http://www.kingsbayperiscope.com/stories/021507/kin_57.shtml

07.12.07 | 2:00 AM
Two people are sitting in a room together: an experimenter and a subject. The experimenter gets up and closes the door, and the room becomes quieter. The subject is likely to believe that the experimenter's purpose in closing the door was to make the room quieter.

This is an example of correspondent inference theory. People tend to infer the motives -- and also the disposition -- of someone who performs an action based on the effects of his actions, and not on external or situational factors. If you see someone violently hitting someone else, you assume it's because he wanted to -- and is a violent person -- and not because he's play-acting. If you read about someone getting into a car accident, you assume it's because he's a bad driver and not because he was simply unlucky. And -- more importantly for this column -- if you read about a terrorist, you assume that terrorism is his ultimate goal.

It's not always this easy, of course. If someone chooses to move to Seattle instead of New York, is it because of the climate, the culture or his career? Edward Jones and Keith Davis, who advanced this theory in the 1960s and 1970s, proposed a theory of "correspondence" to describe the extent to which this effect predominates. When an action has a high correspondence, people tend to infer the motives of the person directly from the action: e.g., hitting someone violently. When the action has a low correspondence, people tend to not to make the assumption: e.g., moving to Seattle.

Like most cognitive biases, correspondent inference theory makes evolutionary sense. In a world of simple actions and base motivations, it's a good rule of thumb that allows a creature to rapidly infer the motivations of another creature. (He's attacking me because he wants to kill me.) Even in sentient and social creatures like humans, it makes a lot of sense most of the time. If you see someone violently hitting someone else, it's reasonable to assume that he's a violent person. Cognitive biases aren’t bad; they’re sensible rules of thumb.

But like all cognitive biases, correspondent inference theory fails sometimes. And one place it fails pretty spectacularly is in our response to terrorism. Because terrorism often results in the horrific deaths of innocents, we mistakenly infer that the horrific deaths of innocents is the primary motivation of the terrorist, and not the means to a different end.

I found this interesting analysis in a paper by Max Abrams in International Security. "Why Terrorism Does Not Work" (.PDF) analyzes the political motivations of 28 terrorist groups: the complete list of "foreign terrorist organizations" designated by the U.S. Department of State since 2001. He lists 42 policy objectives of those groups, and found that they only achieved them 7 percent of the time.

According to the data, terrorism is more likely to work if 1) the terrorists attack military targets more often than civilian ones, and 2) if they have minimalist goals like evicting a foreign power from their country or winning control of a piece of territory, rather than maximalist objectives like establishing a new political system in the country or annihilating another nation. But even so, terrorism is a pretty ineffective means of influencing policy.

There's a lot to quibble about in Abrams' methodology, but he seems to be erring on the side of crediting terrorist groups with success. (Hezbollah's objectives of expelling both peacekeepers and Israel out of Lebanon counts as a success, but so does the "limited success" by the Tamil Tigers of establishing a Tamil state.) Still, he provides good data to support what was until recently common knowledge: Terrorism doesn't work.

This is all interesting stuff, and I recommend that you read the paper for yourself. But to me, the most insightful part is when Abrams uses correspondent inference theory to explain why terrorist groups that primarily attack civilians do not achieve their policy goals, even if they are minimalist. Abrams writes:

The theory posited here is that terrorist groups that target civilians are unable to coerce policy change because terrorism has an extremely high correspondence. Countries believe that their civilian populations are attacked not because the terrorist group is protesting unfavorable external conditions such as territorial occupation or poverty. Rather, target countries infer the short-term consequences of terrorism -- the deaths of innocent civilians, mass fear, loss of confidence in the government to offer protection, economic contraction, and the inevitable erosion of civil liberties -- (are) the objects of the terrorist groups. In short, target countries view the negative consequences of terrorist attacks on their societies and political systems as evidence that the terrorists want them destroyed. Target countries are understandably skeptical that making concessions will placate terrorist groups believed to be motivated by these maximalist objectives.

In other words, terrorism doesn't work, because it makes people less likely to acquiesce to the terrorists' demands, no matter how limited they might be. The reaction to terrorism has an effect completely opposite to what the terrorists want; people simply don't believe those limited demands are the actual demands.

This theory explains, with a clarity I have never seen before, why so many people make the bizarre claim that al Qaeda terrorism -- or Islamic terrorism in general -- is "different": that while other terrorist groups might have policy objectives, al Qaeda's primary motivation is to kill us all. This is something we have heard from President Bush again and again -- Abrams has a page of examples in the paper -- and is a rhetorical staple in the debate. (You can see a lot of it in the comments to this previous essay.)

In fact, Bin Laden's policy objectives have been surprisingly consistent. Abrams lists four; here are six from former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer's book Imperial Hubris:

End U.S. support of Israel
Force American troops out of the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia
End the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and (subsequently) Iraq
End U.S. support of other countries' anti-Muslim policies
End U.S. pressure on Arab oil companies to keep prices low
End U.S. support for "illegitimate" (i.e. moderate) Arab governments, like Pakistan

Although Bin Laden has complained that Americans have completely misunderstood the reason behind the 9/11 attacks, correspondent inference theory postulates that he's not going to convince people. Terrorism, and 9/11 in particular, has such a high correspondence that people use the effects of the attacks to infer the terrorists' motives. In other words, since Bin Laden caused the death of a couple of thousand people in the 9/11 attacks, people assume that must have been his actual goal, and he's just giving lip service to what he claims are his goals. Even Bin Laden's actual objectives are ignored as people focus on the deaths, the destruction and the economic impact.

Perversely, Bush’s misinterpretation of terrorists' motives actually helps prevent them from achieving their goals.

None of this is meant to either excuse or justify terrorism. In fact, it does the exact opposite, by demonstrating why terrorism doesn't work as a tool of persuasion and policy change. But we’re more effective at fighting terrorism if we understand that it is a means to an end and not an end in itself; it requires us to understand the true motivations of the terrorists and not just their particular tactics. And the more our own cognitive biases cloud that understanding, the more we mischaracterize the threat and make bad security trade-offs.

- - -

Bruce Schneier is the CTO of BT Counterpane and the author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World

Source:  WIRED

By RICHARD LARDNER
The Associated Press
Wednesday, June 27, 2007; 1:46 PM

TAMPA, Fla. -- So long, Rambo.

Almost six years after the worst attack ever on U.S. soil, special operations commanders believe that simply killing terrorists will not win a war against an ideologically motivated enemy.

That view is reflected in a series of transitions in special operations leadership posts. New senior officers are expected to give greater weight to an indirect approach to warfare, a slow and disciplined process that calls for supporting groups or nations willing to back U.S. interests.

Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld turned special operations forces into a "giant killing machine," said Douglas Macgregor, a former Army colonel and frequent critic of the Defense Department.

Now, with Rumsfeld gone and Navy Vice Adm. Eric Olson about to take control of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), Macgregor anticipates a return to the fundamentals drilled into Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs and other specially trained troops.

"The emphasis will be on, 'If you have to kill someone, then for God's sakes, kill the right people,'" Macgregor said. "In most cases, you're not going to have to kill people and that's the great virtue of special operations. That's been lost over the last several years."

Olson has been deputy commander since August 2003; Army Gen. Bryan Brown, the command's top officer for the past four years, retires from the military next month.

At defense industry conferences and in congressional testimony, Olson has said the manhunts that grab bad guys as well as headlines will continue to be necessary against terrorists.

"The nation expects to have forces that can emerge from darkness with precision and daring to conduct missions that are especially demanding and sensitive," Olson told the Senate Armed Services Committee at his confirmation hearing June 12.

But these assignments, known as direct action, are means to a broader end.

"We understand well that it is the indirect actions that will be decisive," he testified.

Through the indirect route, support can be overt or covert. But it always is aimed at eliminating safe havens for terrorists. This is done by training foreign militaries, supporting surrogate forces or providing humanitarian, financial and civic backing to areas viewed as possible breeding grounds for terrorists.

It is not uncommon for a battle-ready Army special forces team to rumble into a remote village and spend most of its time painting mosques, drilling wells and running medical clinics.

"It's basically anything that doesn't involve combat operations against terrorists," said Andrew Feickert, a national defense specialist at the Congressional Research Service in Washington. "As Admiral Olson has said, we're not going to kill our way to victory."

At a House Armed Services Committee hearing in June 2006, Max Boot, a national security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said critical indirect tasks had been "shortchanged by SOCOM in favor of sexier SWAT-style raids."

Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on terrorism and unconventional threats, said the blame rests with the Bush administration. By choosing to invade Iraq, the administration gave special operations forces a heavy combat role.

"The main thing holding them back at this point is Iraq, which is pretty much all direct action," said Smith. "The desire has been there, and I think General Brown was trying to move it that way as best he could."

Brown, through a spokesman, said the command "has always emphasized the indirect approach because that is the approach that will ultimately prove decisive."

Formed in 1987 in the wake of the failed attempt to rescue U.S. hostages in Tehran, Iran, Special Operations Command is now an extensive network of soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines who use unconventional methods against untraditional enemies.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the command has received more money, more people and more authority to go after terrorist networks.

In 2001, the command had an annual budget of $2.3 billion and roughly 46,000 military and civilian personnel. The command now has a budget of about $7 billion. By 2012, nearly 59,000 people will be attached to the command. Its headquarters is at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla.

Two years ago, President Bush put the command in charge of "synchronizing" the global fight against terrorism. This new role has been a source of friction within the Defense Department.

More than half a dozen top special operations slots are changing hands over the next few months. These moves are driven by the regular rotation of officers as well as "a better understanding of the complexities of the type of 'war' we are involved in today," according to Pete Gustaitis, a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

Beyond Olson, Gustaitis pointed to the upcoming promotions of Army Maj. Gen. David Fridovich and Air Force Maj. Gen. Donald Wurster as bellwethers.

"Both officers have been very vocal about using indirect methods," said Gustaitis, a retired Green Beret colonel.

Fridovich will run the Center for Special Operations, a 4-year-old organization located at MacDill that plans and oversees anti-terrorism campaigns. He will replace Lt. Gen. Dell Dailey, who has retired and been nominated by Bush to be the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism.

Fridovich has spent the past six years in the Pacific region helping guide what the military considers a successful effort against Abu Sayyaf, an al-Qaida outgrowth in the Philippines.

In a recent edition of the military journal Joint Force Quarterly, Fridovich wrote that the U.S. "cannot simply enter sovereign countries unilaterally and conduct kill-or-capture missions. It must blend host nation capacity building and other long-term efforts to address root causes, dissuade future terrorists, and reduce recruiting."

This indirect approach, Fridovich added, "demands diplomacy and respect for political sensitivities."

Money helps, too.

Earlier this month, the U.S. paid $10 million to four Filipinos who provided information that led to the killing of two top Abu Sayyaf leaders.

Wurster, a combat pilot with more than 4,000 flying hours, will run Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field, Fla. The current commander, Lt. Gen. Michael Wooley, is retiring.

Along with Fridovich, Wurster has substantial experience in the Philippines. From 2000 to 2003 he was the senior special operations officer at U.S. Pacific Command.

In a telephone interview, Wurster called the rewards a "pretty effective tool" that send an important signal. When people in a community are willing to turn in the enemy for cash, it means they are confident the white hats outnumber the black ones.

"That is when your campaign is properly structured and producing the desired effects," he said.

Rep. Smith, an enthusiastic backer of Brown and Olson, said it will be a major challenge to translate success in the Pacific to the volatile Middle East.

"Winning hearts and minds is one thing when you're coming into a relatively stable place where there's a minor insurgent problem," he said. "It's very hard to do those things in the environment that exists in Iraq."

___

On the Net:

Special Operations Command: http://www.socom.mil/

www.consortiumnews.com 

By Coleen Rowley & Other Intelligence Veterans
June 18, 2007

Editor's Note: Former FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley and other members of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have compiled the following memo examining the question of whether Bush administration policies have made Americans safer from the threat of terrorism since 9/11.

Rowley gained national attention on June 6, 2002, when she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about pre-9/11 missteps and how the FBI could do a better job detecting and disrupting terrorism. Time magazine had acquired (not from Rowley) a long letter she had written to FBI Director Robert Mueller listing lapses before 9/11 that helped explain the failure to prevent the attacks.

Five years after her testimony, her VIPS colleagues asked Rowley to evaluate what has been done and what needs to be done. They also have contributed their own expertise to the memo:

Given the effort that many of us have put into suggestions for reform, how satisfying it would be, were we able to report that appropriate correctives have been introduced to make us safer. But the bottom line is that the PR bromide to the effect that we are “safer” is incorrect. We are not safer. What follows will help explain why.

Wrong-headed actions and ideas had already taken root before that Senate hearing on June 6, 2002. Post 9/11 dragnet-detentions of innocents, official tolerance of torture (including abuse of U.S. citizens like John Walker Lindh), and panic-boosting color codes, had already been spawned from the mother of all slogans—“The Global War on Terror”—rhetorically useful, substantively inane.  GWOT was about to spawn much worse.

Within a few hours of the Senate hearing five years ago, President George W. Bush reversed himself and made a surprise public announcement saying he would, after all, create a new Department of Homeland Security. The announcement seemed timed to relegate to the “in-other-news” category the disturbing things reported to the Senate earlier that day about the mistakes made during the weeks prior to 9/11.

More important, the president’s decision itself was one of the most egregious examples of the doing-something-for-the-sake-of-appearing-to-be-doing-something-against-terrorism syndrome.

As anyone who has worked in the federal bureaucracy could immediately recognize, the creation of DHS was clearly a gross misstep on a purely pragmatic level. It created chaos by throwing together 22 agencies with 180,000 workers—many of them in jobs vital to our nation’s security, both at home and abroad. 

It also enabled functionaries like the two Michaels—Brown and Chertoff—to immobilize key agencies like the previously well-run Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), leading to its feckless response to Hurricane Katrina.

Radical, Reckless Departures

There were so many other missteps, so much playing fast and loose with the law, that it is hard to know where to begin in critiquing the results. One transcendent error was the eagerness of senior political appointees to exploit the “9/11-Changed-Everything” chestnut to prime people into believing that effective detection and disruption of terrorism required radical departures from rules governing our criminal justice and intelligence collection systems.

Departures from established law and policies were introduced quickly. Many of the worst of these came to light only later—extraordinary rendition, “black-site” imprisonment, torture, and eavesdropping without a warrant. (We now know that senior Justice Department officials strongly objected to the eavesdropping program.)

The first protests came from those most concerned with human rights and constitutional law. But, by and large, the fear-laden populace “didn’t get it.” The prevailing attitude seemed to be, “Who cares?  I want to be safe.”

Everyone wants security. But all too few recognize that security and liberty are basically flip sides of the same coin. Just as there can be no meaningful liberty in a situation devoid of security, there can be no real security in a situation devoid of liberty.

It took a bit longer for pragmatists to observe and explain how the draconian steps departing from established law and policy—not to mention the knee-jerk collection and storing of virtually all available information on everyone— are not, for the most part, helping to improve the country’s security.

The parallel with the introduction of officially sanctioned torture is instructive. TV programs aside, many if not most Americans instinctively know there is something basically wrong with torture—that it is immoral as well as illegal and a violation of human rights.

Pragmatists (experienced intelligence and law enforcement professionals, in particular) oppose torture because it does not work and often is counterproductive. Nevertheless, the president grabbed the headlines when he argued on Sept. 6, 2006 that “an alternative set of procedures” (already outlawed by the U.S. Army) for interrogation is required to extract information from terrorists. He then went on to intimidate a supine Congress into approving such procedures.

Virtually omitted from media coverage were the same-day remarks of the pragmatist chief of Army intelligence, Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, who conceded past “transgressions and mistakes” and made the Army’s view quite clear: “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.” Who should enjoy more credibility in this area, Bush or Kimmons?

The War on [fill in the blank]

“War!  Huh... What is it good for?  Absolutely nothing!” This 1969 song lyric turns out to be even more applicable to Bush’s “global war on terror” than to the Vietnam War.

As for “The War on Drugs,” that one was readily recognized as little more than a catchy metaphor helpful in arguing for budget increases. But the use of our armed forces for war in Iraq was guaranteed to be self-defeating and to increase the terrorist threat.

-- Military weapons are inherently rough, crude tools. Our rhetoric makes bombs and missiles out to be capable of “surgical strikes,” but such weapons also injure and kill innocent men, women, and children, taking us down to the same low level inhabited by terrorists who rationalize the killing or injuring of civilians for their cause. Civilian casualties also serve to radicalize people and swell the terrorist ranks to the point where it becomes impossible for us to kill more terrorists than U.S. policy and actions create. (In one of his leaked memos, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked about that; he should have paused long enough to listen to the answer.) This inherent “squaring of the error” problem in applying military force in this context has been a boon to terrorist recruitment, and has spurred activity to the point of having actually quadrupled significant terrorist incidents worldwide.

-- Declaring “war” on the tactic of terrorism elevates to statehood what actually may be scattered, disorganized individuals, sympathizers, and small groups. It empowers the terrorists as they add to their numbers and provides the status of statehood to what often should be regarded and treated as a rag-tag group of criminals. 

-- There is, of course, political advantage for a “war president” to rally Americans around the flag, but the negatives of the axioms “truth is the first casualty of war” and “all’s fair in love and war” far outweigh any positives. Ultimately, the recklessness and cover-up mid-wifed by the “fog of war” (everything from the friendly fire that killed Pat Tillman to the torture at Abu Ghraib and other atrocities) just magnify the “squaring the error” effect. Judiciousness—and just plain smarts—tend to be sacrificed for quick action.

-- Perhaps the most insidious blowback from war is that it weakens freedom and the rule of law inside the country waging it. James Madison was typically prescient in warning of this: “No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare;” and “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”

Fire Hose to Niagara to Tsunami

Administration pressure on intelligence collection agencies, together with an extraordinary lack of professionalism and courage in the senior ranks of such agencies, have resulted in not only over-reaching the law, but over-collecting information.

Those on the front lines striving to prevent future attacks face the kind of pressure a soccer goalie would feel trying to keep the other team from scoring when his own team’s offense is off playing in an adjacent field—as when President George W. Bush sent our offense to invade Iraq, the wrong country with negligible ties to terrorism.

Facing that kind of pressure, and lacking strong professional coaching, the defense can feel hopelessly outmatched, leading to still further mishap.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of the difficulty of getting a sip from the fire hose of intelligence being collected and flowing through the system. The stream of intelligence before 9/11 was also described by others as gushing from a fire hose, rendering it hard to find the dots, much less connect them—making it impossible, for example, to find, translate, and disseminate until 9/12 a key 9/11-related intercept acquired shortly before the attacks.

Compounding the problem is the FBI’s unenviable record in acquiring computer technology to facilitate its work—witness the junking of a computerized records system two years ago after wasting $170 million on defense contractors hired to create the system.

But the fire hose soon became Niagara Falls. FBI Director Robert Mueller set the tone early on as he kept telling Congress, “The greatest threat is from al-Qaeda cells in the U.S. that we have not yet identified.” (sic)

Blindly following Mueller’s White House-induced fixation with the “greatest” (though not yet “identified”) threat, the FBI diverted about half its agents and other resources from areas like violent crime to work on terrorism.

Small wonder, then, that tons of additional data have been collected as a result, for example, of the “No-Tip-Will-Go-Uncovered” policy and the hundreds of thousands of National Security Letter requests. And who is surprised that most of that tonnage will never be evaluated?

There is no denying that the threat from Al Qaeda has grown over the past five years, and today probably better fits the earlier inflated warnings of multiple terrorist cells already in place in the U.S. Hard questions must be asked, however, when it appears as though collectors are being paid by the ream, while the drowning analysts go down for the third time.

Extraneous, irrelevant data clutter the system, making it even harder for analysts to make meaningful future connections.

A needle is hard enough to find in the proverbial haystack, without adding still more hay. And once the extra hay is piled onto the stack—by adding still more names to the 40,000-plus already on the “no-fly list,” for example—there doesn’t seem to be any way of reducing it.

Ask Northfield (Minnesota) Police Chief Gary Smith and other law enforcement officers whose very common names have gotten onto this seemingly indelible list and who get stopped every time they try to fly.

Ghost of Poindexter

Just when it appears this insanity cannot get any worse, here come still more dots. Recent news reports indicate that the FBI—presumably having hired different contractors this time around—is compiling a massive computer database that will hold 6 billion records by 2012. This equals 20 separate “records” for each man, woman and child in the United States.

“The universe of subjects will expand exponentially” is the proud spin being put on this recycled version of the Pentagon’s discredited “Total Information Awareness” program, which was launched after 9/11 with the goal of compiling records from a wide array of electronic transactions. (The Big Brother project, which was put under the direction of Iran-Contra figure John Poindexter, was shelved, but not entirely scrapped, after encountering strong congressional resistance.)

Data-mining experts are not convinced this new program is worth the effort. Since there are so few known terrorist patterns of behavior, one specialist has written that this kind of search would not only needlessly infringe on privacy and civil liberties, but also waste taxpayer dollars and misdirect still more time and energy by “flood[ing] the national security system with false positives—suspects who are truly innocent.”

If this were not enough, we learn that the terrorist watch list compiled by the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center is out of control, having apparently swelled to include more than half a million names. So instead of trying to get a sip from a fire hose, or from Niagara Falls, the data-mining challenge is going to be more like sipping from a tsunami.

The good news is that this predicament is creating unusual consensus among people concerned with human rights and those dealing with pragmatic law enforcement. As one specialist on civil liberties observed recently, “There's a reason the FBI has a 'Ten Most Wanted' list, right? We need to focus the government's efforts on the greatest threats. When the watch list grows to this level, it's useless as an anti-terror tool."

Quantity cannot substitute for quality. Higher quality data collection depends not only on better guidance with respect to relevance, but also on judiciousness applied from the beginning and throughout the collection process.

Unfortunately, case and statutory law has come to be regarded as some kind of nicety—or a barrier that needs to be overcome. Not so. That law sets standards of relevancy for collection that used to hold down data clutter.

One might view the process of investigation, intelligence collection, increased intrusiveness, and erosion of liberties as a pyramid with the least intrusive actions and methods on the bottom of the pyramid entailing little or no interference with one’s civil liberties.

As a suspect proceeds up the pyramid from being the target of an investigation, to temporary detention, interview, search, arrest, and finally subject to criminal charges and long-term incarceration, each higher level of intrusiveness should correspond to a greater amount of evidence.

What the “war on terrorism” has done, however, to a large extent, is simply invert this pyramid on its head, allowing long-term incarceration with little or no corresponding evidence.

In the past, general awareness that collected data could either become publicly known through criminal processes (criminal discovery), or through a plain Freedom of Information/Privacy Act request, built an extra degree of judiciousness into data collection. Classifying all information about international terrorism secret, perpetually secret, which is the current practice, removes this natural safeguard.

Former FBI agent Mike German, whose life depended on government secrecy when he was working undercover in domestic terrorism investigations, has an acute understanding of the need for operational secrecy in undercover work.

At the same time, German has pointed to the pitfalls of secrecy where it is not essential, and has emphasized the importance of transparency within the government, even when conducting sensitive operations:

“While my activities were covert during the operational phase of my undercover work, I knew from day one that I would have to be able to defend in court my actions. This gave me extra incentive to do everything by the book, so as to avoid the kind of mistakes or over-reaching that could prejudice efforts to bring domestic terrorists to justice. Operations designed with the understanding that they can remain forever secret do not require this kind of diligence and this can easily lead to abuse.”

What About Emergencies?

J. Edgar Hoover’s vision during the early part of his 48-year control of the FBI not only led to creating the fingerprint identification system, but also brought in highly professional agents who could then be trained and trusted to conduct their own investigations and law enforcement actions without unnecessary interference from superiors.

The FBI became the role model for law enforcement due to its insistence on high educational standards and continuing legal and professional training.  Thus, before the “Miranda Rule” became law as the protocol for conducting interrogations, the FBI had already voluntarily adopted and implemented such a procedure as part of its professional approach to interrogation.

At the same time, the law of criminal procedure, including search and seizure, interrogation, and the right to an attorney, need not be a barrier to effective investigation (or to the prevention of crime or terrorist acts), because “emergency exceptions” have already been carved into that law.

So, for example, if an FBI agent finds him/herself outside a home with probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime exists inside and is being destroyed, that agent can legally conduct a search pursuant to the “exigent circumstances” exception in the law, without having to wait for a court warrant.

Similar emergency exceptions exist under the statutes for monitoring of wire and/or electronic communications. This is one reason why it was difficult for us to understand why President Bush decided simply to ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in ordering warrantless surveillance that included U.S. citizens.

There is in that law an explicit exception allowing emergency monitoring up to 72 hours if, for example, a cell phone of an al-Qaeda operative were suddenly discovered.

For some reason the media have not done a good job of informing the American people about this exception. Those of us who are aware of it have difficulty avoiding the conclusion that the president’s decision to violate FISA means the surveillance program is so intrusive and all-encompassing that it could not bear scrutiny.

The program has already been ruled both unconstitutional and illegal by U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor but, despite that, continues in operation.

The FISA emergency exception is not hard to obtain; it simply requires that the Attorney General approve. That approval is what my colleagues in the Minneapolis field office desperately sought in mid-August 2001 so that they could search the personal effects and computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was already in the custody of our immigration service.

The approval was denied for reasons that make little sense. Suffice it to point out a supreme irony here:  because FBI headquarters personnel were reluctant, for whatever reason, to seek this emergency case-specific authority from the Attorney General and because the attacks of 9/11 were not thwarted, the net result was a presidential decision to ignore FISA altogether and institute a surveillance program in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment as well as FISA, as Judge Taylor has ruled.

A similar exception covering life-and-death situations allows law enforcement officers to dispense with the protection ordinarily afforded by Miranda warnings. The way the so-called “ticking-bomb scenario” has been disingenuously used to justify torture makes one reluctant to mention a scenario in which something like it might apply.

However, unlike TV-glorified “ticking-bomb torture,” there have in fact been cases in which a kidnap victim’s life was in serious, time-sensitive jeopardy. One such kidnap victim was buried alive with limited oxygen supply.

In such cases, the normally required Miranda warning-protection can legally give way to the need to protect the life or lives hanging in the balance. What often gets blurred here, sometimes deliberately by advocates of torture, is the significant difference between the issue of truly involuntary confession—one produced by torture, for example, and thus with no guarantee of reliability—and the much larger area that is protected by the prophylactic Miranda Rule.

Delegate Down

Judicious application of any emergency exception, of course, must obtain in order to prevent such exceptions from swallowing the rule. In the past, individual law enforcement officers have been trained and trusted to behave in such a way as to prevent that.

Some of us VIPS were trained to use deadly force under narrow “emergency” circumstances when an imminent threat existed to our lives or to other innocent victims and there was no reasonable alternative to stopping the imminent threat.

This delegation-down, this investing of trust in junior officers to exercise the enormous power of using lethal force under limited circumstances and after sufficient training, is necessary in order to protect their own and others’ lives.

So, too, it can be argued that investigators and intelligence gatherers should be trained to spot the type of life-and-death circumstances that might allow them to conduct an emergency search without a warrant or to dispense with Miranda protections.

The existence under current law of these “emergency exceptions” means there is no need to paint over civil liberties with a broad brush from on high, in order to effectively detect and disrupt terrorism.

Despite the intense political and PR pressures, it is extremely unwise to allow the pendulum to swing in the reckless way it did post 9/11:

-- From ranking terrorism as the Justice Department’s lowest priority in August 2001 to establishing it as the FBI’s only real priority now. (Despite the word games, anything that consumes half of the FBI’s resources is its only real priority).

-- From ignoring specific instances where emergency action under the law (FISA, for example) was warranted to now simply ignoring long-standing law.

-- From the failure to follow up promptly on specific, well predicated tips pre-9/11 to the “No-Tip-Will-Go-Uncovered” tsunami post 9/11.

-- From training interrogators on the finer points of the Miranda Rule to training on torture techniques.
 
The bottom-line result of this pronounced pendulum swing is not only that our own constitutional and legal protections are jeopardized as seldom before, but also that—far from bringing any real benefit—these practices impede efforts to find and stop actual terrorists, and they lengthen the waiting lines at al-Qaeda recruiting centers.

Steering Group
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Coleen Rowley,  former FBI special agent

Tom Maertens,  former NSC Director for Nonproliferation; former Deputy Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Department of State

Larry Johnson, former CIA analyst; former counterterrorism manager, Department of State

Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst

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FORT JACKSON, S.C. — An eerie image of a magenta, blue-green and yellow face glows on a screen as a government employee steps behind a heat-sensing camera on this sprawling U.S. Army base. Not far away, researchers are studying lasers’ ability to detect muscle contraction. Other technology tracks the movement of a person’s eyes.

Liars beware. The Defense Department facility that trains the people who run the government’s polygraph machines is looking to an even higher plane of technology in its quest to separate fact from fiction.

“We don’t know how far down the road it’s going to be, but this is showing some potential,” Bill Norris, director of the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment, said recently as he talked about the thermal-imaging device that measured his face’s temperature. “We’ve started to look at new technologies that can help us in this business.”

Besides serving as a hub for high-tech research into futuristic methods of lie detection, the academy is responsible for training all polygraph examiners who work for the U.S. military and 23 federal agencies. It turns out about 100 new examiners yearly and conducts much of the 80 hours of refresher training that each of the government’s 650 polygraph examiners must undergo every two years.

Polygraph examiners monitor subjects’ blood pressure, respiration rates and sweat gland activity as part of a standardized — and potentially hours long — interview process. It takes new students 14 weeks of training to learn how to conduct polygraph exams and understand the physiological data that underpins the process.

Part of the job uses the base’s young soldiers to role-play stealing money from a fake bank. Some go through with it; some don’t. The academy’s trainees wire the soldiers to sensors and quiz them about their acts during videotaped exercises, with the details of their heartbeats and other physical reactions displayed on wide-screen monitors.

“Our students have to learn to ask the right questions, to see if the soldiers ‘did the deed’ or not. It’s a great exercise,” Norris said.

Meanwhile, researchers are testing other devices that would allow lie detection to go wireless.

There’s the thermal imaging technology that Norris says is promising given its ability to tie deception to temperature changes in the skin. Another studies the pattern of an individual’s gaze to see how the eye looks at a familiar or an unfamiliar scene.

“This is something that law enforcement might be able to use, say if you showed someone a picture of a crime scene,” to see if they recognized it or not, Norris said.

Researchers are also studying what they call “Laser Doppler vibrometry,” which looks at changes in the body’s muscle contractions, respiration or cardiovascular activity. With it, a laser could be directed at an artery in a subject’s neck to study blood flow from afar, said Debra Krikorian, a molecular biologist working with the institute.

“Can you imagine the potential? You could have a stress test and not be hooked up to all those wires,” Krikorian said.

By Gidget Fuentes - Staff writerPosted : Saturday Apr 28, 2007 8:31:36 EDT

VENTURA, Calif. — A woman battling with her ex-husband over their young daughter. A second woman obsessed by her girlfriend’s nasty custody fight. Male friends asked to kill the ex-husband to protect their friend from alleged death threats.

All a recipe for murder? That’s the Hollywoodlike script Ventura County prosecutors are chasing to determine why John Marmo Jr. — the ex-husband and a former sailor — was gunned down as he left home for work Dec. 1.

Four Navy Seabees are locked up in the city jail, awaiting trial in a case that’s rocked the local and Navy community in this coastal area an hour northwest of Los Angeles.

Three Seabees — Construction Mechanic 2nd Class Rebecca G. Braswell, Construction Mechanic 3rd Class Shannon M. Butler and Construction Mechanic Constructionman Apprentice Matthew G. Toerner — are charged with murder and face trials later this year. Prosecutors paint Toerner as the shooter in a case brokered by Butler with the implicit consent of her close friend, Braswell, the ex-wife of the victim.

The fourth Seabee — Builder Constructionman Apprentice Seth A. Hardy — awaits a preliminary hearing. Police said Hardy admitted to twice attaching makeshift bombs to Marmo’s car in an attempt to kill him.

Bitter from the beginning

Just how these four sailors allegedly came together in a conspiracy to commit murder is at the crux of the prosecution’s case.

Rebecca Braswell, now 26, met John Marmo when they were both in the Navy. They married Dec. 1, 2001, three months before their daughter’s birth in Sigonella, Italy. But the young marriage turned bitter before their separation and subsequent divorce after they moved to California.

The ripple effects of that contentious relationship are at the heart of the murder investigation and conspiratorial web alleged by prosecutors.

During a preliminary hearing April 17-18 for the three, lead prosecutor Richard Simon cited Rebecca Braswell, 26, as the underlying driver and silent partner on the road to Marmo’s murder. Braswell, said prosecutor Simon, told a former paralegal: “He’s going to win. I’m not going to let that happen. He’ll be dead first.”

Braswell and Butler, Simon said in opening statements at the preliminary hearing, “arranged to have John Marmo killed.”

Braswell, Butler and Toerner — each shackled at the legs and wearing orange shirts and slate-blue coveralls — sat with their defense attorneys in the courtroom as a dozen relatives and friends and Marmo’s mother and sisters watched the proceedings. Initial testimony in the hearing before Superior Court Judge John Dobroth showed the Seabees pointing fingers at each other.

The case raises troubling questions beyond the immediate puzzle of the conspiracy. How, for example, could so many sailors casually hear repeated statements and solicitations to commit murder, yet do nothing to stop it or talk them out of it? Why didn’t the command do more to investigate the initial claims of a murder plot — and could it have prevented Marmo’s death?

The following account is based on court documents, law enforcement sources and witness testimony in the case.

The shooting

It was just before 6 a.m. Dec. 1 when three gunshots jarred Sheryl O’Neil from her bed. John Marmo Jr., who rented a room in her Camarillo condo, would have just left for his job at an equipment shop.

Lying in wait inside a Dodge Durango on an adjacent driveway, prosecutors contend, were two sailors, one armed with a Ruger 9mm handgun.

Seconds after the shots rang out, Marmo “banged on the door and said, ‘help,’.” O’Neil testified April 17.

Running downstairs, she dialed 911. “As I opened the door, he was lying face down on the sidewalk” in a pool of blood, she testified. “It was very labored breathing, and then the breathing stopped.”

The shots awoke neighbor Benjamin Matzkind two houses away. “I heard three gunshots, and then I heard a victory cry and tires just peel out,” Matzkind testified.

“It sounded like a ‘woo-hoo,’ like they succeeded in what they were doing, and they took off,” he added.

Six weeks earlier, John Marmo, a former aviation machinist’s mate, told local authorities of two discoveries of makeshift bombs attached to his car. Marmo blamed his ex-wife in the Oct. 14 and Oct. 28 incidents, in which someone affixed propane canisters to the exhaust pipe, and Ventura police and sheriff’s deputies began to investigate.

The ex-wife

Jaclyn Marmo could barely stand to look at her ex-sister-in-law, seated at a table 20 feet away.

John Marmo’s sister testified of often listening in on conversations he had with his ex as their custody and visitation battle strung through hearings and continuances. The short marriage was rocky from the get-go.

During one argument, Rebecca Braswell “told my brother John he’d better watch his back,” testified Jaclyn Marmo, who’s contesting Braswell’s sister for custody of their niece Heather, now 5.

The couple traded accusations. John Marmo, she said, got repeated phone calls from Braswell telling him, “I’m not trying to kill you.”

The girlfriend

In the prosecution’s eye, Shannon Butler, 23 — a slight blonde with pale skin and blue eyes — was the broker in the murder conspiracy.

Several witnesses testified that for months on quarterdeck watch, digging for water wells or during breaks in the Smoke Pit outside the enlisted barracks, Butler openly spoke about hurting or killing Marmo, who they knew as her friend’s ex. Butler often complained that she was “jumped” by unknown assailants and that Marmo had beaten her.

Several Seabees said Butler asked if they would kill or “do something to” Marmo or knew someone who would, and she offered $200 to hurt him or $1,000 to kill him. “Money was put up to see if she could get somebody to abuse the victim, do damage to the car ... just to make it look like it was an accident,” testified Builder 3rd Class Donald Kohler, who dated Butler for two months but broke it off because “I didn’t want to get involved in this.”

Douglas Bonner, a former builder recently discharged from the Navy, testified that Butler once approached him, asking “if I knew any ... contract hit men.”

Seaman Brian Linnell said Butler once showed him a black 9mm handgun. “She asked if I would or if I knew anybody,” Linnell testified. “I said no.”

Butler asked for help in getting a gun and casually spoke “once a week, at least” over four months of her desire “get rid of” her friend’s ex, Equipment Operator Constructionman Apprentice Raymie Huddleston testified. Butler never mentioned Marmo by name, Huddleston said. Butler “said she didn’t tell Rebecca anything ... because she didn’t want to get Rebecca in trouble.”

The shooter

At the Smoke Pit, a smoking area outside the barracks at the Port Hueneme base, Shannon Butler found helpful hands in two sailors, Matthew Toerner and Seth Hardy.

On the day of the shooting, Toerner, then 19, sat in the back seat of a rented SUV driven by Butler. They waited about 30 minutes before John Marmo stepped outside, and Toerner fired the gun, Toerner told homicide detective Joe Evans.

Toerner thought the murder would save Butler. He “felt that Shannon was in danger from Mr. Marmo, and he felt that it was Shannon or Marmo,” Evans testified. “She had told him of incidents that she had been beaten up ... and she was afraid of Marmo.” It’s unclear whether Butler’s claims are true, and no evidence was presented. Toerner said he declined Butler’s offer of money, saying, “It’s about protecting her,” Evans testified.

Toerner, who didn’t know Braswell, may have been conflicted. Days before the shooting, he told Evans, he and Butler went to Marmo’s home. “Shannon wanted him to go in the house and shoot him,” the detective said. But he “didn’t want to do it and he wasn’t going to do it.” They left after a neighbor confronted them.

Evan said Toerner, who said he left the gun in a backpack in the vehicle, was “extremely” remorseful.

The bomber

It wasn’t just Toerner who got sucked into the murderous plot. Detectives said Seth Hardy, 20, admitted he and Butler tried to blow up Marmo’s car. It was a topic of discussion at the Smoke Pit, several sailors said.

Butler “asked about a propane tank and a muffler” and often discussed “if that would work,” Huddleston testified. Kohler testified that Toerner and Hardy “told her they knew how.” Linnell said Butler also spoke about attempts to “blow up” Marmo’s car and, when he asked her why, she told him about “trying to kill him over a custody battle, or something like that.”

Evans said that weeks before the shooting, Toerner tried to persuade Hardy, a friend who “was like a brother to him,” not to help Butler or risk his life for “one dumb mistake.”

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut (AP) -- A former member of the U.S. Navy was arrested Wednesday in Phoenix, Arizona, on charges of providing material support to terrorists and espionage, the Department of Justice said.

Hassan Abujihaad, formerly known as Paul R. Hall, 31, was arrested on a federal criminal complaint. He is alleged to have provided classified information to a London-based group called Azzam Publications about a U.S. Navy battle group as it traveled from California to the Persian Gulf region in 2001.

The charges were brought in Connecticut because, for a time, the Azzam Publications Web sites were hosted on servers located in Connecticut.

Two members of that group, Babar Ahmad and Syed Talha Ahsan, also face terrorism charges in the United States. Federal prosecutors have said that from 1998 to 2002, the two operated Web sites encouraging the donation of money or equipment to terrorists.

Ahmad and Ahsan remain in Britain while they appeal extradition orders.

As British police were searching Ahmad's residence in London, they found a floppy disk with a password-protected document that divulged the classified Navy information, the Justice Department said Wednesday in a statement.

"The document went on to discuss the battle group's perceived vulnerability to terrorist attack," the statement said. "Additional investigation and computer forensic analysis later determined that Syed Talha Ahsan allegedly possessed, accessed, modified and re-saved the electronic battle group file before it was found in Ahmad's possession."

The complaint against Abujihaad alleges he provided the two with the information. Search warrants executed on various e-mail accounts associated with the Azzam Web sites show Abujihaad and members of Azzam Publications had several e-mail exchanges from late 2000 to late 2001. At the time, Abujihaad was an enlistee in the Navy on active duty in the Middle East, stationed aboard the USS Benfold, one of the ships in the battle group whose movements were divulged.

The e-mail exchanges "included discussions regarding videos Abujihaad ordered from Azzam Publications that promoted violent jihad; a small donation of money Abujihaad had made to Azzam Publications; and whether it was 'safe' to send materials to Abujihaad at his military address onboard the USS Benfold," the Justice Department said.

In one e-mail exchange, authorities allege, Abujihaad "described a recent force protection briefing given aboard his ship, voiced enmity toward America, praised Osama bin Laden and the mujahedeen (and) praised the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole." The Cole was a U.S. Navy destroyer attacked in the Yemeni port of Aden.

Abujihaad was discharged from active duty in the Navy in January 2002, before the alleged conduct was known, authorities said.

Prosecutors allege that in 2004, when Abujihaad learned Ahmad had been arrested and allegedly possessed the Navy information, he destroyed Azzam Publications videos and deleted computer files reflecting material from Azzam sites. In recorded negotiations for the purchase of two assault rifles in December 2006, Abujihaad admitted corresponding with Azzam Publications, sending the e-mail regarding the USS Cole and destroying the videos two years earlier, say authorities.

Abujihaad appeared Wednesday before a U.S. magistrate judge, and "agreed to a temporary order of detention and to be removed to the District of Connecticut for further prosecution," the Justice Department statement said.

 

March 21, 2007

The House Armed Services Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities held a hearing yesterday to discuss the Defense Department’s counterterrorism and counter-proliferation priorities. The Center for American Progress and Foreign Policy magazine have teamed up recently to examine just this question in The Terrorism Index, a biannual nonpartisan survey of foreign policy experts.

The Terrorism Index takes a comprehensive look at experts’ opinions on our national security, the Bush administration’s handling of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and where we should focus our efforts in the global war on terrorist networks.

Experts surveyed agree that the United States must shift focus in its counterterrorism efforts. More than two-thirds of the experts believe that Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism and 88 percent think that operations in Iraq are undermining U.S. national security.

The majority of experts believe instead that the United States’ number one priority should be denuclearizing the Korean peninsula. Experts ranked nuclear nonproliferation goals in North Korea higher than securing and stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan, creating a national missile defense system, and convincing Iran to abandon its uranium enrichment program.

The Bush administration’s misguided tactics in the fight against global terrorist networks are making the United States a more dangerous place. Eighty-two percent of the experts expect another 9/11-scale attack on the United States sometime in the next decade, and 83 percent believe that the Taliban, Hamas, and Hezbollah have all strengthened over the past year. An overwhelming 91 percent urge the United States to dramatically increase pressure on Pakistan, which many believe will become the next Al Qaeda stronghold. The United States needs to turn its attention away from Iraq if it hopes to contain these terrorist groups.

The war in Iraq distracts our military from more important pursuits. Experts recommend that U.S. military efforts shift away from Iraq and toward Afghanistan. Sixty-six percent of experts oppose increasing the number of troops in Iraq, but 70 percent support deploying more troops to Afghanistan. This makes sense, considering that 64 percent believe the war in Afghanistan has actually advanced U.S. national security goals.

Mirroring U.S. public opinion, the experts uniformly disapprove of the United States’ handling of the war in Iraq. Ninety-two percent say the Bush administration’s performance on Iraq has been below average, and nearly six out of 10 experts across the ideological spectrum say the administration is doing the “worst possible job” in Iraq. Participants also found shortcomings in public diplomacy policy, homeland security policy, and energy policy.

The results of the survey were not entirely negative, however. Foreign policy experts applaud the Bush administration’s successes in curtailing the flow of terrorist money worldwide. Ninety-five percent say that some or a great deal of progress has been made in terms of freezing terrorist funds. In fact, over the last six years, the Bush administration has successful frozen more than $140 million in terrorist assets in 1,400 bank accounts worldwide. These successes demonstrate what works when it comes to tracking and containing terrorists.

Although the results of the most recent Terrorism Index closely resemble the results of the first, there are certain changes worth noting. Perhaps most significant, in the first index, the highest percentage of experts identified Islamist animosity as the principal reason for the world becoming more dangerous; in the second index, the highest percentage of experts identified the Iraq war.

The Terrorism Index provides comprehensive and nonpartisan answers to important questions on our national counterterrorism policy and shows that the United States must rethink its approach to stopping global terrorist networks. Thousands of lives and billions of dollars have been lost to an incredibly unpopular war that experts say is distracting the United States from its mission in the fight against terrorism. If the Bush administration does not shift its focus, both militarily and monetarily, the United States will become vulnerable to another terrorist attack.

For more information, see:

• The Terrorist Index

To speak with our experts on this topic, contact:

For TV, Sean Gibbons, Director of Media Strategy 202.682.1611 or sgibbons@americanprogress.org
For radio, Theo LeCompte, Media Strategy Manager 202.741.6268 or tlecompte@americanprogress.org
For print, Trevor Kincaid, Deputy Press Secretary 202.741.6273 or tkincaid@americanprogress.org
For web, Erin Lindsay, Online Marketing Manager 202.741.6397 or elindsay@americanprogress.org

By CLAUDE SALHANI
UPI International Editor

WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 (UPI) -- It's been almost five years since a group of 19 Islamist fanatics hijacked and then slammed their commandeered passenger jets into three buildings and a field, killing about 3,000 Americans. And in the process forever changing the face -- and the heart -- of America.

Terrorism was not entirely new to the United States although until now, for the most part, the attacks targeted Americans overseas. Still, fortress America was not immune to terrorism.

"Between 1990 and 1999 some sixty terrorist attacks perpetrated by both domestic and foreign groups occurred in the United States, killing 182 people and injuring more than 1,932," writes Yonah Alexander in his new book, "Counterterrorism Strategies," (Potomac Books, 2006.)

"But," goes on to say Alexander, the director of the Inter-University Center of Terrorism Studies "it was not until the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy and the Marine base in Beirut, killing some 270 Americans, that the U.S. government, for the first time in its history, seriously decided to develop a more coherent and proactive strategy dealing with terrorism."

While Europe witnessed scores of severe terrorist attacks on its soil in the 1970s, '80s and '90s, America felt safe hiding behind a misguided belief that the country could remain immune to major terrorist attack, protected by a vast ocean on either side of the country. America saw itself as a castle sheltered by the largest moats ever -- the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Pacific on the other. But as President Bush pointed out shortly after 9/11, that belief was proven wrong. Suddenly terror struck. And suddenly America lost its innocence. Sadly, America was to join the rest of the world in becoming a target of international terrorism. That was on September 11, 2001.

And since then, America has been at war; better make that at wars -- in the plural. One war is being fought in Afghanistan, another war in being fought in Iraq and yet a third war has been declared on terror. Each war comes with its own difficulties.

The war in Afghanistan against the Taliban is like trying to scoop up mercury. No sooner has one town or region been contained that the Taliban reappears elsewhere.

The war in Iraq is far from over three years and then some after major combat operations were supposed to be over. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found and the body count continues to climb. As of this writing, U.S. fatalities stand at 2,635, according to the Department of Defense and the Iraqi civilian death toll stands at 41,041 (min) and 45,613 (max) according to Iraqbodycount.org.

And the other war, the one on terror, has been one being fought mostly in the shadows. And just how do you fight shadows?

September 11 has changed America, and regrettably the changes have not been for the better. During the five years since those tragic attacks on the twin towers, the Pentagon and the third target that was believed to have been Capitol Hill, but was diverted and crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania, the Bush administration has been slowly but surely eroding individual liberties, restraining freedoms, and going against the very grain of the American way of life.

Among the laws that were passed was the USA Patriot Act, and attempts to wiretap into the telephones of American citizens. To speak up against the administration's folly in Iraq, its complete lack of respect for the Geneva Conventions by establishing legal limbos in Guantanamo, or more recently its saber-rattling over Tehran is to be labeled "unpatriotic."

Just this week Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld accused critics of the Bush administration's conduct of the war in Iraq and the war against terrorism. Rumsfeld said of the war critics, "They seem not to have learned history's lessons," and then the secretary of defense compared the critics to those in the 1930s who advocated appeasing Nazi Germany.

Rumsfeld called the Islamist terrorists "a new type of fascism." Totalitarian may have been a better description.

Is all this supposed to make America feel safer today? Are the majority of the people more prepared, better equipped to respond to an emergency of terrorist nature in a major metropolitan area?

The answer is, probably not. Heaven forbid that a real emergency was to occur in the nation's capital, for example. The only visible steps taken by the authorities in the aftermath of 9/11 are few dozen signs -- the size of a shoebox -- indicating the way to the Capital Beltway via Virginia or Maryland.

Any resident of the greater Washington metropolitan area will tell you the havoc caused to the city's traffic by a little bit of rain; now imagine the effects caused by a real panic....

There is no argument that the country needs to remain vigilant, but one must stop thinking there is a terrorist hiding under every bed. In the meantime a good investment would be a just released book by Robert T. Jordan, a Marine veteran and Don Philpott, titled "Terror-Is America Safe?"

It provides a much needed, one stop shop on what the average citizen should know and can do in both preparing for, and responding to a terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

--

(Comments may be sent to Claude@upi.com.)

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Al-Qaida's No. 2 leader announced in a new videotape aired Saturday that an Egyptian militant group has joined the terror network.

It was the first time that al-Qaida has announced a branch in Egypt, the Arab world's most populous nation. The Egyptian group, Gamaa Islamiya, is apparently a revived version of a militant group of the same name that waged a campaign of violence in Egypt during the 1990s but was crushed in a government crackdown.

"We announce to the Islamic nation the good news of the unification of a great faction of the knights of the Gamaa Islamiya ... with the al-Qaida group," Ayman al-Zawahri said in the videotape aired on the Al-Jazeera news network.

Al-Zawahri said the Egyptian group was led by Mohammed al-Islambouli, the younger brother of Khaled al-Islambouli, the militant who assassinated Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981 and was later executed.

The video included a statement by Mohammed al-Hakayma, identified as another top leader of the revived Gamaa. Al-Hakayma was shown talking in a grove of palm trees.

Mohammed al-Islambouli left Egypt in the mid-1980s and was believed to have been in Afghanistan working with al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, said Diaa Rashwan, an Egyptian expert on militant groups.

It was not clear how much of a following the new version of Gamaa Islamiya has on the ground in Egypt. Its previous incarnation was largely eliminated by the government crackdown, and its leaders later announced a truce from prison. It has not claimed any attacks since the late 1990s.

Rashwan said al-Zawahri's claim was likely just propaganda.

"This is media talk from Ayman al-Zawahri. The Gamaa Islamiya has its own leadership and they said they have already rejected joining al-Qaida in the past," he said. "Gamaa Islamiya has no command outside Egypt. They have dissolved in Egypt."

Egypt has seen a string of terror bombings against tourist resorts in the Sinai Peninsula since October 2004, killing 98 people. Egyptian authorities have said those attacks were carried out by a group calling itself Monotheism and Jihad, with links to Palestinian militants.

Many experts believe Monotheism and Jihad is inspired by al-Qaida and may have some operational links, but the Egyptian government has not announced any connection.

The excerpts of the video played by Al-Jazeera did not mention any imminent threats of attacks in Egypt. In the video, al-Zawahri wore a white turban and was in front of a plain black background.

Al-Zawahri is Egyptian and was once a member of Islamic Jihad, the other main Egyptian militant group that led violence in the 1990s alongside the original Gamaa Islamiya. In the late 1990s he moved to Afghanistan and joined forces with bin Laden, bringing a number of Egyptian militants with him.

In the video, al-Hakayma, wearing glasses and holding an automatic weapon, said former members had decided to revive the group and rejected their jailed leaders' adherence to a truce. He vowed loyalty to Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, Gamaa's former leader who is in a U.S. prison after his 1995 conviction in a conspiracy to blow up New York City landmarks.

Al-Hakayma was once a "second tier" leader of the original Gamaa, Montasser al-Zayat, an Islamist lawyer who once represented many militants in court, told Al-Jazeera.

It was al-Zawahri's second message in just over a week and his 11th this year. The Egyptian-born militant appeared in a video on July 27 in which he called for Muslims to unite in a holy war against Israel and to join the fighting in Lebanon and Gaza.

8/5/2006 20:16:35 EDT