Category: The War on Terrorism

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National Security New York City Politics The War on Terrorism

Opposing Pete King for NY Senate

I didn’t realize that Pete King was planning on making a run for the New York Senate. I liked Pete King for a long time – and he’s now my Congressman. He seems a stand-up guy. He was one of the few Republicans to publicly oppose the efforts to impeach Bill Clinton. Which is why I decided to pick up his novel, Vale of Tears. I could excuse the clunky writing – but what was more difficult to accept was the bigotry towards Muslims and Arab Americans.

Since 9/11, he seems to have made a practice of such Muslim-baiting. Just this year, he demanded the MTA remove subway ads for a mosque in Brooklyn, stating:

They are especially shameful because the ads will be running during the seventh anniversary of September 11, and because the subways are considered a primary target of terrorists.

I’d like to give King the benefit of the doubt here and suggest that his wrath may not have been directed against the ads which simply promoted Islam. ((The ad campaign is also linked by a YouTube video to a controversial imam who was once thought to be possibly connected to the 1994 World Trade Center bombing – but who was cleared and never charged.)) But either way, I’d be concerned if a man like him were in the Senate. Governor Patterson better pick someone who can take on Pete King.

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Libertarianism National Security Politics The War on Terrorism

How the War on Drugs Is Making America Less Safe From Terrorism

[digg-reddit-me]The War on Drugs is undermining America’s War on Terror by:

  • creating an adversarial relationship with a large portion of the country;
  • calling into question the legitimacy of the rule of law and law enforcement;
  • competing for law enforcement resources; and
  • revealing the measures we take to track money being laundered and to stop smuggling.

The threat of terrorism is real, if often exaggerated for political purposes; and the consequences of a low probability, high impact attack could be catastrophic. If terrorism is our most immediate national security threat, then we must rearrange our priorities and end the failing Drug War.

The prosecution of Tommy Chong (half of the perpetually baked comedy duo Cheech and Chong) illustrates some of these points.

The state of Pennsylvania prohibits the shipping of drug paraphernalia – such as bongs – into it’s state. In 2003, a man from Beaver Falls, PA began calling a store in California run by the family of Tommy Chong asking them to ship him a large order of bongs and assorted other glassware. A manager at the store claimed that man called at least 20 times – and each time a representative of the store told him they could not ship to his state, citing the Pennsylvania law. This very determined man traveled to California to order the items – but he was not determined enough to stay around until his order was packed up. He returned to Pennsylvania. The store still refused to ship him the items – but after a few weeks, they gave in to his repeated demands.

That was the excuse a SWAT team needed to raid the store and arrest Tommy Chong. The entire operation was set up by a U. S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Mary Beth Buchanan. The net cost to the taxpayer to put Tommy Chong  in jail for 9 months (Chong was convinced to take the fall although he didn’t run the business and had nothing to do with this incident) was $12 million. Tommy Chong, reflecting on the lessons of his experience pointed to “the absurdity of the War on Drugs when we have a much more pressing – and wholly unrelated – war on terrorism to worry about.”

I only disagree with the sage Tommy Chong in that the two wars are wholly unrelated. They are related intimately – and the war against Tommy Chong is making the war against Al Qaeda harder.

The most profound way the War on Drugs is undermining the War on Terror is how it calls into question the legitimacy of the rule of law and of law enforcement. Tommy Chong’s case is not atypical in how disproportionate the resources used to take him down were to his threat to society – from the millions of dollars spent to the SWAT team to the sting operation – you would expect him to be some kind of violent drug lord. Chong’s case is exceptional only due to his celebrity. The number of hours dedicated to fighting the Drug War against American citizens is incalculable. Each arrest for possession, for possession with intent to distribute, or any other of a long list minor offenses involves the time and attention of police officers, as well as judges and attorneys. Yet with all this effort, this War on Drugs has been fruitless. As Ben Wallace-Wells subtitled his summary of the War on Drugs: “After Thirty-Five Years and $500 Billion, Drugs Are as Cheap and Plentiful as Ever.”

Excessive force is often used in the Drug War – and not just against isolated individuals. The libertarian CATO Institute has documented the enormous number of paramilitary raids – mainly involved in the War on Drugs. They cite an estimate of 40,000 paramilitary raids a year – including many which kill innocent bystanders or are raids on the wrong address. In an example from just a few months ago, police raided the home of the mayor of a small suburb outside of Baltimore and shot his dogs in search of marijuana. The mayor and his family were innocent, as were the dogs. One of the mayors neighbors said to him after the police raid: “If the police shot your dogs dead and did this to you, how can I trust them?”

At the same time, the Drug War has alienated a large segment of its population from its law enforcement and national security agencies. At times – especially as in the case of Tommy Chong – it seems to have become a surrogate for a culture war. Largely as a result of the War on Drugs, America has the largest incarceration rate of any nation in the world. Yet most offenders of drug laws are never imprisoned – as it is estimated that nearly 7% of Americans use illegal drugs every month. Among the Americans to cross into enemy lines in the War on Drugs include our last, current, and future presidents. The War on Drugs has created an adversarial relationship between the government and a large portion of Americans.

The failures of the Drug War haven’t yet affected the War on Terror because it has largely been seen as something “different,” something which unites all Americans, which transcends boundaries. Mobsters, drug dealers, smugglers, and even governors of Illinois may be threats to the rule of law and targets of law enforcement, but they, with law enforcement, see terrorists as enemies of civilization. The Sopranos illustrated this with a storyline in which a mobster is asked by the FBI to keep a lookout for suspicious activity – and he is eager to. But the War on Drugs keeps threatening to undermine this essential distinction, as law enforcement uses powers designated to it in order to fight terrorism for other ends.

The War on Drugs also competes with the War on Terror for government resources and attention. This refers not only to the degree to which the FBI, Customs, and local police forces must split their attention between the two Wars – thus shortchanging both, but also to the more formal war in Afghanistan. Our anti-drug policy is driving the poor farmers of Afghanistan to seek the protection of the Taliban according to President Hamid Karzai. At the same time, even as additional resources have been allocated at the federal level to combat terrorism, local police forces must now split their attention – and their efforts in the Drug War often undermine the trust they need to prevent a potential terrorist attack.

More insidious though is how the intersection of the War on Drugs and the incentives of drug trafficking create an infrastructure that can be used for terrorism as a Congressional report from 2004 explained. The enormous profits involved in drug trafficking have incentivized an industry dedicated to undermining our national security infrastructure – it has created experts in smuggling to get contraband through or around Customs and into America; it supports an industry of money laundering and of illegal weapons and false identifications. All of these are useful and often essential to a terrorist operation – and yet none of these could be adequately financed by terrorism alone. The efforts of the War on Drugs reveal weaknesses in our national security to drug dealers and terrorists alike. One of the authors of a study of America’s vulnerability to nuclear terrorism joked the best way to smuggle nuclear material into America would be in a package of cocaine. If America were to focus our national security efforts – including efforts to track suspicious money and to prevent smuggling on terrorist-related targets, less would be known of our capabilities.

The War on Drugs has failed in its objectives. It affects Americans unequally and unfairly. And it is making us less safe. There is an international consensus on the dangers of heroin and cocaine trafficking – and we should continue to combat them. But we stop fighting a “War on Drugs” that is undermining the War on Terror.

We must rationalize the drug laws – by equalizing the penalties across similar classes of drugs and by legalizing those drugs health experts agree are less dangerous and addictive while continuing to make efforts to reduce the demand for and smuggling of the rest. We must end the “War on Drugs” that is targeting a significant percentage of American citizens and helping to destabilize countries around the world. We must stop blurring the lines between our efforts to stop drug trafficking and the War on Terror. The best defense against terrorism is a people who trust law enforcement, respect the rule of law, and are knowledgeable about threats.

The War on Drugs is squandering this resource. Which is why we must end it.

[Picture licensed under Creative Commons courtesy of CmdrGravy.]

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Libertarianism National Security Politics The War on Terrorism

Illegal Drugs and the War on Terror

In researching a post I was working on, I came across a Congressional report from 2004 that I was surprised I hadn’t heard about. Entitled “Illicit Drugs and the Terrorist Threat: Causal Links and Implications for Domestic Drug Control Policy” [pdf], it lists five potential links between drug trafficking and terrorism:

  1. Supplying cash for terrorist operations;
  2. Creating chaos in countries where drugs are produced;
  3. Generating corruption in law enforcement, military, and other governmental and civil-society institutions that either build public support for terrorist-linked groups or weaken the capacity of the society to combat terrorist organizations and actions;
  4. Providing services also useful for terrorist actions and movements of terrorist personnel and material, and supporting a common infrastructure, such as smuggling capabilities, illicit arms acquisition, money laundering, or the production of false identification papers;
  5. Competing for law enforcement and intelligence attention.

The report focuses on how drug trafficking undermines the War on Terror – but it makes clear both the current quagmire that is the Drug War and the ways in which the incentives created by the War on Drugs undermine the War on Terror.

Now at first glance, it may seem as if the War on Terror and the War on Drugs should be benefit one another. After all, a successful policy that made heroin production and trade less profitable or more difficult would deprive the Afghan Taliban from one of their primary sources of cash. A successful anti-smuggling policy would make it harder for drugs to slip across the border as well as terrorists and weapons.

The Bush administration meanwhile has sought to conflate the two wars – for example, by running ads immediately in the aftermath of 9/11 claiming that drug money paid for terrorism ((At the time, the Taliban and Al Qaeda were not making money from the heroin trade however, so this was rather misleading. The Taliban in fact had prevented poppy-farming until they needed it as a source of revenue after they were ousted from power. The commercials based their claims on FARC in Columbia.)) and by repeatedly using measures from the Patriot Act and other anti-terrorism measures to go after drug offenses.

But looking more closely, one can see that the War on Drugs has often impeded the War on Terror in these very areas. For example, critics of the Bush administration’s drug policy in Afghanistan believe we are in fact driving poor farmers to seek the protection of the Taliban. By using laws designed for the War on Terror in the Drug War, it undermines claims that the War on Terror is “different” and should unite all of us. By using these new powers more often, law enforcement undermines it’s credibility. It’s a vicious cycle.

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    National Security Politics The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

    The Judgment of History

    Patrick Radden Keefe mentioned, in an offhand manner, one of the great questions about the transition:

    Even the legal opinions governing the program are still squirreled away in a safe in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. In recent months, the Senate Judiciary Committee and a Washington district judge have ordered them turned over, and the next attorney general should do so immediately.

    He was referring here to the wiretapping program specifically – but it applies to many of the legal rationales in the War on Terror. Dick Cheney and his lieutenants David Addington and Scooter Libby perfected the art of bureaucratic warfare during the first years of the Bush administration. According to Jack Goldsmith as quoted by Barton Gellman:

    They were geniuses at this. They could divide up all these problems in the bureaucracy, ask different people to decide things in their lanes, control the facts they gave them, and then put the answers together to get the result they want.

    In addition – as Keefe mentioned – and as Gellman reported in his book The Angler – Addington kept certain legal documents exclusively in the safe in his office. Not just copies – but the originals, with no copying permitted, and with access to the documents severely limited. (For example, even the attorneys in the National Security Agency responsible for making sure the NSA was following legal guidelines were not permitted to see the legal rationale for their wiretapping program.) As members of the incoming administration attempt to decide what is the best means to deal with the abuses of power during the Bush administration – Nuremberg-style trials? a truth commission offering clemency? the normal legal system? – you have to wonder what steps Cheney and Addington will take. There has been much discussion of whether or not George W. Bush will offer a preemptive pardon to anyone involved in the War on Terror – but less discussed is what Cheney and Addington might be able to do to entirely obfuscate attempts to find out what happened.

    Based on my understanding of Cheney’s personality as described by Barton Gellman – and on his recent interview with ABC News – I think Cheney might want to just get it all out there. He virtually admitted – though not necessarily to the point of taking legal responsibility – that he authorized war crimes:

    He was also asked whether he authorized the tactics used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

    “I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn’t do,” Cheney said. “And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it.

    It seems that Cheney – at least on some issues – is now, and finally, willing to come forward and admit his role. He isn’t willing to admit fault – but seems proud of what he did, and willing to accept the judgment of history.

    Still given the extreme secrecy surrounding even the legal rationale of many aspects of the War on Terror, we may never know if documents are destroyed.

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    Barack Obama Law National Security The War on Terrorism

    Law as a Guide Rather than an Obstacle in National Security

    Philip Bobbitt in the New York Times:

    Preventing any attacks on the United States since 9/11 is something for which the Bush administration must be given credit, but credit must also go to the American public, which decisively rejected offshore penal colonies, spurious rationalizations for warfare, secret torture chambers and contempt for the constitutional and international laws that would forbid such practices. Indeed, by selecting a former law professor as its new president, the country has thoroughly dismissed the notion that law is an obstacle rather than a guide to achieving security.

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    Humor Libertarianism The War on Terrorism Videos

    Carrie Fischer, Cary Grant, and LSD

    I listened to Leonard Lopate’s interview with Carrie Fischer earlier this week. Today, I just came across an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today Show.  She’s one interesting broad – to use an old term – and incredibly open about the troubles of her life. From the calls from Cary Grant telling her to stop taking acid to the breakup of her celebrity parents’ marriage to her job fixing up troubled scripts to the electro-shock therapy she now undergoes regularly (despite having lost four months of memories to it) to manage her manic-depression.

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    Morality National Security The War on Terrorism

    Does Torture Work?

    Lt-Col Vandeveld, a former military prosecutor at Guantanamo:

    Torture may result in reliable information — no question about that. But is torture reconcilable with our basic humanity or with America’s desire to be an example to the rest of the world? The answer is no. Torture, however you define it, is wrong, appalling, immoral.

    While the overall point Vandeveld is making – that America should not torture – is one I would expect, his initial hedging – “Torture may result in reliable information” surprised me. Aside from top-level political appointees, I’m not sure that I’ve seen anyone in the military in fields related to interrogation acknowledge that torture might work. And many spoke out against it.

    What I’ve seen more of are comments like that of “Matthew Alexander” – a pseudonym used to protect the interrogator’s identity. He was one of the interrogators whose information led to the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He wrote:

    I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I’m still alarmed about that today.

    I’m not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me – both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn’t work. [my emphasis]

    This refrain comes up again and again among interrogators. Most of the public debate though has been driven by people like Senator John McCain and Captain Ian Fishback opposed torture for moral reasons.

    McCain:

    The enemy we fight has no respect for human life or human rights. They don’t deserve our sympathy. But this isn’t about who they are. This is about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies, and we can never, never allow our enemies to take those values away.

    Fishback:

    …the most important question that this generation will answer [is] Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security? Terrorism inspires fear and suppresses ideals like freedom and individual rights. Overcoming the fear posed by terrorist threats is a tremendous test of our courage. Will we confront danger and adversity in order to preserve our ideals, or will our courage and commitment to individual rights wither at the prospect of sacrifice? My response is simple. If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is ‘America.

    This should be our primary reason for opposing torture. But a secondary reason is that most interrogators have stated that it simply doesn’t work if your goal is to get quality information from detainees. Most torture techniques were designed as punishment or to elicit confessions – not to get information. For example, the techniques we use were used by the Soviets to get confessions for show trials and the North Vietnamese for propaganda videos.

    Most experts seem to acknowledge that torture is good for one thing – breaking down a person’s will, perhaps driving them insane, and forcing them to agree with the torturer. This is what has happened in America’s torture program – as detainees confessed to things they did not do and gave information about connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda that Americans wanted to know about but did not exist.

    Whether or not torture works is a secondary question – but an important one nevertheless.

    Categories
    Foreign Policy India National Security Politics The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

    Like Small Children

    In my piece yesterday about the New York Times coverage of the Indian response to the Mumbai massacre, I was struck by the comparison to America’s response to 9/11. I didn’t realize that the person cited in the column, Vir Sanghvi, had actually written a column on this subject:

    [In the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, Indians believed that the] real heroes of 26/11 were the men in uniform, the navy commandos, the Army, the Mumbai police and the ATS. Therefore, we should put our faith in these people not in politicians.

    Others simply say that democracy has failed India and that we need a strong leader. Some talk openly about a benign dictator (a commodity on par with virgin prostitutes) and some demand an abridgement of the universal franchise that, they say, has led us to this mess…

    I’m not saying that any of this is dangerous—no dictator is going to seize power because of discontent in Malabar Hill or Cuffe Parade—but it is certainly silly. Not only does it demonstrate that we have forgotten the lessons of the Emergency but it also shames the Indian middle class and shows up the cowards that are some of its most vocal members.

    Like small children we crave the security offered by men in uniform every time we sense danger. We lose our nerve, abandon the only real functioning democracy in the populous states of the Third World and long for a leader who will fight the terrorists in the manner of Superman. Like frightened rabbits scurrying for cover, we lose all perspective and all common sense.

    Contrast our responses to those from America after 9/11. The President was a dimwit, a man who had just stolen the election, and who reacted bizarrely to the news of the strikes and then took to his plane. But Americans did not abandon faith in their democracy. They came together and resolved to fight terrorism as one nation.

    Categories
    Morality National Security The War on Terrorism

    Army of the Pure

    It has seemed to me that the quest for purity often leads to exceptional evil. The Nazis wanted a pure Aryan race. Religious extremists of all sorts focus on various types of purity. In a sense, the belief that one can attain purity is to reject that most human of all statements: “Nothing human is alien to me.” Instead, purity by definition is about exclusion in contrast to messy humanity.

    I was reminded of this when seeing the New York Times translate the name of the terrorist group that is believed to have been behind the Mumbai massacre: Lashkar-e-Taiba, “army of the pure.”

    In the name of purity, there was another massacre. It will not be the last.

    Categories
    Law National Security Politics The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

    Liberty is Not Another Word for Anti-Antiterrorism

    Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

    [digg-reddit-me]The Wall Street Journal editorial page is a platform for kings and prime ministers,  presidents and scientists, thinkers and businessmen, who want to speak to the powerful and monied interests of the American elite. And then, there are the crazy right-wingers who run the board and invite their friends to write short propaganistics pieces.

    Reading yesterday’s editorial board piece about the “anti-antiterror lobby,” I was tempted to throw around terms like “fascist” and “fear-mongerer” in response. I felt a strong visceral anger as the board described those who insisted laws be followed – the foundational principle of civilization itself – as in league with terrorists (who oddly seek the same freedom from law the Wall Street Journal supports). I was so angry I missed the point of the piece.

    But, after a time, a walk in the cold, I was able to tame my anger – to reason with it, to analyze it, and to direct it more appropriately.

    Despite the hysteric, trying-too-hard rhetoric, the Wall Street Journal might well have a point when it sided with Ray Kelly in criticizing the “unnecessarily protracted, risk-averse process” that is behind the current technological innovations. They’re probably right in stating that the FISA is flawed. Which is why it’s too bad that the Journal board used their influential platform to “boomerize” ((They politicized the issue along the lines of the Baby Boomer divide, using key words and paradaigms that are designed only to appeal to half of the public.)) the issue instead of actually discussing it in any meaningful way.

    I shouldn’t be surprised that the Journal would politicize national security instead of acting responsibly. This is what they do. They represent the worst of Boomerdom. The actual argument they put forth has emotional resonance – touching on themes that were relevant in the 1960s. But it ignores the actual issues at stake here – the rule of law; new technologies; terrorism; checks and balances; liberty; the Constitution; public safety. The Journal doesn’t acknowledge that a balancing test must always be applied – between liberty and security. Instead, they mock those concerned with liberty as pro-terrorists (or to seem less ridiculous, “anti-antiterrorists.”)

    The Journal‘s rhetoric is at worst diabolical – as they seek to place political blame on the Democrats for any future attacks because “Democrats and the left” inserted “an unelected judiciary into the wartime chain of command.” But this invocation of wartime is a sleight of hand – unless the Journal considers America itself to be under marital law. The Journal talks about how the executive branch already has “Constitutional authority” to wiretap communications that FISA was explicitly set up to regulate – neatly accepting the most extreme view of executive authority that led the mutiny of the top members of Bush’s Justice Department and almost causing John Ashcroft (Attorney General), Jack Goldsmith (Head of the OLC), James Comey (2nd in Command of the Justice Department), Robert Mueller (FBI Director), as well as scores of their subordinates – Republicans and staunch conservatives all – to nearly resign in protest. Now, these conservatives are lumped in with “Democrats and the left” as “anti-antiterrorists” because they believe in some limits to executive power, even in the field of national security.

    The Journal manages to explain away why the conservative attorney general is the one who is telling Ray Kelly he’s wrong – rather than the FISA court which has rejected only a handful of the tens of thousands of applications for warrants to wiretap.  Of course, the attorney general is refusing to even submit Ray Kelly’s requests to be adjudicated – which the Journal acknowledges is a wise move because the “system” is dominated by “anti-antiterrorists.” They blame the attorney general’s actions on the liberals. The Journal insists that the famously prickly judge is just trying to please the liberals because only liberals would insist on laws to restrain the actions of the executive. Apparently, the Journal cannot understand what kind of man could stand up for American values in the face of fear and terror – so they presume he must be pragmatically compromising with liberals.

    Thus, the Wall Street Journal has turned a bureacratic struggle between two conservatives into an indictment of the rule of law itself. Apparently, lawfulness is deemed in essence liberal, aka “anti-antiterroristic.” Does that leave us with monarchism? Which laws should the executive obey? What if the law is amended to address concerns? Should we get rid of the Fourth Amendment and that whole idea of “unreasonable searches”? None of these questions are answered – or even addressed. It’s really too bad that the Journal didn’t have any space to let some grown-ups write an op-ed on the issue. They were too busy trying to score clever political points.