Save Your Needles

This is seriously clever:

The CIA organised a fake vaccination programme in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader's family, a Guardian investigation has found.

...

The vaccination plan was conceived after American intelligence officers tracked an al-Qaida courier, known as Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, to what turned out to be Bin Laden's Abbottabad compound last summer. The agency monitored the compound by satellite and surveillance from a local CIA safe house in Abbottabad, but wanted confirmation that Bin Laden was there before mounting a risky operation inside another country.

DNA from any of the Bin Laden children in the compound could be compared with a sample from his sister, who died in Boston in 2010, to provide evidence that the family was present.

...

A nurse known as Bakhto, whose full name is Mukhtar Bibi, managed to gain entry to the Bin Laden compound to administer the vaccines. According to several sources, the doctor, who waited outside, told her to take in a handbag that was fitted with an electronic device. It is not clear what the device was, or whether she left it behind. It is also not known whether the CIA managed to obtain any Bin Laden DNA, although one source suggested the operation did not succeed.

Mukhtar Bibi, who was unaware of the real purpose of the vaccination campaign, would not comment on the programme.

The SEAL's Dog Was Named Cairo

...one of the tidbits of info in the AP's account of the Bin Laden raid.

The Black Hawks were specially engineered to muffle the tail rotor and engine sound, two officials said. The added weight of the stealth technology meant cargo was calculated to the ounce, with weather factored in. The night of the mission, it was hotter than expected.
The Black Hawks were to drop the SEALs and depart in less than two minutes, in hopes locals would assume they were Pakistani aircraft visiting the nearby military academy.

One Black Hawk was to hover above the compound, with SEALs sliding down ropes into the open courtyard.

The second was to hover above the roof to drop SEALs there, then land more SEALs outside — plus an interpreter and the dog, who would track anyone who tried to escape and to alert SEALs to any approaching Pakistani security forces.

If troops appeared, the plan was to hunker down in the compound, avoiding armed confrontation with the Pakistanis while officials in Washington negotiated their passage out.

Mission Accomplished

So we got him.

ABC is showing pics of a bloody bedroom scene that suggests at least a couple of the four people killed in the raid were killed there. 1am local time. Stands to reason that somebody might have been sleeping.

I'd make four observations.

• Obviously, a huge win for our side. No way you're going to convince me that this hasn't been forefront in the minds of our intelligence arm for nine plus years. Statements by our political class saying this guy wasn't important were just because we weren't finding him. Rather like saying Saddam wasn't important - until we got him.
• Pakistan military = total liars, in more ways than one. Whether its the "We had no idea he was here" bunk we're hearing now - or the "We don't help the Americans" they tell their own citizenry - there's just way too much in plain sight to believe either.
• Nothing against those people dancing at Ground Zero, or in front of the White House - and while I'm certainly pleased that Bin Laden is dead, I have to think that even if I lived right next to those places, I wouldn't find myself going out to dance in celebration of UBL's death.
  
  Once you get a few yells out, what do you do? Are there pro-death chants?? Weird.
  
• -and then there's this

Check out this guy's windows:

Dude's the most wanted man in the world and he's got swankier windows than I do.

Dancing to the Other Side's Tune

(Via War is Boring)

There is Only One Threat Level

Bruce Schneier records the obit of the DHS's laughable Terror Threat indicator:

The DHS is Getting Rid of the Color-Coded Terrorism Alert System
Good. It was always a dumb idea.

But the money quote is in his addendum. Something dubbed Blakley's Law:

"Every public alert system's status indicator rises until it reaches its disaster imminent setting and remains at that setting until it is retired from service."

It's easy to see why Blakley's law holds: if something terrible happens and the alert status didn't predict it, the keepers of the alert status will be blamed for not preparing us for the disaster. Setting the alert status to "Disaster imminent" when no disaster is likely costs the public some money and mental health, but it doesn't hurt them in other ways. On the other hand, setting the alert status to "Don't worry, be happy" just before a disaster does happen is the worst case for everyone - nobody prepares for the disaster, and the people in power lose their jobs for failing to prevent or prepare for the crisis.

That....is full blown awesome.

See Spot Jump

(Via Danger Room)

Incredibly, the accompanying text is stranger than the picture:

[British Special Air Service] pooches are trained for High Altitude High Opening (HAHO) jumps, in which parachutes are deployed at a high altitude and long horizontal distance away from a target location in order to allow jumpers to glide in without detection. The SAS dogs are trained to jump tethered to their handlers from heights as high as 25,000 feet and up to 20 miles away — or a 30 minute glide — from a target location.  At that height, the lack of oxygen puts them at risk for hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation,  so the dogs are fitted with special masks to give them breathable air. The Brits reportedly borrowed the tactic from America’s super-secret Delta Force, which first trained dogs to make HAHO jumps.

Asymmetrical Warfare

I've been reading Free Range International for awhile now, a blog by Tim Lynch - a private security contractor in Afghanistan - and one of the recurring themes of his blog is that the Taliban really, really suck at fighting:

There was an attack on the HQ of one of the security firms in Kabul last week involving two suicide bombers.  They popped up well inside the new Kabul “Ring of Steel” checkpoint system which seems to be designed to harass internationals and opened up on the exterior guards as they walked down the street housing Hart Security.  The Hart guards returned fire for a second or two and locked themselves inside the compound as did the exterior guards outside the gates of every other compound on that street which means about 25 men jumped inside their compounds when the two attackers unmasked.  The attackers reached the gate and, according to eye witnesses, one said he’ll take the gate down and the other moved back about 20 feet. When bad guy one blew down the gate, bad guy two also perished because 20 feet of stand off is inadequate for powerful suicide vests.

FRI points out, this is despite years and years of experience planning such operations. Granted the participants are always noobs - but you wouldn't be out of line expecting the people who orchestrate these attacks to learn from failure. And there is plenty of failure - trouble is, when a bomb goes off in a city - very few people know what the original plan was. It is very easy to assume that a detonation is a success - and reporters love an easy story.

Which is precisely why I like to read FRI and articles like the one in The Atlantic he's posting about - The Case for Calling Them Nitwits. Not just because it heaps abuse on those who are attempting to kill our soldiers and pretty much anyone they dislike - but because it presents a deeper analysis of what truly happened when a bomb goes off.

It is depressing to learn that an almost random assortment of tactics, executed by impressionable and gullible novices can simultaneously threaten two nations - and be thought to be a cohesive, organized enemy.

Which is not to dismiss them - they are not losing because they do not give up. The fact that any success in Afghanistan hinges on getting them to do something other than kill people is even less encouraging.

But still - the perspective is useful.

Stewart on Heston on the Bill of Rights

I just love this:


(H/t TPM)

Oh... you meant THIS torture tape???

You gotta be sh!tting me.

Gitmo in Brief

(Via ProPublica)

So far, only 24 of the 779 men held at Guantánamo at some point have been charged with a crime to be heard by a military commission. Four of them have been convicted. Only one detainee, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, has been moved from Guantánamo to face charges in a civilian court; that case is currently unfolding in federal court in New York.

For those of you keeping score at home, that would be 3% of those ever held at Gitmo end up getting charged - and 17% of those charged so far have been convicted.

Drone Wars

The BBC had an interesting blob of data about the US drone strikes in Afghanistan/Pakistan.

Here's a sample:

Commensurate With The Threat

(Via Newshoggers)

Found this interesting - via Thoreau (not that one, this one):

The feds have arrested 10 people charged with spying for Russia. I do not know the validity of the evidence, so I cannot comment on that. I can, however, note that these people were charged with crimes in a court of law.

Now, charging people with crimes in an open court of law is perfectly fine if we’re merely talking about people accused of acting at the behest of a nuclear power with a global intelligence network, a navy and airforce, oil, natural resources with which they play politics with neighbors, and a $1.2 trillion GDP. Sure, they may have some resources behind them, but at least the threat is manageable.

On the other hand, if we’re talking about a small network of guerrilla fighters whose leader lives in caves and whose fighters are armed with at best shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, well, you simply cannot charge them in an open court. The risks are far too great.

He shoots, he scores.

Looks Like We're Staying in Afghanistan...

U.S. Discovers Stunning Mineral Reserves in Afghanistan 

The New York Times says U.S. officials believe the vast veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, lithium, and niobium could "fundamentally alter" the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war.  U.S. officials told the newspaper Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the "most important mining centers in the world." 

Eavesdrop on Your Cell? No. Kill You? Yes.

Greg Marx runs through some tepid coverage of the Obama administration's decision to authorize the extrajudicial killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen accused of fomenting terrorist violence.

Here's the money quote:

To eavesdrop on the terrorism suspect who was added to the target list, the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is hiding in Yemen, intelligence agencies would have to get a court warrant. But designating him for death, as C.I.A. officials did early this year with the National Security Council’s approval, required no judicial review.

“Congress has protected Awlaki’s cellphone calls,” said Vicki Divoll, a former C.I.A. lawyer who now teaches at the United States Naval Academy. “But it has not provided any protections for his life. That makes no sense.”

I'd have to agree.

I can't imagine that the Obama administration's proposed solution can stand up to legal scrutiy.

I get that a total bar on deliberate attacks on Americans can result in some crazy situations
-High value foreign target pals around with nobody American for protection
-US troops encounter a known American fighter on the battlefield and are not allowed to call in airstrikes or artillery.

You would think that military rules of engagement could deal with most of these situations - - but the idea that the US can deliberately assassinate an American without some kind of external check is about as contrary to the idea of secure in ones person as you can get.

This sh!t's gotta stop.

Playing Soldier

God speaks to Hutaree: "Don't Drag Me Into Your Crap"

Watching the Hutaree arrests play out in the media, you can see people are struggling to understand what these folks were up to.

I'd accept these guys could organize a lethal ambush and perhaps detonate a bomb. Fair enough. Arrest them. But stop selling them to me as WMD-wielding soldiers of Armageddon. Watch the videos of these folks and you'll see them imitating the tactics of special forces - badly. They awkwardly go through the motions of a peel off maneuver ("We saw this on TV!") and take cover to return fire over the roof of a civilian vehicle.

They are playing war.

And every media outlet is trying to answer the question "Who are these guys?"

I'd argue this is the wrong question.

You have the feds laying claim to informers and the leader's ex-wife going to the press.

Then you have the rush of other militia members disassociating themselves from the Hutaree.

The Detroit News is reporting stuff like this:

A member of the controversial Michigan Militia said Sunday that the Hutaree is a nationwide organization with an ardent following in Adrian, 10 miles from the Ohio border just west of Detroit. "Their philosophy and ours differ in many ways, so we don't do a whole lot with them. They are too extreme or radical for us," said Jim Gulliksen, coordinator of the Lenaway Volunteer Michigan Militia with membership of about a dozen in the Adrian area. "I just kind of got a bad feeling about the group and we did not want to associate with them. They are a little too paranoid for me.

Then this guy weighs in:

Mike Lackomar of Michiganmilitia.com said he heard from other militia members that the FBI targeted the Hutaree after its members made threats of violence against Islamic organizations. Lackomar said the members of the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia and Michiganmilitia.com weren't arrested.

"Last night and into today (Sunday), the FBI conducted a raid against homes belonging to the Hutaree. They are a religious cult. They are not part of our militia community," Lackomar said.

CNN is also quoting Lackomar as saying the Hutaree are "really a fringe group outside of anything we do...more of a private army or a terrorist organization or really just a criminal organization."

I doubt either of these other militia guys supported the Hutaree's brand of crazy, but let's remember that when the Feds pounced - Lackomar claims the Hutaree called his group looking for help. They knew how to get in touch - and believed that the Michigan Militia would help. If Michigan Militia really went out of their way to avoid the Hutaree, you'd think they wouldn't have gotten the call.

I'm not looking for a wider Federal dragnet - I just think this is symptomatic of people with a shared subculture. These guys know each other because they're in the same area and they all like to play soldier in the woods.

It is very easy to get lost in the Hutaree's motivations & those of the rest of the militia movement.

My guess is less granular:

These guys like to play soldier in the woods.

That will get you started. But this is a fairly intense hobby. You buy weapons & gear and march around on training exercises.

In the normal run of things - this is a completely unnecessary skillset. It doesn't help you with your job, and it doesn't help you feed your family. It is expensive and can be physically demanding.

You need a reason to spend hours lugging around gear and learning how to fight - and to keep coming back.

There's plenty of other hobbies that involve guns and the outdoors. It's going to take something extra to get you to buy gear, lug it around, follow orders, and play war. You need an excuse, and there's a shortage of good ones.

We're re-enactors

That's about it. And it requires a historical and anachronistic outlook.

Once you suit up with modern gear, your every rationalization is going to distance you from most people:

We're getting ready in case of war...in case our country needs us

We're training in case our government collapses....

You need an excuse - and those are better than "I like to play soldier."

Once you buy into that line of reasoning, it only takes a few run ins with local law enforcment to to get to:

The government doesn't like us. They want to stop us from doing this.

The government SHOULD collapse, so we need to be ready...

I'd argue the only thing you need for the last big leap: We're going to MAKE the government collapse is a charismatic and power hungry individual. They may have no power in any other aspect of their lives - but in the woods, playing soldier - they are king.

In the normal run of things - this person would just be the most gung ho, who exhorts their followers to do more, to follow their example. But you get an individual who is hooked on controlling others - on being the big man... you're going to have problems. They start isolating their group, making wilder and wilder claims and pretty soon you have a group that believes they are the defenders of truth and the world needs to learn a lesson.

Put God in the mix and you have a recipe to easily define the world, minimize mortal threats and solidify the leader's control. We are righteous. They are not. They are less than we are.

Jonestown, Waco, and pretty much every suicide cult you've ever heard of has that leader who uses adversity to create unity. Leaders who will invent an enemy as a means of controlling the group. In the fortunate majority of cases - groups like this talk tough, get their kicks out of pretending, and eventually move on to other pastimes.

But then you have that exception- where somebody drunk on their own hype finds willing followers.... and we end up with yet another group of misfits being introduced to the world following a federal raid.

I'd argue their specific ideology isn't a cause - it's just a symptom. A tactic used by their leader to their own end.

We can be thankful nobody died this time.

Team Mayhem vs. The Hurt Locker

Awhile ago, Danger Room offered a day in the life of an army EOD team called Team Mayhem.

Totally worth the read.

A sample:

At about 7 pm, 28 hours into Team Mayhem's shift, the guys are on the roof of a well-groomed apartment building in one of Iraq's nicest remaining neighborhoods. They're looking at a fist-sized projectile that landed about an hour ago. Palmer identifies it as a Chinese-made 60-millimeter mortar, but there's no way to tell from here if it's about to explode. Palmer looks at Ferraro.

Ferraro squares his gear on his chest and crouches next to the shell, his face inches from the mortar. He takes a whiff. And just then, white smoke starts to curl from the thing. "Water! Get some water right now!" Palmer shouts. He knows that the smoke is from white phosphorus, an incendiary agent that burns on contact with oxygen, and that it will ignite the mortar's highly explosive core. The rooftop? About 15 feet wide.

The only way to stop the shell from detonating is to smother it. Very, very soon. Ferraro runs downstairs to get water from the apartment's owner - "and some sand, too!" Palmer yells to his back. Things get worse; the air crackles with the popcorn sound of automatic weapons fire. Mayhem's security escorts, two sergeants carrying M4 rifles, duck behind the waist-high wall surrounding the roof and point their guns out into the setting sun, looking for targets.

Sounds an awful lot like a movie that just sucked up all the Oscars, right?

Now, I get that the pushback on Hurt Locker has already started - but conveying the intensity of this thing next to me could blow at any second is something that the Hurt Locker does very well.

I've read criticisms about the films accuracy and they seem to focus on EOD boys don't use sniper rifles, or go off base alone, or chase bad guys - which are perfectly valid points - but they miss the fact that the guts of the film hold up rather nicely. EOD is dangerous work, moreso when you don't dominate the lanscape.

Story wise, I had a similar reaction to Saving Private Ryan - as spectacle, there are few comparisons you can make. Both films show you new things, new scenes. They get you by the throat.

But as storytelling...there's not a lot of new ground - and the more you think about the story, the less satisfying it becomes.

(Minor Spoiler alert)





















In the Hurt Locker, you have the classic action hero guy - a risk taking, mavrick, who is at first resented, then admired. If they'd left it at that, the film would be just another clichéd war movie. They do one better, by showing you the main character's personality has drawbacks - things go wrong because of their inability to switch it off. But, at least to me - those elements were switched off just as they were becoming interesting. Here's the other side of this guy - now, roll credits.

Credit to the film for bringing across something more than "hail, the conquering bad-@ss" - but I wonder if the raves on this film were more due to the fact that it was a well-done movie about an ongoing war that didn't take sides.

Anyway - read the Team Mayhem stuff.

Stranger Than Fiction

Not much to add here other than:

1) Holy crap - an assassination squad! and
2) Assassination squads take note: Dubai is quite the surveillance state

Hamas leader killed


The men followed their target to his room, saw its number - 230 - and the one across the hall - 237. A call was then made and one of the men - using the name Peter Elvinger - booked room 237 from the business suite of another hotel. Five hours later al-Mabhouh was dead


There was no security camera covering the door to al-Mabhouh’s room and no footage of how the team gained entry. The woman in the squad known as Gail Folliard patrolled the corridor outside. She was seen to distract a hotel guest who appeared at the second floor lift for a few vital seconds to give the killers time to gain access to the room

You gotta love how Dubai is laying this all out there. Naming names and showing photos. You wonder if whoever did this was prepared for public disclosure. They obviously knew they were under surveillance - but there's a bit of a gap between that and front page mugshots.

If Dubai's intelligence groups can be believed, it's a team of 17. That alone suggests a major player - read: Mossad - but wow, that's more than a hit squad - that's like a full patrol staffed with assassins.

Boots on the ground in Pakistan

(Via Danger Room)

Last year, President Obama and his administration ruled out sending U.S. ground forces into Pakistan. Instead, the White House said, America’s clandestine operations there would be waged solely by remote-control — with Predator and Reaper drones. “There is a red line,” said special envoy Richard Holbrooke. “And the red line is unambiguous and stated publicly by the Pakistani government over and over again: No foreign troops on our soil.”

Yet today, three U.S. soldiers were killed and two more were wounded by an improvised bomb in Pakistan. The area was known “as a Taliban stronghold,” the New York Times notes. But the “Pakistani military had declared cleared of the militants.”

It’s another sign that America’s once-small, once-secret war in Pakistan is growing bigger, more conventional, and busting out into the open.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Safe, Expensive & Stupid

FRI's babatim has a new post about Jalalabad's current status as a "white," or dangerous, city.

babatim doesn't have a lot of faith in the idea of locking down a city - and even less in the reasons for why the city was locked down. Here's his awesome run down of why this was a bad idea:

So today Jalalabad was on lock down to the international community. Declared a “white city” by [the United Nations Department of Safety & Security] due to two factors; a report of “five female BBIED (Body Borne Improvised Explosive Device) bombers who are looking to strike important targets” and reporting by various international security agencies of “spectacular attacks,” while President Karzai is in London attending an international conference. There has never been a female suicide bomber in Afghanistan to the best of my knowledge and there is no historical correlation to President Karzai attending international meetings and “spectacular” attacks. The (smart) military intelligence analysts dismissed the female suicide bomber story out of hand – they had seen similar reporting weeks ago and found nothing to substantiate them.

The smaller reconstruction projects which The Bot and I consult for ignored the White City and carried on with our daily routine. International reconstruction specialists cost the taxpayers of America over $1000 per day, so locking them down for no reason is a very expensive mistake. The military knew the principal threat spooking the UN security people was bogus, but they don’t talk to each other much. Both the UN and the military are operating inside huge bureaucratic closed loops – neither organization has the capacity to get into the local environment to conduct real time assessments. Only the small fries in the reconstruction business: JICA, CADG, CHF, etc… pay attention to White Information because they have to in order to operate. The large bureaucracies react to bogus intel which flows around the closed, insulated loops – their analysts deal with emails not people. They have the money which allows them to spend day after day on “lockdown” due to “threat warnings” generated by people who lack local access and situational awareness.

The military is even worse – everyday several times a day they fly people between the Jalalabad PRT and the army base at the Jalalabad airport. That is a trip of no more than 400 meters. You could walk it in 15 minutes – you could run shuttle buses between the camps all day every day for maybe 50 dollars a day. Do you know how much it costs for one flight hour in a military helicopter? Does the military honestly believe that the 200 meters of route one separating their bases is so dangerous that it warrants flying helicopters between them? Of course not – but flying in helicopters is easier than running four vehicle MRAP convoys and every time a soldier drives outside the front gate of a base he has to be in a four vehicle convoy with at least 16 riflemen. Who the hell can afford to spend money this way? Helicopter crashes in Afghanistan routinely kill two to three times more military members than the Taliban has ever been able to kill even when they mass their best fighters against isolated positions held by only a handful of Americans. Why is flying in a helicopter safer than a 15 minute walk or 5 minute bus ride? In large bureaucracies cost efficiency and common sense are not part of the operational paradigm.

Speed to Market vs. End User Needs: Homeland Security Edition

(Via Good Experience)

I remember Sen. Trent Lott once crowing about bringing federal dollars to a Mississippi military base. With the money, the military would be able to build two new buildings and Sen. Lott was there for the ribbon cutting.

I remember wondering what the buildings were for. And none of the news accounts went into a lot of detail. I assumed it was something classified or at least for general consuption. Mississippi has communications units on the coast - and it doesn't take a lot for that kind of gear to be something that is kept out of press releases.

The truth was considerably less impressive. The military had no idea what to do with the buildings. They hadn't asked for them, they didn't want them - but an act of congress had ordered them to build two buildings. The order was duly followed and the base was going to relocate some operations there to keep the buildings occupied and maintained - but they had no pressing need for additional structures.

Nobody had asked them, and yet a few million dollars of taxpayer money went into unnecessary buildings. Then the base had to absorb the additional cost of maintaining them.

If the military had been asked, they would have told congress to spend the money somewhere else. In fact, the military would likely have told congress to close the base in question - or at least dramatically scale back its function.

But Sen. Lott and congress knew better.

60 Minutes tops this story in spades with a discussion of how the US/Mexican border is supposedly being secured with an "electronic fence." Some brainiac had the idea that existing security equipment could be mounted in the desert and still be reliable.

It can't.

They also had the great idea that border agents could carry laptops around and connect to border surveillance feeds via cellular modem.

But the border is 1,200 miles long and doesn't get good cellular reception. Not only that, but the border agents have pointed out that operating laptops in hot cars in the dusty desert ensures that equipment will fail and fail often.

The parallels to I/S development are classic. The vendor (Boeing) promised that it could meet the specifications and the timeline easily.

Then their assumptions about their system were proven horribly wrong. Then their initial 28 mile setup was delayed by years. Then the costs went up.

It's too much of a simplification to say that end user research would have solved the current mess, but when the man in charge of the project is saying they should have done iterations and refined it based on what they learned.

But the client wanted it fast - so they've lost billions and years.

Go figure.