8 January 2010 @ 9:22AM >> CBS News reports:

Less than a month after major Nidal Hasan allegedly killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, the Pentagon’s top intelligence officer sent the White House a report detailing an earlier failure to connect the dots. It reads like a dress rehearsal for the Detroit bomber case, reports CBS News chief national security correspondent David Martin.

According to that still-classified report, the terrorism task force responsible for determining whether Hasan posed a threat never saw all 18 e-mails he exchanged with that radical Yemeni cleric Awlaki whose communications were being monitored under a court ordered wiretap.

Guess which radical Yemeni cleric won’t be using the same communication channels anymore?

This is why we shouldn’t be trying to fight wars in a courtroom.

24 April 2009 @ 8:42AM >> Whatever happened to all that happy post-partisanship Obama promised?

The editors of the Wall Street Journal say there’s no chance of it now:

Mark down the date. Tuesday, April 21, 2009, is the moment that any chance of a new era of bipartisan respect in Washington ended. By inviting the prosecution of Bush officials for their antiterror legal advice, President Obama has injected a poison into our politics that he and the country will live to regret.

Policy disputes, often bitter, are the stuff of democratic politics. Elections settle those battles, at least for a time, and Mr. Obama’s victory in November has given him the right to change policies on interrogations, Guantanamo, or anything on which he can muster enough support. But at least until now, the U.S. political system has avoided the spectacle of a new Administration prosecuting its predecessor for policy disagreements. This is what happens in Argentina, Malaysia or Peru, countries where the law is treated merely as an extension of political power.

If this analogy seems excessive, consider how Mr. Obama has framed the issue. He has absolved CIA operatives of any legal jeopardy, no doubt because his intelligence advisers told him how damaging that would be to CIA morale when Mr. Obama needs the agency to protect the country. But he has pointedly invited investigations against Republican legal advisers who offered their best advice at the request of CIA officials.

In the Washington Post, David Ignatius writes:

Put yourself in the shoes of the people who were asked to interrogate al-Qaeda prisoners in 2002. One former officer told me he declined the job, not because he thought the program was wrong but because he knew it would blow up. “We all knew the political wind would change eventually,” he recalled. Other officers who didn’t make that cynical but correct calculation are now “broken and bewildered,” says the former operative.

[...]

One veteran counterterrorism operative says that agents in the field are already being more careful about using the legal findings that authorize covert action. An example is the so-called “risk of capture” interview that takes place in the first hour after a terrorism suspect is grabbed. This used to be the key window of opportunity, in which the subject was questioned aggressively and his cellphone contacts and “pocket litter” were exploited quickly.

Now, field officers are more careful. They want guidance from headquarters. They need legal advice. I’m told that in the case of an al-Qaeda suspect seized in Iraq several weeks ago, the CIA didn’t even try to interrogate him. The agency handed him over to the U.S. military.

So, this is where we are as a country these days? We’re really considering prosecuting people for authoring legal opinions?

Merely by raising the issue in this fashion, Obama has already undermined the future security of the country. In the environment created by President Obama and Congressional Democrats, who in their right mind would ever begin a career in intelligence or anti-terrorism? Who would stay in the intelligence services, knowing that their work could land them in court any time the presidency changes hands?

The only question is whether Obama administration officials will be prosecuted in the future for what they’re doing today. Because once politicians take the frightening step of criminalizing policy differences, they’d better plan on staying in power forever, or they may one day find themselves in the defendant’s chair. And if being too vigilant about protecting the country is a potential criminal offense, so is not doing enough.

10 August 2006 >> Since the attacks of September 11th, many Americans have been wondering when the next big attack would come. This morning, America woke up to the news that a coordinated attack—what intelligence officials referred to as “the big one”—might have been thwarted.

Time Magazine reports that the “U.S. picked up the suspects’ chatter and shared it with British authorities,” who then rounded up 24 people who were involved in planning simultaneous attacks on 9 different planes:

Their plan was to smuggle the peroxide-based liquid explosive TATP and detonators onto nine different planes from four carriers — British Airways, Continental, United and American — that fly direct routes between the U.K and the U.S. and blow them up mid-air. Intelligence officials estimate that about 2,700 people would have perished, according to the official.

Britain’s MI-5 intelligence service and Scotland Yard had been tracking the plot for several months, but only in the past two weeks had the plotters’ planning begun to crystallize, senior U.S. officials tell TIME. In the two or three days before the arrests, the cell was going operational, and authorities were pressed into action. MI5 and Scotland Yard agents tracked the plotters from the ground, while a knowledgeable American official says U.S. intelligence provided London authorities with intercepts of the group’s communications.

I’m waiting for the media to start demanding answers from our elected officials: Were these intercepts constitutional? Was anyone’s phone tapped? Were warrants necessary and were they obtained properly?

Sure, 2,700 people might have been saved, but at what cost to our principles?

30 June 2006 >> If you as a private citizen came into the exact same information that the Times eventually published, but instead of publishing it, you passed it along to an al Qaeda operative in a dark alley somewhere, you would be guilty of treason and could be executed. Yet, Bill Keller seems to think that “freedom of the press” amounts to one huge legal exemption—the espionage laws do not apply to him!—and by being chosen by a handful of old-money New Yorkers to edit a newspaper, he is somehow in better position to decide what is in the public interest than the government officials that we the people elected to act on our behalf. More >>

26 June 2006 >> A letter to The New York Times:

Your recent decision to publish information about a classified program intended to track the banking transactions of possible terrorists is not only detrimental to America but also to its fighting men and women overseas. I know because I am a sergeant in the army on my second tour to Iraq. As I am sure you don’t know because you aren’t in Iraq, and I am sure never will be, terrorism happens here everyday because there are rich men out there willing to support the everyday terrorist who plants bombs and shoots soldiers just to make a living. Without money terrorism in Iraq would die because there would no longer be supplies for IEDs, no mortars or RPGs, and no motivation for people to abandon regular work in hopes of striking it rich after killing a soldier.

Throughout your article you mention that “the banking program is a closely held secret” but the cat is out of the bag now isn’t it. Terrorists the world over can now change their practices because of your article. For some reason I think that last sentence will bring you guys pleasure. You have done something great in your own eyes-you think you have hurt the current administration while at the same time encouraging “freedom fighters” resisting the imperialism of the United States. However, I foresee a backlash coming your way. I wish I had a subscription to your paper so I could cancel it as soon as possible.

Well, one prominent L.A. blogger exacted that punishment against the Los Angeles Times.

Meanwhile, an interesting observation:

Because the war on terror is fought in a peacetime atmosphere, treason can be presented as dissent, and you can get away with it.

And finally, on a ligher note, a little mockery.

22 June 2006 @ 12:11PM >> It is now considered gospel among those opposed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq that “Bush lied” about Saddam Hussein’s weapons. That’s despite the fact that many prominent Democrats made the same claims during the Clinton Administration, and that virtually every other Western intelligence service believed Saddam was hiding such weapons. That’s despite the fact that Saddam Hussein himself discussed having those weapons, and that he felt the need to bribe French and U.N. officials during his cat-and-mouse game with U.N. weapons inspectors. That’s despite the fact that Saddam Hussein used those weapons before, and that’s even despite the fact, since the war started, that we’ve seen many bits of evidence that point to Iraq’s possession of WMDs.

No, despite all that, if your only source of information is the editorial page of The New York Times, you probably still believe that Saddam Hussein was an innocent man wrongly deposed by a bloodthirsty American president. You’ll probably also find ways to discount this latest report:

U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq have found about 500 chemical weapons since the March 2003 invasion, with more thought to exist, according to portions of an intelligence report made public yesterday.

“Since 2003, Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent,” said an overview of the report, which was declassified at the behest of Sen. Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania Republican, and Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican and head of the House intelligence committee.

“Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf war chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf war chemical munitions are assessed to still exist,” according to the report.

Expect this story to pass in a couple of days without much further discussion. There’s simply no good angle for using it to criticize the war effort. The media that spent a decade covering up for Saddam Hussein has too much invested in the “Bush lied” storyline, and deviating from that storyline now would require one massive correction for the last three years of reporting.

15 January 2006 @ 10:50AM >> Support. Oppose. It seems that the New York Times’s position on wiretaps depends primarily on who occupies the White House.

29 July 2005 @ 11:26AM >> The analysts for our intelligence services have a remarkably difficult job. Not only do they have to pick nuggets of important information from swamps of raw, often useless, and sometimes deliberately deceptive data, but they must then determine whether the data they gather constitutes a threat. To do this, they must set some threshold of sensitivity for the data. Two bits of information might not signal an impeding attack, but ten might. Of course, getting it right isn’t easy, as Jeff Jacoby notes in the Boston Globe:

Three weeks before the London bombings of July 7, Britain’s Joint Terrorist Analysis Center advised policymakers that “at present there is not a group with both the current intent and the capability to attack the UK.” That reassuring message from the country’s top intelligence and law enforcement officials, The New York Times reported last week, prompted the British government to lower its terror alert. Less than a month later, 52 people were murdered and 700 wounded when three subway trains and a bus were blown up in the worst act of terrorism the United Kingdom has experienced since the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.

[...]

[T]he botched terror assessment raises a question for us, too: Which kind of intelligence failure is better — the kind that badly understates a threat, such as the one in London, or the kind that overstates a threat, such as the insistent warnings before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons of mass destruction?

[...]

So what kind of culture do we want intelligence agencies to foster among their operatives and analysts: one that tends to be overly focused on possible threats, or one that is more likely to downplay them? In general, would we rather take action to eliminate a danger that turns out to have been overstated — or take no action, and then be stunned when the enemy strikes?

Two years ago, I wrote:

In the case of the September 11th report, critics say intelligence analysts missed signals and failed to evaluate the threat thoroughly. Had the analysts been more vigilant, the argument goes, perhaps the September 11th attacks would have been prevented. And in the case of the pre-war intelligence on Iraq, the criticism is that intelligence analysts put too much credence in a few suspect pieces of data. In other words, the analysts were overly vigilant in assessing the threat. Of course, it is not possible to be too vigilant and insufficiently vigilant at the same time—but to the president’s critics, that’s beside the point. A political trap has been set that allows the carping to continue under all possible scenarios. Too hot, too cold...to some, it seems the porridge is always the wrong temperature as long as President Bush is serving it.

Because it is often difficult to distinguish suspicious intelligence reports from iron-clad information, human interpretation is required; inferences must be drawn. That’s why there are often disagreements in the intelligence community: different people looking at the same set of data can draw different conclusions. Such disagreements are not evidence of fraud, they’re evidence of varying levels of risk tolerance. That the Bush Administration is now less willing to accept a risk that was tolerated before is a direct result of the lessons learned on September 11th.

How risk-sensitive do we want our intelligence services to be? If we set the sensitivity threshold too high, we’ll get surprised by attacks like September 11th or the recent bombings in London. If we set the bar too low, we run the risk of relying on faulty information, which it appears we did with respect to Iraq’s WMD.

This is a discussion that we as a nation need to have. Indeed, this is a discussion we should have had by now. Unfortunately, it seems that the left these days wants none of the responsibility of putting forth possible solutions. Where is the left-wing plan for dealing with Islamist extremists who want to destroy Western society? We know that the left finds much fault in the United States, but in the nearly four years since the September 11th attacks, I still don’t know what the left proposes in response to the problem. (Sorry, I don’t accept doing nothing as a solution. We did nothing in response to terrorist attacks for years before September 11th, and look where that got us.)

It is legitimate to criticize President Bush, it is legitimate to criticize our past mistakes as a nation, but those criticisms seem to be the only thing the left can articulate. The are many self-proclaimed great thinkers on the left. Where are their ideas for confronting Islamic mass murder?

12 October 2004 >> A new video is making the rounds that gives a rather exhaustive account of President Clinton’s statements on Saddam Hussein’s WMD program and the threat posed by Iraq. Check out The Terror War: Chapter 3, especially if you’re one of the Bush Lied!!! folks.

It remains to be seen whether our intelligence was faulty, as it now appears. Then again, given September 11th, nobody should have been under the impression that our intelligence operation was perfect. The fact remains that every major intelligence service in the world—including those of France, Germany and Russia—believed Saddam Hussein had WMD. Saddam’s own military believed they had WMD.

So when you hear Clinton sounding like George W. Bush, it’s hard to take seriously the conspiracy theorists who talk of oil, Halliburton or “the president’s daddy”. Not that it was easy to take them seriously before.

2 June 2004 >> For analyses of military intelligence—and even the occasional scoop—the hard-core info-junkie will find satisfaction at The DEBKA File and Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor). DEBKA’s main page contains a number of fascinating peeks behind the headlines in the War on Terror, while Strafor is primarily a pay service that offers a few interesting samples for free.

If you’re new to DEBKA, a good place to start is this article looking into recent terror attacks within Saudi Arabia and a succession split within the Saudi royal family.

For an introduction to Strafor, check out this analysis of recent terror attacks around the Middle East and intelligence improvements among the nations battling terrorism.

3 May 2004 @ 11:34PM >> In an editorial, The Wall Street Journal calls attention to some interesting tidbits from Bob Woodward’s latest book, Plan of Attack:

The President continued, “I’ve been told all this intelligence about having WMD and this is the best we’ve got?” At which point Mr. Tenet is said to have thrown his hands in the air and remarked, “It’s a slam-dunk case!” Mr. Bush pressed again, “George, how confident are you?” Mr. Tenet: “Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk!”

It isn’t a shock, of course, that the CIA believed Iraq possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. The Clinton Administration bombed Iraq for four days in December 1998 based on that assessment. Every other major intelligence agency in the world believed the same. What is new in the Woodward account is the extent to which Mr. Bush appears to have been a thoughtful and critical consumer of such intelligence. The President reportedly told Mr. Tenet several times, “Make sure no one stretches to make our case.”

These revelations, of course, haven’t been widely discussed. Doing so would debunk many of the media-propelled myths intended to damage President Bush.

It does make one wonder about Tenet, though. If I were as conspiratorially-minded as many on the left, I’d think that Tenet, a Clinton hold-over, was trying to sabotage the Bush presidency. I don’t think that. I just think intelligence gathering and analysis is a tough business, and that our systems need serious work.

20 April 2004 @ 3:06PM >> According to the left, Bush Lied. Saddam Hussein didn’t pose a threat to anyone, despite the fact that he had used weapons of mass destruction in the past. No, he didn’t have such weapons, they say, despite the fact that when U.N. inspectors vacated Iraq in 1998, they left with a long list of weapons that Saddam hadn’t accounted for.

No, Bush Lied, you see, despite the fact that the intelligence reports Bush cited were consistent across three U.S. administrations and were corroborated by the intelligence estimates of many western nations. Forget all that; those are merely inconvenient details that cloud the bigger picture: Bush Lied.

Now we discover that Denmark Lied, too! According to the BBC:

Denmark has declassified intelligence reports compiled before the Iraq war which show officials thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

In one report, Iraq was thought to have both chemical and biological weapons, as well as an active nuclear programme.

Since John Kerry is so fond of citing his purported popularity in foreign lands, perhaps he should consider running for Prime Minister of Denmark instead. At least then, his wife Teresa “I can’t believe I live in America” Heinz Kerry might be happy.

8 April 2004 >> Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission made for riveting listening. The political fireworks were on full display when the Democrats on the panel pressed Rice, asking why President Bush had not developed a pre-September 11th plan to preemptively attack Afghanistan and disrupt al Qaeda. These questions, of course, come from the same folks who criticize Bush administration for acting preemptively against Iraq.

The inconsistencies of the Democratic arguments against the Bush Administration make it impossible for them to put forth any alternate vision, because anything they propose will conflict with some of their previous criticisms. Even that they’ll deny, though; they’ll sweeten their waffles with the syrup of nuance, the word they use to cover up the fact that they’re holding several completely contradictory stances simultaneously.

According to principles of quantum mechanics, it is possible for a subatomic particle to occupy multiple positions at the same time. Perhaps the Democrats hope to become the quantum party. If so, it explains why John Kerry, the consummate Quantum Candidate, is the perfect person to head the Democratic ticket this fall. More >>

25 July 2003 >> Some in this country still want our intelligence analysts to err on the side of caution, because doing so could thwart future attacks and would therefore save lives. Others believe that no action should ever be taken unless every scrap of intelligence data is unimpeachable and unambiguous. But if you complain that the administration wasn’t vigilant enough in interpreting pre-September 11th intelligence, you can’t credibly claim that the administration was too vigilant in interpreting the data pertaining to Iraq. More >>

12 June 2003 >> Saddam and Osama must not exist. Why? Because they cannot be found. And, as we all know from witnessing the recent hyperventilation about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, if something can’t be found, it must not exist. More >>

23 January 2003 >> Hans Blix decides against using U.S. equipment to aid his search for Iraqi weaponry. Why? To avoid appearing biased. Meanwhile, important sites await inspection by an impotent U.N. More >>

17 November 2002 >> “Now, I know some people are going to say that calling the Democrats to task for their recent criticisms of the terror war is just a way of stifling debate. Not true. Debate is an exchange of ideas. But Senators Daschle and Graham offered no ideas for how to win the war. They just offered complaints. Until they propose actual alternatives that can be discussed and implemented, they’re going to continue sounding like stereotypical mothers-in-law who hover over any activity, whining, ‘No! You’re doing it wrong!’” More >>

21 May 2002 >> “We must try to understand how we mishandled intelligence prior to September 11th, but let’s do it in a calm, rational way, far away from professional politicians. Our goal should be fixing the problem, not affixing the blame. Forgive my skepticism, but judging from the hotheaded handwringing that has taken place already, holding hearings in some Congressional kangaroo court will do little more than provide a podium for people whose primary concern is their next election.” More >>