I was asking for the "big thing." Jeff offers a parable before the "big thing."
Let me use an example from my own religious group (I'm Jewish, in case any of you were wondering) to illustrate a possible answer to this question. Jonathan Pollard, an intelligence analyst for the Navy, was convicted of spying on behalf of Israel in 1986. Pollard's actions cast a shadow over many Jews working in the American national security apparatus. Loyal Americans were questioned, and sometimes denied security clearances, simply because they were Jewish, or had visited Israel. The FBI pursued some dubious cases, including the recently-aborted prosecution of two former AIPAC employees, in large part because of fears that another Pollard was lurking somewhere inside the American government.This actually helps crystallize a few things for me. Ceding that events did unfold this way, (I'm only loosely up on the Pollard case) I strongly disagree with Jeff. I think it's very wrong to deny someone a security clearance, and question them, as Jeff says, "simply because they were Jewish or had visited Israel."
Was it fair that loyal American Jews had their patriotism questioned by the FBI? No. Was it right of the FBI, in the wake of the Pollard case, to be concerned that Israel, having turned one American Jew into a spy, had turned others? Unfortunately, yes. I'm not excusing the witch-hunts that took place after the Pollard scandal, but I am saying that it would have been a dereliction of duty on the part of the FBI to ignore, because of political correctness, an actual threat. Ultimately, it was the fault of Jonathan Pollard, and the Israeli officials who used him as a spy, that innocent American Jews were suspected of spying for Israel.
Morality aside, it doesn't even strike me as very smart. We can't whittle down a class of suspects anymore than "is Jewish?" What about people who are spying for money? What about the hostility you earn by interrogating people strictly because they have the wrong last name? I took a cursory look at Pollard's Wikipedia entry, and from what I can tell, there are many reasons why Pollard should have been flagged that go beyond ancestry and travel itinerary:
Again, I'm not up on all the facts, and maybe this entry is off, but I can't see how you conclude from this that the answer is to profile Jewish agents. And according to Jeff's own example, it wasn't the answer. The upshot was that we ended up prosecuting two people on a really flimsy case and the FBI was embarrassed, no? That's what we don't want, right?Within two months of being hired, the technical director of the NFOIO, Richard Haver, requested that Pollard be terminated.[clarification needed] This came after a reckless and inappropriate conversation with the new hire in which Pollard offered to start a back-channel operation with the South African intelligence service and lied about his own father's involvement with the CIA.[8]
Instead of terminating Pollard, Haver's boss decided to reassign him to a human-gathered intelligence operation. This was apparently because Pollard had a friend from graduate school in the South African intelligence service.[8] In the vetting process for this position, Pollard, it was later discovered, lied repeatedly: he denied illegal drug use, claimed his father had been a CIA operative, misrepresented his language abilities and his educational achievements, and claimed to have applied for a commission as officer in the Naval Reserve.[8] A month later Pollard applied for and received a transfer to the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) surface ships division while keeping his TF-168 position. (NIS was the precursor to NCIS.)
While transferring to his new job at the NIS, Pollard again initiated a meeting with someone far up the chain of command, this time with Admiral Sumner Shapiro, about an idea he had for TF 168 and South Africa (the TF 168 group had passed on his ideas). After the meeting, Shapiro immediately ordered that Pollard's security clearances be revoked and that he be reassigned to a non-sensitive position. According to The Washington Post, Shapiro dismissed Pollard as a "kook," saying later, "I wish the hell I'd fired him".[9]
Because of the job transfer, Shapiro's order to remove Pollard's security clearances slipped through the cracks.
This is not a small point, it gets to a core disagreement, as Jeff outlines the "big thing"
But I think the evidence is growing that the military ignored some pretty obvious warning signs in Hasan's case, signs that Hasan himself seemed to be providing: The Washington Post reports today on Hasan's extraordinary presentation about jihad to his fellow physicians at Walter Reed. It seems as if he was trying to communicate something to a military that wasn't listening. Here's Ta-Nehisi's "big thing" -- perhaps we should take slightly more seriously the degree to which jihadist thought has penetrated parts of the American Muslim community.It does seem clear that the military ignored some pretty obvious warning signs. But just like there's significant difference between being an intelligence officer with the last name Silverman, and being an intelligence officer who repeatedly lies to his superiors, there's significant difference between merely being a Muslim in the Army and being a soldier attempting to cooperate with Al Qaeda.
As for Jeff's last point (that "we should take slightly more seriously the degree to which jihadist thought has penetrated parts of the American Muslim community") I agree--with an emphasis on "parts." But "parts" has to mean more than "regular mosque attendance," or "took a trip to Mecca." Or "has a funny last name."
These are my off-the-cuff thoughts. More later.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
I think you're certainly on the right track here. The key feature in both these cases is not religious identity, but religiously inspired political fundamentalism that manifests itself in clearly suspicious and anti-social behavior. I'm not really up on the Pollard case either, but Hasan made it pretty clear in public statements that he was becoming radicalized in some disturbing ways and that he wanted out of the military at all costs. From what has emerged so far, it doesn't seem that the FBI needed to be screening Muslims, per se, but that they ought to have noted the increasingly extreme behavior of Hasan in particular. I'm not sure what a general backlash or purge or investigation gets us besides, as you say, the animosity and increased stress of the innocent. Entirely counterproductive.
Exactly. I admit I'm not knowledgeable on things like the Pollard case, or the Hansen case (but wait - he was just a white guy, right?), but in what reading I've done, it seems there are ALWAYS signs.
Someone put this in a previous thread: besides the moral implications, profiling is just plain a waste of time. You go after all these people who go the mosque regularly and don't have time to surveil and maybe even deal with the person who is really, really acting suspiciously.
If the FBI was right to profile Jews after Pollard, then why not, well, everyone, after Hansen?
To me, it doesn't freaking matter whether someone had a religious, or political, or racial motivation for their act. Would any of those make it worse than just, say, doing it for the money (in the case of espionage), or just shooting people for kicks, or the crazy (in the case of Ft. Hood)? The result is the same. The signs were quite clear beforehand.
How would profiling have helped?
Profiling would help if you use it intelligently. You don't do it stupidly (as you describe, surveiling every muslim), you do it cleverly: come up with a list of warning signs and associated probabilities. You then use Bayes rule to combine the probabilities and surveil everyone who exceeds a certain threshold (e.g., 1 in 1000 odds of being a terrorist). Racial/age/gender/religion is simply another risk factor to include.
So in practice, what this means is that a muslim man aged 18-30 might require 3 warning signs to get on the watch list, while a christian woman aged 65-75 might require 6 warning signs.
As long as your prior has some information content, Bayes profiling works.
It also seems painfully unclear what the outcome of the profiling, as advocated by Goldberg and some commenters here (NZ, simeond) should be.
Goldberg uses terms like "take seriously," but this is pretty open-ended. He was obviously already being monitored in some fashion -- it looks like he was being watched without some other system of profiling in place.
But it doesn't sound like he did anything that rises near to the level of detainment/prosecution, and it does not seem likely to me that kicking him out of the military would have prevented tragedy. After all, he already felt as though he was being persecuted for being muslim; being cast out by the military and losing his livelihood at the same time does not seem like a recipe for greater psychological stability. Perhaps it would have (especially if it was his request), but it seems far from given.
Brad, I didn't advocate profiling. I said it would be effective if the knowledge "is muslim" conveys information (however incomplete) about terrorism probabilities. I'm disputing an incorrect claim ("profiling is just plain a waste of time"), not making any normative arguments.
One can believe a policy is effective even if it is morally illegitimate. For instance, I oppose torture, though I think it is sometimes effective. (Statistically correct racial profiling is something I'm undecided on.)
NZ,
My objection (here) was specifically not a normative one; I was asking for what the next step should be. After all, if profiling is to be effective, there must be some practical measure as the outcome. What should that measure be? Detention? Dismissal? Therapeutic intervention?
What would have helped in this case, and what can be expected to help generally, and, how is this conclusion reached?
To reach a normative conclusion, though: I think there is something pernicious about advocating for such an obviously controversial (and possibly antagonistic) approach, while only making the vaguest possible gestures about how or why this approach might be effective.
@NZ
Whoops - to be clear, since you explicitly said you were not personally advocating the position, I mean to address the original "something should be done" posturing of Goldberg.
Brad, think of the probabilities involved. An oversimplified model: 1 in 100,000,000 non-muslims is a terrorist, and 1 in 1,000,000 muslims is a terrorist. For this reason, it's a complete waste of time to assume any muslim is a terrorist absent other warning signs.
Warning signs: anti-government sentiments (increases terrorist odds by 100) and fertilizer purchases (also increase odds by 100). (I'm assuming everything is independent, and neglecting intersections. Keep it simple.)
If a non-muslim purchases fertilizer and expresses anti-government sentiments, their odds of being a terrorist are 1 in 10,000, vs 1 in 100 for a muslim who did the same.
If your surveilance rule is "observe anyone with better than 1 in 1,000 odds of being a terrorist", you watch the muslim libertarian farmer but not the christian libertarian farmer. That's the practical measure you take.
NZ,
you say ...you watch the muslim libertarian farmer but not the christian libertarian farmer. That's the practical measure you take.
But my question has always been this: what is the useful step after "watching"? Watching someone, as an end, will not always prevent them from doing something terrible (as this case shows - Hasan was, in fact, being watched, according to reports that his emails were evaluated by the FBI).
I can't ask this more plainly: what is the outcome of more watching (profiling or otherwise) supposed to be? What does the actual intervention look like, particularly in cases like this one (and unlike a McVeigh-style fertilizer example) where there isn't a specific "plot" to be foiled?
[As an aside -- I hope not to sound rude, but you keep answering questions I'm not asking; I never asked about the morality of profiling, nor about the validity of the probabilities suggested, though I admit doubts about both. I'm assuming, for argument, that someone generated "warning signs" (through profiling or otherwise), and am asking "now what?"
I'm asking the question because I think Goldberg is engaging in an unpleasant sort of Monday-morning quarterbacking. He's not actually suggesting what he would have done, how it would have prevented this particular tragedy, and whether it could be broadly applied. Instead, he just says that we erred, and will continue to err, through a vague process of "ignoring."]
Brad, I did answer your question. Watching is the useful step you take as a result of profiling. My "McVeigh-style fertilizer example" simply involved a person purchasing fertilizer - for all you know he simply has a large garden. Profiling is useful in deciding who to watch, but it's useless after you have surveillance results.
Think of it in the same way as medical profiling. Imagine a person walks into harlem hospital with trembling, headaches, lack of coordination and occasional giggling. Racial profiling: you give them a Kuru test if they are from New Guinea, don't bother otherwise. What is the useful step after the Kuru test?
Obviously, racial profiling is no longer useful. Just go with the test results.
(This probably would not have prevented Ft. Hood, but I never claimed it would. I'm only disputing the claim that racial profiling doesn't work. It does work if you do it right. )
I think this is a fair answer, but it isn't really what I thought Goldberg and others were alluding to -- I thought that the criticism was that there was some further action that we need to take. Goldberg's offered analogy (a poor one, I thought, for reasons well articulated by others downthread) was the denial of security clearances as a preventative measure. Maybe this is an unfair reading, but that is the risk that any writer takes without providing specifics.
(And to answer your specific question, I had never heard of Kuru, but I am guessing the next step after a correct diagnosis is palliative care?).
My "McVeigh-style fertilizer example" simply involved a person purchasing fertilizer - for all you know he simply has a large garden. Profiling is useful in deciding who to watch, but it's useless after you have surveillance results.
Supposing, though, that two farmers had both a) published violent anti-government (or anti-any-other-group) screeds and bought some trigger amount of fertilizer, I wouldn't really care which was Christian and which was Muslim. At the very least, someone could (rather easily) check into the size of their farm.
Behavioral warning flags are always going to be more useful than trait-based flags. I have doubts that you can draw the right circle (in practice, not theory -- I'm not denying the whole of Bayesian analysis) where the behaviors themselves alone don't warrant attention, but the behaviors plus "Muslim" works (or, for that matter, "current or former service member," which circumscribes every case that Goldberg mentions, plus McVeigh and John Allen Muhammed). And in this case specifically, there were clearly enough behavioral flags that prior profiling wasn't needed -- which makes it a poor platform for trying to make the point that we need more profiling (again, per inference from Goldberg).
But I'm happy to let this stand as a point of disagreement -- I'm not really in any position to prove otherwise; even if you are, the amount of statistical work it would take to demonstrate the assumption would be burdensome to produce (going beyond anecdotes, which is where Goldberg stopped). We're great pattern recognizers; so good that we recognize patterns that aren't there, including patterns we want or expect to see. This suggestion needs a little rigor to back it up, even apart from moral considerations.
Reply fail. This was meant to the respond to NZ one comment up.
Brad, all I'm saying is that racial profiling is useful in a world of limited resources. If you only have the resources to investigate one fertilizer-buyer, you should investigate the muslim. (Outside my contrived example, you obviously should look up tax returns and check for farm income before you do anything.)
As for Goldberg's specific comment, I think he is complaining that the Army did nothing after Hasan's presentation on Jihad. The implication (stated more explicitly by other writers, and implied by Goldber) is that the Army did *reverse* profiling -- because Hasan was a Muslim, they ignored warning signs to avoid appearing anti-Muslim.
If you only have the resources to investigate one fertilizer-buyer, you should investigate the muslim.
Well, as I said, we are breaking down at the point of "Muslim" being a particularly useful measure, and that the two same candidates with only that difference will likely represent different outcomes. Goldberg provides a very small anecdotal pool to justify this conclusion. I'm asking for more than that, something in the way of rigor.
I think he is complaining that the Army did nothing after Hasan's presentation on Jihad...
In terms of the army ignoring behavioral warning signs or, reverse-profiling: maybe that is what he thinks was happening, but a) that doesn't mount a case for profiling so much as better attention to actual behavioral warning signs and b) the facts simply don't seem to be bearing this out. The FBI was reading his emails; I have no particular knowledge of how he came to be monitored, but he clearly did.
If Goldberg's whole thesis really is akin to "don't rule out paying attention to warning signs b/c someone happens to be Muslim" then I am disappointed in him for writing something so trivial, and in myself for spending so much time trying to make sense of it.
"I think it's very wrong to deny someone a security clearance, and question them, as Jeff says, "simply because they were Jewish or had visited Israel.""
Jeff condemned those specific actions here. He said "Was it fair that loyal American Jews had their patriotism questioned by the FBI? No. Was it right of the FBI, in the wake of the Pollard case, to be concerned that Israel, having turned one American Jew into a spy, had turned others? Unfortunately, yes."
I read that, and the rest of what Jeff said as "be concerned, but be smarter and 'righter' about your strategy for investigating and eliminating the problem."
"But "parts" has to mean more than "regular mosque attendance," or "took a trip to Mecca." Or "has a funny last name.""
I don't see how this quote from you contradicts anything he said in his most recent post.
It's worth considering the whole quote:
It's quite clear that the point wasn't made to contradict--it literally says "I agree"--but to emphasize a portion of that statement.
....and then what?
There's a procedural dilemma at the heart of this with which you seem reluctant to grapple. We have no evidence, so far, that Nidal had entered into a criminal conspiracy. He was not, according to the evidence made available thus far, "attempting to cooperate with Al Qaeda." He wrote messages to a radical cleric, but the content of those messages was reviewed, and determined not to rise to actionable levels.
So you're left with a soldier who is a devout Muslim, and experiencing some doubts and conflicts about his mission. He says some outrageous things, including some that might lead a reasonable person to conclude that he was in sympathy with the very Islamists with whom the Army is elsewhere engaged. But until one tragic day, he hadn't apparently acted on his beliefs.
So what are you suggesting? Imagine, for a moment, that you're an officer reviewing his case. Everything that's been brought to light so far is placed in front of you; all the retrospective connections already made. What do you do with it? He hadn't committed a crime. Nothing he'd said, under the present rules, would justify a general court martial or his involuntary separation from service. This is what Jeff Goldberg is missing. The problem isn't detecting radicals, it's dealing with them once they're found. Nidal was, apparently, well known to authorities. But the present set of policies left them with few alternatives. Once he was cleared of criminal offenses, there wasn't a Plan B.
That's where I think we could learn from this mess. Nidal wanted out. We would have been well advised to send him on his way. I don't know what the bar to his separation was - his critically needed specialty, his rank (there's a shortage of field grade officers), or the large amount of tuition he would have had to repay. But it's not as if the Army had to hunt him down and throw him out. He came to them, and asked to be let go. I think that in the future, when someone steps forward and announces that he finds Islamism so seductive that he's not willing to fight, we'd do better to override the existing regulations, and dismiss him.
There is no "procedural dilemma" that I'm reluctant to grapple with. I'm not sure where you're getting that from. I'm perfectly fine with the idea that there are limits to what can be done. The conclusion that more should have been done is based on the link in the article. ABC, among others, are reporting that, in fact, he did try to contact Al Quaeda:
Perhaps this reporting has been contradicted, if so I'll gladly correct. I'd appreciate you not attaching unsaid motives to me. This is a discussion which I'm happy to have. Assuming more than is here doesn't help.
Here's the link from above:
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/fort-hood-shooter-contact-al-qaeda-terrorists-officials/story?id=9030873
Scratch that. I looked for myself. The story is useless. And it's evidently written by a dude with a bad record. Bad on me.
I was wrong to impute to you any motives, real or imagined - these discussions are always best when they stick to the arguments and the facts. I apologize for crossing that line, and debasing the discussion.
There are two sets of reports currently circulating - one refering to Nidal's contacts with radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, and the other to his attempts to contact al-Qaeda. But there's reason to believe that both sets of reports refer to the same incident. Specifically, that ABC needlessly hyped the story. Several reports have suggested that the correspondence with Awlaki contained nothing directly incriminating - Nidal trying to make contact, and Awlaki largely ignoring or fending off those efforts. Even the most hyped versions of the story don't seem to claim that he was trying to cooperate with al-Qaeda. And that's important. To act, you need some evidence of conspiracy.
What I was getting at above is that too much of the conversation has focused on whether warning signs were missed, and on how broad a net we use to find radicals. I think that largely misses the point. Spotting lone radicals before they act is difficult but not impossible; Nidal was identified long before he pulled the trigger. Figuring out what to do with them is much, much harder. The intelligence community knew that Nidal was pondering dangerous ideas, it just didn't know what to do with that information. It had enough to suspect him, but not enough to dismiss him. The part of the story that makes me want to scream is that Nidal apparently offered to relieve the Army of that dilemma - he would have left of his own volition. That, to me, is the real scandal here.
The lesson of Nidal isn't that we have to screen more aggressively. It's not that we can't trust Muslims. It's simply that when a soldier tells us he's been persuaded by Islamists and he'd like to leave the Army, we should say yes.
I just really don't get him anymore. That's the nicest way I can put that.
There's another issue, which is that Pollard is a very bad comparison with Hasan.
Pollard was a mole within an intelligence organization, Hasan went 'postal' on a military base.
There's not much to be learned one from from the other.
Now, when we get Al Quaeda moles showing up in the CIA, then we begin to worry...
The cynic would note that this is quite unlikely, if only because there are only so many moles to go around, and the Chinese, the Russians, the Saudis and the Israelis have likely plumbed that market pretty thoroughly.
What Pollard, (and Ames, and Hansen, and Philby...etc.) shows us is that the U.S. intelligence apparatus is quite poor about policing its own, and woefully credulous about its own security.\
What Hasan shows us is that the military may be paying less attention than it should to the mental health of its members, perhaps because we're in a situation where "anybody's son will do."
I thinks that's exactly correct. From what I've heard to date, there really isn't any evidence that Hasan was acting in collusion with Al Qaeda or any other islamist group directly. This puts the comparison closer to fringy religious killers such as Scott Roeder or the Lafferty Brothers. In both cases there was (rightly i think) a type of profiling backlash. However, the backlash wasn't against christianity (in the case of the former) or mormanism (in the case of the latter) writ large, and instead against very specific subsets of those faiths. I think this is where the real double standard lies. In the case of "familiar" religions, its very easy to conceptualized a distinction between the LDS, the FLDS, and violent offshoots of the FLDS. When commentators talk about Islam, it is this conglomeration of a)all of the different branches, and b)violent offshoots of various branches. I say that it has to do with familiarity, but maybe that's a cop out and there's something else at work.
Yeah, I'm also finding it ridiculous that denial of security clearance is being compared to ineligibility for military service.
Spying is a game of deception and double agents. It's implicitly accepted by all sides that pretending to be loyal to one side while actually being loyal to another is just the way decent people play the game. Which means that security clearances must discriminate against reasonable people who look like they might have dual loyalties.
Military service is completely different. It's irredeemably evil to swear an oath to a military service and then turn on your comrades. No reasonable or decent person would do that, no matter what their loyalties were. To deny Muslims eligibility for military service would be to deny that Muslims could be reasonable or decent.
"Which means that security clearances must discriminate against reasonable people who look like they might have dual loyalties."
...or they discriminate _for_ dual-loyaltied people who might be willing to take on a triple loyalty -- and here we really enter the wilderness of mirrors.
Of course it seems one significant problem with U.S. intelligence is that all of these permutations of loyalty themselves have to percolate through an elephantine bureaucracy.
Don Cheadle's _Traitor_ captured some of this mess fairly nicely -- though probably far too cinematically.
I agree.
Why are we so quick to go from 0 to 60 in terms of the scope of our skeptism? Profiling is a proxy for the actual indicators and red flags we're looking for. It is always under- and over-inclusive of the potential violators we're trying to find. If it has a use at all, it only makes sense if the actual variables and red flags we're looking for are too hidden, too numerous or too complex to use on their own - and the potential harm is too great. So, if the behavior we're trying to curb is too hard to predict due to the multiplicity of variables giving rise to it AND the cost of not stopping the behavior is too high a stake - then perhaps there is a justification for an over- and under-inclusive profile.
However, where the red flags we're looking for are readily identifiable, then just profile for those. Hasan specifically laid out a case for violence against the military. That, my friends, is a red flag we can profile for. Here's what we look for:
"People who express a justification for violence against innocents."
There. That includes Muslim's who do this, anti-abortionists who do this, anti-business animal activists who do this, anti-government folks who do this etc...
The fact that, on this occasion, it was a Muslim who did so and did so based on his interpretation of his religion is not a reason to "take slightly more seriously the degree to which juhadist thought has penetrated parts of the American Muslim community" [which, translated, means "if you want to prevent another attack like this, watch the dudes walking into the mosque"). No, what Hasan taught us is that we need to watch the guys who justify violence against innocents.
"People who express a justification for violence against innocents." How many tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis are now dead because our elected officials, senior intelligence personnel and media pundits, among so many others (including me,) did such a good job of justifying our violence? I'm afraid that red flag flies over too many people.
Two questions I'm not clear on:
1) If Jeff isn't advocating profiling of Jews and Muslims, what is he advocating?
2) Is he talking about profiling based on religion, or based on mere ancestry? (Bear in mind that Jewish identity doesn't function in quite the same way as Muslim identity; people can be called Jewish based on ancestry alone.)
Your problem is that you're reading Jeffrey Goldberg and assuming there's some sort of good faith argument there.
One thing I don't understand about Jeff and others making these sorts of calls for profiling, heightened suspicion of Muslims, etc., is that they already have what they want. That is, Muslims are already profiled and investigated and have other actions taken against them for no real reason other than being Muslim.
I know that anecdotes are only so useful, but as a Muslim, this sort of thing is commonplace, at least among the people I know. For example, numerous family members of mine have been hauled in to be questioned by the FBI on pretty thin grounds -- e.g., someone sent a few grand back to the old country to pay for his sister's wedding, and the feds assumed he was trying to fund terrorists. I've had family members pulled off planes because random passengers felt uneasy (I know there have been some recent well-publicized cases of this but these were unpublicized). I've been stopped by undercover NYPD walking home at night and been forced to answer the most pointless questions. On the more horrible end of the spectrum, a Muslim guy I once met years ago has been sitting in solitary confinement over a year awaiting trial (yes, solitery confinement awaiting trial!) based on secret evidence that his attorneys can't see.
Though I agree with what Ta-Nehisi wrote, I think it'd be helpful to point out this reality. Otherwise a discussion of principles just masks the fact that, at a practical level, we're already at the place Jeff wants us to be. If the FBI and others dropped the ball on Hasan, it certainly wasn't because their hands were tied by political correctness.
Cheneyesque thinking under the premise that we can 100% of the time control extreme behavior. Certainly slippery slope thinking, though not so far slid down the line yet as internment camps. As others have pointed out, Hasan was not under the radar; he had been emitting a clear and steady blip. You could profile till you were blue in the face, it appears, and all that would happen would be a lot of innocent people would deprived of their Constitutionally given rights.
While we debate this insofar as the security of American citizens are concerned, the most frightening thing I have read today was reported in the Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/10/on-bushs-watch-us-suffere_n_352204.html, and seems to slip under the radar of our national obsession with mass murderers:
Apparently last Sunday's 60 minutes ran a segment in which Jim Lewis, Director for the Center for Strategic and International Studies stated, "Some unknown foreign power, and honestly, we don't know who it is, broke into the Department of Defense, to the Department of State, the Department of Commerce, probably the Department of Energy, probably NASA. They broke into all of the high tech agencies, all of the military agencies, and downloaded terabytes of information." And this massive break-in was at the time covered up by the Bush administration.
"And last November, according to Lewis, 'someone was able to get past the firewall and encryption devices of one of the most sensitive U.S. military computer systems and stay inside for several days." That system? The CENTCOM network, which you might know as "the people who are fighting all of our wars.' The hackers were able to sit inside the network, tracking information and documents 'like they were part of military command.'"
I realize this is tangential to this discussion; however, I am always trying to understand our media obsessions in the light of real perspective. We are not likely to prevent mass slayings of American citizens, but surely the understanding that someone has hacked into all our defense, diplomatic, energy, and commerce policy data ought to give us a bit more pause.
The recent book, the Human Factor, seems to surface a number of other reasons for concern.
The bottom line, our intelligence and security services have been dripping like a colander since Kim Philby advised us on counterintelligence.
Part of the reason your post is on point -- Hasan could have done real damage had been sufficiently sound of mind to take deep cover and travel to Afghanistan.
We have a truly distorted perspective about the threats we really face, and, conversely these folks who go postal have a greatly exaggerated sense of the impact of their own acts of 'revenge' on 'the great satan.'
If I'm reading this right, Jeff's "Big Idea" is: It's too easy to underestimate how pervasive jihadist thought has penetrated American Muslim communities. Therefore, we as a country need to be a little more alert (sorry to say, more afraid) when it comes to our Muslim neighbors and citizens.
Jeff's a good man. He put himself in the shoes of the untrusted minority by bringing up the Pollard case. He seems to have wrestled with this one: "Don't treat others in ways that you wouldn't want to be treated." And in the final analysis, he says, go ahead treat me this way -- suspect me based on my race and religion (I think a lot of people already do given some of his hatemail).
This troubles me in and of itself. But the nuance Jeff tries out makes it sinister: By contrasting "fairness" (not fair to suspect) with "rightness" (right for FBI to follow through on suspicions), he's trying to absolve citizens of our responsibility over what the FBI does in our name. "Hey, I know it's not fair, and I wouldn't suspect you; but the FBI, they need to follow through with their procedures." It's claiming to still be good ("I don't discriminate against Muslims") while asking the centralized agents of our collective judgment to treat other Americans by separate rules based strictly on race/faith.
Maybe this is what government is for (a far-off veal farm), and maybe it's practical -- a moral convenience that we all need. But I don't like it.
Maybe this makes me strange but I would rather live in a free society where tragic things sometimes occur than the alternative. It isn't right to question the motives of all Muslims in the military and to investigate on no other basis than their religion would not only be wrong it would be foolish. A waste of time and resources that would be better spent finding people who constitute threats based on evidence instead of prejudice.
The kind of argument Jeff's making is pretty easy to dismiss: in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, did we decide that "whites"--or even "white men" or "white male veterans" were, as a group, suspect? Obviously not.
The tough thing about the Hasan case is that the facts that seem to be accruing--he was unhappy, he struggled with feeling that his religious and military obligations were at odds, he did some things that in retrospect seem like warning signs--are very, very difficult to translate into reasonable action. The military doesn't want to discharge people because they're principled, or religious, or have qualms about war. Arguably, in fact, the military should take pains to *retain* people who have qualms about war: you *want* people who will (for example) stand up in the face of possible war crimes, who will try to avoid indiscriminate killing, who understand that what they and their fellows may have to do, or what they may have to *order* fellow soldiers to do, shouldn't be done lightly. Certainly the military doesn't want to "let" people go easily. And we have to be cautious about hindsight; there are plenty of studies showing that eyewitnesses will misremember what happened after a violent event. It's really hard to predict with any kind of accuracy who is going to do something like this. The best we can do is figure out what kinds of things make it more likely, and even then I suspect it's difficult to tell the difference between, say, a depressed, unhappy, troubled person who is a suicide risk and a depressed, unhappy, troubled person who is at risk of going postal. (Personally I would guess that one difference might be that the postal person is more likely to express angry, anti-social hostility, but I'm probably wrong about that and it's only a guess.)
And in this particular case, given that the shooter was himself a military officer (albeit one who probably didn't tend to handle firearms in the course of his duty), there's the added problem of it being exceedingly difficult to deny him the means of committing a crime like this. We can hardly declare military bases weapons-free zones, as we can schools.
In any case, Hasan isn't the first military man to turn against his fellows. It happens on the battlefield occasionally. Domestic violence is a huge problem in the military. Rape is a huge problem. McVeigh, who I mentioned above, was a veteran. Probably it is a simple fact that military training, especially battle experience, disproportionately appeals to those with a propensity for violence and may create one in those who didn't have it before. It definitely gives people knowledge about how to be more *effectively* violent.
In short, I don't think this kind of thing is avoidable.
Actually, per Slate, military bases are essentially weapons-free zones weapons and ammo must be accounted for and returned -- notably, the folks who shot Hasan were civilian police.
I'm not sure how much of weapons restrictions on base are because the weapons themselves are Uncle Sam's property, how much it is an issue of order and discipline. I wouldn't be too surprised if things shifted toward the latter.
The interesting buzz is that Hasan bought his 5.7 pistol at a Texas gun show and carried it, concealed, past the gate.
Of course white men were not automatically suspect after the McVeigh bombings.
However, white-supremacist white men were suspect, since McVeigh was motivated in large part by this belief system.
I think it's becoming increasingly clear that Hassan was motivated in large part by his belief system as well, and that it was not incidental to his derangement.
But who gets to define who the 'white-supremacist white men' are and how accurate is it?
For you, that list might be limited to known members of 'racist' organizations (KKK, White Knights, Neo Nazis, etc.)
For others, that list could include everyone who got Ron Paul's newsletters to police officers with a history of giving out a disproportionate number of tickets to minorities.
There is another point that has to be made -- there are two intelligence responses to the Pollard case.
One is to realize that the CIA is a colander, and lose the fiction that secure information is actually secure.
The second, more proactive response would still have been the opposite course of action from what Jeff suggests: rather than tightening security with respect to Israelis and people with contacts in Israel, we would be _recruiting_ folks who fit this profile precisely because these are the folks who could build a viable counterintelligence capability. This latter response, of course, was beyond our political or institutional capacity, but it is a useful hypothetical nonetheless.
The relevant issue, however, is that Jeff entirely misses a similar dynamic with respect to the Muslim world -- we're fighting a guerrilla war in Afghanistan, and to a lesser extent Pakistan and Iraq. We often complain about fighting such wars with one hand tied behind our back, but the reality is that purging Muslims from the military would be like fighting the war after poking out our own eyes.
Even within American society, the best 'tips' on potential Muslim terrorists are going to come from their co-religionists, but again, only if law-abiding citizens have not been convinced that the best policy is that of the old Irish song: "whatever you say, say nothing."
I'm disturbed by the Army's continuing reliance on Hasan in the wake of some of the allegations, but in assessing how to move forward, Marc Lynch makes some good points - i.e. that al Qaeda's goal is to create a sense of rupture between Islam and "the West" and what some on the right are calling for in response to the questions surrounding this tragedy, like seperation of Muslims from military service or arbitrary "screening" on the basis of nothing other than ethnicity and/or religion, are exactly the direction that al Qaeda wants us to move.
http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/11/09/al_qaedas_master_plan
I would like to second brucds invocation of Lynch's interpretation.
I’m proud of the Obama Administration’s response thus far, which has not given into racial or religious prejudice and fearmongering. Fort Hood was tragic. Investigations will determine if he had terrorist connections, etc.
But there is another tragedy that can be averted: the impulse toward racial profiling, alienating Arabs and Muslims, and all the accompanying garbage to the “clash of civilizations” narrative. It would be so sad to fall back into that trap because of one individual's senseless act of violence.
Here's how I understand Goldberg's logic:
America has wrongly used racial profiling in the past to discriminate against ethnic groups. Therefore, we should commit that same wrong again, because political correctness endangers us. Plus, it’s the terrorist’s fault anyway that people who have similar background are then discriminated against.
Here’s Goldberg’s logic applied to another historical example: America put Japanese-Americans in internment camps during World War II. It was wrong. But, they were a threat. Anyway, it’s the Japanese’s fault: they shouldn’t have bombed Pearl Harbor in the first place.
Inquiry into potential dual loyalty can be valid, particularly when public officials or employees are involved.
I was an observer of the ’94 elections in KwaZulu-Natal. It was clear that many Zulus were acting and voting based on the instructions of their ethnic superiors. Similarly, I was raised in a hierarchical religion that created interests and imposed obligations other than those of the democratic polity.
Fairness requires full disclosure of such potential conflicts.
Maybe. Probably.
But importantly...you have to realize that his coworkers weren't likely saints either. Was such behavior grossly out of bounds compared to others? People lie about accomplishments all the time in order to get hired.
I think I have never seen such near unanimity on a comment thread. Great post, and spot on.
It's very telling that Goldberg, in promising to give us "the big thing," doesn't actually give us that much. He seems to back away from the logical consequence of his insinuation that Hasan killed fellow Americans because he was a muslim, which is that we should put all American muslims on trial.
But somehow I think that's the strategy. He makes a specious argument, refuses to draw the morally untenable conclusion, but secretly hopes that someone us will. That's why his cowadly retreat from the consequence of his own logic is so contemptible: it's like convincing another kid to steal candy and proclaiming innocence since you're not actually the one who did it.