The Political Conundrum!

Recently, in the Atlantic Monthly Daniel Byman and Christine Fair (two first-rate analysts) argue that the reality is that the terrorist enemies of the United States are not highly disciplined religious fanatics – but in fact are a bunch of nitwits. The article is interesting, provocative, and makes some important points. But we cannot dismiss the terrorists as nitwits quite yet – they’ve had failings in attacking the U.S. homeland directly, but they have also had some important successes.

Byman and Fair point out the many cases of terrorist incompetence such as the Times Square bomber, the UK doctors, and the Miami jihadis. In many regards, I agree with them. Terrorist groups are extremely constrained in their efforts to hit “far targets.” I’ve argued that this is a logistical issue. With intelligence agencies worldwide on high alert it is increasingly difficult to move operatives long distances. This complicates long-range terror strikes. Self-starters do not have the necessary skills and groups do not want to risk well-trained operatives on operations that will probably not succeed. The failed attacks on the West aren’t because the terrorists are stupid. What’s more they are adaptable. My argument continued that the danger was now in the realm of geopolitics – terrorists destabilizing and important country rather than carrying out direct attacks in the U.S. or the West.

Fair and Byman also state that the Taliban are similarly stupid. They frequently blow themselves up and also become intimate with livestock (this has been caught on tape by drones and other battlefield cameras). Maybe, but they are also giving the U.S. military a run for its money so discounting their capabilities seems unwise.

Read the full post here.

The deaths within days this weekend of two major figures behind major Middle East terrorist attacks and the possible death of a third last month should serve as a reminder of how long the terrorist threat has been with us -- and the difficulty in taking action against terrorists when they enjoy safe havens.

In Damascus, Mohammed Oudeh, better known as Abu Daoud -- the mastermind of the 1972 massacre of Israel athletes at the Munich Olympics, died Friday of kidney failure at the age of 73.

In Beirut Lebanon on Sunday morning, a liver hemorrhage claimed the life of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the Shiite spiritual leader of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist organization which conducted the 1983 bombings of the barracks of the U.S. and French peacekeeping forces and the U.S. embassy. The group was also involved in the kidnappings of dozens of American and other Western hostages in Lebanon in the 1980’s. He was 75.

Both deaths were announced separately by the families or associates.

In an unconfirmed report last month, the German press agency DPA reported that a drone missile strike in Pakistan on June 19 killed Mohammad Ali Hamadeh, a Lebanese Hezbollah member who was accused of killing of an American Navy diver, Robert Stethem during the hijacking of TWA 847 flight to Beirut 25 years ago in June, 1985. However State Department officials said they could not confirm the report when it came out and DOD did not respond to a query.

Both the Munich Olympics attacks and the Beirut bombings had wide ranging consequences although not necessarily those intended by the perpetrators.

My favorite magazine edition of the year just came out: Foreign Policy's Failed State Index.. As always it is full of interesting data points that help one understand how and why state's fail. But this year there is also a ranking of the worst leaders in the world.

What is striking, from my perspective, is that only two Latin American leaders are named: Hugo Chávez, weighing at number 17 of the 23 worst listed, and Raúl Castro at number 21. What is also striking is that their three primary allies outside of Latin America are also among the world's worst: Mahmoud Ajmadinejad of Iran at number 8; Basher al-Assad of Syria (recently jointly bashing Israel and calling for an end to the empire, meaning the United States) at number 12; and China's Hu Jintao, busying buying up all the natural resources he can, at number 10.

Sub-Saharan Africa, of course, has the most of the worst, including my personal favorite, Equatorial Guinea's Teodoro Obiang (number 14), who has hired Lanny Davis and other prominent and once respectable people as lobbyists. Obiang deposed and killed his uncle before assuming power in 1979, and was well-loved for continuing his uncle's heart-warming custom of having his political enemies beaten to death with metal bars in the main stadium while the band played "Happy Days are Here Again."

But back to Latin America: One can tell a great deal about leaders by the company they keep and the alliances they build. Chávez, rather than embracing any government with a liberal democratic form of government, has gone for the most repressive. Not coincidentally, both Syria and Iran are among the world's foremost sponsors of terrorism. Cuba, toying with modest internal reforms, remains a formidably repressive state, and has been busy helping the Bolivarian states implant state of the art internal security apparatuses that are sure to improve their respective repressive capacities.
My "a href="http://www.douglasfarah.com/article/540/failing-states-and-despots-interesting-reading.com">full blog is here.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week, Undersecretary of State William Burns and Undersecretary of the Treasury Stuart Levey laid out the administration's game plan for leveraging the sanctions mandate created by UN Security Council Resolution 1929, adopted earlier this month. Central to this strategy is "vigorous" implementation, in part through a monitoring committee. The resolution, Burns noted, includes "new platforms" and "new tools," including a tough cargo inspection regime to detect and prevent Iranian smuggling efforts aimed at circumventing the sanctions. Now that these measures have been passed, he emphasized, we "need to make the maximum use of them." One key area that would benefit from greater attention and enforcement is closing the re-export loopholes through which Iran has successfully evaded sanctions in the past.

Deceptive Trade Practices

Mirroring the Iranian banking sector's deceptive financial practices -- which the Treasury Department has studiously exposed over the past few years -- procurement agents, businesses, and transporters in Iran have developed a network of front companies and willing partners as a means of procuring controlled military and dual-use technologies. Some of these fronts are aware of the deception, while others are not.

Resolution 1929 highlighted such conduct by both Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) and IranAir's cargo division. For example, since Treasury designated IRISL in 2008, the company has sought to evade sanctions by not only establishing new front companies, but also renaming and repainting its vessels.

The just-released annual report of the Czech Security Information Service (BIS) offers similar findings. In 2009, Iran used "mediating firms" in the Czech Republic to procure items that could facilitate the production of weapons of mass destruction. According to the report, Iran orchestrates "complex business channels in which companies from various countries fulfill only partial tasks without knowing the whole chain of suppliers and customers." Iranian procurement agents have been active within the United States as well.

The complete article is available here.

Although the United States continues to successfully target high-level al-Qaeda leaders along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, efforts to contest the Islamist ideology that fuels and supports violence have not kept pace. At home, incidents of domestic radicalization have increased dramatically in 2010, while abroad, the myriad, complex security challenges inspired by various violent strands of Islamist ideology have multiplied from Yemen to Pakistan. Indeed, just today several Muslim-American youth from Northern Virginia were convicted in a Pakistani court of plotting terrorist acts with militants in Pakistan they had met via the internet and sentenced to 10 years in jail each.

In the context of the recent release of the Obama administration's National Security Strategy and the one-year anniversary of the president's Cairo speech, the Washington Institute convened a special Policy Forum marking the release of recommendations from the Institute's forthcoming report on Obama administration efforts to address violent extremism -- a follow-up to the Institute's 2009 bipartisan task force report Rewriting the Narrative: An Integrated Strategy for Counterradicalization This new report, soon to be released in full, was the product of a study group comprising J. Scott Carpenter, Matthew Levitt, Steven Simon and Juan Zarate.

A rapporteur's summary of the event, which featured Mr. Carpenter, Dr. Levitt and Mr. Zarate (Coauthor Steve Simon was unable to attend due to travel conflicts), is available here. Audio of the event, which also appeared on C-SPAN, is available here.

The Indonesian police counter-terrorist unit, Special Detachment 88, conducted a raid in North Klaten sub-district, Central Java province, late on Wednesday afternoon (local time). One suspect, Juli Hartono (alias Yuli Sartono) was shot dead, and three others were captured. Unconfirmed reports indicate that one of the three is Abdulah Sunata, Indonesia's most-wanted terrorist fugitive who reportedly helped organize the paramilitary camp uncovered in Aceh last February. Sunata is a repeat offender, having served an earlier prison sentence for terrorist offenses before being released ahead of schedule for good behavior.

The police reportedly found a bomb and an unspecified firearm at the Klaten terrorist safehouse.

If it turns out Sunata was captured alive, this would be a major coup for Special Detachment 88, which has come under criticism in recent months for being too fast to kill senior terrorist suspects.

Some quotes and comments buried in recent press articles, including an article this week by Jessica Stern, should give pause to the theories fashionable in some circles that terrorism is prompted primarily by “root causes.”

Usually cited are poverty and despair and/or U.S foreign policy (especially support for Israel) and or support for Arab governments such as Egypt and Saudi that are often called repressive regimes. Another alleged cause is the U.S. invasion of Iraq that overthrew an oppressive regime, headed by Saddam Hussein. And of course there is the narrative promoted by some radical Muslims that the west is out to destroy Islam (never mind the U.S. and NATO support for the Muslims in the Bosnia conflict or the emergency aid that the U.S. has rushed to Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other Muslim countries in the wake of major natural disasters). Hundreds of thousands of words have been written on these theories.

The vexing question of “what makes terrorists tick” is an important one, especially as governments are paying more attention to the need to counter radicalization. Some countries such as Saudi Arabia and Indonesia have programs, with limited success, to try to deradicalize captured terrorist suspects. They and western governments, especially Britain, the Netherlands and more recently the United States have been trying to develop and strengthen programs to counter terrorism radicalization, including public diplomacy efforts.

This is important and necessary. It is essential that we try to counter the ideology, spread so easily on the internet that justifies mass murders for the sake of some “sacred cause” or restoring an idealized 15th century world of purity and/or the Muslim Caliph that stretched from the Middle East into Spain.

Ideology, however, is not the only factor in why some people, especially young men, embrace violence and terrorism and done suicide belts.

Although some writers have discussed the psychological aspects of terrorists, this aspect is often overlooked in the pontification about policies and “root causes.”

I am by no means an expert on the motivation of terrorism but I want to call attention to several recent articles that deserve a closer look.

They include the article by Ms. Stern, a respected counterterrorism expert, in Sunday’s Washington Post Outlook section describing her experiences in researching terrorism and her theories on the role of trauma in the outlook of some terrorists. An earlier June 15 Reuters article reported that Somali Islamists killed two persons and arresting dozens of others for the transgression of watching the World Cup soccer matches on television.

A June 11 New York Times in-depth article described the motives of two young New Jersey men who were arrested June 5 as they were about to fly to Egypt and then to Somalia to link up with a terrorist group and kill Americans.

And a June 22 New York Times front page article describing the path to radicalizcation taken by Faiesal Shahzad, who pleaded guilty to trying to set off a car bomb in Times Square.

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision today upholding the 1996 law that makes it illegal for American citizens and residents to knowingly provide material support to designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations helps maintain a major tool to curb terrorist fund raising.

Here is some additional background on the case and the free speech issues raised in the court case. This piece supplements and emphasizes different aspects of the ruling than the excellent and more comprehensive blog item just filed by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, written by Stephen Landman.

The material support statute, signed into law in April 1996 by President Clinton and also used by the Bush and Obama administrations, is one of the U.S. Government most important tools against terrorism fundraising. Justice Department officials say it has been used more than 150 times since Sept. 11, resulting in 75 convictions. Additionally, there also have been plea bargaining and confessions by persons charged with violating the provision that makes it illegal for persons to knowingly provide funds, services, training, weapons or other forms of material support to groups designated by the Secretary of State as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO.)

I won’t repeat the full legal text of the material definition contained in the 4th paragraph of Landman’s article, but note that most of those cases, especially relating to Al Qaeda and Hamas, involved money and other tangible support for terrorist groups.

The Department of Justice won a major victory Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the "material support" statute. In a 6-3 opinion announced by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court held that the Constitution does not preclude the government from criminalizing speech and other forms of advocacy in support of designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO), even if the intent is to support the group's "peaceful or humanitarian" efforts.

Under U.S. law, it is a crime for any person to provide "material support or resources" to a designated FTO. Known as the "material support" law, 18 U.S.C. § 2339B has become a cornerstone in U.S. counter-terrorism efforts. Since 2001, the U.S. has charged approximately 150 defendants with violations of the statute, and to date approximately 75 people have been convicted.

The statute defines "material support or resources" as:

"any property, tangible or intangible, or service, including currency or monetary instrument or financial securities, financial services, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance, safehouses, false documentation or identification, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, lethal substances, explosives, personnel (1 or more individuals who may be or include oneself), and transportation, except medicine or religious materials" (emphasis added).

The Court began by rejecting the argument that the statute was violated the Fifth Amendment because it was unclear to an ordinary person what type of activity was actually prohibited. Explaining that "perfect clarity and precise guidance have never been required," the majority found the statute was sufficiently clear in what conduct was proscribed:

"Of course the scope of the material-support statute may not be clear in every application. But the dispositive point here is that the statutory terms are clear in their application to plaintiffs' proposed conduct, which means that plaintiffs' vagueness challenge must fail."

Next, the Court rejected the claims that the law violated free speech and free association guarantees in the First Amendment. Those challenging the statute sought to provide non-violent resources to support the humanitarian and peaceful efforts of terrorist organizations. The Court found that not only was there no distinction between the violent and non-violent wings of terrorist groups, but that terrorist groups benefit from any support given to them.

The case on appeal involved groups and individuals who wanted to support the humanitarian and political activities of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)—groups that were designated as FTOs in 1997.

Hoping to continue supporting the PKK and LTTE, the petitioners challenged the law, aiming to have it struck down as unconstitutional. As they explained in their opening brief to the court, "plaintiffs here seek only to safeguard their right to promote lawful, nonviolent activities through pure speech," and the statute violated their First and Fifth Amendment rights by preventing them from doing so.

Rejecting each of the challenges, the Court conceded that the PKK and the LTTE may engage in political and humanitarian activities. But overwhelming evidence also showed that both groups have committed numerous acts of terrorism, some of which have harmed Americans. In light of the dual-use qualities of terrorist organizations, the Court went on:

"Whether foreign terrorist organizations meaningfully segregate support of their legitimate activities from support of terrorism is an empirical question. When it enacted section 2339B in 1996, Congress made specific findings regarding the serious threat posed by international terrorism. One of those findings explicitly rejects plaintiffs' contention that their support would not further the terrorist activities of the PKK and LTTE: 'Foreign organizations that engage in terrorist activity are so tainted by their criminal conduct that any contribution to such an organization facilitates that conduct.'"

Read our full report by Stephen I. Landman here.

A group of U.S. experts on open source intelligence today said that the U.S. intelligence efforts are negatively affected by the cutbacks in the number of newspaper correspondents overseas and the terrorists’ own use of the internet to gather information on the United States.

They made their comments at a crowded forum at the National Press Club today, June 17, titled “The Future of Open Source Intelligence,” sponsored by LexisNexis.

Mr. Daniel Butler, Assistant Deputy Director for Open Source in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said that open source intelligence gathering is basically good research and analysis and that the internet has been a “game changer” in gathering material. This raises new challenges in organizing and prioritizing the material to be analyzed, he said

Butler, a former Defense Department official and military intelligence officer, and other panelists noted that open sources include a wide variety of information, not only from the media but from academia and other sources. They also predicted that open source intelligence will be increasingly integrated into traditional intelligence analysis that heavily relied on classified sources.

In response to a question, Butler said that the open source program had been impacted negatively by the reduction in the number of foreign correspondents. He said the quantity, breadth and quality of overseas reporting has declined because of the decisions by many news organizations to cut back the number of their correspondents overseas. During the past several years several major newspapers and television networks have eliminated or minimized their foreign correspondents posts, mainly for financial reasons. Butler quipped that one only has to pick up the Washington Post every morning to see how much lighter it is.

Kevin O’Connell, who has served in the CIA, and in Defense Department and State Department analyst positions, said that reporting from foreign correspondents often provides a context and depth of understanding a country that is not always available to analysts who have not been there. * O’Connell, who also served in the Vice President’s office and at Rand, is now an adjunct professor at Georgetown University said that is important that our education system emphasis the development of critical analytical training. He is also President/CEO of Innovative Analytics & Training.

The terrorists are also exploiting open sources, said Kenneth Rapuano, a former White House Homeland Security Advisor in the Bush Administration, who resigned from his civilian post in 2006 to serve in Afghanistan as a Marine Corps officer on a special joint operations task force. He said that, although the popular image of the Afghan Taliban was that of guys in ragged clothes toting AK-47’s, U.S. forces found they had computer hard drives with information on the U.S. infrastructure, GAO reports and even Congressional testimony. Rapuano is now Director of Advanced Systems and Policy at the MITRE Corporation.

Dr. Mark Gabriele, trained as a computer science specialist, said the technology was changing quickly. Even though the cell phones and equipment in Africa lagged 10 years behind the United States, they were adequate for most purposes. Dr. Gabriele, previously with Rand and now with Booze Allen and Hamilton, noted that even the GPS is now an open source device.

Other panel participants were Mr. Doug Magoffin, Chief of the Defense Department Open Source Program, who spoke of the need to develop and recruit people with good language skills, and Mr. Alexander Joel, Civil Liberties Protection Officer, ODNI, who emphasized the efforts to develop guidelines to protect civil liberties.

* A personal observation: as a consumer of intelligence while in the State Department Office of Counterterrorism, I and many of my fellow officers closely read press articles for information and context that often was not contained in the official message traffic from embassies or the intelligence community. In an earlier career as a news agency correspondent overseas, it was apparent that correspondents often would have a wider range of local contacts and more freedom to move about than intelligence or embassy political officers.