What Latin America and elephant tusks can tell you about intelligence

4knowledge had a couple of recent posts worthy of checking out.

The first is about an article about the need for Latin American nations to have ‘professionalized’ spy agencies to keep track of and stymie the threat posed by Cuba, Venezuela and other assorted commies.  Now, I have no visibility (at all) on Latin America and so can’t weigh the merits of his article other than to note that previous regimes based on anti-communism haven’t done the people of Latin America a whole lot of good.

What I do want to point out is a brilliant sentence the author mentions in the first paragraph:
“Coherent and fluid intelligence agency structures for achieving the mainstay of intelligence, which is organizing evidence for sound hypothesis, eludes many governments.”

Ok, not the most finely crafted sentence but can I still get an ‘Amen’?  The mainstay of intelligence is organizing evidence for sound hypothesis.  I’ve heard a lot of organizations (on the sub-federal level) struggle with trying to explain why they want to get into the intelligence business and how it would make them more efficient and effective but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this point addressed.  That’s because, in part at least, the overwhelming emphasis on tactical issues and concerns.

As I’m also on a kick about good intelligence requiring well thought out processes, the first phrase is appealing as well.  He doesn’t say you need a rigid, hierarchical organization but (and I think this is important) a ‘coherent and fluid’ one.  When your threats are formed into loose networks (either criminal or terrorist), rigid hierarchies have a difficult time dealing with them.

Quite frankly, I would have been much more interested in seeing the author develop that one sentence.  I suspect it’s a very rich vein to be mined.

The second post concerns a very exciting aspect of intelligence:  Wildlife crime.  It cites a report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (website here) which advocates for ‘intelligence led enforcement’ for environmental crimes.

“Without intelligence, enforcement officers canonly operate on a reactive basis, with limited insight into which tactical responses should be adopted or where to direct resources.”

“The primary objective of any criminal intelligence system or group of systems should be to contribute to the prevention and detection of a crime.” (emphasis added)

And, of course, if we want to look at prevention rather than reaction then we need to look at new metrics of success:
“In order to accurately measure successes and identify areas for development, enforcement agencies need to establish clear performance indicators.”

Pretty interesting stuff.

Metrics Metrics Metrics

From Tom Ricks’ blog:

Sam Damon, our thoughtful officer of last week, concludes by offering some different and unusual ways of measuring whether we are succeeding:

Stop counting IEDs. The enemy is a second order effect or consequence. Count how many times tribes use shar’ia law or tribal mediation to settle disputes rather than local government. Count how many days the Afghan elected governor is in his province or district and compare it to how many days the Taliban Commander or shadow governor is there among the population. This is the primary type of Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield that is needed, not the old paradigm that we still teach Military Intel officers.

I like this approach, which strikes me as similar to some of the suggestions Exum and his posse made in their paper titled Triage, in the section about metrics to avoid and metrics to use.

So at least we’re talking about metrics in Afghanistan.  Why then, here in the U.S., when we’re looking at the effects of crime and criminal networks are we still obsessed with the same two metrics we’ve been using for decades:  arrests and quantity of illegal material seized?

Neither of those factors will tell you if all your efforts will do any more than create a temporary vacuum into which new criminal networks will rush in.

Back in 2004 I was convinced the military could learn some valuable lessons from law enforcement in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Now, I’d say the reverse is true but there’s simply very little interest in law enforcement absorbing anything from the military except ‘Rambo gear’.

Flattery will get you everywhere

I was poking around my blog stats recently and found a link to this site from 4knowledge which is a South African company which conducts training on intelligence issues.  Allow me to quote the all wise Ms. Duvenage.

I just love Travels with Shiloh - cynical,tongue-in-the-cheek and in-your-face realism about intel stuff, events and manipulations.

Ms. Duvenage, I believe I love you (oh, and any chance you can open comments on your blog?).

Ok, enough narcassistic preening.  Even though I began perusing through the blog in hopes of finding more complementary things about me in it, there are a lot of really good ideas bouncing around there worthy of your time.

Case in point:  This post about the question of ‘professionalizing’ the analytical community.

[we're] still in the awareness-building phase. There is little sharing…and people are either just too lazy, disinterested or restricted by operational security organisational culture to contribute…Interest in belonging to professional organisations is also minimal. We only have 5 members of the International Association for Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts (IALEIA) in SA. Why so little interest? The same reasons as above apply, plus people do not see their jobs as careers. Before we can even think about a professional organisation for organisational or South African or African Intelligence Analysts, there should be a shared vision built on passion for what we do.

I get both hopeful and discouraged reading stuff like this.  Hopeful because when I look around I realize we’re not as far behind everyone else as I sometimes fear and discouraged because we’ve got so far to go and there aren’t any trailblazers we can follow.

So, regarding her post specifically.  I would argue that looking to the FBI specifically or the (U.S.) national level intelligence community generally might not be a good example for trying to professionalize other (smaller, less ‘networked’) agencies.  It seems however, like we’ve got two choices of how to go (you will note the influence my studies in Soviet political theory have upon me here):

1. The Menshevik approach:  Appeal to the broadest possible audience.  The terms ‘Analyst’ or ‘intelligence professional’ will be used in their most general sense in order to swell your ranks in the hopes that numbers lead to influence.  Of course, the drawback is that any loyalty you garner may be broad but shallow.  Further, because you’ve cast your net so wide, it’s difficult to discuss anything in any detail.  You’re constantly spending your time trying to get everyone to understand the basics of your field and so can never get into advanced or detailed issues because you’ll lose your constituancy.
   
2. The Bolshevik approach:  Forget the masses, they’re “lazy, disinterested or restricted by operational security organisational culture” and won’t do anything to advance your agenda.  Instead, focus your attention of identifying people who will act as a vanguard of the proletariat and drag history kicking and screaming into the next stage.  If you’d like a metaphor a little less Marxist-Lenninist, think of Kevin Costner in ‘Field of Dreams’ (which I haven’t seen, btw).  If you build it, they will come.  This is the sort of ‘judo analysis’ I’ve discussed before when talking about organizational change only on a broader front.  It’s certainly frought with more danger than the other approach but the payoff is greater.
   

I’d argue IALEIA is an example of the first approach.  What is it, really?  Read their ‘About Us‘ section and I defy you to tell me anything about it an hour later. What does it really stand for or against? Does it advocate for anything or is does it just exist so people can look for new job opportunites and go cool places for conferences (and believe me, I’m totally jealous about those conferences and would go in a second)?  If that’s what the organization is about, that’s cool but you shouldn’t really expect to generate much passion or interest in the organization.  It possesses the worst characteristics of new and old organizations, few resources and capabilities, and a conservative ‘don’t rock the boat’ agenda.

It needs to carve out a niche and it’s not going to do that by being a tool of governmental glacial change (or worse) not having a position on anything.  IALEIA needs to develop some positions and then push for them.  If that causes people to leave the organization, so be it.  What are they doing for you now, anyway?

If you want to know why IALEIA membership constitues a fraction of the potential membership (and more importantly, the active membership is probably even much smaller) ask yourself, why should analysts need to be members?  What would drive them to say to themselves ‘Yes!  I want to be a part of that.’  There are problems with analysts not seeing their jobs as careers but a distant professional organization isn’t going to change that.  Better to identify the people who already see their vocation as a profession (or better yet, a calling) and recruit them.

The Swedish response to organized crime

Last week, while listening to my Radio Sweden podcast, I heard this story about something called the ‘Alcatraz List’.  It seems it is a list developed by Swedish law enforcement of the ‘most dangerous’ criminals in the country and there are concerns that it might not have been worth the expense to create it given that only half of the people on the list have received any jail time in the three years the list has been in existence.  The story was pretty sparse on details so there wasn’t much to say.  I did a bit of poking around on this wonderful series of tubes that is the internets and found this summary of report evaluating 14 initiatives designed to fight organized crime.  Thank god the Swedes love to 1)  do research, 2)  write about it and 3)  translate it.

Just an observation, Swedes apparently also love their white space.  The amount of blank pages stuffed in the front of the report (you’ve got to get to page 6 of a 33 page report before you get to any content) and the margins in the report are so big (oh my god…it’s full of stars!) that I’m reminded of my school days as I tried desperately to pad my reports to get them to meet the minimum page requirements.

In 2006, the Swedish National Police Board decided that SEK 120 million (approx 15.5 million dollars. Eds.) would be released for police efforts aimed at fighting organised crime…It was hoped that the campaign would provide the Criminal Investigation Department and the police authorities with an incentive to commence
larger projects, which previously lacked resources.

That being said, even though the report is in typically restrained Swedish style there’s quite a bit here to raise an eyebrow.  First, let this soak in:

Brå was commissioned to make an evaluation of the special campaign against organised crime, i.e. a thorough investigation of outcome and results made upon completion…This entails not just describing what was done within the campaign, but also why it was done, and whether it was the most efficient way of doing it.

Whoa…an actual evaluation of anti-crime initiatives?  That is impressive all by itself.  While in the U.S. the Department of Justice may do evaluations of initiatives I suspect you’d be hard pressed to find such work being done at the state level.  While it may be basic management strategy, the idea that law enforcement initiatives should be clearly articulated with cost estimates and metrics to determine success or failure remains as elusive as bigfoot at sub-Federal levels in the U.S..  Given that 11 U.S. states have populations roughly equal or larger than Sweden’s 9 million and have significant amounts of personnel and resources devoted to law enforcement and anti-crime activities one would think there would be some interest to determine the effectiveness of their efforts.

Secondly they identified their broad targets as:

1. Groups involved in organised crime: Hells Angels, Bandidos, Outlaws, Original Gangsters, Angereds Tigrar, Brödraskapet and A.S.I.R.
2. The importation and distribution of cannabis in Sweden.
3. Particularly difficult and serious crime over time, for example attacks on security transports.

Now, the report isn’t clear if their goals were more specific than this (How exactly is ‘organized crime’ defined?  What in the world is ‘difficult and serious crime’?) and it might either have been included in the full report or be an issue with translation but such broad goals could lead to abuse of the program.

How?  Glad you asked.

Imagine offering departments a big bucket of money to address the problems above.  A good bureaucrat will look around at what they’re already doing and see if they can shoe-horn existing activities (via some creative writing) into this program resulting in extra money for no extra work.  I’m not saying that happened here and knowledge that there would be an evaluation of funding and results would certainly go a long way to mitigating that risk but clear definitions would be helpful.

Some of the findings of the report:

• Much more is needed in the form of preventive action.
• Cooperation with municipalities and the social authorities involved in crime prevention
  work has, however, not been developed within the project.
• Cooperation with private sectors has not been particularly developed either.
• What has been mentioned in the interviews as less successful, are those projects that have had a narrow focus, primarily those that have been directed towards a particular individual.
• Most projects within the campaign have been operational, and have been directed towards tactical analysis with short-term objectives, in the form of confiscation and legal
  proceedings. Internationally, it has been put forward that there is a need for more strategically directed analyses within the police
• One implication regarding the projects that have, so far, been concluded, is that most of them are based on methods used by the police in their day-to-day police work.

It’ll be interesting to see if these points resonate within the Swedish justice system and they devote some energy to prevention, strategic planning and targeting, and incorporating non-law enforcement partners.  They are, essentially, arguing to adopt an intelligence led policing model of which I’m a fan, although I haven’t seen it actually work as advertised in an ongoing basis (although I hear positive things out of Canada and the U.K).

I would really like to know what sort of intelligence and analytical techniques they found (un)helpful and incorporate in their operations.  They get hinted at several times throughout the report but I can’t get a feel if they’re being intentionally vague, don’t see it as central to their initiatives or don’t really incorporate intelligence and analysis in their activities.

Update:  Oh, and just for the record I do not approve of the new intro music for Radio Sweden.

Counterinsurgency as domestic policy?

I was thinking about the infatuation everyone has apparently developed with social networking software as a result of the resent events in Iran and I began considering ways in which they could as intelligence collection assets.

Then I read Peter’s post (with whom I am engaged in an interesting if accidental back and forth) further expanding upon the idea about using counterinsurgency concepts to reconsider approaches to stressed (high crime, non-existent legal economic base, lawlessness, etc) urban areas in Western cities.

Stick with me as I try to intertwine these two ideas.

Peter says:

Give trusted local partners in local communities the training, resources, backup and legal authority to provide their own basic security – as community patrols, neighbourhood watches, special constables?  Free up law enforcement agencies for specialist tasks, like emergency response, investigations, surveillance, and intelligence collecting and analysis.

I would agree  with this sentiment although, as a precondition, locals would need to trust whatever ‘local partners’ take over basic security.   That might prove to be difficult and have to be built from the ground up.  In Iraq, the U.S. co-opted the Sons of Iraq, most of whom were militia members, former insurgents or armed tribesmen of dubious law abiding credentials but with the general trust of those they would be patrolling.  I don’t think there’s a reasonable counterpart that could be quickly adopted for use in Western cities.  Even if there was I think any such organization would be viewed with hostility by law enforcement which would see it as a competitor for authority and resources.

However, there is an important role to be played by local residents.  Not only are there not enough resources to adequately patrol every neighborhood but, from a broader public safety perspective, there are huge gaps in our knowledge of the environment.  Everyone knows people have (but frequently don’t use) 9-1-1 to report crimes but what about places where people feel unsafe for any number of reasons?  At what point will authorities find out that some buildings being taken over by homeless squatters?  That illegal garbage is being dumped in an abandoned lot?  That street lights have been shot out along a certain section of road?

Typically, that information has to peculate through a variety of channels, usually avoiding any sort of integration and thereby making the development of a clear picture of what’s going on difficult.

Here’s where those Iranian protesters come back into things.  If we could get locals to use social networking tools to provide near real time information about their neighborhoods, it would provide authorities the ability to address problems more quickly and consistently than currently.

Now, first off, I’m not advocating any sort of secret police, inform on your neighbor sort of system.  One of the characteristics of any such reporting system is that information submitted should be visible to the general public (like a twitter feed, blog post or flickr photostream).  Unfortunately the law enforcement community has picked up the bad habit of overclassification from the national intelligence community and seems to think the more information it can keep from the public the more valuable it is.  Real confidential information (anonymous reporting of crime, etc) should be handled in the traditional way.

Consider the effects of having a series of tweets from residents all saying they won’t let their children get on the school bus at the 4th street stop because of drug dealing in the area or reporting on a running gun battle (which don’t always get reported).  Or asking people to send in photos of their neighborhoods of areas that are unsafe or frightening (my boss told me about that idea at a conference he recently attended…my apologies but I don’t know who to attribute that to).

And there’s nothing saying this would have to be a one way communication.  Couldn’t authorities use this to query the general public for information?  Asking people to identify the location of homeless people in advance of a dangerous cold snap so that they can be brought to shelters, for example.

If you develop that capacity, then you’d also be better prepared in the event of a larger threat to public safety.  Imagine the utility of such a resource during Katrina or the Los Angeles riots.  What neighborhoods are safe and calm and which need attention immediately?  What’s going on in areas with limited access?

The Army has a concept called ‘Every Soldier a Sensor‘ which is designed to get soldiers used to the idea that, in addition to their assigned military specialty, they also have a role as an information/intelligence collector.  I’m advocating something like a ‘Every Citizen a Sensor’ approach with careful consideration of preventing/removing any sinister Orwellian implications.

Of course, you’d need a whole host of collators and analysts at the back end to integrate that information with the stuff collected from traditional channels and then create something that can be used by decision makers and the general public.  Some of this work could (and hopefully would) be done by the public, combining the data with other information to examine in ways that are relevant to them and the authorities (police, emergency services, transportation/infrastructure types, etc.) would be customers in their own rights using the data as they see best.

Gangs and Insurgencies (Con’t)

Last week I wrote a piece about an article trying to describe criminal street gangs as insurgencies and a serious threat to nation states.  It did generate a couple of comments that highlighted my tendency to offer superficial answers and I think it’s worthwhile to flesh out my ideas a bit.

Peter said:

Where I part company with Dean is the idea that urban counter-gang strategy should be modelled on counterinsurgency doctrine. In Dean’s words, “Restore order, establish you’re there for the long haul and rebuild infrastructure, opportunity and trust”.

In theory this sounds like a good plan. But in practice, how many American municipal authorities have the resources to do this justice? And how would they sustain progress for the long haul? Success ultimately depends on people having secure jobs in legit economies. That in turn relies on industry returning to inner cities. There are good reasons why industry left – like changing patterns of demand, new means of production, the lure of cheap offshore labour – and that will be impossible to reverse.

There are some problems with me advocating counterinsurgency principles when discussing dealing with domestic criminal networks.  I’m not talking about calling in troops, imposing martial law or anything like that.  Rather, it’s an understanding that there are underlying factors which are driving the negative behavior (whether financially or politically motivated) and until you address those factors, you aren’t going to get any long term success.

So, we’ve seen policy groping towards this idea through Broken Windows theory or the implementation of the Boston Gun Project or its new incarnation. These programs attempt to go beyond the standard ‘Book ‘em Dano’ approach and aren’t unrealistic in terms of resource requirements.  They do however face some serious problems:

• While, at their best, they incorporate and encourage social service/community involvement, law enforcement by its nature (with access to reliable funding, it’s highly structured organization and the ‘long tail’ of the criminal justice system behind it) is gong to be the (very) senior partner in any such program and effectively calling all the shots.
• Government decision makers are similar to business decision makers in that they have short term horizons.  Instead of looking at the next quarter or fiscal year they are primarily concerned with the next election cycle.  Therefore, reducing crime now is usually more favored than enacting policies which might lead to reduced crime later.  That means money and resources will flow to those things (like cops on the streets, new prisons, tougher criminal penalties) which encourage short term suppression rather than those (better job opportunities, social services, education) that lead to long term crime reduction.
• There are few to no potential partners for any of these schemes which can address long term concerns.  In COIN language of ‘Clear, Hold, Build’, we’ve got the ‘clear’ capability, might have the ‘hold’ capability and aren’t even trying to address the ‘build’ portion.

Admittedly, local and state governments (most of which are strapped for cash) would need to make some tough decisions if they wanted to address these problems over the long term.

Right now, anti-crime/gang initiative usually originate in the same way:

1. Ignore problem
2. Some ‘newsworthy’ event occurs (usually a child killed in a crossfire between warring groups)
3. Public outrage ensues
4. Officials spring into action and flood the area with police resources, arresting anyone and everyone they can
5. Criminals lay low
6. Crime falls
7. Law enforcement is quietly withdrawn
8. Return to #1 above

This is not a recipe for long term success and I reject the idea that we have to tell (implicitly or explicitly) that this is the best they can hope for.  Local/State/Federal governments will have to make some choices and I’m by no means an expert who can recommend what should be cut to pay for this but accepting the status quo seemsincredibly short sighted.

The first priority must be to restore order and not with the ‘drive by policing’ system we have now.  In many communities the public safety sector is viewed as indifferent (at best) to hostile (at worst) and trust can be non-existent.

Law enforcement and emergency services therefore should be permanently stationed (and adequately staffed) in the worst areas and not just drive through on patrol.  This will be difficult for some municipalities which find themselves running from one emergency call to another but where county or state law enforcement resources can come into play.  Right now, those resources are often disbursed on a myriad of investigative missions, diluting their effectiveness.  Instead, those forces should be used as a strategic reserve (think of county/state law enforcement as a potential comitatenses to the local police’s limitanei).  This is where the Broken Window/Operation CeaseFire plans can be implemented.  Restore order and trust.  Commit to a long term presence.

While I’m not an urban policy guy I suspect there are a host of ideas and initiatives that could be tried to restore legitimate opportunities for employment in even the most depressed communities.  People in these areas get by now through the gray or black markets.  Microfinancing for small, legitimate service jobs (auto repair, tailoring, babysitting, etc.).  Tax subsidies for outside business/industry.  Converting/leasing open space for food production.  Don’t worry about competing in the world economy but initially focus on serving the local community (which is what the illicit market has done so well by providing narcotics, prostitution, gambling, etc).

Gangs and insurgencies

Foreign Policy has an interesting looking article about the organized crime and insurgencies.  In it, the author cites a new paper in the Small Wars Journal by John P. Sullivan titled “Future Conflict: Criminal Insurgencies, Gangs and Intelligence”.  I don’t know how but Sullivan somehow manages to sucker me into reading his stuff every time and every time I’m disappointed.  The paper is a motherload of unexamined assumptions, outdated information and self promotion (17 of his 24 footnotes cite himself).  I don’t know Sullivan and I’m sure he’s a great guy but if this is the sort of thinking that’s driving policy as Robbert Haddick is kinda-sorta implying, we’re in big trouble.  Sullivan has been promoting essentially the same idea for over 10 years, that gangs are going to politicize and become the major threat to the nation state system as these modern day barbarians storm the gates and plunge us into a new dark age.

Oh…he also seems to have a bizarre obsession with the number 3.  There are three ‘generations of gangs’ and three types of cartels.  Why three?  Beats me, since the categories are entirely arbitrary and there’s no evidence to support these divisions.

He begins with a bold statement:

“Gangs dominate the intersection between crime and war.”

I don’t even know what the hell that means but he tells us he’s going to examine areas where “acute and endemic crime and gang violence challenge the solvency of state political control.”  Therein lies his major defect, as I see it.  For Sullivan, gangs are a cause of instability rather than a function of it.  Therefore…eliminate the gang and stability returns.

Too bad there’s no evidence for that.

Gangs don’t form to ‘challenge the rule of law’ as Sullivan states, but rather, form to fill a void where the rule of law is absent.  In the absence of order, people organize and when a group of people are in a Hobbsian state of nature (whether in a Brazilian slum or an urban housing project here in the U.S.) the people who can wield force tend to run things.  They may get more ambitious later but I think you’ll find very few people entering the life of crime with the goal of undermining the Westphalian system (check out Gang Leader for a Day if you want a brilliant 320 page example of this).  They want to meet their basic Maslow(ian?) needs initially.

Transnational gangs aren’t the reason there isn’t a strong, stable democracy in Russia, Columbia, Nigeria or Mexico.  Those nations have a history of corruption, instability and lack of public safety that precedes the arrival/creation of transnational gangs in their territories.  Gangs certainly don’t make the situation better but I’d like to see the evidence that they are the cause of these problems.

He then describes ‘criminal enclaves’ and uses Ciudad del Este as an example.  He discribes it thus:

A jungle hub for the world’s outlaws, a global village of outlaws, the triple border zone serves as a free enclave for significant criminal activity, including people who are dedicated to supporting and sustaining acts of terrorism. Denizens of the enclave include Lebanese gangsters and terrorists, drug smugglers, Nigerian gangsters and Asian mafias: Japanese Yakuza, Tai Chen (Cantonese mafia), Fuk Ching, the Big Circle Boys, and the Flying Dragons. This polyglot mix of thugs demonstrates the potential of criminal netwarriors to exploit the globalization of organized crime.

That certainly seems to make sense but if there’s such a good case that the area is as bad as all that why does he use a reference that’s ten years old?  Are we to assume that this area of the world has been untouched by 9/11 and its aftermath?  There’s certainly been work done to assess the nature of Ciudad del Este in the past ten years why not mention any of it?

Ciudad del Este is a cartel?  Who’s running it?  Is there some sort of Evil League of Evil pulling the strings or is it an anarchic wonderland that attracts all sorts of criminal and terrorist group because they can all do their own thing?  If the latter, how could it be a cartel?

There’s just so much to critique in the paper I’m not sure how much detail I should go into.  His ‘generations of gangs’ is absolutly terrible and has no utility when discussing gangs or anti-gang strategy.  It’s uselessness is demonstrated by his definitions of the generations which require the existance of gangs which exist in more than one generation at a time.  So, does that mean there are five generations?  Four and a half?  It starts to feel like the papal astronomers adding more and more orbits to the planets in order to keep the Earth at the center of the universe.  Just dump it and find a better explanitory tool already.

I’ve been looking at gangs for about 10 years now and ever since that time I’ve been hearing horror stories about how gangs are just about ready to destroy civilization.  I suspect scaremongering like this has a lot more to do with securing grant funding and speaking engagements than it does with depicting reality.  Some gang leaders in the U.S. do occasionally attempt to transform their gang into a politically motivated force.  There are even some examples of short term, local successes on their part.  But they don’t last over time or space because of a number of inherent contradictions between the conditions needed for a politically motivated group (even if criminal) and an economically motivated one.

There are some interesting parallels between gangs and insurgencies.  They both feed on disenfranchisement.  The Sunnis fueled the insurgency in Iraq because they were out of power and looking to be on the wrong end of a payback spree.  The reason street gangs went from neighborhood nuicence to serious criminal problem has a lot to do with collapsing economic systems in inner cities in the 70s and 80s, the rise of narcotics as an opportunity to achieve financial well being and neglect by government of social services.  Both populations had little to lose and so elements of that population decided ‘What the hell’.

There are important lessons to our response to both as well.  Our current anti-gang strategy (such as it is) much more resembles our Iraq strategy (such as it was) in 2003-2006.  We generally isolate ourselves from the population, do the occassional ‘kenetic operation’, engage in the usual post operational chest pounding and declarations that we’ve ‘turned a corner’ and then find ourselves right back where we’ve started.

Perhaps the answer isn’t what Sullivan recommends (more riot police, counterterrorism forces, high intensity policing, etc. – you know an M-16 armed balaclava wearing dude on every streetcorner to kick the shit out of anyone who questions state authority) but rather the same principles advocated for COIN operations.  Hearts and minds.  Clear, Hold, Build.  Restore order, establish you’re there for the long haul and rebuild infrastructure, opportunity and trust.  Yes, it’ll be expensive.  Yes, it’ll take a lot of time.  Clearly building and filling prisons isn’t proving to be the answer so perhaps it’s time for a different approach.

The CIA – Nervous breakdown or going rogue?

I don’t know what to make of this Newsweek article about concern within the CIA about the torture memo debate.  I found this quote interesting:

Obama has promised legal support for any CIA officer caught up in probes. Still, says a former senior agency official, the rank-and-file are “nervous.” One former undercover operative said some spies are so despondent they have “lost their sense of mission.” “The committee is being given access—with appropriate, agreed-upon safeguards—to the material it needs,” agency spokesman Paul Gimigliano said. “The CIA is being transparent with the Congress, true to its word.” In fact, negotiations are still in progress, though officials close to the matter said Congress will likely get its way but will have to examine documents at CIA HQ. “If they blow this, if stuff leaks or it all gets turned into a political circus, you can close the book on the current system of intelligence oversight,” one intel official warned. “Nobody will trust it.”

What exactly does it mean when the CIA says intelligence oversight by the elected representatives of the U.S. is a ‘closed book’?  I can’t tell if that’s some sort of threat or not.

Really, I keep hearing how vital the CIA is but don’t hear too many specifics as to why and forgive me but I don’t buy the argument that all their successes are secret.  Secrecy may conceal successes but it also hides failures and embarrassment.

So, what positive things have the agency done that couldn’t be done by the Department of Defense or the State Department?

Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks the status quo isn’t exactly worth maintaining.

And the waters cleared…

Good news today as the President ordered a review of our national classification system perhaps even more interesting is that it looks like the review will include information included in the ‘Sensitive but Unclassified‘ category as well.

This is great news since it seems that everyone and their brother seems to subscribe to the idea that ‘the only valuable information is restricted information’ and so slaps all sorts of caveats onto their products to give them the air of gravitas.  My personal pet peeve is ‘law enforcement sensitive’ which is horribly overused and guidelines for its use (like who can slap that title on or take it off) are about as elusive as bigfoot.

Let’s hope this is a sign of some coming common sense.

Quick, get the CIA some cheese to go with that whine!

Ok, Nancy Pelosi is an idiot.  You’ll get no argument from me there.  She, like many Democrats in congress were complicit in our entry in the Iraq War as well as excesses after 9/11.  I imagine the reason behind their efforts to be lap dogs for the previous administration is some combination of crass political opportunism and ignorance.  You could almost see them drooling at the opportunity to go to their voters bragging about how they could get tough with terrorism and take on Saddam.  Until, of course, the quick and easy war they thought we were going to get proved to be a bit more tricky.

Now, Pelosi is trying to argue that she didn’t know we were torturing people in custody which just makes her look clueless instead of an accomplice.  I guess that’s the best she can hope for but she really needs to come up with a better story then what she’s peddling now.

Of course, that doesn’t mean she isn’t telling the truth when she says the CIA lied.  In fact, I’ve been amazed at how people have been shocked by that statement (with some even demanding the CIA is owed an apology!).

I’m sorry, but the CIA has a long history of lying to the American people, congress and even the president and, on balance, a pretty poor track record in actually delivering good outcomes.  It’s operational arm should be moved to the Department of Defense where it would at least have the illusion (if not more) of oversight and control.  That will never happen however because every president (no matter how liberal or conservative) likes the freedom of having their own private army, accountable to no one and free from all those pesky rules that govern regular armies.

So now, apparently, elements within the CIA are getting worried that they might actually face some sort of accountability for breaking laws or going ‘cowboy’ (although I seriously doubt it).   From the Washington Post:

Former CIA director Michael V. Hayden said in an interview that CIA managers and operations officers have again been put “in a horrible position.” Hayden recalled an officer asking, “Will I be in trouble five years from now for what I agree to do today?”

Now, if someone is seriously asking that question my guess is that they probably should be in a different line of work.  Nobody is talking about sending an agent to Pelican Bay because they parked in the wrong spot or didn’t fill out their time card in triplicate but if you’re clearly violating U.S. and international law by, oh let’s say beating a prisoner to death, yeah you’ve got a problem.