Trying to say something new about Bin Laden

Here’s my attempt to say something that hasn’t been said before in Bin Laden. It’s going to be hard, because one problem with an extremely rapid information economy is that pretty much every idea gets said (in usually a factually incorrect and superficial way) right way — and I’m going to contribute to that I guess.

It’s already very common to see articles saying that killing Bin Laden doesn’t really do anything to make the U.S. more secure because terror groups will continue operating, like a hydra, even though one of its many heads has been cut off.

Ok fair enough, but this ignores what I think is really quite a mind boggling conclusion: the U.S government actually did a really good job with this and our DETERRENCE has been boosted immeasurably. Let’s pretend that for every crime that you committed, you would be punished in ten years, with a probability of 1 (certainty). This would drastically reduce crime. There have been a ton of studies confirming that certainty is a huge factor.

So, the U.S., by keeping its political eye on the prize as it were, has manifested an unprecedented ability to connect an action with a counteraction. Many political decisions have no such bite because the tides of politics comes and goes, a subsidy is switched on and then back off. One group puts in a tax break and another takes it right back. The government of any country rarely sets a goal so ruthlessly in mind and then so effectively pursues it (is the space race a counterexample?).

In the Bin Laden kill, the U.S. kept this intensity and focus over the course of a decade and two presidencies, AFTER George Bush blew it in Afghanistan (most people know I’m not a partisan, so at least consider believing me when I say I’ve read A LOT about those Afghanistan days, and we really screwed up. We could have probably gotten Bin Laden there and then.) So, what this killing shows is not that the “leader” of Al Qaeda is dead (there is no such thing for Al Qaeda) but rather the the planners and executors of specific actions against the U.S. can expect a certain IMPLACABLE retaliation.

If you’re really following this post, you’re saying to yourself “but Jordan, the sample size here is only 1. No terrorist will make an inductive inference based on n=1 (one instance).” The next terrorist is just as likely to conclude that THEY can get away with things. Wrong, psychology is very powerful here, and all the salient psychological factors play the U.S.’s way in this. What I mean is that the human brain assesses risk very poorly, and it draws on all sorts of irrelevant things to make an assessment of how risky something is. That’s why flying can scare some people, because for all our risk-assessing apparatus knows, we should not be 30,000 feet above the earth. Same goes for would-be terrorists. Sure, you can shoot up some marine barracks or plant some IEDs. That won’t earn you the ire of the entire U.S. military/political establishment, but planning a major operation that succeeds in hurting a lot of Americans is likely to bring to mind vivid images of black men in helicopters coming in the night to shoot you and your closest friends. That is an image that is hard to endure for any length of time. I’m pretty firmly convinced that Bin Laden must have been going insane (he already was in one way) hiding out in his compound, learning about the outside world only through runners and couriers.

Ironically, that is perhaps the most powerful type of TERRORISM available, and the U.S. right now, is its master.

Unbelievably, wikileaks could have really given Bin Laden a clue about our action against him. Does this show that wikileaks doesn’t matter because evil people are too stupid to read it, or does it show rather that some sort of censorship might be really important in this information age.

Also, just read this.

Extra-Judicial Killings

Here is an issue that I have not really thought about at all. There is a lawsuit that has just been filed in which the U.S. government is being sued for placing a U.S. citizen (now living in Yemen) on a “kill list.” In short, the U.S. has singled this person out for death, and it seems, not without good reason because he is a suspected terrorist.

So there are some interesting background themes that it relates to. Some Bush administration people tried to reduce legal protections to terrorists because they saw such protects as encouraging what they called “lawfare” which is the use of legal protections to hinder the effectiveness of the U.S. military and intelligence organizations. This is a classic case because the guy they’re after, I’ll call him Anwar in this post, is hiding in Yemen and his father is bringing a lawsuit asking the U.S. to stop trying to kill him. There has already been something like 10 attempts on his life, but he gets to essentially fight back even though he is no match for the military force of the U.S.

Some other points. One is that the optics of this for the ACLU are TERRIBLE. They are basically defending a (suspected) terrorist hiding in Yemen. A lot of people already hate the ACLU, and I understand why, but I want to put things in context. The ACLU’s daily work I think is extremely positive in that they take cases almost instinctively on the basis of any allegation of unfairness. This pressure on government, private institutions, corporations, and other groups in society is probably mostly for the good. It’s better that these groups, which all have massive power by the way, think twice before they do things that could provoke the ACLU. It’s also wrong to label the ACLU as liberal, as is commonly done, because their cases can involve property rights and other freedoms that conservatives cherish.

That said, the ACLU is pretty indiscriminate about the cases that it takes, and so every once in a while, I think they take on really silly cases that make it easy to paint them as ridiculously naive do-gooders. A prime example is this issue, in which they are trying to get prisons in South Carolina and Alabama not to segregate prisoners with AIDS. Now, I don’t know what the final verdict on this issue should be, but just reading the ACLU’s report, they don’t even cite ANY conclusive evidence that such segregation is not the best way to control HIV rates among prisoners. This kind of strikes me as provocative and a little careless. But like I said, their indiscriminate desire to jump into legal matters on the side that appears to be imperiled by unjust forces is usually for the better. I can respect that.

This issue of “kill lists” might be another case in which they end up looking pretty silly. However, on the legal issues, things seem pretty solid. Anwar is a citizen and so is entitled to due process and a right to life (Where is the right to life in the constitution you ask? Perhaps in the preamble?).

Still, things are different when viewed in another light. After all, U.S. military personnel can kill U.S. citizens if they take up arms against us (and as courts ruled, U.S. citizens can be deemed enemy combatants, I’m thinking of Padilla). So, the ACLU notes that this guy is away from a battlefield and so can’t be killed, but isn’t this a little disingenuous? After all, if the last nine odd years taught us anything, its that the battlefield is a meaningless fiction. Terrorists blend in with the populace (they don’t wear uniforms) and are unaffiliated with states, making international law somewhat dated regarding what to do. Is it fair for terrorists to plot destruction all over the globe and in civilian’s clothes and then turn around claim they are non-combatants entitled to the rights of citizens.

I’m not sure. It’s a difficult issue, but I hope the ACLU knows what its doing on this one, cause it sure seems like there could be good reason to try to kill terrorists whenever we can, and I don’t mean that in a bloodthirsty “kill ’em all” type of way. I just mean that if we find that people are out to harm innocents and damage international institutions and we cannot get to them (to have a trial) because of their abuse of the laws of war, then we should consider trying to kill them. I wish it weren’t so.

random prediction — Obama will get a second term

I was just thinking about the way things are going today, and it seems that Obama has a great chance of winning anther term. This post is a kind of naive and undeveloped defense of this intuition I have, but I want this down on paper in case he does win again.

1. In the past few months, the economy has really picked up and confidence is running high. As long as employment starts to get back on track, his handling of the economy will be a real win.

2. We’re using drones to kill people overseas, thus not using as many Americans to accomplish that goal. Always a plus. Then again, if the use of drones instead of people results in another attack, then of course Obama is sunk.

3. Obama got healthcare through. This is a big legislative win regardless of what one actually thinks of the bill.

Drone warfare — update

Today’s NYT has an article about the use of drones to fight Al Qaeda (an issue I’ve just started paying attention to, see here). It doesn’t try to address the rate of civilian casualties, but it does suggest that drones are used in conjunction with, not to the exclusion of, capturing people and pumping them for intelligence.

The article also suggests that using drones is a better way of keeping pressure on Al Qaeda and has an effect on how freely they can move and communicate. Again, another hard claim to assess, but one that’s definitely worth making.

The last point of the article is just that the Obama administration is really relying heavily on the use of drones. Should be a good chance to see if total civilian casualties (air and ground) rise in proportion to the use of drones, although again, it’s hard to separate any increase in casualties from being caused by just a plain old increase in fighting in the region.

P.S. Talking about drones makes me think of Skynet.

media games

Here is a great example of the pettiness and dishonesty of mainstream media.

There are allegations that some of the terrorists that the Christmas day bomber associated with are based in Yemen, and that some of these terrorists were released from Guantanamo Bay by Bush.

So, of course Fox News runs a story about how a republican congressman is in the midst of a letter writing campaign to Obama asking him not to release any more detainees from Guantanamo. In a brilliant and completely cynical use of media magic, an action by a past president is transformed into a veiled critique against the current one.

The real travesty is that no one bothers to defend Bush’s decision on it’s original merits. When GTMO was operating, some people never stopped calling for the release or transfer of prisoners, and the Bush administration itself was actually committed to releasing and transferring detainees, but found significant roadblocks to doing so. Nonetheless, the process of trying to find out who does and does not belong at GTMO is a noble one, and mistakes are bound to be made in both directions (mistakenly letting people go or wrongly holding them when they’re innocent), but of course Fox News could never make an argument like that; it’s much easier just to hide behind media stage tricks.

(PS: a bunch of liberal news programs do this all time as well. I’m thinking of Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann. It’s just that when I woke up this morning, I saw this Fox News program, so I’m complaining about them).

Terrorism

These two charts show dramatic decreases in the confidence that Muslims have in Bin Laden and suicide bombing. There are huge drops from 2008-2009 when Obama took over, but there were also significant decreases all during most of the Bush years.

One pessismistic interpretation however is that confidence in Bin Laden is decreasing, not because confidence in terrorism as a response to globalization/westernization/whatever, but that confidence in Bin Laden the person is decreasing even though confidence in the cause of terrorism may be steady or increasing. As I recently read, and this shows how out of touch I am with current events, Bin Laden is not really considered by the government to be the leader of Al Qaeda anymore. According to the state department, that honor goes to Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the former #2 man of the group. So, it might be that the decline in confidence in Bin Laden really just represents his falling out of favor compared to Al-Zawahiri, and shows nothing about people’s judgment about Al Qaeda’s goals.

As for the suicide bombings, I don’t have a ready-at-hand pessimistic interpretation. Although, just because the general populace becomes more critical of suicide bombings does not necessarily mean there will be less of them. All that matters is that the small minority of those who do believe in suicide bombings continue to exist and to execute attacks.

congressional hearing testimony and Ellen Tauscher

I’m going through a lot of congressional testimony lately for my job, and I picked this section of testimony at random to make a point: our leaders are not very good at questioning knowledgeable people about complex issues. The cynical reason is that our leaders are not very smart, but I think that’s too easy. Rather, I think the fact that hearings are part political show results in some unnecessary badgering and some strange lines of questioning that are pursued for the consumption of constituents.

Take this line of questions (from a 7/25/07 hearing) asked by Ellen Tauscher, a democratic house representative from California. She votes with a majority of democrats 99.3% of the time.

REP. ELLEN O. TAUSCHER (D-CA): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I think the reason that we’re at somewhat of a wide variance on the import of
what is happening exactly right now is that there is such a wide variance in the
two NIEs. These are documents that are not similar in my mind, having read both
of them. If they had been transposed — if the one I read last week was the
2006 document, I’d certainly feel a lot better. The problem is is that the 2006
document is kind of like a sleeping pill — take it and you’re going to feel
better tomorrow. Unfortunately, we woke up and we had the 2007 NIE, which set
my hair on fire. It is unambiguous about the current threat and it says to me
that we have not been successful in dealing with the threat of al Qaeda, its
ability to recruit, its ability to reconstitute itself, and that’s something —
I’m suspicious that something that we’ve been doing has caused us to not be able
to defeat what everyone has agreed for a very long time is our number one enemy
— people that really, really want to kill us and are really trying hard to do
it.
And I think that if we all kind of agree on what the state — where we are
right now — if that is true, then we have every reason to be concerned.
What is it that has caused us to not find and kill Osama bin Laden? Because
he’s hiding in the FATA?
MR. GISTARO: Ma’am, if I could just address the difference between the two
NIEs: I think they are different papers trying to answer different questions.
The 2006 estimate was really looking at the underlying trends driving extremism
within the Sunni community worldwide. This paper that we’re discussing today is
much more tightly focused on intent and capabilities to attack us here. And I
think that those different — the different focus of the two papers may explain
why we have different language and a perception that they have radically
different —
REP. TAUSCHER: With all due respect, they seem like they’re written by
different people with different methodologies setting up — setting a framework
for people to understand. This is the difference between, “Gee, I’m really
worried there may be something happening up the street; you might want to walk
faster.” That’s one set of comments. The other is, “Run, run, run! Run for
your life.” That’s the difference between these two documents.
Now, if you’re trying to tell me that this is about somebody writing in a
different style or that different methodologies were used, I don’t really think
that’s what you mean to have me believe.
MR. GISTARO: No, ma’am. I think they were trying to answer fundamentally
different questions.
REP. TAUSCHER: Well, can I make a suggestion? Until the problem changes,
until we find and kill Osama bin Laden, that’s all I really want from you people
is to tell me what the status of al Qaeda is and whether they have in fact
reconstituted themselves — which is what you tell us they have — that they
have refinanced themselves, that they have rested, that they have actually
franchised themselves into Iraq and probably other places — all the time while
I think many of us bought, and certainly my constituents believed, that we were
trying to get them.
MR. LEITER: Ms. Tauscher, if I may — there is a historical vent which — to
at least some degree that I can talk about in open session — which changed this
trend, which is the North Waziristan Peace Agreement. And President Musharraf
has noted that the agreement that was signed for North Waziristan has not
necessarily helped eliminating the safe haven in the FATA. So that was
something that was just before the 2006 NIE —
REP. TAUSCHER: With all due respect, you have gone through the chronology
from 2001-2002 to 2007, where you basically said, “This is like a balloon. You
push here, it bubbles out over there.” We have watched them hop, skip and jump
pretty much with freedom and ability to reconstitute from Afghanistan to
Pakistan urban areas to South Waziristan to North Waziristan. They can move
pretty much where they want in that whole entire area, and have for the last
seven years, and we haven’t found them and killed them.
MR. LEITER: Well, respectfully, ma’am, some of them have been found and
killed. And I would just note that it is not a constant trend either way. We
have had ups and downs. The elimination of the Afghan safe haven did diminish
capabilities for a period, and they did reconstitute somewhere. And then they
were chased from the urban areas. And they did reconstitute somewhere.
REP. TAUSCHER: Well, if I can make a suggestion. I think these NIEs have to
be congruent with each other. They have got to be side- by-side documents. We
have to have a way to look at them and say, “This is what you told me the last
time, and this is whether we’re going up or down.” Simply a little thing like
this or a little thing like that would be very, very helpful. We can’t have
this complete divergence as we’ve had in these two documents because it causes
tremendous amount of anxiety for the population when they hear about the NIE on
television. And then for those of us who think that we’re watching this closely
to see such a swing away from what our expectations have been — that we have
actually decapitated these guys in 2006, and now they’re traveling around
wherever they want, reconstituting and refinancing and being more robust.
MR. LEITER: And my last note would be, ma’am, that the NIEs really are
snapshots in time. So they don’t come out all that often. They come out once a
year. So —
REP. TAUSCHER: Well, then you better take them from the same camera because
the picture’s got to look a little familiar.
MR. LEITER: And I would just say that the stream of intelligence that we’ve
seen I think has tried to provide those regular updates.
REP. TAUSCHER: I’m going to yield back. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
REP. SKELTON: Thank you, Ms. Tauscher.

I guess its really important to her that all national intelligence reports have the exact same message. Notice also though how her most emphatic reason for having continuity in intelligence reports (whether this continuity mirrors reality or not) is that such reports scare her constituents. Huh?

Now, I’m not saying that these two NIE’s were both done with the same level of competence, but notice how she spends her entire questioning time to make an assertion that she really has no sophisticated reason for believing while the witnesses both give two reasons for thinking the NIE’s might change, that the questions they answer differ and the fact that well, things change from year to year.