Slate just posted a new
article yesterday by Lee Smith that is the best thing I've seen yet on Islamic terrorism from an American source (Jason Burke in England; and Olivier Roy and Giles Kepel in France are the gold standard). I'd heartily recommend it to all.
Smith makes a number of intelligent points. He makes the point made brilliantly by Jason Burke in his book Al Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, that we completely misunderstand the terrorism threat when we see Al Qaeda as a large, coherent, centralized organization with its tentacles and cells penetrating across the world. In fact, there is a Salafi-jihadist ideology that inspires countless decentralized groups across the globe. Various grow and decline in importance. AQ took on unusual importance from 1996-2001, but now in all likelihood barely exists. But this argument should be familiar to DKos readers by now.
Much more interesting and equally persuasive is Smith's defense of a law enforcement approach to terrorism, and his assertion that since the mid-1990s France has had great success with exactly this approach (after experimenting for a decade with various failed efforts).
Smith provides three main arguments for the law enforcement over the war approach: i/terrorism is a permanent problem that will wax and wane - not an evil that can be ended - and we need a permanent professional juridical-policing structure that can deal with it, not a temporary "war" which implies an ending that will never come; ii/war implies and requires an object and so leads us into follies like assuming Al Qaeda is the problem and is a coherent organization that can be defeated; law enforcement deals with constant, multiple and mutating threats; iii/war implies and requires secrecy - secret intelligence, secret interogations, secret planning - while law enformcement has some secrecy but ultimately requires public trials based on evidence that can be aggressively tested. Law enforcement implies and requires VALID INFORMATION.
This is where Smith's piece intersected with my thinking about the intelligence hearings of the past week. I must admit that while I generally subscribe to the "no stick is a bad stick if it can be used to beat the president about the head" school of thought, I do have next to zero sympathy for the argument that 9/11 should have been prevented. It just assumes a politics and a bureaucracy that don't exist on this planet and never will. And my response to that August 6th briefing is not that it's incredible nothing was done in response to it, but that it's incredible - considering what we did know at the time - how little of it got into that briefing. I suppose if I were the President my response would have been to ask that the author of the briefing be censured and a new one be produced.
Then I watched the re-run of PBS's nice show on former FBI counter-terrorism specialist, John O'Neill, who knew more than anyone about the Islamist terrorist threat. O'Neill fought like mad with the FBI leadership and ultimately got pushed out of the agency and died in the WTC attacks. But if you ask, on September 10th 2001, where the most knowledge about the Islamist terrorist threat resided in the US, the answer would be in the FBI. And if you ask, where did the FBI get that information, the answer would be in three criminal investigations - the 1993 WTC attack (successfully prosecuted), the 1998 African embassy attacks (successfully prosecuted), and the 2000 Cole attack (in progress) - that involved thousands of agents engaged in - essentially - intelligence work.
And if you ask why the FBI had better information than the crap that the CIA had, I would say it is because they had to put together information that would withstand rigorous challenge by qualified defense attorneys as true beyond a reasonable doubt and they had the trained manpower to do so. Moreover, the information then entered the public record and wise journalists like Burke and scholars like Roy and Kepel could both challenge the FBI's reasoning and use the information to build more valid models of Islamic terrorism, which in turn could inform further law enforcement work. And the CIA had to withstand challenges from? No one. Their information was secret and it was provided to people who had no independent means to challenge it (or if they did, like Wolfowitz before the Iraq war, it was subject to even less challenge).
Since 9/11, the situation has of course gotten even worse. The interrogations of Bin Al-Shibh and Khalid Shaikh Muhammed and Abu Zubaydah that could tell us invaluable information, not to mention the thousands of lower-level operatives and fanatics, are all secret. This information will now reside permanently in the bowels of the CIA and DIA, where no one can challenge the analysis made of it by the professionals that produced that Aug. 6th briefing, analysis which will undoubtedly reinforce the story-line being promoted from above. It will be unavailable to wise scholars (and fools alike) who could point out the connections (connect the dots!!) that are obscure to the professional spooks and so forth.
In short, intelligence is hard. There is no reason to think FBI people were more intelligent or capable than CIA people before 9/11 and we know FBI leadership was less interested in terrorism. The argument is systemic. The FBI people who were assigned to terrorism and terrorist cases were forced by the constraint of open, fair trials to produce reliable information. This can only come out of rigorous testing and secrecy is the enemy of inquiry. Oddly enough, law enforcement may be a better long-run intelligence source than spooks (though one needs both) and terrorism is a quintessentially long-term problem.
The objection that this is all post facto investigation and terrorism must be prevented. This is true and the French system with a permanent magistrate working on counter-terrorism has addressed this issue successfully since the mid-1990s and presumably a similar system could work here. The key point for this post is that prevention will never work without reliable information.