Making Sense of Jihad

Dude, Where’s My Book Review?

You can always tell a leftist is writing counterterrorism analysis, because more often than not they will communicate their oh-so-nuanced approach to Al Qaeda by dismissing what AQ has to say, and moving on to more important things, like, say, the reasons why we went into Iraq (none of which have anything to do with the actual reasons why we went into Iraq).  Throw in a few words on how the US is ultimately to blame for all this mess, and you have yourself something worthy of, say, a Washington Post book review. 

CFR Senior Fellow Steven Simon leaves Iraq out of his "review" of Ray Ibrahim’s new book The Al Qaeda Reader.  For that, I’m grateful. Instead, he spends most of the review pushing individuals and ideas more to his ideological liking.  Don’t get me wrong, he does appear to like the book.  He describes what Mr. Ibrahim has “cobbled together” as “useful,” and “instructive,” but the reader has got to work to get an overall positive impression.

Three paragraphs into it, Mr. Simon has already condescended to the author and dismissed UBL’s “utterances” and Al-Zawahiri’s “scribblings” as inspired by the ever-so ho-hum “anti-American and anti-Semitic motifs that have circulated in Europe and the Middle East for over a century...” 

I could have done without his sneering dismissal of Mr. Ibrahim’s analysis.  Apparently, Mr. Ibrahim’s weakness is that he has “found a place in the neocon blogosphere.”  For such an offense, however, Mr. Simon is willing to forgive him, because, you see, Mr. Ibrahim is a victim. “As the son of an immigrant family from Egypt and a Coptic Christian,” he writes, “he might be forgiven for taking this position.  Fundamentalists of al-Zawahiri’s ilk have tried to make a misery of Coptic life in Egypt.”  Oh, yes, of course, Mr. Ibrahim’s analysis all has to do with sour grapes, events beyond his meager “archivists” mind. 

Mr. Simon and his “ilk” apparently only see the current global conflict with radical Islam in geopolitical terms.  This fits in with their training.  It also continues to be an effective analytical approach for analyzing practically any other trends, event, person or policy other than radical Islam.  When it comes to radical Islam, all geopolitical analysis falls short, and individuals who would otherwise give sound insights on any other topic are actually left sputtering and posing.  Because, you see, the enemy has no interest in dealing with us in anything but their own terms, and those terms are spelled out in their astonishingly broad body of religious and ideological texts, the most important of which predate Al Qaeda by decades. 

It’s hard to explain to someone who is not in the “industry” so-to-speak, but this posing is common among the Middle East studies-graduates being fast-tracked into key government analysts positions.  They tend to be so ill-prepared to take on the radical Islamist ideology that they can only pretend to know anything about it by dismissing it, feigning some deep, nuanced understanding of the enemy with a sniff of condescension.  Many of them can parrot Edward Said without so much as an intake of breath, but can’t seem to wrap their minds around one of Al Qaeda’s three fatawa. 

Now, Steven Simon has written two books on Al Qaeda. I'll give him credit for knowing far more than your average GS-9 analyst, but if all he's going to do is sniff at the enemy and blame the US , he might as well get a hobby. He writes:

The usefulness of anthologies such as this one is generally thought to lie in the importance of better knowing the enemy. But winning a war of ideas also requires understanding how others see us -- and why it resonates with so many whose hearts and minds we are battling for. I'm reminded of a Hellenistic tombstone from Egypt that depicts a reclining skeleton and the phrase gnothe seauton: "know thyself." That's part of the challenge bin Laden poses to us.

No, Mr. Simon.  The only challenge UBL poses to us is how to kill him. 

Radical Islam existed for decades before bin Laden and will outlive him for many more decades.  The challenge is understanding radical Islam, and for this we turn to men like Ray Ibrahim.  At least he's willing to take the enemy at their word.

I remember sitting at some think tank event recently where a group of analysts from one think tank were arguing with a group of analysts from another think tank about the quality of their sources: “Our sources are better than yours.”  Reply:  “No, ours are better than yours.”   Of course, with a few exceptions, like RAND, and Steve Emerson’s Investigative Project, most think tank analysis of Al Qaeda is appallingly off, because they're all stuck in the Cold War era mindset of analyzing for national interests.  Al Qaeda isn't a nation, as a matter of fact, it tries its darnedest to eradicate national identity from its followers.  The major reason why groups like RAND and Investigative Project tend to get it right lies in their reliance on primary source material.  They take the enemy at their word.

Minor edits - 10-08-07

Evil Lemons

I've noticed a strong spike in hits from Daniel Pipes' blog.  No doubt this has to do with Columbia University's (and the National Press Club's) decision to embrace the Iranian dictator. 

The leftists who run universities no doubt see this in part as a snub on President Bush.  In response, I believe that the President should make a public statement regarding Columbia's decision, for two reasons:

1. It would bring this appalling event into the national political dialog and it will be an opportunity to challenge political leftists, presidential candidates to clarify their policies on Iran (something they are incapable of doing); and
2. It would be an opportunity to make a statement supporting the persecuted reporters and students of Iran,  and turning this event into an opportunity to highlight Ahmadinejad's own suppression of academic activity and free speech

If the idiot leftists at Columbia want this to be political, then perhaps our Republican leaders should make it political.

Update:  If our leftist establishment wants to hug high profile thugs, I think they should be permitted to do so.  However, we should make sure everyone knows exactly what they're doing and what the consequences are every time they do it between now and election day '08.

About Right

AP recently reported on public comments made by National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell which included this little piece of info that highlights the sheer immensity of the bureaucratic hurdles FBI agents and analysts have to go through in order to put someone under surveillance:

—McConnell said it takes 200 hours to assemble a FISA warrant on a single telephone number. "We're going backwards," he said. "We couldn't keep up."

—Offering never-disclosed figures, McConnell also revealed that fewer than 100 people inside the United States are monitored under FISA warrants. However, he said, thousands of people overseas are monitored.

BTW: If I recall, the government has two types of surveillance authorities, one is evidence collection, that’s the Title III wiretap, and then there is intelligence gathering, that’s FISA surveillance.  (Until recently you couldn't use FISA-collected info in court proceedings.)  Neither of these things is eavesdropping, only mainstream media outlets and the clueless liberals call it eavesdropping.

Eavesdropping is what you did to your big brother or sister when they were talking on the phone and you wanted to annoy them.  Example:

“Mom!  Marisa keeps on picking up the kitchen phone!” 

This was particularly effective in the bad old days when a house had two phones and the only way you could get any privacy was to have a receiver with a really long cord so you could hide in the closest closet. 

On a related note

This recent Newsweek article is a frustrating read, and reminds me that it wasn’t just the cube dwelling paper pushers in DC who struggled against a tide of worthless bureaucratic process and, as Hotair notes, “fatal risk aversion:”

Rice, the A-Team sergeant stuck in his safe house near Kandahar, recalls that his team’s frustration peaked when a memo came down from the brass at Baghram, ordering men not to initiate fire fights and even not to use words like “death” and “destruction” in their CONOPS. Among Rice’s men, it became known as the “limp dick memo.”

Note to Charles (at LGF)

Please don't give them any more ideas.

NYT Hysterics & the Real News

UPDATE (10:05 PM):  NY Times posted the article at 10 PM.  It's here.  As I say below.  There's nothing new here.

As recently as 2005, American intelligence assessments described senior leaders of Al Qaeda as cut off from their foot soldiers and able only to provide inspiration for future attacks. But more recent intelligence describes the organization’s hierarchy as intact and strengthening.

“The chain of command has been re-established,” said one American government official, who said that the Qaeda “leadership command and control is robust.”

American officials and analysts said a variety of factors in Pakistan had come together to allow “core Al Qaeda” — a reference to Mr. bin Laden and his immediate circle — to regain some of their strength. The emergence of a relative haven in North Waziristan and the surrounding area has helped senior operatives communicate more effectively with the outside world via courier and the Internet.

This tells us more about the quality of intel analysis than about our counterterrorism policy. Policy needs to be guided by the light of good intel, analyzed for maximum benefit.  If the analytical product sucks, then we're stumbling around in the dark.

------------------------------------------------

Drudge Report has just posted the really big red headline (no siren, though) breaking a NY Times report that supposedly says that Al Qaeda leadership has reconstituted itself along the Pakistani/Afghan border.  This is news?  Apparently to the mainstream media this is news.  Whatever.

I've never bought the idea that Al Qaeda was the loose network of networks.  It was too sexy and too impractical a concept.  It sounded like something thought up by a bunch of government contractors.  Successful attacks need ideas, money, and most of all, good leadership.  You don't get that from a bunch of kids downloading jihadi stuff off the internet.

The UK and Australia have both broken several huge terrorist plots in the past three years that all include some combination of senior Al Qaeda leadership guidance, Al Qaeda-linnked money sources, or extensive training (in Pakistan) for its operatives. 

• Ministry of Sound cell (UK - 2004)
• Sydney Cell (Australia - 2004)
• Issa al-Hindi Cell (UK/US - 2004)
• London 7/7 Cell (UK - 2005)
• Sydney/Melbourne Cell (Australia - 2005)
• Airliners Cell (UK - 2006)

None of these were work of a weakened Al Qaeda.

The real news on DRUDGE tonight wasn't the fact that Al Qaeda is alive and well, it's the fact that a significant portion of one of the world's largest Protestant denominations is considering realigning itself with the Roman Catholic church.  In other words: Drudge is reporting on a possible miracle. 

Once again the Triune God enters from stage above.

The Slow Moving Wheel

A cynical old analyst once described our intelligence community (IC) as a slow, squeaky wheel that occasionally jerked forward an inch or two when someone or something pushed hard enough. 

I couldn't help but recall that analogy when I read this:

The CIA's "Strategic Intent," distributed to agency employees in December and posted on its public website this month, stresses improved flexibility and fewer barriers between departments. It contains several corporate-style flourishes, including ongoing employee input, an advisory board drawn from business and academia and "action teams" assigned to implement the plan.

In a speech to CIA workers at the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters Jan. 4, CIA Director Michael Hayden said the plan aims to reassert the 60-year-old agency's primacy in the intelligence community.

"The operational demands of the recent past too often limited the time and energy CIA has to address the demands of the future," Hayden said. "We've gotten away with it for a few years — and for very good reasons — but no organization can thrive indefinitely without tending to strategic imperatives."

The changes come as President Bush has chosen retired vice admiral J. Michael McConnell as director of national intelligence. He would replace John Negroponte, who will become the top deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. McConnell, like Hayden, is a former National Security Agency head.

Amen, Sister!

In her book, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror, Mary Habeck encapsulates the key weakeness in Western ideological analysis of the global jihad:

The consistent need to find explanations other than religious ones for the [9-11] attacks says, in fact, more about the West than it does about the jihadis.  Western scholars have generally failed to take religion seriously.  Secularists, whether liberals or socialists, grant true explanatory power to political, social, or economic factors but discount the plain sense of religious statements made by the jihadis themselves.  To see why jihadis declared war on the United States and tried to kill as many Americans as possible, we must be willing to listen to their own explanations. To do otherwise is to impose a Western interpretation on the extremists, in effect to listen to ourlseves rather then to them.

Amen, sister

Okay, Class

At Couterterrorism Blog Daveed Gartenstein-Ross schools a couple of popular lefty bloggers in all this jihad stuff.  Apparently, the lefty bloggers have no idea why there's so much fuss about Somalia.   

He Said, They Said

Detriot has cars, L.A. has Hollywood, and DC has government.  Exploiting a vast niche of aging government managers is a panolpy of publications like GovExec.com.  Its editors know its readership is reliably leftwing, and when it comes to reliable administration-bashing GovExec.com never disappoints.  It also has a tendancy to misrepresent reports that may support (or counter) their reliably leftwing "narrative."

Case in point:  IBM's Jeff Jonas and CATO Institute's Jim Harper recently published a report analyzing the effectiveness of datamining tools in predictive counterterrorism analysis, that is the kind of analysis that attempts to discover terrorist activity within patterns of data. 

This is how GovExec.com covered the release of the report:

Government-sponsored mining of databases for information is costly, ineffective at catching terrorists and threatens citizens' privacy rights, a new Cato Institute study claims.

The statistical likelihood of false positives is so high that the practice "will inevitably waste resources and threaten civil liberties," according to authors Jim Harper, Cato's information policy studies director, and IBM researcher Jeff Jonas.

This is how Jeff Jonas reports on his report:

This paper also highlights a real governmental need to efficiently locate, access, and aggregate information about specific suspects. To highlight this point we show that starting with two primary suspects, available data points and existing laws, a good number of the 9/11 terrorists could have been identified in a very narrow investigative fashion before September 11th.

Make no confusion about it; though data mining has many value uses from reducing corporate direct marketing costs, to classifying celestial objects and even medical research, it just so happens that it is not so helpful to discover underlying patterns of low- incident terrorism.

A bit different, no?

I once worked on a data-mining project that attempted to do this kind of predictive analysis, and its effectiveness was only so-so.   The problem is many tech companies in the region talk-up their datamining tools like they'll find Osama bin Laden's cave.  Datamining is good for certain applications.  Decision-makers shouldn't put their hopes (and money) in tools that are only partially effective.  That said, government decision-makers also shouldn't put much trust in Gov Exec.com's hysterical reporting.

Bad Old Days

Michael Tanji over at The Haft of the Spear points to a devastating insider critique at just how bad our intelligence services -- in this case military intelligence -- are at, well, everything but bureaucracy:

Bogus bean-counting, middling, meddling bosses who think they can read the chief's mind but don't have the stones to actually ask questions, grunts watching days of hard work get boiled down into a PowerPoint bullet devoid of any meaning or context.

Regurgitating the news, pummeling original thoughts into mindless gov-speak, a process that turns "current" intel into ancient history . . . it's like reliving the bad old days . . . must be what a bad acid trip feels like.

The bad old days never left.

Farah Nails It

Douglas Farah at CT Blog nails it:

It is not a popular thing to say in public circles, but there is a growing awareness of the the nature of the Islamist threat to the United States and the West in the Pentagon and elsewhere.

In an interview with the Washington Times, Brig. Gen. Mark O. Schissler, deputy director for the war on terrorism within the strategic plans office of the Pentagon's Joint Staff, stated that the enemy is "absolutely committed to the 50-. 100-year plan" to establish a caliphate.

This is not news. But this type of public assessment has been sorely lacking since 9-11. People in the Intelligence Community here and abroad, who read the _jihadi_ literature and pay attention to what they say, know this. But there has been an extreme reluctance to make this case publicly and constantly, so people are aware of not only what the stakes are but of the need for an over-arching, long-term strategy. [emphasis mine]

Jihad v Education

To get an idea of how bad the current analytical meltdown is in our intelligence community, read Walid Phares' new piece for Homeland Security Today.  He nails it when he notes that at the core of our collective cluelessness is the failure to educate the general public (and as an extension the students who will one day be government counterterrorism analysts):

When historians analyze the War on Terror in the near future, they will most likely look back at the war of ideas preceding 9/11 and understand the role academia played as a central battlefield leading to the weakening and defeat of the country, before it rose back in resistance. For if the fields of foreign policy, regional studies and international relations teaching—the most sensitive feeders for security and defense decision-making—were obsolete in identifying the “enemy,” all that is left to national security is the last shield, which is the hope that intelligence and counterterrorism sensors can catch the raiders at the doors or beyond the gates. And that’s what didn’t occur in 1993, 1998 and 2001.The terror offensive against America was preceded by a War of Ideas, blurring the eyes of the nation.

If intellectual blurring starts in classrooms, it soon reaches the newsrooms and, eventually, the intelligence rooms and war rooms. If young Americans are mistaught the ideology, political culture and intentions of the enemy while at school and in college, once graduated, they will carry this misperception with them as they find jobs and are recruited in all the layers of national analysis. Students enter the media, legislative research, security, intelligence, foreign policy, justice, think tanks and other sectors crucial for national decision making at the bottom levels and rise up to the ultimate positions.

By failing students in the classrooms, the educational system caused a national analysis failure: Media failed to report terrorism as it should have, impacting government’s various levels of policymaking; intelligence analysis, deprived of cultural understanding, saw the data but couldn’t put the bigger picture together; courts couldn’t process the concepts of terrorism beyond criminality; and, ultimately, both the legislative and executive branches were denied sound advice on the war already in progress against the country.

In conclusion, the failure in education led to a derailment of national analysis.

Fighting Terrorism, the Old-Fashioned Way

I was too far down the totem pole at the FBI to remember Dennis Lormel or Pat D'Amuro as anything but names on memos requiring signatures.  At Counterterrorism Blog, Mr. Lormel (now retired) defends the character and  accomplishments of current and former Bureau senior counterterrorism officials from the half-truths and exaggerations of a recent NBC News hit-piece, er, report.  I have to agree and disagree with him.  He's right to defend the character, expertise and hard work of his friends and associates.  However, I disagree with his somewhat romanticized description of the Bureau's counterterrorism operations and its accomplishments. 

Lormel's post is a response to an irritating controversy surrounding one of the Bureau's perpetually aggrieved Muslim special agents, in this case Bassem Youssef.  Apparently, during depositions in Youssef's lawsuit, his attorney asked a few senior officials about their basic knowledge of things Islamic and jihad-related.  And apparently they couldn't answer with enough precision:

Dale Watson, now retired, was the FBI's top counterterrorism official before and after 9/11.

In a deposition taken on Dec. 8, 2004, Youssef’s lawyer Stephen Kohn asked Watson: “Do you know who Osama bin Laden's spiritual leader was?"

Watson: Can't recall.

Lawyer: And do you know the differences in the religion between Shiite and Sunni Muslims?

Watson: Not technically, no.

NBC reports this as a senior FBI official ignorant of the difference between Sunni and Shiite.  I don't see it.  The question is vague and could be answered in several different ways. Of the two highlighted the first question is the one that stands out.  Apparently, the answer they were looking for is the Abdel-Rahman, aka the Blind Sheik.  Really? He's not my first answer.  I would have answered, Abdullah Azzam. 

I wouldn't expect every special agent to know the name Abdullah Azzam coming in to the counterterrorism division; however, they should know it after they've moved on to something more exciting, like bank robberies.  Subject matter knowledge in counterterrorism is easy to gain, you just have to be willing to read a few books, surf a few websites.  But let's face it, the mainstream media doesn't have a -- blinking -- interest in improving the FBI's counterterrorism mandate.  They're out to embarrass government officials.

However, I also believe that Mr. Lormel is romanticizing the Bureau's day-to-day counterterrorism operations, and its accomplishments:

Restructuring the Counterterrorism Division required significant resource enhancements. Many of the Agents reassigned to Counterterrorism, like myself, came from the Criminal Division and possessed minimal counterterrorism experience. One of the first things I did was to seek and receive as much training as possible about all facets of terrorism for myself and the personnel who worked for me. We received regular training and briefings from terrorism experts from both within and outside of the Bureau. We accomplished this while working 15 to 18 hour days.

I don't believe this.  I worked with TFOS folks on several different cases, and fellow ITOS analysts in my section would have said something about all those lucky TFOS people getting all that training.  It was never acknowledged.  When I was there in 2003, TFOS had a handful of full-time analysts.  Literally, you could count the number on one hand.

It's important to set the record straight.  From the top down it may have appeared to be hard, worthy work, but from the bottom up it was soul-withering chaos.  As an Intelligence Operations Specialist, I dealt with headquarters CT agents day in and day out.  Of the dozen I knew well, I'd say three were serious about counterterrorism (the field agents were far more dedicated). The others were desk warmers thrown into the division to fullfill a bureaucratic requirement that they work at headquarters.  None of them wanted to be there, and most were scheming for a new position from the first day they were assigned to the division.

Meanwhile, agents continued to treat the analytical staff like dirt.  I had a ten-year research and management career (and a book published) before I even went to work for the Bureau.  But to the special agents I worked with, I was a fetch and photocopy girl.  Literally.  I was told that my main tasks were to pick up draft FISA applications from one office and make copies of them.  I spent two years working in international competitive intelligence, but at the Bureau I spent about a quarter of my time secure faxing documents to the field offices.

With all the claims of accomplishment and all the promises of a better tomorrow, the fact remains that five years after 9-11, the FBI is still reeling.  Its agents receive little counterterrorism training, and few are interested in pursuing it.  They're still operating with dangerously obsolete technology.  And the only response from officials, current and retired, is, "we're making progress."  Like this recent Washington Post report:

FBI officials said the bureau plans to build a multimillion-dollar state-of-the-art intelligence center at Quantico equipped with secure classrooms and classified computers. But it won't be ready for eight years.

If you're the loved one of someone dead in the next terrorist attack, is this what you want to hear from your government officials?  "We're sorry for your loss, but take heart!  We'll have our act together by 2015."

I'm sorry, Mr. Lormel.  This isn't good enough.

Ideological Advantage

Our enemy has Ibn Tamiyya, Hassan al-Banna, and Sayyid Qutb.

We have "post-colonial" studies:

The postcolonial moment in security studies
TARAK  BARKAWI  and MARK  LAFFEY

Abstract

In this article, we critique the Eurocentric character of security studies as it has developed since World War II. The taken-for-granted historical geographies that underpin security studies systematically misrepresent the role of the global South in security relations and lead to a distorted view of Europe and the West in world politics. Understanding security relations, past and present, requires acknowledging the mutual constitution of European and non-European worlds and their joint role in making history. The politics of Eurocentric security studies, those of the powerful, prevent adequate understanding of the nature or legitimacy of the armed resistance of the weak. Through analysis of the explanatory and political problems Eurocentrism generates, this article lays the groundwork for the development of a non-Eurocentric security studies.

And I have a headache

AQ, NIE, and our IC

NY Times reporting on the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) this weekend was comical, but the Times article, and today's subsequent release of the NIE summary exposed two common weaknesses in the intelligence community (IC):  1) its pervasive left-leaning leadership, and 2) its consistently weak counterterrorism analytical capabilities.  Of the two, I am more concerned about #2, than #1.  Old lefties retire and fade away, but generation after generation of weak analytical capabilities will guarantee more American deaths in the future.

First, the intelligence community is run for the most part by career government employees, some of whom identify closely with the counterculture movements of the 60s/70s.   Many are leftists, some are hard left.  Now I knew a lot of good, hard working lefty analysts, but I also worked with senior IC employees who openly expressed their hatred for the President.  Outward disdain for President Bush wasn't uncommon.  It wouldn't take much for a few to leak their spin of the NIE to the NYT.   As a matter of fact, I would expect these kinds of leaks for every national election until the activist analysts retire (and then they'll write books). 

Second, it exposes how very weak much of the analytical thinking is throughout the IC.  As Michelle Malkin says of the NIE, it's a "historically ignorant view of jihad more suited for the moonbat Left than our premier intelligence agencies."   The part of the NIE that caught her attention, also caught mine:

Four underlying factors are fueling the spread of the jihadist movement:  (1) Entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness; (2) the Iraq "jihad;" (3) the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social, and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations; and (4) pervasive anti-US sentiment among most Muslims - all of which jihadists exploit. 

This is the influence of academic subject matter experts on our strategic thinking.  It's the grievance-based analysis so pervasive in "post-colonial" theory.  It has no basis in the jihad "sciences " that occupy the lives of Al Qaeda's ideologues and strategists.  It offers no insight into our enemy's broad historical view.  It makes no allowances for radical dawah (proselytizing) efforts, or the Islamization of education.  It makes no mention of ongoing centers of jihad (outside of Iraq).  It could be that these factors are discusses in more detail within the body of the NIE.  I hope so.  If not, we're looking at a new generation of analysts trained to think in "root causes" fallacies and who know nothing of the enemy.

The original NYT article was necessary, because it exposes the utter cluelessness of the senior intelligence officials who leaked the information in the first place.  It was leaked for political reasons (as many leaks are) in an attempt to influence the elections, and it displays for the American people how partisan the IC has become.  It also shows the leakers' ignorance of the current media landscape.  They are unaware of the center-right media's influence as a counterweight to the MSM.  This may appear naive to blog readers, but for the most part I'm describing senior officials whose only daily exposure to "open source" information is the hard copy of the NY Times and Washington Post, and NPR's Morning Edition during the drive in to work. It's a comfortable, suburban, highly educated bubble of awareness that partly influences analytical judgment.

Just think about it, if they're that clueless about American elections, why should the President (or the American people) trust their analytical judgment on any other country?

He's Not the Only One

IPS News & Reuters report on a new Harper's interview with the former senior CIA official, Emile Nakhleh, who retired at the end of June as director of the agency's Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program.  It's a terrifying look into the mind of the senior IC community leadership:

The latest report found "significant shortfalls" in the government's knowledge of both Islamist militancy abroad and the potential extremist threat at home and said it had failed to counter the rhetoric of anti-American Islamist extremists The intelligence community has only a single office devoted to understanding political Islam -- the CIA's Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program, created in 2004 to study the issue, advise policymakers and engage academics worldwide, it said. It said the effort should be expanded, and called on U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte to create similar operations at other agencies. The CIA had no immediate comment on the report.

But the CIA program's former director, Emile Nakhleh, played down the problem and estimated only two to three percent of the world's 1.4 billion Muslims were politically active. "Political Islam is not a threat," Nakhleh, who retired from the CIA in June, said in an interview posted on the web site of Harper's magazine. "The threat is if the people become disenchanted with the political process and democracy, and opt for violence."

Good God, there's a Great Big Analytical Fallacy coming right out of the mouth of a man who once had a key position in the IC.  Terrorism is just some sort of violent crie de coeur of the dispossessed.  It's the 70s-era leftist analysis super-imposed on a new threat in a new era:

In an interview published this week by the online edition of Harper's Magazine, Emile Nakhleh, who retired at the end of June as director of the agency's Political Islam Strategic Analysis Programme, said that the Bush administration's tactics had "lost a generation of goodwill in the Muslim world" and its Middle East democratisation programme "has all but disappeared, except for official rhetoric".

I'm sorry, but did I miss the last 36 years of Middle East history or something?  What "good will" is he talking about?   My favorite new "line" of argument among the analytical gray hairs is "engagement:"

"The growing influence of Hezbollah, and its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, across the region and within the Sunni street, and the growing regional influence and reach of Iran, are two new realities that we should recognise and engage," [emphasis mine] he told Harper's editor, Ken Silverstein.

Actually in international, lefty diplo-speak Engagement = Money & Political Power.   This would be fine if you were talking to a western-style political terrorist group like the IRA.  Offering a few seats in Parliament is a victory for peace.  But when the stated goals of an organization isn't a voice in government, but the elimination of the state of Israel, I'm not quite sure what you're going to engage on.  And to be honest, neither do folks like Mr. Nakhleh.

Many agencies in the IC require their new recruits counterterrorism training.  As a general rule, these courses are awful.  When I went through CT training, we were first introduced to the "major" terrorist groups of the 70s. It made perfect sense, most of the gray matter experts in IC are in fact gray-haired, too.  Their CT experience is based almost entirely in the 70s/80s era of "political" terrorist groups like the IRA.  To them, terrorism is a tactic used to further specific political goals. 

Well, jihad is different.  It has been the goal of political Islam to seize global dominance in the name of Islam since the Muslim Brotherhood's founding day.  Thus political Islam is only one method among many to bring about the global caliphate. This isn't political, it's ideological.  It's not the IRA, it's communism. To approach political Islam and jihadism like they're some semi-legitimate form political expression is to miss the threat entirely. 

What should concern everyone is not the strategic position this very blind person once held,
but that his colleagues are still working in equally powerful positions.  From the interview summary, it appears that like many former CIA managers, Mr. Nahkleh is just settling old scores with the administration on Iraq.  It's an example of how badly IC leadership hates the president, and how far they're willing to go to undermine his policies.

However, I suspect also that there is the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in this man's understanding of political Islam.  Look for an interview at IslamOnline soon.

The Fool Named Juan

I rarely comment on the foolishness I read at Professor Juan Cole's blog, because once I start I could end up writing for days, non-stop. But the man is an honest-to-goodness leftist academic, the kind who are training a new generation of government expert analysts.  Along with Univ of Chicago wit Robert Pape, Cole's  about all the left can show for decades of dominance in the field of Middle East studies.

In Prof Cole (and in his recent post on the Pope) we have all the professional "qualities" that make our academic experts on the Middle East so thoroughly worthless:

1) Dependency on post-modern ideological fads

Some commentators have complained about Muslim sensibilities in this regard. But in my view, this sensitivity is a feature of postcolonialism. Muslims were colonized by Western powers, often for centuries, and all that period they were told that their religion was inferior and barbaric. They are independent now, though often they have gained independence only a couple of generations (less if you consider neocolonialism). As independent, they are finally liberated to protest when Westerners put them down.

To an academic like Prof. Cole, shoving all historical challenges into the Western framework of a single ideological fad -- Edward Said's "post-colonialism" -- you're actually thinking deep into the issue.

2)  Absurd over-confidence in analytical ability (leads to stupid, unrelated historical analogies)

There is an analogy to African-Americans, who suffered hundreds of years of slavery and then a century of Jim Crow. They are understandably sensitive about white people putting them down, and every time one uses the "n" word, you can expect a strong reaction. In the remarks the pope quoted about Muhammad, he essentially did the equivalent of using the "n" word for Muslims. It is no mystery that people are protesting.

3) Millimeter deep understanding of world religions (resulting in naive over-generalizations):

All he has to do is quote Vatican II on Islam, which is still Catholic doctrine last I knew, and the whole issue would blow over.

Because a group of radical Islamist involved in a power grab are going to accept the authority of Vatican II?

4)  Occasional glimpses of productive thinking

The Pakistani parliament passed a resolution condemning the Pope's remarks. (Since the Pakistani parliament has been fighting Muslim fundamentalists and trying to avoid implementing Islamic law, this was an easy way to stress their Muslim bonafides even as they pursue secular policies).

To an analyst like Prof. Cole, the underlying, overarching, all-encompassing explanation for every ill in the Middle East is the lingering effects of Western "colonialism," "post-colonialism," or "neo-colonialism."  All western concepts, by the way, with no Islamic analogs.

Use More Open Source

Cross-posted at The Other Intelligence

Federal Computer Week reports on a new CSIS study on the government's use of open source information.  The study offers excellent, practical recommendations.  It also offers some of the clear-headed, even-handed discussions of open source's potential and its limitations:

1. Use the information correctly.

“The goal isn’t to find actionable intelligence,” Sanderson said. “It’s to provide context.”...Freely available information can offer invaluable context for framing the secret information that intelligence agencies tend to favor, the CSIS report argues. The bias toward putting more weight into secret information obtained through espionage is a holdover from the Cold War and relies on assumptions, Sanderson said.

2. Understand the role of technology.

Al Qaeda had been using the Internet quietly for years before the 2001 terrorist attacks....“The ready availability of sizeable numbers of computer engineers and scientists at the service of transnational terrorism also enables the cyber caliphate to add to its toolkit the ability to send instructions to followers using seemingly innocuous coded messages or more advanced, state-of-the-art encryption techniques,” the CSIS team discovered.

3. Use software tools effectively.

CSIS’ network uses collaboration software — Microsoft Groove, in this case — for communication, including threaded discussions.

4. Choose participants carefully.

Terrorism experts are not the only people suited to become part of a trusted information network, Sanderson noted. Journalists, academics and consultants — people who frequently travel to regions of the world where useful information is available — are all potentially good choices.

Poor Mr. Hajj

He got caught.  And we know how much that sucks don't we, kids? 

Seriously, LGF master, Charles Johnson, yesterday picked up on the bad photoshop job done by Reuters stringer, Adnan Hajj.  In the spirit of free inquiry, two other bloggers -- Ace of Spades and Dan Riehl -- got in on the fun, with a simple search of Mr. Hajj's portfolio, and uncovered more than one curious example of image manipulation.

Inspired by their example, I've been searching my sources for more of Mr. Hajj's "art" like this one he made in January 2006:

Lebanese student wave flags as anti-riot police block main road to US embassy in northern Beirut 

ADNAN HAJJ
REUTERS
83 words
17 January 2006 10:24
Reuters Pictures English (c) 2006 Reuters Limited

Lebanese student wave flags as anti-riot police block the main road to the U.S. embassy in Awkar in northern Beirut January 17, 2006. About 10.000 Lebanese students, chanting "America out" marched to the U.S. embassy near Beirut on Tuesday to protest against Washington's policy in Lebanon. REUTERS/Adnan Hajj

There's this recent example, with one of the strangest description I've read in a long time:

Hajj was at the front lines of the Danish protests, and during the annual Ashura blood-letting.  Once the bombs started dropping, he appears to be taking pictures with all sorts of Hizbullah supporters, but he first appears in the record on March 2005 with a Beirut fire and Syrian soldiers:

Syrian soldiers wave from their truck as they move towards the border in eastern Bekaa Valley. 

84 words 28 March 2005 Reuters Pictures English (c) 2005 Reuters Limited

Syrian soldiers wave from their truck as they move towards the border in eastern Bekaa Valley March 28, 2005. About 2,000 Syrian troops have pulled out of eastern Lebanon over the past week, a senior Lebanese security source said on Monday, bringing Syria a step closer to ending its 29-year military domination of Lebanon. REUTERS/Adnan Hajj

His work includes "local flavor" shots taken at a cock fight, women voting in the 2005 elections, street protests after the Hariri murder, and the aftermath of a few of Hizbullah's car bombs targeting the Christian sections of Beirut (mainstream media and moonbats have forgotten about those).

A Lebanese civil defence personnel inspects the damage inside a church in the port city of Jounieh. 

85 words 7 May 2005 Reuters Pictures English (c) 2005 Reuters Limited

A Lebanese civil defence personnel inspects the damage inside a church in the port city of Jounieh in north Beirut May 6,2005. A bomb exploded in a Christian port town north of the Lebanese capital on Friday, killing one Sri Lankan woman, wounding six people and damaging shops and houses, a security source said. REUTERS/Adnan Hajj

Here he is in December 2005 with a "Palestinian guerilla"

Palestinian guerrilla takes aim from position after Israeli air strike on Palestinian target at Na'meh area south of Beirut 

ADNAN HAJJ REUTERS 97 words 28 December 2005 08:57 Reuters Pictures English (c) 2005 Reuters Limited

A Palestinian guerrilla takes aim from his position behind sandbags, after an Israeli air strike on the Palestinian target at Na'meh area, south of Beirut, December 28, 2005. Israeli warplanes attacked a Palestinian guerrilla group's training base in Lebanon on Wednesday, the army said, after a rocket strike on an Israeli town raised border tension to its highest level in years. REUTERS/Adnan Hajj

The same "Palestinian guerilla" obviously had time for a smoke before "taking aim:"

He likes his fisheye lense, there are several composed with it:

FISC-ing the NYT

AJ Strata uses expertise and common sense to smack down (once and for all) the December New York Times article exposing NSA's terrorist surveillance program:

In one of my earliest posts I noted the FBI whining that they had to chase down all these leads to make sure there was not an undetected AQ cell in the US as evidence the NY Times had the story all wrong. To get to FISA you have the FBI plead the request, and they need evidence to make their case for a warrant. The fact the FBI was finally passed leads on possible terrorists here in the US which the NSA was picking up after 9-11 by monitoring terrorist leaders overseas is so subtle it seems the leftwing media and conspiracy whackos cannot grasp the meaning of what this means.  [emphasis mine]

Bingo! But I don't give leftwing media and their leaking sources that much credit.  They do understand the subtlety of the meaning; they just want us to lose.

Army of Analysts

How does our government fight WWIII?  With a useless, whiney bureauracy.

Russ Travers, the counter-terrorism center’s deputy director for information sharing and knowledge development, said the “single-biggest question” that needs answering is what is each agency’s specific responsibility.

He said the center was “clearly not there yet” on fully implementing the intelligence statute. For example, the center does not have standards for evaluating and incorporating suspicious activity reports created by state and local law enforcement.

Ah, yes:  authorities, standards, and responsibilities, but nothing about solutions or results.  Its a slow death by process, with bureaucrats seeking to carve out their authorities in order to justify more federal funding (and their own salary increase), but unwilling to seek results from all their fretting.

There is a solution to the problem of bureaucratic lethargy.  It's opening the information pool to the American people.  I'm not talking about intel used to support senstive operations or what's used to help hide our intel assets. I'm talking about the terrabytes of open source or nearly open source data no one in the government is willing to share, and even fewer are capable of analyzing with any skills.

Michael Tanji, has it so right when he says,

The fact of the matter is that no one can say that agency X, that collects and “owns” data Y, is the best agency to make full and effective use of that data. OPENING access to everyone with a stake in the fight (yes, of course, keep your handling caveats if you must) means that you’re not wasting time while the data flows up, over, and then back down. Nothing against liaisons, but there are enough delays built into the system.

It's what he calls the Army of Analysts.

The Real Agenda

This morning, the New York Times' collective editorial insanity is on clear display.  The Times revealed its editorial agenda in an editorial replete with wild, unsubstantiated exaggerations, leftist fantasies about government counterterrorism policy and programs, and language dripping with embarassing condescension. 

This is not a high point for the newspaper.  It's a careless, defensive temper tantrum that exposes its true editorial mission:

Over and over again, the same pattern emerges: Given a choice between following the rules or carving out some unprecedented executive power, the White House always shrugged off the legal constraints. Even when the only challenge was to get required approval from an ever-cooperative Congress, the president and his staff preferred to go it alone. While no one questions the determination of the White House to fight terrorism, the methods this administration has used to do it have been shaped by another, perverse determination: never to consult, never to ask and always to fight against any constraint on the executive branch.

Get that?  The New York Times tells us that the administration simply ignores constitutional requirements in its vicious power grab, but all the assumptions packed into that first sentence are assumptions based on the newspapers' own incomplete and weak reporting.

And then there's a self-constructed narrative about Guantanamo that assumes rights and privileges on terrorists that simply do not exist.  It's written with all the cue-the-ominous-music hyperbole designed to support their assertion that the President is after an unprecedented power grab.  I don't know how a president grabs power from non-citizen, non-combatants, but there's nothing sane about this editorial. 
It goes on to assume that the recent disbanding of the ineffectual CIA Bin Laden group practically guarantees we will never find him:

The divide made it clear how little this all has to do with fighting terrorism. Undoing the Geneva Conventions would further endanger the life of every member of the American military who might ever be taken captive in the future. And if the prisoners scooped up in Afghanistan and sent to Guantánamo had been properly processed first — as military lawyers wanted to do — many would never have been kept in custody, a continuing reproach to the country that is holding them. Others would actually have been able to be tried under a fair system that would give the world a less perverse vision of American justice. The recent disbanding of the C.I.A. unit charged with finding Osama bin Laden is a reminder that the American people may never see anyone brought to trial for the terrible crimes of 9/11.

Of course, the editors here assume Bin Laden and other senior Al Qaeda leaders should be brought to trial for 9-11.  How nice of them to decide how the US military should fight its war in Afghanistan! 

And then there's this passage, dripping with condescension:

The hearings were supposed to produce a hopeful vision of a newly humbled and cooperative administration working with Congress to undo the mess it had created in stashing away hundreds of people, many with limited connections to terrorism at the most, without any plan for what to do with them over the long run. Instead, we saw an administration whose political core was still intent on hunkering down. The most embarrassing moment came when Bush loyalists argued that the United States could not follow the Geneva Conventions because Common Article Three, which has governed the treatment of wartime prisoners for more than half a century, was too vague. Which part of “civilized peoples,” “judicial guarantees” or “humiliating and degrading treatment” do they find confusing?

And here they rewrite history, and characterize a legal program to monitor terrorist communications as an extension of over-zealous executive power.  Again, note the condescension:

A special court was established through a 1978 law to give the executive branch warrants for just this purpose, efficiently and in secrecy. And Republicans in Congress were all but begging for a chance to change the process in any way the president requested. Instead, of course, the administration did what it wanted without asking anyone. When the program became public, the administration ignored calls for it to comply with the rules. As usual, the president’s most loyal supporters simply urged that Congress pass a law allowing him to go on doing whatever he wanted to do.

The crescendo includes this whopper that shows the Times' editors insanely presumes authority to influence national policy that it does not have, nor ever had:

The bill the president has agreed to accept would allow him to go on ignoring the eavesdropping law. It does not require the president to obtain warrants for the one domestic spying program we know about — or for any other program — from the special intelligence surveillance court. It makes that an option and sets the precedent of giving blanket approval to programs, rather than insisting on the individual warrants required by the Constitution. Once again, the president has refused to acknowledge that there are rules he is required to follow.

In other words, the President won't do the bidding of the New York Times; therefore, the war on terrorism is ineffectual and he's just grabbing power.  I am going to assume that the editors thought through the publication of such an embarassing editorial.  There was some sort of politcal strategy behind this, but it appears to be as insane as so much the left has been doing recently in its own desperate moves to reclaim political power during the upcoming Congressional elections. And yet, the Times couldn't have hurt their leftist agenda more.  By wrapping a fantasy narrative with the most vile condescension, they have almost guaranteed full coverage of its content, exposing it to 1) the truth and 2) the countering-energies of social and political conservatives. They've moved the left (and Democrats) closer to total irrelevance, and have handed conservatives yet another justification for their policies.

Other bloggers assume that with this editorial, the Times' mask is off and it has jumped the shark.  But old lefties never die, they just grow increasingly more depraved. Expect more leaks.  And just wait, this editorial isn't the bottom.  The Times has just started its own Big Dig program.

Teaching the Next Generation of CT Analysts

LGF notes that Kevin Barrett a 9-11 conspiracy theorist gets to teach his course on Islam at the University of Wisconsin -- Madison. If you don't know who Barrett is, check out his recent op-ed in a local newspaper:

Are the media ignoring all these people, and dozens more like them, because there is no evidence to support their charges? Hardly. Overwhelming evidence, from the obvious air defense stand-down, to the nonprotection of the president in Florida, to the blatant controlled demolition of World Trade Center building 7, proves that 9/11 was an inside job. As noted philosopher-theologian and 9/11 revisionist historian David Griffin writes: "It is already possible to know, beyond a reasonable doubt, one very important thing: the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job, orchestrated by terrorists within our own government."

Of course, his bosses at the university say they cleared him to teach because this lunatic in their own words encourages "critical thinking:"

[UW-Madison Provost, Patrick] Farrell notes that a broader issue at play in the Barrett case is the UW-Madison’s long tradition of protecting classroom expression and encouraging students’ critical thinking by allowing analysis of even the most controversial ideas. [emphasis mine]

I doubt "professor" Barrett -- all the way up there in Madison, WI -- is the only wackademic who teaches this lunacy in the classroom.  And I would bet that some of them teach at our "finest" universities.  This guy is just an example of a broader problem within academics, and it comes back to haunt the American people when we hire graduates with "formal" education in Middle East/Islamic studies.  They're being taught by nutters like Barrett.

What passes for "critical thinking" at universities is just insanity everywhere else.