Eric Umansky

The Bungling Boys in Miami, Finally Free?

Yesterday, a jury again deadlocked on the "Seas of David" trial, a case involving seven Haitian-American in Miami who were accused of plotting to bomb the Chicago Sears Tower. As  I wrote in a piece for Mother Jones a few months ago, there wasn't a lot of evidence against these guys.  The case instead relied heavily on a pushy and well-paid informant who seems to have come quite close to engaging in a bit of time-honored entrapment.

When a jury first deliberated on the case last fall, it deadlocked then too and a mistrial was declared. A whole new trial ensued, with a whole new jury, and it shouldn't be a surprise that that jury deadlocked too. That because, while the evidence in the case might have been thin, the laws these men were charged with violating--the so-called material-support provisions--are darn expansive. As I wrote:

After deliberating for nine days last December, the jury acquitted one man who'd separated himself from the group and moved to Atlanta. But it deadlocked on the others, and a mistrial was declared. A new trial is scheduled for this spring. Until then the six men are in prison, and they and their lawyers are under a gag order. (The same applies to the acquitted man, Lyglenson Lemorin, who's in detention awaiting possible deportation to Haiti even though he's lived here legally for nearly 20 years. Citing privacy laws, the government will not explain why he is being kicked out.)

"I think it may hang again," juror Delorise Thompkins told the Miami Herald. "You're going to find someone always afraid of terrorist groups, but then when you see the evidence, there's not a lot there—no plans, no papers, no pictures, no nothing connecting them to Osama bin Laden." The jury's ambivalence is understandable. The plots were little more than talk encouraged by informants; the central evidence in the case—the taped oath—was a staged fbi production. But then, whether the men were a threat or the plot real doesn't matter when it comes to the charge of material support.

More (on) Cameras

Neither  friends nor readers are taking kindly to my plea for thousands of surveillance cameras in the NY subway system  "watching every move of mine and everybody elses."

So maybe I wasn't right to predict that after London most people will feel similarly and that privacy concerns will fade away.  (Then again, cameras do suddenly seem to be  all the rage  now.) But whatever the public sentiment about cameras, let me just reiterate my call for plenty of them. 

Yes, there should be safeguards. For instance, crude racial profiling = not good. So create the appropriate policies and procedures banning such faux paus. That could ammeliorate some of the concerns.  Of course there always could be abuses--it's only reasonable to expect that there will be. But that doesn't mean we should just skip cameras  altogther. The risk of abuse can be  minimized  while the potential benefit of the things could be huge. Consider that not only did the cameras in London ID the four bombers--after the fact, of course--they also picked up a big lead, the kind that could save lives:

British police and intelligence officials have launched a nationwide manhunt for a man identified as a likely bomb maker in last week's London attacks, who was seen on a security tape with the four suspected bombers, according to a U.S. official ...

"They know who No. 5 is," said the official, who has access to substantial intelligence flowing from the bomb investigation but asked to not be identified ...

A video camera in King's Cross Station in North London captured the five men huddling together at about 8:30 on the morning of the bombings. Then, said the official, "The four goons [suicide bombers] went their way, and No. 5 went his."

And it's not like London has a few  unobstrusive  cams.  The  Underground is a  privacy absolutist's nightmare:   

Large Underground stations, such as those close to the attacks, have around 100 surveillance cameras each. And hundreds more cameras line the streets surrounding each station, providing literally thousands of hours of footage for police to comb through.

Londonistan

The Jamestown Foundation, which does some of the best analyses of  jihadism,  put out a report last year about how Britain's lax asylum laws have helped make it a  home-away-from-home for many Islamic militants.

This kind of argument can  easily morph into racism or xenophobia. But the Jamestown folks. are serious analysts not 'immigration reformers' looking to  score cheap points.  And despite the queasiness connected to the conclusions they might also be accurate.  They're at least worth a read: 

You could say that London has become, for the exponents of radical Islam, the most important city in the Middle East. A framework of lenient asylum laws has allowed the development of the largest and most overt concentration of Islamist political activists since Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Just ask the French, whose exasperation with the indulgent toleration afforded to Algerian Islamic activists led them to dub the city dismissively as “l’antechambre de l’Afghanistan.”

They certainly have a point. Many of Bin Laden’s fatwas were actually first publicized in London. In fact, the United Kingdom in general seems to differ from other European states in the degree to which it became a spiritual and communications hub for the jihad movement. As such, it can furnish the indefatigable researcher a wealth of primary source material on Islamic terrorism.

The refuge the United Kingdom offers Islamist opposition is little short of bizarre. What appears to have happened is that the country’s asylum laws were designed to protect only dissidents and refugees from foreign governments. Victims of other persecutions, such as sectarian or ethnic struggles, fall through the net. The result of this is that, for the Middle Eastern refugee population, a proportion of them can claim asylum specifically on the basis of their Islamist political opinion and activity.

[...]

The latitude granted by British law to activities other countries would find impermissible has bred a stock of legally savvy Islamists who know how to express themselves as provocatively as possible but just staying a whisker within the law. Anjam Choudry, the chairman of al-Muhajiroun is a lawyer himself, and another master of the art is the Syrian born radical Islamist and veteran of the 1982 Muslim Brotherhood uprising, Sheikh Omar bin Bakri Muhammad, a founder of Hizb al-Tahrir and co-founder of al-Muhajiroun. By the time of the 9/11 attacks, Bakri had long presented himself as the spokesman of Osama bin Laden’s International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, and funder of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But he came to notoriety as far back as 1991 and the first Gulf War when he claimed that the then UK Prime Minister, John Major, was “a legitimate target; if anyone gets the opportunity to assassinate him, I don’t think they should save it. It is our Islamic duty and we will celebrate his death,” [3] a point which he later clarified as “a legitimate target if he were to set foot in a Muslim country.”

The contradiction with reality is somewhat startling, as Sheikh Bakri acknowledged to the press that he had been living on social benefits from the British government of “nearly £300 a week in state handouts for himself, his wife, and their five (as of 1996) children.” He explained it thus: “Islam allows me to take the benefit the system offers. I’m fully eligible. It is very difficult for me to get a job. Anyway, most of the leadership of the Islamic movement is on [state] benefit.”

I don't know that the analysis is right--maybe it has the facts all screwed up. But it's worth finding out more about...

Global War on Terror: "Wrong Concept"

[Note: I'm having some trouble with my archives, so this is actually a repost of something I published last month, which, sadly, now looks all screwy in its original.]

That line comes from an unlikely source:  Three star  General Wallace Gregson, currently commander  of Marine forces in the Pacific. It's all part of a fascinating talk he gave recently at the Naval War College, which was picked up by  Inside Defense, the  highly respected and highly expensive industry newsletter. Unless you pay you can't play, but here are some excerpts:

This war has a popular label and a political label, but it’s not accurate,” said Gregson. “Terrorism is a means of power projection, it’s a weapon, it’s a tool of war. Think of it as our enemy’s stealth bomber. This is no more a war on terrorism than World War II was a war on submarines. It’s not just semantics . . . Words have meaning. And these words are leading us down to the wrong concept.”

Gregson added, “What we’re fighting is an insurgency defined as a popular movement that seeks to change the status quo through violence, subversion, propaganda, terrorism or other military action. But it’s different from other national insurgencies that we’ve known in the past. This one is networked thanks to the wonders of technology. It’s primarily ideologically driven, fundamentalist and extremist.”

[...]

“It’s a collection or a confederation of movements empowered by regional and global fundamentalist extremist insurgents,” Gregson said. “You can borrow an old phrase and say they think globally and act locally.”

[...] “The center of gravity, the decisive terrain in this war is the vast majority of people who are not directly involved but whose support, willing or coerced, is necessary to insurgent operations around the world,” he said. “Hearts and minds are more important than capturing and killing people.”

“The main thrust of my remarks was that we know we’re stuck with the name, it’s going to be the global war on terrorism. . . . But even though we’ve got that name out there, we’ve got to at least in the security community and then further on through the greater world . . . explain what we’re about here and get it into something that is properly categorized and puts us on the side of the angels in various areas.”

We have a chance to start winning this war here and walk it back into the Middle East, but we can’t just continue to admire the problem,” Gregson said. “We have to start doing something and we have to start walking the propaganda back in the other direction and get ourselves on the right side of this issue.”

Providing doctors, engineers, dentists, veterinarians and other aid to enhance the lives of people living in very troubled parts of the world is “often far more important than projecting some type of force,” Gregson said.

Let's give General Gregson a promotion (and maybe a column in the Nation)!  More thoughts later, but I of course, am  happy  to see a top military man talking this way.

Global War on Terrorism: "Wrong Concept"

That line comes from an unlikely source:  Three star  General Wallace Gregson, currently commander  of Marine forces in the Pacific. It's all part of a fascinating talk he gave recently at the Naval War College, which was picked up by  Inside Defense, the  highly respected and highly expensive industry newsletter. Unless you pay you can't play, but here are some excerpts:

This war has a popular label and a political label, but it’s not accurate,” said Gregson. “Terrorism is a means of power projection, it’s a weapon, it’s a tool of war. Think of it as our enemy’s stealth bomber. This is no more a war on terrorism than World War II was a war on submarines. It’s not just semantics . . . Words have meaning. And these words are leading us down to the wrong concept.”

Gregson added, “What we’re fighting is an insurgency defined as a popular movement that seeks to change the status quo through violence, subversion, propaganda, terrorism or other military action. But it’s different from other national insurgencies that we’ve known in the past. This one is networked thanks to the wonders of technology. It’s primarily ideologically driven, fundamentalist and extremist.”

[...]

“It’s a collection or a confederation of movements empowered by regional and global fundamentalist extremist insurgents,” Gregson said. “You can borrow an old phrase and say they think globally and act locally.”

[...] “The center of gravity, the decisive terrain in this war is the vast majority of people who are not directly involved but whose support, willing or coerced, is necessary to insurgent operations around the world,” he said. “Hearts and minds are more important than capturing and killing people.”

“The main thrust of my remarks was that we know we’re stuck with the name, it’s going to be the global war on terrorism. . . . But even though we’ve got that name out there, we’ve got to at least in the security community and then further on through the greater world . . . explain what we’re about here and get it into something that is properly categorized and puts us on the side of the angels in various areas.”

We have a chance to start winning this war here and walk it back into the Middle East, but we can’t just continue to admire the problem,” Gregson said. “We have to start doing something and we have to start walking the propaganda back in the other direction and get ourselves on the right side of this issue.”

Providing doctors, engineers, dentists, veterinarians and other aid to enhance the lives of people living in very troubled parts of the world is “often far more important than projecting some type of force,” Gregson said.

Let's give General Gregson a promotion (and maybe a column in the Nation)!  More thoughts later, but I of course, am  happy  to see a top military man talking this way.

Dept. of Very Desperate Measures

This just in from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting:

MOSUL BID TO KEEP INSURGENTS AT BAY
Moat-like trench around the northern city is intended to keep out the insurgents.

By Shareef Haza'a and Wa'ad Ibraheem in Mosul

New security measures intended to frustrate insurgents' efforts to create mayhem in the city have failed to win over local residents.

The measures - surrounding Mosul with a moat-like ditch and ordering taxi drivers to take the trunk lids off their vehicles - are aimed to prevent militants bringing in car bombs and other weapons and kidnapping locals.

In recent months, the insurgents have been stepping up their activities in the area, with around 30 car-bomb attacks per week, according to the US Defence Department.

Local officials say the ditch will be 55 km-long and several metres wide, with 12 crossing points manned by Iraqi security forces. 

Mosul deputy governor Khesrew Goran said he was confident the measures - which have the backing of the American military - will thwart the infiltrators, "It's a correct plan and it will be successful."

[...]

While local officials are optimistic about the prospects of the ditch and the trunk-lid ban stopping attacks, Mosul residents say they are less sure.

Engineer Emad Tawfeeq was sceptical that the trench would stop insurgents.
"It's like the old tactic of fortifying cities, but there's no guarantee that [Mosul] will not be penetrated one way or another," he said.

Mohammed al-Mosuli, a Mosul resident and sociology professor at Sulaimaniyah
University, agreed. "We are not in the middle-ages and Mosul is not a small castle to be surrounded by a ditch," he said.

I wish them luck, honestly. But I can't say my expectations are too high. For one thing, recall what Anthony Cordesman concluded recently in his big Iraq survey:

Dual loyalty and HUMINT penetration of Iraqi security and military forces may be the rule, rather than the exception.

Unfortunately, that jibes with the latest from Iraq. Not the hostage rescue, but this:

[A] suicide bomber wearing an Iraqi Army uniform detonated a bodybelt bomb in a canteen at an Iraqi Army base at Khalis, a market town between the Tigris and Diyala rivers about 40 miles north of Baghdad.

Protecting U.S. Nuke Reactors (or Not)

A bit more than three years, I wrote about how the government was actually cutting funding for security at nuclear plants. One the key issues was that the feds hadn't updated something called the 'design basis threat', which details the worst security threats plants need to be able to protect themselves against. At the time, the problem was that the design basis threat seemed to be lowballing the threat. As I recall, it called for plants to be able to protect themselves against a gang of all of three men. Which meant that if there were, say, 19 dedicated terrorist attackers, the 'plan' consisted of calling 911 and praying hard.

Now fast forward three years. Of course, the administration has done a bang-up job funding and otherwise ramping up homeland security. Here's this coming week's Time on the first-rate job done improving those issues nuke plants:

New York – A tightly held Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) document reviewed by TIME raises serious questions about whether the government has set security requirements for nuclear plants too low and allowed nuclear plant operators to provide security on the cheap, TIME’s Mark Thompson reports. Many guards working in nuclear plants and some senior security experts working for the U.S. government say the defenses facilities rely on are too meager to thwart an assault by a force the size of the one al-Qaeda put together when it attacked the U.S. on 9/11—Mohamed Atta’s band of 19 hijackers, TIME reports.

“The NRC and the nuclear power industry,” says a senior U.S. antiterrorism official, “are today where the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] and airlines were on Sept. 10, 2001.” Whereas the U.S. has spent $20 billion improving aviation security since 9/11, it has spent $1 billion enhancing nuclear-plant security, TIME reports.

At least they've finally created a solid Design Basis Threat. Errr... actually:

Terrorists may not need a dramatic skyborne attack to get the job done. They could take over a plant on foot. The key to understanding how the NRC has prepared for such an event is a standard called the design-basis threat, or DBT. The DBT is the regulatory worst-case scenario, the largest threat the NRC requires plants to train its guards to defeat, TIME reports.

“I don’t think they could handle a 9/11-size attack,” says David Orrik, a senior NRC official who retired in February after a 20-year career probing power-plant vulnerabilities. The guards themselves have doubts. “These guys are coming in to die. They know they’re not leaving,” says a veteran guard at a U.S. nuclear power plant. “Our training has increased, but I don’t think it’s increased enough to deal with that.” A guard at another plant agrees. “We don’t have the weapons or training to stop an attack of that magnitude,” he says. “Everyone feels that way. It’s a consensus of opinion.”

According to the NRC and the NEI, a force as big as Atta’s band or anything bigger than the DBT is an “enemy of the state.” That means it’s the Pentagon’s problem. “We recognize that there can be threats to our plants that are greater than what is defined by the DBT,” Marvin Fertel, chief nuclear officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute has told Congress. “Although our security would provide an initial deterrence, at some point such threats are the responsibility of the Federal Government.” That wouldn’t necessarily do the plant’s defenders any good, though. “They could call for the cavalry, but they’d never get there in time,” Orrik says. “These things can be over in minutes.”

“Security at the plant is pathetic,” says Kathy Davidson’s former chief guard trainer at the Pilgrim nuclear power plant south of Boston. “It’s just too confusing.”

This kind of security stuff is guesswork. And frankly, I think it's tempting to get a bit hysterical about it all. You can't prepare against every eventuality. And there are always going to be cost-benefit issues. But that just means there needs to be a good debate about where to draw the line.

P.S. It's worth looking again at the quote above from David Orrick, and then taking a look at, basically, his resume. That doesn't mean he's incapable of overstating, but he knows a helluva lot more than you or me.

Bernie's possible (bad) replacement

Among the names being floated is that of  "counter-terrorism czar"  Frances  Fragos  Townsend.  Now, I  won't take cheap shots and argue that her  job seems to consist of spending your  mornings on TV. Or point out that a half-dozen people have quit the same gig since 9/11.  That would be mean and unfair.

But I would hope that the coming  director of the Dept. of Homeland Security would have a good understanding of  the kind of threat represented by al-Qaida, including an understanding of what exactly AQ  is--and wouldn't be a White House hack when describing it.

No such luck with Townsend.

According to a lengthy WP assessment of the White House's counter-terrorism efforts, she sees al-Qaida as a distinct entity that can be brought down, as she put it, by "decapitating the beast." Townsend was once a prosecutor and went after the Gambino family. When she took her latest job at the White House this summer, she said, fighting al-Qaida "actually turns out not to be that big a leap" from her previous work. "Really in many ways you're talking about a group with a command-and-control structure."

Talk to just about any independent analyst, and they'll tell you that view is wrong and likely to lead to mistakes.

Dread Men Walking...

I wonder why the White House has trouble keeping its top counter-terrorism officials on board. The latest one to punch out:

ASSOCIATED PRESS, WASHINGTON -- The government's cybersecurity chief has abruptly resigned after one year with the Department of Homeland Security, confiding to industry colleagues his frustration over what he considers a lack of attention paid to computer security issues within the agency.

Amit Yoran, a former software executive from Symantec Corp., informed the White House about his plans to quit as director of the National Cyber Security Division and made his resignation effective at the end of Thursday, effectively giving a single's day notice of his intentions to leave.
[...]

Yoran effectively replaced a position once held by Richard Clarke.

Ouch!