Why Kill the Messenger When You Can Kill the Message Instead?

I just watched the video of a talk on drone warfare that was delivered a couple weeks ago by Scott Shane, a NYT reporter and the author of Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone, which is embedded above. You can read an account of the talk here: The Pros and Cons of Drones in Counterterrorism.

In addition to discussing drones as a counterterrorism tool in place of a strategy, Shane also pointed out the hugely counterproductive result of killing Anwar al-Awlaki, the premier Islamist propagandist, and U.S. citizen, who had fled the United States for Yemen.

Contrary to expectations, the strike proved that in the Internet age, a propagandist’s operational value could never be truly eliminated. In fact, Awlaki, in death, gained greater lasting relevance. “Ultimately, his real home was on YouTube, and it is today,” Mr. Shane said, citing the 67,000 videos to his name on the site, ranging from a 53-CD set on the life of the Prophet Mohammed to one entitled “the Cult of Jihad.”

“Killing the messenger by no means kills the message,” he said. “He speaks from the Internet today with greater authority than when he was alive, because like Christianity, Islam has a tradition of martyrdom, and if you look at the stuff his fans post, they often call him ‘the martyr Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki.’ His influence has been absolutely remarkable.”

So, our whacking of al-Awlaki, while it might have given us some emotional satisfaction, resulted in amping up his message and giving it the added authority of coming from a martyr to the cause. A big backfire.

And this massive fail occurred despite all the hoopla about countering violent extremism, or counter radicalization, or strategic messaging, or information operations, coming from nearly every agency of the U.S. government today. Are we serious about countering the messages of an al-Awlaki, or are those just buzz words used in budget justifications and grant requests?  

To make matters worse, the USG had the means all along to kill the message itself by discrediting the messenger and causing him to lose credibility with his audience. Al-Awlaki, it turns out, patronized prostitutes like he was a Secret Service agent on TDY in Thailand.

But more than Muslim persecution motivated his abrupt departure. The FBI had been surveilling Awlaki because two of the 9/11 hijackers had attended a mosque he led in San Diego. By monitoring him 24/7, the FBI had concluded that he was not, at that time, affiliated with al-Qaeda. They had, however, observed his un-Islamic secret—that he enjoyed the regular company of prostitutes. His fear of being discredited before his conservative followers was the greatest influence in his decision to leave, Mr. Shane learned from Awlaki’s brother and newly declassified documents. Awlaki discovered the FBI had found him out from a Washington madam, who called him to complain he had brought scrutiny upon her business.

“He couldn’t take that kind of humiliation, so he took off, and [that] was not intended by the FBI,” Mr. Shane said. He added: “Talk about unintended consequences. This guy could have been part of the discussion here, in the tent, ended up very much outside the tent and a very dangerous character.”

There is also another angle that could have been pursued had the USG cared to deal with al-Awlaki as a political threat. It seems his U.S. citizenship might not have been quite completely legal. Back in 2002, Diplomatic Security Service Special Agent Fournier had initiated a passport fraud case against al-Awlaki. The U.S. Attorney in Denver issued an arrest warrant in that case, but ultimately declined to pursue a prosecution. Another opportunity lost.

Had we revoked his citizenship and deported him back then, that might have disrupted some of al-Awlaki's subsequent operations. At the very least, it would have relieved the legal and political embarrassment that resulted from the USG targeting him for an extrajudicial killing.

As Casey Stengel said to the 1962 Mets, can't anybody here play this game? This is why it matters that the USG has a law enforcement agency where we need a security agency, something along the lines of the British MI-5 or Israel's Shin Bet. An agency that seeks to infiltrate, control, disrupt, counter, frustrate, confuse, render ineffective, or otherwise deal with - even extrajudicially - threats to national security. Instead, we have lawyers and law enforcement agents who apparently just cannot get on the same wavelength as our sub-state adversaries.   

OTD in 1953: Big Commie Bites the Dust

Photo from Michael Beschloss

A Washington DC restaurant offered free borscht to celebrate the death of Stalin, which occurred on this day in 1953.

I think I can find something more celebratory than borscht. There's some Ukrainian vodka I've been saving, and that might be appropriate.  

 

 

Most Eyebrow-Raising Headline of the Week

"Man accidentally kills himself while taking photos with gun" - Skaget Valley Herald

Seven Easy Steps to State-Building

"Quik-Bild" kinda rhymes with Carl Bildt

Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Sweden, has drawn upon "the international community’s interventionist wisdom" (??), so famously gained in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, to advise the world on how to build yet another state, this time in Syria.

Here are Bildt's Seven Lessons of State Building:

Lesson 1: Establish a secure environment fast.

Lesson 2: Focus on state building first.

Lesson 3: Know what kind of state to build.

Lesson 4: Focus early on the preconditions for long-term economic growth.

Lesson 5: Nurture a benevolent regional environment.

Lesson 6: The greater the international support, the easier the process.

Lesson 7: Nation-building takes time and resources.

I especially like the one about nurturing a benevolent regional environment. In the region around Syria? Good idea! I'm sure people will get right on that.

Isn't this sort of list normally preceded by the words "Dear Santa?"

Trump, Il Duce, and Bill Clinton

You're the top!
You're the Great Houdini!
You're the top!
You are Mussolini!

The great Twitter troll of the day happened early this morning when Donald Trump retweeted a slogan used by Mussolini:

"@ilduce2016: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.”

I say "used by" Mussolini because it wasn't original to him, but rather is an old Roman proverb. However, he used it in 1928 as one of many slogans for his Italian Fascist movement.

While I don't agree with everything Mussolini ever said or did, the man blazed a trail that was followed unashamedly by many other 1920s Progressives. Was there a similarity between FDR's economic measures - especially the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 - and Italian Fascist economic policy? Mussolini, for one, thought so. The Progressive school of American historians also thought so at the time. Even FDR himself thought so, according to his letters. Case closed.

Lots of political and cultural figures just couldn't get enough of Mussolini back in his day. Winston Churchill and Sigmund Freud were two. He got a
shout-out in a 1934 London production of the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes.

More recently and more interestingly, President Bill Clinton championed "the Third Way" of social democratic politics, a neither-free-market-Capitalism-nor-state-Socialism fusion that originated - by that name - with Mussolini. Let me Google that for you. So did Clinton's buddy Tony Blair and many other figures and institutions on the political left.

Here's where the term and the political strategy originated:

In March 1919, Benito Mussolini reformed a Milan fascio (nationalist group) consisting of 200 men, into the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian Combat Squad). Mussolini created what we called fascism today, during this time. Fascism supported national unity, regardless of class, in the hopes that Italy would go up to the levels of its Roman past. He appeased the upper class, by promising to protect their existence, and the working class by advocating for the creation of a minimun wage and drastic improvements in transportation (like railroads) and infrastructure. Mussolini’s political ideology stimulated both the revolutionaries and traditionalists, and created what he called the ‘Third Way’. This way was neither socialism/communism, nor laissez-faire capitalism, but a combination of ideas from both of the extremes.

So Trump retweeted a slogan Mussolini used in the 1920s? The joke there is that he didn't recognize the slogan or the "Il Duce" name of the sender. So what?

I am much more concerned that so many contemporary leftist politicians consciously use the term and adopt the policy strategy that Mussolini created.

And what the hell is with that Mussolini chin pose that President Obama always strikes? That is just weird and annoying.

A Thought Experiment: Release All GITMO Detainees Today ...

... then kill them all with drones tomorrow. Well, why not? The Obama White House desperately wants to close GITMO - it's "not who we are" and a terrorist recruitment tool, etc. - but, at the same time, it seems to have no angst whatsoever about using its Disposition Matrix, Obama's secret Kill List, the Facebook of Death.

The Obama administration already hunts down and kills released detainees, like this one for instance, only not immediately and not en masse. If it's serious about emptying out GITMO, why not give mass targeted killing a chance? It would satisfy most critics on the right, and would not necessarily upset all the critics of GITMO on the left.

There are critics of drone warfare, to be sure. But many of the activists who oppose GITMO seem to be single-issue types who are so obsessed with the fact we hold detainees at all that they have no energy left for protesting the administration's practice of killing instead of capturing its enemies. Maybe a mass execution would come as a relief to them after the last seven years of frustration over Obama's many failed plans to close GITMO.

The most recent of those plans has the anti-GITMO groups fearing a bait-and-switch tactic, in which Obama would move detainees from Cuba to some new place in the U.S. but continue to hold them indefinitely. See this great piece by Spencer Ackerman: 'No one but himself to blame': how Obama's Guantánamo plans fell through :

As one of his first acts in January 2009, the president decreed that Guantánamo be closed within a year and set subordinates to work on the details. As Obama spoke of “responsibly” closing the facility, civil libertarians began to perceive a gap between what they meant by closing Guantánamo and what the White House meant.

They wanted the president to announce that he would try the long-held detainees in federal courts, then hold those convicted and release those acquitted or unable to stand trial because torture tainted the evidence against them. They also wanted him to forswear trying those charged in military commissions that the supreme court had junked in a 2008 ruling. Every such group, from the ACLU to Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch, understood the phrase “closing Guantánamo” to mean putting an end to those practices, which they contended had undermined longstanding US commitments to the rule of law and human rights.

-- snip --

The human rights groups so encouraged by Obama’s pledge to close Guantánamo smelled a bait-and-switch. Even if Obama got what he wanted, he wouldn’t be closing the facility in any substantive fashion. The indefinite detentions without charge, the military commissions, everything, save torture, that made Guantanamo internationally infamous would live on, except this time closer to home.

The best thing in the article is this amazing quote that shows just how detached from reality professional activists can get. Referring to the resettlement to Bermuda of four Uighur detainees - those are fighters of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement who were captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan where they had been receiving training from Al-Qaeda - one activist had this fantastical vision of what might have been:

Cori Crider of the human rights group Reprieve, who has represented numerous Guantánamo detainees, considers the Uighur resettlement an early, unforced and underappreciated capitulation that sowed the seeds for further failure.

“Just think for a minute if those snapshots had been in America – if from spring ’09, everybody’s mental picture of ex-detainees was five dudes in T-shirts and hipster beards at a backyard barbecue. Everything later would have gone down differently,” Crider said.

The sight of ex-detainees at play in Bermuda so moved Ms. Crider that she wants to build the Uighurs a home and furnish it with love, grow apple trees and honey bees and snow white turtle doves. You know the song. Just change the lyrics to 'grow hipster beards, wear dirty tees, and grill halal kabobs.'

"Everything later would have gone down differently." What?? What color is the sky in Cori Crider's world? In what alternative universe would American voters have a mental picture of dudes with hipster beards when they see Islamic violent extremists, even ones like the Uighurs who only kill Chinese victims?

To share her fantasy, you would have to ignore a massive load of reality. There are practical obstacles to releasing detainees, such as Pentagon foot-dragging that has effectively sabotaged the release mechanism, something that will likely increase as time runs out on Obama's last term. But, more importantly, there is an overwhelming bipartisan political consensus against closing GITMO or bringing detainees to the U.S. You could start with the recent vote on the current defense spending bill, which contained provisions to prevent the transfer of detainees to the U.S. That bill passed the Senate by a vote of 91 to 3, and passed the House 370 to 58. When Obama vetoed the bill, Congress overrode his veto and kept the provisions against transfer.

The same thing happened back in 2009, when Democrats controlled Congress, and the administration wanted to bring detainees to the U.S. and put some of them on trial. That time even Bernie Sanders voted against the bill, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said this:

“You can’t put them in prison unless you release them [from GITMO],” he said. “We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.”

There is no other issue on which so many of our elected representatives agree, and they agree emphatically. GITMO's detainees can't come here, so there will be no backyard barbecue photo-ops. Sorry Ms. Crider, but if you want a cute pet that will signal your virtue you should look into getting a rescue dog. 

So if transfer to the U.S. isn't politically possible, and if we've run out of foreign partners willing to accept more detainees, what can Obama do to make good on his Number 1 political promise of closing GITMO? Back to my thought experiment: since targeted killing using drones is a very feasible option for ex-detainees, as well as for the would-be detainees that we aren't trying to capture anymore, why not release and kill them?

For whatever reason, Official Washington does not have the same objection to extrajudicial killing that it does to detention, not even the objection that it is a cause of terrorist recruitment and radicalization. That is very puzzling to me, because drone warfare clearly is a tool for recruitment and radicalization. There is a broad consensus for that proposition, coming from drone operators themselves as well as from the ranks of senior U.S. military leaders and intelligence and counterterrorism officials and foreign policy experts. Yet, the administration drones on and on, seemingly with no qualms about counterproductive backlash or even the very iffy evidence that leadership decapitation is an effective strategy in the first place.

Why no qualms? I don't know, but maybe it's because the physical and mechanical distance between us and the victims makes drone warfare a political winner even when the victims are unintended (and there may be many unintended victims), while up-close-and-personal measures against detainees in our custody make us queasy.

It's crunch time on Obama's promise to close GITMO, and here's my contribution to the all-nighters his dwindling band of loyal staffers are no doubt having. Go to Pakistan, ask them to accept our ninety or so remaining detainees - the worst of whom, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the planner of the 9/11 attack, is their citizen anyway - and relocate them to North Waziristan where we can pick them off at our leisure.

Food for thought.

Most Eyebrow-Raising Headline of the Week

So he went to a lot of trouble for nothing, then

"Police: Fugitive bids to hide identity, chews off fingertips" - PIX 11 News


Police say they figured out who he is after photos of his tattoos were provided by police in Florida, where he’s wanted on firearms and drug charges.