communications systems architecture, is charged with breaking down the technological barriers among what he calls intelligence "tribes" with a built-in reluctance to divulge their secrets.
Meyerrose, a recent addition to the DNI's office, does not dispute or defend the slow pace of information-sharing. "My government's had five years," he acknowledged in a recent interview behind a code-locked door inside the high-security DNI headquarters at Bolling Air Force Base. "I'm very sympathetic to that. But you know what? I've had four months, and there's nothing I can do about the 4 1/2 years that went before me."
Technology is important, but "it's the transparency of the process that people are griping about," Meyerrose said. Feuding intelligence agencies don't argue about a lack of computer interface, he said, they talk in terms of "The FBI wouldn't tell me this." Rather than imposing new computer systems from the top down, he has started from the human end, bringing representatives from different agencies to the same table to work on specific intelligence issues.
The NCTC operates on the same principle of "co-location," fashioned under the 2004 intelligence reforms, that pulled the branches of the armed forces into a combined structure designed to end decades of destructive and expensive rivalry.
The Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 created unified regional commands under a single general or admiral directly answerable to the nation's civilian leadership and named the chairman of the Joint Chiefs the principal military adviser to the president. By making assignments to the joint staff from across the military a prerequisite for most high-level promotions, it created a cadre of senior officers with perspectives beyond the narrow confines of their individual branches.
Negroponte, a former Foreign Service officer who most recently served as ambassador to Iraq and to the United Nations, is the intelligence community's equivalent of the chairman, and the NCTC is his joint staff. NCTC Director Redd is a retired vice admiral, and everyone else in the structure is on temporary duty from somewhere else in the intelligence community, usually for two-year stints. "Everybody still belongs to their other agency," a senior official said. "We're trying to tell them that the NCTC is them ."
The idea is that familiarity will breed cooperation and that personal relationships formed through shared tasks will carry through once individuals return to their home offices. "We are diverse cultures, working to form habitual relationships," the official said. "It takes time."
Written by officials at the National Counterterrorism Center, under a directive signed by the president last winter, the 160-page plan aspires to achieve what has eluded the Bush administration in the five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: bringing order and direction to the fight against terrorism.
In the years since Bush stood atop the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center and pledged retaliation against "the people who knocked down these buildings," the federal government has undergone an unprecedented expansion and reorganization.
Yet the counterterrorism infrastructure that resulted has become so immense and unwieldy that many looking at it from the outside, and even some on the inside, have trouble understanding how it works or how much safer it has made the country.
Huge amounts of money have been spent -- $430 billion so far on overseas military and diplomatic counterterrorism operations, according to the U.S. comptroller general, a tripling of pre-9/11 expenditures for domestic security programs to an estimated $50 billion to $60 billion this year, and untallied billions more in state and local money.
Institutions historically charged with protecting the nation have produced a new generation of bureaucratic offspring -- the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) and Joint Intelligence Task Force for Combating Terrorism (JITF-CT), the Treasury Department's Office of Intelligence and Analysis (OIA), and the FBI's National Security Service (NSS), to name a few -- many with seemingly overlapping missions.
New laws have broadened domestic enforcement powers, and the Justice Department has been radically restructured to emphasize counterterrorism. The FBI, where counterterrorism now accounts for half of all investigations, has nearly doubled its budget to $6 billion since 2001 and added 7,000 employees. Twenty-two domestic agencies have been combined under the new Department of Homeland Security, while separate counterterrorism divisions now exist in virtually every nook and cranny of the federal government, from the Transportation Department to the Food and Drug Administration.
Outside Washington, 42 states have established intelligence "fusion centers" -- centralized locations where local, state and federal officials operate joint information-gathering and analysis operations.
The proof that it is all working, White House officials often say, is that there has been no attack on U.S. soil since 2001.
But critics say that after nearly five years, the fight against terrorism often seems like a chaotic work in progress.
"It's as if we're at 2002 and not 2006 in terms of where we are," Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said in an interview.
The ad hoc construction, adding layer upon layer with none taken away, has left intelligence and security agencies competing for turf. Deadlines for priorities have been missed. DHS, for example, has repeatedly delayed supplying a congressionally mandated list of the nation's critical infrastructure, and a blueprint for information-sharing among federal, state and local entities has been slow to get off the ground.
Continuity and coherence have been undercut by rapid turnover among top officials, particularly in the institutions responsible for domestic security and preparedness.
DHS's cybersecurity division has been run by an acting director since the last full-time appointee -- the third person to leave the post in a year -- resigned in October 2004. In April, the FBI's sixth counterterrorism chief since 2001 tendered his resignation after 10 months on the job. Many with government training and security clearances resign or retire, only to sign on at far higher salaries with the burgeoning private-sector security industry.
At the state and local front lines, officials complain of limited input in the development of homeland security policies and impenetrable layers of federal secrecy -- including as many as 90 categories of "sensitive but unclassified" information -- that limit the usefulness of terrorism alerts they receive from Washington, according to separate surveys this spring by the National Governors Association and the Government Accountability Office.
On paper, at least, the man in charge of much of the counterterrorism effort is Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte. His office was created last year under the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act to fix two widely acknowledged problems. The first was the intelligence community's pre-9/11 failure to collect and share information that might have warned of the al-Qaeda attacks. The second problem was the confusion and competition spawned by post-9/11 attempts to fix the first.
Negroponte supervises the 16 agencies that make up the federal intelligence community and is the president's chief intelligence adviser. Directly under him, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) is the central repository for terrorism information collected throughout the community. Its several hundred analysts integrate intelligence, figure out what it means and redistribute it across the government. The center's strategic planning division provides what NCTC Director John Scott Redd has called "the missing piece" between White House policy decisions and the operational departments and agencies that carry them out.
"We've done a great deal" in the years since 9/11, said one of a number of counterterrorism officials interviewed for this article, all of whom agreed to speak only if their names were not used. "There's a lot more we need to do. A lot more."
The official added: "The American people ought to have some faith that we're working on it."
Beyond the Military Approach
It was only natural that the military would take the lead in fighting terrorism after Sept. 11. In Afghanistan and other al-Qaeda locales, U.S. forces produced victories that were substantive and quantifiable, as well as politically useful to the administration.
Other parts of the government had important roles. But the Defense Department, buttressed by its intrinsic organizational skills, its traditional role as the recipient of the lion's share of the intelligence budget, and the zeal and policymaking influence of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, quickly grew to dominate much more than the war-fighting effort.
The Pentagon has clashed repeatedly with the CIA and the State Department as it has sought to expand its counterterrorism mission. Last year, both protested a secret Pentagon program that sends Special Forces units in plain clothes on intelligence-gathering missions to countries where no war is in progress and with which the United States has friendly diplomatic relations.
The Pentagon argued that troops report to their commanders and the defense secretary, not the secretary of state or the CIA director, and do not need to seek permission from or even to inform local U.S. ambassadors or CIA station chiefs. And, it said, the military needs its own "situational awareness" of possible future combat areas.
When the level of animosity peaked last summer, Rumsfeld and then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss were prodded by Michael V. Hayden, then deputy director of national intelligence, to negotiate an agreement to delineate intelligence-gathering responsibilities. Under a separate memorandum of understanding, the Pentagon and the State Department agreed that ambassadors would be informed of all military activity in their countries and given the opportunity to object.
Beyond the turf battles, however, counterterrorism officials grew concerned that U.S. strategy needed to expand beyond what one called the "whack, capture, interrogate and whack again" approach of the military. "Our thinking has matured radically since 2001," he said. "Then, it was looked at as the al-Qaeda network. Now, it is seen as looser, more diffuse, and also in our own country, in Western Europe and Canada."
"The military can't be the big hammer" anymore, he said, because al-Qaeda and its affiliates "are not the nail."
"You'll never win unless you can get to the sources of radicalization," he added. ". . . As the threat has changed, we've tried to adapt. But it's taken some time. As an American taxpayer, I wish we could have gotten it right in October 2001."
The "changing paradigm" applies at home as well as overseas, said a senior FBI official. The FBI operated on the assumption that "al-Qaeda was 'The Sopranos,' with a boss, an underboss, the consiglieri and the captains who ran the cells," the official said. "It was comfortable for us to understand."
New initiatives such as the National Implementation Plan were launched to eliminate overlap and set priorities for what the administration now calls the "long war." Beyond drawing sharper lines of responsibility, officials said, the plan is designed to drag the nation's counterterrorism strategy back from military dominance, better balancing the military "whack" with diplomacy and the "hearts and minds" campaigns that are now seen as critical to long-term victory.
Bush was briefed on the plan on June 26. A White House official said the plan reflects Bush's feeling that the terrorism fight is "all-encompassing," including military attacks but also "the war of ideas and the softer side, the long-term battle."
Within half a dozen broad objectives, the document designates lead and subordinate agencies to carry out more than 500 discrete counterterrorism tasks, among them vanquishing al-Qaeda, protecting the homeland, wooing allies, training experts in other languages and cultures, and understanding and influencing the Islamic psyche.
Achieving agreement among more than 200 department and agency representatives over 10 months of often-torturous negotiations was "a heroically ambitious exercise," said a senior administration official who participated in the process. "A couple of months ago, everybody was still shaking their heads."
The plan is expected to prompt a rewrite of the president's February 2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, which emphasized the physical elimination of terrorist networks while making largely symbolic bows to international partnerships and addressing the "underlying conditions that terrorists seek to exploit."
Eventually, officials acknowledged, it will also require a reconfiguration of the intelligence budget, now heavily weighted toward the military. No one expects that to happen overnight -- early proposals to shift spending brought a sharp protest from Rumsfeld.
But even at the Pentagon there are signs of turf-war fatigue. "Two years ago, we didn't have anything," said Brig. Gen. Robert Caslen Jr., who until June was the Joint Chiefs of Staff's deputy director for the terrorism fight. "Every department of government had its own idea on who was the enemy. Now we have a strategy and a plan that gives specific tasks and responsibility," he said.
Others are guardedly optimistic that the plan can be implemented. "It's going to alleviate a lot of the turf tensions and the growing pains," said one senior counterterrorism official. "But they're not going to go away."
The Overlaps Persist
In the lead-up to this year's Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, eight of the 16 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community independently produced assessments of possible terrorist threats to the Games. The "finished intelligence products," a counterterrorism official said, all concluded exactly the same thing -- that the threat was minimal.
"They posted them internally to their own organizations and sent them out to share" with other community members as the authoritative bottom line, the official said. "They would all argue, 'We had to do it for our principal, our Cabinet member' or whatever." Watching the competing agencies, he said, "is like watching 7-year-olds play soccer -- you've got 20 kids all following the ball."
Avoiding such duplication and wasted effort, he said, "was the whole point" of setting up the NCTC as the sole provider of integrated intelligence analysis. Yet neither congressional mandates nor presidential directives have been enough to eliminate the overlap.
Before the Intelligence Reform Act, the CIA was in charge of bringing together "all-source" intelligence and analyzing it for the larger intelligence community, the White House and policymakers. It was the CIA that chaired the daily interagency meeting at 5 p.m. to discuss real-time terrorism information and what to do about it. The agency drew up the daily "threat matrix" and the CIA director briefed the president each morning.
But the Sept. 11 commission found that long-standing tensions within and among the CIA, the FBI and the rest of the community, along with institutional firewalls constructed during the Cold War, meant that "information was not shared" and "analysis was not pooled" that might have warned of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.
The CIA's responsibilities for integrating and analyzing all-source intelligence have now been transferred to the DNI and the NCTC. All members of the intelligence community -- including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and other Defense Department agencies and the FBI -- are restricted to analyzing only what they need to accomplish the "tactical missions" specific to their own assignments. For the CIA, that means concentrating on building the clandestine network and human resources that Congress and a series of outside studies have found lacking, especially in the Middle East.
But the DNI-NCTC structure remains vastly outweighed in power, personnel and tradition by the growing bureaucracies it hopes to tame. While the number of NCTC analysts is scheduled to double to 400 by 2008, the FBI alone has tripled its analytic staff since 2001 to more than 2,700. The DIA has nearly 8,000 employees collecting and analyzing intelligence, and the CIA has twice that many.
On July 11, Negroponte signed an internal document titled "Analytic Framework for Counterterrorism" for distribution among the 16 agencies. In a cover note, he pointedly wrote that while he recognized each "must continue to support its agency leadership and unique operational activities, as well as to provide a robust analytical capability and reliable steam of diverse viewpoints," both Congress and the president had given him the authority and "fully empower the NCTC" to "reduce unnecessary duplication of effort."
The framework, said one counterterrorism official, directs operational agencies such as the CIA "to focus their analytical resources" on "penetrating and eliminating known terrorist organizations," leaving the NCTC to provide comprehensive threat analyses for the government as a whole.
Although Hayden's appointment as CIA director in May is likely to hasten the agency's acceptance of what is known in the community as "the lanes in the road," intelligence officials have not been shy about expressing skepticism and resentment.
Many see themselves as demoted to mere intelligence-gatherers, stripped of their rightful roles as strategic analysts and forward-looking policy advisers. An internal CIA study, declassified last month a year after it was written, criticized the NCTC model as promoting "watered-down analysis, duplication, confusion, and misuse of scarce resources." Separating those who collect intelligence from those who analyze it would result in a weaker product, the study said, and was likely to lead to more strategic failures like those in Iraq.
The addition of new non-operational layers to integrate, analyze and share information "has made the organizational picture more, not less, confusing," Paul R. Pillar, a former national intelligence officer for the Middle East and South Asia, said recently. The question of "who's in charge of intelligence, when it comes to counterterrorism, is harder to answer now than it was before."
Teamwork at the NCTC
Three times each day -- at 8 a.m., 3 p.m. and 1 a.m. -- representatives from across the intelligence community meet to update the nation's threat matrix. The meetings -- held most days via videoconference -- are chaired at NCTC headquarters, a nondescript, unlabeled office building in Northern Virginia, around a massive, football-shaped wooden table. The table, designed as neutral ground, has 16 seats, pop-up computer terminals and ceiling-mounted screens that can show al-Jazeera broadcasts as well as highly classified graphics.
Participants include representatives of the CIA and FBI; the Defense Intelligence Agency and others under the Pentagon umbrella; the departments of State, Homeland Security, Treasury and Energy; and other subsidiary agencies such as the Drug Enforcement and Transportation Security administrations. Topics include individual suicide bombers, movements of groups and people, potential targets, reliability of information on specific threats, and actions being planned or already taken.
Material for the meetings is gathered by the 24-hour operations center deep within the ultra-secure building. The room is dark, with a high ceiling, drop-down video screens and sound-muffling walls; its carpeted floor is covered with desks where integrated intelligence teams examine and share incoming data from their separate agencies in 12-hour shifts. At opposite ends of the room, the CIA and FBI counterterrorism divisions have satellite offices representing their own headquarters.
The thrice-daily meetings are the substantive and symbolic core of NCTC's melding of the intelligence community. But most of the center's activities take place in offices and cubicles where officials plumb 28 databases of raw and processed intelligence from across the community.
The analysts turn out reports, adding context and information about response actions already taken, that are disseminated to more than 5,500 policy and intelligence officials with the security clearances required to read them.
Even within the NCTC, however, access to information is not easy. Most desks are stacked high with half a dozen or more computer processing units connected to various intelligence agencies that still cannot, or will not, communicate with one another electronically.
Negroponte deputy Dale Meyerrose, a retired Air Force major general and expert in creating and integrating communications systems architecture, is charged with breaking down the technological barriers among what he calls intelligence "tribes" with a built-in reluctance to divulge their secrets.
Meyerrose, a recent addition to the DNI's office, does not dispute or defend the slow pace of information-sharing. "My government's had five years," he acknowledged in a recent interview behind a code-locked door inside the high-security DNI headquarters at Bolling Air Force Base. "I'm very sympathetic to that. But you know what? I've had four months, and there's nothing I can do about the 4 1/2 years that went before me."
Technology is important, but "it's the transparency of the process that people are griping about," Meyerrose said. Feuding intelligence agencies don't argue about a lack of computer interface, he said, they talk in terms of "The FBI wouldn't tell me this." Rather than imposing new computer systems from the top down, he has started from the human end, bringing representatives from different agencies to the same table to work on specific intelligence issues.
The NCTC operates on the same principle of "co-location," fashioned under the 2004 intelligence reforms, that pulled the branches of the armed forces into a combined structure designed to end decades of destructive and expensive rivalry.
The Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 created unified regional commands under a single general or admiral directly answerable to the nation's civilian leadership and named the chairman of the Joint Chiefs the principal military adviser to the president. By making assignments to the joint staff from across the military a prerequisite for most high-level promotions, it created a cadre of senior officers with perspectives beyond the narrow confines of their individual branches.
Negroponte, a former Foreign Service officer who most recently served as ambassador to Iraq and to the United Nations, is the intelligence community's equivalent of the chairman, and the NCTC is his joint staff. NCTC Director Redd is a retired vice admiral, and everyone else in the structure is on temporary duty from somewhere else in the intelligence community, usually for two-year stints. "Everybody still belongs to their other agency," a senior official said. "We're trying to tell them that the NCTC is them ."
The idea is that familiarity will breed cooperation and that personal relationships formed through shared tasks will carry through once individuals return to their home offices. "We are diverse cultures, working to form habitual relationships," the official said. "It takes time."
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Reduce the Risk of Suicide Terrorism in the U.S. Through Technology by Bill Roggio
Iran and Hezbollah could strike preemptively anytime in the U.S. and Europe. So how can we prevent, or at least reduce the risk of, suicide bombings in the U.S.?
The recent experience with martyrdom operations in Iraq and elsewhere adds urgency to the search for innovative preventive solutions. In addition to cultivating sufficient intelligence, we have to employ technological innovation to defend areas against suicide terrorists. Of paramount concern will be critical infrastructure facilities, symbolic targets, and high-population density enclosures (such as office and government buildings) at which such attacks are most likely to occur.
While the tactical advantages of suicide terrorism ensure that successful attacks are never 100% preventable, striving to stay at least close to terrorists’ tactical innovations must be a priority. Currently, battlefield and non-military applied technologies in use in foreign countries to stop terrorists from entering a potential target area are underutilized in the U.S. For example, active millimeter wave technology, with no x-ray involved, is currently deployed across the world in both military and civilian capacities: at airports in Tel Aviv and London, the Baghdad courthouse where Saddam Hussein was tried, Israeli and U.S. military checkpoints, and border-crossings. This technology is a proven, safe and efficient methodology for detecting the variety of non-metallic components (i.e. “DEET” explosives) that comprise the modern suicide device, by generating holographic images of those screened. But, as yet, this technology hasn't been deployed in any U.S. airport.
U.S. authorities should also strongly consider the deployment of technologies which would automatically enable the extraction and collection of explosives residue from carry-on luggage during the airport security screening process. Over 4 billion pieces of carry-on and checked luggage are screened each year worldwide, but existing solutions are still labor-intensive, slow, and cannot handle the expected increase in the number of bags.
The movement of tactical explosives expertise from the Middle East to Europe and Southeast Asia proves that the attempted use of such hard-to-detect explosives here should be expected. It's imperative that U.S. counterterrorism and homeland security officials employ our technological expertise to leverage the input from the intel agencies.
The recent experience with martyrdom operations in Iraq and elsewhere adds urgency to the search for innovative preventive solutions. In addition to cultivating sufficient intelligence, we have to employ technological innovation to defend areas against suicide terrorists. Of paramount concern will be critical infrastructure facilities, symbolic targets, and high-population density enclosures (such as office and government buildings) at which such attacks are most likely to occur.
While the tactical advantages of suicide terrorism ensure that successful attacks are never 100% preventable, striving to stay at least close to terrorists’ tactical innovations must be a priority. Currently, battlefield and non-military applied technologies in use in foreign countries to stop terrorists from entering a potential target area are underutilized in the U.S. For example, active millimeter wave technology, with no x-ray involved, is currently deployed across the world in both military and civilian capacities: at airports in Tel Aviv and London, the Baghdad courthouse where Saddam Hussein was tried, Israeli and U.S. military checkpoints, and border-crossings. This technology is a proven, safe and efficient methodology for detecting the variety of non-metallic components (i.e. “DEET” explosives) that comprise the modern suicide device, by generating holographic images of those screened. But, as yet, this technology hasn't been deployed in any U.S. airport.
U.S. authorities should also strongly consider the deployment of technologies which would automatically enable the extraction and collection of explosives residue from carry-on luggage during the airport security screening process. Over 4 billion pieces of carry-on and checked luggage are screened each year worldwide, but existing solutions are still labor-intensive, slow, and cannot handle the expected increase in the number of bags.
The movement of tactical explosives expertise from the Middle East to Europe and Southeast Asia proves that the attempted use of such hard-to-detect explosives here should be expected. It's imperative that U.S. counterterrorism and homeland security officials employ our technological expertise to leverage the input from the intel agencies.
Hizballah UAV Further Illustrates Iranian Support by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
On Monday night, the IAF's F-16 fighters shot down a Hizballah unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) ten kilometers off the coast of Acre. The drone reportedly had the capacity to carry 90 pounds of explosives.
Hizballah's drone was a Misrad-1, which is the same model as the Iranian Mohajer. It is also the same model UAV that Hizballah previously launched twice: in November 2004 and April 2005. In late 2004, Stratfor stated, "European intelligence sources say Hezbollah has acquired two to three UAVs from Iran . . . . In addition, Hezbollah has gathered an international team of engineers and scientists to equip the UAVs with a weapons system, enabling it to use the aircraft for a limited combat role as well as reconnaissance. Some reports indicate that later versions of the Iranian Mohajer can be equipped to fire chemical weapons." And Israeli sources provided similar analysis in 2004, stating that "Iran supplied Hezbollah with 8 such drones, and over the past two years some 30 Lebanese operatives have undergone training at Revolutionary Guards' bases near Isfahan to fly similar aircraft."
The drone launch comes atop ongoing revelations about the degree to which Iran has managed to build up Hizballah's deadly arsenal. Writing in the Weekly Standard in late July, counterterrorism consultant Dan Darling provided a detailed analysis of Hizballah's arsenal:
"Hezbollah has deployed a range of extremely sophisticated weapons against Israel. The most notable has been the Iranian C-802 Noor (Tondar) variant of the Chinese Silkworm missile that was used against an Israeli gunship off the Lebanese coast. Four Israeli sailors were killed, and the gunship was put out of commission.
The Associated Press reports that "Iran is believed to have supplied Hezbollah with up to 120 Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets, with ranges of 22 miles and 45 miles respectively," noting that it was a Fajr-3 that is thought to have been responsible for an attack on Haifa that killed 8 civilians. More recently, Israeli military officials have sought to destroy sites in Lebanon believed to house long-range Zelzal missiles of Iranian manufacture that they suspect are capable of hitting Tel Aviv."
CBN News analyst John Waage also noted that "[t]he Russian made Metis M anti-tank missile, supplied by Iran, is among the most deadly weapons in the Hezbollah arsenal. At least 44 Israeli soldiers have been killed by the missiles, which can punch through the steel of Israel’s highly-regarded Merkava tanks."
One cannot understand the current conflict in Lebanon without understanding the degree that Iran has sponsored Hizballah and built up its arsenal. And just as Iran is the key to understanding the present realities of the conflict, so too is its sponsorship a critical factor in understanding what Hizballah's future will be after a ceasefire is eventually reached.
Hizballah's drone was a Misrad-1, which is the same model as the Iranian Mohajer. It is also the same model UAV that Hizballah previously launched twice: in November 2004 and April 2005. In late 2004, Stratfor stated, "European intelligence sources say Hezbollah has acquired two to three UAVs from Iran . . . . In addition, Hezbollah has gathered an international team of engineers and scientists to equip the UAVs with a weapons system, enabling it to use the aircraft for a limited combat role as well as reconnaissance. Some reports indicate that later versions of the Iranian Mohajer can be equipped to fire chemical weapons." And Israeli sources provided similar analysis in 2004, stating that "Iran supplied Hezbollah with 8 such drones, and over the past two years some 30 Lebanese operatives have undergone training at Revolutionary Guards' bases near Isfahan to fly similar aircraft."
The drone launch comes atop ongoing revelations about the degree to which Iran has managed to build up Hizballah's deadly arsenal. Writing in the Weekly Standard in late July, counterterrorism consultant Dan Darling provided a detailed analysis of Hizballah's arsenal:
"Hezbollah has deployed a range of extremely sophisticated weapons against Israel. The most notable has been the Iranian C-802 Noor (Tondar) variant of the Chinese Silkworm missile that was used against an Israeli gunship off the Lebanese coast. Four Israeli sailors were killed, and the gunship was put out of commission.
The Associated Press reports that "Iran is believed to have supplied Hezbollah with up to 120 Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets, with ranges of 22 miles and 45 miles respectively," noting that it was a Fajr-3 that is thought to have been responsible for an attack on Haifa that killed 8 civilians. More recently, Israeli military officials have sought to destroy sites in Lebanon believed to house long-range Zelzal missiles of Iranian manufacture that they suspect are capable of hitting Tel Aviv."
CBN News analyst John Waage also noted that "[t]he Russian made Metis M anti-tank missile, supplied by Iran, is among the most deadly weapons in the Hezbollah arsenal. At least 44 Israeli soldiers have been killed by the missiles, which can punch through the steel of Israel’s highly-regarded Merkava tanks."
One cannot understand the current conflict in Lebanon without understanding the degree that Iran has sponsored Hizballah and built up its arsenal. And just as Iran is the key to understanding the present realities of the conflict, so too is its sponsorship a critical factor in understanding what Hizballah's future will be after a ceasefire is eventually reached.
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