UN Admits to Flawed Security System

The Washington Times' UN correspondent seems to be almost alone - certainly alone among Washington DC news media - in covering the United Nation's internal review of the car-bombing of its headquarters in Algiers last December. See Dual roles said to put U.N. staffers at risk , the text of which is copied below, and U.N. faults 7 in Algeria bombing.

The latest development is a heavily redacted report, released last week, that acknowledges systemic weaknesses in the UN's new Department of Safety and Security and its country threat assessments. In brief, Algiers was rated low on the UN/DSS threat ranking system despite having an active and long-standing indigenous terrorist threat and an emerging transnational threat. Apparently, the Resident Representative in Algiers and other UN officials did not wish to raise the threat ranking to a realistically high level for fear of offending the host government.

A low threat ranking has logical consequences when resources are allocated by the UN/DSS in New York, so Algiers did not receive the perimeter security enhancements its security advisor in Algiers had requested long before the December 11 attack. By the time the Algerians discovered evidence of targeting (a sketch of the UN's Algiers headquarters was discovered on a cell phone in the possession of an al Qaeda affiliate) it was far too late to start constructing the kind of anti-ram vehicle barriers that would have limited the damage done by a vehicle-borne explosive device.

There are two lessons to be learned here, both of which will be familiar to those of my colleagues who remember going through very lean years of security funding in the 1990s.

First, effective anti-ram barriers cost a lot of money, and they are notoriously difficult to incorporate into city streets, most of which are already full of buried water, gas, power and sewage lines that run where the barrier footings need to go. By the time you know for sure you'll need them, it's far too late to start the necessary planning, budgeting, and asking for municipal permission to tear up city streets.

Second, country threat ratings are an indispensable tool of risk management, and they are the only means of providing an equitable distribution of security resources. The threat rating system must not become a political football. [Since I'm trying to avoid discussing 'matters of official concern' I will bite my tongue rather than suggest the UN isn't the only organization to consistently under-assess the terrorism threat in Algiers.]

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UNITED NATIONS Inherently flawed security is compromising the safety of tens of thousands of U.N. employees around the world, according to the organization's third report on the fatal Dec. 11 bombing of U.N. offices in Algiers.

Algeria, where an explosives-packed truck bomb killed 24, "was not on the radar screen" for U.N. security officials who, said the authors of the report, "were preoccupied with Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia and Sudan."

Ralph Zacklin, former U.N. legal adviser, led the five-person inquiry to assign responsibility for the attack. Seventeen of those killed were U.N. staffers.

On Sunday, Mr. Zacklin's panel submitted to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon an 88-page report with thousands of pages of annexes.

Mr. Ban's office has refused to release that document for security and privacy concerns, but on Wednesday distributed a four-page summary of the report.

Shortly after 9 a.m. on Dec. 11, 2007, a truck bomb barreled past a minimal barrier and slammed into an office used by several U.N. agencies.

Fire engulfed the building. In addition to those killed, scores were injured. Most were Algerian.

Responsibility was quickly claimed by a local insurgency called al Qaeda in the Maghreb, a group that had been publicly agitating against the presence of the United Nations and other foreign organizations in Algeria.

There had been several bombings in the capital over the preceding months that were claimed by the same group.

Nonetheless, out of courtesy to the Algerian government's political sensibilities, U.N. officials did not raise the threat assessment, nor vigorously demand additional security measures to be put in place, the report said.

Despite these threats, and the repeated pleas for assistance by local security officer Babacar Ndiaye to the U.N. Department of Safety and Security (DSS) in New York, nothing happened.

Mr. Ndiaye was killed in the explosion.

Marc de Bernis of the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) was responsible for conveying security concerns to the Algerian government because he was the most senior official at the post. He was also responsible for running his agency's programs in the region.

Mr. Zacklin said this dual tasking, standard in most U.N. duty stations, is a "design flaw" that must changed.

"It's not hard to imagine that a person wearing two hats may find himself or herself in conflict," he said.

Mr. de Bernis, a French national who has since been posted by UNDP to Brussels, is currently on medical leave, according to a UNDP spokesman.

The UNDP Wednesday acknowledged the difficulty of the post.

"As Mr. Zacklin said, there are clearly built-in tensions between the twin responsibilities, of security and program delivery, assigned to the head of a U.N. field office," UNDP spokesman Stephane Dujarric wrote in an e-mail. "Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that we address these built-in ambiguities in the U.N. system's security architecture so as to better clarify issues of functional and personal roles and responsibilities in the future."

The Zacklin panel also found that at U.N. headquarters in New York, the security department was hobbled by poor training and recruitment, limited resources and other problems.

Two previous U.N. reports on the Algeria bombing also paint a grim picture of an understaffed department constrained by hierarchy and turf wars, in which bad news was unwelcome.

Terrorism Alert Fatigue

A panel hosted by the Center for American Progress has some good advice for the next administration on the subject of terrorism alerts and warnings (Security experts call for improved public communications). Here's the key quote:

The next president must develop a more effective and disciplined way of communicating to the public about what kind of threats the country faces and what individuals and families can do to be prepared for disasters, a panel of homeland security experts said Friday ... The next president, regardless of which party wins, will be able to chart a new course for communicating with the public, according to experts at a panel discussion hosted by the Center for American Progress. "I think that, by and large, the president needs to reassure the public that they are not going to see a repeat of what went on for the last eight years," said Jerome Hauer, chief executive officer of the Hauer Group and former HHS assistant secretary. "The public is fatigued," he added. "They are tired of the sky-is-falling mind-set." He said the next president needs to ensure that public warnings are based on solid information and that the federal government sends out messages out of an urgent need, not because it wants to distract the public.

It's a coincidence of timing, but the panel could have been talking about the warning (or "analytical note") that the FBI and DHS sent to law enforcement this week and which was leaked to NBC News.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security today issued an analytical "note" to U.S. law-enforcement officials cautioning that al-Qaida terrorists have in the past expressed interest in attacking public buildings using a dozen suicide bombers each carrying 20 kilograms of explosives.

Authors with the U.S. Office of Intelligence and Analysis added that they have "no credible or specific information that terrorists are planning operations against public buildings in the United States." The FBI and DHS analysts said they were releasing the note because "it is important for local authorities and building owners and operators to be aware of potential attack tactics."

Once again, the sky is not falling. There is no impending attack to warn about, and no feasible steps law enforcement agencies, or building owners, could take to prevent the scenario the FBI and DHS want them to be aware of. So why send this warning out? Where's the urgent need?

And sending it during October in an election year is simply begging for cynical political interpretations.

It's Not Pronounced "Pahk-ee-stahn"

I caught only about ten minutes of the second Presidential debate yesterday (due to the demands of a normal family life, I rarely spend my leisure time watching TV in the evenings) but that was enough to hear the name "Pakistan" mispronounced about twenty times. By coincidence, this week my English as a Second Language class is working on long and short vowel sounds, so maybe I was particularly sensitive to how both candidates mispronounced the word such that the last syllable rhymed with "don" when it should rhyme with "man." In McCain's case, he usually said "Pahk-ee-stahn," and Obama always said "Puck-ee-stahn." They're a bad influence on my students.

I once had an ESL student from Kosovo who would go into a rage when he heard native English speakers twist the 'Stans - Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, etc. - into 'Stahns. He could see that such people are pretending that a foreign word mispronounced in English is being correctly pronounced in whichever foreign language. But it's not, and people who do that are just putting on airs.

If one of the candidates would drop the faux foreign pronunciation and just say "Pak-ee-stan," I'd be so happy I'll vote for him.

U.S. Embassy in London for Sale

The State Department has announced that the U.S. Embassy in London will be moving to a new site in a few years, leaving it's prime downtown location in Grosvenor Square for a property to be purchased in a former industrial area on the outskirts of the city near the landmark Battersea power station. Here are stories by the Washington Post and the UK Times.

Incidentally, the Battersea power station is a famous coal-fired power plant built in the 1930s, the first in a series that created a national power grid, and it has been a protected historic site since it went out of service in the 1980s. You've probably seen its distinctive four-chimney main building, or its art deco interior, since it has been used as the setting for many television programs set in London, two classic rock album covers (The Who and Pink Floyd both used it) and dozens of movies from 1936's Sabotage to this year's Batman: the Dark Knight.

The current embassy property is so extraordinarily valuable that the proceeds of its sale will pay for the construction of the new embassy. The total price tag for this land deal will most likely exceed the $700 million spent on the new Baghdad embassy complex, thus setting a new record for Most Expensive New Embassy Ever.

Obama: Cool, Aloof, and Insensitive (Say the Brits)

By now, most people will have seen the news about the July 2008 letter sent by Sir Nigel Sheinwald, British Ambassador to the United States, to Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister, to prepare him for a visit by Senator Barack Obama to London.

The British Ambassador described Obama as "temperamentally cool" and "maybe aloof, insensitive," and one about whom "the charge of elitism ... [is] not entirely unfair." Wow! When the Brits call you cold and haughty, you ought to take a good look in the mirror.

Of course, it might just be that the Ambassador isn't the best judge of American politicians, since he also reported that Obama "demands calm and 'no dramas' from those around him ... That will, I think, be an important criterion for his choice of running mate." Sir Nigel couldn't have been more wrong about that prediction. Joe Biden is never calm, and much of the time he is more dramatic than a Mexican soap opera.

Dancing Queen, the Improved Version

	Make your own at MoreCowbell.dj

The Rolling Stones Needed More Cowbell

	Make your own at MoreCowbell.dj

Here's a great application for you music lovers. Visit the site at the link above, upload an MP3 from your computer, and then improve it by adding more cowbell. I think Mick Jagger really benefits from that treatment, and I'm experimenting now with an improved version of ABBA's Dancing Queen to surprise my wife.

Go ahead, you can really explore the studio space.