Rantingprofs

Look What's Slipped in the Middle

I'm too far behind on most of the issues raised in Dana Priest's summary article on CIA programs post 9/11 to comment on them in a particularly thoughtful way, (although I'm sure the rest of the blogosphere will be all a-buzz today) but one thing raises big alarm bells for me.

The point of the article is supposed to be that there are a range of activities under one large umbrella program, the legality of each of which is questionable, but all of which are being justified by the same concepts. But in the middle of the article we find this:

Tenet, according to half a dozen former intelligence officials, delegated most of the decision making on lethal action to the CIA's Counterterrorist Center. Killing an al Qaeda leader with a Hellfire missile fired from a remote-controlled drone might have been considered assassination in a prior era and therefore banned by law.

But after Sept. 11, four former government lawyers said, it was classified as an act of self-defense and therefore was not an assassination. "If it was an al Qaeda person, it wouldn't be an assassination," said one lawyer involved.

This month, Pakistani intelligence sources said, Hamza Rabia, a top operational planner for al Qaeda, was killed along with four others by a missile fired by U.S. operatives using an unmanned Predator drone, although there were conflicting reports on whether a missile was used. In May, another al Qaeda member, Haitham Yemeni, was reported killed by a Predator drone missile in northwest Pakistan.

That is patent nonsense. The laws regarding the circumstances under which someone can be killed are complex -- it's why the Air Force and Naval aviation units employ so many JAG officers to go over targeting decisions -- but they have nothing to do with questions about "assassination."

For one thing, the ban on assassination is not legislative, it's an Executive Order, so if the President wanted to do away with it, he could do so with the stroke of a pen. And for another, assassination is generally defined as the killing of a head of state, and not even Osama bin Laden meets that criteria. There was some discussion over whether targeting Saddam at the very beginning of the invasion might have met that criteria, but in point of fact it would not since as the commander of military forces at a time of war (pdf) he was a legitimate military target (as President Bush would also have been once hostilities commenced.)

At the very least, Priest needed to point out that these issues surround the question of assassinations, not write as if the very fact that terrorists are being killed in the field means that the US is violating some crystal clear legislative ban on some crystal clear act. That she wrote it this way makes me wonder if the article isn't padded, if she didn't try and throw in as many points of controversy as she could find, up to and including the kitchen sink, from the last four years of covert activity, to make her point as dramatically as possible, and it makes me wonder, if I knew more about the issue, what else in her article would jump out at me?

Normally I take anything written by Priest very, very seriously, but suddenly my guard is up.

Hugs and Kisses

Essentially every piece of information that might be considered negative about Louisiana Gov. Blanco appeared inside yesterday's Times; the front page is all about her steely determination and the way she's been underestimated (as woman often are, you know) -- well, that and the fact that her support in the state is down to 19%.

But lets, face it, given the Governor's performance during the storm, the Times just doesn't have that much to work with.

So if you can't build up, tear down.

This also appears in the front page portion of yesterday's article:

And through it all, Ms. Blanco, a 63-year-old Democrat, has found herself dogged by invidious comparisons to a certain mayor of New York whose stand-tall image after Sept. 11, 2001, seems to have become the one that all elected officials are expected to duplicate during a crisis.

"People can't stop comparing her to Rudy Giuliani," said State Representative Troy M. Hebert, a Democrat from Jeanerette. "When 9/11 came, he looked like he was doing something. I'm not sure he was. But he looked like it."

I've never seen a single suggestion that Rudy's performance was over-hyped or any less than it was made out to be.

Have you?

More on Milblogs

Actually a decent article (via Memeorandum) from the BBC, but while explaining that the military is worried about operational security, that worry is never explained. On the other hand, at least it isn't dismissed as nothing more than an excuse for shutting down pesky sites the military doesn't like. That temptation, to try and regulate writing commander's don't like, is surely there (although commanders, I think, are quickly learning there isn't that much they can really do) but the operational security concerns are very real but also not always self-evident. Just throwing the label around doesn't necessarily help people understand how it is that these sites can be problemmatic, particularly since a single piece of information can often seem entirely innocuous -- it's only when taken in tandem with other information that it might become dangerous.

Russsia Had Their 9/11

Now their 9/11 Commission, and it ain't pretty. If you thought the ambiguous intelligence prior to 9/11 demanded action, take a look at what the Russians had prior to Beslan:

Speaking to both houses of parliament, Torshin said that on Aug. 2 last year, the Russian Interior Ministry was warned about a possible terrorist attack. Three days later, that information was refined to suggest a major attack in the North Caucasus, which led the Interior Ministry to order tighter security across the region. The ministry subsequently received information that terrorists were planning an attack on a school, probably in Ingushetia, a Russian republic that borders North Ossetia, where Beslan is located.

Hiding Among the Innocent

It has long been understood that one of the greatest challenges posed by al Queda is that the innocent Muslim immigrant communities in this country present them obvious places where they can send operatives to easily blend in. That presents us simultaneously with a double challenge: first, finding them, and second, how do you look for the guilty among the innocent while also protecting the innocent, both physically and, er, metaphysically? I've argued before that we don't even have the language that allows us to begin to discuss this issue, because it's almost impossible to talk about it without the language of "racial profiling" coming up.

Now the Post reports that the radiation checks of urban mosques was essentially just such a program. The mosques themselves weren't really under suspicion, but there was fear that al Queda operatives, if they did get hold of radiological material, would use mosques to hide it.

Why aren't the targets of these searches even more outraged than before at al Queda, and demanding more not fewer radiation checks, checks right out in the open, to deter al Queda and any other terrorist group from considering such a site as a safe one for such material? That's what would make me angry, that the checks weren't public, and therefore providing some level of deterrence, the way the roving bands of counterterror police do in New York City. After all, radiation is odorless, tasteless, invisible: if it was hidden in your mosque you'd never know until your worshippers started to get sick. Instead the concern is whether some NEST guy crossed two feet over property lines? What the hell is wrong with these people?

I'll tell you what:

The official familiar with the program acknowledged that "now it sounds like a crazy thing. But at the time it didn't sound like a very crazy thing. . . . All the intel was saying, 'An attack is coming, it's likely to be al Qaeda, likely to be launched in a U.S. city, likely to involve a dirty device'. . . . Where would you go looking for that?"

If government officials don't believe in the threat anymore, why should anyone else take it seriously? The risks are being balanced in a very odd way here.

Lest I Forget

Yes, yes, normal people take time off on the 25th. Well, you know . . .

I'm out of town, and should be posting a fair amount today, but tomorrow, and perhaps Saturday things will be light.

Giving Terror a Platform

NBC's excuse for giving this terrorist a platform is that all Americans should know the face of the enemy.

I'm all for that. That's why, for example, I want the networks to rehabilitate the footage of the planes hitting the World Trade Centers.

But this interview doesn't do that, not by a longshot. And since they work so hard to pretty-up the footage they have of the "battle" between this man's fighters and a US Navy Seal, and since they cut away before a US helicopter is shot down, they don't actually show us the true face of this enemy, do they?

We learn nothing of substance from this interview. All we get out of it is the terrorist's efforts to justify his actions, while he gets out of it the chance to legitimize himself by appearing to be someone worthy of a big-time network interview.

It may be an "exclusive," but it's a pathetic performance on NBC's part.

Giving Terror a Platform

NBC's excuse for giving this terrorist a platform is that all Americans should know the face of the enemy.

I'm all for that. That's why, for example, I want the networks to rehabilitate the footage of the planes hitting the World Trade Centers.

But this interview doesn't do that, not by a longshot. And since they work so hard to pretty-up the footage they have of the "battle" between this man's fighters and a US Navy Seal, and since they cut away before a US helicopter is shot down, they don't actually show us the true face of this enemy, do they?

We learn nothing of substance from this interview. All we get out of it is the terrorist's efforts to justify his actions, while he gets out of it the chance to legitimize himself by appearing to be someone worthy of a big-time network interview.

It may be an "exclusive," but it's a pathetic performance on NBC's part.

This Just Gets Better and Better

Defense attorneys for terrorists get geared up to use NSA wiretaps as an argument.

Unsatisfying

This Post story on how and whether New Orleans will come back doesn't really tell me all that much. What everybody was going on about was the way the storm revealed this pocket, this entire population of underemployed minorities that no one had paid attention to.

What I want to know is whether those people are better or worse off where they ended up.

The press coverage, which initially went on and on about race and poverty, now focuses exclusively on the question of whether this or that plan is capable of bringing New Orleans back the way it was.

But if New Orleans the way it was included this fairly large cluster of minorities unable to break out of poverty, why does the press coverage all build on the assumption that that's our top policy priority, recreating what was there?

Where's the coverage of those who were at the lowest end of the scale in the old of New Orleans, and how they're doing now? Maybe part of the reason they aren't rushing back, unlike the relatively middle class families inevitably featured in these stories, is that they've discovered that in other cities, maybe in smaller cities, or cities with economies not built on tourism and the service sector, they can do better?

I actually heard an interview on MS where the interviewer (who was black) said to the author, after all, none of us wants a cleaned up New Orleans, a "New Orleans Disney," because part of what we liked about the city was its "grittier" part.

Yes, God forbid we get a "cleaner" New Orleans, but I suspect those "grittier" parts were far less enjoyable for those who were living in the city as opposed to those who only visited there, and the rebuilding of the city should also keep their needs in mind.

My point is that the coverage takes a single goal and value -- rebuilding the city as it was -- and never questions or critiques it. But the initial coverage made it quite clear that beyond the tourist districts, New Orleans was a city with quite a few problems. If the residents who fled aren't coming back, shouldn't the press ask why -- and ask that question of all segments of the population, after they so aggressively informed us that there were layers of that population we hadn't been paying attention to?