Bryan Strawser

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Terrorism

Boston’s War on Terror Continues

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As I thought might happen some time ago, the War on Terrorism has returned to Boston, captured here in this article from the Boston Globe:

The FBI launched a massive manhunt across the region yesterday for six people, four Chinese scientists and two Iraqis, said to be planning to detonate a “dirty bomb” in Boston, local public safety officials briefed on the threat said.

An anonymous tipster told authorities that the six sneaked into the United States from Mexico and were headed to New York and then to Boston, where they intended to launch an attack that could involve a lethal radioactive material, several officials briefed on the threat said.

The threat was reported to a California police department by someone in Mexico who said he had smuggled the suspects across the border, the officials said. The FBI had not corroborated the information as of last night, and officials expressed skepticism about the credibility of the tip, saying the names of the suspects had been run through all available databases of criminals and nothing had come up.

“What we’re trying to do is reassure the public that there’s no reason to panic, because the information has come from an unknown source, and none of the information has been corroborated,” US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan said in an interview yesterday. “At the same time, we have to do our diligence.”

Sullivan said officials had decided to release the names and photos of the four Chinese nationals — Zengrong Lin, Wen Quin Zheng, Xiujin Chen, and Guozhi Lin — because they believe the public could help investigators find the two men and two women.

“There’s an interest on the part of law enforcement to at least locate and speak with these individuals,” Sullivan said.

The information about the four was all that the tipster provided, public safety officials said. The tipster gave no identifying information about the Iraqis, they said.

Federal, state, and city officials were taking the threat seriously yesterday. The threat was discussed in President Bush’s morning security briefing. Representatives from several state agencies, including the Department of Public Health and the National Guard, were gathered at an emergency bunker in Framingham, as Boston police were readying themselves to respond to an attack.

FBI Holds Onto Passenger Records

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The Boston Globe reports today that the FBI has been keeping millions of records on air travelers who flew in the months before September 11th:

If you’re among the millions of Americans who took airline flights in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the FBI probably knows about it and possibly where you stayed, whom you traveled with, what credit card you used and even whether you ordered a kosher meal.

The bureau is keeping 257.5 million records on people who flew on commercial airlines from June through September 2001 in its permanent investigative database, according to information obtained by a privacy group and made available to The Associated Press.

Privacy advocates say they’re troubled by the possibility that the FBI could be analyzing personal information about people without their knowledge or permission.

”The FBI collected a vast amount of information about millions of people with no indication that they had done anything unlawful,” said Marcia Hofmann, attorney with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which learned about the data through a Freedom of Information Act request.

And I say. BIG DEAL.

I believe in privacy. I’ve been a member of the ACLU since I was 16 years old – I’m a long time member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organizations – and I’ve written a ton of letters and done some individual lobbying about issues like the Clipper chip, digital telephony, and other issues.

But you also have to draw a line about what’s reasonable from the standpoint of investigations – and I’m trying to see the issue here.

If you think the FBI really has the time to go digging through these records to see if you and your mistress were flying somewhere together because they’re trying to co-opt your vote – then I recommend that you pull the tin foil hat down a little closer around your ears to block the alien rays.

More Love from Victor Davis Hanson

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As always, Victor Davis Hanson provides a perspective on the War in Iraq that I had not considered:

Second, our very success creates ever increasing expectations of perfection for a postmodern America used to instant gratification. We now look back in awe at World War II, the model of military success, in which within four years an unprepared United States won two global wars, at sea, on the ground, and in the air, in three continents against Japan, Italy, and Germany, and supplied both England and the Soviet Union. But our forefathers experienced disaster after disaster in a tale of heartbreak, almost as inglorious as the Korean mess or Vietnam tragedy. And they did things to win we perhaps claim we would now not: Shoot German prisoners in the Bulge, firebomb Axis cities, drop the bomb — almost anything to stop fascists from slaughtering even more millions of innocents.

Our armored vehicles were deathtraps and only improved days before the surrender. American torpedoes were often duds. Unescorted daylight bombing proved a disaster, but continued. Amphibious assaults like Anzio and Tarawa were bloodbaths and emblematic of terrible planning and command. The recapture of Manila was clumsy and far too costly. Okinawa was the worst of all operations, and yet was begun just over fourth months before the surrender — without any planning for Kamikazes who were shortly to kill 5,000 American sailors. Patton, the one general that could have ended the western war in 1944, was relieved and then subordinated to an auxiliary position with near fatal results for the drive from Normandy; mediocrities like Mark Clark flourished and were promoted. Admiral King resisted the life-saving convoy system and unnecessarily sacrificed merchant ships; while Bull Halsey almost lost his unprepared fleet to a storm.

The war’s aftermath seemed worse, to be overseen by an untried president who was considered an abject lightweight. Not-so-quite collateral damage had ruined entire cities. Europe nearly starved in winter 1945-6. Millions were on the road in mass exoduses. After spending billions to destroy Nazi Germany we had to spend billions more to rebuild it — and repair the devastation it had wrought on its neighbors. Our so-called partisan friends in Yugoslavia and Greece turned out to be hard-core Communist killers. Soon enough we learned that the guerrillas in the mountains of Europe whom we had idolized, in fact, fought as much for Communism as against fascism — but never for democracy.

But at least there was clear-cut strategic success? Oh? The war started to keep Eastern Europe free of Nazis and ended up ensuring that it was enslaved by Stalinists. Poland was neither free in 1940 nor in 1946. By early 1946 we were already considering putting former Luftwaffe pilots in American jets — improved with ample borrowing from Nazi technology — to protect Europe from the Red Army carried westward on GM trucks. We put Nazis on trials for war crimes even as we invited their scientists to our shores to match their counterparts in the Soviet Union who were building even more lethal weapons to destroy us. Our utopian idea of a global U.N. immediately deteriorated into a mess — decades of vetoes in the Security Council by Stalinists and Maoists, even as former colonial states turned thugocracies in the General Assembly ganged up on Israel and the survivors of the Holocaust.

After Americans had liberated France and restored his country, General de Gaulle created the myth of the French resistance and immediately triangulated with our enemies to reforge some pathetic sort of French grandeur. An exhausted England turned over to us a collapsing empire, with the warning that it might all turn Communist. Tired of the war and postbellum costs, Americans suddenly were asked to wage a new Cold War to keep a shrinking West and its allies free. The Department of War turned into the Department of Defense, along with weird new things like the U.S. Air Force, Strategic Air Command, Food for Peace, Alliance for Progress, Voice of America, and thousands of other costly entities never dreamed of just a few years earlier.

VDH: World Weary Americans

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As always, Victor Davis Hanson, expands my mind and launches a broadside at some of the “conventional wisdom” out there in the world:

The U.S. military is habitually slurred even though it possesses the world’s only lift and sea assets that could substantially aid in the ongoing disasters in Indonesia and Thailand. Blamed for having too high a profile in removing the Taliban and Saddam, it is now abused for having too meek a presence in Southeast Asia. No doubt America should have “preempted” the wave and acted in a more “unilateral” fashion. Meanwhile we await the arrival of the Charles De Gaulle and its massive fleet of life-saving choppers that can ferry ample amounts of Saudi, Chinese, and Cuban materiel to the dying — emissaries all of U.N. and EU multilateralism.

All this hypocrisy has desensitized Americans, left and right, liberal and conservative. We will finish the job in Iraq, nursemaid democratic Afghanistan through its birthpangs, and continue to ensure that bandits and criminal states stay off the world’s streets. But what is new is that the disenchanted American is becoming savvy and developing a long memory — and so we all fear the day is coming when he casts aside the badge, rides the buckboard out of town, and leaves such sanctimonious folk to themselves.

Tom Friedman: The Stakes

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Over at Castle Argghhh is a post about Tom Friedman’s December 23rd Column in the New York Times that I believe clearly lays out what the stakes are in Iraq:

There is much to dislike about this war in Iraq, but there is no denying the stakes. And that picture really framed them: this is a war between some people in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world who – for the first time ever in their region – are trying to organize an election to choose their own leaders and write their own constitution versus all the forces arrayed against them.

Do not be fooled into thinking that the Iraqi gunmen in this picture are really defending their country and have no alternative. The Sunni-Baathist minority that ruled Iraq for so many years has been invited, indeed begged, to join in this election and to share in the design and wealth of post-Saddam Iraq.

As the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum so rightly pointed out to me, “These so-called insurgents in Iraq are the real fascists, the real colonialists, the real imperialists of our age.” They are a tiny minority who want to rule Iraq by force and rip off its oil wealth for themselves. It’s time we called them by their real names.

However this war started, however badly it has been managed, however much you wish we were not there, do not kid yourself that this is not what it is about: people who want to hold a free and fair election to determine their own future, opposed by a virulent nihilistic minority that wants to prevent that. That is all that the insurgents stand for.

Friedman goes on to conclude:

We may lose because our Arab allies won’t lift a finger to support an election in Iraq – either because they fear they’ll be next to face such pressures, or because the thought of democratically elected Shiites holding power in a country once led by Sunnis is anathema to them.

We may lose because most Europeans, having been made stupid by their own weakness, would rather see America fail in Iraq than lift a finger for free and fair elections there.

As is so often the case, the statesman who framed the stakes best is the British prime minister, Tony Blair. Count me a “Blair Democrat.” Mr. Blair, who was in Iraq this week, said: “Whatever people’s feelings or beliefs about the removal of Saddam Hussein and the wisdom of that, there surely is only one side to be on in what is now very clearly a battle between democracy and terror. On the one side you have people who desperately want to make the democratic process work, and want to have the same type of democratic freedoms other parts of the world enjoy, and on the other side people who are killing and intimidating and trying to destroy a better future for Iraq.”

I believe whether you supported the decision to goto war or not – if you can’t see and understand the stakes before us in Iraq then you don’t understand at all the world that we live in today.

Politics Trump Students over Security Management Program

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Via Little Green Footballs comes this little tidbit from the New York Sun:

Furious students and faculty members at the Borough of Manhattan Community College are demanding that the school abandon plans for a certificate program on security management. They view it as an endorsement of the Bush administration’s Department of Homeland Security.

Like hundreds of other community colleges across the nation since the September 11 attacks, the two-year CUNY school in Lower Manhattan is hoping to take advantage of the surging demand for security training. The school’s faculty proposed a program in May that would teach students about threats to homeland security and how to counter them.

At a school where the student government headquarters is decorated with a poster of a tortured Abu Ghraib prisoner and another that calls President Bush a “madman,” some students and faculty members have reacted to the proposed program with intense suspicion.

While those who proposed the program argue that it will offer BMCC students sought-after skills to help them find jobs in the security industry, critics say the program is an oppressive outgrowth of the Department of Homeland Security.

I’m a security professional by trade – educated at Indiana University’s Department of Criminal Justice. This has to be one of the most ridiculous political moves I’ve ever seen made by a community college before.

The security industry continues to grow and expand – organizations such as the American Society for Industrial Security are helping to lead this effort. Obviously at this community college, they have more important priorities – and those priorities are not their students.

Strong Showing by Hamas in Palestinian Elections

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The New York Times is reporting on Hamas’s strong showing in the local Palestinian Elections today:

The militant group Hamas made a surprisingly strong showing in local Palestinian elections, according to preliminary results obtained Friday,

signaling a drop in popularity for the ruling Fatah movement before next month’s presidential poll.

[…]

According to preliminary results obtained by The Associated Press, Fatah won a majority of council seats in 14 towns, while Hamas, taking part for the first time in Palestinian elections, took control in nine.

[…]

Hamas has been at the forefront of anti-Israeli violence, carrying out suicide bombings and other attacks, even as it has emerged as the strongest political challenger to Fatah, the Palestinian Liberation Organizations faction formerly led by Yasir Arafat.

This is democracy? Hamas elected to lead nine towns.

Wake me up please.