Category Archives: Wars of the Middle East

War Movies 8: “American Sniper.”

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Chris Kyle (1974-2013) had a rare talent at shooting, joined the Navy SEALS at the beginning of global terror’s war on us, did four tours in Iraq as a sniper, wrote a book about his experiences, and was killed by a disturbed military veteran he was trying to help.

Warner Brothers bought the movie rights to the book and signed Bradley Cooper to star. First, David Russell (“The Fighter” (2010), “Silver Linings Playbook” (2012), “American Hustle” (2013),) was going to direct; then Stephen Spielberg; and finally Clint Eastwood.[1]

Kyle’s father instructs his son on shooting and in manly conduct: “there are three kinds of people: sheep, wolves, and sheep dogs.” Chris Kyle (played by Bradley Cooper) takes the message to heart. He is determined to use his skill to save the lives of endangered American troops in Iraq. A chance encounter with his younger brother, who had enlisted after 9/11, drives home the importance of this mission. The younger man is skittish and eager to be gone from Iraq. This sense of duty leads him to serve four tours in Iraq. He becomes a legend among the common soldiers and Marines. A dead insurgent plunges off a rooftop into the midst of an American patrol. An officer casually remarks “that’s the over-watch; you can thank him later.” Increasingly, Kyle becomes obsessed with an insurgent master sniper called “Mustafa.”[2] He returns for his final tour in hopes of killing Mustafa. He succeeds and comes home.

The price is very high: Cooper plays Kyle as “calm and confident,” so he doesn’t emote much about stress. He’s just increasingly distant, uncomfortable with the emotions of other people (both his wife’s and those of grateful veterans), with flashes of rage. Eventually, this self-contained man makes his way home by finding a new means to “save” fellow soldiers.

The movie has been criticized from the Left for de-contextualizing Kyle’s story. Eastwood portrays Kyle as motivated by the Al Qaeda attacks on the American embassies in East Africa and by 9/11; then the events in Iraq focus on the effort to kill Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. How the United States came to invade Iraq is scrupulously left out. The critics are mad that this wasn’t about the lies that led us to war. That would be a different movie. Indeed, it has been. Several times. All of which were flops. “Rendition” (2007, dir. Gavin Hood); “Lions for Lambs” (2007, dir. Robert Redford); “Redacted” (2007, dir. Brian de Palma); and “Green Zone” (2010, dir. Paul Greengrass) all lost money or fell short of earning expectations. That says something about audiences and what they’re willing to acknowledge. . In contrast, “American Sniper” is well over $200m in the black.

“American Sniper” falls into a different category of war movie from the ones that haven’t succeeded with American audiences. “The Hurt Locker” (2008, dir. Kathryn Bigelow) and “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012, dir. Kathryn Bigelow) became huge hits by focusing on driven individuals, the personal price they pay, and on the shameful American indifference to the human costs of wars waged by their country.   However, “American Sniper” ends on a different note than do Bigelow’s two movies. In her work, the protagonists (played by Jeremy Renner and Jessica Chastain) are lonely souls, estranged from their less-driven colleagues, cut off from home, and unknown to their fellow Americans. “American Sniper” ends with Kyle’s funeral procession across Texas. On a rainy day masses of people line the highway and the overpasses, fire-engine ladder trucks hoist huge American flags, Stetsons and baseball caps come off as the cortege passes. Eastwood is in his eighties. This may be his last movie. Hell of a way to go out.

[1] “American Sniper” (2014, dir. Clint Eastwood).

[2] It’s worth noting that the film portrays Mustafa (played by Sammy Sheikh—who has portraying evil Muslims down to a fine art) as an insurgent version of Kyle: skilled, committed, and with a family that is shut out of his work.

Bozo Haram.

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Religion can have internal (esoteric) and external (exoteric) components. The esoteric approach is essentially mystical. The exoteric is essentially about adherence to the law. As institutions, churches are usually satisfied with the exoteric. Sometimes true believers want the esoteric in order to achieve union with God. In Islam, those who pursue the esoteric are often called “sufi.”

Nigeria gained its independence from Britain in 1956. The new nation divided between a Christian South, with access to rich oil resources, and a Muslim North, which suffered from poverty. Bitterness arose in the North, where people complained of both the evils of the Christian government and the failings of their own clergy and traditional leaders to obtain justice. A religious protest movement arose around Mohammed Marwa (c. 1920-1980, knick-named “Maitatsine”) that led to violence and deaths. The government never entirely managed to suppress support for it. Then, during the 1960s and 1970s, Sufism began to make in-roads among Muslims in northern Nigeria. Inspired by the Saudi Arabian Wahhabist-funded World Muslim League, Sheikh Ismaila Idris (1937-2000) began to push back. In 1978 he founded the Izala Society to advocate a traditional form of Islam. One of the bright lights of this movement was Ja’afar Mahmud Adam (1960-2007). He was trained as a teacher in Nigeria, then studied at the Islamic University in Saudi Arabia. From 1993 to 2007 he preached in a mosque in Kano, Nigeria. One of his followers was Mohammed Yusuf (1970–2009). About 2002, Adam and Yusuf fell out.[1]

Yusuf went his own way to found Boko Haram. He seems to have recruited many of the same sorts of people with the same sorts of grievances who had followed Marwa twenty years before. Yusuf concentrated his mission on building support in the far northeast of Nigeria, near the borders with Chad and Niger. Yusuf may have aimed at the creation of an Islamist state. Certainly, he gathered arms and young men with nothing to lose. One of these was Abubakar Shekau.[2] Shekau became Yusuf’s second-in-command.

In July 2009 Boko Haram clashed with Nigerian security forces and Yusuf was killed “while trying to escape.” Shekau took command of Boko Haram. In September 2010 he opened war against the government with a prison break that freed over a hundred members of the group. Beginning in 2011 Boko Haram has used bombings (suicide and IED) and shootings to drive the police off the street and then out of towns. As a result, general lawlessness spread throughout the north. The Army and police reacted violently, but usually against civilian target that came to hand rather than against the Boko Haram militants. Reports of massacres, rapes, and pillaging carried out by the “forces of order” became common. During 2013 the conflict spilled over into Chad, Niger, and Cameroon. In 2014, Boko Haram transiently caught the attention of the world when it kidnapped several hundred girls from a school at Chibok.[3] The gory fight goes on.

As is the case in Syria and Iraq, the Islamists are up against corrupt or incompetent or non-existent governments. They aren’t fighting real soldiers: they’re fighting men with guns hired to prop up the government. They’re “filled with a terrible certainty,” while their opponents “lack all conviction.” Probably because the courts are rigged.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boko_Haram for a more detailed account.

[1] In 2007 someone shot Adam to death in his mosque. The whole area was too violent to pin the blame on Yusuf.

[2] He may be anywhere from his mid-30s to his mid-40s.

[3] I haven’t seen a lot of “Bring back our girls” posts of late on my FB feed. First there was the “ice bucket challenge,” then all the memes sent out by groups like AddictingInfo to denounce the enormities of the Republicans.

The other land of liberty and opportunity.

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The terrible events in Paris in early January 2015 have inspired all sorts of questions. What are the limits of “free speech”? Why did the security services fail to discern the threat? Perhaps most importantly, why do some French Muslims become radicalized?

During the 19th Century French population grew at a pace (40 percent) much below that of the rest of Europe (100+ percent). This population gap began to have an effect on the supply of workers. In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries the French began to make up the difference by encouraging immigration from countries like Italy, Poland, and Spain. By the eve of the Great Depression, immigrants had increased from 1 percent of the population to 3 percent. The Depression caused the French to seek to reduce the number of immigrants in the country. In the aftermath of the Second World War, however, France turned to encouraging the immigration of guest workers from its colonial empire as a national policy. The collapse of the French position in Algeria in the early Sixties then brought a flood of refugees (both Algerians of European descent and Algerian Muslims who had been loyal to France in the Algerian war). This population movement totaled well over a million people in the space of a few years.

From this point onward the question of immigration became politicized and tense. For one thing, there the “pied noir” immigrants from Algeria and the “harkis” competed for the same jobs at the bottom of the French economy, spawning a bitter hostility. For another thing, the great economic slump of the Seventies intensified the competition for jobs. France put a stop to immigration in 1974, but the immigrants in the country put down roots rather than going “home.” They sent for their families before French laws could prohibit this. Consequently, the immigrant population actually increased in size at a time when France sought to limit it. For a third thing, the French accepted the sociological theory of a “threshold of tolerance,” beyond which the number of unassimilated immigrants worked to disintegrate society. This latter theory had a particular resonance because of the “French social model.”

That model holds that there is a single French national culture and everyone has to assimilate to it to be French. Anyone who is not French is “foreign” (etranger). Formally, “etranger” refers to anyone without French citizenship, but informally it includes anyone who refused to become “French.” The French reject the Anglo-American model of multi-culturalism. The French carry this to the point of refusing to gather statistical data on the ethnic or national origins of French citizens. Rough estimates, done on the basis of the number of “etrangers” and their descendants living in France, put the number of non-French within the hexagon at 14 million or 25 percent of the population. Of these, it has been estimated that 5-6 million are Muslims.

It is open to question whether the Muslim immigrants have assimilated to French culture. On the one hand, they undoubtedly have: they eat pork, smoke, drink, and have premarital sex, just like ordinary “French” people of their generation. On the other hand, they are walled off in ethnic ghettoes on the outskirts of the major cities (especially Paris). These areas are marked by very high unemployment (40-50 percent), crime, and drug-use. At the same time, one can wonder whether the French have made much of an effort to assimilate the immigrants. The inhabitants of these ghettoes are often third generation residents of France with little knowledge of or interest in their “homelands,” there is a good deal of evidence that French employers prefer to hire people with lighter skins and French-sounding names, and former President Nicholas Sarkozy may have been expressing a common sentiment when he referred to the rioters at the end of 2005 as “racaille” (scum).   See: The Week, 2 December 2005, p. 15.

Euro Muslims.

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Ten years ago, almost to the day, Ross Douthat made the following observations.[1] Then, about 4 percent of the population of Europe was Muslim.[2] This seemed likely to change. Demographers projected that the low and falling birthrate among Christian Europeans would reduce the European population from 728 million people to about 630 million by 2050. Moreover, it will be an aged population dependent upon young workers from somewhere else to finance their pensions and medical care. Already about 900,000 immigrants entered Europe each year. This was about enough to off-set native European population decline and to keep the population at about the 1995 level. However, in 2000 a UN study projected that the countries of the European Union will require over 13 million immigrant workers EACH YEAR to preserve the 1995 ratio of workers to retirees. Thus Europeans may be compelled to organize a huge increase in immigration over the coming decades. Much of this population growth will come from nearby Muslim countries.   In addition, Muslims in Europe have a younger demographic profile and a birth rate triple that of non-Muslims. As a result of these trends alone, and disregarding immigration, demographers anticipated that the Muslim share of European population would reach eight percent by 2015. Moreover, many Europeans are not so much Christian as non-Muslim. If we suppose that a future renewal of European religious enthusiasm is possible, why would Christianity benefit? Might not wide conversions to Islam take place?

Already in 2005 Europeans were being forced to consider the possibility that Muslims within Europe uphold values that are hard to reconcile with currently prevailing norms: the French expelled an imam who insisted that the Koran authorized wife-beating (and what if the imam is correct?); in 2002 and 2004 Muslim militants assassinated two Dutch politicians who warned against the danger posed by Muslim immigration; and the Madrid (2004) and London (2005) train bombings reminded Europeans of the dangers of Islamic radicalism.

Ten years on, Reuel Marc Gerecht makes a number of important points.[3] First, jihad has become charismatic for some EuroMuslims. ISIS is conquering territory, not just blowing up things. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young men have gone to fight under the black banners. They come from Europe as well as the Arab countries. To my mind, it is their Spanish Civil War.

Second, European Community states are not likely to sit still for selective targeting of their Muslim citizens by American immigration officers. Hence, American security against European radical Islamists depends on the French and British domestic security services. Both governments have robust security services, while the Americans have little human intelligence from among European Muslims. If the British MI-5 and the French DCRI fail in their efforts to track Euro jihadis and thwart their plots, then the United States is in for a bad time.

EuroIslam may succeed where EuroDisney failed. After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 the Hagia Sophia cathedral became a mosque. Will we live to see the day when American tourists line up to enter the great mosque on the isle de la Cite, and when the nearby statue of Charlemagne, the grandson of Charles Martel who defeated an Arab army at Tours, seems like a monument to Muslim persistence?[4]

[1] Ross Douthat, “The World in Numbers: A Muslim Europe?” Atlantic Monthly, January-February 2005, pp. 58-59.

[2] The admission of Turkey to the European Union would raise the share of Muslims in the population to 15 percent. There is no way that will happen now, given the Islamist tilt of the current Turkish government.

[3] Reuel Marc Gerecht, “France and the New Charismatic Jihad,” WSJ, 8 January 2015, A11.

[4] OK, that’s alarmist. My imagination got the better of me.

What We Learned from the Report of the 911 Commission XXIX.

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The tricky issue of Personality and Culture.

The foreign intelligence community did a pretty good job of centralizing information and analysis on threats to American interests abroad and of coordinating a response. However, there was no centralization of information and analysis on domestic threats, no co-ordination of response, and no adequate communication between foreign and domestic intelligence. No one seems to have realized that the domestic agencies had no formal plans or procedures for how to respond to terrorism; no one told the agencies to develop such plans and procedures. (pp. 378-379.) There was no central co-ordination of intelligence analysis or threat assessment. “The mosaic of threat intelligence came from the [CIA’s] Counterterrorist Center, which collected only abroad. Its reports were not supplemented by reports from the FBI.” (p. 294.)

“Beneath the acknowledgement that Bin Laden and al Qaeda presented serious dangers, there was uncertainty among senior officials about whether this was just a new and especially venomous version of the ordinary terrorist threat America had lived with for decades, or was radically new, posing a threat beyond any yet experienced.” (p. 491.) Richard Clarke failed in repeated efforts to get the Clinton administration to recognize al Qaeda as a first order threat, and he was still trying to get a decision on this from the new Bush administration in early September 2001. However, no one—even Richard Clarke—ever forced an open debate on the issue. (p. 491.)

NB: A point worth considering. The above analyses fairly frequently point out the deficiencies of the FBI, the CIA, and the State Department because all three of them privilege the local commanders (so to speak) over central authority. Local offices tend to have autonomy about what they do and how they do it within the broad outlines of general policy defined from the center. However, at the start of Chapter Five, “Al Qaeda Aims at the American Homeland,” there appears the following remark. “Bin Laden and his chief of operations,…, occupied undisputed leadership positions atop al Qaeda’s organizational structure. Within this structure, al Qaeda’s worldwide terrorist operations relied heavily upon the ideas and work of enterprising and strong-willed field commanders who enjoyed considerable autonomy.” (p. 210.) How could the same system work FOR al Qaeda and AGAINST the United States?

President Clinton apparently grew impatient with the inability of the United States government to make Bin Laden just go away. President Clinton once remarked to JCS Chairman (and Green Beret and former commander of all Special Forces) Hugh Shelton that “You know, it would scare the shit out of al-Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp.” Shelton subsequently declared that he didn’t remember Clinton making the statement and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen said that he thought the President might have been making a hypothetical statement, however Clinton has repeatedly stated that he said this. (p. 272.) NB: It’s like listening to my 13 year-old—when he was younger.

“According to Clarke, [National Security Adviser Sandy] Berger upbraided DCI [George] Tenet so sharply after the Cole attack—repeatedly demanding to know why the United States had to put up with such attacks—that Tenet walked out of a meeting of the principals.” (p. 278.) In Summer 2001 Tenet engaged in a lot of hand wringing about ordering a lethal attack on Bin Laden. “Are America’s leaders comfortable with the CIA doing this, going outside of normal military command and control? Charlie Allen told us that when these questions were discussed at the CIA, he and the Agency’s executive director, A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, had said that either one of them would be happy to pull the trigger, but Tenet was appalled, telling them that they had no authority to do it, nor did he.” (reported, p. 305.) NB: What would Dulles, or Helms, or Colby have said?

What We Learned from the Report of the 911 Commission XXVIII.

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So, there were flaws in how the government professionals responded to the danger posed by al Qaeda. How did elected officials do?

 

The Carter administration began the practice of having counter-terrorism co-ordinated by an NSC staff member in the White House. A civil servant, Richard Clarke, took over the function of co-ordinating policies on trans-national crime, narcotics, and terrorism (“drugs and thugs”) in the Reagan administration after Olly North’s “arms for hostages enterprise ran aground. The Clinton administration kept Clarke on. Beginning in 1995 the Clinton administration took a considerable interest in resisting terrorism: the anti-terrorism budget of the FBI was substantially increased and the budgets of the CIA ceased to decline; the US leaned on foreign countries to stop providing shelter to terrorists; and Richard Clarke was promoted to be “national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection, and counterterrorism.” (pp. 144-150.) In theory, Clarke was supposed to report through the Deputies Committee; in practice Clarke reported directly to a restricted sub-group of the Principals. (p. 288.)

However, Osama Bin Laden declared war on the United States in February 1998, but neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush went to Congress for a corresponding declaration of war against Osama Bin Laden. This limited the possibilities for action against Bin Laden. (NB: On the other hand, how do you declare war against one guy living in a cave in the most backward place on earth?)

 

In the wake of the Watergate scandals, Congress created House and Senate select committees to over-see the work of the intelligence agencies (and to keep them from making a mess on the carpet). However, the Armed Services committees have real authority over the intelligence agencies, so the intelligence budgets rise and fall with the over-all levels of defense spending.

The grab for a “peace dividend” in the 1990s by cutting defense budgets also drove down intelligence budgets; Congress wasn’t interested in terrorism as a problem; and Congress has become progressively less capable of exercising over-sight of the executive branch in recent decades. Instead of carefully reviewing the implementation of laws and programs, Congressional committees have shifted to “a focus on personal investigations, possible scandals, and issues designed to generate media attention.” (Quoted, p. 155.) They certainly did nothing to push the executive branch to reorganize itself to deal with the post-Cold War world. (pp. 150-157.) NB: The general coarsening of American public life showed up here as well.

 

What We Learned from the Report of the 911 Commission XXVII.

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The Federal Aviation Administration thought that security was not much of an issue and that a bombing was more likely than a hijacking, let alone a suicide-hijacking. Even so, FAA security was “seriously flawed prior to 9/11.” (p. 123.) Its intelligence assessment was focused overseas and in any event was ignored by the FAA leadership. No one in the other sections of the government (CIA, FBI, State Department) ever bothered to pass the multiple thousands of names on government terrorist “watch lists” to the FAA for inclusion on its passenger pre-screening lists. Many tests of passenger boarding security indicated that it could be easily breached, but no one ever took the matter seriously because effective measures would make air travel more cumbersome and even more of a pain in a neck that it was already. There were only 33 air marshals, and they guarded overseas flights.

Air carriers—or the security firms to which they contracted out the work—simply ignored requirements for continuous random searches of carry-on luggage. Previous experience with hijackings led to a common prescribed strategy of cooperation and conciliation. (pp. 121-126.)

The State Department had dominated the making and implementation of American foreign policy until the end of the Eisenhower administration in 1960; the Kennedy-Johnson administrations shifted leadership to the Defense Department, which took up the task with a will; the Nixon administration then concentrated leadership in the National Security advisor.   Budgets followed function, reducing the means the diplomats possessed to match their declining importance. (pp. 137-138.)

In the Sixties and Seventies terrorism wasn’t very important, so it was left to the State Department. Thereafter, terrorism policy became a tin can kicked from one place to another: in the Carter administration National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski seized control of the issue during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979-1981; in the Regan administration Secretary of State George Schultz adopted an aggressive stance on the matter in the Eighties, but found himself blocked by Caspar Weinberger’s resistance to military solutions; the Clinton State Department was largely indifferent to the issue relative to more pressing tasks. (pp. 138-140.)

Since the Eighties the military services have emphasized “jointness” (or you don’t get promoted). This has tended to homogenize the military advice provided to political leaders and it definitely shifted the balance of power within the services to favor the regional commands over the central authority of the Joint Chiefs. (pp. 140-141.) [NB: You will notice the parallel to the autonomy of CIA station chiefs and FBI SAICs.]

Once the Israelis whacked the Palestinian hijackers at Entebbe (1976) and the West Germans did the same at Mogadishu (1977), the Army created Delta Force. Delta Force suffered a humiliating catastrophe during the attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages (1980), then Hezbollah truck bombed the Marines in Beirut; then Army Special Forces suffered a perceived defeat in Mogadishu (1993). The American military took from these reverses a belief that special operations required “maximum preparation, overwhelming force, and a well-defined mission.” (p. 142.) Conversely, air strikes against Libya (1986) and against Iraq (1993) in response to acts of state-sponsored terrorism seemed to the American military to define an effective use of conventional military power against unconventional enemies. (pp. 143-144.)

Conversely, foreign terrorists may have taken the lesson that the Americans could be forced into retreat by relatively minor casualties suffered in spectacular acts of terrorism, and would respond to attack by blowing up a building, then going away. (pp. 143-144.)

Thoughts for the New Year.

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I don’t know anything. So, here are my thoughts on a couple of issues.

Climate change is a grave reality. However, I doubt that people can entirely hold back (let alone turn back) global warming. Carbon-burning is central to the industrialization of developing-economies. There aren’t a lot of cheap and ready-to-use alternatives. Instead, there is going to be a long period of adaptation to worsened conditions. It is going to make environmentalists, intellectuals, and other “progressive” people very angry that there will turn out to be market-driven profit opportunities when statist restrictions might have provided more desirable outcomes.

In terms of foreign policy, Vladimir Putin is considerably more of an adult than are American leaders. Balance-of-power politics and spheres of influence are realities in world politics. Power and influence are not the single and permanent prerogative of the United States. For one thing, Ukraine is to Russia as Mexico is to the United States. (“Pity poor Mexico. So far from God, so near the United States.”) For another thing, Putin has tried to help the US out of a couple of ditches into which American leaders have driven it. Syrian chemical weapons and a possible solution to the Iranian nuclear problem are the key examples. All the while he has been vilified because he isn’t a democrat at home and he’s resisting the onward march of Western power around the borders of Russia.

In the Middle East we are witnessing a re-writing the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Iraq is fragmenting into Shi’ite, Sunni, and Kurdish enclaves. This fragmentation is being papered-over during the current emergency. The Shi’ites will never be able to repair their behavior during the Maliki period. Syria is going to fragment into Alawite, Sunni, and Kurdish enclaves. A Kurdish state will emerge. This new country will have trouble with both Turkey and Iran. Will Jordan or Saudi Arabia absorb the unstable and impoverished new Sunni micro-state in western Iraq?

The “two-state solution” to the Israel-Palestine conflict isn’t. Israel cannot afford to have a Palestinian state created. That state would be implacably revanchist, regardless of whatever professions its spokesmen might make in order to obtain sovereignty. Over the centuries, many people have felt that the problems of the world could be resolved if only the Jews would die and stop bothering people. Well, the Israelis aren’t buying this line.

The United States gets much less from the US-Israel alliance than does Israel.

ISIS isn’t a serious problem. The enthusiasm for “jihad” among many Muslims is a serious problem. It is likely to be around for a long time. I’m not sure that it can be de-legitimized by Western propaganda. I’m not sure that playing military whack-a-mole with every new outbreak will solve the problem.

Much as I agree with the objectives being pursued by President Obama on some key issues, I don’t believe that he has the authority for some of his actions. The Supreme Court is likely to overturn the authority-grab carried out by the EPA. The immigration problem wasn’t/isn’t a crisis. It’s just a stick with which to beat the Republicans and an effort to keep Hispanic-American voters on the side of the Democrats. American liberals are going to rue the day that they celebrated his unilateral actions on coal-burning energy generation and immigration. One day, a Republican president will invoke the Obama example.

What we learned from the Report of the 911 Commission XXVI.

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Second, there were restrictions on the sharing of information.

The Watergate-era investigations of government abuses of power led to the adoption (1976, 1983) of highly-restrictive rules for domestic intelligence gathering.

In addition, in 1978 Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that controlled domestic intelligence gathering directed against a foreign power, usually by the FBI. The Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR) took charge of presenting applications for a FISA warrant to the FISA court. The Justice Department’s initial interpretation of the law limited co-operation between criminal prosecutors and the FBI agents gathering FISA information, but in 1994-1995 the Clinton Administration’s Justice Department (acting head of OIPR Richard Scruggs, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick) further tightened restrictions on contact between the FBI and prosecutors in national security cases. (p. 115.)

“These [1995] procedures were almost immediately misunderstood and misapplied.” (p. 115.) OIPR then bullied the FBI and Criminal Division prosecutors into compliance with this “misunderstanding” of what the procedures actually required. Reviews of these issues in 1999, 2000, and 2001 all concluded that the 1995 procedures were being misapplied to the detriment of national security, but no one did anything to correct the problem. (p. 116.) [NB: Neither Attorney General Janet Reno nor Gorelick tried to correct what the 9/11 Report later characterized as a “misunderstanding.”]

As a result, FBI agents working on intelligence matters communicated but little with both prosecutors and with FBI agents working on criminal matters, although they did pick up lots of useful information from their contacts with the NSA and the CIA. FBI counterintelligence became a sort of black hole in the Justice Department. (p. 116.)

Third, there was a sort of autism prevalent in the FBI. “The FBI simply did not produce the kind of intelligence reports that other agencies routinely wrote and disseminated. As law enforcement officers, Bureau agents tended to write up only witness interviews. Written cases analysis usually occurred only in memoranda to supervisors requesting authority to initiate or expand an investigation.” (p. 259.)

Fourth, Louis Freeh did not communicate with President Clinton. (p. 513.) [NB: I don’t know if this is a reflection of the on-going investigations of Clinton? Somebody needed to give up in the scandals for the good of the country.]

Other Law Enforcement Agencies. “Before 9/11, with the exception of one portion of the FBI [essentially the New York City field office], very little of the sprawling U.S. law enforcement community was engaged in countering terrorism.” (p. 120.) The Department of Justice has the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency; the Treasury Department has the Secret Service, the Customs Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was swamped trying to deal with the flood of both legal aliens (requiring naturalization) and illegal aliens (flooding in over the southern border). The INS was woefully under-funded relative to its responsibilities. Although the INS attempted to respond to terrorism after the 1993 WTC bombing, “might have been” horror stories abound. (pp. 118-120.)

What we learned from the Report of the 911 Commission XXV.

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What Went Wrong?

The truck bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993 had several noteworthy features. First, it heralded the arrival of a new sort of terrorism intended to create massive casualties among American civilians. Second, the American government responded in a devastating fashion through its law enforcement agencies. Third, the successful law enforcement response led American officials to both underestimate the new danger facing the country and to over-estimate the ability of the government to respond to that danger. (pp. 105-107.)

 

Adaptation—and Non-adaptation—in the Law Enforcement Community.

Superficially, it appeared that the FBI was taking strong action against terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1986 Congress authorized the FBI to investigate anti-American terrorism abroad; in 1989 Congress authorized the FBI to arrest people abroad without the consent of the host country. (pp. 109-111.) Louis Freeh (Director of the FBI, 1993-2001) established a Counterterrorism Division in the FBI, created a five year plan for counterterrorism (1998), multiplied the number of “legal attaches” abroad and urged them to co-operate with the local CIA stations.

The reality was very different. First, the FBI grants a lot of autonomy to each of its 56 Special Agents in Charge (SACs) to run their field offices; assesses performance on the basis of conventional crime statistics; rewards the “office of origin” for success in operations that involve more than one field office; and promotes on the basis of performance. Hence, FBI agents had powerful disincentives to investigate terrorism or espionage, or to co-operate with an investigation in a different field office. (pp. 108-109.)

The tendency toward local autonomy was strongly reinforced by Louis Freeh’s tenure as Director of the FBI (1993-2001). Moreover, Freeh never forced the re-allocation of budget resources to s upport counterterrorism and never forced the field offices to actually direct their efforts toward combating terrorism. This showed up in the hiring and deployment of analysts, the allocation of agents to intelligence and counterterrorism work, and the failure to create an effective system of information processing and communication with regard to terrorism. (pp. 111-114.)