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The National Security Forum
Presents
Stephen H. Frye, M.D.
“The War on Drugs:
A Super-Colossal Failure”
Or How the Legalization of Drugs Will Enhance Our National Security Interests, Dramatically Reduce Drug Use, Lower Crime,
and Provide an Enormous Economic Boost.
With a commentary by
District Attorney Richard Gammick
The Siena Hotel Ballroom, 9am, Friday, July 23rd
Dr. Frye was an assistant professor at the University of Nevada School of Medicine. A practicing psychiatrist, he received his MD from George Washington University, did a residency at UCSF, and served two years in the Army with the 10th Special Forces. He is an outspoken advocate of drug legalization, which he believes will reduce our prison population, save us billions of dollars that are now going to Mexican cartels and leading to the possible destabilization of the Mexican government, bring down the number of teen gangs, and provide a major economic boost to the treasury.
Frye alleges that the “drug war, not drugs” kills people. He believes the drug war has caused a huge increase in teen gangs, our prison population, and furthers racial discrimination – “whites do the drugs (86%) and blacks do the time (75%).” He points out that our high school dropout rate is “six times higher than in the Netherlands where drugs are legally available, regulated, controlled and taxed.”
Washoe County District Attorney Dick Gammick, an avid foe of the legalization or even decriminalization of drugs, will provide a counter-viewpoint to Dr. Frye’s presentation. Dick Gammick has served as the DA for 18 years, generally recording the highest vote-win percentage of any candidate.
Please RSVP (acceptances only!) to this e-mail or by calling 746-3222. A full breakfast will be served ($15 for this event), so we recommend folks arrive by 8:30.
Those wishing more information on Dr. Frye should consult his website, http://www.25reasons.org/
Colleagues: This is a very important analysis of President Obama’s emerging nuclear posture, the conflicts ongoing within the Administration, attacks from his base on his slowness to move away from Bush-era policies, and–most importantly–a large-scale conventional weapons capability known as “Prompt Global Strike”.
Great that this analysis, which I have highlighted below, comes out just before Keith Hansen’s discussion on this Wednesday.
February 28, 2010
White House Is Rethinking Nuclear Policy
New York Times, 1 March 2010
WASHINGTON — As President Obama begins making final decisions on a broad new nuclear strategy for the United States, senior aides say he will permanently reduce America’s arsenal by thousands of weapons. But the administration has rejected proposals that the United States declare it would never be the first to use nuclear weapons, aides said.
Mr. Obama’s new strategy — which would annul or reverse several initiatives by the Bush administration — will be contained in a nearly completed document called the Nuclear Posture Review, which all presidents undertake. Aides said Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates will present Mr. Obama with several options on Monday to address unresolved issues in that document, which have been hotly debated within the administration.
First among them is the question of whether, and how, to narrow the circumstances under which the United States will declare it might use nuclear weapons — a key element of nuclear deterrence since the cold war.
Mr. Obama’s decisions on nuclear weapons come as conflicting pressures in his defense policy are intensifying. His critics argue that his embrace of a new movement to eliminate nuclear weapons around the world is naïve and dangerous, especially at a time of new nuclear threats, particularly from Iran and North Korea.
But many of his supporters fear that over the past year he has moved too cautiously, and worry that he will retain the existing American policy by leaving open the possibility that the United States might use nuclear weapons in response to a biological or chemical attack, perhaps against a nation that does not possess a nuclear arsenal.
That is one of the central debates Mr. Obama must resolve in the next few weeks, his aides say.
Many elements of the new strategy have already been completed, according to senior administration and military officials who have been involved in more than a half-dozen Situation Room debates about it, and outside strategists consulted by the White House.
As described by those officials, the new strategy commits the United States to developing no new nuclear weapons, including the nuclear bunker-busters advocated by the Bush administration. But Mr. Obama has already announced that he will spend billions of dollars more on updating America’s weapons laboratories to assure the reliability of what he intends to be a much smaller arsenal. Increased confidence in the reliability of American weapons, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said in a speech in February, would make elimination of “redundant” nuclear weapons possible.
“It will be clear in the document that there will be very dramatic reductions — in the thousands — as relates to the stockpile,” according to one senior administration official whom the White House authorized to discuss the issue this weekend. Much of that would come from the retirement of large numbers of weapons now kept in storage.
Other officials, not officially allowed to speak on the issue, say that in back-channel discussions with allies, the administration has also been quietly broaching the question of whether to withdraw American tactical nuclear weapons from Europe, where they provide more political reassurance than actual defense. Those weapons are now believed to be in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Turkey and the Netherlands.
At the same time, the new document will steer the United States toward more non-nuclear defenses. It relies more heavily on missile defense, much of it arrayed within striking distance of the Persian Gulf, focused on the emerging threat from Iran. Mr. Obama’s recently published Quadrennial Defense Review also includes support for a new class of non-nuclear weapons, called “Prompt Global Strike,” that could be fired from the United States and hit a target anywhere in less than an hour.
The idea, officials say, would be to give the president a non-nuclear option for, say, a large strike on the leadership of Al Qaeda in the mountains of Pakistan, or a pre-emptive attack on an impending missile launch from North Korea. But under Mr. Obama’s strategy, the missiles would be based at new sites around the United States that might even be open to inspection, so that Russia and China would know that a missile launched from those sites was not nuclear — to avoid having them place their own nuclear forces on high alert.
But the big question confronting Mr. Obama is how he will describe the purpose of America’s nuclear arsenal. It is far more than just an academic debate.
Some leading Democrats, led by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have asked Mr. Obama to declare that the “sole purpose” of the country’s nuclear arsenal is to deter nuclear attack. “We’re under considerable pressure on this one within our own party,” one of Mr. Obama’s national security advisers said recently.
But inside the Pentagon and among many officials in the White House, Mr. Obama has been urged to retain more ambiguous wording — declaring that deterring nuclear attack is the primary purpose of the American arsenal, not the only one. That would leave open the option of using nuclear weapons against foes that might threaten the United States with biological or chemical weapons or transfer nuclear material to terrorists.
Any compromise wording that leaves in place elements of the Bush-era pre-emption policy, or suggests the United States could use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear adversary, would disappoint many on the left wing of his party, and some arms control advocates.
“Any declaration that deterring a nuclear attack is a ‘primary purpose’ of our arsenal leaves open the possibility that there are other purposes, and it would not reflect any reduced reliance on nuclear weapons,” said Daryl G. Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association. “It wouldn’t be consistent with what the president said in his speech in Prague” a year ago, when he laid out an ambitious vision for moving toward the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Mr. Obama’s base has already complained in recent months that he has failed to break from Bush era national security policy in some fundamental ways. They cite, for example, his stepped-up use of drones to strike suspected terrorists in Pakistan and his failure to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility by January as Mr. Obama had promised.
While Mr. Obama ended financing last year for a new nuclear warhead sought by the Bush administration, the new strategy goes further. It commits Mr. Obama to developing no new nuclear weapons, including a low-yield, deeply-burrowing nuclear warhead that the Pentagon sought to strike buried targets, like the nuclear facilities in North Korea and Iran. Mr. Obama, officials said, has determined he could not stop other countries from seeking new weapons if the United States was doing the same.
Still, some of Mr. Obama’s critics in his own party say the change is symbolic because he is spending more to improve old weapons.
At the center of the new strategy is a renewed focus on arms control and nonproliferation agreements, which were largely dismissed by the Bush administration. That includes an effort to win passage of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was defeated during the Clinton administration and faces huge hurdles in the Senate, and revisions of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to close loopholes that critics say have been exploited by Iran and North Korea.
Mr. Obama’s reliance on new, non-nuclear Prompt Global Strike weapons is bound to be contentious. As described by advocates within the Pentagon and in the military, the new weapons could achieve the effects of a nuclear weapon, without turning a conventional war into a nuclear one. As a result, the administration believes it could create a new form of deterrence — a way to contain countries that possess or hope to develop nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, without resorting to a nuclear option.
Colleagues: Two very important and interesting pieces today.
The first is from Bob Gast, a Renoite and participant in this Forum, who recently retired as an Assistant Director of the FBI. Bob laments the publicity given to how we handle terrorist suspects and the difficulties that presents for FBI or other interrogators.
Following that is a sharp critique by Mike Hayden, former NSA and CIA Director, who finds much to be concerned about with the direction AG Holder and the Justice Department/FBI are proceeding on counter-terrorism issues, including but not limited to the manner in which the Christmas bomber was handled.
First, this from Bob Gast: (reprinted with permission)
Hi to all – Having been involved in handling or supervising interrogations ( or interviews as the FBI calls them) for nearly forty years, I was most distressed recently to see in the media and hear from various politicians and other pundits a series of criticisms, opinions, and ( most worrisome) details of the manner in which interrogations are and may be conducted.
I believe that this desire ( however well intended) to shine a light on a most useful investigative technique is harmful to our national security and could well impact negatively on our ability to obtain valuable intelligence data. Why do I say this??
Interrogations are a delicate dance between the interrogator who wants information from the interviewee, and the interviewee who may or may not have information but , in any case, is probably unlikely to give in easily. At the outset, the interrogator has a number of “arrows in his quiver”:
– #1 The interviewee is probably in custody or at least is unable to leave the scene of the interview so he/she are somewhat anxious.
– #2 The interviewee has little knowledge of what the interrogator knows or suspects.
– #3 The subject ( this is the Bureau term. In New York he is the perp as in “lets whale on the Perp” or the Mutt as ” lets sweat the Mutt.) In any case the subject doesn’t know with any certainly what the interrogator can and will do to him – physically or mentally. Sure they’ve heard all these stories that the Feds are good guys or the local cops are wimps etc etc. but can he/she be sure???
– #4 In military interrogations there is also available to the interrogator a wide range of other options, such as rendition ( it may not be too nice to be returned to Iraq or Saudi Arabia) , the Gitmo option, and a lot of other scary stuff involving threats of serious bodily harm.
Ok, all this is going through the mind of the subject when he is first confronted and he is definitely on the defensive. But the biggest advantage of all to the interrogator is APPREHENSION and FEAR of what may happen. What do I mean? Simply a definite unease as to the UNKNOWN. He doesn’t think that he will be physically harmed but he DOES NOT KNOW FOR SURE. Moreover, he is unsure as to what the interrogator may be able to do for him. i.e., speak with the prosecutor offer immunity etc. The skillful interrogator can manipulate the subject using all of these CONCERNS and with time will obtain valuable information.
The problem we have now is that the Government/ Justice Department seems hell bent on publicizing in great detail the rules of interrogation and, worst yet, what will happen to the interrogator if she or he fails to follow the rules. Note, for example, the pending courts marshall of the three navy seals in Afghanistan. This takes away from the interrogation a great deal of the suspense and apprehension on the part of the subject and will make it infinitely more difficult to obtain information on a timely basis.
All the bad guys, be they domestic or foreign warriors, will now have the advantage over the interrogators because you can bet your life savings on the fact that these ” RULES OF CONDUCT” will now be part of their “training manuals”.
The contention by the government that this bright light shone on the subject will somehow be viewed favorably by our friends and enemies abroad is, I believe, total BS.
Finally I was glad to read that the interrogation teams will spend considerable time on the study of the backgrounds of likely terrorist subjects and will seek outside help in gaining a better understanding of their possible motivations, religious strictures, family relationships etc. This will take time but we must build within our intelligence community a very high level of expertise before we can consistently go ”one on one” with some of these subjects.
Hope that you all find this of interest and I’d welcome comments.
Bob Gast, FBI Assistant Director Retired
Now here is the article I denoted by GEN Mike Hayden, former Director of the NSA and the CIA. While Hayden’s article is two weeks old, I think the criticism he levels at the Obama Justice Department and the AG personally is worth serious consideration. Subsequent to the torrent of criticism of the handling of the Christmas bomber, we have seen White House officials troop out to declare that Umar the Bomber is now spilling his guts, so it really didn’t matter that he was “Miranidized” quickly and “lawyered up” by the FBI.
I love Hayden’s last comment noting how slow this Administration has moved in setting up the mechanisms needed to go after the terrorists, but how quickly it seems to be moving against the Navy Seals and, especially, CIA interrogators: “They are apparently still getting organized for the al-Qaeda interrogations. But the interrogations of CIA personnel are well underway.”
Washington Post
January 31, 2010
Pg. 21
Justice And Terror
The mishandling of enemy combatants
By Michael V. Hayden
In the war on terrorism, this country faces an enemy whose theory of warfare ends the hard-won distinction in modern thought between combatant and noncombatant. In doing that for which we have created government — ensuring life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — how can we be adequately aggressive to ensure the first value, without unduly threatening the other two? This is hard. And people don’t have to be lazy or stupid to get it wrong.
We got it wrong in Detroit on Christmas Day. We allowed an enemy combatant the protections of our Constitution before we had adequately interrogated him. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is not “an isolated extremist.” He is the tip of the spear of a complex al-Qaeda plot to kill Americans in our homeland.
In the 50 minutes the FBI had to question him, agents reportedly got actionable intelligence. Good. But were there any experts on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in the room (other than Abdulmutallab)? Was there anyone intimately familiar with any National Security Agency raw traffic to, from or about the captured terrorist? Did they have a list or photos of suspected recruits?
When questioning its detainees, the CIA routinely turns the information provided over to its experts for verification and recommendations for follow-up. The responses of these experts — “Press him more on this, he knows the details” or “First time we’ve heard that” — helps set up more detailed questioning.
None of that happened in Detroit. In fact, we ensured that it wouldn’t. After the first session, the FBI Mirandized Abdulmutallab and — to preserve a potential prosecution – sent in a “clean team” of agents who could have no knowledge of what Abdulmutallab had provided before he was given his constitutional warnings. As has been widely reported, Abdulmutallab then exercised his right to remain silent.
In retrospect, the inadvisability of this approach seems self-evident. Perhaps it didn’t appear that way on Dec. 25 because we have, over the past year, become acclimated to certain patterns of thought.
Two days after his inauguration, President Obama issued an executive order that limited all interrogations by the U.S. government to the techniques authorized in the Army Field Manual. The CIA had not seen the final draft of the order, let alone been allowed to comment, before it was issued. I thought that odd since the order was less a legal document — there was no claim that the manual exhausted the universe of lawful techniques — than a policy one: These particular lawful techniques would be all that the country would need, at least for now.
A similar drama unfolded in April over the release of Justice Department memos that had authorized the CIA interrogation program. CIA Director Leon Panetta and several of his predecessors opposed public release of the memos in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit on the only legitimate grounds for such a stand: that the documents were legitimately still classified and their release would gravely harm national security. On this policy — not legal — question, the president sided with his attorney general rather than his CIA chief.
In August, seemingly again in contradiction to the president’s policy of not looking backward and over the objections of the CIA, Justice pushed to release the CIA inspector general’s report on the interrogation program. Then Justice decided to reopen investigations of CIA officers that had been concluded by career prosecutors years ago, even though Panetta and seven of his predecessors said that doing so would be unfair, unwarranted and harmful to the agency’s current mission.
In November, Justice announced that it intended to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and several others in civilian courts for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The White House made clear that this was a Justice Department decision, which is odd because the decision was not legally compelled (other detainees are to be tried by military commissions) and the reasons given for making it (military trials could serve as a recruitment tool for al-Qaeda, harm relations with allies, etc.) were not legal but political.
Even tough government organizations, such as those in the intelligence community, figure out pretty quickly what their political masters think is not acceptable behavior. The executive order that confined interrogations to the Army Field Manual also launched a task force to investigate whether those techniques were sufficient for national needs. Few observers believed that the group would recommend changes, and to date, no techniques have been added to the manual.
Intelligence officers need to know that someone has their back. After the Justice memos were released in April, CIA officers began to ask whether the people doing things that were currently authorized would be dragged through this kind of public knothole in five years. No one could guarantee that they would not.
Some may celebrate that the current Justice Department’s perspective on the war on terrorism has become markedly more dominant in the past year. We should probably understand the implications of that before we break out the champagne. That apparently no one recommended on Christmas Day that Abdulmutallab be handled, at least for a time, as an enemy combatant should be concerning. That our director of national intelligence, Denny Blair, bravely said as much during congressional testimony this month is cause for hope.
Actually, Blair suggested that the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), announced by the administration in August, should have been called in. A government spokesman later pointed out that the group does not yet exist.
There’s a final oddity. In August, the government unveiled the HIG for questioning al-Qaeda and announced that the FBI would begin questioning CIA officers about the alleged abuses in the 2004 inspector general’s report. They are apparently still getting organized for the al-Qaeda interrogations. But the interrogations of CIA personnel are well underway.
The writer was director of the CIA from 2006 to 2009.
Colleagues:
Have been in Hawaii on vacation, so you haven’t heard much from me. But I did want to send out this analysis of the growing cyber-warfare threat.
Two important recent developments: First, Google went public denouncing China for attempting to plant destructive codes in the Google China network and to tap into the data bank that, among other things, would provide information on who was searching what topics. Google had previously agreed to censor its searches in response to Beijing’s demands, but this was a step too far.
Google says it will exit the potentially lucrative Chinese market, at least for now. One observer noted that while the PRC won the battle, “my money’s on Google for the long term”. Maybe.
More alarming is the analysis below of a recent cyber-warfare game that left U.S. officials in despair. It needs to be read carefully. For myself, the bottom line is that if a serious conflict broke out between the PRC and the US, Beijing could cripple us immediately.
What do you think? Ty
January 26, 2010
Cyberwar
In Digital Combat, U.S. Finds No Easy Deterrent
By JOHN MARKOFF, DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON — On a Monday morning earlier this month, top Pentagon leaders gathered to simulate how they would respond to a sophisticated cyberattack aimed at paralyzing the nation’s power grids, its communications systems or its financial networks.
The results were dispiriting. The enemy had all the advantages: stealth, anonymity and unpredictability. No one could pinpoint the country from which the attack came, so there was no effective way to deter further damage by threatening retaliation. What’s more, the military commanders noted that they even lacked the legal authority to respond — especially because it was never clear if the attack was an act of vandalism, an attempt at commercial theft or a state-sponsored effort to cripple the United States, perhaps as a prelude to a conventional war.
What some participants in the simulation knew — and others did not — was that a version of their nightmare had just played out in real life, not at the Pentagon where they were meeting, but in the far less formal war rooms at Google Inc. Computers at Google and more than 30 other companies had been penetrated, and Google’s software engineers quickly tracked the source of the attack to seven servers in Taiwan, with footprints back to the Chinese mainland.
After that, the trail disappeared into a cloud of angry Chinese government denials, and then an ugly exchange of accusations between Washington and Beijing. That continued Monday, with Chinese assertions that critics were trying to “denigrate China” and that the United States was pursuing “hegemonic domination” in cyberspace.
These recent events demonstrate how quickly the nation’s escalating cyberbattles have outpaced the rush to find a deterrent, something equivalent to the cold-war-era strategy of threatening nuclear retaliation.
So far, despite millions of dollars spent on studies, that quest has failed. Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made the most comprehensive effort yet to warn potential adversaries that cyberattacks would not be ignored, drawing on the language of nuclear deterrence.
“States, terrorists and those who would act as their proxies must know that the United States will protect our networks,” she declared in a speech on Thursday that drew an angry response from Beijing. “Those who disrupt the free flow of information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government and our civil society.”
But Mrs. Clinton did not say how the United States would respond, beyond suggesting that countries that knowingly permit cyberattacks to be launched from their territories would suffer damage to their reputations, and could be frozen out of the global economy.
There is, in fact, an intense debate inside and outside the government about what the United States can credibly threaten. One alternative could be a diplomatic démarche, or formal protest, like the one the State Department said was forthcoming, but was still not delivered, in the Google case. Economic retaliation and criminal prosecution are also possibilities.
Inside the National Security Agency, which secretly scours overseas computer networks, officials have debated whether evidence of an imminent cyberattack on the United States would justify a pre-emptive American cyberattack — something the president would have to authorize. In an extreme case, like evidence that an adversary was about to launch an attack intended to shut down power stations across America, some officials argue that the right response might be a military strike.
“We are now in the phase that we found ourselves in during the early 1950s, after the Soviets got the bomb,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the Kennedy School at Harvard. “It won’t have the same shape as nuclear deterrence, but what you heard Secretary Clinton doing was beginning to explain that we can create some high costs for attackers.”
Fighting Shadows
When the Pentagon summoned its top regional commanders from around the globe for meetings and a dinner with President Obama on Jan. 11, the war game prepared for them had nothing to do with Afghanistan, Iraq or Yemen. Instead, it was the simulated cyberattack — a battle unlike any they had engaged in.
Participants in the war game emerged with a worrisome realization. Because the Internet has blurred the line between military and civilian targets, an adversary can cripple a country — say, freeze its credit markets — without ever taking aim at a government installation or a military network, meaning that the Defense Department’s advanced capabilities may not be brought to bear short of a presidential order.
“The fact of the matter,” said one senior intelligence official, “is that unless Google had told us about the attack on it and other companies, we probably never would have seen it. When you think about that, it’s really scary.”
William J. Lynn III, the deputy defense secretary, who oversaw the simulation, said in an interview after the exercise that America’s concepts for protecting computer networks reminded him of one of defensive warfare’s great failures, the Maginot Line of pre-World War II France.
Mr. Lynn, one of the Pentagon’s top strategists for computer network operations, argues that the billions spent on defensive shields surrounding America’s banks, businesses and military installations provide a similarly illusory sense of security.
“A fortress mentality will not work in cyber,” he said. “We cannot retreat behind a Maginot Line of firewalls. We must also keep maneuvering. If we stand still for a minute, our adversaries will overtake us.”
The Pentagon simulation and the nearly simultaneous real-world attacks on Google and more than 30 other companies show that those firewalls are falling fast. But if it is obvious that the government cannot afford to do nothing about such breaches, it is also clear that the old principles of retaliation — you bomb Los Angeles, we’ll destroy Moscow — just do not translate.
“We are looking beyond just the pure military might as the solution to every deterrence problem,” said Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, in charge of the military’s Strategic Command, which defends military computer networks. “There are other elements of national power that can be brought to bear. You could deter a country with some economic moves, for example.”
But first you would have to figure out who was behind the attack.
Even Google’s engineers could not track, with absolute certainty, the attackers who appeared to be trying to steal their source code and, perhaps, insert a “Trojan horse” — a backdoor entryway to attack — in Google’s search engines. Chinese officials have denied their government was involved, and said nothing about American demands that it investigate. China’s denials, American officials say, are one reason that President Obama has said nothing in public about the attacks — a notable silence, given that he has made cybersecurity a central part of national security strategy.
“You have to be quite careful about attributions and accusations,” said a senior administration official deeply involved in dealing with the Chinese incident with Google. The official was authorized by the Obama administration to talk about its strategy, with the condition that he would not be named.
“It’s the nature of these attacks that the forensics are difficult,” the official added. “The perpetrator can mask their involvement, or disguise it as another country’s.” Those are known as “false flag” attacks, and American officials worry about being fooled by a dissident group, or a criminal gang, into retaliating against the wrong country.
Nonetheless, the White House said in a statement that “deterrence has been a fundamental part of the administration’s cybersecurity efforts from the start,” citing work in the past year to protect networks and “international engagement to influence the behavior of potential adversaries.”
Left unsaid is whether the Obama administration has decided whether it would ever threaten retaliatory cyberattacks or military attacks after a major cyberattack on American targets. The senior administration official provided by the White House, asked about Mr. Obama’s thinking on the issue, said: “Like most operational things like this, the less said, the better.” But he added, “there are authorities to deal with these attacks residing in many places, and ultimately, of course, with the president.”
Others are less convinced. “The U.S. is widely recognized to have pre-eminent offensive cybercapabilities, but it obtains little or no deterrent effect from this,” said James A. Lewis, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies program on technology and public policy.
In its final years, the Bush administration started a highly classified effort, led by Melissa Hathaway, to build the foundations of a national cyberdeterrence strategy. “We didn’t even come close,” she said in a recent interview. Her hope had been to recreate Project Solarium, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower began in the sunroom of the White House in 1953, to come up with new ways of thinking about the nuclear threats then facing the country. “There was a lot of good work done, but it lacked the rigor of the original Solarium Project. They didn’t produce what you need to do decision making.”
Ms. Hathaway was asked to stay on to run Mr. Obama’s early review. Yet when the unclassified version of its report was published in the spring, there was little mention of deterrence. She left the administration when she was not chosen as the White House cybersecurity coordinator. After a delay of seven months, that post is now filled: Howard A. Schmidt, a veteran computer specialist, reported for work last week, just as the government was sorting through the lessons of the Google attack and calculating its chances of halting a more serious one in the future.
Government-Corporate Divide
In nuclear deterrence, both the Americans and the Soviets knew it was all or nothing: the Cuban missile crisis was resolved out of fear of catastrophic escalation. But in cyberattacks, the damage can range from the minor to the catastrophic, from slowing computer searches to bringing down a country’s cellphone networks, neutralizing its spy satellites, or crashing its electrical grid or its air traffic control systems. It is difficult to know if small attacks could escalate into bigger ones.
So part of the problem is to calibrate a response to the severity of the attack.
The government has responded to the escalating cyberattacks by ordering up new strategies and a new United States Cyber Command. The office of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates — whose unclassified e-mail system was hacked in 2007 — is developing a “framework document” that would describe the threat and potential responses, and perhaps the beginnings of a deterrence strategy to parallel the one used in the nuclear world.
The new Cyber Command, if approved by Congress, would be run by Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, head of the National Security Agency. Since the agency spies on the computer systems of foreign governments and terrorist groups, General Alexander would, in effect, be in charge of both finding and, if so ordered, neutralizing cyberattacks in the making.
But many in the military, led by General Chilton of the Strategic Command and Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have been urging the United States to think more broadly about ways to deter attacks by threatening a country’s economic well-being or its reputation.
Mrs. Clinton went down that road in her speech on Thursday, describing how a country that cracked down on Internet freedom or harbored groups that conduct cyberattacks could be ostracized. But though sanctions might work against a small country, few companies are likely to shun a market the size of China, or Russia, because they disapprove of how those governments control cyberspace or use cyberweapons.
That is what makes the Google-China standoff so fascinating. Google broke the silence that usually surrounds cyberattacks; most American banks or companies do not want to admit their computer systems were pierced. Google has said it will stop censoring searches conducted by Chinese, even if that means being thrown out of China. The threat alone is an attempt at deterrence: Google’s executives are essentially betting that Beijing will back down, lift censorship of searches and crack down on the torrent of cyberattacks that pour out of China every day. If not, millions of young Chinese will be deprived of the Google search engine, and be left to the ones controlled by the Chinese government.
An Obama administration official who has been dealing with the Chinese mused recently, “You could argue that Google came up with a potential deterrent for the Chinese before we did.”
HOMELAND SECURITY AFTER UMAR THE TERRORIST: WHOSE FAULT AND WHAT DO WE DO NOW?
Colleagues,
The reality is that we dodged a very BIG bullet when the Al-Qaeda trained Nigerian terrorist failed in his clumsy attempt to blow up a Northwest Airliner on Christmas Day as it approached the Detroit airport. The bungled attack was the result of sheer luck, an incompetent perpetrator, and quick reaction by passengers on board. The foiled explosion was by no means the result of expert investigatory and security work on the part of our government intelligence and homeland security agencies—in fact, once again we are treated to the spectacle of a failure of the responsible authorities to share and act on information that was readily available.
Let’s see now: Umar the would be Islamic Jihadist, trained in Yemen by Al Qaeda, turned in to the U.S. State Department by his own father for his terrorist beliefs and training, boards a plane as a last minute passenger paying in cash, and who brought no luggage. Many have wondered how a grandmother from Des Moines can be frisked and subject to interrogation, but an Islamic jihadist on the government’s terrorist watch list can carry a bomb on a plane and all they want to know, one observer caustically points out, “is whether he would like the chicken or the vegetable dinner”. The multi-billion dollar, highly intrusive and economically debilitating system we have in place to protect the flying public did not work.
The major failure occurred within the intelligence community and the State department. Clearly the consolidation of the Intelligence Community has not led to sharing terrorist data in a timely fashion—the CIA had been watching Umar since November, but guess what? They didn’t tell the Department of Homeland Security! The State Department was contacted by Umar’s father regarding his terrorist leanings, but he still possessed multiple-entry visas to the U.S. More than faulting the DHS, blame should be laid at the feet of the CIA, the Director of National Intelligence, and the State Department. And, by the way, at the Senate, which has been sitting on the nomination of a talented new director of the TSA for months.
This by no means excuses the DHS or its director, Janet Napolitano. Her initial statement that the failed attempt demonstrated that “the system worked” was preposterous, another debit in the list of charges that have led many to question her competence and leadership. President Obama, who had to be whisked off the golf course to make a hasty statement after Napolitano’s gaffe, reiterated his “full support” for the Secretary—which is tantamount to saying she will be walking the plank soon.
In fairness, DHS does not get the major blame here. The terrorist was subjected to screening in Amsterdam, Homeland Security did not have the information they needed, and there is no indication that this incident is the result of some policy change that weakened our security measures. George Bush’s Director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, said on NPR yesterday that this would have likely occurred under his administration as much as it did under Napolitano’s.
So where do we go now? Do we begin “profiling” passengers? Institute more invasive security procedures? Redraw the Intel community wiring diagram? We will probably do all three and the net result will probably be no better security measures, but onerous, economically draining procedures implemented by a bureaucracy that doesn’t know what else to do so it dreams up asinine restrictions designed to show that “they are responding seriously” to the threat.
Before I get to profiling, a few words on our “system” of security procedures. After 9/11, Al Qaeda secured a major victory, not only by the actual attack on the twin towers, but by forcing Western democracies to institute mechanisms that probably provide little additional security but impose enormous economic penalties and create time-wasting procedures. On many flights after this incident passengers were not able to have anything—no newspapers, no child’s bottle, no pillows—on their laps for the last hour of the flights, nor could they even get up. Now how in the hell does this do any good, except to persuade would be terrorists to go to the bathroom and ignite themselves an hour and half earlier?
On this I would agree with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, that noted today that “The Islamic terrorists seek to cripple America’s economy. The current absurd, counterproductive….”airport screening” regime accomplishes just that for the enemy”, while failing to offer any real protection. Overstated, maybe, but still a pertinent observation. I fear, along with the LVRJ, that the new measures I anticipate will be implemented will be even more oppressive, intrusive and equally ineffective. For example, the full body scan is now the hot new tool to defeat the terrorists, but how would that scan show the PETN explosive attached (surgically?) to the man’s penis?
We need to have a courageous task force convened to decide what measures should be taken to insure passenger safety and what are simply bureaucratic responses that pretend to do something. Maybe we even have to assume some risk here. That is, we certainly want to prevent highjacking airliners and flying them into buildings—but what is the price for trying (ineffectively) to prevent every and any incident that could affect just 200-300 passengers? After all, we know that lowering the national speed limit to 55 mph would save thousands of lives annually, but there we have accepted a certain degree of risk.
What about “profiling”? It is a technique used extensively by the Israelis, who have not had an air incident in over 30 years. Profiling can be racial, psychological or personality based, and the Israelis use all three in clearing passengers for El Al flights. Israeli airport security begins before passengers enter the security area, monitoring individuals in the terminal waiting area for suspicious behavior, for example. Race is certainly a factor, but not the only screening indicator, and it does include ethnic and religious background. Almost all airline-related terrorist incidents have been caused by Arab males between the ages of 19 and 39, and most have lived in countries of concern (Somalia, Yemen) who have embraced extreme interpretations of Islam. While this regime would offend some foreign visitors, we need to realize that we simply can’t make ourselves totally inoffensive to militant Islamists.
I am aware that some, including Secretary Chertoff, oppose profiling. Chertoff feels that it violates civil rights and simply doesn’t work. I am not sympathetic to his view on the first issue, but knowing that implementation of profiling would be in the hands of ordinary people like you and me in the TSA (“Thousands Standing Around”, the LVRJ says), I am dubious that we can replicate the skills and competence the Israelis demonstrate. Nor do I wish to declare war on the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims, most of whom are moderate and pose no threat to the U.S. But if we are not training our security personnel in profiling, if we are not looking more closely at specific groups and nationalities, then we are foregoing one of the most effective security measures at our disposal.
I hear a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking now, especially in Congress as our representatives madly search for a scapegoat. There is a lot of justifiable criticism for those in the loop failing to share the data available that had been amassed, but remember that it is always easier to connect the dots when “you know what the answer is”, as Newsweek notes. But it just may be that stopping dedicated terrorists is really hard and we may not always succeed. As one observer noted, “We need to be lucky every time….the bad guys need only to be lucky once”. Al Qaeda and its allies are no doubt analyzing our response to this incident—indeed, I suspect that Umar was a “useful idiot” trained for such a penetration/testing mission—and are preparing other, “asymmetric” tactics to foil our cumbersome security efforts.
In the meantime, take Jay Leno’s advice, who noted after 9/11, “If your first name is Mohammed and your last night is not Ali, you’d better get to the airport early”. Guess we all will now as well.
- Ty
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