The Best Way to Fight Terrorism

Terrorism is a crime. It’s not an act of war, it’s a crime.

When terrorism is treated as a crime, something to be dealt with by law enforcement working with security services, results happen. The key is sleuthing, not bombing.

Ask Momin Khawaja, the Canadian foreign affairs department computer tech, who’s now facing life behind bars after being convicted, in Ottawa, of five terrorism charges. Evidence adduced at his trial showed that Khawaja was an Islamist extremist who joined forces with likeminded villains in England. He agreed to produce 30-bomb detonators for his chums.

It was police work that brought Khawaja down and a criminal justice system that’s put him behind bars for what may well be the remainder of his natural life.

It’s not often mentioned, but when it comes to thwarting al-Qaeda, the FBI and the CIA have been vastly more successful than the Pentagon.

 

A Killer Who Took the Easy Way Out or An Innocent Man Driven to Suicide?

American anthrax scientist, Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, has died at his own hand. According to the Washington Post, Ivins’ death comes just as a federal grand jury was about to indict the scientist for murder in the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people and terrorized the country.

“Prosecutors were considering whether to seek the death penalty against Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who worked at an elite U.S. Army bioweapons laboratory in Fort Detrick. Ivins died Tuesday in an apparent suicide.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital, according to an obituary published in the Frederick News-Post. The Los Angeles Times first reported in today’s editions that a federal grand jury in Washington had been gathering testimony about Ivins’s alleged involvement in the attacks, and that Ivins had been notified that criminal charges were looming.

Fort Detrick, located 50 miles north of Washington, has been a focus of Justice Department and FBI investigators for nearly six years, since anthrax-laced letters arrived at media organizations and Senate offices shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

The anthrax mailings killed five people, including two postal workers at the Brentwood Road facility in the District, and sickened 17 others, spreading fear on Capitol Hill and across the country only weeks after hijacked jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

For the past several months, the grand jury had been hearing testimony from scientists who worked alongside Ivins at Fort Detrick, performing research on inhaled anthrax spores, according to the Times report. While the Times report said Ivins worked in the elite biodefense lab since 1990, the News-Post obituary said he had been a scientist at Fort Detrick for 36 years.

The mailings, sent to then-Sen. Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), network television offices in New York and the company that owns the National Enquirer, gripped the nation and disrupted correspondence. In addition to the two D.C. postal workers, a Florida photographer, a New York hospital worker and an elderly Connecticut woman died after being exposed to the powder. “

 

Pushing the Fear Agenda

Thanks to Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria for shining a spotlight on a Simon Fraser University report that reveals how “terrorism” statistics have been gamed for nothing other than to make us all afraid – very afraid.

“The U.S. government agency charged with tracking terrorist attacks, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), reported a 41 percent increase from 2005 to 2006 and then equally high levels in 2007. Another major, government-funded database of terrorism, the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terror (MIPT), says that the annual toll of fatalities from terrorism grew 450 percent (!) between 1998 and 2006. A third report, the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), also government-funded, recorded a 75 percent jump in 2004, the most recent year available for the data it uses.

The Simon Fraser study points out that all three of these data sets have a common problem. They count civilian casualties from the war in Iraq as deaths caused by terrorism. This makes no sense. Iraq is a war zone, and as in other war zones around the world, many of those killed are civilians. Study director Prof. Andrew Mack notes, “Over the past 30 years, civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Bosnia, Guatemala, and elsewhere have, like Iraq, been notorious for the number of civilians killed. But although the slaughter in these cases was intentional, politically motivated, and perpetrated by non-state groups-and thus constituted terrorism as conceived by MIPT, NCTC, and START-it was almost never described as such.”

Including Iraq massively skews the analysis. In the NCTC and MIPT data, Iraq accounts for 80 percent of all deaths counted. But if you set aside the war there, terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years. In both the START and MIPT data, non-Iraq deaths from terrorism have declined by more than 40 percent since 2001. (The NCTC says the number has stayed roughly the same, but that too is because of a peculiar method of counting.) In the only other independent analysis of terrorism data, the U.S.-based IntelCenter published a study in mid-2007 that examined “significant” attacks launched by Al Qaeda over the past 10 years. It came to the conclusion that the number of Islam-ist attacks had declined 65 percent from a high point in 2004, and fatalities from such attacks had declined by 90 percent.

The Simon Fraser study notes that the decline in terrorism appears to be caused by many factors, among them successful counterterrorism operations in dozens of countries and infighting among terror groups. But the most significant, in the study’s view, is the “extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years.” These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists’ tactics and world view, the less they support them.

The University of Maryland’s Center for International Development and Conflict Management (I wish academic centers would come up with shorter names!) has released another revealing study, documenting a 54 percent decline in the number of organizations using violence across the Middle East and North Africa between 1985 and 2004. The real rise, it points out, is in the number of groups employing nonviolent means of protest, which increased threefold during the same period.

Why have you not heard about studies like this or the one from Simon Fraser, which was done by highly regarded scholars, released at the United Nations and widely discussed in many countries around the world-from Canada to Australia? Because it does not fit into the narrative of fear that we have all accepted far too easily.”

There you have it. The far-right Bush/Cheney/McCain/Harper gang keep telling us that we’re in a fight for the very survival of our civilization because they don’t dare acknowledge that Islamist jihadism is collapsing under its own weight. They can’t, make that won’t, tell us the truth because it undermines what Zakaria properly calls their “narrative of fear.”

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/fareed_zakaria/2008/05/the_only_thing_we_have_to_fear.html

 

Speaking Truth to Power

I wish Harpo was in Chicago. If he was, maybe he’d load up on a lot of wisdom about the international turmoil now underway in Afghanistan and elsewhere. There’s plenty of it to be had in the Windy City from the roughly 3,000 international affairs thinkers gathered there for the annual, International Studies Association convention.
Here, according to James Travers, writing in the Toronto Star, are some of the words of wisdom Harper could find helpful:

“Politicians stiffening national backbones won’t find renewed strength in this sampler drawn from four intensive days. There’s no guarantee imposing democracy controls terrorism, that being over there necessarily makes us safer over here or, most importantly, that the hope of reconstructing Afghanistan as a stable, modern state is guided by a common blueprint.

“None of that is idle musing. Academic and think tank business is booming in the failed states/security sector and the result is a lot of empirical holes in subjective cloth.

“For example, research predicts that violent groups will cling to their methods even after becoming political parties, Western powers become targets by intervening in essentially local conflicts, and practical short-term tactics make nonsense of the theoretical long-term Afghanistan strategy.”

“A steady supply of walk-in suicide bomber recruits is a product of new anger over infidel boots on Islamic soil and not just a manifestation of more deeply rooted grievances.

“And in Afghanistan the goal of winning hearts and minds is being pushed further over the horizon by the day-to-day damage of air strikes in a war fought among the people and by anti-drug policies that make farmers poorer and more vulnerable to corrupt officials.”

This isn’t revolutionary thinking, far from it. It’s actually very conventional wisdom that is simply not heard very often and even more rarely heeded.