This email came to reporters’ inboxes from the office of the director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, objecting to this Politico story about Blair’s testimony to the House intelligence committee today. From spokesman Arthur House: The article published by Politico today regarding testimony of the Director of National Intelligence before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is inaccurate and irresponsible. The DNI did not criticize the Administration in any way – the assertion that he did is simply wrong. The DNI stated that the combination of reality and politics regarding the December 25 attempted terrorist attack is surprising and that the Intelligence Community is trying to bring intelligence and law enforcement to bear on those who threaten our country. To suggest that his statement is a “blast” at the White House distorts words clearly spoken and seeks to create a conflict where none exits. The current version of Politico’s piece appears to have excised the relevant description. An addendum reads: “Blair’s office objected to an earlier version of this story which said that he had criticized the White House for leaks about the case.”

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Dennis Blair vs. Politico

Just out from U.S. Central Command about the three soldiers who died yesterday in a Pakistan bombing . According to the statement — reprinted in full after the jump — the soldiers were part of a civil affairs training team that had been invited into Pakistan by the government and were in the Northwest Frontier Province “to attend an inauguration ceremony at a girls school that had recently been renovated with U.S. humanitarian assistance money.” Three U.S. military members died of wounds suffered from an improvised explosive device today in the Lower Dir District of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, and two U.S. service members were wounded. The service members were assigned to the Office of the Defense Representative, Pakistan to conduct civil affairs-related training at the invitation of the Government of Pakistan. They were in Lower Dir to attend an inauguration ceremony at a girls school that had recently been renovated with U.S. humanitarian assistance money. “This attack demonstrates the terrorists’ lack of respect for life, and their willingness to use violence against women and children as a means for advancing their malign vision,” said Rear Adm. Hal Pittman, Director of Communication at U.S. Central Command. “The U.S. personnel were in Pakistan at the request of the Government of Pakistan to assist the Pakistanis with training in support of our long-standing partnership with Pakistan, and this horrific attack will not dissuade that partnership. We extend our sincere condolences to the families and loved ones of those innocent individuals who were killed or injured.” The names of the deceased are being withheld pending notification of next of kin and release by the Department of Defense. The names of the service members are announced through the U.S. Department of Defense Official Website at http://www.defense.gov. The announcements are made on the Website no earlier than 24 hours after notification of the service members’ primary next of kin. The wounded service members were evacuated for treatment.

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CENTCOM Issues Statement on Soldier Deaths in Pakistan

Speaking of Attorney General Eric Holder’s reminder to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that the criminal justice system “is an extremely effective tool for gathering information,” I just got off the phone with Jack Cloonan, a 27-year veteran of FBI counterterrorism who retired in 2002. Cloonan has interrogated several members of al-Qaeda, including Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, a onetime bin Laden associate -turned-state witness, and if the FBI had been allowed to proceed with Jose Padilla’s interrogation, Cloonan would have been assigned to interrogate him as well. While Cloonan considers himself “apolitical,” he’s more than a little dissatisfied that conservative politicians who lack any experience  in interrogations are inveighing against the FBI’s handling of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. “What would you expect from Mitch McConnell?” Cloonan said. “They just don’t know what they’re talking about. They really don’t.” For one thing, despite endless repetition on the right, reading a suspect his Miranda rights does not compel him to cease cooperation with interrogators. “People keep talking about Mirandizing as if it’s a preventive measure, getting someone to shut up, but most critics have never been in position have to Mirandize one,” Cloonan said. “It’s to keep pristine information you’ve already gotten and to have a prosecutable case. It’s not the end of an interview.” Nor does the presence of a lawyer mean a suspect has to be quiet. “The attorney’s gonna say the case against you is significant” and press Abdulmutallab to cooperate — as, he said, has doubtlessly happened by the fact that the would-be Christmas bomber’s family has been brought into his continued discussions with the FBI. “A lot of people make big a deal out of Mirandizing Abdulmutallab, thinking he’ll clam up and will never talk,” Cloonan said. “What’s gonna work, over the next several weeks, is a bit of gamesmanship. Here’s what we’re looking for — from both the FBI and the attorney — and the U.S. Attorney in Detroit will say this is what he’s got to do. They’ll put together a proffer agreement outlining what his obligations are.” If it comes out that Abdulmutallab “exaggerated or lied about any of it, then it’s void.” Cloonan ultimately thinks that’s the way the Abdulmutallab case will end: with some form of proffer deal, even one that ends with the 23-year old pleading guilty and serving life in prison. While U.S. intelligence officials are unlikely to get a wide array of information about active plots from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from Abdulmutallab — “the notion that Abdulmutallab might be an infinite fount of knowledge presupposes they brought him into inner workings [and] they wouldn’t do it,” he said — the most likely outcome will be to get a better sense of how the terrorist group recruits and trains its operatives. Cloonan even noted that in the days after Abdulmutallab’s initial FBI interview, the Yemeni security forces and CIA drones struck at AQAP. “They’re gonna get all kinds of information from this guy.”

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Ex-FBI Interrogator: McConnell and Co. ‘Don’t Know What They’re Talking About’ on Abdulmutallab

Unclear why they were there as yet; according to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad they were helping train the Pakistanis in counterinsurgency. But there’s this: The American soldiers, who may have been part of a training unit, were en route to inspect a proposed site for small-scale development projects that were to be undertaken by the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force that the American Army has been training, a senior official in the North-West Frontier Province said. … That American soldiers were involved in development assistance had not been previously known. Given the sensitivities in Pakistan to a U.S. troop presence, how smart is it to be using soldiers for development work and not, say, civilian development experts? Of course, that’s assuming the embassy’s story is true.

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U.S. Soldiers Killed in, Uh, Pakistan

Two data points that are almost certainly connected. First : Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a jetliner bound for Detroit on Dec. 25, started talking to investigators after two of his family members arrived in the United States and helped earn his cooperation, a senior administration official said Tuesday evening. And second : America’s top intelligence official told lawmakers on Tuesday that Al Qaeda and its affiliates had made it a high priority to attempt a large-scale attack on American soil within the next six months. The assessment by Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, was much starker than his view last year, when he emphasized the considerable progress in the campaign to debilitate Al Qaeda and said that the global economic meltdown, rather than the prospect of a major terrorist attack, was the “primary near-term security concern of the United States.” No threat determination like that is ever the result of one line of intelligence. But it’s impossible to believe Abdulmutallab’s resumed cooperation — the subject of heavy administration pushback to its critics, as Josh Marshall observes , after two weeks of attack following Blair’s disastrous congressional testimony — did not inform the assessment. The Times: Another federal official said Mr. Abdulmutallab had provided information about people he met in Yemen, where he is believed to have receiving training and explosives from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a branch of the terrorist network. “He’s retracing his activities over there,” said the official, who would discuss the case only on the condition of anonymity. “You run to ground what he tells you, validate it and follow up. You build a relationship. It’s a pretty standard process.” And that cooperation would not have come without Abdulmutallab’s family trying to get him the best deal they can from federal prosecutors. Welcome to a law-enforcement-informed approach to terrorism.

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This Threat Warning, Brought to You by the U.S. Law Enforcement Community

See this guy? Marine Corps Maj. Gen. David Heinz ? He’s the program manager for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a program plagued by cost overruns. Robert Gates, the secretary of defense, just fired him. One reporter called it a “bombshell” in a still-ongoing press briefing. But Gates canceled the Air Force’s F-22 fighter jet in favor of making the JSF the replacement jet, as, among other reasons, it’s operable across both the Navy and the Air Force. But defense reformers have pointed to the JSF’s ballooning costs as similarly problematic. Gates just said that the program’s coming under fiscal control. But he said he couldn’t put the program back in order “without people being held accountable.” So says a defense secretary who two years ago fired the entire leadership of the Air Force over a nuclear weapons mishap. If there’s a theme to Gates’ tenure at the Pentagon, he said, it’s that “when things go wrong, people will be held accountable.” Unless I misunderstood Gates, Heinz’s deputy, Air Force Maj. Gen. C.D. Moore , will head up the F-35 program office for the time being. Update, 1:49 p.m. : I think I did misunderstand Gates. Pressed on who takes over the program, Gates demurred, saying an announcement is forthcoming. Update 2, 1:55 p.m .: Don’t miss Noah Shachtman’s detailed post on Gates’ JSF bombshell .

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Gates Fires the Head of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have just begun their Pentagon budget and QDR press briefings. Here’s what they’re asking Congress to approve for the next year: $548.9 billion for the so-called base budget next year, excluding the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which Gates said reflects “realism with regard to risk, realism with regard to resources” and “plausible real-world scenarios, potential threats and adversaries.” But if you read my QDR preview , you knew all that. “The wars we fight are seldom the wars we planned,” Gates said. So for next year’s war request, Gates wants $159.3 billion. But that’s not all: for the “extended surge,” he wants a $33 billion supplemental to pay for the extra 30,000 troops. That’s technically part of this year’s budget request. “I will be asking the Congress to enact the supplemental by the spring,” Gates said. That’s $741.2 billion to be spent on the Pentagon over the next year, if you’re counting. Compare that to last year’s total $663 billion request .

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Gates Wants $741.2 Billion for Defense This Year

If you didn’t get enough reporting and analysis on the Pentagon’s master planning document, the Quadrennial Defense Review, from my preview piece on Friday , today is your day. This afternoon, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a briefing for reporters, will unveil the so-called QDR alongside next year’s Pentagon budget request. But if you were hanging around the internet this weekend, you already know what the QDR says. That’s because Andrew Exum, a defense analyst at the Center for a New American Security, posted the final version of the QDR on Saturday . That led to a series of posts from Robert Farley of the University of Kentucky and (ahem) myself, on my personal blog, here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here , digesting its importance. By the time Gates and Mullen present, you’ll already know what the document is about: reorienting defense around the fights we’re in and the threats we presently face and not some futuristic vision of warfare; robust collective security and multilateralism; and helicopters, helicopters, helicopters. There’s a lot about including cybersecurity in our conception of defense — in fact, as much about cybersecurity as about conventional warfare! — and the rationale for that is adequately demonstrated by the fact that you can, by now, argue that the QDR is Old News.

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The Pentagon’s QDR: Analyzed & Digested, Ahead of Today’s Rollout

Under a new policy announced today by CIA director Leon Panetta, an intelligence officer can’t be promoted to the agency’s highest rank — the Senior Intelligence Service — without a demonstrated proficiency in a foreign language. From a CIA release: While many senior Agency officers have tested proficient in a foreign language over the course of their careers, some have not kept their skills current. Under the new policy, promotions to SIS for most analysts and operations officers will be contingent on demonstrating foreign language competency. If an officer is promoted to SIS and does not meet the foreign language requirement within one year, he or she will return to their previous, lower grade. This is a powerful incentive to maintain and improve skills critical to the Agency’s global mission. Languages play a key role in the CIA’s work at all career levels. “The stricter requirement for SIS promotion,” said Panetta, “is meant to ensure that leadership on this vital initiative comes from the executive level. With an unwavering commitment from SIS officers—to both lead by example and to support language proficiency at all levels—we will reach not only our language goals, but our ultimate objective: an Agency that is better positioned to protect our nation in the years ahead.”

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Panetta Cracks Down on CIA Foreign-Language Deficiency

Apropos of my story today about the consistently-ballooning defense budget, Defense News has a leak of the Quadrennial Defense Review , the Pentagon’s big planning document that, among other things, is supposed to shape the budget. This is just a leak of a draft, and not the final document. But the document is entering its absolute final phase, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will be testifying about it and next year’s budget (they’re released simultaneously) before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. As I wrote today, Gates sent strong signals last year that the QDR would signal what further big-ticket items would get reined in or cut altogether. And the draft suggests that Gates wasn’t playing around. Some bullet points: The FY11 budget build on FY10, providing additional attention to key lines of investment that are highlighted in the reports ■ Taking care of our troops and our people ■ Reforming how we buy and operate Rebalancing for: ■ The current fight ■ Plausible future challenges Now, you can’t tell from that what will be cut . The defense budget is always a fight between the immediate challenges of the present and what each military service envisions as the future of war and its relevance to it. Gates has said, repeatedly — and conspicuously last year when he chopped a bunch of programs —  that he’s sick of buying stuff for every conceivable challenge, no matter how hypothetical. But we need to wait and see how that cashes out. The draft’s intro says: QDR analyses centered on the following challenge areas: defending the United States and providing defense support to civil authorities, conducting irregular operations (including counterinsurgency, stability operations, and counter-terrorist operations), defeating adversaries armed with anti-access capabilities, countering weapons of mass destruction, and operating effectively in cyberspace. That paragraph strongly suggests — as does Gates’ entire tenure, really — that the Pentagon ought to be reoriented around immediate, manifested challenges.  (I guess you could argue that the “anti-access capabilities” thing is the exception; my ignorant speculation is that’s in there so the South Koreans and Japanese don’t think we’re ignoring North Korea.) But here’s the thing: the services are really good at arguing that their existing priorities are applicable to new circumstances. That’s how the F-22, a Cold War-era fighter aircraft, survived until Gates killed it last year. So we’ll have to see how exactly the budget measures up to the QDR construct. Does it rebrand old wine or does it smash some corked bottles? Luckily, Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, will give a speech on Tuesday, before Gates and Mullen testify, on the QDR.

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Huge Defense Planning Document Leaks; What Does It Mean for the Budget?

Vice Adm. Robert Harward, a former senior officer with the Joint Special Operations Command and U.S. Joint Forces Command, arrived in Afghanistan in late November to take charge of detention operations for his longtime colleague, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. In those two months — his command formally stood up on Jan. 8 — Harward took the dramatic step of inking a deal with the Afghan government to transition responsibility for the infamous U.S. prison at Bagram Air Field to Afghan authorities over the next several months . It’s expected to turn over to the Ministry of Defense by 2011. But there’s a lingering challenge facing Harward. Around the time he arrived in Afghanistan, The New York Times reported that the Joint Special Operations Command retains a detention facility off-limits to the Red Cross that human rights organizations and ex-detainees call the “Black Jail.” McChrystal wasn’t asked about it in his Congressional testimony last month . But in response to a question from TWI during a conference call with bloggers this morning, Harward said unequivocally that “all detainees under my command have access to the International [Committee of the] Red Cross.” The admiral suggested that The Times may have misconstrued “field detention sites” where detainees are initially in-processed for “a very short period” before transfer to detention facilities like the Parwan facility at Bagram , since the locations are undisclosed for operational security reasons. “There are no black-jail secret prisons,” Harward said. “We do have field detention sites we do not disclose, but they’re held there for very short periods, and then they’re moved — if they’re determined to need additional internment, they’re moved to the detention facility at Parwan or released.”

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McChrystal’s Chief Detentions Officer: ‘All Detainees Under My Command’ Have Red Cross Access

The Dennis Blair Show continues : Former Gov. Thomas H. Kean, New Jersey Republican, and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, Indiana Democrat, said U.S. intelligence agencies should have been consulted before the bombing suspect, Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was granted constitutional protections under U.S. law, known as Miranda rights, and initially stopped talking to investigators. It doesn’t appear as if Kean and Hamilton actually object to Mirandizing Abdulmutallab, just the non-existent coordination between the FBI on scene and the intelligence community. Still, that might give some push to a forthcoming bill from Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) to compel such coordination. The director of national intelligence’s misstep last week continues to compound.

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9/11 Commissioners Back Blair on Abdulmutallab

Since I’ve been singing the praises of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments all day , I leave this one to Colin Clark of DODBuzz : “I can tell you there is no way the defense budget will be immune to budget reduction efforts,” Stan Collender, one of Washington’s most respected budget wallahs, said at CSBA’s annual budget briefing. Yes, but the key word there is “efforts.”

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Budget Freeze Quote of the Day

Rolf Mowatt-Larsen, a longtime intelligence official who works at the nexus of al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction, writes that al-Qaeda “has been far more sophisticated in its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction than is commonly believed.” And there’s no reason whatsoever to disbelieve him. But what ought to be pointed out is al-Qaeda’s capabilities, not just its aspirations. For one thing, al-Qaeda has failed for over a decade to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Mowatt-Larsen notes that al-Qaeda accordingly scaled back its ambitions to get nuclear weapons in favor of less-lethal but relatively easier to acquire bioweapons. But even that effort was dealt a setback by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Instead, look at the pattern of recent al-Qaeda attacks or potentially al-Qaeda-inspired attacks. Lots of big-devastation conventional impact attacks in south Asia and the Middle East, with occasional forays into Europe and southeast Asia. In the United States, a failed attempt at conventional explosions of an aircraft — damaging if it would have succeeded, but it would have killed an order of magnitude fewer people than the sophisticated and complex attack on 9/11 to turn several planes into missiles and fly them into strategic targets. There’s an argument to be had over whether to put Nidal Malik Hasan’s attack on Fort Hood into the “al-Qaeda-inspired” category. If you do, you get a successful attack that killed 13 people and wounded 45, not dozens, let alone hundreds or the thousands killed on 9/11. Then you get a criminal claiming after the fact that his murder of a soldier outside a Little Rock recruiting office was connected to al-Qaeda. And failed efforts that were busted up before they reached fruition, as with Najibullah Zazi. All this is why in the just-published issue of a bulletin published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center , Martha Crenshaw, a terrorism scholar with the Center for International Security and Cooperation , concludes: Al-Qa`ida is declining, but it is still a dangerous organization. It is not a mass popular movement, but rather a complex, transnational, and multilayered organization with both clandestine and above-ground elements. It has proved durable and persistent. The determination of its leaders to attack the United States is undiminished and might strengthen as the organization is threatened, but another attack on the scale of 9/11 is unlikely. None of this is to say that vigilance against the prospect of an al-Qaeda WMD attack is unwarranted. But it is a call to put the chances of one into perspective.

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Sure, al-Qaeda Wants to Attack the U.S. With WMD …

In case I left the impression in my previous post that the elevation of British diplomat Mark Sedwill to a new senior NATO civilian envoy to Afghanistan was a demotion for U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, let me correct it straight away. In Eikenberry’s dour November cables warning about the treacherous road ahead in Afghanistan, he explicitly called for a new NATO civilian partner for Gen. McChrystal to equalize civilian and military efforts : The proposed strategy does not remedy an inadequate civilian structure. There is no civilian organizational counterpart to ISAF and no political leadership equivalent to NATO-ISAF commander [Gen. Stanley McChrystal], a deficiency that hampers civilian effectiveness and heavily skews the NATO-ISAF dialogue with the Afghan government. UNAMA [the United Nations mission to Afghanistan] is not capable of coordinating all the civilian efforts, because its role is not to serve as the civilian policy and program counterpart to NATO-ISAF. … [O]ur coalition efforts will remain less than optimum unless a stronger civilian structure is created. That structure will be formally unveiled on Thursday in London.

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Eikenberry’s Dire Cables Asked for a Top NATO Civilian in Afghanistan

The national security adviser didn’t say anything new during his afternoon talk to the Center for American Progress about reconciliation with the Taliban. Jim Jones pledged an “open door” for “those who would abandon violence” and “respect the rights of fellow citizens.” Those are parameters for negotiation, not a focus on personalities, in other words. Asked by Jon Landay of McClatchy about hypothetical negotiations with Mullah Omar as Jones headed to the elevators, Jones responded, “We’re pursuing a general strategy of engagement and we’ll see where that takes us.” But he expressed some dismay about the Pakistani military’s announcement that it won’t pursue al-Qaeda in North Waziristan during the next year . “The speed with which we are able to achieve our goals in Afghanistan has a relationship to the willingness of Pakistan to take on the safe havens that exist in the border region,” Jones said. He added that the administration is trying to get Pakistan to see the “urgency of the moment” for Afghanistan, Pakistan and “the region itself.” Convincing the Pakistanis of that urgency requires persuading them that the United States is ready, for the long haul, to promote Pakistan’s legitimate interests.

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Jim Jones Wants Pakistanis to See the ‘Urgency of the Moment’

There’s a big international conference in London beginning next Thursday to harmonize allied civilian efforts in Afghanistan. One thing to expect out of it: new “Afghan-led integration measures” to bring insurgents into line with the government, according to British Foreign Secretary David Miliband. Miliband is before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee right now, outlining a few expectations for what the conference will produce. Some of it is vague: “coherence and clarity of the plan for Afghanistan” among the 70-odd foreign ministers expected to attend is the “biggest deliverable of all,” Miliband said. But Miliband set a specific expectation by saying a new mechanisms for persuading Afghan insurgents to come in from the cold were crucial for success, adding that he referred to “structures I hope that President Karzai will announce next Thursday.” It’ll be interesting to see what Karzai might outline. There is a longstanding political consensus on the need for integrating insurgents and reconciling with those fighters who have no ties to al-Qaeda. But the mechanisms in place to date have yielded only sporadic results. Another thing to expect from the conference: a new civilian counterpart to Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

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Karzai to Announce New Insurgent-Reconciliation Structure

Barely two hours after Togo West and Vernon Clark finished briefing the Senate Armed Services Committee on the results of their review of systemic Army challenges to identifying extremist threats within the service, here’s a statement about further action from Army Secretary John McHugh: “I have directed Gen. Carter Ham to conduct an accountability review to identify whether any personnel were responsible for failures or deficiencies in applying Army programs, policies, and procedures to the alleged assailant. Further, he will provide a recommendation as to whether disciplinary or adverse action is warranted by each finding, and if so, the nature of such disciplinary or adverse action and the basis for such recommendation. “In addition, I have requested that Gen. Ham provide me with any general observations he may have developed as a senior leader in our Army, and as a member of the Independent Panel, that he believes may be of help to the Army in charting a way ahead. “We are an Army that is grounded on disciplined and established standards. Leaders at every level are responsible for ensuring that our policies and regulations are followed and that appropriate action is taken if they are not. “We must use this incident as an opportunity to reinforce the basics of leader involvement with soldiers. It is this fabric that binds us together in war, and we must ensure that it is continuously strengthened.”

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Army Secretary McHugh on Fort Hood Review

Togo West and Vernon Clark, the co-chairmen of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s Fort Hood commission, have been beaten up all morning in the Senate Armed Services Committee for not focusing exclusively on the threat of Islamic extremist radicalization within the military. Acrimony is all around. West tried to make the case that he and Clark have to take a comprehensive approach. “This is our one shot at it, Adm. Clark and I, to look at the indicators [of] religious extremism, whatever its source,” he said. Clark, a former chief of Naval operations, was blunter: ”Someone accused me of being politically correct. I don’t care.” Senators Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Clark Collins (R-Maine) [sorry, long morning/fast typing] pleaded with the two of them to put out at least some specific guidelines for the military services to recognize the warning signs of Islamic extremism, noting that when West was Army secretary in the 1990s, he approved a pamphlet on precisely those signs for what was then a danger from white-supremacist infiltration. West and Clark said they took the point, but reluctantly. Enter panel chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who said such a “legitimate effort” needed to ensure that “Muslims be involved” in distinguishing the warning signs of Islamic extremism from the signs of legitimate religious expressing. “Excellent suggestion,” Lieberman replied, adding it would be a “real omission if Muslims weren’t involved.” Collins endorsed it as well. “What we are tolerant of, and proud of it, are other people’s religious views,” said Levin. And the hearing went into closed session from there.

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A Moment of Tense Consensus on Fort Hood, Islamic Extremism and Political Correctness

Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, may think the interrogation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab went haywire when the would-be bomber was Mirandized instead of being subject to the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group. But FBI Director Robert Mueller had a different take about the value of intelligence collected within the criminal justice system. In a hearing today before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), who’s also on the intelligence committee, had the following colloquy with Mueller: FEINGOLD: OK, thank you. Director Mueller, we’ve heard criticism this morning for the decision to try Abdulmutallab in federal court. And I’m, of course, a little mystified by this reaction, given the similarity of this case to the attempt by Richard Reid, who was prosecuted in federal court by the prior administration, now serving a life sentence. Some have argued the decision has compromised our ability to obtain useful intelligence. But as I understand it and as Senator Feinstein touched on, there are quite a few examples of people who have been charged with terrorism-related crimes in federal court and cooperated with the U.S. government. Do you see any reason to treat this case differently from the Richard Reid case? And has it been your experience that alleged terrorists charged with crimes in federal court often cooperate with the government and provide useful intelligence? MUELLER: Well, in direct answer to the question, we’ve had a number of cases in which through the process — the criminal justice process of the United States, individuals have decided to cooperate and provided tremendous intelligence. That is not to say that there may not be other ways of obtaining that intelligence. But, yes, in answer to your question, the criminal justice system has been a — a fount of intelligence in the years since September 11th.

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FBI Director Mueller Thinks You Can Get Good Intel From the Criminal Justice System

Building off Matt’s excellent post about today’s outbreak of GOP enthusiasm for torture and lawlessness, check out this just-released paper from Ken Gude at the Center for American Progress separating myths from facts about the military commissions, civilian courts, and interrogations with lawyers present. For instance, here’s Gude arguing against former Attorney General Michael Mukasey: The evidence from recent terrorism investigations proves Judge Mukasey right that access to lawyers does not interfere with interrogating suspected terrorists. Nothing prohibits interrogations to continue after a suspect is given access to an attorney. In fact, terrorist suspects have given what U.S. officials call “ an intelligence goldmine ” after meeting with attorneys. Brent Vinas, an American convert to Islam captured in Pakistan in 2008 and turned over to the FBI, has proven to be one of the U.S. government’s most valuable sources of information about Al Qaeda. From the moment Vinas was in American custody he had all the access to attorneys and other rights afforded criminal suspects, and he still produced what one intelligence official called a “ treasure trove ” of information about Al Qaeda. In more than 100 interviews with counterterrorism officials, Vinas provided information that led to a Predator drone strike that killed a suspected militant, and his information has allowed counterterrorism officials “to peer deep inside the inner workings of Al Qaeda.” David Headly—also known as Daood Gilani—was arrested in Chicago and charged in connection with the 2008 Mumbai attack that left more than 150 people dead. Headly pleaded not guilty, but he is cooperating with prosecutors and helped U.S. officials uncover a plan by Lashkar-e-Taibi to unleash a similar attack in Copenhagen, Denmark, targeting the newspaper that printed cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. Meeting with his attorney has not prevented him from providing intelligence information that disrupted at least one terrorist plot. After all, detainees give up information in plea deals. A related point made in a recent post of mine : reading a detainee his Miranda rights doesn’t stop interrogations. It just means information used from those interrogations can’t be used in court.

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CAP: You Can Give a Detainee a Lawyer and Get Good Intel

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who thinks trying Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in civilian court is a “terrible, terrible mistake,” takes Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair’s earlier statements about the role of the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Unit a step further. Does the director of national intelligence believe the culprit behind the near-attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 “tried in civilian court or military tribunal? “I’m not ready to offer an opinion on that in open session,” Blair replied. “In open session”? Get read for the meme to spread… Directing the question to Michael Leiter, McCain gets this response from the director of the National Counterterrorism Center: “I honestly don’t have an opinion.” Blair adds that the “FBI agent-in-charge on the scene” in consultation with the Department of Justice made the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab.

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Blair Won’t Say Whether Abdulmutallab Should Be Tried in Civilian Court

In their joint opening statement to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, and Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, squared up to a point I’ve been making for nearly a month about Northwest Flight 253 : Within the Intelligence Community we had strategic intelligence that al Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) had the intention of taking action against the United States prior to the failed attack on December 25th, but, we did not direct more resources against AQAP, nor insist that the watchlisting criteria be adjusted prior to the event . In addition, the Intelligence Community analysts who were working hard on immediate threats to Americans in Yemen did not understand the fragments of intelligence on what turned out later to be Mr. Abdulmutallab, so they did not push him onto the terrorist watchlist. How will the watchlisting standards change? And how will they change so as not to overwhelm intelligence analysts with data?

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Blair and Leiter: We Should’ve Changed the Watchlist Criteria

From the Washington Post : An investigative report scheduled for release Wednesday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee cites U.S. concern over as many as three dozen American citizens who converted to Islam in prison and moved to Yemen after their release in the past year. Some of them have “dropped off the radar” of U.S. and Yemeni law enforcement and may be receiving al-Qaeda training there, the report says. I’ll be covering the Northwest Airlines Flight 253 recriminations/reform tour — Janet Napolitano! Michael Leiter! Dennis Blair! — in the Senate Homeland Security & Government Affairs Committee in about 15 minutes. Let’s see if these prison converts show up on the committee’s radar.

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Yemen: Drawing U.S. Radicals, Too?

Just out from State Department press chief P.J. Crowley: The Secretary of State has designated al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended (INA). The Secretary also designated AQAP and its two top leaders Nasir al-Wahishi and Said al-Shihri under E.O. 13224. Secretary Clinton took these actions in consultation with the Attorney General and the Secretary of the Treasury. These actions prohibit provision of material support and arms to AQAP and also include immigration related restrictions that will help stem the flow of finances to AQAP and give the Department of Justice the tools it needs to prosecute AQAP members. As Crowley explains, the next step is to get the United Nations to follow suit, so members will be obligated to “implement an asset freeze, travel ban, and arms embargo against these entities.”

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State Department Targets al-Qaeda’s Yemen Affiliate

Ken Keen, a three-star Army general, was in Haiti on Tuesday at the U.S. ambassador’s office shortly before nightfall when the quake began. The ambassador’s office is high above the city of Port-au-Prince. Keen heard “the screaming and yelling of the people in the valleys below.” Now Keen is the commander of the U.S. military mission in Haiti, working alongside the Haitian government and the U.N. security mission to get humanitarian assistance to a population in dire need of it. Updating bloggers on a conference call Sunday night, Keen made it clear that one of the most difficult obstacles he has to overcome is the sorry state of Haiti’s pre-earthquake transportation infrastructure. Take the airport. Yes, airport , singular. Haiti has a single airport, with just one runway and one taxiway. Before the quake it managed 13 flights daily. But maintaining that pace is a death sentence for Haitians in need of water, food, shelter, medical care and other necessities. So Haitian President Preval authorized the U.S. Air Force to control the so-called “slot times” for letting planes land and then depart, which the airmen set at two hours per plane. That means planes have to be back in the air after two hours’ wheels-down to unload their cargo and refuel if necessary. The pace has meant over 100 planes went through Haiti on Sunday with no delays, Keen said, the first time in six days the airport hasn’t reported a delay. But the rapid turnaround also meant a mobile hospital had to get back in the air — a major problem, and one Keen sounded frustrated about. The quake seriously damaged Haiti’s major seaport. Keen sent divers into the port, which he called South Port, and found “we do have some separations [between] the pylons and the pier.” He estimated it would be at least the end of the week before the port could be opened, something he called “absolutely critical” to move cargo in and take pressure off the airport. It’s a tense moment. Keen was proud of delivering 233,000 bottles of water to civilians on Sunday, but said it was “nearly not enough,” considering there are an estimated 3.5 million Haitians — nearly a quarter of the population — suffering from the quake. A more sustainable solution for hydration is on its way: 16 water purification units are being shipped to get people off of bottled water. The USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier with 19 helicopters, is just offshore, and the hospital ship Comfort will arrive later this week. In the next several weeks, Keen said his military contingent will grow to about 10,000, with half kept offshore to minimize the logistical needs — food, water, shelter — that go along with large-scale deployments. “Everyone is doing the best they can,” Keen said. “Obviously, there is much more to do.” And only a handful of ways of getting the necessary assets into the country.

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The Ongoing Logistical Nightmare of Haiti, Six Days Later

John Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser, has completed his review of the November shootings at Fort Hood . The White House has just released a public version of his findings, all of which are about improving information sharing across the government — a stark contrast with Brennan’s Flight 253 review, which found that information sharing between the intelligence agencies was robust. “Communication protocols between DOD and the Department of Justice regarding disaffected individuals, in particular, need to be improved, and the policies governing information sharing and cooperation between the two departments on investigative matters require additional clarification and re-calibration,” the review states. The full declassified summary of the review is after the jump. Public Summary of the Inventory of Files Related to Fort Hood Shooting BACKGROUND On November 5, 2009, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, U.S. Army, entered the Army Base at Fort Hood, TX, and opened fire on a group of fellow soldiers.  Before he could be stopped by law enforcement officers, Hasan fatally shot 13 members of the U.S. Army and injured 32 others, most of them military personnel.  Hasan has been charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) with 13 specifications of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder. He is currently awaiting trial. Following the tragic shooting at Fort Hood, on November 6, 2009, the President convened a meeting of his national security team to discuss what was known to the Government about this incident.  During that meeting, upon learning what was known at the time about the shooting and the individual believed to be responsible, the President immediately directed an immediate inventory be conducted of all information in United States Government files that existed prior to November 5, 2009, relevant to the shooting and the alleged shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan.  In addition, the President directed that a review be initiated to determine how any such information was handled, shared, and acted upon within and across departments and agencies.  The relevant agencies and departments were directed to report their findings to the President by November 30.  Following is a summary of what was learned as a result of this inquiry, as well as the recommendations for improvements going forward. It is important to point out that this review is just one part of this story.  Two additional reviews are being conducted to determine whether additional lessons can be learned as to how the U.S. Government can better protect the American people, including our brave men and women in uniform.  First, the Secretary of Defense ordered an independent review of Department of Defense (DOD) policies and procedures to identify potential security threats within the military.  The initial findings of that review, which was conducted by former Admiral Vernon Clark and former Army Secretary Togo West, were made public today, January 15, 2010.  Second, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) asked Judge William Webster to conduct a broad review of the FBI’s handling of information relative to Major Hasan, including looking at laws and policies that govern the FBI’s actions. In the days and weeks following the shooting, all agencies and departments of the United States Government conducted a thorough search of their files to determine whether they were in possession of information about the shooting by Major Hasan.  The results of those searches were reported to the President on December 1 and have already been briefed to appropriate Members and Committees of Congress.  Because of the sensitivity of the information, and the concern that disclosure could jeopardize the ongoing criminal investigation and prosecution by the military, some of the information uncovered during those searches cannot be shared publicly at this time. FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS In addition to gathering the facts, the President ordered this review to determine whether there are ways in which the U.S. Government could enhance its ability to protect the American people.  We must always look critically at the events leading up to any tragic event like this in order to determine whether things should be done differently in the future.  To that end, the departments and agencies involved in this review took a careful look to see whether systemic changes could enhance their ability to keep Americans safe from violent attacks.  They have made several recommendations that have been endorsed by the President. · Processes and Protocols: Though information sharing between agencies and departments has improved dramatically since September 2001, there is still room for improvement in certain areas.  Communication protocols between DOD and the Department of Justice regarding disaffected individuals, in particular, need to be improved, and the policies governing information sharing and cooperation between the two departments on investigative matters require additional clarification and re-calibration. · Intelligence and Law Enforcement Analysis: A more thorough and layered analysis of certain information available to intelligence and law enforcement personnel must be conducted, along with ensuring the appropriate allocation of resources to accomplish that goal. · Information Technology: The United States Government must continue to enhance its information technology in order to better and more readily identify relevant data. · Training: The Joint Terrorism Task Forces should improve their personnel training, including of detailees from other departments and agencies, to ensure that those assigned are both adequately equipped and fully aware of all available tools to perform the critical tasks they are called upon to complete. This review was conducted on an accelerated timeline to identify issues of concern or potential vulnerabilities in our systems and to immediately take appropriate corrective measures.  The preliminary report was provided to the President weeks ago, and several steps have already been taken to implement the specific recommendations.  It is critical that we act quickly to put them into place to strengthen our ability to ensure the safety and security of the American people going forward, particularly those who serve in our Armed Forces.  However, as we have no doubt learned through our experience, taking these steps does not allow us to claim that the work is done.  This inventory and review, as well as the reviews taking place within DOD and the Intelligence Community, is part of an ongoing process to constantly evaluate and improve upon the tools and defenses we have in place to protect the American people against all forms of violence. ### Note: This summary reflects preliminary findings to facilitate immediate corrective action.  Neither the report nor its findings obviate the need for continued review and analysis to ensure that we have the fullest possible understanding of any systemic problems that need to be addressed to ensure that we do everything we can to prevent the sort of senseless violence that took place on November 5, 2009, from occurring again.  Note further that sensitive intelligence data was removed from this public report to protect sources and methods.

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White House Fort Hood Review: Better Info Sharing Needed

The commission Defense Secretary Robert Gates appointed to investigate how the Army failed to notice the radicalization of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged gunman at Fort Hood, has apparently taken a very structural examination of the failure. Look at this portion of its assessment : As Hasan’s training progressed, his strident views on Islam became more pronounced as did worries about his competence as a medical professional. Yet his superiors continued to give him positive performance evaluations that kept him moving through the ranks and led to his eventual assignment at Fort Hood. Recent statistics show the Army rarely blocks junior officers from promotion, especially in the medical corps. In recent years there’s been a fair amount of grumbling in Army reformist circles that too many underqualified officers are pushed up the ranks. Usually that’s come in the context of wartime exhaustion, as the Army needs to retain its junior-to-mid-level officers to keep functioning, and the way to do that is through de facto automatic promotion. (Or, put differently, you have to seriously mess up not to be bumped upward.) It’s not clear that’s what happened in Hasan’s case, but the problem is nevertheless structural. If the default position of the Army is to promote, particularly in needed specialties like the medical corps, superiors are unlikely to pay sufficient attentions to warning signs like Hasan’s increasingly anti-American rhetoric. Apparently as many as eight officers could be disciplined over the Hasan case. The Senate Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing about the commission’s report next Thursday.

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Unexpected Culprit in Ft. Hood Attack: Automatic Promotions

Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction (SIGIR), released a new report this morning showing a surprising amount of waste on a key reconstruction project in Iraq: rebuilding Baghdad’s looted Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. While the tomb has been “significantly improved by the renovation project,” Bowen’s team of investigators found, the lack of oversight on the contract was so acute that SIGIR couldn’t find “payment documentation and quality assurance reports.”  It’s an all-too-familiar story for SIGIR. That’s why, as a remedy, Bowen last fall proposed the creation of a new operational agency to coordinate civilian and military activities in failing states or complex conflict zones called the U.S. Office of Contingency  Operations , or USOCO. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Report comes in advance of SIGIR’s next quarterly report for Congress, due January 30, and you can expect Bowen will highlight his latest waste, fraud and abuse findings for legislators to underscore the urgent need to stand USOCO up. That proposal may be controversial in some circles — particularly in areas the development community, where there’s concern that USOCO might represent a more cumbersome bureaucratic structure. But Bowen’s idea is attracting some powerful allies, like the widely admired former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker. “I do support the concept,” Crocker, the incoming dean of the George Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University , emailed me. “The current situation requires a perpetual reinventing of wheels and a huge amount of effort by those trying to manage contingencies.”

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USOCO Proposal Rolls On, With Support From Ambassador Ryan Crocker

Mark Leon Goldberg has a wonderful Daily Beast piece about the Haiti that the U.S. rarely sees: the functioning society that arduously got built in the 1990s and 2000s, only to be ravaged by manmade and now natural disaster. This is Haiti’s tragedy: Just as the trend lines shift in the right direction, calamity strikes. But even with our limited and early information, the January 12, 2010 quake seems beyond comparison. Hospitals have crumbled and city blocks are flattened. Even the presidential palace, which presumably would be among the sturdiest of buildings, has caved in on itself. This is clearly a scary time for Haiti. Still, Haitians can take some comfort in its unique relationship with the United States. For one, the country has a champion in the husband of the current secretary of state. In May 2009, former President Bill Clinton was appointed a UN Special Envoy to Haiti, meaning that even as the public’s focus turns away from Haiti in the coming weeks, he will remain a high profile advocate for reconstruction. Also, a large and politically active Haitian Diaspora community in the United States ensures that Congress will keep an eye on Haiti’s progress. I grew up in a Brooklyn neighborhood with a large Haitian population, so I got a flavor of Haitian culture at a young age. It’s distressing that American cameras are only interested in a Caribbean neighbor with such close and historical ties to the U.S. when disaster strikes.

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Haiti, In Between The Crises

It doesn’t appear so, according to Greg Jaffe’s preview of the Pentagon’s investigatio n: A high-level Pentagon inquiry into the Fort Hood shootings that left 13 people dead has concluded that the military should focus more resources on identifying service members who might pose a threat to their colleagues and outlines a series of steps the Pentagon should take to prevent future attacks, Pentagon officials said. According to Jaffe’s piece for The Washington Post, the report — expected to be released on Thursday — will recommend the Defense Department “to ensure that it fully staffs FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Forces so that information collected by other government agencies about potential contacts between troops and terrorist groups is shared promptly with the Defense Department.” We’ll know more on Thursday, but it appears for now like Gen. George Casey’s call not to stigmatize American Muslim soldiers has been embraced by the panel, led by ex-Army Secretary Togo West and ret. Adm. Vern Clark. Good for them .

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No Profiling of Muslims in Fort Hood Recommendations?

After the confusion over what happened during a December U.S.-Afghan raid in Kunar Province that resulted in about nine deaths , the NATO command in Afghanistan, known as ISAF, is reacting more rapidly to potentially damaging stories about civilian casualties. Xinhua reported earlier today that a protest in Helmand Province’s Garmsir District included NATO forces firing on demonstrators. (I can’t find the actual report, but here’s a Xinhua follow-up .) The story is starting to spread across the Internet. So ISAF’s media branch emailed this flat denial of the story out to reporters just minutes ago: ISAF forces did not open fire on civilians in Garmsir District as claimed in a report from the Chinese wire service Xinhua. As noted in our previous press release, during today’s protest an insurgent sniper shot an Afghan official who was within Forward Operating Base (FOB) Dehili. ISAF service members identified the insurgent sniper, shot and killed him. There were no other injuries or shots fired by ISAF forces. Local ISAF task force leadership in Garmsir District have been invited to participate with the District Governor and Chief of Police in a shura tomorrow. Yesterday a poll came out reflecting a surprising Afghan comfort with foreign forces . Clearly NATO wants to husband that apparent support.

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NATO, Afghanistan, Civilian Casualties and Damage Control

They friend each other ! Mr. Neely, an Army veteran who spent six months at the prison in 2002, sent messages to one of the freed men, Shafiq Rasul, and was astonished when Mr. Rasul replied. Their exchanges sparked a face-to-face meeting, arranged by the BBC , which will be shown on Tuesday. Mr. Neely, who has served as the president of the Houston chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War, says his time at Guantánamo now haunts him, and has granted confessional-style interviews about the abuses he says he witnessed there. In a message to Mr. Rasul, Mr. Neely apologized for his role in the imprisonment. Gavin Lee, a BBC correspondent, learned about the Facebook messages from Mr. Rasul, who lives in Britain , and thought the situation was incredible. Mr. Lee tracked down Mr. Neely — on Facebook, naturally — and asked, “would you consider meeting face to face?” “He thought about it and he said, ‘I would love to,’ ” Mr. Lee recalled last week. “I would love to apologize in person.” This is happening tonight on BBC World News America.

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Just Your Typical Facebook Interaction Between GTMO Guards and Ex-Detainees

Vice Adm. Robert Harward arrived in Afghanistan this fall to take over detention operations for Gen. Stanley McChrystal. McChrystal’s explicit instructions for Harward’s portfolio were to transfer control of the prison at Bagram Air Field to Afghan control . On Saturday, that instruction took a big step forward : Afghan officials have agreed to take over the running of the US military prison at Bagram, which currently houses about 750 inmates, including around 30 foreign nationals. A so-called Memorandum of Understanding signed on Saturday could see the controversial facility handed over to Afghan control within months, officials said. The plan appears to be to transition Bagram first to the Afghan defense ministry and then to the justice ministry. But the shift also augurs something profound: it means that Bagram can’t serve as neo-Guantanamo, as some have suggested. Daphne Eviatar reported that the influential Center for American Progress floated a proposal in November to send Guantanamo detainees to Bagram as an interim step to closing the Cuban prison. But handing Bagram over to Afghan control effectively forecloses on that option.

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Afghans to Take Over Bagram Prison

Wow oh wow oh wow . Former Department of Justice official and torture memo author John Yoo will be on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Monday to promote his new book, according to the show’s website . Yoo is not a nincompoop like Jim Cramer . He knows what he’s getting into. Stewart is going to have to go hard. May I make a suggestion ?

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John Yoo Meets Jon Stewart

Apropos of White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan’s comment yesterday that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had made a new strategic decision to attack the U.S. homeland , Leah Farrall, an al-Qaeda expert and former terrorism adviser to the Australian federal police, says it’s nothing new. “I watched AQAP congeal online in early 02  and I have their founding documents, their guidelines, objectives and rules of conduct and lists of what detachments they formed–right down to the oath recruits were to take,” in case you were wondering about her credentials. She writes : I know that this is not the first time AQAP has tried to attack in N America. It’s not even the second time. Both of these earlier plots are mini case studies for the last section of my thesis. And with al Qaeda what is old inevitably becomes new again. By the way, both of the earlier plots would have been much much bigger than this–had they come to fruition. What this shows is that AQAP has still not reached the capacity it had in its earlier campaign, when it was allowed by its HQ to launch external attacks. If there’s a way of squaring her comments with Brennan’s, it’s that she points out the Saudi counterterrorism campaign in the middle of the decade “decimated” AQAP and the organization has been slowly getting back to where it was. So what’s new here, if anything? The only *new* thing here is the type of device used and reaction to the plot. But even in terms of  IED’s, AQAP has always been on the sharp end of the stick when it comes to innovation. That’s because it has a great core of IED engineers who cycle in and out of the organisation. Not particularly encouraging.

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Or Maybe al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Is Pretty Weak

You’d think nothing could top Rudy Giuliani’s noun-verb-9/11ism , but, via Ben Smith , that’s because you don’t pay enough attention to Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.): “You are saying someone should be held accountable. Name one other specific recommendation the president could implement right now to fix this,” host George Stephanopoulos said to King. “I think one main thing would be to — just himself to use the word terrorism more often,” said King, the ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee. TERRORISM TERRORISM TERRORISM TERRORISM TERRORISM TERRORISM TERRORISM TERRORISM TERRORISM TERRORISM. You are now ten times safer than you were before you read this post.

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Every Time Someone Says ‘Terrorism,’ Peter King Gives An Angel Its Wings

The New York Times reports : American missiles, presumably fired by remotely piloted drones, struck twice Wednesday in North Waziristan, the tribal region that is a stronghold of Qaeda and Taliban militants. One hopes the targeting wasn’t the result, in some vestigial manner, of spotting done by the suicide bomber who murdered CIA operatives in Afghanistan last week .

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Retribution For FOB Chapman Massacre?

This is the beginning of an assessment written by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the senior-most intelligence adviser to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, for the Center for a New American Security about intelligence and the Afghanistan war: Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy. having focused the overwhelming majority of its collection efforts and analytical brainpower on insurgent groups, the vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade. Ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the cor- relations between various development projects and the levels of cooperation among villagers, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers — whether aid workers or Afghan soldiers — U.S. intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high level decision-makers seeking the knowledge, analysis, and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency. It actually gets more scathing from there. “Every level of the U.S. intelligence hierarchy” comes in for criticism. Flynn says that U.S. intelligence in Afghanistan “overemphasize[s] detailed information about the enemy at the expense of the political, economic, and cultural environment that supports it.” In other words, intelligence in Afghanistan is enemy-centric, when it needs to be population-centric, much like the military operations it supports. Flynn wants intelligence reports on “census data and patrol debriefs; minutes from shuras with local farmers and tribal leaders; after-action reports from civil affairs officers and Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs); polling data and atmospherics reports from psychological operations and female engagement teams; and translated summaries of radio broadcasts that influence local farmers, not to mention the field observations of Afghan soldiers, United Nations officials, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).” Instead, U.S. intelligence “seems much too mesmerized by the red of the Taliban’s cape.” Flynn, joined by co-authors Capt. Matt Pottinger and the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Paul D. Batchelor, writes: The intelligence community’s standard mode of operation is surprisingly passive about aggregating information that is not enemy-related and relaying it to decision-makers or fellow analysts further up the chain. It is a culture that is strangely oblivious of how little its analytical products, as they now exist, actually influence commanders. Flynn never specifically calls out the CIA. His paper says it’s talking about “the thousands of uniformed and civilian intelligence personnel serving with the Department of Defense and with joint inter-agency elements in Afghanistan,” and it focuses heavily on practical military intelligence issues. His key recommendations center on creating intelligence fusion centers around the regional commands run by NATO in Afghanistan. So, just to be totally clear: This is mostly about military intelligence. But this applies far beyond intelligence officers on a battalion’s staff: In a recent project ordered by the White House, analysts could barely scrape together enough information to formulate rudimentary assessments of pivotal Afghan districts. It is little wonder, then, that many decision-makers rely more upon newspapers than military intelligence to obtain “ground truth.” Whether or not Flynn and his co-authors make a strong argument, the paper comes just days after the CIA in Afghanistan suffered one of the greatest losses of life in the agency’s history .

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McChrystal Intelligence Adviser Strongly Criticizes U.S. Intelligence Community

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From Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s remarks today with the prime minister of Qatar: Among the matters that we consulted on, the situation in Yemen is a top concern. How can we work together and with others to stabilize Yemen, assist in securing its borders and providing for its people in combating al-Qaida. The instability in Yemen is a threat to regional stability and even global stability, and we’re working with Qatar and others to think of the best way forward to try to deal with the security concerns. Tremble, Sweden! Cower, Borneo! Take heed, Tonga! (h/t Marc Lynch )

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A ‘Global Threat’ From al-Qaeda in Yemen?

Too close to racial profiling, says Michael German, a former FBI counterterrorism agent who’s now the civil liberties organization’s national-security legal counsel. From a new statement: “We should be focusing on evidence-based, targeted and narrowly tailored investigations based on individualized suspicion, which would be both more consistent with our values and more effective than diverting resources to a system of mass suspicion,” said Michael German, national security policy counsel with the ACLU Washington Legislative Office and a former FBI agent. “Overbroad policies such as racial profiling and invasive body scanning for all travelers not only violate our rights and values, they also waste valuable resources and divert attention from real threats.” According to the ACLU, the government’s plan to subject citizens of certain countries to enhanced screenings is bad policy, because there is no way to predict the national origin of a terrorist and many terrorists have come from countries not on the list. For instance, the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid is a British citizen, as were four of the London subway bombers, and in 2005 a Belgian woman launched a suicide attack in Iraq. “Singling out travelers from a few specified countries for enhanced screening is essentially a pretext for racial profiling, which is ineffective, unconstitutional and violates American values. Empirical studies of terrorists show there is no terrorist profile, and using a profile that doesn’t reflect this reality will only divert resources by having government agents target innocent people,” said German. “Profiling can also be counterproductive by undermining community support for government counterterrorism efforts and creating an injustice that terrorists can exploit to justify further acts of terrorism.” Why, I made the Richard Reid point myself earlier today. Correction : An earlier version of this post misidentified German as ACLU national-security director. That’s Jameel Jaffer. Apologies to both individuals, and to you.

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ACLU Criticizes New TSA Rules

Remember the Virginians arrested in Pakistan last month for  trying to link up with al-Qaeda in the tribal areas ? Well : The five Americans were returned to prison after the brief midday session in an anti-terror court in the city of Sargodha, and another hearing was set for Jan. 18. But the judge released Khalid Farooq Chaudhry, the father of one Pakistani American defendant, Umar Chaudhry, saying there was insufficient evidence to keep him detained. All six men were arrested at the elder Chaudhry’s family home in Sargodha in mid-December. The Virginia Chaudrys might want to hold off on any family reunion plans they maybe had scheduled for 2010.

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This Guy Might Not Want to Visit His Family in Virginia

In a forthcoming Q & A to be published in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo tells Deborah Solomon that he never met President George W. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney, but that he would advise them all over again that they could ignore legal prohibitions on torture if they wanted to. Casting himself as a lowly functionary in the administration with less access to the president than an intern, Yoo — now a Berkeley professor who frequently faces protests from students who say he’s responsible for the Bush administration’s torture policies — says he was just following orders. Of those torture papers, he says: “I had to write them. It was my job. As a lawyer, I had a client. The client needed a legal question answered.” His parents, he tells Solomon when she asks about his childhood, were both psychiatrists. Not that he’s in denial or anything.

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Yoo Never Met Bush but Would Recommend He Torture People All Over Again

In his press briefing yesterday, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly took a beating over the fact that department bureaucrats didn’t revoke Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s visa to enter the United States. Kelly, in something of a defensive crouch, said that it was the responsibility of an interagency effort run by the National Counterterrorism Center to order the department to revoke the visa. I’ve contacted NCTC to solicit a response, but no luck yet. In the meantime, I’ve talked to people who’ve directly processed foreigners’ visas. Long story short: It’s even harder for State to revoke a visa than Kelly made it sound. First things first. Like Kelly said, State consular officers need to receive affirmative word from the interagency process that someone is a terror suspect or other security risk before it can revoke a visa on those grounds. Where State does have grounds to revoke a visa unilaterally is if officers catch visa recipients in a lie or violation, such as overstaying a visa’s duration. In those cases, which typically occur when someone reapplies for a visa, officers would have to present the recipient with evidence for why they were revoking his or her visa. Consular officers can tap into the so-called TIDE database of 550,000 names of people who the intelligence community suspects might cause the U.S. harm. But that occurs, typically, when an officer is issuing a visa in the first place. Officers don’t get pinged every time someone gets added to TIDE. Taken together, all that means in practice that State Department officers were not going to revoke Abdulmutallab’s visa. That visa was issued in June 2008, long before anyone had any suspicions about him, and good until June 2010. Making matters more complicated, Abdulmutallab got his visa in London, but it was U.S. embassy officials in Abuja who learned about the threat he posed after his father warned them in November. They entered him into TIDE. The issuing consular office might very well not have known about it. Absent a determination from NCTC that didn’t occur, no one in the State Department was going to yank the visa. And if some clever consular officers decided to skirt the rules, they would still have to alert Abdulmutallab to the revocation — and hope they didn’t tip him off to the fact that U.S. authorities were monitoring him. I don’t know exactly what the procedure is for the State Department to have known that the U.K. actually denied him a visa in May. Given that Abdulmutallab wasn’t a U.S. citizen, there may not have been a procedure mandating notification. The U.K. didn’t turn him down for terrorism suspicions; the Brits turned him down because his academic pretext for staying in Britain was dubious. None of this should be interpreted as an argument for the merits of the current system. It’s just an explanation of how the system currently works, and one that underscores the difficulty of changing it.

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State Department, for All Practical Purposes, Couldn’t Have Revoked Abdulmutallab’s Visa

Now that we’ve stripped away the mistaken outrage, here’s cause for real alarm. CBS finds that the State Department twice failed to do something about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s visa to enter the U.S. after his name appeared on a terror watchlist. CBS is presumably working to elaborate on the piece now, because there isn’t much detail about why this occurred. And it appears that Abdulmutallab’s visa was issued before he was on any such list. I’m not sure what the procedures are for revoking a visa post-issuance — whether it’s possible; or whether doing so could complicate the problem by potentially letting a suspect know he’s being watched. I suppose we’ll learn more when next month’s congressional hearings into Northwest Airlines Flight 253 proceed. But until then, Matthew Yglesias makes a good point building off Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s Sunday-show comments that there are way more people on the watchlist Abdulmutallab was on than there are government agents who can track every pre-probable cause basis for suspicion: Even if you want to restrict your view to one billion Muslims, the math is the same. Consequently, tips, leads and the like are overwhelmingly going to be pointing to innocent people. You end up with a system that’s overwhelmed and paralyzed. If there were hundreds of thousands of al-Qaeda operatives trying to board planes every year, we’d catch lots of them. But we’re essentially looking for needles in haystacks. There’s clearly a common-sense understanding of how the watchlist system — and, I suppose, the visa system — failed in allowing Abdulmutallab to board his plane. But it’s not immediately clear to me what the fix is.

Originally posted here:
Issuing Visas to Watchlisted Travelers: Not the Greatest Idea!

How hard is it to watch a clip of an interview? Yesterday on ABC’s “This Week,” Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano made the following observation about the aftermath of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempted detonation of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 : Once this incident occurred, everything went according to clockwork, not only sharing throughout the air industry, but also sharing with state and local law enforcement. Products were going out on Christmas Day, they went out yesterday, and also to the [airline] industry to make sure that the traveling public remains safe. I would leave you with that message. The traveling public is safe. We have instituted some additional screening and security measures, in light of this incident, but, again, everyone reacted as they should. The system, once the incident occurred, the system worked. An uncontroversial point, no? Somehow this has rocketed around journalistic circles as Napolitano defending the system that allowed Abdulmutallab to board the plane . Marc Ambinder wrote it up that way . So did Mike Allen . Andrew Sullivan followed on Ambinder . Bill Kristol not only echoed them, he’s also saying Napolitano has now “ conceded ” the system didn’t work. All for saying exactly what she said on “This Week.” It takes about thirty seconds of effort to watch the relevant clip from “This Week” and process what Napolitano said in context. Jake Tapper’s headline even makes it easier than that !

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If You Take Her Out of Context, Then Yes, Napolitano Said Something Dumb

InsideDefense has a good story about a bureaucratic change pushed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to resolve a recurrent problem between his department and Foggy Bottom. In a memo called “Shared Responsibility, Pooled Resources,” Gates is proposing to revamp how the U.S. trains foreign partner militaries (”section 1206,” legally speaking) and how the Pentagon handles security and stability operations (”section 1207″). Unfortunately the piece is behind InsideDefense’s subscriber firewall, but here’s the gist: Pentagon programs executed under both sections have had “some notable successes over the past several years,” Gates writes. However, the authorities granted DOD under sections 1206 and 1207 have “stirred debate over [U.S. government] roles and missions,” regarding security and stability operations, specifically between DOD and the State Department, he adds. In order to “transcend these recurrent debates” on how such authorities should be divvied up between DOD and State, Gates’ SRPR plan calls for the creation of three “pooled funding mechanisms” focused on three areas: security capacity building, stabilization and conflict prevention, the memo states. To some degree, this is Gates saying, “You guys at State want this so bad? Great! Here’s your share. Now help us implement it.” To another degree, it underscores how Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton really do want to rebalance the civilian and military aspects of national security . I’m curious to see how they react to this .

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Gates to State: Don’t Hate, Collaborate

Speaking of Guantanamo , The New York Times profiles an Al Jazeera journalist, Sami al-Hajj, who was wrongly imprisoned there for seven years. We’ve had protests in this country for the past year in which overprivileged white conservatives bray about how the expansion of health care coverage to the most vulnerable Americans represents a despicable assault on freedom. I wonder whether a single one of them could tolerate imprisonment without charge for seven years and emerge not only as a functional human being but as a civil liberties correspondent for a major international news organization. Freedom isn’t free; and some whiners are certainly treating it cheaply.

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This Man Is Going to Kill You, Your Grandmother and Every American Flag

The 2008 presidential election promised to bring great changes to the country’s national security policy. Here are the five players who did the most to craft America’s approach to keeping its citizens safe in 2009. Click here to begin slideshow.

Read more from the original source:
Top Five National Security Players of 2009

The Department of Justice this morning announced that twelve detainees have been transferred from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to Afghanistan, Yemen and the Somaliland region. Here’s the announcement, with the names of the detainees, which had previously been withheld : As directed by the President’s Jan. 22, 2009 Executive Order, the interagency Guantanamo Review Task Force conducted a comprehensive review of each of these cases. As a result of that review, which examined a number of factors, including potential threat, mitigation measures and the likelihood of success in habeas litigation, the detainees were approved for transfer. In accordance with Congressionally-mandated reporting requirements, the Administration informed Congress of its intent to transfer the detainees at least 15 days before their transfer. Over the weekend, four Afghan detainees, Abdul Hafiz, Sharifullah, Mohamed Rahim and Mohammed Hashim, were transferred to the Government of Afghanistan. In addition, two Somali detainees, Mohammed Soliman Barre and Ismael Arale, were transferred to regional authorities in Somaliland. Finally, six Yemeni detainees, Jamal Muhammad Alawi Mari, Farouq Ali Ahmed, Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi, Muhammaed Yasir Ahmed Taher, Fayad Yahya Ahmed al Rami and Riyad Atiq Ali Abdu al Haf, were transferred to the Government of Yemen. These transfers were carried out under individual arrangements between the United States and relevant foreign authorities to ensure the transfers took place under appropriate security measures. Consultations with foreign authorities regarding these individuals will continue. Since 2002, more than 560 detainees have departed Guantanamo Bay for other destinations, including Albania, Algeria, Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Belgium, Bermuda, Chad, Denmark, Egypt, France, Hungary Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Maldives, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Palau, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom and Yemen.

Originally posted here:
U.S. Transfers 12 Detainees Out of Gitmo