ANTI-ANTI-DRONE WARFARE

“I have visited the UK before without incident. I have long admired British culture.”

So begins Yemeni drone warfare investigator Baraa Shiban’s description of what happened to him at London’s Gatwick Airport on September 23, published 2 days later by The Guardian.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/25/like-david-miranda-interrogated-british-airport

“I spent part of my education in Wales,” Shiban continues. “This time I came at the invitation of Chatham House to speak at a seminar on Yemen. Standing at passport control, bleary eyed from the long flight, I expected another routine trip.

“The border agent asked what my job is. When I explained I was the Yemen project co-ordinator for London-based legal charity Reprieve he said, ‘Sir, please come with me. We have a Terrorism Act and I have some questions I need to ask you.’"

This was Shiban’s welcome to the low-calorie version of what had happened to David Miranda, the life partner of Guardian reporter Glen Greenwald, and the business go-between for Greenwald and his investigative partner Laura Poitras.  Miranda was detained at Heathrow Airport on August 18, and dispossessed of his cellphone, his computer, and files containing more revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, detailing the agency’s surveillance and other activities in the interest, the NSA would claim, of American national security.

Miranda was held incommunicado and harshly questioned by officers of the Metropolitan Police for 9 hours before being released.  Shiban’s security toss took just an hour and a half, but it shared some of the same abusive and deranged anti-terrorist assumptions that marred Miranda’s interrogation.

“The suited man quizzed me about my political opinions,” Shiban says. “When I suggested that these should have no bearing on whether I am allowed into the country, the agent threatened to hold me for the maximum extent of his powers. ‘I am authorised to detain you for up to nine hours," he said. "We have only been here for an hour, but we can be here for up to nine. So you understand what this can lead to.’

“He took my Reprieve business card and disappeared. When he returned,  … A telling exchange followed: ‘So,’ he asked, ‘does your organisation have anything to do with terrorism in Yemen?’

“I replied, ‘My organisation addresses counter-terrorism abuses inside the country.’

“‘Exactly!’ He said. ‘Why doesn't your organisation do something about the terrorism that happens in your country, instead of focusing on the counter-terrorism abuses?’

“What could I reply? Of course I oppose terrorism. But I also oppose the secret air war in my country – waged by the US, apparently with covert support from the UK and others. The drone war in my homeland has claimed innocent lives and terrorised civilians. It operates wholly outside the law, and serves only to fuel anti-western sentiment.”

I want to butt in here, to make 3 points:

1)    I agree with Shiban’s negative judgments of the American directed drone attacks against suspected Al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen.

2)    I have been impressed with the evidence he, and any number of reputable local and global news organizations have compiled, suggesting that although our targeting is intended to be selective and precise, it is often misinformed about its selections and indiscriminate in its effects.  The bottom line, any number of reports from Yemen have said, is that any tactical benefit derived from killing some “bad guys,” and I’ll agree with the NSA that the drone-missile-struck Islamist preacher and accused terrorist recruiter Anwar Al-Awlaki was a very bad guy, is negated, nay overwhelmed, by the strategic disrepute America has earned in Yemen by killing more than a few innocent, non-terrorist civilians.  One suspects, just to mention one case, that Al-Awlaki’s 16 year old son Abdurrahim, also drone-popped, in a separate attack, might not have been that bad.

3)    Whether you or the British government agree with Shiban’s conclusions, his subject is worth considering, and his evidence was bravely and professionally collected, and is essential to any rational consideration, affirmation or rejection of an increasingly important component of American and British military practice, missile-armed drones.

4)    Critically considering drone warfare is something every military, intelligence, or political official, indeed every citizen, should do, and is NOT to be confused with aiding or abetting terrorism.

If you think that distinction is obvious and can go without saying, you probably missed a Greenwald article published in The Guardian the same day as Shiban’s story of his arrest.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/25/nsa-uk-drone-opponents-threats

In it, Greenwald makes public an entry identified by Snowden as being from “a top secret internal US government website,” used only by people "with top secret clearance and public key infrastructure certificates," which Greenwald notes equates “the most basic political and legal opposition to drone attacks [with] ‘propaganda campaigns’ from ‘America's ‘adversaries’”

“One specific entry,” Greenwald writes, “discusses ‘threats to unmanned aerial vehicles,’ including

1)    ‘air defense threats’,

2)    ‘jamming of UAV sensor systems’,

3)    ‘terrestrial weather’,  

4)    ‘electronic warfare employed against the command and control system’ [and]

5)    ‘propaganda campaigns that target UAV use.’”

What does this high-powered NSA analyst (I’ll bet my money these are the “thoughts” of a “Beltway Bandit” contractor) consider enemy propaganda?

One example is the idea, being pressed in the Federal courts by The ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights, that executing American citizens, like the Awlakis, father and son, without formal accusation or trial, deprives them of their Constitutional rights to due process.

You don’t have to be a law professor to see the logic of this argument, agree with it or not, and I don’t.  But, you do have to be totalitarian or a fool to use the label “enemy propaganda” to try to preempt its presentation and discussion.

Not to say, you can’t be a totalitarian and a fool like those who tried to quash any consideration of the wisdom of continuing the war in Vietnam with labels like “Communist,” or “tool of Hanoi.”

Or the "senior American counterterrorism official" who smeared the UK-based non-profit The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, whose website says it has collaborated with such respected news organizations as the BBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera English, the Independent, the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times, Le Monde, the Guardian, the Independent, the Daily Mirror, the Observer and the Daily Mirror.   Said this fellow, who undoubtedly has an access key to the “top secret website” mentioned above, "Let's be under no illusions – there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign [drone warfare] and help Al-Qaeda succeed."

He must believe the crapulous in-house propaganda against “propaganda.”  And he’s not the only one.  Thus summer several folks in the Obama Administration conspired to deny a visa to Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who represents family members of victims killed by US drones in a suit against the US government.

Akbar had been invited to come to the US to testify before a Congressional committee, not necessarily because members agree with his criticisms of the US drone campaign in northwest Pakistan, or endorse his arguments in behalf of his clients and their relatives allegedly killed or maimed in drone attacks, but because he has information about when and where drone attacks have occurred, and whom they killed or injured, and what the popular reaction to these attacks has been, in the affected “tribal areas,” and across the country, where every poll shows deep Pakistani hostility to the US drone campaign.

If you want to understand the leaders of Pakistan, from President Nawaz Sharif on down, something any responsible Congressperson would want to do, it is useful to hear Akbar out, perhaps even cross-examine him rigorously. But thanks to the Obama Administration, Congress, the news media, and the American people have been denied the chance.

Do you suspect that sometimes, the security apparat inflates the threat of terrorism?

Do you worry that drones kill too many civilians?

Do you think the net effect of deadly remote-controlled American attacks inside other countries’ national territory may be to alienate people over there, fuel more terrorism, and create more hatred of the US?

Someone high up in the NSA is being told that all these ideas are just "adversary propaganda themes."

In fact, the document Snowden showed Greenwald labeled  “the phrase ‘drone strike’ …a ‘loaded term,’ [designed to] ‘invoke an emotional reaction’. This, the document asserts, ‘is what propaganda intends to do.’”

Yes, Polonius, propaganda plays with people’s emotions, in large measure by limiting or eradicating their options for rational consideration.        

The Brits gave Baraa Shiban an unwarranted hard time, but they let him give his speech at Chatham House, which was probably not unlike the presentation he had been allowed to make to Congress back in May.

How’s the old song go? “It’s a long, long way from May to December, but the days grow short when you reach September.”  Too short for the beleaguered Obama Administration to permit a full discussion of the drones falling in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and soon, I’ll bet, in Somalia.

Wanna bet, at the NSA and the White House, they’ve already got a drones’ “enemies list?”

 

AL-SHABAAB: ENDGAME?

For a very interesting and well-informed perspective on Al Shabaab and the recent terrorist attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, I recommend this report from the always-excellent Peter Greste of Al Jazeera English.

http://blogs.aljazeera.com/blog/africa/al-shabab-dying-or-resurgent#.UkkfOUsSLD8.twitter

Greste suggests that my (when it was published) contrarian analysis of Al Shabaab as a declining rather than ascending threat is becoming more of a commonplace in Nairobi, where he is based.  He then offers a refutation, which, in my typically insistent way, I see largely as a confirmation.

What’s my logic?

The picture he paints of Al Shabaab activity inside Somalia is of a once-aspiring revolutionary movement now descended into simple, if widespread criminality.  The once alluring moral authority of Al Shabaab’s late predecessor the Islamic Courts Movement has devolved from religious fidelity into extremist puritanical tyranny.  Gone, as in much of once Taliban-controlled Afghanistan (and northwest Pakistan), is all but a fragment of popular support.  Discredited is a group that once claimed to be better, both in morality and efficiency, than the Government.  What has replaced subscription or tolerance is just fear.

Al Shabaab’s wannabe prophets of a purer Islam are now seen just as dangerous criminals.  Their success is simply extortion.  They may still be a constant and menacing presence in Mogadishu, as Greste bravely reports from the scene, but almost everyone who lives there wishes only for their absence.

This in all the important terms of Al Shabaab’s one-time ambitions is devastating failure.

It must also be said, and seriously thought upon, that in today’s difficult world, noted in my previous pieces on the Kenya attack, a weak central government means lots of ungoverned spaces.  And in those inchoate zones, there are many desperate and angry people who can still be mobilized into desperate and angry actions.  And, worse, there is endless, easy access for these desperados to powerful, portable weapons, supplied by rich and irresponsible sponsors to fanatic criminals like those acting as Al Shabaab, who commissioned the Westgate Mall raid.

As presently constituted, the armed and police forces of the government of Somalia, and the visiting troops of the African Union, the Kenyan Army and the Ethiopian Army and Air Force, lack both the will or the capability to pursue and extirpate the urban extortionists or hidey-hole terrorist commanders out in the Somali bush.

That may change, as an effective response to the Nairobi attack is organized.  Again, as I said before, attackers come with “jackets,” criminal and security files, so that, once identified, they and their contacts go up on military and intelligence radar screens.  For them, the hunt is on.  It will be long, slow and expensive, and alas, violent and often not-well-focused.  But if Al Shabaab and its diminishing support network are not already on the run, they soon will be.

But for them, the revolution is over, and whatever battles they may win, the war is lost.  Now (as always) the real job is to make government in Somalia, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, (in Kenya and Ethiopia, Congo and Zimbabwe, and for God’s sake, in the USA) work.

This struggle will be longer and harder than eliminating Al Shabaab.

PRIVACY AND SECRECY

The “debate” over PRISM and other American and international snooping programs grows more pathetic by the day, still dominated by laments over these “evil” new technologies of data gathering and collation.

The latest “highlight” was conservative columnist Robert Samuelson’s regretting the invention of the Internet.  This is the return of the mad Irish King Cuchulainn cursing the ocean’s waves.

The Internet, with all its dangers and opportunities is here, Bob; get over it.  Or better, learn to manage it.

The same must be said for today’s new surveillance technology: it exists, and any national security agency that fails to use it should be disbanded.  The question is how are these new opportunities to monitor people and their communications used by the NSA, its colleagues and competitors.  It is a given that they can and do register and file just about every form and piece of human communication.  But, what triggers more particular and invasive attention to people or institutions?  And once closer looks are begun, who gets access to selected materials?  Who monitors the snoopers from both inside and outside the system, and what powers do they have to rein in irresponsible or unnecessary prying?  And who tells what about all of this to the people who, in a democracy, should have the ultimate power and responsibility?

These are hard questions, but familiar ones, since they recur often, whenever the balance of power between citizens and their states is transformed by technological or cultural change.

In this case, the ongoing development of surveillance technology and data gathering and mining, like the ongoing development of global use of the Internet creates both dangers and opportunities for both sides of the citizen/state balance of power.

On the one hand, for the 21^st Century and beyond, the uncomfortable fact is that personal privacy is dead, and not just because of government supercomputers. The global distribution of mobile phones with audio or video recording capabilities has created an environment in which anything that happens “in public” is almost as likely to be recorded as your “private” phone calls, texts messages, snail- and e-mails, and probably more likely to be distributed with or without your permission.

But, there is a countervailing truth here: government secrecy is as almost as dead as privacy; people have never-before-equaled powers to rip the government’s blindfolds off their eyes.  The fatal flaw of secret systems, that they require human participation, and inevitably, every secret decision can produce active dissent, is nothing new.  But what is new and growing is the ability of whistleblowers to record events, and to distribute the recordings and their dissident criticisms to the world at large. Thus, what really be created is a new and different balance of powers between citizens and states, uneasy, instable, but still a balance of powers.

And the evidence suggests, people have already begun adapting to this new balance.  Even old folks like me have noticed that younger people have different attitudes toward and expectations for privacy.  They are prone to exhibit more of and about themselves than their parents did. Largely this is because they can; but it also because others can create these displays, with little to stop them, and that such exposures create far less embarrassment or social cost.  Note the political returns of Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner and Mark Sanford, just to name 3.  Every college newspaper, it seems, has either a sex or a porn column, which trade in what even fairly recent graduates might consider TMI, too much information.

This is not to say, there are no norms, but just to note that, for most people under 30 the limits on personal disclosure are looser than for older people.  When it comes to the NSA snoopers, the key task will be to determine the norms, not on what you can do, but on what you can do without inviting real surveillance.  If you can fly beneath that radar, and would-be terrorists have long known this and did not need Edward Snowden to tell them to be careful, you can do almost anything you want, until it is too late for even the most aware parents, potential employers or professional counter-terrorists to prevent it.

So, Norms for Our Time:  when you are on the phone or the Internet, assume your every move is being turned into government data, and when you are on the street or anywhere “in public,” assume there is a good possibility everything you say or do is being recorded. 

That’s relatively easy.  Personal and cultural change is constant and people are used to dealing with it.  Much harder is to define and apply rules and limits to powerful institutions like governments and their often-loosely- supervised security agencies.  They are much slower to understand, and much, much slower to adapt to new conditions than people.

After all, it has been 50 years since the US sent troops into Vietnam, and still there has been little recognition of how changes in communications and weapon technologies have made military invasion an exercise in futility.  The universality of digital communication is one key reason why old war-fighting tactics no longer work, and why local organizations cohere so successfully and durably.  The rapid escalation in portable or “improvised” (i.e. locally sourced) firepower is another.  Taken together, these changes explain why, as I like to put it, “In today’s warfare, the visiting team never wins.” 

Gone are the days of “secret wars.”  If a sparrow, much less a bomb falls, the destruction it causes will be publicly known via Twitter, Facebook and supremely, YouTube, not just by the home folks suffering the damage, who will inevitably be alienated from the outside forces responsible for it, but by the “visitors’ own citizens, who will know what death and destruction are being committed in their names. 

Increasingly, Americans are coming to understand that for every terrorist (in, or without quotation marks) killed by American drones in northwest Pakistan, hundreds of friends, relatives and neighbors, and hundreds of thousands of Pakistani fellow-citizens are turned into irrevocable enemies.  They can see the damage on their TV screens, computers and mobile phones. 

Similar secret US attacks inside Somalia, may have eliminated a few terrorists, but they have also strengthened the Islamist terrorist group Al-Shabaab’s legitimacy as an anti-imperialist force there.  Somalis, like Pakistanis, count the collaterally dead as their friends, those who killed them as enemies, and today’s communications technologies assure they, and anyone they can communicate with, can count corpses as easily or efficiently as domestic spooks can track your correspondence.  American diplomats on the ground recognize this blowback, but in Washington, other imperatives still rule.

Between whistleblowers and video cameras, government secrecy is dead as a doornail, or the concept of personal privacy.  The Video Era, like those of such earlier modes of communication as the human voice, the printing press, radio and TV, has created great opportunities for the consolidation of power in those who can control or best utilize those media.  But, equally, for ordinary people the new media, each time they change the world, also greatly empower individual communications to spread farther faster to an ever-growing audience. 

There is a new balance of power in communication and, as Darwin noted, adaptation is the only answer. 

David Marash