Duckery

Over at the Duck of Minerva, I've recently posted the following:

December 10, I posted "Political judgment: Iraq edition." It is about my January 2007 forecasts about the effects of "the surge."

Sunday, December 9: "More than 2 Americas," which is about the various cultural tensions dividing constituencies within the Democratic party.

On December 6, "Terrorism, the shopping mall, and global gun norms." It's difficult to keep up with the shootings this December, but this post is about the shopping mall incident in Omaha.


Note: see this definition of duckery.

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At the Duck

Lately, at the Duck of Minerva, I have blogged the following:

November 20, "The decline in Iraqi violence" which explains why "the surge" may not explain the recent decline in violence in Iraq.

Tuesday, November 13: I blogged "Breathe easier, DC and NYC," which is about the (un)reality of so-called "suitcase nukes."

Saturday, November 10: "Is neoconservatism still vibrant?" The title speaks for itself.

Thanks for reading.


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Quacking up

Over at the Duck of Minerva, I've posted a couple of somewhat comedic items that might be of interest to my readers:

Today, I blogged "Bush: still alone on climate change" about this week's White House climate summit. It would be funny if it wasn't so depressing.

September 15, I posted "Terrorism and your neighbor's sex life." Apparently, some transnational terrorists are selling fake Viagra to raise cash for their own dirty deeds.


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Doomsday scenarios: put off investing?

OK, I'm not much of an investor, but time is money and I know how to waste the former by following increasingly paranoid internet links. Who doesn't enjoy a good conspiracy theory?

First, the background. Somebody is betting big bucks that the European stock market is about to tank. This news is from Smart Money, August 16 and apparently references a financial news piece owned by Dow Jones:

An anonymous investor has placed a bet on an index of Europe's top 50 stocks falling by a third by the end of September, as world equity markets plunged for a third day and volatility hit a three-year high.

The mystery investor has bought put option contracts on the DJ Eurostoxx 50 index that will result in a profit if it plunges to 2,800 or below by the end of September. Based on the 2,800 strike price, the position covers a notional EUR6.9 billion, and potentially even more using a market price of about 4,100 when the trades were done on Tuesday and Wednesday.

That's 245,000 put options for those keeping score.

And EUR6.9 is currently worth about 9.4 billion U.S. dollars.

To me, that seems like quite a lot to risk on the idea that the market is going to collapse by one-third in September.

August 27, CNBC reported a similar phenomenon in the U.S, though the amounts at stake are much smaller -- and the expected collapse is not as great:

So far, over $500 million in so-called put options have been purchased betting that the benchmark Standard and Poor's 500 index will tumble anywhere from 5% to 11% in September. Some investors are even buying put options calling for 52% decline.

The story says that this volume is on the high side:

Of course, there are always investors betting on big declines -- they're called bears. What's unusual is the amount of money being put up on such a doomsday scenario.

"The activity in those puts has been a lot more aggressive then we have seen in the past," said Bill Lefkowitz, options strategist at brokerage firm Finance Investments.

I've seen speculation about the same sort of large put option trading in Japanese markets too, but have been unable to confirm them with a more credible source.

In any event, what is causing this kind of pessimistic U.S. and European market speculation? Well, it could simply be a large hedge fund (and some copycats) trying to protect profits against a huge market "correction." These could simply be savvy investors who think the market is highly overvalued.

Or, if you believe what you read on the internets, it could be a forecast of "another 9/11 within 4 weeks."


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The 700 Club

Art Levine included this scary statistic in his piece on "Dick Cheney’s Dangerous Son-in-Law" in the latest Washington Monthly.

[EPA] data showed that at least 700 [chemical] sites across the country could potentially kill or injure 100,000 or more people if attacked.

The story explains how the Bush administration has let industry prevent any regulatory attempts to make these plants safe from attack.

3/16/07 Update: I forgot this telling passage from the article:

In January 2005, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) began a series of hearings looking at the subject before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, during which one grim highlight had been the testimony of [Richard] Falkenrath, the former homeland security adviser, who called chemical security the nation’s top domestic vulnerability and admitted that since 9/11, “we have essentially done nothing.”

Gulp. If only someone could do something about this problem.


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New Terror Study

Peter Bergen, working with Paul Cruickshank, has recently released a new study about post-9/11 terrorism rates. Their main finding:

The rate of fatal terrorist attacks around the world by jihadist groups, and the number of civilians killed in those attacks, has risen sharply since the invasion of Iraq. Comparing the period before the war (Sept. 12, 2001, to March 20, 2003) and the period since, there has been a 607% rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks - and a 237% jump in the fatality rate.

The authors relied upon data from the Rand Corp. and the Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism.

Much of this violence is in Afghanistan and Iraq -- fight them there, so "we" don't have to fight them here, right? Well, that's not a complete explanation:

even after excluding these two hot spots, there has been a 35% rise in the number of terrorist attacks globally and a 25% increase in attacks on Western targets....

This has particularly been the case in the Arab world, whose countries excluding Iraq have seen 783% more fatalities from jihadist terrorism since the U.S. invasion....

Excluding Iraq and Afghanistan, we see a 150% increase globally in the rate of suicide attacks by jihadist groups since the war began.

The authors, who are fellows at NYU's Center on Law and Security, also found evidence of so-called "blowback" attacks in Saudi Arabia, France and Jordan. Those are attacks perpetrated by veterans of the Iraq insurgency.

The study does not include violence by Palestinian extremists. These are acts of violence by al Qaeda-inspired Sunni extremists.

Good news: Not counting civilian contractors in Iraq or Afghanistan, only 18 American civilians have been terror victims since the start of the Iraq war.

The full study results are in the March/April Mother Jones. There's plenty more there, including this nugget about the country that supplied 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11:

Mohammed Hafez, a visiting professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, in a study of the 101 identified suicide attackers in Iraq from March 2003 to February 2006, found that more than 40 percent were Saudi....

The Israeli researcher Reuven Paz, using information posted on Al Qaeda-linked websites between October 2004 and March 2005, found that of the 33 suicide attacks listed, 23 were conducted by Saudis, and only 1 by an Iraqi. Similarly, in June 2005 the Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute of Washington, D.C. found by tracking both jihadist websites and media reports that of the 199 Sunni extremists who had died in Iraq either in suicide attacks or in action against Coalition or Iraqi forces, 104 were from Saudi Arabia and only 21 from Iraq.

Read the entire article at MJ.

Hat tip: AlterNet also has a story about this study: "The War on Terror Is the Leading Cause of Terrorism."


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Anthrax update

The recent murder of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko reminded me that I have for some weeks meant to post an update about the anthrax attacks of fall 2001. Like the more recent case, the killer(s) apparently used an unusual weapon to send a political message.

After five years, however, we still do not know who obtained and sent the anthrax that was mailed to various journalists and Senators. The Washington Post published a story updating the investigation on September 25, but the Hartford Courant scooped the Post on September 22 with a similar narrative:

Contrary to a widely held theory among anthrax experts, the killer needed no sophisticated equipment or intimate knowledge to produce the anthrax mailed to two U.S. congressmen, Douglas Beecher wrote recently in a trade magazine for microbiologists.

Anthrax experts and many media reports have long theorized that the killer would have needed to mix the deadly substance with an additive to aerosolize it - a feat most likely accomplished by a limited number of people with access to high-level labs such as those operated by the U.S. military.

The FBI official's apparent dismissal of that theory is chilling in that it greatly broadens the potential pool of suspects, experts who have followed the case say. Beecher also wrote that previous theories "may misguide research and preparedness efforts and generally distract from the magnitude of hazards posed by simple spore preparations."

Beecher is named as a microbiologist in the FBI's hazardous materials response unit, so his article is certainly worth noting. The FBI has said very little about the case for four years.

In any case, Beecher's article debunks the "widely circulated misconception...that the spores were produced using additives and sophisticated engineering supposedly akin to military weapon production."

However, the Courant also quoted "prominent anthrax expert, Louisiana State University Professor Martin Hugh Jones" saying that he still believed the anthrax was made in a sophisticated laboratory rather than a basement because of quality control issues and cost ($20,000 for the proper equipment).

The Post story quotes, anonymously, a scientist stating that the 2001 anthrax had no signature that "points to a domestic source." The so-called "Ames" strain long-linked to the attacks is widely available around the world, meaning that that this lineage alone means nothing.

It appears that the case is more of a mystery than ever. While some on the right have used this latest news to suggest that Iraq or al Qaeda could have been behind the attacks, this is pure speculation. The notion that the 9/11 hijackers were exposed to anthrax seems almost surreal -- and the evidence is anecdotal at best. Even then, there's no reason to believe that Mohamed Atta and crew could have made the anthrax.

The person who did make the anthrax cooked up a really pure form, so he or she is a good microbiologist, but the anthrax was not weaponized. Moreover, it could have come from anywhere in the world.

This news might make it harder to identify the killer, but it is probably good news overall in that there is now no evidence that a terrorist has access to militarized and extraordinarily lethal anthrax.


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Filed as: anthrax

Was Litvinenko a victim of terrorism?

The media has been focusing great attention on this story about former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko. From the BBC:

Police probing the death of Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko have found above normal levels of radiation at three locations in London.

Mr Litvinenko's death has been linked to the presence of a "major dose" of radioactive polonium-210 in his body.

Scotland Yard confirmed traces were also found at his home, a sushi bar and a hotel

From what I've seen on TV and in the American press, no one on this side of the Atlantic is discussing this as a suspected case of terrorism.

Yet British "anti-terror police" have been investigating the crime.

The following is from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, on a webpage called "Definitions of Terrorism." It addresses the well-known problem that "UN Member States still have no agreed-upon definition." Nonetheless look at this proposed definition:

4. Academic Consensus Definition:

"Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons, whereby - in contrast to assassination - the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperilled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought" (Schmid, 1988).

Alexander Litvinenko's family apparently thinks that Russian President Vladimir Putin had the former spy assassinated. They released this statement purportedly from the diseased:

You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed.

You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilized value. You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilized men and women.

You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.

If this crime fits within a pattern of violence designed to intimidate dissenters, then it would seem to qualify as an act of terror and not simply murder/assassination.


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Filed as: Litvinenko

Osama off the hook?

Fox reports, you decide.

Via Think Progress, an interview with Fox talking head Fred Barnes:

HOST: Alright Fred, you and a few other journalists were in the Oval Office with the President, right? And he says catching Osama bin Laden is not job number one?

BARNES: Well, he said, look, you can send 100,000 special forces, that’s the figure he used, to the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan and hunt him down, but he just said that’s not a top priority use of American resources. His vision of a war on terror is one that involves intelligence to find out from people, to get tips, to follow them up and break up plots to kill Americans before they occur. That’s what happened recently in that case of the planes that were to be blown up by terrorists, we think coming from England, and that’s the top priority. He says, you know, getting Osama bin Laden is a low priority compared to that.

Watch the video; this is not a verbatim transcript, but the quotes accurately reflect what Barnes said about Bush.

And remember, Barnes is the guy granted "insider" access to Bush to publish a puff-piece book on the President.

Isn't it interesting that President Bush's top priority seems to be postitively,...what's the right word...Clintonian?

Here's what Vice President Dick Cheney said about this kind of anti-terror approach on March 17, 2004:

In his view, opposing terrorism is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering, law enforcement operation. As we have seen, however, that approach was tried before, and proved entirely inadequate to protecting the American people from the terrorists

Cheney was talking about John Kerry and Bill Clinton, not his boss.

Addendum: "War on terror" ally Pakistan has made peace with the Taliban.


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Filed as: Osama

Latest terror plot

I was interviewed twice today about the terrorist arrests in England. The local public radio station (WFPL) talked to me around noon, and then WHAS TV came by at 2 pm.

So far, I haven't heard or seen either broadcast, but I presume they won't use more than 20 to 45 seconds of tape even though I talked for 5 to 10 minutes to each of the reporters.

Basically, I said that these kinds of arrests reflect good intelligence and police work, and are arguably the most important part of the "war on terror" as most people think of it. There are reports that some of the suspects are linked to Pakistan and US officials are already suggesting al Qaeda connections. If the plot to blow up multiple planes had been successful, it would have been nearly as dramatic -- and traumatic as 9/11.

Of course, I also mentioned that the risks of terrorism are relatively low. It has been nearly 5 years since 9/11 and few Americans have died in terror attacks. This doesn't mean that law enforcement and intell officers should not be vigilant, but it does suggest that the general public has little need to live in a constant state of heightened fear and anxiety.

The risk of terror attack is sort of like the risk of dying in a lightening strike. It's horrible when it happens, but society survives and there is no need to turn the nation into a police state. There is no way to eliminate every risk of terrorism (bombs in stadiums, schools, etc.) and many freedoms would be lost if we tried too hard to limit behavior.

In any case, the arrests were certainly good news.


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Filed as: UK plot

Islamo-fascism

For some time, I've been meaning to post about the idea of "Islamo-fascism." As recently as June 9, President Bush referenced this threat in the context of the "war on terror."

it's really important for the American people to understand that al Qaeda has got an ideology and a strategy to impose that ideology. And part of the strategy is to create turmoil in moderate Muslim nations. And they want to overthrow moderate Muslim nations. They want to have their view of the world. I call it totalitarian, Islamo-fascism. Whatever you want to call it, it is extreme and it's real.

At various times, Bush uses this phrase as a synonym for Islamic radicalism (sometimes evil Islamic radicalism) and militant Jihadism.

According to Bush, Islamo-facism

exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: the establishment by terrorism, subversion and insurgency of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom.

Clearly, Bush implicitly assumes that terrorist ideology and motives matter a great deal in world politics. Note that he does NOT say that these evil Jihadists have the power to accomplish their goals and implement their strategy.

For Bush and his followers, the radical ideas themselves serve as prima facie evidence of a threat.

I think this simplification explains why many on the left worry that the "war on terror" will resemble prior ideological struggles, used as a sledgehammer to pound domestic political enemies defined as soft on war. The enemy tries to be invisible, after all, which practically demands and obviously justifies absolute vigilence. Some dare call it treason when foes of the administration challenge its war strategies.

As I've noted elsewhere, both constructivist and realist scholars of international relations have argued that states cannot truly know the motives of other states. For this reason, realists argue that states have to focus on the material capabilities of potential foes.

The same standard should be applied to non-state actors as well. Joe Stalin once asked of the Pope: "How many divisions has he got?" Security analysts should demand the administration to answer a similar question about al Qaeda. Just how serious is the material threat?

Of course, President Bush claims that the war in Iraq is designed to keep Islamo-facists from acquiring a state base:

They want to use the vacuum that would be created by an American retreat to gain control of a country, to build a base from which to launch attacks on America and to conduct their war against non-radical Muslim governments.

Over the past few decades, radicals have specifically targeted Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Jordan for potential takeovers. And for a time, they achieved their goal in Afghanistan, until they came face to face with the men and women of the United States military. (Applause.)

In Afghanistan, we put the terrorists on the run, and now they've set their sights on another country -- they're trying to turn Iraq into what Afghanistan was under the Taliban, a terrorist sanctuary from which they can plan and launch attacks against our people.

The question, however, is whether evil, radical, Islamic terrorists have the ability -- not merely the wish -- to capture a state, hold it, and use it not only as a training site, but also as a base of operations.

Consider me a strong skeptic. Conservatives spent years trumpeting the fact that the mighty US had defeated the powerful Soviet state and empire. The Soviets had an advanced industrial economy, millions of men under arms, 1000s of long-range ballistic missiles capable of inflicting tremendous nuclear destruction, and control over a ring of satellite states.

For the right to trumpet al Qaeda as any kind of similar threat is simply outrageous. Even the most hawkish counter-terror experts recognize that al Qaeda's forces are measured in the small number of thousands. It almost certainly does not have a nuclear arsenal and likely does not have a significant chemical or biological capability.

It is time for opponents of the administration to stand up and demand a reality check. Otherwise, I fear that the world's democracies will veer aimlessly from one alert to another over the next months and years, wasting tremendous national resources, ignoring many more serious problems and (re)electing foolish hawks.


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Filed as: Islamo-facism

US missile strike: "state terrorism"?

Pakistan, as a member of the "coalition of the willing," has learning that the American citizens potentially losing their privacy are not the only "friendlies" being asked to sacrifice in the "war on terrorism." That missile attack earlier this month is provoking all sorts of harsh criticism.

The BBC reported this development:

But nearly two dozen of the country's Islamic parties and right-wing political groups, have made statements expressing outrage and condemnation.

Some have described the bombings as state terrorism, and others have said it is an attack on the entire Islamic world.

State terrorism?

Is that what one calls it when a state launches a surprise "armed attack" on another state and kills a number of innocent people?


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Terrorism: State sponsor update

For more than 25 years, the State Department has been required to list all state sponsors of terrorism because such a designation precludes the US from providing foreign aid and exporting arms. Here's the latest list:

Country and Designation Date

Cuba, March 1, 1982
Iran, January 19, 1984
Libya, December 29, 1979
North Korea, January 20, 1988
Sudan, August 12, 1993
Syria, December 29, 1979

On October 20, 2004, Iraq was formally removed from this list. Since May 2003, the President had made terror-related sanctions inapplicable to Iraq, under authority granted by Congress.

Iraq, of course, was previously removed from this list in February 1982, when the Reagan administration wanted to provide aid and trade credits during its war with Iraq, and was re-designated only after its invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. During that period, experts say that Iraq continued to sponsor terrorism.

In 2005, the State Department stopped publishing its annual report Patterns of Global Terrorism, claiming that the new National Counterterrorism Center will be publishing most of the same data. The NCTC's first report, however, is simply a chronology of 2004 incidents of terrorism.

After a bit of digging, I found the latest information about state-sponsorship of terrorism on the State Department's webpage. On April 27, 2005, Philip Zelikow, Counselor of the Department, and John Brennan, interim Director of NCTC, briefed the assembled media "on the State Department Country Reports on Terrorism, and the statistical reports...prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center."

Country Reports on Terrorism is apparently the new State document that will replace the old Patterns annual report. The new report has a section on State Sponsors:

These countries provide a critical foundation for terrorist groups. Without state sponsors, terrorist groups would have a much more difficult time obtaining the funds, weapons, materials, and secure areas they require to plan and conduct operations. Most worrisome is that these countries also have the capabilities to manufacture weapons of mass destruction and other destabilizing technologies that could fall into the hands of terrorists.

We've heard all that before. US grievances about state sponsorship apparently haven't changed much.

However, State is claiming some US victories in the "war on terror." This is from Zelikow in the April briefing:

2004 was also marked by progress in decreasing the threat from states that sponsor terrorism – state-sponsored terrorism. Iraq's designation as a state sponsor of terrorism was formally rescinded in October 2004. Though they are still on the list, Libya and Sudan took significant steps to cooperate in the global war on terrorism.

Libya cooperated in the elimination of its WMD programs and resolved some old terror attacks by turning over suspects and paying reparations. Syria has taken some anti-al Qaeda measures, worked to close its open border with Iraq, and, oh by the way, "has not been implicated directly in an act of terrorism since 1986."

Before getting too excited by that last sentence, keep in mind that the 2000 report, released in April 2001 (about 20 weeks before the 9/11 attacks), concluded that "The [Iraqi] regime has not attempted an anti-Western terrorist attack since its failed plot to assassinate former President Bush in 1993 in Kuwait." Within two years, the US invaded Iraq, citing its sponsorship of terrorism.

Iran is now the state of greatest concern:

Iran remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism in 2004. Its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Ministry of Intelligence and Security were involved in the planning and support of terrorist acts and continued to exhort a variety of groups to use terrorism in pursuit of their goals.

Iran continued to be unwilling to bring to justice senior al-Qa’ida members it detained in 2003. Iran has refused to identify publicly these senior members in its custody on “security grounds.” Iran has also resisted numerous calls to transfer custody of its al-Qa’ida detainees to their countries of origin or third countries for interrogation and/or trial.

The cited examples of state sponsorship all involve Iranian support for anti-Israeli terrorists, though the document references "reports" that Iraq may be sponsoring insurgent activity in Iraq.

On the bright side, NCTC's Brennan recognizes that focusing on state sponsorship of terror is a dated approach. The statute requiring the gathering of all this information references "international terrorism," but that's a misleading phrase as Brennan explained in the April briefing:

These criteria dated to a period of focus on state-sponsored terrorism in the early 1980s and not the transnational phenomena we confront now...."International" is also defined in the statute as "involving the citizens or territory of more than one country." And as I'll show you on the next chart, this definition, while appropriate for state-sponsored terrorism, is simply not as useful for the current trans-national threat we now face.

Maybe Brennan will be able to convince the Bush administration!

"Open University of Jihad"

Over the past decade, I've written a couple of book chapters about the use of the internet by transnational political activists. Environment, human rights, and peace organizations, for example, utilize the internet to communicate instantly with thousands of like-minded people around the world. Technology helps overcome resource mobilization costs for social movements.

This use of the web generally helps progressive organizations promote their causes, typically in the face of well-funded corporate and national political opponents.

Of course, the technology has a dark side as well -- and this has been apparent, literally, since 9/11.

Indeed, terrorist use of the internet seems to be booming. Today's Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article by reporter Dan Murphy, "Iraq, Internet fuel growth of global jihad."

"The world is just starting to understand the real influence of the Internet as an open university of jihad,'' says Reuven Paz, the head of the Project for the Research of Islamic Movements in Israel. "Like the attacks in Madrid, the bombings in London should be viewed as an export of the war in Iraq to Europe, based on local adherents of global jihad rather than on volunteers from the heart of the Arab world."

I've already discussed the role of the Iraq war in dispersing global terror; this time, I'm interested in the additional role of the 'net and other mass media communications:

the confluence of America's decision to invade Iraq and new communication technologies that has created the most powerful machine for recruiting new terrorists in history, says Evan Kohlmann, an American terrorism consultant who has tracked jihadi websites since the late 1990s.

Terror expert Peter Bergen wrote last year that the web emerged as the main terror home base before the Iraq war began:

To the extent that Al Qaeda -- "the base" in Arabic -- has a new base, it is, to a surprising degree, on the web. According to a U.S. government contractor who specializes in analyzing jihadist chat rooms and websites, web traffic was "tremendously energized" in the period before the Iraq war.

The security experts discussing this issue recognize the virtues of the internet: speed, wide distribution and low cost. Back to Murphy's story:

Insurgent[s] in "martyrdom operations" appear on websites within days of attacks in Iraq, and the latest calls to carry jihad to Western capitals from the likes of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's No. 2 and Al Qaeda's chief ideologue, spread around the globe within minutes.

"Whatever framework we use to talk about Iraq - take Afghanistan for instance - it's whatever happened there, but on steroids,'' says Toby Craig Jones, a political scientist and analyst of events in Saudi Arabia for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. "It seems to be proceeding much more quickly this time."

The Bush administration often worries publicly about the effect of Aljazeera TV broadcasts on "the Arab street," and I'm confident that the CIA is watching back-alley jihadist blogs and websites, but it's not clear to me that even close scrutiny of the communication outlets can do much to stop future attacks.

In the case of the London bombs, intelligence and government officials were apparently taken by surprise because they did not detect an increase in terror "chatter" prior to the attacks.

Unfortunately, the web may be so vast that jihadists will remain at least a step ahead of those trying to monitor their activities.

Yuppie vices -- and global terror

Cross posted on Duck of Minerva.

First, the administration explained in a famous advertisement featured during the 2002 Super Bowl that buying drugs abets terrorism.

Then, in 2003, Arianna Huffington's "Detroit Project" ran ads claiming that owning an SUV indirectly aids terror; buying lots of gas provides lots of cash to the Iranians and Saudis.

Now, apparently, it turns out that feeding your baby fosters global terrorism. This link is explained by FBI Director Robert Mueller (quoted by Bradley C. Bower of AP) in today's Christian Science Monitor:

"Middle Eastern criminal enterprises involved in the organized theft and resale of infant formula pose not only an economic threat, but a public health threat to infants, and a potential source of material support to a terrorist organization."

Don't snicker, stolen infant formula is apparently a major criminal enterprise:

Theft of baby formula from store shelves has risen over the past decade, costing retailers billions of dollars. Formula was the fourth most-often-shoplifted item last year, according to a survey by the Food Marketing Institute, a Washington, D.C., trade group....

Calling it "a serious security issue" for retailers, the National Retail Federation unveiled its 200-page report highlighting "organized retail theft" of infant formula. At least seven of the report's 10 case studies detail fencing operations run by citizens of Middle Eastern origin.

"The rings I identified dealing in stolen infant formula are operated mostly by Middle Easterners," says Charles Miller, a loss-prevention consultant and author of the report. They typically organize the rings, pay the shoplifters (who are mostly from Latin America), repackage the formula, and resell it. Out of $30 billion in annual retail theft, about $7 billion of infant formula is stolen and resold for a tidy profit, Mr. Miller estimates.

Who knew? Bower points out in his story that Ebay had over 1000 offers for Enfamil baby formula this Monday.

The story quotes a number of skeptics about the terror link and the officials acknowledge that the connections to terror are largely unproven. They trace the cash to the people of Middle Eastern origin, then to their home countries...but the money trail is ultimately lost. Who knows what happens to this cash?

It's not for lack of trying. The CSM story references an alleged terror-related baby formula bust that coincidentally occurred on 9/11 in Texas, so this is something that state and federal officials have been following for years.

Of course, it could be that this illegally obtained money is simply used by family and friends back home to pay their bills. This is from a VOA story a few weeks ago:

About 80 percent of worldwide remittances are used for food, goods and services. Much of the rest goes into building better housing or buying properties.

Annually, tens of billions of US dollars are funneled out of the country by immigrants, temporary workers, and illegal aliens. Typically, these remittances are more significant than foreign aid or direct investment. It's a lot of cash to track.

Still, next time you need formula, you might want to buy from a regular store, rather than a private seller on Ebay or at the flea market.

Managing Terror (not terrorism)

Paul Parker, guest blogging for Rodger.

Two weeks Timothy Noah posted the provocatively titled “Conservativism as Pathology: Are Bush supporters literally insane?" on Slate. The starting point is puzzle in Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” – how to explain the working class support of the Republicans, given the two parties’ economic policies.

An obvious response to Frank is “not much:” The New Deal Coalition was centered around economics, but it was torn asunder largely due to social issues surrounding race, prayer, and abortion. Add in guns and gays, and 25 years later we are talking about “values voters” to explain the 2004 election. A liberal may think it false consciousness for (some) people to vote (certain) (intolerant) values over economics. But that objection sets up liberals for the very charge that Republicans use so successfully: liberals are out of touch with the concerns of the common person.

After raising a serious, if flawed, question, Noah unfortunately, demonstrates the lack of deep thinking and serious attention we associate with the "chatterbox" giving his column its name. After briefly considering two psychological approaches that have implications for this topic, he concludes, “The further you get into this line of thinking, I’m afraid, the more ridiculous it starts to sound.”

That might especially be true as you approach 800 words. Call it a day, your column is knocked out. But let's go a little deeper.

The two views that Chatterbox considered are Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition (pdf), and Terror Management Theory. The first he subtly dismisses, first by noting one coauthor has done work on birthorder, and then more directly through a silly armchair analysis of George Bush 41 and 43’s ‘famous 1972 mano-a-mano confrontation’ – despite noting that “the authors don’t cite this incident.” For good reason: social scientists are interested in patterns and probabilities, rather than explaining every action in every individual’s life.

His treatment of terror management theory is even worse. Once again, Noah starts out accurately, but soon deteriorates into dismissivness:

"terror management theory," ... as best I can make out, posits that an inordinate fear of death "engenders a defense of one's cultural worldview" and therefore a resistance to outsiders and new ideas. Conservatives are also said to "score lower on measures of extraversion" and "general sensation seeking," which I think is a polite way of saying that they don't get enough sex.

I like reading about sex, and so I am disappointed that I have never run across any discussion of sex in all my readings of, and about, terror management theory. It could be I am thick, and these researchers are coy, but it could also be that Noah has no real idea of what he is talking about.

Could one form of sensation- seeking be driving too fast? A USA Today cover story a couple weeks ago indicated soldiers home from Iraq – where their mortality salience would be heightened – are getting into car crashes at rates higher than one would expect. This fits squarely with terror management theory. Not so sexy, though.

More generally, Noah and others might want to read the book In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror. The authors nicely review many of the scores of cross-national experimental studies in which persons for whom mortality is made salient demonstrate attitudes and behavior that support terror management theory. This theory has been subjected to numerous imaginative and potentially disconfirming studies. In the laboratory, it holds up. And yes, this is the theory that underpinned the study much discussed last year that when reminded of death (the mortality salience condition) people increased their support for George Bush over John Kerry.

Is this evidence of pathology, as framed by Noah’s question? Not according to the authors of In the Wake of 9/11: its an adaptive response to a terrifying reality. And one of the ways we deal with that terror is to reinforce our cultural norms; an obvious way to do that is to punish transgressors. And this makes all the more puzzling Noah’s dismissive attitude toward the Political Conservatism study mentioned above:

The authors ... do say that intolerance of ambiguity may "provide a psychological context" for Dubya's declaration, at an international conference of world leaders, "I know what I believe and I believe what I believe is right."

And terror management theory would suggest that such certainty is comforting. How was it that the Bush campaign branded Kerry? This article on the American Psychological Association website will tell you more about TMT, and about a study derived from this theory, regarding the 2004 election.

Losing the war on terror?

Last summer, the Bush administration had to acknowledge that data included in the State Department's annual report "2003 Patterns of Global Terrorism" was wrong. Though claiming in April 2004 that terror attacks were decreasing in 2003, terror attacks were actually at their highest level in twenty years. The Department issued a correction in June.

Recently, Paul Kerr of Arms Control Wonk noted that the State Department's 2004 release, due on April 30, will now exclude statistical analysis of terror attacks. It will focus on various countries, which is apparently the congressional mandate for the report.

The Department claims that the job of counting attacks belongs now to someone else, the National Counterterrorism Center.

California Representative Henry Waxman (D) thinks something else is behind this shift. Terror attacks tripled during the fourth year of the Bush administration. From the BBC story:

Mr Waxman accused the state department of concealing an increase in terror attacks.

He said congressional briefings by federal officials pointed to a dramatic rise in the number of "significant" terrorist attacks - those that result in loss of life, serious injury or major damage.

There were about 650 such attacks last year, the congressman said - up from 175 in 2003, a record number at the time.

Waxman says the State Department and the Bush administration are playing politics. Since they can no longer tout their anti-terror record, why say anything at all?

"The large increases in terrorist attacks reported in 2004 may undermine administration claims of success in the war on terror, but political inconvenience has never been a legitimate basis for withholding facts from the American people," the letter added.

Last year, by the way, Secretary of State Colin Powell blamed the undercounting on clerical mistakes.

All this misdirection emanates from the people who so like to talk about accountability.

Dirty bomb movie

Tonight, the Kennedy School screened HBO's "Dirty War."

The movie is well-done and certainly provocative. If you haven't seen it yet, I'd recommend watching soon. The users at imdb.com give it only 6.6 out of 10, but I'd probably rate it about 7.5.

After the screening, a heavy-hitting panel of Graham Allison, Rand Beers, and Richard Clarke discussed the movie's terrorism scenario. In the film a set of terror cells plan and successfully implement a dirty bomb attack on London.

All three called the film quite realistic.

Indeed, some of the remarks were, well, scary.

Allison, a professor in the Government Department and former Assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration, said that a dirty bomb attack is "long overdue." He finds it hard to explain why an attack has not already happened.

Gulp.

Allison also said that he worries "very much" about a smallpox attack and "most" about an actual nuclear bomb.

Beers, who was a foreign policy advisor to John Kerry (and as recently as 2002 was Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Combating Terrorism), raised a lot of good questions. Is the US ready to deal with this threat from terrorists? How much should the US spend to counter terror? Who has the power to regulate threats such as transportation of deadly chemicals?

And Beers declared that the US will never be able to answer the question, "How much is enough?" in terms of anti-terror effort and spending.

As for potential tradeoffs between human rights and anti-terror, Beers said that such questions would be decided by public dialogue.

I hope he's right. Clarke pointed out that we need to have these debates now, before the next attack.

Clarke, who was the top anti-terror guy on the National Security Council on 9/11, was his usual pessimistic self. Washington DC, as of two years ago, had only 2 decontamination units. In the HBO film, London has 10, which can each decontaminate 200 people per hour...but several hundred thousand people might be exposed to radiation in a dirty bomb attack.

Do the math; it isn't good: at 200 people "processed" per hour, it would take 1250 hours (52 days) to decontaminate a quarter of a million people.

Clarke also claimed that the US has made no effort to establish minimim essential conditions for security. In other words, we don't even know what would be required to provide safety.

And while Clarke acknowledged that there's no way to know for sure, the number of jihadists has likely increased "significantly" over the past two years.

Bottom line since 9/11: more terrorists, poor preparation for their attacks, and many worst-case scenarios are quite realistic -- if not likely.


Editing note: I fixed the math typo above. With 2 decontamination machines (handling 400 people per hour), a quarter million people could be "processed" in 26 days. With 10 machines, it would take a bit more than 5 days.

Organized International Terrorism?

I gave a talk today to a group of about 25 adults for a "Solidarity" class in a local Baptist church. The talk went well, I thought, and the audience had a lot of good questions at the end.

I'm not going to include every point I made, but these seemed important:

1. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) says al Qaeda has evolved into a "network of networks." I compared the structure to the way my Department's small computer network contained in a small building connects to the broader university-wide network, which itself includes both numerous smaller networks and one or more connections to the larger internet. The internet, of course, includes an enormous "network of networks."

This is a lot different from an organizational hierarchy. It's also quite different from the "hub system" used by airlines. I think it has significant implications for anti-terror efforts, but I'm not 100% sure what those are.

IISS says there were 20,000 jihadists trained in Afghanistan since the mid-1990s. Maybe 2000 were killed or captured once the US started making war in Afghanistan and maybe 1000 "foreign fighters" in Iraq are jihadists. Where are the other 85% (17,000)? Apparently, they are secretly dispersed in this decentralized network of networks in 50 or 60 nation-states. There is not much evidence that these jihadists are supported by states. The trained terrorists are more like parasites attached to unwitting hosts.

Finding them and stopping them from committing acts of terror probably won't be much like war. It is law enforcement, intelligence gathering, and homeland security.

So why does the US and global debate seem mostly to focus on the use of military threats to address state sponsors?

I saw a recent estimate (reported by UPI) that the US is spending over $5.8 billion per month on the war in Iraq. How many new resources have gone to the non-military tools of law enforcement, intelligence gathering and homeland security since 9/11? Hint: not nearly as much as claimed and not nearly as much as Iraq has and will cost the US.

2. I also talked a great deal about the "false sense of insecurity" that many analysts have discussed in regard to terror. The odds of any American facing a terrorist threat is very, very low. One study calculated that driving a bit more than 11 miles on rural interstate highways (which are the safest US roads) poses about the same risk of death as an airline terrorist attack (1 in 13 million).

Yet, many Americans are irrationally afraid of terrorists. I think al Qaeda should be taken seriously and that the US government should expend fairly significant resources to find those jihadists before they commit acts of terror, However, I do not think that average Americans ought to worry about the risks of terror attacks very much. Except for 2001, which featured an attack nearly 10 times worse than any other terror attack in history, terrorism kills only a few hundred people worldwide in any given year.

That's about as worrisome as peanut allergies, bathtub falls, or deer wandering on to the interstate highways.

Nuclear, biological and chemical proliferation pose additional problems that may or may not be related to terrorism. I think proliferation should be taken very seriously, but no one is going to enrich uranium in a cave and all sorts of non-proliferation tools are potentially available to address the problem. Again, this particular threat may or may not be best addressed with military means.

The debate needs to include serious discussion of sanctions, norms, international law, diplomacy, intelligence gathering, and law enforcement.

Osama's "Endorsement"

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) released their own translation of the latest Osama bin Laden videotape. MEMRI says that OBL was threatening voters in red states!

The tape of Osama bin Laden that was aired on Al-Jazeera(1) on Friday, October 29th included a specific threat to "each U.S. state," designed to influence the outcome of the upcoming election against George W. Bush. The U.S. media in general mistranslated the words "ay wilaya" (which means "each U.S. state")(2) to mean a "country" or "nation" other than the U.S., while in fact the threat was directed specifically at each individual U.S. state. This suggests some knowledge by bin Laden of the U.S. electoral college system. In a section of his speech in which he harshly criticized George W. Bush, bin Laden stated: "Any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security."

I do not know if this translation is accurate. I googled a bit and couldn't find any major media that have picked this up.

It is on several dozen right-leaning blogs, however, so I fully expect this to be in the news cycle soon. Volokh has a link from the NY Post...as one of my commenters pointed out.

I'm waiting for Abu Aardvark or Juan Cole to weigh in on this, though I did find this from the Aardvark in late August 2003, when he was still on blogspot:

For me, the problem isn't that MEMRI is run by Israelis - it's that their agenda, more or less explicitly, is to highlight the worst and ugliest of the Arab media. They generally don't mistranslate - I haven't seen any instances of that - but their selections and emphases give a misleading picture of the state of Arab public debate.

Do a search, and you can find more Aardvark critique of MEMRI.

[Update: Abu Aardvark spikes MEMRI's translation.]

I stand behind my initial reactions to the tape. OBL must know that his threats cause Americans to rally behind Bush. It's awfully difficult to see how this is any kind of argument that he wants Bush to lose or wants Kerry to win.

Yet, that's exactly what Republicans and numerous TV talking heads have been saying all weekend. The right-leaning/Republican spin machine is truly awesome to behold isn't it? Consider this story from the AP: "Thompson: Bin Laden wants Kerry elected."

A new videotape of Osama bin Laden was meant to help elect Sen. John Kerry president, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson says.

The former Wisconsin governor said the admitted mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks wants voters to elect someone other but President Bush. Bin Laden’s message was ‘‘obvious to anybody that looks at it,’’ Thompson said Saturday...

Yet, in the same story, Thompson acknowledges that the opposite is actually true. The tape helps Bush:

Thompson said he believes bin Laden’s videotape would help Bush attract undecided voters.

‘‘I’ve come to the conclusion this has got to help George Bush, because if you are undecided and you see a sworn enemy of America - somebody bragging about what he was able to accomplish to hurt our country and kill thousands of Americans, and have the audacity to brag about it,’’ Thompson said.

On Saturday, some Bush campaign advisor said the same thing, though in more gloating terms:

"We want people to think 'terrorism' for the last four days," said a Bush-Cheney campaign official. "And anything that raises the issue in people's minds is good for us."

A senior GOP strategist added, "anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush."

He called it "a little gift," saying it helps the President but doesn't guarantee his reelection.

A Houston Chronicle columnist used the new talking point openly.

Even Senator John McCain said of the tape, "It's very helpful to the president."