To follow is an excerpt from the CQ Researcher report on "Homegrown Jihadists" by Peter Katel, September 3, 2010
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Overview
For one young resident of Washington's Oakton, Va., suburbs, the door into jihadism was football. 
Shortly before the FBI arrested him in July, 20-year-old Zachary Adam Chesser wrote that he converted to Islam in 2008 while playing on a football team formed by a member of a Muslim missionary organization.
“By Allah Jihad is a part of this religion and by Allah it is obligatory,” Chesser wrote on an extremist Website shortly before his arrest for allegedly providing “material support” to a terrorist organization. He also acknowledged that in talks with FBI agents he had “praised the Baghdad Sniper who killed 37 U.S. soldiers,” and explained that FBI agents “were mad because the Baghdad Sniper killed Americans. I informed them that I was not rooting for the Americans and that the Baghdad Sniper was on the side I wanted to win.”[Footnote 1]
The agents also asked Chesser, who said he grew up in a household with two lawyers, about sports, apparently reflecting the view of terrorism experts that sports can be a jihad precursor. “A reliable predictor of whether or not someone joins the Jihad is being a member of an action-oriented group of friends,” Scott Atran, research director of ARTIS, a Phoenix-based social science research firm specializing in political violence, told the Senate's Emerging Threats Subcommittee in March. “It's surprising how many soccer buddies join together.”[Footnote 2]
Sports enthusiasm is far from a reliable predictor of extremism, of course. Indeed, no one can predict who will be drawn to jihadism powerfully enough to seek training or launch an attack. But one thing is clear, national security officials agree: Most of the estimated 2.5 million Muslims in the United States as well as the vast majority of the 1.6 billion-plus Muslims worldwide, reject jihadism.[Footnote 3]
Worldwide, Atran testified, the number of Muslims who move from jihadist sympathy to violence amounts to no more than a “few thousand.” In the United States, veteran terrorism analyst Brian Jenkins of the RAND Corporation think tank has counted 46 cases — involving 125 people — of recruitment to jihadist violence from Sept. 11, 2001, to the end of 2009.[Footnote 4]
A recent string of attacks and attempts — including the killing of 13 military personnel at Fort Hood last year and an attempted car bombing in Times Square three months ago — has experts intensifying the search for jihadists' distinguishing characteristics. But the clues are many and varied.
“No single pathway towards terrorism exists,” Kim Cragin, a senior policy analyst at RAND, told the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment last December.[Footnote 5]
Still, for Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of New York University's Center on Law and Security, one conclusion is inescapable: “It is no longer possible to think of jihad as a purely foreign phenomenon,” she wrote in The New Republic in May. “American jihad ranges the full spectrum from lone nuts cloaking a general appetite for violence in jihadist rhetoric to more sophisticated would-be terrorists who have actually trained abroad. In all these cases, it is a threat we ought not to ignore.”[Footnote 6]
A series of widely varied episodes that began last year seems to reflect a mix of “lone wolf” attackers and small-group conspirators, both from immigrant and longtime citizen backgrounds:
* On June 1, 2009, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (Carlos Bledsoe), a Muslim convert claiming to be retaliating for U.S. military aggression against Muslims, allegedly shot and killed a U.S. Army private and wounded another outside a military recruiting center in Little Rock, Ark. He is awaiting trial.[Footnote 7]
* Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan residing in the United States, was arrested on Sept. 19, 2009, for preparing to bomb the New York subway system. In pleading guilty this year, he said he'd been trained in Afghanistan and ordered to make the suicide attack. At least one other man was directly involved and has pleaded guilty.[Footnote 8]
* An American who converted to Islam in prison and a Jordanian immigrant were arrested by the FBI on Sept. 24, 2009, in two separate cases in which each one allegedly tried to detonate a building with fake explosives provided by undercover agents. Talib Islam (Michael Finton) is awaiting trial; Hosan Maher Husein Smadi pleaded guilty.[Footnote 9]
*Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly killed 13 fellow service personnel at Fort Hood, Texas, on Nov. 5. Hasan, a psychiatrist from a Palestinian immigrant family, is awaiting trial in a military court.[Footnote 10]
* David C. Headley, an American citizen with a Pakistani father, pleaded guilty on March 18 to a series of crimes outside the U.S. growing out of a long-term affiliation with Pakistani jihadist groups and Al Qaeda, including six months of training in combat and surveillance.[Footnote 11]
* Faisal Shahzad, 30, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan, tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square on May 1. Upon pleading guilty, he admitted receiving bomb-making training in Pakistan. “I consider myself a Mujahid, a Muslim soldier. The U.S. and NATO forces have attacked the Muslim lands,” he said. “It's a war … I am part of that.”[Footnote 12]
If the recent incidents have anything in common, it's that they all differ significantly from the intricately orchestrated Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, which were carried out entirely by Arabs, some of whom had studied in Europe. “Al Qaeda and affiliated movements,” Cragin said, “have demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt to different recruiting environments, adjusting both message and method of recruitment.”[Footnote 13]
Terrorism experts are also making adjustments. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, many had argued that young American Muslims are less drawn to jihadism than their counterparts in Western Europe, with its ghettoized populations of second- and third-generation Muslim immigrant families and its history of intolerance toward newcomers. But in light of the latest attacks and attempts, that view is less widely held.
To be sure, American Muslims do tend to be more affluent and more integrated in a country with a long history of religious and social pluralism. “Far more Muslims in three of the four Western European nations surveyed said they considered themselves first as Muslims, rather than citizens of their countries,” a 2007 study by the Pew Research Center concluded. Nevertheless, about one-quarter of U.S. Muslims said they had experienced discrimination, and most said their lives had gotten more difficult since 9/11.[Footnote 14]
Difficulties aside, some experts have long pointed to the existence of a jihadist current within a generally well-off, well-integrated population as evidence that socioeconomic advantages don't prevent jihadism. “I see very little connection between status in life and proclivity to resort to violence,” says Daniel Pipes, a conservative commentator on Islam and the Middle East and director of the Middle East Forum, a think tank for promoting U.S. interests. “I believe it's ideological, and unpredictable.”
Others venture some forecasting, based on an upsurge of anti-Muslim sentiment this summer sparked by a proposal to build an Islamic cultural center and mosque near the former World Trade Center site in New York. As the furor has intensified, some politicians and activists have gone from attacking the project near “ground zero” to denouncing the religion as a whole. In effect, some experts argue, the attacks are providing supporting evidence for a key tenet of jihadism: that America is at war with Islam.
“The jihadi and Glenn Beck need each other,” says counterterrorism consultant Marc Sageman, a sociologist, psychiatrist and former CIA operative in Pakistan.
Beck, a radio talk-show host and Fox News TV commentator — and one of the more prominent opponents of the mosque projects — said in August: “You tell me you want to build an ‘Allah tells me to blow up America mosque’ — yeah, I got a problem with that.”[Footnote 15]
Such talk, and projects such as a Florida preacher's plan to hold an “International Burn a Koran Day” on Sept. 11, are generating rhetorical violence in Muslim online chatrooms. “By Allah, the wars are heated and you Americans are the ones who … enflamed it,” says one posting reported by The Wall Street Journal. “By Allah you will be the first to taste its flames.”[Footnote 16]
Other Muslims have objected to the cultural center project precisely because it provided an arena for denouncing their faith. And from the jihadist side, amped-up rhetoric didn't begin with the cultural center project.
Chesser, the former Virginia high-school football enthusiast now in custody, rose to the attention of law enforcement and eventually the public through virulent Web postings that he signed as an individual — most notoriously a declaration that the creators of the “South Park” TV show were likely to be killed for planning to include a caricature of the Prophet Muhammed in an episode. (The Comedy Central network censored the offending episode.)[Footnote 17]
Chesser was arrested after allegedly trying to travel to Somalia to join al-Shabab (“the youth”), an Al Qaeda-allied militia that controls part of Somalia. At least three other Americans have also been arrested recently for allegedly making the same attempt.
The three had spoken of their jihadist plans to men who turned out to be informants or undercover law enforcement agents. Chesser himself knowingly spoke to FBI agents about his beliefs. No trained operative would let down his guard or trust outsiders — actions that arguably rank the men strictly as amateurs.
Jarret Brachman, a counterterrorism consultant formerly with the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, hypothesizes that Chesser was trying to emulate Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi. The Jordanian jihadist killed seven CIA operatives, including a top agent, in a suicide operation in Afghanistan after luring them into a meeting.[Footnote 18]
Balawi's attack was a popular topic on Websites to which Chesser contributed, Brachman says, adding, “I think that was his model.”
The Issues:
* Does ideology — rather than discrimination, alienation or foreign policy — drive domestic jihadism?
* Are domestic jihadis competent enough to mount serious threats?
* Are U.S. Muslim communities doing enough to counter jihadist influence?
For more information see the CQ Researcher report on "Homegrown Jihadists" [subscription required] or purchase the PDF
Footnotes:
[1] “Breaking: Zach Chesser Indicted for Material Support of Terrorism,” Jawa Report (blog), July 22, 2010, contains archived Web posting by Chesser; Tara Bahrampour, “Terror suspect took his desire to belong to the extreme,” The Washington Post, July 25, 2010, p. C1.
[2] “Efforts to Counter Violent Extremism,” Senate Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities,” committee testimony (written), March 10, 2010,
[3] “Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream,” Pew Research Center, May 22, 2007, p. 9; “Major Religions of the World Ranked by Number of Adherents,” Adherents.com, updated Aug. 9, 2007,.
[4] “Efforts to Combat Violent Extremism,” op. cit.; “House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment,” CQ Congressional Transcripts, May 26, 2010.
[5] “Extremist Thought and Actions,” House Homeland Security Committee, Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, Dec. 15, 2009.
[6] Karen J. Greenberg, “Homegrown: The Rise of American jihad,” The New Republic, May 21, 2010. For background, see Sarah Glazer, “Radical Islam in Europe,” CQ Global Researcher, November 2007, pp. 265–294.
[7] John Lynch, “A GI-slaying case intensifies,” Arkansas Democrat, Aug. 5, 2010.
[8] Tina Susman and Richard A. Serrano, “Guilty plea in terror attack,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 23, 2010, p. A1; “Guilty plea in New York subway bombing plot,” The Associated Press (Los Angeles Times), April 24, 2010, p. A16.
[9] Mike Robinson, “Men accused of unrelated bomb plots in Ill., Texas,” The Associated Press, Sept. 25, 2009; “Jordanian pleads guilty in Dallas skyscraper bombing plot,” Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, May 27, 2010.
[10] Dana Priest, “Fort Hood suspect warned of threats within the ranks,” The Washington Post, Nov. 10, 2009, p. A1.
[11] Jane Perlez, “American Terror Suspect Traveled Unimpeded,” The New York Times, March 26, 2010, p. 1; United States of America v. David Coleman Headley, No. 09 CR 830-3, Plea Agreement,” March 18, 2010,.
[12] Quoted in Patricia Hurtado, “Times Square Bomb Suspect Shahzad Pleads Guilty,” Bloomberg, June 22, 2010,.
[13] “Extremist Thought and Actions,” op. cit.
[14] “Muslim Americans …,” op. cit., pp. 3–4.
[15] “Becks suggests mosque near Ground Zero is an ‘Allah tells me to blow up America mosque,’” Media Matters for America, Aug. 3, 2010.
[16] Jonathan Weisman, “Protests, Rhetoric Feeding Jihadists' Fire,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 23, 2010, .
[17] Dave Itzkoff, “‘South Park’ Episode Altered After Muslim Group's Warning,” The New York Times, April 22, 2010, republished on Revolution Muslim, (original posting no longer available there) .
Homegrown Jihadists
Are strikes by unmanned aircraft ethical?
To follow is an excerpt from the CQ Researcher report on "Drone Warfare" by Thomas J. Billitteri, August 6, 2010.
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OVERVIEW
Mustafa Abu al-Yazid ranked high on the roster of global terrorists. He was jailed in connection with the 1981 assassination of 
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, thought to have managed finances for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States and, as the No. 3 official in Al Qaeda, was widely viewed as a prime conduit to Osama bin Laden. [Footnote 1]
Yazid's life apparently came to an end in May when a missile from a CIA drone aircraft hit him in the lawless tribal region of western Pakistan. Al Qaeda claimed Yazid's wife, three of his daughters, a granddaughter and other children and adults also died.
The attack on Yazid, also known as Sheikh Sa'id al-Masri, was part of a massive and controversial expansion in the use of “unmanned aerial vehicles,” often called UAVs or drones, for battlefield reconnaissance and targeted killing of suspected militants.[*]
The boom in drones has stirred a variety of concerns among critics, but the greatest has been over strikes carried out covertly by the CIA under a classified, but widely reported, program of strikes against suspected militants inside Pakistan. Critics say the intelligence agency's drone attacks violate the laws of war because they are executed by civilian agents and occur inside another nation's sovereign territory. Others, however, defend the strikes as lawful acts of war and national self-defense in the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.[Footnote 2]
So far, the Obama administration has carried out at least 101 drone strikes in Pakistan, more than twice the 45 executed by the Bush administration from 2004 through 2008, according to the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank. [Footnote 3] Allegations of high civilian casualty rates have heightened the drone controversy. About a third of those killed by CIA strikes since 2004 were non-militants, foundation researchers concluded.
Meanwhile, some question the attacks' effectiveness at stemming Al Qaeda and the Taliban insurgency. The Reuters news agency found that the CIA had killed roughly a dozen times more low-level fighters than mid- to high-level leaders since the summer of 2008, when drone strikes in Pakistan intensified. [Footnote 4]
Critics also argue that drone strikes are fueling anti-American sentiment and spurring more terrorism. They point to Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistan immigrant living in Connecticut who tried to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square in May. Shahzad, who pleaded guilty, suggested U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere helped motivate him. [Footnote 5]
But drone supporters argue that strikes are precise, limited in collateral damage compared to conventional bombing or artillery attacks and save the lives of U.S. soldiers.
On Aug. 3, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit with potentially broad implications in the debate over targeted killing. The suit contests a Treasury Department rule requiring lawyers to get a special license before they can provide legal services benefiting a U.S.-born radical Muslim cleric thought to be hiding in Yemen whom the Obama administration has reportedly placed on a kill list.
The New York Times said the suit could test “some of the most deeply contested disputes to arise in the conflict against Al Qaeda — including whether the entire world is a battlefield for legal purposes, or whether terrorism suspects who are found away from combat zones must, in the absence of an imminent threat, instead be treated as criminals and given trials.” [Footnote 6]
The growing use of unmanned warplanes is part of a much broader embrace of drone technology for both military and civilian uses — everything from environmental monitoring and U.S. border patrol to drug interdiction and post-disaster searches. But it is the expanding robotic technology for war that is stirring the greatest debate.
In recent years the U.S. military has spent billions of dollars to expand its fleet of unmanned planes, which has gone from 167 aircraft in 2002 to more than 7,000 now. Last year, the Air Force trained more pilots to fly unmanned planes than traditional fighter pilots. [Footnote 7]
Drone technology itself is astonishing in its capacity to reconnoiter and kill. In the case of the Predator and its even more powerful brother, the Reaper, controllers sit at computer consoles at U.S. bases thousands of miles from harm's way and control the aircraft via satellite communication. With the ability to remain aloft for long hours undetected on the ground — Predators can fly at altitudes of about 50,000 feet — the planes can do everything from snap high-resolution reconnaissance photos of insurgents' vehicles to shoot Hellfire missiles at them.
A secret archive of classified military documents controversially released in July by the group WikiLeaks revealed the lethal power of the Predator. As reported by The New York Times, in early winter 2008 a Predator spotted a group of insurgents suspected of planting roadside bombs near an American military outpost in Afghanistan. “Within minutes after identifying the militants, the Predator unleashed a Hellfire missile, all but evaporating one of the figures digging in the dark,” The Times said. “When ground troops reached the crater caused by the missile, costing $60,000, all that was left was a shovel and a crowbar.” [Footnote 8]
The Times noted that the U.S. Air Force flies some 20 Predator and Reaper aircraft a day in Afghanistan, almost twice as many as it did a year ago, and that allies such as Britain and Germany have their own fleets. The leaked incident reports, the newspaper said, show that missions include snapping reconnaissance photos, gathering electronic transmissions, sending images of ongoing battles to field commanders and attacking militants with bombs and missiles, plus supporting U.S. Special Operations missions.
“Killer drones are the future of warfare,” Afsheen John Radsan, a former CIA lawyer who teaches at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minn., told a House panel in April. [Footnote 9]
But overshadowing that future is a fierce debate over how, where and by whom drones are being used. Of particular concern is the CIA's drone program, which reportedly has targeted suspected militants in western Pakistan and other remote trouble spots where the United States is not engaged in open hostilities, including Yemen, where a 2002 drone strike killed a group of Al Qaeda suspects that included a U.S. citizen. [Footnote 10]
The CIA attacks have raised important legal questions about the role of targeted killing in the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Administration officials contend that such killings are legal under established principles of self-defense, international laws of armed conflict and the Authorization for Use of Military Force — the so-called “law of 9/11” passed by Congress following the 2001 terrorist attacks.
In March, Harold Koh, the State Department's legal adviser, defended the administration's use of unmanned aircraft for targeted attacks, asserting that the United States “may use force consistent with its inherent right to self-defense under international law.” [Footnote 11]And CIA Director Leon E. Panetta called drone strikes “the only game in town in terms of confronting and trying to disrupt the Al Qaeda leadership.” [Footnote 12]
But critics say CIA attacks inside Pakistan violate international laws of armed conflict because the United States is not at war with Pakistan, is not using its drones as part of Pakistan's own military operations and its drone strikes are carried out by civilians in secret far from active battlefields. “You can never, at the end of the day, find a legal basis for the CIA to be doing this,” argues Mary Ellen O'Connell, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, who says militants like Yazid should be pursued through law enforcement means, not covert attacks.
In a report this spring, Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, sharply criticized targeted killings of terrorism suspects and the use of drones to carry them out, citing “the displacement of clear legal standards with a vaguely defined licen[s]e to kill, and the creation of a major accountability vacuum.” [Footnote 13] He also warned against “a ‘Playstation’ mentality to killing” with drone technology. [Footnote 14] A CIA spokeswoman told U.S. News & World Report that “without discussing or confirming any specific action, this agency's operations are … designed from the very start to be lawful and are subject to close oversight.” [Footnote 15]
In a groundbreaking exposition of the CIA's drone program, New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer wrote last fall that “embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force. And, because of the CIA program's secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war.” [Footnote 16]
On Capitol Hill, where hearings on drone policy were held this spring, U.S. Rep. John F. Tierney D-Mass., chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, noted that “the use of unmanned weapons to target individuals — and, for that matter, the targeting of individuals in general — raises many complex legal questions. We must examine who can be a legitimate target, where that person can be legally targeted and when the risk of collateral damage is too high.” [Footnote 17]
At least 40 other nations, including China, Russia and Iran, have “begun to build, buy and deploy” unmanned planes, according to Brookings Institution senior fellow P. W. Singer. [Footnote 18] Last year, U.S. fighter jets shot down an unarmed Iranian spy drone over Iraq. [Footnote 19] And drones are in the arsenals of non-state actors, including Hezbollah, the Lebanese paramilitary group. National-security experts worry that if drones fall into the hands of terrorists, the United States itself could be at risk of attack. “Simple logic tells us that every day drones become a greater threat,” says Gary Solis, a former law professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point who now teaches at the Georgetown University Law Center.
“What you have moving forward is a debate not just about what can these systems do, but who can use them,” says Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. “That question of who can use them covers the gamut from the military to the federal government to local police forces to civilian actors.”
The Issues:
* Do drone strikes comply with international law?
* Are drones an effective counter-terrorism tool?
* Is drone technology ethical for use in war?
For more information see the CQ Researcher report on "Drone Warfare" [subscription required] or purchase the PDF
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Footnotes:
[1] “Senior Afghan al-Qaeda leader ‘killed in Pakistan,’” BBC News, June 1, 2010, . See also Eric Schmitt, “American Strike Is Said to Kill a Top Qaeda Leader,” The New York Times, May 31, 2010; and Zeeshan Haider, “U.S. believes it killed al Qaeda No. 3,” Reuters, June 1, 2010.
[2] For background, see the following CQ Researcher reports: Peter Katel, “America at War,” July 23, 2010, pp. 605–628; Thomas J. Billitteri, “Afghanistan Dilemma,” Aug. 7, 2009, pp. 669–692; Peter Katel, “Rise in Counterinsurgency,” Sept. 5, 2008, pp. 697–720; Peter Katel, “Cost of the Iraq War,” April 25, 2008, pp. 361–384; and Robert Kiener, “Crisis in Pakistan,” CQ Global Researcher, December 2008, pp. 321–348.
[3] Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, “The Year of the Drone,” New America Foundation, 2010. Bergen is the CNN national security analyst and is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
[4] Adam Entous, “Special Report: How the White House Learned to Love the Drone,” Reuters.
[5] Andrea Elliott, “Militant's Path From Pakistan to Times Square,” The New York Times, June 22, 2010.
[6] Charlie Savage, “Rule Limiting Legal Services in Terror Cases Is Challenged,” The New York Times, Aug. 3, 2010, .
[7] Drone inventory figures and pilot-training facts are from statement of Rep. John F. Tierney, D-Mass., chairman, House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, hearing on “Rise of the Drones: Unmanned Systems and the Future of War,” March 23, 2010.
[8] C. J. Chivers, et al., “View Is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan,” The New York Times, July 25, 2010.
[9] Statement of Afsheen John Radsan before the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, “Loftier Standards for the CIA's Remote-Control Killing,” April 28, 2010.
[10] “U.S. defends Yemen strike,” BBC News, Nov. 10, 2002.
[11] Harold Hongju Koh, “The Obama Administration and International Law,” U.S. Department of State, March 25, 2010.
[12] Mary Louise Kelly, “Officials: Bin Laden Running Out of Space to Hide,” National Public Radio, June 5, 2009.
[13] Philip Alston, “Report of the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions,” United Nations General Assembly, Human Rights Council, May 28, 2010, p. 3. See also Charlie Savage, “U.N. Report Highly Critical of U.S. Drone Attacks,” The New York Times, June 2, 2010.
[14] Ibid., p. 25.
[15] Quoted in Alex Kingsbury, “CIA Drone Strikes Draw United Nations Fire,” U.S. News & World Report, June 10, 2010.
[16] Jane Mayer, “The Predator War,” The New Yorker, Oct. 26, 2009, p. 38.
[17] Statement of Rep. John F. Tierney, D-Mass., Chairman, Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives, April 28, 2010.
[18] P. W. Singer, “Defending Against Drones,” Newsweek, Feb. 25, 2010.
[19] “U.S.: We shot down Iranian drone over Iraq,” CNN, March 16, 2009.
Are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan making U.S. enemies weaker?
To follow is an excerpt from the CQ Researcher report "America at War" by Peter Katel, July 23, 2010
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From the very beginning of the post-Sept. 11 wartime period, U.S. officials were warning that the conflicts wouldn't end with the equivalent of the definitive enemy surrenders that halted World War II.
Instead, the key sign would be the elimination of terrorist sanctuaries, where Al Qaeda and like-minded organizations can plan, train and coordinate. Today, the key sanctuary is the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. That zone is the “locus of the heartland of Al Qaeda,” Defense Undersecretary for Policy Flournoy told the House Armed Services Committee in May. [Footnote 30]
And Al Qaeda in some ways is more dangerous today, said Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, a government agency established in 2004 that reports to the president. He said the organization showed its capabilities in the case of Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan immigrant to the United States, who pleaded guilty in February to terrorism charges centered on a plan to explode a bomb in the New York subway system.[Footnote 31] “There has been a diversification of the threat and a move towards simpler, smaller efforts to attack the United States,” Leiter said, “which don't have quite the same level of threat in terms of the damage it might cause, but in the multiplicity of the threats I think it is more challenging today.”[Footnote 32]
But with half its leaders killed, “Al Qaeda senior leadership in Pakistan is weaker today than it has been since 2001,” Leiter told a conference at the Aspen Institute think tank in Colorado. “Now, weaker doesn't mean harmless … It is still a meaningful and dangerous force.”[Footnote 33]
Opponents of the Afghan war say conditions in the jihadist heartland show the failure of the effort to destroy Al Qaeda in war, as opposed to more precisely targeted law-enforcement and military operations. “We ourselves, for domestic political reasons, make things worse and not better by turning these mass murderers into warriors,” says Andrews of Win Without War. “Framing this as a war and elevating them to warriors fighting for a cause, we strengthen them. We need to revisit whether this approach makes sense — the facts show very clearly that it doesn't.”
A smarter, more effective response to the Sept. 11 attacks would have been to “use tools that actually work — surgical operations where you go after these guys,” Andrews says. “That does not mean invading and having a massive military footprint in a country.”
But a senior U.S. security official with long experience both in Iraq and Afghanistan argues that the long military campaign has weakened the United States' enemies. “The risk of a 9/11-type event has clearly gone down,” the official says, speaking on condition he not be named. “They've not been able to pull off something like that. The pressure we've put on their networks, and the leadership targeting, is important.” To be sure, he acknowledges, much of that pressure and targeting is taking place in Pakistan, where U.S. troops are not waging war.
Nevertheless, he says, “What takes Afghanistan from an important national interest to a vital national interest is that, if we did not surge in Afghanistan, you would see the Pakistanis cutting a lot more deals” with jihadists. “The resources we are investing in Afghanistan have helped us make the case to them that we are doing our part.”
But other experts argue that the war — along with drone strikes on Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan — is hurting more than it's helping. “The presence and operations of the U.S. in the theater … because they are misperceived in terms of their nature and purpose, has continued to be a stimulus to radicalism including radicalism that takes the form of terrorism,” Paul Pillar, a former career CIA specialist in the region, said in June at a Washington conference held by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).[Footnote 34]
The U.S. military deployment has also prompted non-radicals to join the fight against the Americans and their allies, said Pillar, now the graduate studies director of Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies in Washington “This has been reflected … in the continued taking up of arms by many Afghans who have no sympathy whatsoever for the extreme political and social views of the Taliban but see themselves as waging an anti-occupation struggle.”[Footnote 35]
~~~~~~~~~~~
The Issues:
* Can the United States meet the troop drawdown start date in Afghanistan?
* Should immediate negotiations with the Taliban be the top U.S. priority?
* Are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan making U.S. enemies weaker?
For more information see the CQ Researcher report on "America at War" [subscription required] or purchase the PDF
~~~~~~~~~~~
Footnotes
[30] ”House Armed Services Committee Holds Hearing on Developments in Afghanistan,” CQ Congressional Transcripts, May 5, 2010.
[31] A.G. Sulzberger and William K. Rashbaum, “Guilty Plea Made in Plot to Bomb New York Subway,” The New York Times, Feb. 22, 2010.
[32] “Terror Threat From Abroad,” Aspen Institute, C-SPAN, June 30, 2010 (Web video).
[33] Ibid.
[34] “Beyond Afghanistan: America's Enduring Interests in Central and South Asia,” Center for a New American Security, June 10, 2010, transcript.
[35] Ibid.
Prosecuting Terrorists
Should suspected terrorists be given military or civil trials?
By Kenneth Jost, March 12, 2010
President Obama is under fierce political attack for the administration's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called Christmas Day
bomber, in civilian courts instead of military tribunals. Republican lawmakers argue the defendants in both cases should be treated as “enemy combatants” and tried in the military commissions established during the Bush administration. Administration officials and Democratic lawmakers say criminal prosecutions are more effective, having produced hundreds of convictions since 9/11 compared to only three in the military system. And they insist that Abdulmutallab is providing useful information under interrogation by FBI agents. But the administration is reconsidering Attorney General Eric Holder's original decision to hold Mohammed's trial in New York City and considering making greater use of military commissions with other terrorism cases.
The Issues
* Should suspected terrorists be tried in civilian courts?
* Should suspected terrorists be tried in military tribunals?
* Should some Guantánamo detainees be held indefinitely without trial?
For more information see the CQ Researcher report on "Prosecuting Terrorists" [subscription required] or purchase the CQ Researcher PDF.
Should governments block terrorist Web sites?
Below is an excerpt from the CQ Global Researcher issue on "Terroism and the Internet" by Barbara Mantel, November, 2009
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Many of those who think the Internet is a major terrorist recruiting tool say authorities should simply shut down terrorists' sites.
Often the call comes from politicians. “It is shocking the government has failed to shut down a single Web site, even though Parliament gave them that power,” Britain's opposition security minister, Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, said last March. “This smacks of dangerous complacency and incompetence.” [Footnote 16]
In France, a minister for security said she wanted to stop terrorist propaganda on the Internet. [Footnote 17] And a European Commission official called for a Europe-wide prohibition on Web sites that post bomb-making instructions. [Footnote 18]
Although governments have shut down terrorist Web sites when they felt the information posted was too great a threat, some critics say such a move is legally complicated, logistically difficult and unwise.
Last year, three of the most important discussion forums used by Islamist terrorist groups disappeared from the Internet, including ek-Is.org, which had posted the six-part training manual. Jordanian terrorism expert Bakier says counterterrorism officials were so worried about the site that he “used to get requests from concerned agencies to translate the exact texts posted on ek-Is.org that were referenced in my articles. It was that serious.”
“It is widely assumed that Western intelligence agencies were responsible for removing the three sites,” and probably without the cooperation of the Internet service providers (ISPs) that host the sites, says Neumann, of King's College. “It would have required the cooperation of all the ISPs in the world,” because those Web sites were not accessible at all, he explains. Instead, he thinks intelligence agencies may have launched so-called denial-of-service attacks against the sites, bombarding them with so many requests that they crashed. This September, one of the sites resurfaced; however, many experts believe it is a hoax. [Footnote 19]
But government takedowns of terrorist sites — by whatever method — are not common, say many researchers. First, there are concerns about free speech.
“Who is going to decide who is a terrorist, who should be silenced and why?” asks Haifa University's Weimann. “Who is going to decide what kind of Web site should be removed? It can lead to political censorship.”
Concern about free speech may be more acute in the United States than elsewhere. Current U.S. statutes make it a crime to provide “material support” — including expert advice or assistance — to organizations designated as terrorist groups by the State Department. [Footnote 20] However, the First Amendment guarantee of free speech may trump the material support provisions.
“Exceptions to the First Amendment are fairly narrow” says Ian Ballon, an expert on Internet law practicing in California. “Child pornography is one, libelous or defamatory content another. There is no terrorism exception per se.” Words that would incite violence are clearly an exception to the First Amendment, he says, “but there is a concept of immediacy, and most terrorism sites would not necessarily meet that requirement.” A 1969 Supreme Court case, Brandenburg v. Ohio, held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless it is inciting or likely to incite imminent lawless action. [Footnote 21]
In Europe, where free-speech rights are more circumscribed than in the United States, the legal landscape varies. Spain, for instance, outlaws as incitement “the act of performing public ennoblement, praise and/or justification of a terrorist group, operative or act,” explains Raphael Perl, head of the Action Against Terrorism Unit at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, a regional security organization with 56 member nations, based in Vienna, Austria. And the U.K. passed the Terrorism Acts of 2000 and 2006, which make it an offense to collect, make or possess material that could be used in a terrorist act, such as bomb-making manuals and information about potential targets. The 2006 act also outlaws the encouragement or glorification of terrorism.Footnote 22 Human Rights Watch says the measure is unnecessary, overly broad and potentially chilling of free speech. [Footnote 23]
Yet, it does not appear that governments are using their legal powers to shut down Web sites. “I haven't heard from any ISP in Europe so far that they have been asked by the police to take down terrorist pages,” says Michael Rotert, vice president of the European Internet Service Providers Association (EuroISPA).
For one thing, says Rotert, there is no common, legal, Europe-wide definition of terrorism. “We are requesting a common definition,” he says, “and then I think notice and takedown procedures could be discussed. But right now, such procedures only exist for child pornography.”
But even if a European consensus existed on what constitutes terrorism, the Internet has no borders. If an ISP shuts down a site, it can migrate to another hosting service and even register under a new domain name.
Instead of shutting down sites, some governments are considering filtering them. Germany recently passed a filtering law aimed at blocking child pornography, which it says could be expanded to block sites that promote terrorist acts. And Australia is testing a filtering system for both child pornography and material that advocates terrorism.
The outcry in both countries, however, has been tremendous, both on technical grounds — filtering can slow down Internet speed — and civil liberties grounds. “Other countries using similar systems to monitor Internet traffic have blacklisted political critics,” wrote an Australian newspaper columnist. “Is this really the direction we want our country to be heading? Communist China anyone? Burma? How about North Korea?” [Footnote 24]
Ultimately, filtering just may not be that effective. Determined Internet users can easily circumvent a national filter and access banned material that is legal elsewhere. And filtering cannot capture the dynamic parts of the Internet: the chat rooms, video sharing sites and blogs, for instance.
Even some governments with established filtering laws seem reluctant to remove terrorist sites. The government owns Singapore's Internet providers and screens all Web sites for content viewed as “‘objectionable’ or a potential threat to national security.” [Footnote 25] Yet Osman, of the Nanyang Technological University, says the government is not blocking Web sites that support terrorism. “I can still get access to many of them,” she says, “so a lot of other people can, too.”
In fact, counterterrorism officials around the world often prefer to monitor and infiltrate blogs, chat rooms, discussion forums and other Web sites where terrorists and sympathizers converse. If the sites remain active, they can be mined for intelligence.
“One reason [for not shutting down sites] is to take the temperature, to see whether the level of conversation is going up or down in terms of triggering an alert among security agencies,” says Anthony Bergin, director of research at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
Another purpose is to disrupt terrorist attacks, says Bergin. Just recently, the violent postings of Texas resident Hosan Maher Husein Smadi to an extremist chat room attracted the attention of the FBI, which was monitoring the site. Agents set up a sting operation and arrested the 19-year-old Jordanian in late September after he allegedly tried to detonate what he thought was a bomb, provided by an undercover agent, in the parking garage beneath a Dallas skyscraper. [Footnote 26]
Footnotes
[16] Clodagh Hartley, “Govt Can't Stop ‘Web of Terror,’” The Sun (England), March 20, 2009, p. 2.
[17] “Interview given by Mme. Michèle Alliot-Marie, French Minister of the Interior, to Le Figaro,” French Embassy, Feb 1, 2008.
[18] Greg Goth, “Terror on the Internet: A Complex Issue, and Getting Harder,” IEEE Computer Society, March 2008.
[19] Howard Altman, “Al Qaeda's Web Revival,” The Daily Beast, Oct. 2, 2009.
[20] Gregory McNeal, “Cyber Embargo: Countering the Internet Jihad,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, vol. 39, no. 3, 2007–08, p. 792.
[21] Brandenburg v. Ohio.
[22] “Safeguarding Online: Explaining the Risk Posed by Violent Extremism,” op. cit., p. 3.
[23] Elizabeth Renieris, “Combating Incitement to Terrorism on the Internet: Comparative Approaches in the United States and the United Kingdom and the Need for an International Solution,” Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law, vol. 11:3:673, 2009, pp. 687–688.
[24] Fergus Watts, “Caught out by net plan,” Herald Sun (Australia), Dec. 29, 2008, p. 20.
[25] Weimann, op. cit., p. 180.
[26] “Jordanian accused in Dallas bomb plot goes to court,” CNN, Sept. 25, 2009.
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Interrogating the CIA
Should its role in terrorism cases be reexamined?
By Kenneth Jost, September 25, 2009
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has asked a career federal prosecutor to reexamine evidence of possible abuses by Central Intelligence Agency operatives
years ago in the questioning of “high-value” terrorism suspects. The CIA's role in interrogating detainees has been controversial because the agency used so-called “enhanced” techniques, including waterboarding. Under President George W. Bush, the Justice Department approved the harsh measures even though many critics said some amount to torture. President Obama has now barred the use of the techniques, but former Vice President Dick Cheney is among those who say the practices yielded valuable intelligence that helped keep the country safe after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. A newly released internal CIA report documents several apparent abuses during the interrogation program. The release of the report is said to be hurting morale at the CIA even as it prompts renewed calls for a broad investigation of the Bush administration's policies in the war on terror.
The Issues:
* Should CIA agents be prosecuted for exceeding interrogation guidelines?
* Should the CIA be allowed to use “enhanced interrogation techniques” when questioning “high-value” detainees?
* Should Congress authorize an in-depth investigation of past detention and interrogation practices?
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Burhan's Death and the Somali Swamp
The recent killing of Burhan Hassan, a 17-year-old Somali-American high school student who allegedly traveled to Somalia to fight for the Shabaab militia in the country’s civil war, is a shocking and tragic coda to this Newsweek story about the potential threat to the United States from radical Islamists among Somali immigrant communities.
If there’s a lesson in Burhan’s death, it’s that despite the headlines about rampant piracy in Somalia and potential fifth-column Somali terror groups in the Twin Cities, Somalia’s civil war is still a far greater threat to Somalis than it is to the West. One of the most telling points I came across in researching this month's CQ Global Researcher ("The Troubled Horn of Africa") is that none of the analysts I interviewed could name a single successful act of international terrorism carried out by a Somali. In fact, I’d argue that the main reason Western powers have been so disengaged in Somalia since the end of Operation Restore Hope in 1995 (during which the infamous Black Hawn Down incident occurred) is precisely because the country has posed so little threat to the outside world. Somalia’s immediate neighbors — particularly Ethiopia and Eritrea, who have both been major actors in the Somali war — obviously see things differently. But so long as the main protagonists and casualties of the war are Somalis themselves, it’s hard to see President Barack Obama or any other Western leader wanting to walk into the Somali swamp.
One of the most shocking aspects of the war is that over the past two decades a new class of Somali businessmen with a vested interest in the continuing chaos has emerged to become arguably the most powerful political force in Somalia. For all the talk about the Islamists battling the new moderate transitional government, a real back-story is the treachery of the country’s business class. This group includes exporters of charcoal made from Somalia’s few remaining forests, importers of the narcotic leaf "khat" and the local militias that “tax” aid organizations wanting to bring food aid to civilians living in militia-controlled regions — not to mention businessmen who print their own local currency or deal in arms.
Like Mogadishu’s “recycling” barons who in the 1990s sold off copper wire and scrap metal looted from the vestiges of the country’s physical infrastructure or today's pirates who hold ships hostage until their owners fork over millions of dollars, Somalia's businessman thugs have a vested interest in preventing a central government from coming to power that could outlaw or tax their trade. When even the rich guys don’t want a functioning government, you know your country’s in trouble.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Defeat of the Tamil separatists
When CQ Global Researcher freelance reporter Brian Beary heard the momentous news about the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka this week, he sent us this message:
The recent surrender of the Tamil Tigers, the militant rebel group in Sri Lanka fighting for decades for an independent Tamil homeland, came as a bit of a shock to me. Early last year, when I was researching my article on separatist movements for the April 2008 Global Researcher, the Tigers still controlled large swathes of Sri Lankan territory and the conflict seemed deadlocked. Since then the Tigers have undergone a spectactular collapse and the Sri Lankan government is proclaiming outright military victory. Such an apparently clear-cut outcome to a separatist conflict is more the exception than the rule, I found, in charting the fate of about 25 active separatist movements across the globe, from Tibet to Kosovo to Somaliland to Bolivia.
The Sri Lankan conflict has been remarkable for its sheer bloodiness: It has the unenviable accolade of spawning that most terrifying of species, the suicide bomber. But contrary to a widespread perception, many separatist movements are peaceful -- Scotland, Quebec and Flanders being obvious examples. They only tend to turn violent when the country they are part of gives separatists no space to voice their opinions or is unwilling to contemplate granting them genuine political autonomy as an alternative to full independence. The Tamils are a case in point, as are the Uyghurs in China and the Kurds in Turkey. Military victory may be possible in such cases but it is unlikely to quell the aspirations of Tamils, Uyghurs and Kurds to preserve their culture and govern their affairs.
Closing Guantánamo
by Kenneth Jost, February 27, 2009
Can Obama close the detention camp within one year?
President Obama on his second full day in office ordered the closing of the Guantánamo detention camp within a year. The facility at the U.S. Naval Station in Cuba has been controversial ever since President George W. Bush decided in late 2001 to use it to hold suspected enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Both Obama and Republican candidate John McCain promised during the presidential campaign to close the facility if elected. But that poses many difficult issues about the camp’s remaining 241 prisoners. The government wants to send many to other countries – with few takers so far – but worries that some may resume hostile activities against the United States. Some may be brought to the U.S. for trial, but those prosecutions would raise a host of uncharted legal issues. Meanwhile, opposition already has surfaced to any plans for housing detainees in the United States. And human-rights advocates worry the Obama administration may continue to back some form of preventive detention for suspected terrorists.
- Should the government continue repatriating Guantánamo detainees to other countries?
- Should Guantánamo detainees be prosecuted in civilian courts?
- Should some Guantánamo detainees be held indefinitely without military or civilian trial?
For a more in-depth summary, see the Overview of this week’s report.
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Overview from the issue on Closing Guantánamo (2/26/2009)
by Kenneth Jost
Mohammed Jawad has spent more than a quarter of his young life in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for an offense he says he didn’t commit.
The government says the Afghani teenager threw a grenade at a U.S. military jeep in Kabul in 2002, wounding two American soldiers and their Afghan interpreter.
Jawad, who was 16 or 17 at the time, claims he was working to clear land mines when the attack occurred and that another youth was responsible. Jawad says he confessed under coercion while in custody in Afghanistan and again at the U.S. detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, only after more than a year of abusive interrogation.
Then, in a pair of rulings in October and November, an Army judge threw out the confessions that the prosecution had said were central to the case.. Col. Stephen Henley ruled that Jawad had confessed the first time only after Afghan soldiers threatened to kill him and his family. The statements made in Guantánamo, Henley said, were also coerced.
With a case so badly handled, Jawad would seem to be an obvious candidate for release from the controversial prison camp that President George W. Bush ordered to be established in 2002 for “enemy combatants” captured in the Afghanistan war or elsewhere. In its final week in office, however, the Bush administration on Jan. 13 urged the review panel that acts as an appeals court for the military commission system at Guantánamo to reverse the rulings in Jawad’s case and allow the prosecution to go forward.
After taking office only a week later, President Obama signed an executive order for a review of all pending Guantánamo cases and the closure of the facility – which now houses 241 prisoners – within one year. In Jawad’s case, however, the new administration returned to the military review panel to ask for a 120-day delay before it rules on Jawad’s case. The panel granted the request, over the objections of Jawad’s lawyers.
Obama’s action – on his second full day in office – moved toward fulfilling his repeated campaign pledge to close Guantánamo, known as “Gitmo.” Human rights advocates, who have strongly criticized Guantánamo and the legal rules the Bush administration established for enemy combatant cases, are applauding Obama’s move.
“Today is the beginning of the end of this sorry chapter in our nation’s history,” Elisa Massimino, executive director and CEO of Human Rights First, said after Obama signed the order. “The message this sends to the world could not be clearer: The United States is ready to reclaim its role as a nation committed to human rights and the rule of law.”
Even some former Bush administration officials agree the time has come to close the facility. John Bellinger, who was legal adviser at the State Department and National Security Council during the Bush administration, says he has “very strongly” supported closing this “albatross around our necks.”
“The benefits of Guantánamo have been outweighed by the legacy costs of Guantánamo, and that has been true for some time,” says Charles “Cully” Stimson, former assistant secretary of Defense for detainee affairs and now a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. The facility has taken “a moral toll” on the U.S. image at home and abroad, he says.
Robert Chesney, a respected national security expert now a visiting professor at the University of Texas Law School in Austin, says Guantánamo reflects a broader failure of policy on how to deal with suspected terrorists captured both within and outside the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon by the Islamic terrorist group al Qaeda.
“For more than seven years, we’ve struggled to define a counterterrorism policy that is effective, that is politically sustainable and simultaneously reflects our core values as Americans,” Chesney remarked as he opened a panel discussion at the school on Feb. 3. “We have not yet succeeded in doing this.”
Despite indications of editorial and public support for Obama’s action, Republicans are raising questions and apparently setting the stage to criticize the closure if suspected terrorists are transferred to facilities within the United States. “Most families neither want nor need hundreds of terrorists seeking to kill Americans in their communities,” House GOP Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia said in a statement issued the same day.
Another critic, however, notes that Obama’s executive order did nothing other than promise a review of case files and set a goal of closing the facility. “He hasn’t really done much,” says Andrew McCarthy, legal editor of National Review and chairman of the Center for Law and Counterterrorism at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
McCarthy has backhanded praise for the interim nature of Obama’s move, which he says contrasts with candidate Obama’s “demagogic, overheated rhetoric” during the campaign. “What he has obviously found is that there are very difficult issues, very complex issues that have to be worked through with respect to the detainees,” McCarthy says.
“It was unfortunate that he and people who are like-minded were critical of Guantánamo,” McCarthy adds, “when in point of fact if you didn’t have Guantánamo, you would need to have something like it, whether it was inside the United States or outside.”
In establishing Guantánamo, President Bush said the camp would be used to house “the worst of the worst” suspected terrorists. But the national security and human-rights camps diverge on how to regard the 779 prisoners who have been held at Guantánamo over its seven-year history, some 540 of whom have been released. Among the detainees still being held, Bellinger predicts the Obama administration will find “a lot of bad people left, or at least many in the gray area.”
“We’ve known all along that not everyone held at Guantánamo had any business being held there at all,” counters Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior counsel with the Constitution Project, an advocacy group that seeks to find consensus on constitutional issues.
Outside government, the most extensive study of the Guantánamo detainees appears to have been conducted by Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank and author of a highly regarded new book on counterterrorism policies, Law and the Long War. Wittes writes that his examination of the information publicly available on the detainees indicated many of them had incriminating ties to al Qaeda. An updated compilation by Wittes available on the Brookings Web site, however, shows that only a small fraction of the prisoners still being held are considered major al Qaeda leaders.
Paradoxically, Obama’s pledge to close Guantánamo appears to be contributing to an increase in tensions in the prison camp. A special Defense Department review team that spent almost two weeks at Guantánamo concluded in February that detainees are being treated humanely in compliance with the provisions of the Geneva Conventions regarding wartime captives. But the report noted a nearly sixfold increase in disciplinary incidents by detainees since September 2008 and tied the increase in part to detainees’ “uncertainty and anxiety about the future.”
Along with Guantánamo, the Obama administration inherits an array of legal proceedings. Obama’s order froze proceedings in the military tribunal system, which thus far has secured three convictions: Ali Hamza Ahmad Suliman al-Bahlul, Osama bin Laden’s alleged media secretary, was found guilty of 35 counts relating to support of terrorism and sentenced to life in prison; Salim Ahmed Hamdan, bin Laden’s former driver, was convicted on reduced charges; and David Hicks, the so-called Australian Taliban, pleaded guilty to one count of providing material support of terrorism. He and Hamdan were essentially sentenced to time served and have since been released. But pending cases in federal courts up to and including the Supreme Court are continuing.
The high court is scheduled to hear a case on April 22 testing whether the government can hold without trial a Qatari native – Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri – as an enemy combatant after he was arrested while lawfully residing in the United States on a student visa. In a closely divided ruling, the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., said yes – but with more judicial scrutiny than proposed by the Bush administration. In one of its first moves, the Obama administration asked for and was granted an extension of time to file the government’s brief with the high court.
In a separate case, the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia is reconsidering whether former Guantánamo detainees can sue government officials for alleged torture and religious discrimination. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the appeals court in December to consider the impact of the justices’ decision in June that Guantánamo detainees can use federal habeas corpus to challenge their confinement.
The pending cases are forcing the Obama administration to make policy decisions sooner than the one-year timetable outlined for closing Guantánamo, according to Chesney. “There will not be as much new time as the administration would like,” Chesney said at the panel discussion.. “The litigation calendar will force them to take positions much faster than that.”
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Homeland Security
Is America safe from terrorism today?
By Peter Katel, February 13, 2009
Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the U.S. government created the Department of Homeland Security, giving it stepped-up power to shadow and detain terrorism suspects. Then-President George W. Bush credited these measures — and intelligence and military operations abroad — with preventing new attacks on U.S. soil in the nearly eight years since 9/11. But some intelligence experts argue that the new department failed to coordinate the nation's many turf-conscious intelligence agencies, and that continued U.S. military pressure has rendered Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network incapable of mounting new attacks within the United States. Moreover, jihadist cells that have wreaked havoc in Europe lack counterparts in the U.S., where Muslims are far less alienated, experts say. Still, the danger of a new attack remains. According to an emerging school of thought, Americans should learn to live with the possibility of an eventual attack, rather than expecting government to eliminate all danger.
- Does al Qaeda remain a danger within the United States?
- Is the Department of Homeland Security set up effectively to spot potential threats?
- Is the United States focusing anti-terrorism resources in the right places?
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Overview from the issue on Homeland Security (2/13/2009)
by Peter Katel
The attackers struck in the last days of November 2008. With terrifying precision, shooters in five two-man teams moved from target to target, unleashing lethal bursts of automatic weapons fire in the train station, an upscale restaurant, two luxury hotels and a Jewish cultural center.
By the time the terrorists had been killed or captured three days later, 173 people had been slain.
The massacre occurred in Mumbai, India, but 7,800 miles away, New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly couldn't help but notice some troubling parallels. Mumbai, he told the Senate Homeland Security Committee in January, is “the country's financial capital, a densely populated, multi-cultural metropolis and a hub for the media and entertainment industries. Obviously, these are also descriptions of New York City.”
In the post-9/11 world, Kelly's job is to make such connections. But among Americans in general, beset by foreclosures, job layoffs and other manifestations of the global economic meltdown, terrorism fears have diminished in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
“There may be a false sense of security in the United States because we haven't been attacked in seven years,” says Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and former scholar-in-residence for counterterrorism at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Indeed, while the Mumbai attacks seem as distant from the United States as South Asia itself, Hoffman and others view Mumbai as a wake-up call for the United States.
The attacks have been linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), or the “Army of the Pure,” a Pakistani group with deep connections to Pakistan's intelligence service. LeT seeks to force India to cede Kashmir to Pakistan, which, like Kashmir is majority Muslim. The group shares longstanding ties with Osama bin Laden's jihadist group al Qaeda, which carried out the 9/11 attacks.
While the daily fear that gripped Americans after Sept. 11 may have faded, the nation nonetheless has remained on high alert ever since, its security infrastructure extensively strengthened.
Creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the year after the attacks reflected officials' certainty that further terrorist strikes were imminent. Since then, increasingly intense airport screenings provide constant reminders of danger, along with warnings by terrorism experts that the United States' 361 ports and long borders leave the nation vulnerable.
“America's margin of safety against a WMD (weapon of mass destruction) attack is shrinking,” a blue-ribbon congressional commission reported in December, pointing specifically at Pakistan and the jihadist groups flourishing there. “Were one to map terrorism and weapons of mass destruction today, all roads would intersect in Pakistan. . . . Trends in South Asia, if left unchecked, will increase the odds that al Qaeda will successfully develop and use a nuclear device or biological weapon against the United States or its allies.”
Bin Laden is doing his best to keep fears alive. Five days before Barack Obama's Jan. 20 inauguration, a recording released by bin Laden said the new president was “inheriting two wars, in which he is not able to continue, and we are on our way to open other fronts, God willing.”
Thought to be holed up in the mountainous tribal-ruled belt of northwestern Pakistan, bin Laden and his top commanders — notably Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor who is considered al Qaeda's second-in-command — remain America's No. 1 counterterrorism targets. As Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee in January: “We will go after al Qaeda wherever al Qaeda is.”
Still, some veteran terrorism analysts say bin Laden's network no longer commands the funds, communications facilities nor technical expertise necessary to plan and carry out a major attack in the United States.
Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer in Pakistan, notes that the London subway and bus attacks in 2005 mark the last effective al Qaeda action outside Asia or Africa. “There has not been a single fatality from al Qaeda or an al Qaeda-linked group in the West since July 7, 2005,” Sageman, now a consultant to the NYPD's counterterrorism division, told a Washington conference sponsored by the Cato Institute think tank in January.
Another longtime expert on al Qaeda, Peter Bergen, noted recently that intensive investigations since 9/11 failed to uncover a single al Qaeda “sleeper cell” in the United States or any operatives on immediate missions. “While a small-bore attack may be organized by a Qaeda wannabe at some point, a catastrophic, mass-casualty assault along the lines of 9/11 is no longer plausible,” said Bergen, a journalist and a fellow at the nonpartisan New America Foundation, who interviewed bin Laden in 1997.
John Mueller, an Ohio State University political scientist, has been arguing for several years that U.S. officials have vastly exaggerated the extent of terrorism danger to the United States. “It's looking more and more that 9/11 was an outlier,” says Mueller, author of a 2006 book on terrorism. “Even if you assume that U.S. protection measures are 90 percent effective, that would mean that some al Qaeda agents would have been caught entering the United States. The fact that the government can't find any means that al Qaeda isn't trying.”
Even experts who question the need for some security procedures call Mueller's position extreme. Al Qaeda and its allies “would kill you if they could,” says James Jay Carafano, director of the conservative Heritage Foundation's Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies. Minimizing terrorism threats would be risky, he argues. “If you get a cold and just ignore it, then you get pneumonia and die.”
However, experiments conducted last year by journalist Jeffrey Goldberg suggest that domestic aviation security, at least, wouldn't stop terrorists. Goldberg got on a flight from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Washington with a forged boarding pass, no driver's license and a coat (in summertime) over an Osama bin Laden t-shirt. A security supervisor let Goldberg through. “ 'All right, you can go,' ” he said, pointing me to the X-ray line. “ 'But let this be a lesson for you.' ”
Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Director Kip Hawley previously told one of Goldberg's key sources, security guru Bruce Schneier, that the agency's intelligence service effectively spots potentially dangerous passengers before they reach airports. “Our intel operation works closely with other international and domestic agencies,” Hawley told Schneier.
Other intelligence experts argue for paying close attention to the shared jihadist roots and operational ties between al Qaeda and LeT, the apparent Mumbai attack mastermind. “Bin Laden was an early supporter of the group and provided some of the initial funding,” writes Bruce Riedel, a former CIA expert on Pakistan now at the Brookings Institution think tank. He has noted that the first major al Qaeda operative arrested after 9/11, Abu Zubayda, was nabbed in an LeT safe house in Islamabad.
Riedel, author of a recent book on al Qaeda, predicts that Mumbai sets a pattern for future attacks. “I think this will become a role model for terrorists around the world,” he told the German news magazine Der Spiegel. “You will see the copycat phenomenon where others will try to imitate what has just happened in Mumbai.”
Some say it's an easy model to adapt. “In Mumbai, the terrorists demonstrated that with simple tactics and low-tech weapons they can produce vastly disproportionate results,” Brian M. Jenkins, a terrorism analyst at the RAND Corporation think tank, told the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Their weapons, he noted, amounted essentially to a 1940s-era arsenal — rifles, pistols and grenades.
By attacking a non-aviation transportation hub, the attackers reinforced another warning by many terrorism analysts — jihadists' adaptability. “I think what Homeland Security has done well up to this point is to prepare defenses to respond to the last attack,” says Roger Cressey, transnational threat director for the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. “If you look at TSA, it's more focused on aviation than on any other element of transportation.”
Many other terrorism experts point to al Qaeda's apparent obsessiveness about aviation and highly symbolic targets. Sept. 11 provided the clearest example. In addition to the hijackers aiming at the World Trade Center and Pentagon a fourth plane apparently had targeted the Capitol or White House. It crashed in Shanksville, Pa., after passengers rushed the cockpit.
In fact, jihadists had tried toppling the towers once before, exploding a bomb in the garage in 1993. After fast police work rolled up nearly the entire network of conspirators, counterterrorism expert Hoffman warned that the danger hadn't passed.
“The fact there haven't been any more attacks doesn't mean we're out of the woods,” he said. “Terrorism doesn't work in a predictable fashion.” He was speaking in 1994, seven years before 9/11.
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