Category Archives: Terrorism

Updated: ‘The System’ Did It

Free Markets, Government, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Propaganda, Regulation, Terrorism, The State

“A nimble adversary” is how Obama characterized a bunch of rag-tag terrorists—Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—who had resorted to recruiting for their mission a clumsy, inept boy, about whom ample warnings existed in “The system.”

Mr. Abdulmutallab was not placed on the no-fly list “despite the government’s having information that showed him to be not only a threat, but also a threat with a visa to visit the United States.”

Inflating 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s abilities does wonders to lessen our failings, which are legion.

Remember and rehearse: What failed was the (intelligence) system. No flesh-and-blood was involved in the many monumental mistakes. All there was was an amorphous thing called “The system.”

Pray tell if you know of a private company, subject to market forces, getting away with assigning blame to their “system,” rather than to its constituent parts—individual operators. Such a firm would be without customers.

(And people who know they’d get fingered and fired from their private-sector jobs for such failings are clamoring for a public option to serve as competition to the health care insurance industry.)

Under the stumble-bumble Bush administration, we experienced, and forgave, the criminal negligence that facilitated the most devastating terrorist attack on US soil.

Condy Cow (CC) ignored “a 1999 report by the Library of Congress stating that suicide bombers belonging to al-Qaida could crash an aircraft into U.S. targets,” stating that it belonged to the realm of analysis, and wasn’t ‘actionable intelligence.'”

We’re still debating the same disconnected darn dots.

CC then blamed her ineptness on the need to reform Washington’s atrophied alphabet soup of intelligence agencies. Ten years on, the Obama administration is doing the same, although to his credit, the president has taken responsibility for the failures; says they embarrassed him, and accuses his people of letting him down (brownie point for Barack).

The bare-bones truth is that the National Security Council, headed by Rice, was an office created to advise the president on anything relating to national security and to facilitate inter-agency cooperation. “If suspicion existed – analytic, synthetic, prosaic or poetic – Rice should have put the squeeze on the system she oversaw.”

The same goes for the people (the same folks, really) operating “The System” today.

On Condy’s watch America experienced perhaps the worst intelligence lapse ever: Remember the Phoenix FBI agent who wrote a memorandum about the bin Ladenites who were training in U.S. flight schools? Agent Ken Williams’ report was very specific. Over and above the standard sloth the memo met in the Washington headquarters, it transpired that the FBI was as concerned about ‘racial profiling’ then as it is today.

Since Bush, the way we talk about security failures has changed little, bar some semantic tweaks. Neither will it. There are simply no incentives in a government “system” to make it amenable to corrective feedback. The reason nothing changes is because of the nature of “The System.”

Update (Jan. 8): And the concept of terrorism in its aspirational stage? What state-speak is that?

Updated: 'The System' Did It

Free Markets, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Propaganda, Regulation, Terrorism, The State

“A nimble adversary” is how Obama characterized a bunch of rag-tag terrorists—Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—who had resorted to recruiting for their mission a clumsy, inept boy, about whom ample warnings existed in “The system.”

Mr. Abdulmutallab was not placed on the no-fly list “despite the government’s having information that showed him to be not only a threat, but also a threat with a visa to visit the United States.”

Inflating 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s abilities does wonders to lessen our failings, which are legion.

Remember and rehearse: What failed was the (intelligence) system. No flesh-and-blood was involved in the many monumental mistakes. All there was was an amorphous thing called “The system.”

Pray tell if you know of a private company, subject to market forces, getting away with assigning blame to their “system,” rather than to its constituent parts—individual operators. Such a firm would be without customers.

(And people who know they’d get fingered and fired from their private-sector jobs for such failings are clamoring for a public option to serve as competition to the health care insurance industry.)

Under the stumble-bumble Bush administration, we experienced, and forgave, the criminal negligence that facilitated the most devastating terrorist attack on US soil.

Condy Cow (CC) ignored “a 1999 report by the Library of Congress stating that suicide bombers belonging to al-Qaida could crash an aircraft into U.S. targets,” stating that it belonged to the realm of analysis, and wasn’t ‘actionable intelligence.'”

We’re still debating the same disconnected darn dots.

CC then blamed her ineptness on the need to reform Washington’s atrophied alphabet soup of intelligence agencies. Ten years on, the Obama administration is doing the same, although to his credit, the president has taken responsibility for the failures; says they embarrassed him, and accuses his people of letting him down (brownie point for Barack).

The bare-bones truth is that the National Security Council, headed by Rice, was an office created to advise the president on anything relating to national security and to facilitate inter-agency cooperation. “If suspicion existed – analytic, synthetic, prosaic or poetic – Rice should have put the squeeze on the system she oversaw.”

The same goes for the people (the same folks, really) operating “The System” today.

On Condy’s watch America experienced perhaps the worst intelligence lapse ever: Remember the Phoenix FBI agent who wrote a memorandum about the bin Ladenites who were training in U.S. flight schools? Agent Ken Williams’ report was very specific. Over and above the standard sloth the memo met in the Washington headquarters, it transpired that the FBI was as concerned about ‘racial profiling’ then as it is today.

Since Bush, the way we talk about security failures has changed little, bar some semantic tweaks. Neither will it. There are simply no incentives in a government “system” to make it amenable to corrective feedback. The reason nothing changes is because of the nature of “The System.”

Update (Jan. 8): And the concept of terrorism in its aspirational stage? What state-speak is that?

Triple Agent, Or Agent Of Allah?

Homeland Security, Intelligence, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Terrorism, The West

AGENT OF ALLAH. He was supposed to be a double agent. Jordan’s intelligence agency, the General Intelligence Directorate, was confident that they had “flipped” “suicide bomber Humam Muhammed al-Balawi, the Jordanian double agent who killed seven CIA operatives and his Jordanian handler” in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, on December 30, as reported by ABC.

But al-Balawi was just flipping the bird to Jordan and, more poignantly, to the US.

Al Balawi was born in Kuwait in 1977, raised in Jordan and attended medical school in Turkey. He had been arrested by Jordan’s intelligence agency, the General Intelligence Directorate, more than a year ago. Believing they had flipped al Balawi and made him a double agent, the Jordanians released him from prison and sent him to Afghanistan to penetrate al Qaeda by pretending to be an aspiring foreign jihadi.

The naive, American, CIA operatives salivated, setting up a meeting with “the supposed informant” at the “C.I.A.’s Forward Operating Base Chapman in the southeastern province of Khost” (NYT). Having strapped explosives to his body, Al Balawi blew himself up, taking with him one of the spy agency’s elite teams.

Al Balawi had “strong jihadi credentials” for a reason. He was a strong Jihadi.

This is what I’m getting at: The liberal aims to make humanity over in his image. As the creed of left-liberalism sees it, each and every individual has the potential to be a liberal. When operating from the foolish and infinitely arrogant premise that every Muslim is no more than a lesser Westerner struggling to unleash his inner liberal—you’re bound to play footsie with fanatics.

Muslims such as Al Balawi simply possess stronger core beliefs than the average CIA operative can fathom—even the “elites” among them.

Yemen Via Al Jazeera

Foreign Policy, Just War, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, Terrorism, War

A’s For Al Jazeera, becasue AJ is one of the best news channels. If I could get Al Jazeera, I’d spend much less time ferreting for facts absent from American “news” media.

Writes Marwan Bishara: “As the US and Britain prepare for covert war on Yemen, and following on their failures in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan, Yemenis might wonder if the joke is becoming a reality.

One does not have to be a Yemen expert to tell you that further destabilising Yemen along the lines of Pakistan or Somalia is not sound policy, and that Yemen’s proximity to the Gulf and the Horn of Africa does not bode well for regional stability.

But that is exactly what will happen if the US/UK “counterterrorism” policy focuses on providing military support to a three-decade-old government that presides over an unstable and decentralised country.

By offering more military training, arms, naval patrolling, intelligence sharing and possibly shared offensive operations, the West might help prolong and sustain an autocratic regime that faces secessionist movements in the North and South.

Mostly, though, it will aggravate a fragile state of Yemen into a failing state.

Even if estimates are exaggerated (Yemen’s interior minister in 2002 put the number of guns at 60 million), Yemeni tribes are better armed than any other in the region and will not surrender their weapons quietly to the central government, especially in light of the declared foreign intrusion into their country’s affairs.”

[SNIP]

I don’t know who Marwan Bishara is, but do Brush up on reality with his Al Jazeera analysis of the “Onward To Yemen” impetus, courtesy of the neoconservatives and their neoprogressive philosophical soulmates.

Distrust my recommendation? My fervently pro-Israel father is surely credible on this front. According to dad, the only fair shake Israel ever gets in the media broadcasting in the democratic South Africa is from … Al-Jazeera.