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The Find Every Terrorist at Any Cost Industry

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As a thought experiment, replace the word “terrorist” in this paragraph with “soldier” or “military.”

All terrorists fundamentally see themselves as altruists: incontestably believing that they are serving a “good” cause designed to achieve a greater good for a wider constituency—whether real or imagined—which the terrorist and his organization or cell purport to represent. Indeed, it is precisely this sense of self-righteous commitment and self-sacrifice that that draws people into terrorist groups. It all helps them justify the violence they commit. It gives them collective meaning. It gives them cumulative power. The terrorist virtually always sees himself as a reluctant warrior: cast perpetually on the defensive and forced to take up arms to protect himself and his community. They see themselves as driven by desperation——and lacking any viable alternative—to violence against a repressive state, a predatory rival ethnic or nationalist group, or an unresponsive international order.

The paragraph comes from Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown Professor/ThinkTanker whose studies of terrorism predate 9/11 by decades. It forms part of his explanation, post Boston, for why people become terrorists: because they, like our own country increasingly, see violence as a solution to their grievance.

That’s not all of Hoffman’s description of what makes people terrorists, mind you. He goes onto discuss religion and the human relations that might convince someone to engage in violence. But the paragraph has haunted me since I read it over a week ago for how clearly it should suggest that one of the few things that separates terrorism from our country’s own organized violence is official sanction (and at least lip service about who makes an appropriate and legal target).

Which is one reason why Jack Levin, in a piece debunking four myths about terrorism, offers this as one solution.

Somehow, we must reinstate the credibility of our public officials — our president, our Congress, and our Supreme Court Justices — so that alienated Americans do not feel they must go outside of the mainstream and radicalize in order to satisfy their goals.

Blaming terrorism on our dysfunctional political system feels far too easy, but it’s worth remembering that in Afghanistan, Somalia, and parts of Yemen, Al Qaeda has at times won support from locals because it offered “justice” where the official government did not or could not.

In any case, the common sense descriptions Hoffman and Levin offer haven’t prevented a slew of people responding to Boston — some experts, some not — from demanding that we redouble our efforts to defeat any possible hint of Islamic terrorism, no matter the cost.

Batshit crazy Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert claims the Boston attack is all Spencer’s fault: because FBI purged some its training materials of some of the inaccurate slurs about Muslims (but did not even correct the training of Agents who had been taught that claptrap in the first place), it can no longer speak a language appropriate to pursuing terrorists. “They can’t talk about the enemy. They can’t talk about jihad. They can’t talk about Muslim. They can’t talk about Islam.” Which elicited the equally batshit crazy response from Glenn Kessler of taking Gohmert’s premise as a valid one that should be disproven by weighing how much offensive language remains in FBI materials, rather than debunking the very premise that only people who engage in cultural slurs would be able to identify terrorists. I award Kessler four wooden heads.

Somewhat more interesting is this piece from Amy Zegart, another Professor/ThinkTanker. She admits we may not know whether Boston involved some kind of intelligence failure for some time.

Finding out what happened will be trickier than it sounds. Crowdsourcing with iPhones, Twitter, and Lord & Taylor surveillance video worked wonders to nail the two suspects with lightning speed. But assessing whether the bombing constituted an intelligence failure will require more time, patience, and something most people don’t think about much: understanding U.S. counter-terrorism organizations and their incentives and cultures, which lead officials to prioritize some things and forget, or neglect, others.

But that doesn’t stop her from insisting FBI’s culture remains inappropriate to hunting terrorists “pre-boom.”

But it is high time we asked some hard, public questions about whether the new FBI is really new enough. Transformation — moving the bureau from a crime-fighting organization to a domestic intelligence agency — has been the FBI’s watchword since 9/11. Read more →

Anwar al-Awlaki Is the New Aluminum Tube

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Mark Mazzetti, Charlie Savage, and Scott Shane team up to provide the government’s best case — and at times, an irresponsibly credulous one — for the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki and the collateral deaths of Samir Khan and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.

Yet even in a 3,600 word story, they don’t present any evidence against the senior Awlaki that was fresher than a year old — the October 2010 toner cartridge plot — at the time the Yemeni-American was killed. (I’m not saying the government didn’t have more recent intelligence; it just doesn’t appear in this very Administration-friendly case.) Not surprisingly, then, the story completely ignores questions about the definition of “imminent threat” used in the OLC memo and whether Awlaki was an “imminent” threat when he was killed.

The “linked in various ways” standard for killing Americans

Moreover, the case they do present has various weaknesses.

The story provides a fair amount of space to Awlaki’s celebration of the Nidal Hasan attack (though it does make it clear Awlaki did not respond enthusiastically to Hasan’s queries before the attack).

Investigators quickly discovered that the major had exchanged e-mails with Mr. Awlaki, though the cleric’s replies had been cautious and noncommittal. But four days after the shootings, the cleric removed any doubt about where he stood.

“Nidal Hassan is a hero,” he wrote on his widely read blog. “He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.”

It uses far vaguer language to describe Awlaki’s role in the Faisal Shahzad and toner cartridge plots.

Meanwhile, attacks linked in various ways to Mr. Awlaki continued to mount, including the attempted car bombing of Times Square in May 2010 by Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen who had reached out to the preacher on the Internet, and the attempted bombing by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula of cargo planes bound for the United States that October.

“Linked in various ways” seems to be the new standard for killing an American. That, in spite of the fact that Shahzad’s tie to Awlaki seems to be the same Hasan had: an inspiration, but not any involvement in the plot. And while Awlaki is reported to have had some role in the toner cartridge plot, reports from Saudi infiltrator Jabir al-Fayfi apparently fingered others in AQAP as the chief plotters.

I guess that would be too much nuance to include in a 3,600 word article.

NYT doesn’t care about problems with the Abu Tarak explanation

Which leaves the UndieBomb attack as the sole attack in which the NYT presents evidence about Awlaki’s direct role. But there’s a problem with their claims there, too.

The would-be underwear bomber told F.B.I. agents that after he went to Yemen and tracked down Mr. Awlaki, his online hero, the cleric had discussed “martyrdom and jihad” with him, approved him for a suicide mission, helped him prepare a martyrdom video and directed him to detonate his bomb over United States territory, according to court documents.

In his initial 50-minute interrogation on Dec. 25, 2009, before he stopped speaking for a month, Mr. Abdulmutallab said he had been sent by a terrorist named Abu Tarek, although intelligence agencies quickly found indications that Mr. Awlaki was probably involved. When Mr. Abdulmutallab resumed cooperating with interrogators in late January, an official said, he admitted that “Abu Tarek” was Mr. Awlaki. With the Nigerian’s statements, American officials had witness confirmation that Mr. Awlaki was clearly a direct plotter, no longer just a dangerous propagandist.

I don’t doubt that Awlaki was directly involved in this attack in some way. And I got the same explanation about Abu Tarak from “an official” back when I first noted the discrepancy between DOJ’s public claims (thanks for not crediting me on that one, NYT boys). But either Abdulmutallab said something beyond “Abu Tarak was Awlaki,” or the entire explanation is not credible.

That’s because Abdulmutallab’s initial interrogation — according to the version presented by Jonathan Tukel in the opening arguments of Abdulmutallab’s trial — said Abu Tarak did the following:

  1. Spoke daily with Abdulmutallab about jihad and martyrdom
  2. Suggested to Abdulmutallab that he become involved in a plane attack against the United States aircraft
  3. Gave him training in detonating the bomb
  4. Told him to make sure he attacked a U.S. aircraft and make sure the attack takes place over the United States

Yet according to the version of Abdulmutallab’s interrogation presented in his sentencing memo, here’s who did those things:

  1. Awlaki and Abdulmutallab discussed martyrdom and jihad
  2. Defendant and Ibrahim Al Asiri discussed defendant’s desire to commit an act of jihad; Asiri discussed a plan for a martyrdom mission with Awlaki, who gave it final approval
  3. Asiri trained defendant in the use of the bomb
  4. Awlaki instructed defendant that the only requirements were that the attack be on a U.S. airliner, and that the attack take place over U.S. soil

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Targeted Killing Timeline

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A timeline!

I’ve been working on this timeline for almost nine months, trying to pull together the known dates about strikes against Americans, the evidence supporting the strike against Anwar al-Awlaki, the legal cases surrounding both targeted killing and torture, to which targeted killing is linked via the Memorandum of Notification, and Congressional efforts to exercise oversight.

September 17, 2001: George Bush signs Memorandum of Notification (henceforth, Gloves Come Off MON) authorizing a range of counterterrorism techniques, including torture and targeted killing.

September 18, 2001: Congress passes the Authorization to Use Military Force.

November 3, 2002: US citizen Kamal Derwish killed in drone purportedly targeting Abu Ali al-Harithi.

Late 2008: Ruben Shumpert reported killed in Somalia.

June 24, 2009: Leon Panetta gets briefed on assassination squad program.

June 26, 2009: HPSCI passes a funding authorization report expanding the Gang of Eight briefings.

July 8, 2009: The Administration responds with an insulting appeal to a “fundamental compact” between Congress and the President on intelligence matters.

July 8, 2009: Silvestre Reyes announces CIA lied to Congress.

October 26, 2009: British High Court first orders British government to release language on Binyam Mohamed’s treatment.

October 28, 2009: FBI kills Imam Luqman Asmeen Abdullah during Dearborn, MI arrest raid.

October 29, 2009: Hearing on declassifying mention of Gloves Come Off MON before Judge Alvin Hellerstein; in it, Hellerstein reveals NSA James Jones has submitted declaration to keep mention of MON secret.

November 5, 2009: Nidal Hasan attacks Fort Hood, killing 13.

December 24, 2009: JSOC tries but fails to hit Anwar al-Awlaki. On that day, the IC did not yet believe him to be operational.

December 25, 2009: With Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attack, FBI develops full understanding of Awlaki’s operational goals.

January 2, 2010: In conversation with David Petraeus, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=10SANAA4“>speaks as if Awlaki, whom he refers to as a cleric, not an AQAP member, was a designated target of December 24 attack.

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The “Darker Side” to Dual Citizenship

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A central thrust to Peter Schuck’s argument that it should be easier to deny citizens of judicial due process is that there are so many dual citizens. And dual citizenship, he says, has a darker side.

Dual citizenship has proliferated as easier travel and cosmopolitan mobility have fostered international relationships, which lead to more naturalizations and more marriages between people of different nationalities, who in turn can often transmit their different citizenships to their U.S.-born children. Government policies, both here and abroad, have also increased dual citizenship, mostly for good reasons. Traditionally, the State Department opposed dual citizenship out of concern about conflicted loyalties, military service requirements, diplomatic protection burdens and the like. Today the government no longer resists it, recognizing the legitimate causes of dual citizenship, the practical obstacles to preventing it and the fact that, in practice, it causes little harm.

But there remains a darker side to dual citizenship: Some citizens who spend most of their lives abroad now have only notional ties to the United States rather than a genuine communal or emotional connection. Al Qaeda will surely focus recruitment efforts on this group, even though only a few will turn on their country.

Which brings us to the case of Awlaki, a dual citizen of the United States and Yemen. The government claimed there was hard, actionable intelligence that he had plotted to kill Americans, and that he was our citizen in name only. He refused to return to the U.S. and could not be captured for interrogation and trial without putting troops on the ground and in danger (and perhaps not even then).

Does the Constitution really require that he receive the judicial process owed to a citizen who lives in our society and is charged with a serious crime? I think not.

I’m a dual citizen, having gotten Irish citizenship through my spouse. Does that mean I should forgo judicial process because I’m a suspect Irish terrorist? Was Peter King? Are Israeli-American dual citizens — a pretty common dual citizenship — suspect of being terrorists as well?

Of course, Schock doesn’t actually connect dual citizenship with increased likelihood that person will declare himself an enemy of the state (he even suggests that native-born Nidal Hasan was just dual-citizens Awlaki’s cat’s paw, all the evidence in the Webster report notwithstanding). He just uses it — and the prospect of all these dark scary people wandering around with US passports — to invoke fear before he proposes limiting due process to citizens.

Maybe his fear is what has led him, in the very same piece, to be so confused. He applauds our rigid treason laws, a stance utterly at odds with his suggestion suspect dual citizens should get different judicial due process.

The court has also held that the government may not take away one’s citizenship against one’s will, regardless of one’s actions, except for treason, which the Constitution properly makes hard to prove if, like Awlaki, you are not under a U.S. court’s jurisdiction.

How do you applaud the necessity of a court judgement, with rules about the standard of evidence, before someone gets labeled a traitor, and at the same time suggest that citizens (he really doesn’t limit it to dual citizens) should not have judicial process before they’re killed?

Apparently we now have Yale law professors so terrified by dual citizens he has decided American citizens — dual citizen or not — should have a lower standard of due process to be killed than to retain their citizenship.

One of Just Four Overseers on Drone Targeting Believes First Amendment Protected Activities Merit Execution

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While the Gang of Four do not have access to the CIA’s kill list (and therefore did not know whether Samir Khan was on it before his death), they are the only people outside the Executive Branch who had, before today, seen the government’s rationale for killing Anwar al-Awlaki (and DOJ still has 8 memos on targeted killing to turn over). Thus, up until today, the Gang of Four has been the only outside review on that killing, 16 months after Awlaki’s death.

That’s all very nice because last March, in the context of the Administration’s refusal to turn over these memos, Dianne Feinstein offered this guarantee that the targeted killing program — and all other counterterrorism programs — are constitutional.

The Attorney General presented the administration’s legal analysis for the use of force against terrorists, including Americans. I believe it is important for the public to understand the legal basis and to make clear that our counterterrorism efforts are lawful under the Constitution, U.S. law and the law of war.

We are made safer by strikes against terrorists who continue to lead and carry out attacks on the United States. There are legal limits to this authority and great care is taken to ensure it is exercised carefully and with the absolute minimum of collateral damage. The Senate Intelligence Committee is kept fully informed of counterterrorism operations and keeps close watch to make sure they are effective, responsible and in keeping with U.S. and international law. [my emphasis]

That’s it. One of the only assurances that Awlaki’s death, and everyone else’s, is legal.

Which is all the more troubling given that DiFi’s judgement of what makes someone a legitimate target is so outrageous it made even John Brennan pause.

DiFi presented a series of terrorist attacks and asked Brennan to validate that Awlaki was, in fact, involved. It went something like this:

DiFi: Did he have connection to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab?

Brennan: Yes.

DiFI: Can you tell us what that was?

Brennan: I prefer not to.

DiFI: Did he have a connection to Fort Hood?

[long pause and serious squirming]

Brennan: As a member in AQAP he had a role in inciting a number of individuals. There were a number of occasions where individuals, including Awlaki, has been in touch with Nidal Hasan.

DiFi: Did Faisal Shahzad tell interrogators he was inspired by Awlaki.

Brennan: Yes

DiFI: Last October, was he involved [not sure she used that word, and she means October 2010] in the failed attempt to bring down cargo aircraft?

Brennan: Awlaki was involved in overseeing a number of attacks–there was a relationship there.

Now, it is rather telling that Brennan didn’t want to address Abdulmutallab; I think it possible that there are problems with Abdulmutallab’s confession, as I lay out here. That said, there is also NSA information (leaked by Pete Hoekstra and made fairly obvious by the Webster report) and, probably, information from people infiltrated into AQAP, meaning Brennan needed to protect sources and methods.

And the toner cartridge plot is pretty weak, too, as Jabir al-Fayfi reportedly testified that others from AQAP were really in charge of the operation.

But for DiFi to suggest that Awlaki could be killed because of his role in the Nidal Hasan attack is outright irresponsible. After all, FBI read the correspondence between Hasan and Awlaki in real time. And yet having read it all — and having read whatever else email Awlaki received between June 2009 and December 24, 2009 when the US first tried to kill Awlaki — they still didn’t consider Awlaki to be operational (though one office following him believed he aspired to be).

As of January 7 and June 16, 2009, the FBI knew Anwar al-Aulaqi was an anti-American, radical Islamic cleric and the subject of a Tier <redacted> FBI counterterrorism investigation. San Diego believed [<redacted> that Aulaqi was [developing ambitions beyond radicalization] <redacted>. WFO viewed him at that time as merely inspirational. The FBI’s full understanding of Aulaqi’s operational ambitions developed only after the attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day 2009.

Indeed, William Webster spent years trying to figure out whether FBI should have known Hasan was planning an attack from the emails, which is a much closer call. But even after reading everything that might have transpired between the two, no one believes that Awlaki had anything more than an inspirational role.

And yet one of the only four people outside the Administration who has attested to the legality of the strike on Awlaki thinks this should be part of the case to justify a due process free execution.

It got worse from there. She went on to insist that [rough transcript] ” Awlaki was not, by far, an American citizen of whom America would be proud.”

But like writing a bunch of First Amendment protected hateful propaganda, being “an American of whom America would not be proud” is not reason to be executed.

Dianne Feinstein, however, thinks it is.

 

National Security Tools and Gun Violence

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Within days after Nidal Hasan killed 13 people in Fort Hood, TX, Crazy Pete Hoekstra leaked FBI intercepts to the press to suggest Anwar al-Awlaki had pushed Hasan to attack, with the underlying implication that the Obama Administration had failed to prevent terrorism.

And while a number of Democrats have come forward to say that this time we have to do something to prevent massacres like the one in Sandy Hook, no one has yet suggested that it was a failure not to.

It may not have been a failure; thus far, the evidence suggests Adam Lanza’s attack might have been a failure of our mental health system, but there’s no indication he came on the  law enforcement radar outside a failed attempt to buy a gun.

All that said, there’s a shocking underlying assumption there, that the President and the National Security bureaucracy has more responsibility to protect the soldiers in Fort Hood than the 6-year olds in Newtown’s elementary schools from crazed gunmen.

Which is where this Charlie Savage story comes in. It explains how, in the wake of the Gabbie Giffords shooting (by a guy whose profile may be similar to Lanza’s), DOJ moved to ramp up the background checks on gun buyers.

Instead, it focused on ways to bolster the database the F.B.I. uses for background checks on gun purchasers, including using information on file at other federal agencies. Certain people are barred from buying guns, including felons, drug users, those adjudicated mentally “defective,” illegal immigrants and people convicted of misdemeanor offenses related to domestic violence.

For example, the study recommended that all agencies that give out benefits, like the Social Security Administration, tell the F.B.I. background-check system whenever they have made arrangements to send a check to a trustee for a person deemed mentally incompetent to handle his own finances, or when federal employees or job applicants fail a drug test. It also proposed setting up a system to appeal such determinations.

Although advocates for gun rights and privacy protection would probably object to the sharing of such information among agencies, the Justice Department concluded such activity would be lawful and appropriate.

Savage explains that the effort was shelved because of increasing pressure on DOJ because of Fast and Furious. I don’t find that explanation remotely adequate (it may be true, but if so, it’s a measure of the Administration’s failure to defend its own rather than a real political measure). DOJ could have said Border Patrol Brian Terry’s death demonstrated that gun-walking–one intelligence response to the urgent problem of drug gangs using US-purchased guns–had failed, and that this data-driven focus represented DOJ’s new approach to deal with the still urgent problem. (Note, Savage says DOJ also called for increased penalties for straw buyers, which would have fit with that explanation.)

Whatever the excuse, the Administration backed off this plan, even as it rolled out its effort to do something similar, but even more intrusive–to make some of the same databases available for NCTC’s counterterrorist data mining. Once again, the NatSec bureaucracy uses far more intrusive methods against terrorists–who have killed fewer people since 9/11 than the number that died at Sandy Hook Friday–than against gun violence generally.

Mind you, while the scrapped plan sounds fairly reasonable, I’d want to learn more before I agreed this is the right solution. And it would amount to a half measure if it didn’t come with increased accessibility for mental health care.

Though if it happened, I suspect it would trigger the kind of debate about privacy that we should be having over the counterterrorist measures, and we might see the same kind of privacy protections, such as DOJ’s plan to set up an appeal process, in those CT efforts.

As we go forward with this debate, we need to do something about gun violence. But we also need to make it clear that the government has every bit as much–more–responsibility to protect children from crazed gunmen as it has to protect military bases from terrorism. It’s time to stop treating unarmed radicalized Muslims as a bigger threat than mentally ill or imbalanced young men bearing Bushmasters, because far more people are being killed by the latter.

Investigating National Security Personnel in the Post-Nidal Hasan Era

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Three years and one day before FBI briefed DNI Clapper about the questionable email practices of David Petraeus, and less than three years before FBI alerted Leon Panetta to John Allen’s perhaps less questionable email practices, an Army officer who had been the subject of a 6-month investigation into his questionable emails killed 13 people and wounded another 29 at Fort Hood, TX.

While a number of people are criticizing the FBI (rightly, in the case of the agent who reportedly made this investigation his or her own personal project) for being out of control in the investigation that started with Jill Kelley’s email, I’d like to put the FBI’s decision to inform Petraeus’ and Allen’s superiors about their emails in the context of the failure to stop Nidal Hasan.

I don’t mean to suggest that Petraeus and Allen’s smutty emails to some beautiful middle aged housewives equate to an Army psychiatrist writing a radical anti-American cleric. At least given what we know, there were far more serious red flags in Hasan’s emails to Anwar al-Awlaki than there were in Petraeus’ love notes to Paula Broadwell (though Petraeus’ use of counter-surveillance techniques would, by themselves, be a red flag).

But the point is–and one key lesson of the failure to stop Hasan–is that the FBI can’t always know how important inappropriate email contacts are without talking to a person’s superiors. If they had done with Hasan what they did here–inform the officer’s superiors after concluding no criminal behavior had taken place (which is what they concluded with Hasan)–they might have learned of the more troubling context behind the emails.

Besides, the most damaging leak, today’s stories revealing a huge chunk of Allen emails that may be flirtatious but in no way problematic, came from a senior US defense official, not the FBI. There were surely more appropriate ways to delay Allen’s confirmation hearing later this week, but that decision was presumably DOD’s, not FBI’s.

Carrie Johnson captures some of the other disclosure issues FBI faced. But the question as to why FBI informed Clapper and Panetta can be answered, IMO, by pointing to lessons learned with the Nidal Hasan case. FBI almost certainly had no reason to doubt Petraeus and Allen. But I don’t blame FBI for not wanting to make the final decisions about how this email behavior affected the Generals’ fitness to command.

The Terror Attack in the Temple

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Over at Lawfare yesterday, a Sikh Notre Dame professor, Naunihal Singh, argued that the media have treated the Oak Creek attack as a singularly Sikh tragedy, not an American one.

The media has treated the shootings in Oak Creek very differently from those that happened just two weeks earlier in Aurora. Only one network sent an anchor to report live from Oak Creek, and none of the networks gave the murders in Wisconsin the kind of extensive coverage that the Colorado shootings received. The print media also quickly lost interest, with the story slipping from the front page of the New York Times after Tuesday. If you get all your news from “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” you would have had no idea that anything had even happened on August 5th at all.

The tragic events in the Milwaukee suburb were also treated differently by political élites, many fewer of whom issued statements on the matter. While both Presidential candidates at least made public comments, neither visited, nor did they suspend campaigning in the state even for one day, as they did in Colorado. In fact, both candidates were in the vicinity this weekend and failed to appear. Obama hugged his children a little tighter after Aurora, but his remarks after Oak Creek referred to Sikhs as members of the “broader American family,” like some distant relatives. Romney unsurprisingly gaffed, referring on Tuesday to “the people who lost their lives at that sheik temple.” Because the shooting happened in Paul Ryan’s district, the Romney campaign delayed announcement of its Vice-Presidential choice until after Ryan could attend the funerals for the victims, but he did not speak at the service and has said surprisingly little about the incident.

As a result, the massacre in Oak Creek is treated as a tragedy for Sikhs in America rather than a tragedy for all Americans. Unlike Aurora, which prompted nationwide mourning, Oak Creek has had such a limited impact that a number of people walking by the New York City vigil for the dead on Wednesday were confused, some never having heard of the killings in the first place.

I absolutely agree with his assessment of media attention, and I agree that the differential attention stems from real discomfort (which is a polite word for ignorance, maybe) about Sikhism. It was all the media could do to explain that Sikhs weren’t Muslim, by which I actually think they meant well, but which betrayed horrible things about their views both of Muslims and turbans.

But I don’t agree, exactly, that politicians stayed away (or didn’t publicize their attendance at the memorial, in the case of Ryan) because of their unfamiliarity with Sikhs. I don’t think any of the Presidential and Veep candidates are as unfamiliar with Sikhs as the media are, for example.

Rather, I think it has to do with the political role of terrorism.

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It’s Not Just Whether Nidal Hasan’s Emails Stuck Out, It’s Whether Abdulmutallab’s Did

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I’ve been meaning to return to the Webster report on Nidal Hasan’s conversations with Anwar al-Awlaki. This conversation between Gunpowder & Lead and Intelwire about how alarming those emails were will be a start provides a good place to start.

Hasan’s emails should have raised more concern–but probably didn’t because of the sheer volume of Awlaki intercepts

G&L notes that certain details from the emails–such as his invocation of Hasan Akbar, a Muslim-American soldier who killed two officers in Kuwait–as an example that should have raised more concern than it did.

But more significant, his question to Awlaki didn’t actually deal with the valid question that he raised, the feeling of inner conflict between one’s faith and serving in the U.S. military. Instead, he leaped right to a question that should rightly trigger alarm: if Hasan Akbar died while attacking fellow soldiers, would he be a martyr? Hasan skipped over questions about whether serving in the U.S. military is religiously acceptable; whether going to war against fellow Muslims is a violation of religious principles. Instead, in addressing “some” soldiers who felt conflicted about fighting fellow Muslims, Hasan right away asked whether it was permissible to kill other U.S. soldiers in the way Hasan Akbar.

After a close analysis of a number of the emails, G&L refutes the representation of these emails as “fairly benign.”

I agree with that assessment (and would add that the suggestion, in a February 22, 2009 email, that Hasan was donating to entities that his mosque would not is another troubling detail). But I also agree with Intelwire. These emails, from an Army officer, surely merited more attention. But these emails, as they likely appeared among the stream of Anwar al-Awlaki communications, probably did not stick out.

Based on who Hasan was (a military officer), who he was talking to (a suspected 9/11 accomplice), and the fact he repeatedly tried to get Awlaki’s attention using a variety of stratagems, the case should have been escalated and Hasan’s superiors should have been informed.

But when you place the content of Hasan’s messages alongside all the other raw intelligence that counterterrorism investigations generate, it’s extremely hard to argue from a subjective, non-psychoanalytical reading that they represented a red flag.

Which is why this report has seemed poorly scoped to me. Because not only did Nidal Hasan’s emails fail to trigger further attention, but Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s contacts with Awlaki before Fort Hood did too.

In spite of the fact that the FBI had two people spending a significant chunk of each day (they claimed it took 40% or 3 hours of their work day; 88) reviewing communications tied to Awlaki, in spite of the fact that two men about to attack the US were in contact with Awlaki, “the FBI’s full understanding of Aulaqi’s operational ambitions developed only after the attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day 2009.” (72)

The government also failed to respond to Abdulmutallab intercepts leading up to the Fort Hood attack

Consider: according to the report itself, Robert Mueller formally asked William Webster to conduct this inquiry on December 17, 2009 (though Webster’s appointment was reported over a week before then). Just 8 days later, another terrorist who had been in contact with Awlaki struck the US. Just 5 days after that, sources started leaking details of NSA intercepts from 4 months earlier (so around August) that might have warned about the attack.

Intelligence intercepts from Yemen beginning in early August, when Abdulmutallab arrived in that country, contained “bits and pieces about where he was, what his plans were, what he was telling people his plans were,” as well as information about planning by the al-Qaeda branch in Yemen, a senior administration official said. “At first blush, not all these things appear to be related” to the 23-year-old Nigerian and the bombing attempt, he said, “but we believe they were.”

It’s unclear how many of these intercepts were directly between Abdulmutallab and Awlaki, and therefore presumably reviewed by the FBI team in San Diego. But at least according to the sentencing materials submitted in the Abdulmutallab case (there are reasons to treat this with a bit of skepticism), there were substantive communications between Awlaki and Abdulmutallab.

Defendant provided this individual [who offered to connect him with Awlaki] with the number for his Yemeni cellular telephone. Thereafter, defendant received a text message from Awlaki telling defendant to call him, which defendant did. Read more →

Jailed Journalist More Credible than FBI Interview

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There are two paragraphs of the William Webster report on Nidal Hasan’s contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki I find particularly interesting. [This appears on page 62; remember that Webster uses both redactions and substitutions–I’ve used different brackets to distinguish the two]

<Redacted> [In mid]-2011, an FBI <redacted> report documented an interview with an FBI subject <redacted> in which <redacted> [the subject] claimed to have met Aulaqi after the Fort Hood shootings. According to <redacted> [the subject], Aulaqi told him that Hasan “had contacted him via the Internet and had asked what he could do to help Muslims” and that Aulaqi had “advised Hasan that since he was an American soldier, he should kill other American soldiers.” According to <redacted> [the subject], Aulaqi said he had given Hasan “permission to carry out his attacks on Fort Hood.”

Although Hasan did contact Aulaqi via the Internet, we found no evidence, direct or indirect, that Aulaqi made these purported statements to Hasan (see Chapter 7). The evidence shows instead that Aulaqi did not even respond to Hasan’s first message and its question about whether the acts of Muslim soldiers who had killed other soldiers could be reconciled with the Quran. The Washington Post reported on November 16, 2009, that in an interview with a Yemeni journalist, Aulaqi “said that he neither ordered nor pressured Maj. Nidal M. Hasan to harm Americans….”

In effect, the conclusion of the Webster report is that this claim from an FBI interview proved to be uncorroborated by the known evidence. The suggestion is it may be a false claim–perhaps made by someone overselling his knowledge, perhaps to negotiate an informant deal or distract the FBI.

But in the following paragraph, as if to corroborate what the data say–which is that no such communication happened–Webster treats the claims Awlaki made to a journalist in a November 2009 interview as credible.

While Webster doesn’t say it, the journalist in question is Abdulelah Haider Shaye, the Yemeni journalist who remains in jail based in part on Obama’s direct request to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

In his first interview with a journalist since the Fort Hood rampage, Yemeni American cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi said that he neither ordered nor pressured Maj. Nidal M. Hasan to harm Americans, but that he considered himself a confidant of the Army psychiatrist who was given a glimpse via e-mail into Hasan’s growing discomfort with the U.S. military.

[snip]

Aulaqi declined to be interviewed by an American journalist with The Washington Post. But he provided an account of his relationship with Hasan — which consisted of a correspondence of a dozen or so e-mails — to Abdulelah Hider Shaea, a Yemeni journalist and terrorism expert with close ties to Aulaqi whom The Post contacted to conduct the interview. The Post reimbursed Shaea’s travel expenses but did not pay him.

On Sunday, Shaea offered details of his interview with Aulaqi, an influential preacher whose sermons and writings supporting jihad have attracted a wide following among radical Islamists. Shaea allowed a Post reporter to view a video recording of a man who closely resembles pictures of Aulaqi sitting in front of his laptop computer reading the e-mails, and to hear an audiotape in which a man, who like Aulaqi speaks English with an American accent, discusses his e-mail correspondence with Hasan.

Now, as I’ll post later, it looks like the representations of the emails that both Shaye and government sources provided underplayed the degree to which Awlaki comes off as a disinterested egotist rather than terror inspiration (though both seem to be a response to the way Pete Hoekstra framed the emails; notably, Crazy Pete has, AFAIK, remained utterly silent about the Webster report which shows his demagoguery to be overblown).

But I find it notable that the Webster report treats Awlaki’s comments–as mediated by Shaye and the WaPo–to be more credible than the FBI interview.