reflectivepundit

Republicans Try to Exploit Failed Attack by Underwear-Bomber

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Republicans did not lose time to attack President Obama and his administration after Umar Farouk Abdulmuttallab, a passenger on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit, tried to detonate PETN, a powerful plastic explosive he had hidden in his underpants.

To begin with, Representative Peter King and others criticized the president for not addressing the nation right after the failed attempt on Christmas Day. It is far from clear that this would have been the right move. Why add to the media hype and reward the masterminds of the latest terror plot with the highest level attention they crave? After all, the attempt failed. [As an aside, one wonders why the same people who are so eager to go public with their criticism of Obama remained silent, when President George W. Bush failed to pay attention to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, a real catastrophe…]

More troubling are the Cheney-like voices who exploit the failed attempt by the would-be underwear bomber to intensify their attacks on the current administration’s counterterrorism policy. An editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal is a case in point. It calls Janet Napolitano “Secretary of Homeland Anxiety.” If anyone deserves this name, it is the first Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge who took his cue for raising the color-coded terror threat alerts from a White House that was aware that public fear of further terrorism increased the president’s approval ratings and his chances for reelection in 2004.  

As for the Obama administration’s counterterrorism efforts, they are mostly continuations of measures put in place in the more than seven post-9/11 years of the Bush administration. That is true for airport and aviation security as it is for the intelligence about possible terrorists in pertinent data bases. From what is known so far Abdulmuttallab’s name was on the list of persons with alleged connections to terrorists but not on the no-fly roster. Obviously, it does not make sense to have more than half-a-million names on a general list of somewhat suspect persons without checking that list constantly against important developments and new information—in this case the alarm triggered by the would-be bombers own father. Moreover, these lists should be shared with allies and equally vulnerable countries.

The Surge in Afghanistan: Consistent With Obama’s Campaign Speeches

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Tom Hayden, one of the most prominent leaders of the Anti-Vietnam Movement of the 1960s, wrote the other day in The Nation, “It's time to strip the Obama sticker off my car. Obama's escalation in Afghanistan is the last in a string of disappointments.” His sentiment is far from unique among Obama’s most enthusiastic supporters during the presidential campaign.

They either did not pay attention to candidate Obama’s stump speeches during the campaign or they did not want to hear and believe what their candidate said with respect to what he called “a war of necessity”—Afghanistan.  Otherwise, they couldn’t have been too surprised about the president’s finally revealed Afghanistan strategy.

On October 22, 2008, shortly before he won the presidential election, Barack Obama said in a speech in Richmond, Virginia, what he stated in earlier and later stump speeches: 

“Ending the [Iraq] war will help us deal with Afghanistan…In 2002, I said we should focus on finishing the fight against Osama bin Laden. Throughout this campaign, I have argued that we need more troops and more resources to win the war in Afghanistan, and to confront the growing threat from al Qaeda along the Pakistani border…”

“Make no mistake: we are confronting an urgent crisis in Afghanistan, and we have to act. It's time to heed the call from General McKiernan and others for more troops. That's why I'd send at least two or three additional combat brigades to Afghanistan. We also need more training for Afghan Security forces, more non-military assistance to help Afghans develop alternatives to poppy farming, more safeguards to prevent corruption, and a new effort to crack down on cross-border terrorism. Only a comprehensive strategy that prioritizes Afghanistan and the fight against al Qaeda will succeed, and that's the change I'll bring to the White House.”

So, the president decided to do what he said as candidate.

However, it is far from clear whether the positive results of the surge in Iraq can be repeated in Afghanistan by deploying 30,000 more troops there in addition to several thousand additional troops from a variety of other NATO members and the more than 20,000 U.S. soldiers already added on President Obama’s watch earlier this year. 

Playing Political Football with the Trial of 9/11 Plotters in New York

By Brigitte L. Nacos

More than eight years after the 9/11 attacks, more than six years after the breaking news of the 9/11 mastermind’s arrest, and after many years of secrecy, human rights violations, legal maneuvering, and inaction—most of it during George W. Bush’s presidency--, the Obama administration decided to try Khalid Sheik Mohammad and four others in a federal court in downtown Manhattan.

This seemed a logical choice. After all, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center Bombing in 1993, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, one of the participants in a plot to bomb several Manhattan landmarks, and a number of other terrorists were tried, convicted and sentenced to life or long prison terms in the same court house without any problems.

Yet, Attorney-General Eric Holder’s announcement that the 9/11 plotters will be tried in a civil court in New York City rather than before military tribunal at Guantanamo was greeted with far louder opposition than support. Republicans were shameless in playing political football as they once again exploited the families of 9/11 victims for their partisan games.

As the Washington Post reported, before the attorney-general began his testimony before the Senate Judiciary, GOP Senators introduced “[m]ore than a dozen friends and relatives [that] had assembled in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Wednesday morning to watch the hearing.” After the hearing ended, Holder met with families and friends of 9/11 victims and listened to their opposition to bring them to justice in a civil court. The Post described the meeting as an “encounter with grief-stricken relatives.”

While one certainly sympathizes with the emotions of relatives and friends of 9/11 victims, eight years after the terrorist attacks politicians and reporters should stop dramatizing and amplifying the emotional plight of these families as if it were forever unique to this particular group of people.   

What Endgame in Afghanistan?

By Brigitte L. Nacos
President Barack Obama has differentiated between a war of choice in Iraq and a war of necessity in Afghanistan. As he ponders whether and how many additional troops to send to Afghanistan, he has yet to reveal the objectives of the present NATO forces and the expected troop surge to an increasingly skeptical American public. Indeed, recent opinion polls show that a plurality of Americans wants a reduction in present troop levels, not an increase. The same is true for some prominent voices and unlikely bedfellows to the right (i.e., columnist George Will) and to the left (i.e., Senator Russ Feingold).

After his recent trip to Afghanistan, Senator Lindsay Graham said according to today’s New York Times that Afghanistan is the country “where 9/11 was planned and executed.” And he advised the president to explain more convincingly “the consequences of Afghanistan being lost and becoming a safe haven for Al Qaeda.” Those are as valid arguments today as they were right after 9/11. Then the objective was to vanquish the leadership of Al Qaeda Central and of their Taliban allies and thereby remove the terrorist threat posed by Osama bin Laden and his directorate.

Although the Bush administration claimed victory after destroying Al Qaeda’s headquarters and camps and chasing Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders into Pakistan to the almost unanimous applause at home, bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and their circles were alive and well across the border—and still are. As to the real reason for going to war in Afghanistan, the allegedly highly successful intervention was a failure.  
Obama was right, when he criticized his predecessor during the campaign for rushing into a war of choice in Iraq instead of concentrating on the war of necessity against Al Qaeda.

The recently stepped up use of special commandos and un-manned drones to target Al Qaeda and the Taliban in their Pakistani hiding places was a right decision and has achieved some success. This is the way to go. Pour more resources in fighting and defeating Al Qaeda Central for good, the real threat to the security of the U.S. and its allies. That was the objective in the fall of 2001and that should be the objective today.

What to Make of Hero's Welcome for Pan Am Flight 103 Terrorist?

By Brigitte L. Nacos
In my mind, the intentional detonation of a bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988 and the killing of 270 persons aboard and on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland, marked the beginning of the age of catastrophic terrorism. 

Now, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahithe only person convicted for mass murder was released by Scottish authorities on "compassionate" grounds so that he can die at home in Libya surrounded by his family.
No wonder, that the families of the victims are outraged. They did not even have a chance to say good-bye to their loved ones beforeFlight 103 was blown out of the sky and disintegrated into billions of pieces. 

Terrorists are not in the business of compassion. They hate and kill indiscriminately.  

But even more troubling than the decision to free al-Megrahithe's release are the incredible images of the hero's welcome that was staged in Tripoli for the Lockerbie terrorist. There is no doubt that Gadhafi arranged for his son Saif al-Islam el-Qaddafi to bring the former agent home aboard a government plane and orchestrated the glorious homecoming.

If Gadhafi intends to tell the world that the festive reception was for a man wrongly blamed for the downing of Flight 103, he will not convince those governments and peoples that matter. The released Libyan was not used as a scapegoat by the United States and other western countries to highlight Libya's state sponsorship of terrorism, but was actually a victim of Gadhafi without whom no Libyan agent would have plotted the horrific terrorist strike. 

The fact that Gadhafi staged the homecoming celebration for al-Megrahithe in defiance of contrary advice by Scottish and other Western authorities raises new doubts about his sincerety, when it comes to his swearing off support for terrorism and the abondonment of WMD-programs. 

Signaling different behavior in the post-9/11 years, Gadhafi was rewarded in that Libya returned into the family of nations and was taken off the U.S. State Department's lists of state sponsors of terrorism that results in a host of sanctions.

Now, Gadhafi, acted once again like the leader of a rogue state.  

Tom Ridge and the Cooked Terrorism Alerts: Selling Fear Works

By Brigitte L. Nacos, Yaeli Bloch-Elkon and Robert Y. Shapiro

Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security, is in the headlines because he reveals in a book he authored that he was pressured by top advisers to President George W. Bush to raise the national terrorism threat alert level just before the 2004 election. Actually, as noted on this blog in fall 2006, Ridge had voiced this suspicion after he resigned as Secretary of Homeland Security in early 2005, when he told reporters that "there were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it [the color-coded alert level], and we said, ‘For that?" The White House and others in the administration knew exactly for what: they believed that raised alert levels increased the fear of Americans and their support for the crisis-managing president. They were right as our systematic research has demonstrated.

Terrorists, policy-makers, and terrorism scholars have long assumed that the mere threat of terrorist strikes affects societies that have experienced actual terrorist attacks. But so far research has neither validated this conventional wisdom nor demonstrated in detail how mass-mediated threat communications by terrorists and terror alerts and threat assessments by government officials affect the public in targeted countries. Our research fills this gap.

To begin with, we found that in the 39 months after 9/11, network TV-newscasts devoted large amounts of airtime to threats communicated by Osama bin Laden and his associates and to terror alerts and threat assessments issued by administration officials. In the evening newscasts of ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News, the average length of news segments devoted to Al Qaeda threat messages was close to four minutes and five-and-a-half minutes for those reporting that the administration had increased the color-coded terror alert level. In contrast, when the official terror alert was lowered by the administration, television devoted on average only one-and-a-half minutes to this news. Similarly, all cases of increased terror alerts levels were reported as lead stories, whereas only thirteen percent of the lowering of terror alerts were lead stories–if they were reported at all.

These coverage patterns played into the hands of the Al Qaeda leadership whose communications left no doubt about their intent to make the American public more fearful. But President George W. Bush and his administration, too, benefited from the generous coverage of their terror alerts, warnings, and assessments in that this reminded the public frequently why the "war on terrorism" had to be fought. Shortly after 9/11, the administration urged the TV-networks not to air bin Laden/Al Qaeda tapes, but there were no follow-up complaints. Obviously, the White House did no longer object to the media’s attention to Al Qaeda communications. After all, President Bush himself told a White House reporter with respect to a bin Laden tape that  was released and heavily covered five days before the 2004 presidential election, "I thought it was going to help. I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden does not want Bush to be president, something must be right with Bush."

Bill Clinton and the Freed Hostages: A Win-Win for the U.S. and North Korea?

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Who wouldn’t be touched by the images of joyful and relieved former hostages Euna Lee and Laura Ling, their families, friends, and colleagues? As far as the hostages and their loved ones were concerned, Bill Clinton’s humanitarian mission to North Korea was the right and only thing to do. After all, the imprisoned American reporters had conveyed in their phone calls home that the ransom demand by North Korean officials was the request that former president Bill Clinton were to visit Pyongyang. Thus, the deal was struck before Clinton touched down on North Korean soil: A special pardon by Dear Leader Kim Jong Il would free the two American reporters and allow Clinton to bring them back to America.

So, why isn’t there universal praise for Clinton’s successful trip that the White House characterized as a purely private initiative? Well, as one would expect the former U.S. president’s visit to the most isolated and oppressive country on earth was used as propaganda fodder by North Korea’s dictatorial leadership that promptly received the visitor as if he was still in office, when he touched down in Pyongyang. The images of Clinton's reception and those showing Kim Yong and Clinton side-by-side were publicized all over the world. In that, the North Korean leaders got precisely what they and the rulers of other rogue states are after: attention by big names and players on the world stage and the quasi-legitimacy that comes along with sitting at the same table as legitimate political actors. 

John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is very critical of Clinton’s trip and mission. He told Agence France Press, "I think this is a very bad signal because it does exactly what we always try and avoid doing with terrorists, or with rogue states in general, and that's encouraging their bad behavior.”

If Bill Clinton’s marching order from the White House was to solely focus on the release of the two reporters, few observers believe that North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and capabilities were not discussed during the meetings. After all, among the top level officials that greeted Clinton at the airport was North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator Kim Kye-gwan. At issue is whether to criticize or applaud efforts to once again try to convince North Korean leaders to abandon their nuclear weapons program.

Under the headline “Paying Kim’s Price,” The Wall Street Journal, “If it turns out that if a new nuclear negotiation really was begun during Mr. Clinton’s visit, it will also send the signal to North Korea that the worse its behavior, the more it stands to gain from the U.S. And it will mean that Kim’s price will be even higher to spring the next American hostages.”

Another Victim of Anti-Abortion-Terrorism

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Today, Dr. George Tiller, a long-time target of the extremist anti-abortion milieu, was shot to death while he served as an usher during the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas. In 1993, Tiller survived a shooting attack by an anti-abortion fanatic. Nobody should be surprised about the killing because Dr. Tiller was one of the most prominent targets of anti-abortion hate speech and of the revived so-called Nuremberg Files that list the names of abortion providers and advocates. Just take a look at one of these sites that call abortion providers “baby butchers” and ask like-minded fanatics to “Starve Satan: Stop Abortion.” Virtual blood drips from parts of aborted babies on this site and similar ones. And there is a prominent headline “Tiller the Killer” that links to a list of baby butcher’s “evils.” Another web site proclaims that “Abortion is Slavery to Satan. Stop it or God will Destroy the USA.”

Although The Nuremberg Files were banned and disappeared from the Internet for a while, they made a come back more recently and once again list abortion clinic owners and workers as well as pro-choice supporters. Moreover, anti-abortion activists are asked to “locate themselves outside baby butcher businesses across the nation and film the people coming and going” to establish a record of those “who go out to kill God’s little babies.”

While law enforcement circles and the media report regularly on “eco-terrorism” by extreme environmentalist who have not killed a single person so far, they avoid the terms anti-abortion terrorism and anti-abortion terrorists although the perpetrators of this sort of violence killed half a dozen abortion doctors in the U.S. and Canada so far and injured far more. It seems that political violence from the right tends to be characterized as crime whereas political violence from the left is more readily labeled terrorism.

When Peace Negotiations Fail: Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Reporting about talks between “intermediaries” and the Taliban as well as other militant factions in Afghanistan, Dexter Filkins wrote recently that these secret negotiations have taken place “for months,” “accelerated since Mr. Obama took office” and have been conducted with the blessing of the Kabul government and without opposition from Washington. Reportedly, the Taliban and other militants insist that the removal of U.S. and coalition forces from Afghanistan must be part of any peace deal, whereas the Obama administration demands that the Taliban disarms as precondition for negotiations. Imagine for a moment that the two sides would agree to each these conditions and come to a peace agreement.

You would have to believe in the fairy tale to expect that such an arrangement would work in the real world--certainly not as long as Taliban leader and bin Laden ally Mullah Muhammad Omar and his Afghan counterparts spread violence and terror in order to hold and expand their power positions in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Officially, it is the goal of the Obama administration to win over “moderates” within the Taliban and thereby strengthen the support base for peaceful cooperation and legitimate participation in Afghan public affairs. But neither this official position nor the indirect talks with Taliban and other militant leaders promise any progress in the search for a peaceful solution in Afghanistan.

One does not have to look further than neighboring Pakistan for evidence. After all, it was the peace-agreement between the Pakistani Taliban and the provincial government of the North-West Frontier region of early 2009 and approved by the national parliament that led to civil war-like conditions, terrorism, and, most of all, a colossal humanitarian crisis. As part of the settlement, the army withdrew from the region. But although the agreement gave the Taliban the right to impose the most extreme form of sharia law and de facto control over the SWAT valley, the extremists did not lay down their arms as they had agreed to. Instead, they fought to expand their rule of terror into other regions of the country with the goal to take down the central government and bring their brand of religious rule to all of Pakistan. 

In short, the agreement that surrendered a whole province with a population of 1.5 million to the Taliban emboldened the extremists to mount a brutal offensive beyond the Swat region shortly after the “peace” deal was agreed to.

What Speaker Pelosi Knew When: Less Than a Sideshow

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Speaker Pelosi’s spoken words and body language did not add up to a convincing defense against the accusation that she was briefed by the CIA about the so-called “enhanced interrogation” methods used to force terrorist and suspected terrorists to reveal important information as early as September 2002. If she remembers being told at the time that waterboarding was considered legal, as the has said, it is difficult to figure out why she thought this kind of torture was not yet used—unless the CIA said precisely that during the briefing in question. On that count, we have Pelosi’s “the-CIA-misled-members-of-congress” and former U.S. Senator Bob Graham’s “the-CIA’s-records-of-briefing-dates-are-wrong” charges versus CIA-Director Leon Panetta’s “CIA-officers-briefed-her-truthfully” and former Congressman and former CIA-Director Porter Gross’s “we-were-briefed-at-the-early-date” positions.

Ultimately it does not matter whether Pelosi and other members of congress, Democrats and Republicans, learned about inhumane treatment and torture of detainees in September 2002, when President George W. Bush and Karl Rove rolled out their marketing plan for the Iraq invasion—or some weeks or months later. After all, the Bush White House with Vice President Cheney in a key role and key departments and agencies did not wait for any advice from the legislative branch for their conduct of the so-called “war against terrorism.”

Nancy Pelosi has admitted that she knew by early 2003 before the invasion of Iraq when the mass-mediated torture debate was still seemingly a hypothetical exercise. Because then majority leader Pelosi remained silent, Republicans now try hard to turn the spotlight away from those highest level administration officials who decided in favor of torture and those in the White House, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Justice who twisted the law to justify waterboarding and other illegal, inhumane and ultimately ineffective interrogation techniques.