Taliban Cells and Cables

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I’m not really sure if these dots connect at all, but let me point them out and have the tech wizards rip me to shreds.

On January 31, two telecom cables lines to Egypt went out. The countries that were most affected, by far, by the cuts were Egypt and Pakistan–with Pakistan losing over 70% of its connectivity. Cables continued to go down around the Middle East; eventually, a UN official conceded the outages may have been intentional.

Today, Noah Shachtman reports that the Taliban in Afghanistan are threatening to take out cell phone towers if the providers don’t turn them off for ten hours every night.

Taliban militants threatened Monday to blow up telecom towers across Afghanistan if mobile phone companies do not switch off their signals for 10 hours starting at dusk.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujaheed said the U.S. and other foreign troops in the country are using mobile phone signals to track down the insurgents and launch attacks against them.

The AP notes that Afghanistan’s cell network went in since our 2001 invasion, so presumably the connectivity to the country, like that in Iraq, is largely under US control. That is, as insurgents in Iraq are doing, you’d have to blow the towers to cut their connectivity.

Shachtman goes on to note that the Taliban have a point.

Without getting into specifics, let me say that Mujaheed’s concern is eminently reasonable. Former Royal Navy sailor Lew Page notes:

The mobile companies have long been thought by the Taliban to be colluding with NATO and Coalition forces operating in Afghanistan, and in fact it would be surprising if they weren’t. The Afghan government is heavily dependent on the international troops. Use of the mobile networks for intelligence is an obvious step which is well-nigh certain to have been taken, just as governments have done in every country. And it’s well known that masts can be used to locate a phone which is powered up.

What’s less clear is why the Taliban have chosen to demand a shutdown of mast signals at night. Even the most paranoid phone-security advisers would normally suggest taking the battery out of one’s phone, rather than menacing local cell operators unless they went off the air. (The idea of removing the battery is to guard against someone having modified the phone to switch itself on without the owner’s knowledge.)

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The OTHER Sources for the Hatfill Stories

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Over a month ago, I noted an LAT article naming three of the sources for the reporting that Steven Hatfill was a "person of interest" in the anthrax investigation. But it appears that Hatfill didn’t learn all of the sources–Judge Walton is preparing to hold at least one reporter in contempt for not revealing the sources for her Hatfill reporting.

A federal judge said Tuesday he will hold a former USA Today reporter in contempt if she continues refusing to identify sources for stories about a former Army scientist under scrutiny in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton said reporter Toni Locy defied his order last August that she cooperate with Steven J. Hatfill in his lawsuit against the government. Walton indicated he would impose a fine until she divulged her sources, but that he would take a few more days to decide whether to postpone the penalty as she pursues an appeal.

The judge is also considering whether to find former CBS reporter James Stewart in contempt.

[snip]

Walton previously ordered five journalists to reveal all of their sources. Stewart and Locy refused, saying Hatfill was partly to blame for news stories identifying him as a suspect after his attorney provided details about the investigation.

The story if interesting for two reasons. First, it seems to pinpoint who shared their sources (after reportedly being released to do so) and who didn’t. Judge Walton compelled testimony from five journalists–Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman, Allan Lengel, Toni Locy, and James Stewart–and Locy and Stewart are the only two for whom he is considering contempt.

Also, as I pointed out last month, Hatfill now appears to have the sources for leaks that actually weren’t that damaging–stories that made it clear that Hatfill was just one of a number of people under suspicion for the attack.

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Journalists Name Former DC USA as Hatfill Leaker

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Apparently, at least some of the journalists who reported that Steven Hatfill was a "person of interest" in the anthrax investigation have revealed their sources (after being released by those sources).

Attorneys for the former Army physician who was branded a "person of interest" in the deadly 2001 anthrax mailings named three federal officials Friday who they said leaked investigative details that harmed their client.

The physician, Steven J. Hatfill, has not been charged with a crime and maintains his innocence. Hatfill is suing the FBI, the Justice Department and a handful of present and former law enforcement officials. He alleges that the leaks were illegal, damaged his reputation and violated his right to privacy.

"We have identified three of the leakers who were previously anonymous," one of Hatfill’s attorneys, Mark A. Grannis, said near the outset of a sparsely attended hearing in federal court. "Some of the most damaging information leaked in this case [came] straight out of the U.S. attorney’s office."

The anthrax mailings killed five people and sickened about 20 others from Florida to Connecticut. Coming on the heels of the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and on the Pentagon, the mailings led to the shutdown of a Senate office building and heightened the nation’s fear of prolonged terrorism.

Hatfill’s attorneys alleged that the three officials who leaked investigative details to the media were: Roscoe C. Howard Jr., who from 2001 to 2004 served as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia; Daniel S. Seikaly, who served as Howard’s criminal division chief; and Edwin Cogswell, who formerly served as a spokesman for the FBI.

This is where this suit will get interesting. Many of the stories that Hatfill named in his suit complained about the revelation of facts pertaining to ongoing FBI searches: news that dogs searching for anthrax had responded to locations on Hatfill’s property.

The agents quietly brought the dogs to various locations frequented by a dozen people they considered possible suspects — hoping the hounds would match the scent on the letters. In place after place, the dogs had no reaction. But when the handlers approached the Frederick, Md., apartment building of Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, an eccentric 48-year-old scientist who had worked in one of the Army’s top bioweapons-research laboratories, the dogs immediately became agitated, NEWSWEEK has learned. "They went crazy," says one law-enforcement source. The agents also brought the bloodhounds to the Washington, D.C., apartment of Hatfill’s girlfriend and to a Denny’s restaurant in Louisiana, where Hatfill had eaten the day before. In both places, the dogs jumped and barked, indicating they’d picked up the scent. (Bloodhounds are the only dogs whose powers of smell are admissible in court.) Read more →

FBI Tells Librarians: “Sssshhhhh!”

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Remember when librarians used to be caricatured as stern matrons telling us all to shush up while we were at the library? That is, until they took on a front-line fight defending the civil liberties of Americans who just want to read books (or use computers). We all owe a debt to those librarians fighting against PATRIOT Act restrictions on free speech.

Which is why I’m not so sure it’s a good idea for the FBI to make such a clumsy stand against free speech at the librarians’ Midwinter Meeting tomorrow (h/t Momsrighthand) [note, the ALA article has been updated, but I’ll keep the original]:

The attorney who represents FBI Supervisory Special Agent Bassem Youssef, chief of the Counterterrorism Division’s Communications Analysis Unit, advised the American Library Association’s Washington Office two days before the agent’s scheduled January 12 speech at ALA’s Midwinter Meeting at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia that the FBI had warned him against delivering the speech. Instead, Youssef would appear to answer “acceptable questions presented by members of the audience,”

The FBI has already gotten in trouble for trying to silence Special Agent Youssef. But apparently, they still don’t want him to talk about problems with the FBI’s counter-terrorism effort.

[F]ollowing a December 20 ALA press release that detailed the program, the FBI e-mailed Youssef January 3 and “expressed its displeasure at the proposed content of his presentation, and the viewpoints for which he would raise at the conference.” Kohn added that the Bureau “explicitly took exception” to the idea that Youssef “is expected to discuss a number of critical failures within the FBI’s Counterterrorism program, which undermine basic constitutional rights of American citizens and threaten the effectiveness of America’s counterterrorism efforts.”

The FBI e-mail then issued a clear warning to Youssef against making such a presentation, noted Kohn, who explained that the agency also forwarded to Youssef a multi-page document setting forth various rules concerning pre-publication clearance of any potential speech and forbidding him to show the rules to anyone outside the agency. “The FBI does not want the general public to know the contents of the censorship provisions it unconstitutionally demands that its agents follow,” Kohn wrote, advising that Youssef would not be able to make the planned presentation.

Call me crazy, but this is just clumsy. I mean, I can see censoring someone giving a talk to DFH bloggers. But librarians? C’mon. They’re Read more →

Is Dick Finally Going to Go After OBL?

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The NYT has a disturbing story this morning, explaining that, with the US policy in tatters after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, they’re considering ratcheting up the pressure by allowing the CIA to partner with the Special Forces on operations in Pakistan.

President Bush’s senior national security advisers are debating whether to expand the authority of the Central Intelligence Agency and the military to conduct far more aggressive covert operations in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

The debate is a response to intelligence reports that Al Qaeda and the Taliban are intensifying efforts there to destabilize the Pakistani government, several senior administration officials said.

[snip]

Several of the participants in the meeting argued that the threat to the government of President Pervez Musharraf was now so grave that both Mr. Musharraf and Pakistan’s new military leadership were likely to give the United States more latitude, officials said. But no decisions were made, said the officials, who declined to speak for attribution because of the highly delicate nature of the discussions.

Many of the specific options under discussion are unclear and highly classified. Officials said that the options would probably involve the C.I.A. working with the military’s Special Operations forces.

Two pseudonymous counter-insurgency analysts cross-posting at Danger Zone have a good response to this: Read more →

John Yoo complains, “I am trapped on a plane in all of this bad weather”

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Poor John Yoo. Apparently now he’s trapped. Or, as his lawyer said, faced with "nothing more than a political rant disguised as a lawsuit." I know you’re all crying for him.

I’m a little bit late to posting about the law suit, on the behalf of Jose Padilla and his mother, against the guy who rationalized his torture, John Yoo. But that makes my punditry job easier–I can just borrow liberally from all the smart lawyers who have been debating the suit in this thread.

Though I’m not a lawyer, I agree with bmaz’s take that the suit is fairly weak.

First off, as despicable as Yoo is, I am not sure he is a proper party defendant here. Secondly, I think his actions are probably entitled to qualified immunity. Third, I see a real problem establishing direct causation for Padilla’s damage elements. Fourth, despite the allegations in the complaint, I am not sure that NDCA is the proper venue. fifth, it is just not particularly artfully plead. Read more →

Get Caught in a Sting, Get Thrown Out of the USA, Get Gagged about It

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I suggested last month that the Liberty City Seven indictment looks more and more like a made for TV event, particularly after a mistrial was declared and one of the Seven, Lyglenson Lemorin, was acquitted of all charges. Well, now Lemorin is undergoing his own little Orwellian hell.

On the day of his acquittal, the judge in the case issued an oral gag order pertaining to the upcoming retrial of the remaining six defendants.

A federal judge on Friday aired serious concerns about the possibility of jury tampering in the upcoming retrial of an alleged homegrown terrorism group and ordered that Miami-Dade jurors be selected anonymously for the high-profile case.

[snip]

Her order — an edict normally seen in organized crime or major drug cases — means that potentially hundreds of Miami-Dade voters who receive jury summonses for the retrial in January will be referred to by number, not by name. Jurors’ names were known to both sides in the first trial.

The judge also ordered U.S. marshals to provide criminal background checks on all prospective jurors for both sides, and to escort those chosen for the 12-member panel to and from the courthouse in downtown Miami.

”I do find there is a strong reason to believe the jury needs protection,” Lenard said. “Here we have defendants accused of being members of a terrorist cell.”

No such precautions were taken during the first trial, which ended Dec. 13 in a mistrial for six defendants of the so-called Liberty City 7.

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Bhutto

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Given my well-known complaint with those who have long underplayed the importance of Pakistan in our foreign policy debates, I feel like I have to say something about Bhutto’s assassination. But so far, the most intelligent thing I’ve seen written on Pakistan comes from AmericaBlog’s AJ:

The first thing to say about Bhutto’s assassination is that any kind of rush to judgment, especially along the lines of impending doom, is probably imprudent.

Unless Musharraf planned this assassination as part of a larger campaign to reimpose his power, I would imagine things are–and will remain–in a state of flux for some time. If Musharraf didn’t plan it, only sort of allowed it to happen with inadequate security, and instead Islamic extremists pulled it off, then Musharraf himself may be subject to a lot more pressure from those extremists. But we don’t know–and I’m not convinced we’ll really know for sure for some time, if ever.

And while AJ warns against seeing this as a collapse into anarchy, it seems clear that Bhutto’s assassination devastates our Pakistan policy. Here’s AJ again:

In terms of policy implications, this is reflective of a massive US foreign policy blunder, in that the Bush administration, in a monumentally stupid move, shoved Bhutto down the throat of Musharraf (and the rest of Pakistan) as a savior, despite her lack of broad popular support and general reputation as corrupt. In making someone who didn’t necessarily have the ability to deliver the savior for democracy in Pakistan, we simultaneously set up our own policy to fail and offered Musharraf a return to (or continued) total power in the event that our little power-sharing arrangement didn’t work. We also — though not only us — painted a big fat target on her back. Really a debacle all the way around.

And here’s Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler in the WaPo: Read more →

The Terror–Or Maybe Something Else–Presidency

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I just finished Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency. As I’ve been reading, I’ve been focusing primarily on the insight it might offer onto the Terror Tape Destruction. I’ll come back to this, but the short version is that, from June 2004 to December 2004, the CIA had no legal cover for the water-boarding they had already done, which explains why they’d want to destroy the evidence they had been doing it; but that still doesn’t explain why they’d wait until November 2005 to destroy the tapes, which seems to be the really pressing question right now.

But I appreciated Goldsmith’s book, too, for the way that reading an intelligent and sincere conservative helps me to see my disagreements with conservatives more clearly.

While I was reading the book, I found myself repeatedly bugged by several of Goldsmith’s blind spots, not least for his explanation that the excesses of the Administration are attributable to the accountability a President has and the fear everyone had of another terrorist attack.

The main explanation is fear. When the original opinion [on torture] was written in the weeks before the first anniversary of 9/11, threat reports were pulsing as they hadn’t since 9/11. … "We were sure there would be bodies in the streets" on September 11, 2002, a high-level Justice Department official later told me. Counterterrorism officials were terrified by a possible follow-up attack on the 9/11 anniversary, and desperate to stop it.

[snip]

I have been critical of my predecessors’ actions in writing the interrogation opinions. But I was not there when they made the hard calls during the frightening summer of 2002. Instead, I surveyed the scene from the politically changed and always-more-lucid after-the-fact perspective. When I made tough calls in crisis situations under pressure and uncertainty, I realized that my decisions too would not be judged from the perspective of threat and danger in which they were taken. … Recognizing this, I often found myself praying that I would predict the future correctly.

Now, much as I respect Goldsmith’s intelligence, I’m convinced he conjures this explanation as a way to understand how someone like David Addington could be shredding the Constitution, but be doing it in good faith. It’s all understandable and desirable, Goldsmith seems to be saying, in that it will keep us safe in the long run. And David Addington means well, really he does. Read more →

The “Other” Provision Of The Records Act

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It appears the fluid and constantly evolving rationalization of the Bush Administration for their destruction of the torture tapes may be starting to congeal in an operative theory relying, at least in significant part, on a provision of the Federal Records Act allowing destruction of certain records located outside of the United States during wartime. As EW pointed out in the last post, this defense was revealed in Isikoff’s December 21, 2007 Newsweek article:

But agency officials could be relying on another provision of the records law that permits an agency, during wartime, to destroy records outside the continental United States that are judged to be "prejudicial to the interests of the United States." The CIA has argued that one reason for destroying the tapes was that agency officials feared that if the videotapes were leaked they might compromise the identity of the CIA interrogators.

It is certainly a relief that we don’t have some sort of rogue Administration running around destroying evidence material to a whole plethora of cases and forums, and that their decision was fully in compliance with United States law. That law would be the Federal Records Act, and the pertinent provision, as codified in 36 CFR Part 1228, reads:

a) Destruction of records outside the territorial limits of the continental United States is authorized whenever, during a state of war between the United States and any other nation or when hostile action by a foreign power appears imminent, the head of the agency that has custody of the records determines that their retention would be prejudicial to the interest of the United States, or that they occupy space urgently needed for military purposes and are without sufficient administrative, legal, research, or other value to warrant their continued preservation (44 U.S.C. 3311).

(b) Within 6 months after the destruction of any records under this authorization, a written statement describing the character of the records and showing when and where the disposal was accomplished shall be submitted to NARA (NWML) by the agency official who directed the disposal. (ed. note: see also 44 U.S.C. 3311).

Well, hold on a minute here. Is that their final answer? Of course it’s not their final answer; there is never a final answer, on anything, with the Bush Administration; just a continuing series of intentionally disingenuous obfuscations. It takes no more than a cursory inspection of the foreign war records exception to expect Read more →