Our New Reality

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

It’s time for Americans to understand the new world we have entered into.

Terrorism linked to today’s electronics represents a modern version of the ancient means of insurgent warfare against governmental authority. In the old days it was knives or poison; then came armed rebellion and now it’s terrorism that will not go away quickly, neither at home nor abroad.

Therefore, we have to understand what causes it and adapt to the 21st century means needed to fight against it.

That requires heightened security within the U.S., increased intelligence gathering at home and abroad, sharing with allies, and continued use of drones and other joint counterterrorism operations overseas.

In his new book, “Playing To The Edge,” former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden [a Cipher Brief Network Expert] quotes from documents released in a 2015 al Qaeda court case that were seized during the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Many show “the incredible stress being felt within the organization as a result of the [remotely piloted vehicle] strikes,” according to Hayden.

He quotes from one letter to bin Laden reporting how on May 22, 2010, a “spy plane” operated by CIA killed Mustafa abu-al-Yazid, Al-Qaeda’s third-ranking operative in Pakistan. The letter reads in part, “As we see it, based on our analysis, they [the U.S. unmanned aircraft] are constantly monitoring several potential, or possibly confirmed targets. But they only hit them if they discover a valuable human target inside, or a gathering…”

Hayden cites another letter where an aide complains to bin Laden after “the killing of 20 brothers in one place on the day of Eid.” The aide notes that they had “gathered for the holidays, despite our orders and our emphasizing to avoid gatherings in one place…but sometimes they discuss matters and take their own decisions.”

Predator and other remotely piloted aircraft strikes have also been effectively used by the Pentagon in Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Somalia against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups. Nonetheless, they remain controversial here in the U.S. because of associated civilian deaths.

The new movie “Eye in the Sky” vividly presents the dilemma facing American operatives carrying out the missions along with officials who must authorize them when innocent civilians might be killed or wounded in a strike against high value targets.

For example, the 2010 strike that ended Yazid’s life also killed his wife, three daughters and a granddaughter, according to the report sent to bin Laden. “We ask God to have mercy on everybody and accept them as martyrs,” says the al Qaeda report, accepting what happened as part of their jihad, their war against the U.S.

Somehow, the idea has grown in some circles in the U.S. and abroad that the killing of civilians in a justified military attack caused by American operatives safely thousands of miles away is more terrible than similar deaths caused by a bomber pilot who could be safely 20,000 feet above the same target and the source of greater collateral damage.

Ironically, since the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernadino, complaints about the National Security Agency’s collection of telephone metadata and interception of electronic messages have died down in the wake of some legislative reforms.

However, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and activist Glenn Greenwald, who generated the initial public debate through the release of thousands of once-highly-classified documents and the publication of many, have continued their questionable attacks on the processes used for the mass collection of data and the reasons for the the processes.

During a panel discussion last Friday at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Snowden, appearing via Skype from Moscow, claimed Turkey’s warning about terrorist connections of a Belgian citizen it deported, Ibrahim el Bakraoui, should have alerted Belgian officials about the threat. In retrospect, since he turned out to be one of the Brussel’s airport bombers, Snowden claimed the bombings “were preventable” through “traditional means not through mass surveillance.”

What he ignored was that the Belgian initial review  of el Bakraoui in the wake of his deportation was that he had a criminal record, had served a jail term for participating in a robbery, but had no known terrorist connections. Had they conducted continued surveillance on him, they may have uncovered the plot.

Snowden also used questionable hindsight in saying that traditional intelligence could have prevented the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. He claimed Russian intelligence “explicitly warned” the FBI and CIA in 2011 that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who two years later turned out to be one of the bombers, “would be engaged in that kind of activity and yet we did nothing to stop it.”

The facts are that the FBI carried out a preliminary inquiry in 2011 after being warned by the Russians that Tsarnaev, of Chechen origin, had associated with Islamic militants while on a trip to Chechnya. When that failed to develop negative information, it had Tsarnaev placed on a watch list but had no legal authority to open a full scale investigation.

Snowden then implied to his audience that mass collection of data by NSA hampered the FBI from focusing in the following two years on Tsarnaev.

Then, almost as a throw-away thought, Snowden put forward the notion that using an NSA program he could “look up your email or anybody else’s browsing Amazon.com…without a court order or anything else…of course you’re not supposed to do this…but all you have to do is enter the email address and no one is ever going to know about it.”

Reading that closely you see Snowden admitted what he said he could do was against NSA rules. His implying that “no one is ever going to know about it” leaves out NSA’s new electronic system, which can track every computer that has accessed data bases, something that went into effect at Snowden’s last NSA employment site after he had left.

That Snowden and others continue to misrepresent the U.S. electronic surveillance program to unknowing audiences is a problem because Americans have to learn to live in this new surveillance world, much as the country has over the past 71 years learned to live with the atomic bomb.

Brussels, like San Bernardino, Paris, the Boston Marathon bombing and 9/11 were horrific events. But they pale against Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what could have happened or even still could happen in the event of nuclear warfare.

What’s needed in the ongoing fight against terrorists is putting things in context and avoiding the creation of excess fear. Far more Americans have died from mass shootings in this country, done by angry or mentally disturbed people, than at the hands of Islamic terrorists.

What’s not needed is for politicians, such as Donald Trump, playing on people’s fears as he did last Sunday. In a phone interview on ABC’s This Week he said, “I don’t think America is a safe place for Americans, you want to know the truth.”

President Obama had it right when he said during his March 23 press conference in Argentina, “Even as we are systematic and ruthless and focused in going after them [the Islamic State terrorists], disrupting their networks, getting their leaders, rolling up their operations, it is very important for us to not respond with fear.”


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