America overreacting to terrorism? Ted Koppel thinks so

The following appeared in the Wall Street Journal.  It is set out in full because you can't read it on line with out a subscription.

Do I agree with his conclusions?  Yes, I do.  What do you think?

Ted Koppel: America's Chronic Overreaction to Terrorism The country's capacity for self-inflicted damage must have astounded even Osama bin Laden
 By TED KOPPEL
 June 28, 2014, will mark the 100th anniversary of what is arguably the most eventful terrorist attack in history. That was the day that Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, shot and killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.
 In one of those mega-oversimplifications that journalists love and historians abhor, the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his pregnant wife, Sophie, led directly and unavoidably to World War I. Between 1914 and 1918, 37 million soldiers and civilians were injured or killed. If there should ever be a terrorists' Hall of Fame, Gavrilo Princip will surely deserve consideration as its most effective practitioner.
 Terrorism, after all, is designed to produce overreaction. It is the means by which the weak induce the powerful to inflict damage upon themselves—and al Qaeda and groups like it are surely counting on that as the centerpiece of their strategy.
 It appears to be working. Right now, 19 American embassies and a number of consulates and smaller diplomatic outposts are closed for the week due to the perceived threat of attacks against U.S. targets. Meantime, the U.S. has launched drone strikes on al Qaeda fighters in Yemen.
 By the standards of World War I, however, the United States has responded to the goading of contemporary terrorism with relative moderation. Indeed, during almost a decade of terrorist provocation, the U.S. government showed the utmost restraint. In February of 1993, before most of us had any real awareness of al Qaeda, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who would later be identified as the principal architect of 9/11, financed an earlier attack on the World Trade Center with car bombs that killed six and injured more than 1,000.
 Five years later, al Qaeda launched synchronized attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 220 and injuring well over 4,000 people. In October 2000, al Qaeda operatives rammed a boat carrying explosives into the USS Cole, which was docked in Yemen. Seventeen American sailors were killed and 39 were injured.
 Each of these attacks occurred during the presidency of Bill Clinton. In each case, the U.S. responded with caution and restraint. Covert and special operations were launched. The U.S. came close to killing or capturing Osama bin Laden at least twice, but there was a clear awareness among many policy makers that bin Laden might be trying to lure the U.S. into overreacting. Clinton administration counterterrorism policy erred, if at all, on the side of excessive caution.
 Critics may argue that Washington's feckless response during the Clinton years encouraged al Qaeda to launch its most spectacular and devastating attack on Sept. 11, 2001. But President George W. Bush also showed great initial restraint in ordering a response to the 9/11 attacks. Covert American intelligence operatives working with special operations forces coordinated indigenous Afghan opposition forces against the Taliban on the ground, while U.S. air power was directed against the Taliban and al Qaeda as they fled toward Pakistan.
 It was only 18 months later, with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, that the U.S. began to inflict upon itself a degree of damage that no external power could have achieved. Even bin Laden must have been astounded. He had, it has been reported, hoped that the U.S. would be drawn into a ground war in Afghanistan, that graveyard to so many foreign armies. But Iraq! In the end, the war left 4,500 American soldiers dead and 32,000 wounded. It cost well in excess of a trillion dollars—every penny of which was borrowed money.
 Saddam was killed, it's true, and the world is a better place for it. What prior U.S. administrations understood, however, was Saddam's value as a regional counterweight to Iran. It is hard to look at Iraq today and find that the U.S. gained much for its sacrifices there. Nor, as we seek to untangle ourselves from Afghanistan, can U.S. achievements there be seen as much of a bargain for the price paid in blood and treasure.
 At home, the U.S. has constructed an antiterrorism enterprise so immense, so costly and so inexorably interwoven with the defense establishment, police and intelligence agencies, communications systems, and with social media, travel networks and their attendant security apparatus, that the idea of downsizing, let alone disbanding such a construct, is an exercise in futility.
 The Sunday TV talk shows this past weekend resonated with the rare sound of partisan agreement: The intercepted "chatter" between al Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri and the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was sufficiently ominous that few questions have been raised about the government's decision to close its embassies.
 It may be that an inadequate response to danger signals that resulted in the death of the U.S. ambassador in Benghazi last September contributed to an overreaction in the current instance. Clearly, it does not hurt, at a time when the intelligence community is charged with being overly intrusive in its harvesting of intelligence data, that we be presented with dramatic evidence of the program's effectiveness.
 Yet when all is said and done, al Qaeda—by most accounts decimated and battered by more than a decade of the worst damage that the world's most powerful nation can inflict—remains a serious enough threat that Washington ordered 19 of its embassies to pull up their drawbridges and take shelter for fear of what those terrorists still might do.
 Will terrorists kill innocent civilians in the years to come? Of course. They did so more than 100 years ago, when they were called anarchists—and a responsible nation-state must take reasonable measures to protect its citizens. But there is no way to completely eliminate terrorism.
 The challenge that confronts us is how we will live with that threat. We have created an economy of fear, an industry of fear, a national psychology of fear. Al Qaeda could never have achieved that on its own. We have inflicted it on ourselves.
 Over the coming years many more Americans will die in car crashes, of gunshot wounds inflicted by family members and by falling off ladders than from any attack by al Qaeda.
 There is always the nightmare of terrorists acquiring and using a weapon of mass destruction. But nothing would give our terrorist enemies greater satisfaction than that we focus obsessively on that remote possibility, and restrict our lives and liberties accordingly.
 Mr. Koppel is a special correspondent for NBC News and news analyst for NPR.
 A version of this article appeared August 7, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: America's Chronic Overreaction to Terrorism.
 

Stephen M. Flatow

9/11 Victims Lose in Appeals Court

Some bad news for victims of 9/11 and their families in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

The hopes of plaintiffs who attempted to hold dozens of foreign organizations and individuals responsible for aiding and abetting al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks were dashed yesterday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

In three separate decisions in multi-district litigation over the attacks, the circuit upheld the dismissal of claims brought against most of the defendants, including the bin Laden family's construction company, Saudi and Sudanese banks and Islamic charities under the Anti-Terrorism Act, the Alien Tort Statute, the Torture Victim Protection Act and common law tort.

I'm personally familiar with the efforts required to obtain compensation from terrorists and their supporters.  The plaintiffs should not be discouraged by this turn of events.  It's just time to regroup.

Read the article from the New Jersey Law Journal here.
Alisa Flatow
Stephen M. Flatow

So much for secrets, I agree with Peter King

What's with the intelligence community?  I always thought that operatives--in the good old days, spies--were to be anonymous, working in the background, with methods of operation and identities protected.

Comes now the CIA and Saudi intelligence authorities talking about the operation that interrupted another Al Qaeda underwear bomb plot.

As reported in the New York Times,

The suicide bomber dispatched by the Yemen branch of Al Qaeda last month to blow up a United States-bound airliner was actually an intelligence agent for Saudi Arabia who infiltrated the terrorist group and volunteered for the mission, American and foreign officials said Tuesday.

 I'm not the only one puzzled by this behavior.  Congressman Peter T. King of Long Island, New York has also weighed in:

But American intelligence officials were angry about the disclosure of the Qaeda plot, first reported Monday by The Associated Press, which had held the story for several days at the request of the C.I.A. They feared the leak would discourage foreign intelligence services from cooperating with the United States on risky missions in the future, said Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

OK, guys, good job here, but let's keep these stories out of the newspapers.

Well, that's what I think.

Stephen M. Flatow

This isn't Showtime's Homeland

This is the real stuff, not a made for TV series, about US efforts to capture would be terrorists before they can do harm. The case is that of

Barry Walter Bujol Jr., a 30-year-old Hempstead, Texas, resident and former student at Prairie View A&M University, has been convicted for attempting to provide material support to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a designated foreign terrorist organization...

To get an idea of how these cases unfold, read the full report from the US Attorney here.

Keep up the good work ladies and gentlemen.

Well, that's what I have to say.

Stephen M. Flatow

alisa flatow israel

Wall Street Journal - The War on Terror Goes On

The editors of the Wall Street Journal add up the results of the past few weeks on the war on terror.

The main credit here goes to the folks in the intelligence community that our friends on the left love to hate.

Credit goes as well to Barack Obama, who as President has abandoned much of his previous opposition to proven antiterror measures like warrantless wiretaps, and who has only stepped up the campaign of targeted hits on terrorist ringleaders. He's fortunate the Bush Administration left him with a potent intelligence team and the precedent of taking the fight, pre-emptively, to the terrorists on their home turf.

Highlights:

• U.S. special forces operating in Somalia killed top al Qaeda operative Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, believed to have been a planner in the November 2002 bombing of a hotel in Kenya in which 15 were killed.
• Also killed in recent days was senior al Qaeda leader Ilyas Kashmiri—via a U.S. drone attack in western Pakistan—and Indonesian terrorist mastermind Noordin Muhammad Top, suspected in the July bombing of two Jakarta hotels.
• A British court convicted three men for an August 2006 plot to blow up several airliners over the Atlantic. The convictions were obtained largely on the strength of communications intercepts—possibly warrantless—gathered by the U.S. National Security Agency, according to a report by Britain's Channel 4.

Doesn't sound like a very high "body count" does it? But as the premise behind body counts has long been debunked, I, too, think it's been a good week.

Read the full editorial.

Stephen M. Flatow

Yearning for the good old days

That's Beetle Bailey on the right, Plato on the left.

Planning for Mumbai-style Attack - a follow-up

We previously wrote about NYPD Trains for Mumbai-style Attack. John Yoo, writing in the Wall Street Journal, "Yes, We Did Plan for Mumbai-Style Attacks in the U.S. Why the latest assault on Bush anti-terror strategy could make us less safe," compares the Bush administration's response to al-Qaeda's attacks and the threat of a Mumbai-style attack happening here with new policies of the Obama administration.

Suppose al Qaeda branched out from crashing airliners into American cities. Using small arms, explosives, or biological, chemical or nuclear weapons they could seize control of apartment buildings, stadiums, ships, trains or buses. As in the November 2008 Mumbai attacks, texting and mobile email would make it easy to coordinate simultaneous assaults in a single city.

After 9/11, we had a responsibility to consider all possible threats.In the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, strikes on New York City and Washington, D.C., these were hypotheticals no more. They became real scenarios for which responsible civilian and military leaders had to plan. The possibility of such attacks raised difficult, fundamental questions of constitutional law, because they might require domestic military operations against an enemy for the first time since the Civil War. Could our armed forces monitor traffic in a city where terrorists were preparing to strike, search for cells using surveillance technology, or use force against a hijacked vessel or building?

According to Yoo, while the military did its job, "it was the duty of the government to plan for worst-case scenarios -- even if, thankfully, those circumstances never materialized." Such efforts raised "unprecedented questions under the most severe time pressures."

Judging from the media coverage of Justice Department memos from those days --released this week by the Obama administration -- this careful contingency planning amounted to a secret plot to overthrow the Constitution and strip Americans of their rights. As the New York Times has it, Bush lawyers "rush into sweeping away this country's most cherished rights." "Irresponsible," harrumphed former Clinton administration Justice Department officials.

Yoo's article does not descend into an apologia for Bush administration tactics. It is a look at the Constitutional underpinnings of the post-9/11 actions of the government going as far back as Alexander Hamilton's opinions on the use of Federal force.

To blame Yoo and others for abuse of Constitutional powers is just silly and that's what is "irresponsible."

There's a good history lesson here, one that folks on the left and right should read. Read the full article.

The Coming Swarm - Get ready for small attacks

The New York Times runs an op-ed by John Arquilla, who teaches in the special operations program at the Naval Postgraduate School and is the author of “Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military.” His topic-- the prospect of more "Mumbai model" terror operations, including the possibility of similar attacks taking place in the United States.

What's the attractiveness of these smaller group attacks?

The basic concept is that hitting several targets at once, even with just a few fighters at each site, can cause fits for elite counterterrorist forces that are often manpower-heavy, far away and organized to deal with only one crisis at a time. This approach certainly worked in Mumbai, India, last November, where five two-man teams of Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives held the city hostage for two days, killing 179 people. The Indian security forces, many of which had to be flown in from New Delhi, simply had little ability to strike back at more than one site at a time.

So, why should America get ready for such attacks? Because it's already happened here in the form of the 9/11 attacks "where four small teams of Qaeda operatives simultaneously seized commercial aircraft and turned them into missiles, flummoxing all our defensive responses."

So how are swarms to be countered? The simplest way is to create many more units able to respond to simultaneous, small-scale attacks and spread them around the country. This means jettisoning the idea of overwhelming force in favor of small units that are not “elite” but rather “good enough” to tangle with terrorist teams. In dealing with swarms, economizing on force is essential.

It's not too late to develop a response. Read the full op-ed here.

Follow-up to al-Qaeda's Panning of Barack Obama

The New York Times has now weighed in with a story on al-Qaeda's dissillusionment with the election of Barack Obama.

Just what is al-Qaeda up to?

Ronald Walters, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, said he wondered whether Al Qaeda was responding to the aggressive tone of Mr. Obama’s campaign pledges to go after the terrorist network and capture or kill Mr. bin Laden. Dr. Walters said that if the tape was an attempt to reach black Americans or the Third World, it was “ham handed” and futile. [Pun intended? SMF]

“You’re talking about someone who looks like the rest of the world, and that’s got to be threatening to them,” he said, referring to Mr. Obama. “On 9/11, Al Qaeda didn’t make any racial distinctions in who it killed, and people remember that.”

Read Al Qaeda Coldly Acknowledges Obama Victory

Of Course You Realize, This Means War. Terrorists to President-elect Obama: The honeymoon's over.

BEST OF THE WEB TODAY NOVEMBER 19, 2008
Of Course You Realize, This Means War
Terrorists to President-elect Obama: The honeymoon's over.
By JAMES TARANTO

Ah, for the lost innocence of . . . well, of three days ago, when David Ingatius of the Washington Post penned these words:

Let's try for a moment to read the mind of an al-Qaeda operative in the remote mountains of Waziristan as he listens to the news on the radio. His worldview has been roiled recently by two events--one confounding his image of the West and the other confirming it.

The upsetting news for our imaginary jihadist is the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States. This wasn't supposed to happen, in al-Qaeda's playbook. Its aim was to draw the "far enemy" (meaning America) ever deeper onto the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Instead, the jihadists must cope with a president-elect who promises to get out of Iraq and whose advisers are talking about negotiating with the Taliban. And to top it off, the guy's middle name is Hussein.

That honeymoon sure didn't last. Today Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's Joe Biden, released a recording that, as the Middle East Media Research Institute mildly puts it, "criticized U.S. president-elect Barack Obama." Memri has the transcript, in which Zawahiri addresses Obama in the second person:

"You represent the direct opposite of honorable black Americans like Malik al-Shabazz, or Malcolm X (may Allah have mercy on him). You were born to a Muslim father, but you chose to stand in the ranks of the enemies of the Muslims, and pray the prayer of the Jews, although you claim to be Christian, in order to climb the rungs of leadership in America. And so you promised to back Israel, and you threatened to strike the tribal regions in Pakistan, and to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan, in order for the crimes of the American Crusade in it to continue. And last Monday, your aircraft killed 40 Afghan Muslims at a wedding party in Kandahar."

As for Malik al-Shabazz (may Allah have mercy on him), he was born to a black pastor killed by white bigots, but Allah favored him with guidance to Islam, and so he prided himself on his fraternity with the Muslims, and he condemned the crimes of the Crusader West against the weak and oppressed, and he declared his support for peoples resisting American occupation, and he spoke about the worldwide revolution against the Western power structure."

That's why it wasn't strange that Malik al-Shabazz (may Allah have mercy on him) was killed, while you have climbed the rungs of the presidency to take over the leadership of the greatest criminal force in the history of mankind and the leadership of the most violent Crusade ever against the Muslims."And in you and in Colin Powell, Rice and your likes, the words of Malcolm X (may Allah have mercy on him) concerning 'House Negroes' are confirmed."

Even those who think the victims of 9/11 were little Eichmanns who got what was coming to them cannot possibly countenance such racial insensitivity. The only thing that can be said in Zawahiri's favor is that he didn't call Obama "Hussein." (Shame on you, David Ignatius.)

And in case you think we're just looking on the Sunni side of the street, Memri also has an address by Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a member of the Iranian Assembly of Experts*, in which he expresses skepticism about the president-elect's promise of change:

Other people run the show. For almost 60 years – since the days of Eisenhower – American foreign policy has not changed one bit. It's only the game that has changed. Sometimes they think they can control things by using the slogan of change, and other times by using the slogan of the war on terror. So it wouldn't be right to pin one's hopes on them. . . .The American politicians should know that as long as they persist in their arrogance, this [Iranian] people will not change. The slogans of this people will remain the same. Our people has not changed one bit. Its slogan of hatred toward America continues to resound: Death to America.The crowd then chants the familiar "Death to America."

The ayatollah should be careful what he wishes for. After all, he could change U.S. policy to bring it in line with a certain Beach Boys number.

* What would we do without 'em?

Good writing Mr. Taranto.