Several Things Bugging Me Recently

Wow, what a great headline, no? I'll never be an editor, that's for sure! Like, totally! And can we ever get enough Valley Girl speak? I still cringe when I hear current American teens using the word "like" as a preposition, a noun, a verb, and as every fifth word in their sentences. It's cringe-worthy! Cringealicious! The Cringeinator!*

* OK, so that last one went one too far. Sue me.

Several things have been gnawing at me lately, so I thought I would combine them into a single post rather than spreading them out over several days.

The first is that I was troubled by how many people threw around the "Drinking the Kool Aid" metaphor in mid-November. I'm fully cognizant of the fact that 18 Nov 2008 was the thirty-year anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre (wait, can we call it a massacre if the Dr. Jones followers willingly drank the cyanide-laced Kool Aid?). I'm also fully aware that people have used that term to describe any groupthink, especially when it becomes rather obsessive. However, I saw people using that term in all manner of diverse methods around the time of the 30th anniversary, and it bothered me. Given that over 900 people lost their lives that day, we should be more circumspect in our words and their usage thereof. Maybe popular culture has moved on to the point where people casually disregard other human life unless it personally impacts us as individuals. Heaven forbid! I do see people joining causes to stop the exploitation and trafficking of school-age boys and girls in Third World countries, so perhaps there is still hope.

The 30th anniversary of Jonestown was, of course, followed by the news of the terrorist attack in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India. That dominated the news for the entire Thanksgiving weekend, which we sometimes have to remind ourselves is a uniquely American tradition.* When I heard the details of the attack, and that only 10 terrorists were responsible for a well-planned, well-coordinated, series of precision attacks meant to sow the greatest discord and achieve the greatest publicity world-wide, I was very troubled. Al-Qaeda, for all of its skill in training suicide bombers in organized camps pre-9/11, never had that level of sophistication in its attacks. Yes, they did an incredible job convincing 19 radical Muslims to take pilot training in advance of the 9/11 flying-airliners-as-weapons attacks, but their bombings always seemed a bit cruder than what happened in Mumbai.

* Try finding turkey, cranberry sauce, or pumpkin pie being served on 24 November outside the U.S. You might be surprised!

Now, some people might quibble with the previous paragraph. The terrorist group apparently responsible for the Mumbai attacks was officially named as Lashkar-e-Taiba, and it does have links to al-Qaeda. The group supposedly denied responsibility, which is strange for a terrorist organization; typically, they want their name associated with an attack, especially a highly successful (in their eyes) one.

What really bothered me about the attack was how coordinated it was, and how effective the ten attackers were against some top anti-terror Indian police and military units. It does show how small unit tactics and special operations-style training matters. Sadly, those tactics were used against innocent civilians this time. I fear that the effectiveness proven during this attack will be seized by other terrorists, who will undoubtedly try to copy the training and tactics. Heaven forbid, indeed!

And then I saw that lifestyle guru Deepak Chopra was making comments on CNN and other media outlets recently, blaming the U.S. for the attacks in Mumbai. (That's a WSJ link; subscription req'd) Needless to say, that bothered me! Even though the CNN interviewer interrupted Chopra and forced him to somewhat backtrack from his inflammatory remarks, there is no doubt that many people believe the same way Chopra does. Forget that the U.S. in October tried to warn the Indian government of an impending attack from the sea on Mumbai, which is found in the link from AFP provided two paragraphs above. This simplistic idea that Islamic terrorists strike against all nations simply because of U.S. foreign policies since WWII (inevitably and inexorably tied in with our support of Israel, naturally) is, well, just that: too simplistic.

Let's not forget about the Holy Crusades fought throughout the 10th-15th centuries, shall we? Let's not forget that Muslims, Jews, and then Christians have been having our little "family feud" ever since Abraham first fathered Ishmael with his hand-maiden, Hagar. Since Ishmael was the first-born, Muslims always considered that God's covenant was established with him, making theirs the one true religion. In our Old Testament Bibles, we are taught that God established his covenant with Issac, Abraham's son by his true wife, Sarah. From Judaism sprang Christianity, so we're all in this mess together, it seems.

Let me discuss one final issue bugging me recently, and I'll close. Tied up in all this mess of Presidential transition activities is the hope of many that policies enacted by the Bush 43 administration, especially the Patriot Act, will be repealed or fall by the wayside under Obama 44. I read this very strong op-ed piece from the WSJ discussing the need to move Intelligence past the 1970s. In the article, L. Gordon Crovitz focuses more on the usefulness or applicability of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, and rightfully so. He also touches on just how technology has advanced to the point of making FISA obsolete. The Mumbai attackers used Blackberries to communicate! They didn't even need to rely upon radios, which are almost always line-of-sight and short range, problems that bedevil our first responders even beyond the fact that the radios often aren't compatible between the police and fire departments. Perhaps the Indian first responders' first action should have been to shut down Internet access where the attacks took place. Maybe that will be standard operating procedure in the future.

Without giving away the farm, I can say that the Intel community has struggled for some time to remain relevant in terms of data collection. On one hand, we can collect staggering amounts of data, most of which ends up "on the floor" without ever being processed, simply because we don't have enough analysts to listen or look for what's really important. On the other hand, all Intel agencies struggle to obtain that highly relevant data from suspected terrorist groups who wisely avoid using technologies that we compromised long ago. Why is Osama bin Laden still at large? He relies more on couriers and messengers from his inner circle to distribute his edicts, and we have no way of intercepting those or of infiltrating his group.

Which led the first Bush 43 administration, dominated by the neo-conservatives, to suggest we build the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, later renamed as Terrorism Info Awareness after privacy-minded individuals raised serious objections to the DARPA-funded program. Perhaps people in America have forgotten about TIA, but the Brits have not. Recently, my wife and I watched the thoroughly engrossing Masterpiece Contemporary miniseries titled The Last Enemy (2008) on our local PBS station. If you get a chance to see it, I highly recommend it. I obviously understand the makers of that miniseries overly dramatized the reach and capabilities of the Intel agencies in Britain in order to make their point about TIA-style information mining programs run amok. It's the same whenever Hollywood puts out a movie with the National Security Agency (NSA, or "No Such Agency") as the bad guys (think Enemy of the State (1998) with Gene Hackman and Will Smith).

But as Crovitz said very eloquently, we do need to balance the need to discover terrorists with the right to privacy expected by average U.S. citizens. Which gets into all its own arguments pro and con, and this could go on ad infinitum. I've gotta cut it off here. Whew! That's what's been on my mind recently.