Not surprisingly, the Commander of the Military District of Washington has chosen to accept the findings of a preliminary hearing held last year, and ordered that Pfc. Bradley Manning face a General Court Martial for the charges that he stole hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documents which eventually ended up in the hands of Wikileaks:

The commander of the Military District of Washington has ordered a court-martial for Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, the former intelligence analyst accused of giving hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

Maj. Gen. Michael S. Linnington made the decision Friday after reviewing testimony and arguments from a preliminary hearing at Fort Meade in December, officials said.

There was no word on whether the as-yet-unscheduled court-martial would also be held at Fort Meade, one of three installations within the military district equipped to host such a proceeding.

Manning, 24, is charged with aiding the enemy and violating the Espionage Act. If convicted, he could be sentenced to life in prison.

Manning is accused of sending raw field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies around the world and a video of a U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad to be published online.

The U.S. Army Trial Judiciary will now assign a military judge, who will set a date for Manning’s arraignment, motion hearings and trial.

During a preliminary hearing in December, Army prosecutors called computer forensic investigators who testified that materials uploaded to WikiLeaks came from computers on which Manning worked.

Manning’s attorneys sought to portray him as a troubled young man who struggled with gender identity, was isolated from his fellow soldiers and should not have been given access to the classified materials.

Manning, who lived in Potomac and studied at Montgomery College before he enlisted in the Army in 2007, attended the hearing but did not speak. It was his first public appearance since his arrest in Iraq in May 2010.

During his detention, his case became a cause celebre among anti-war activists, who say the footage of the 2007 Apache helicopter attack that he is alleged to have released appears to show evidence of a war crime.

At least one of the charges against Manning, Aiding The Enemy, carries with it a potential death sentence but it appears that military prosecutors will demur from seeking that sentence and instead ask for life in prison. Between that charge and the others than Manning faces it’s fairly certain that, if convicted, he would never see the outside of a military prison again for the rest of his life. Judging from last year’s preliminary hearing, the outcome of the case hardly seems to be in doubt. Manning’s lawyers offered no real defense at that hearing, not that they were required to, but it was rather clear from the arguments they did make that they didn’t really have much to argue on their clients’ behalf beyond questioning and testing the elements of the prosecutions case. The logical thing at this point would be for them to try to cut a deal on Manning’s behalf, but it’s possible that Manning himself doesn’t want to plead guilty.

The other unresolved question in the Manning case, of course, is the status of Julian Assange and others associated with Wikileaks. As I noted while the hearing was ongoing, military prosecutors revealed at the time that they had recovered online communications between Manning and Assange that apparently predated the time when Manning stole the classified material. This material has been turned over to civilian prosecutors who are apparently investigating the matter further. Whether there’s enough there to charge Assange under the Espionage Act or anyone else remains unclear at this time, though. Of course, American prosecutors probably aren’t in a rush when it comes to getting something on Assange, he remains under house arrest in the United Kingdom where he’s fighting an order that he be extradited to Sweden to face rape charges. If we want him, we’re going to know where to find him.

Not surprisingly, it looks like Pfc. Bradley Manning is headed for a court martial related to the allegations that he improperly accessed, copied and transferred classified information that later ended up in the hands of Wikileaks:

WASHINGTON — The military officer who presided over an evidentiary hearing on charges against Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of confidential government documents to WikiLeaks, recommended on Friday that Private Manning face court martial.

The officer, Lt. Col. Paul Almanza, who heard a series of witnesses last month at Fort Meade, Md., concluded that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that Private Manning committed the crimes he is accused of, including aiding the enemy, theft of public records and computer fraud.

Given the Manning’s defense team barely put up a defense at the evidentiary hearing, and totally abandoned the defense that had been asserted in opening statements alleging that Manning’s sexuality was somehow a justification for what he did, this isn’t a surprise. The decision to take Manning to trial is up to senior officials but it seems quite likely that it will go forward, as it should.

Matt Drudge spent most of the morning, and a good part of the afternoon, in full-on panic banner headline mode over a Reuters story that an agency of the United States Government routinely takes a look at this thing called the Internet:

(Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s command center routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report, according to a government document.

A “privacy compliance review” issued by DHS last November says that since at least June 2010, its national operations center has been operating a “Social Networking/Media Capability” which involves regular monitoring of “publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites and message boards.”

The purpose of the monitoring, says the government document, is to “collect information used in providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture.”

The document adds, using more plain language, that such monitoring is designed to help DHS and its numerous agencies, which include the U.S. Secret Service and Federal Emergency Management Agency, to manage government responses to such events as the 2010 earthquake and aftermath in Haiti and security and border control related to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia.

A DHS official familiar with the monitoring program said that it was intended purely to enable command center officials to keep in touch with various Internet-era media so that they were aware of major, developing events to which the Department or its agencies might have to respond.

The types of sites that DHS officials are monitoring is interesting in itself because it really leads one to wonder what value they actually find in this program:

[The list includes] social networking sites Facebook and My Space – though there is a parenthetical notice that My Space only affords a “limited search” capability – and more than a dozen sites that monitor, aggregate and enable searches of Twitter messages and exchanges.

Among blogs and aggregators on the list are ABC News’ investigative blog “The Blotter;” blogs that cover bird flu; several blogs related to news and activity along U.S. borders (DHS runs border and immigration agencies); blogs that cover drug trafficking and cybercrime; and websites that follow wildfires in Los Angeles and hurricanes.

News and gossip sites on the monitoring list include popular destinations such as the Drudge Report, Huffington Post and “NY Times Lede Blog”, as well as more focused techie fare such as the Wired blogs “Threat Level” and “Danger Room.” Numerous blogs related to terrorism and security are also on the list.

Some of the sites on the list are potentially controversial. WikiLeaks is listed for monitoring, even though officials in some other government agencies were warned against using their official computers to access WikiLeaks material because much of it is still legally classified under U.S. government rules.

Another blog on the list, Cryptome, also periodically posts leaked documents and was one of the first websites to post information related to the Homeland Security monitoring program.

Also on the list are JihadWatch and Informed Comment, blogs that cover issues related to Islam through sharp political prisms, which have sometimes led critics to accuse the sites of political bias.

Also on the list are various video and photo-sharing sites, including Hulu, Youtube and Flickr.

It doesn’t appear that OTB is on the list of DHS must-visit sites for breaking information on world events. I suppose we ought to take that personally. What’s most amusing about this story, and the blogosphere’s reaction to it, though, is the fact that we already know this was going on. Stewart Baker at The Volokh Conspiracy, which I’m sure is on the list because they’re, you know, conspiratorial, notes that he wrote about this program two years ago:

Here’s what I said two years ago:

With his usual nudge-and-wink, Matt Drudge invites us to be dismayed that “BIG SIS” — his moniker for Janet Napolitano — is “Monitoring Web Sites for Terror and Disaster Info.” Drudge links to a story saying that DHS will be monitoring social media like Twitter, as well as websites like Drudge, to keep abreast of events during the Winter Olympics. The source of the story is a twelve-page “Privacy Impact Assessment” issued by DHS.

This isn’t the first Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) on DHS’s use of social media. A few weeks earlier, DHS wrote a similar assessment of using social media during Haitian rescue operations.

I am indeed dismayed, but not for Drudge’s reasons.  True, it’s disappointing that neither the Volokh Conspiracy nor www.skatingonstilts.com is deemed worthy of government monitoring.  But what’s really dismaying is that DHS and its Privacy Office felt obliged to labor over two separate and painfully obvious privacy assessments just to do things that you and I would do by simply firing up our browsers.

That’s it.  The story is that people at DHS are, gasp, browsing the Internet. As I said then, there’s no scandal, other than the electrons wasted by DHS agonizing over the privacy implications of browsing public Internet sources to find out what’s happening in the world.

And if it was a nonstory in February of 2010, what does that make it in January of 2012?

I’d say it makes Reuters, and Drudge, look pretty dumb. In any event, like Baker, I’ve got to say that I’m disappointed that neither OTB nor my personal site are apparently deemed important enough to be monitored on a regular basis by the Department of Homeland Security, and I’m totally with Jazz Shaw in wondering how one gets a job at DHS surfing the internet all day because that sounds like a pretty sweet gig.

On a more serious note, this story brings to mind James Joyner’s post yesterday about information overload in America’s intelligence agency. This program alone undoubtedly collections thousands of gigabytes of information, all of which has to be analyzed by someone, somewhere. Is it really likely that DHS is really getting that much useful intelligence from public websites to begin with, or that, if it is, its analysts aren’t so overworked that they’re just going to overlook something that might actually be crucial should it turn up in the weekly data dump? Perhaps some of these tasks can be performed by computers that search the information for keywords and flags things that might be significant for human attention. A system like that, though, would be dependent upon the reliability of the software, and it would still require a review by human eyes at some point along the way. With this program as with many others, we’re mining a ton of data but it’s unclear that we’re ever going to be able to find the needles in the haystack that might actually be of value.

NPR begins its story on this (“Why America’s Spies Struggle To Keep Up“) by following the wrong trail–the old bureaucratic infighting and stovepiping meme:

Before Sept. 11, 2011, there were 16 intelligence agencies in the United States. But after the attacks, the 9/11 Commission recommended creating a 17th intelligence agency — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) — to coordinate intelligence operations.

The 16 already existing agencies didn’t react well, says historian and former intelligence analyst Matthew Aid.

“They hated the idea of a [so-called] ‘intelligence czar,’ ” he tells Fresh Air’s Dave Davies. “Each of the 16 intelligence agencies that existed before the creation of the ODNI [are] bureaucracies. They have a bureaucratic identity … and they love their independence.”

After much debate, the ODNI was created — but given almost no authority over the 100,000 or so spies who work for the Pentagon. The result? Essentially two separate spy networks within the intelligence community: the civilians who work for the 16 agencies reporting to the ODNI, and the 100,000 spies at the Pentagon who report to the undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

“They have separate budgets, they report to separate committees, and it is a structural nightmare,” says Aid.

In his book Intel Wars, Aid details how overlapping jurisdictions, bureaucratic policies and a glut of data have crippled the intelligence community in its war against would-be terrorists.

“You talk to officials who used to work or work today at the ODNI, and there’s just frustration,” he says. “I quoted one official as saying, ‘It would be nice if the boys over at the Pentagon let us know what they were up to,’ which I think gives a hint that says things could be more tightly controlled than they are right now.”

While I’m sure that turf wars exist–it’s the nature of bureaucracy in general and intelligence, with its understandable culture of secrecy, in particular–but the real point is this:

Before Sept. 11, Aid says, the U.S. had 200 drones collecting data all over the world. That number climbed to over 6,000 after the attacks. Many of these drones provide essential information for intelligence forces, says Aid, but there’s a problem: Mixed in with the good stuff is also a lot of nonessential information. Aid says intelligence analysts are drowning in the data — particularly because there aren’t enough analysts to sift through what’s potentially important.

“I’ve interviewed a number of collectors who worked in Iraq and Afghanistan, and one of their complaints is, ‘I’m sitting in a foxhole and I’ve got 3,000 emails coming in from Washington every morning with all the latest intelligence. And the guy said, ‘It’s wonderful that they’re sharing this stuff with me; I just wish they were a little more selective about what they were sending me.’ ”

“They’re essential, but the problem is … the amount of data is literally drowning the analyst on the order of something like 275 operators and analysts to analyze the result of each drone intelligence mission,” says Aid.

The main problem is that there aren’t enough people who can intelligently skim all this data and decide what’s worth passing on, so they pass it all on. The corollary problem is that agencies have different priorities and missions and information that’s completely worthless to most can be essential to one or two. So, the raw information really has to be made available to everyone and the culling decisions have to be made at the local level.

Except that it’s really impossible to do. Even with unlimited budgets, it would be impossible to recruit and train enough competent people.

Collecting information, at least this sort of information, is easy. Performing competent analysis quickly enough to be useful to policy-makers and action officers is really, really hard.

Just north of me at Fort Meade, Maryland, the pre-trial hearings in the Court Martial of Pvt. Bradley Manning, accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that eventually ended up in the hands of Wikileaks, have been going on. Manning’s attorneys have not begun putting on their case yet, but they have made some statements which seem to suggest that they will try to argue that Manning’s homosexuality, and the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Policy will somehow play a role in their defense. How that could possibly be relevant to espionage is something I’ll leave to his lawyers to explain at a later date. What prompts this post, is news that military investigators have apparently uncovered something we did not believe previously existed, evidence of what appears to be a direct link between Manning and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange:

A government digital forensic expert examing the computer of accused WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning retrieved communications between Manning and an online chat user identified on Manning’s computer as “Julian Assange,” the name of the founder of the secret-spilling site that published hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables.

Investigators also found an Icelandic phone number for Assange, and a chat with a hacker located in the U.S., in which Manning says he’s responsible for the leaking of the “Collateral Murder” Apache helicopter video released by WikiLeaks in spring 2010.

Until Monday’s revelation, there have been no reports that the government had evidence linking Manning and Assange, other than chat logs provided to the FBI by hacker Adrian Lamo last year. Assange is being investigated by a federal grand jury, but has not been charged with any crime, since publishing classified information is not generally considered a crime in the U.S. But if prosecutors could show that Assange directed Manning in leaking government documents that he then published, this could complicate Assange’s defense that WikiLeaks is simply a journalistic endeavor.

The news of the chat logs between Manning and Assange came on the fourth day of Manning’s pre-trial hearing being held to determine whether he’ll face court martial on 22 charges of violating military law for allegedly abusing his position as an intelligence analyst in Iraq in order to feed a treasure trove of classified and sensitive documents to WikiLeaks.

Mark Johnson, a digital forensics contractor for ManTech International who works for the Army’s Computer Crime Investigative Unit, examined an image of Manning’s personal MacBook Pro and said he found 14 to 15 pages of chats in unallocated space on the hard drive that were discussions of unspecified government info between Manning and a person believed to be Assange, which specifically made a reference to re-sending info.

While the chat logs were encrypted, Johnson said that he was able to retrieve the MacBook’s login password from the hard drive and found that the same password “TWink1492!!” was also used as the encryption key.

Assange’s name was attached to a chat handle “dawgnetwork@jabber.ccc.de” listed in Manning’s buddy list in the Adium chat program on his computer. That Jabber address uses the same domain name allegedly mentioned by Manning in the chat logs that ex-hacker Adrian Lamo gave to the FBI and to Wired.com last year. In that earlier chat log, Manning was making reference to a domain that Assange was known to use.

In Manning’s buddy list there was also a second handle, “pressassociation@jabber.ccc.de,” which had two aliases associated with it: Julian Assange and Nathaniel Frank. CCC.de in the domain refers to the Chaos Computer Club, a hacker club in Germany that operates the Jabber server.

When asked about the two aliases, Johnson said it was odd for a user to assign two names to one account, implying that some subterfuge might have been at play.

The chat logs mention a request to re-send some unspecified data, showing that the parties had talked before, Johnson said, as well as discussion about using SFTP for uploading data securely to an FTP server.

The laptop hard drive also revealed a chat transcript in which Manning apparently admitted to a third party that he was the source of one of the early Wikileaks releases, a video of a 2007 Apache helicopter mission in Iraq that resulted in the friendly fire deaths of two journalists. And then there is this:

Johnson says he also examined an external hard drive found in Manning’s bunk room in Iraq that contained a text file called wl-press.txt that was created on Nov. 30, 2009, right around the time that Manning told Lamo that he first made contact with WikiLeaks.

The file included the line: “You can currently contact our investigations editor directly in Iceland at 354.862.3481 : 24 hour service : ask for Julian Assange.”

Assange has always denied direct contact with Manning, although he has never revealed how the materials that Manning stole just happened to come into the possession of Wikileaks. These revelations appear to provide at least a clue on that last part, and suggest that Assange has been lying about his contact with Manning.

The big question is whether this strengthens any potential American legal charges against Assange regarding the Manning matter. Up until now, it has seemed as though he would be untouchable because there was no direct evidence that he had been in contact with Manning prior, or subsequent to, the data theft. Now, though, there is at least the suggestion that he may have been involved with Manning prior to the time the material was stolen, perhaps even coaching him about what to look for. If that’s the case, we’re looking at potential liability under the Espionage Act or similar laws.  As Jazz Shaw notes, there is a huge difference between a situation where Assange was merely the recipient of documents from some anonymous third party that had received the data from Manning and a situation where he was actively in direct contact with Manning before, during, and after the data theft. In the first situation, the defense that he was acting as a journalist would likely work. In the second, he’d have some serious legal liability to worry about at the very least.

Obviously, this information has been in the possession of military, and most likely Federal civilian, investigators for some time now. Whether it will result in charges against Assange, who is currently still under house arrest in England awaiting final resolution of an appeal of the order that he be extradited to Sweden to stand trial for rape, remains to be seen.

Photo via Wired

Today’s New York Times notes the extent to which the death of Korea’s reclusive “Dear Leader” reveals how little we know about what really goes on inside the modern day Hermit Kingdom:

WASHINGTON — Kim Jong-il, the enigmatic North Korean leader, died on a train at 8:30 a.m. Saturday in his country. Forty-eight hours later, officials in South Korea still did not know anything about it — to say nothing of Washington, where the State Department acknowledged “press reporting” of Mr. Kim’s death well after North Korean state media had already announced it.

For South Korean and American intelligence services to have failed to pick up any clues to this momentous development — panicked phone calls between government officials, say, or soldiers massing around Mr. Kim’s train — attests to the secretive nature of North Korea, a country not only at odds with most of the world but also sealed off from it in a way that defies spies or satellites.

Asian and American intelligence services have failed before to pick up significant developments in North Korea. Pyongyang built a sprawling plant to enrich uranium that went undetected for about a year and a half until North Korean officials showed it off in late 2010 to an American nuclear scientist. The North also helped build a complete nuclear reactor in Syria without tipping off Western intelligence.

As the United States and its allies confront a perilous leadership transition in North Korea — a failed state with nuclear weapons — the closed nature of the country will greatly complicate their calculations. With little information about Mr. Kim’s son and successor, Kim Jong-un, and even less insight into the palace intrigue in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, much of their response will necessarily be guesswork.

“We have clear plans about what to do if North Korea attacks, but not if the North Korean regime unravels,” said Michael J. Green, a former Asia adviser in the Bush administration. “Every time you do these scenarios, one of the first objectives is trying to find out what’s going on inside North Korea.”

In many countries, that would involve intercepting phone calls between government officials or peering down from spy satellites. And indeed, American spy planes and satellites scan the country. Highly sensitive antennas along the border between South and North Korea pick up electronic signals. South Korean intelligence officials interview thousands of North Koreans who defect to the South each year.

And yet remarkably little is known about the inner workings of the North Korean government. Pyongyang, officials said, keeps sensitive information limited to a small circle of officials, who do not talk.

“This is a society that thrives on its opaqueness,” said Christopher R. Hill, a former special envoy who negotiated with the North over its nuclear program. “It is very complex. To understand the leadership structure requires going way back into Korean culture to understand Confucian principles.”

It isn’t just the United States, Japan, and South Korea that had no idea that Kim had died until the news was announced yesterday, but it seems fairly clear that the Chinese weren’t aware of it either, although it’s probable that the North Koreans may have informed their contacts in Beijing before releasing the news to the rest of the world. In fact, it’s worth point out the fact that we don’t really know that Kim really died on Saturday morning, or that he really died on a train trip. He could’ve died hours or days before that, and the interim time has been taken up with forces inside the country shoring up power and preparing the inevitable propaganda barrage of mourners, which seemed to erupt conveniently quickly yesterday.  Undoubtedly, the North Koreans know that they are being observed from all sides and have already taken steps to limit communication over channels that can be monitored from outside the country. Additionally, Kim has been ill for at least a year now and it’s likely that contingency plans were already in place for his death (Communists love plans, remember). Executing that plan when Kim did die would have been relatively straightforward given the closed nature of the Kim regime.

Despite the fact that the only thing we really know about North Korea is that we don’t really know much about North Korea, that hasn’t stopped all manner of speculation about what the rise of Kim Jong-Un, who has already been given the title “Great Successor” despite being about the same age as people in the United States who barely out of college, means for North Korea and the rest of the world. One of the most popular theories yesterday seemed to be that the young Kim would have a difficult time consolidating power, that he would become a puppet of the advisers his father left behind to guide him, or that the end of the Pyongyang government was near. Michael Hirsh, meanwhile, pointed out that anyone who counts the Kim regime’s days as numbered may be sadly disappointed:

There is, perhaps, no totalitarianism in the world that is as all-embracing as North Korea’s. Something like it hasn’t existed since Stalin died (and with him a personality cult very much like that which surrounds the Kims). I have spent time in other police states, but even in some of the most vicious of them, an undercurrent of dissent ran like a subterranean stream through the back rooms of restaurants, bars and private meeting rooms. Even under Saddam Hussein, Iraqi cab drivers would glance around when pressed and spit out their hatred of the dictator. Dissidents in Myanmar, during the worst of the crackdown, would whisper their fealty to democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. In Vietnam, Saigon residents would raise their eyebrows and snort at the central planners in the North. In China, after Mao’s death, there was a reappraisal of his policies, and the Communist Party ultimately allowed that some elements of “Mao Zedong Thought,” like the disastrous Great Leap Forward of the ’50s or the Cultural Revolution of the ’60s, had not been successful.

But in North Korea, long after Stalinism has become a yellowing chapter in the history books elsewhere—and despite intermittent reports of a power struggle at the top– there is little evidence that dissent among the public exists at all, even today. The effects of the Arab Spring seem to have reached China, and possibly Russia. But there are no reports of any democracy movement in North Korea. Very few people yet seem willing to question whether the Kim family dynasty might be to blame for an economic slide that took the North from parity with South Korea, as recently as the 1960s, to one of the highest rates of malnutrition in the world and the death of hundreds of thousands of people from starvation.

It is too simplistic to attribute this mindset to a mere fear of repression or self-censorship.

Indeed, one only needs to listen to this seven minute description by the late Christopher Hitchens (and how unfortunate is it that he did not live long enough to learn of the death of one of the world’s worst dictators?) of his own trip to Pyongyang:

The North Korean people have lived under this regime for half a century now, and by all accounts those who have defected to China or South Korea are genuinely shocked to learn that the things they were told about the outside world and the DPRK’s place in it is untrue. It’s worse, it seems, than the culture shock that defectors from the Soviet Union would experience. Under those conditions, the prospects for a “Pyongyang Spring” seem rather unlikely unless accompanied by an utter collapse in the government itself and, since everyone in a position of power knows that their personal survival depends on keeping the government in power,  the likelihood of that happening may not be as high as those of us who wish the North Korean people to be free would hope.

As for Kim Jong-Un himself, the Wall Street Journal suggests that he may actually be worse than his father:

North Korea’s new leader is depicted in U.S. intelligence assessments as a volatile youth with a sadistic streak who may be even more unpredictable than his late father, according to U.S. officials.

U.S. intelligence officials say they have limited information about Kim Jong Eun, the youngest son of Kim Jong Il and his anointed successor. The U.S. has had few direct contacts on which to make a “conclusive assessment” of Kim Jong Eun’s nature and character, a senior U.S. official said.

(…)

The portrait of Kim Jong Eun that emerges in his U.S. profile is that of a young man who, despite years of education in the West, is steeped in his father’s cult of personality and may be even more mercurial and merciless, officials said.

A senior U.S. official said intelligence analysts believe, for instance, that Kim Jung Eun “tortured small animals” when he was a youth. “He has a violent streak and that’s worrisome,” a senior U.S. official said, summing up the U.S. assessments.

(…)

A further detriment to the younger Mr. Kim’s outside reputation outside North Korea, were two North Korean assaults on South Korea last year, which U.S. officials have said appeared to have been instigated by Mr. Kim’s son to prove his credentials.

“His temperament is not good,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, citing the attacks.

I tend to agree with Daniel Drezner’s take on this in two respect. First, as he puts it, we have “no friggin’ clue” what’s going to happen next. Second, Kim Jong-Un, or whoever is going to be guiding him from behind the scenes, is likely to last longer than some might think. That second part is bad for the North Korean people most of all, who will continue suffering under what is undoubtedly the worst tyranny on the planet today, and quite possibly the most totalitarian regime that has ever existed. The first is bad for the rest of us. We saw last year what can happen when the North Koreans act unexpectedly when they sank a South Korean naval ship and shelled a South Korean island, raising tensions on the Peninsula twice in less than six months.  As it turns out, both of those exercises may have been related to efforts to enhance the military reputation of the youngest Kim (I have been tempted more than once in this post to refer to the new leader of the DPRK as “Lil’ Kim”). What happens next is anyone’s guess, and that may be the biggest cause for concern.

The Christian Science Monitor is out with a story that Iranian engineers are claiming that they were actually able to electronically take control of the RQ-170 drone captured last week:

Iran guided the CIA’s “lost” stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on the captured drone’s systems inside Iran.

Iranian electronic warfare specialists were able to cut off communications links of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel, says the engineer, who works for one of many Iranian military and civilian teams currently trying to unravel the drone’s stealth and intelligence secrets, and who could not be named for his safety.

Using knowledge gleaned from previous downed American drones and a technique proudly claimed by Iranian commanders in September, the Iranian specialists then reconfigured the drone’s GPS coordinates to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its actual home base in Afghanistan.

“The GPS navigation is the weakest point,” the Iranian engineer told the Monitor, giving the most detailed description yet published of Iran’s “electronic ambush” of the highly classified US drone. “By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain.”

The “spoofing” technique that the Iranians used – which took into account precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data – made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center, says the engineer.

The revelations about Iran’s apparent electronic prowess come as the US, Israel, and some European nations appear to be engaged in an ever-widening covert war with Iran, which has seen assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, explosions at Iran’s missile and industrial facilities, and the Stuxnet computer virus that set back Iran’s nuclear program.

Now this engineer’s account of how Iran took over one of America’s most sophisticated drones suggests Tehran has found a way to hit back. The techniques were developed from reverse-engineering several less sophisticated American drones captured or shot down in recent years, the engineer says, and by taking advantage of weak, easily manipulated GPS signals, which calculate location and speed from multiple satellites.

Western military experts and a number of published papers on GPS spoofing indicate that the scenario described by the Iranian engineer is plausible.

“Even modern combat-grade GPS [is] very susceptible” to manipulation, says former US Navy electronic warfare specialist Robert Densmore, adding that it is “certainly possible” to recalibrate the GPS on a drone so that it flies on a different course. “I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but the technology is there.”

If true, this would explain why the drone displayed by the Iranians seems to be in such relatively good shape, which one would not expect if the vehicle had crashed somewhere or been downed by enemy fire. This is also the second time we’ve heard about possible electronic vulnerabilities in the U.S. drone fleet. Just a few months ago, it was reported that Predator Drone’s had been infected by a virus in their control software. This would also answer the question of why an auto-destruct mechanism was not activated, assuming the drone actually has one. And, finally, it would indicate why a mission to retrieve or destroy the craft was not feasible. From the article, it seems clear that the Iranians were able to guide the RQ-170 to a landing in an area they controlled.

Needless to say, this isn’t a good development.

Micah Zenko argues over at Foreign Policy that the RQ-170 drone captured by Iran last week isn’t nearly as big an intelligence loss as the media and some pundits are making it out to be:

It is understandable that an event with headlines that include the words “Iran,” “drone,” and “nuclear” generate a great deal of attention. Yet, for all the bytes and ink expended in discussing the downed Sentinel drone, it is neither surprising nor particularly revealing. As was true in 1960, the benefits of spying on Iran outweigh the dangers of the program being revealed or a downed aircraft, and are what Americans should expect from the $55 billion spent last year on national intelligence. To understand why this downed drone is such an ordinary event requires an understanding the day-to-day process of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC).

(…)

Since Iran is among the most important intelligence collection priority, it would only make sense for the United States to utilize its most advanced capabilities, just as the U-2 spy plane was a half-century ago. The United States has reportedly been flying drones of various capabilities and missions over Iran since as early as April 2004, some of which Iranians believed to be UFOs. The following year, Iran protested the drone flights to the United States through Swiss diplomatic channels, and via letters to the U.N. Security Council, demanding “an end to such unlawful acts.” The RQ-170 Sentinel drone itself, pictures of which were first published in 2007, had flown from Afghan airbases over Iran “for years,” according to the Associated Press. (Of course, Iran also flies surveillance drones against U.S. military assets, as demonstrated in this grainy video of the USS Ronald Reagan.)

That one of many drones dedicated to collecting intelligence over Iran has fallen into Iranian hands is also expected given the law of averages. Drones crash at rates higher than manned aircraft for any number of reasons, including due to human error, incorrect information, network interference, system failure, weather, or being shot down. As a former official warned: “It was never a matter of whether we were going to lose one but when.”

That’s worth keeping in mind. Once you put any piece of military equipment into the field, whether its an unmanned drone or more advanced night vision goggles, there’s going to be a danger that it, or some important piece of it is going to fall into the wrong hands thanks to capture, enemy fire, or good old-fashioned mechanical failure as appears to have been the case with the RQ-170. Every time we send one of these surveillance drones, or a Predator, into the field there’s always a risk that it won’t come back and that someone nefarious will get their hands on it no matter how carefully you design guidance systems, self-destruct systems, or navigation. Nothing is perfect and, in the field, the unexpected can always be expected to happen. That is the part of the calculation that the President and intelligence officials must make when deciding to utilize this technology in areas where it won’t be easy to recover an aircraft if something goes wrong.

Obviously, as Zinko notes, there is the danger that this technology will now fall into Chinese and Russian hands, but that’s happened before too. We’ve lost planes and missiles in Afghanistan over the years before 9/11, and the Chinese got access to those. During operations over  Serbia in the 1990s, an F-117A Stealth Fighter was lost. It’s going to happen, but as Zinko notes in closing there’s another untold part of this story:

When the ill-fated U-2 was lost over the Soviet Union, its superior replacement, the A-12 OXCART, was already well under development at the ultra-secret Skunk Works facilities — so the U-2 was no huge loss. Similarly, the Sentinel’s downing will only be a temporary setback. As Aviation Week reported, the Sentinel’s sensor package considered “so invaluable when it debuted in Afghanistan about two years ago is considered outdated.” The hyper-spectral sensor capabilities mounted on future stealth drones will make the RQ-170 Sentinel seem quaint. When those future drones also unfortunately fall onto the territory of Iran or other adversaries, people will be surprised and unnecessarily alarmed then, too.

Unfortunate loss of an expensive and useful aircraft? Yes. Intelligence disaster? Not so much.

Ralph Peters lays out a warning for the people advocating military action against Iran’s nuclear program on the theory that it will be a quick operation:

Let’s look at what “Bomb Iran!” really means: The Iranians may appear mad, but that doesn’t mean they’re fools, and they’ve studied the errors of other rogue states that sought nuclear weapons. The results? First, the Iranians have dispersed their research, development and production facilities. Second, they’ve fortified a number of vital sites in bunkers deep underground. Third, they’ve placed other link-in-the-chain laboratories and research sites in populated areas so that any attack upon them would generate large numbers of civilian casualties ― and very ugly images in the global media. Fourth, the Tehran regime has made this program a matter of nationalist pride. An attack on Iran’s nukes would be viewed as an attack on Iran, period, by the great majority of the population (even many regime opponents would “rally ’round the flag,” in an Iranian version of the 9/11 effect). Fifth, Iran would respond promptly and asymmetrically in the wake of such an attack ― unless its extensive capabilities to hit back were also attacked and disabled from the start.

(…)

How would Iran respond to strikes on its nuke facilities? Inevitably missiles would be launched toward Israeli cities ― some with chemical warheads ― but these tit-for-tat attacks would be the least part of Tehran’s counterattack strategy. The Iranians would “do what’s doable,” and that means hitting Arab oil-production infrastructure on the other side of the narrow Persian Gulf. Employing it mid-range missiles, aircraft and naval forces, Tehran would launch both conventional and suicide attacks on Arab oil fields, refineries, storage areas, ports and loading facilities, on tankers in transit, and on the Straits of Hormuz, the great chokepoint for the world’s core oil supplies. The price of a barrel of crude would soar geometrically on world exchanges, paralyzing economies ― exactly as Iran’s leaders intend. Ten-dollar-a-gallon gas would be a brief bargain on the way to truly prohibitive prices. And, in the way of the world, Tehran would not get the blame. We would.

None of what Peters lays out here seems out of bounds. It seems rather obvious that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, whether by the United States or Israel, would not be the kind of one-off attack that we saw in Iraq in 1982, or in Syria in 2009. As Peters notes, Iran has learned from those examples to the point where an attack would require hitting multiple targets with weapons capable of penetrating hardened bunkers in multiple locations. We’d never know if we took everything out in one strike, and we’d have to worry about counterattacks. In other words, it wouldn’t be an “attack,” it would be a war:

So…if we are forced to attack Iran’s nuclear-weapons facilities at some point, what would it take to do it right and limit Tehran’s ability to respond with such devastating asymmetrical attacks?

At the most-basic level, we would need to conceive of the operation as a war, not just a brief series of raids. In addition to the standard requirements to knock out Iran’s early-warning and air-defense systems, we would have to strike the headquarters facilities of the Revolutionary Guards, the military and the various intelligence arms. We would need to destroy Iran’s combat aircraft on the ground, and then destroy any aircraft ― including passenger jets ― that could be used as flying bombs against oil facilities. It would be essential to destroy, early on, Iran’s navy and the Revolutionary Guards’ naval arm, right down to the Zodiac-boat level. We also would need to sink any commercial vessel that attempted to leave an Iranian harbor throughout the period of hostilities, since it could be used in an attack scheme. Not only would we need to disable Iran’s government and military communications infrastructure on the first day, but we also would have to disrupt civilian communications indefinitely. Then we would have to parry years of Iranian attempts to take revenge, not just regionally, but globally. We certainly would see a resurgence of state-sponsored terrorism ― and it could be taken to a whole new level.

Is America ready for another war in the Middle East, and one that could make Iraq and Afghanistan seem like a cakewalk by comparison? Frankly, I’ve got to doubt that the public support for such a commitment will be there regardless of who the President is unless we find ourselves in some situation where Iran has taken aggressive action against the United States. Yes, there’s a history of animosity against the Iranians that goes back to the Hostage Crisis (which began 32 years ago yesterday), but there was also a history of animosity against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi and yet the public never really got behind the minimal action that President Obama took there beginning in March. Would they really go along with an Iraq style war halfway across the world based on fears of an Iranian nuclear program based mostly on intelligence that, as I noted earlier this week, has been contradictory at best? Frankly, I don’t think they would.

Coincidentally, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has an article today that paints a similarly grim picture of the prospects of war against the Islamic Republic:

How will an Israel-Iran war look if it breaks out eventually? This question is at the center of a new study compiled by the Defense Ministry. Researcher Dr. Moshe Vered writes that such a war could go on for a long time. He believes that the Iranian’s typical willingness to sacrifice many victims for a long period of time in a conflict with Israel will dictate a prolonged war between the two states, which will be difficult to end.

Dr. Vered, a physicist, occupies various roles in the defense establishment’s technology division. He published his study this week as part of a sabbatical at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University. He argues that the length of an Israel-Iran war “will be measured in year, not in weeks or days.” This stems from the Shiite perception by which one must fight and sacrifice for the sake of justice and to correct wrongs to Islam and to Muslims. “This outlook sees Israel’s existence as a wrong that must be corrected for the sake of world redemption. The achievement of this goal will only be possible once Israel is annihilated. The Iranians will continue fighting this war, as much as it is up to them, until they achieve their objective, despite the heavy toll that will be exacted in battle,” Vered writes.

Vered argues further that only the fear the Iranian regime being toppled could bring such a war to an end. But, it seems unlikely that Israel will be able to pose a real threat to the Iranian regime, and “in the absence of a way out, acceptable to both sides, the war could continue for a very long time.”

Vered mentions the fact that the Iran-Iraq war, in the 1980s, lasted eight years. Iran fought many years to achieve its demands – to correct the basic wrong of Iraq’s invasion into its territory, Iraqi recognition of its culpability, and the removal of the head of the Iraqi regime Saddam Hussein.

Iran paid an inconceivable price in that war – half a million dead and economic damage higher than the country’s entire oil income in the 20th century – before it agreed to a ceasefire. The ceasefire came only when there was a real danger that the Iranian regime would not survive.

(…)

Vered rejects the assumption that in the absence of a shared border, the Israel-Iran war will be fought only with surface to surface missiles. Such warfare shouldn’t last a long time because Iran’s supply of long-range missiles isn’t large. However, he writes, it is more plausible to assume that Iran will want to continue the fighting against Israel via messengers: Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, and maybe even an Iranian force on Syrian soil, as part of a defense treaty between Tehran and Damascus. He plays down the likelihood of a short confrontation (Israeli assault followed by a punishing counter assault and then an immediate ceasefire under international pressure while both sides realize that the war has played out), he thinks that the ideology of the Iranian regime will dictate a prolonged war. Yes, this isn’t exactly what you would call relaxing reading material for the weekend.

No, it’s not, but it’s a must-read for anyone who thinks about these issues. It stands as a helpful counterweight to the arguments made by the John Bolton’s of the world who seem to argue for military action against Iran on every day that happens to end in a “y” and dismiss any concerns about the consequences of such action. It’s very unlikely we’re talking about a one-off bombing run here. Instead, we’re talking about a prolonged campaign that could potentially ignite a spark of terrorism against the United States and Israel around the world. Would that really be worth it, especially when we don’t even know if we’d be successful in knocking out the nuclear program? I have serious doubts about it to say the least. Hopefully, this is exactly the kind of assessment that the people who actually make decisions in the United States and Israel and, hopefully, they’ll be honest with the public if they ever do decide to travel down this road because we’ll all be living with the consequences of their decision.

H/T: Stephen Green

DEVELOPING STORY: In a well-marked building in McLean, Virginia, hundreds of CIA analysts are reading newspapers and watching cable news networks for information that might be helpful in assessing terrorist networks. Often, sources tell OTB, this information is pieced together in order to then kill people in faraway countries using drones.

Additionally, as a wildly provocative AP report reveals, they are using this new invention called “the Internet” in a similar fashion.

Adam Entous, Sioban Gorman, and Julian Barnes reporting for WSJ (“U.S. Tightens Drone Rules“):

The Central Intelligence Agency has made a series of secret concessions in its drone campaign after military and diplomatic officials complained large strikes were damaging the fragile U.S. relationship with Pakistan.

The covert drones are credited with killing hundreds of suspected militants, and few U.S. officials have publicly criticized the campaign, or its rapid expansion under President Barack Obama. Behind the scenes, however, many key U.S. military and State Department officials demanded more-selective strikes. That pitted them against CIA brass who want a free hand to pursue suspected militants.

The disputes over drones became so protracted that the White House launched a review over the summer, in which Mr. Obama intervened.

The review ultimately affirmed support for the underlying CIA program. But a senior official said: “The bar has been raised. Inside CIA, there is a recognition you need to be damn sure it’s worth it.”

What was the bar before?

Among the changes: The State Department won greater sway in strike decisions; Pakistani leaders got advance notice about more operations; and the CIA agreed to suspend operations when Pakistani officials visit the U.S.

The Pakistan drone debate already seems to be influencing thinking about the U.S. use of drones elsewhere in the world. In Yemen, the CIA used the pilotless aircraft in September to kill American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a suspected terrorist. But the White House has for now barred the CIA from attacking large groups of unidentified lower-level militants there.

The CIA concessions were detailed by high-level officials in a series of interviews with The Wall Street Journal. But in a measure of the discord, administration officials have different interpretations about the outcome of the White House review. While some cast the concessions as a “new phase” in which the CIA would weigh diplomacy more heavily in its activities, others said the impact was minimal and that the bar for vetting targets has been consistently high.

“Even if there are added considerations, the program—which still has strong support in Washington—remains as aggressive as ever,” said a U.S. official.

It’s not obvious from the report when all this took place. David Petraeus, easily the most famous American field general since World War II, just took over the agency on September 6. It would be odd to install a military commander, fresh from tours of duty in a war zone, as the head of CIA and simultaneously ratchet back the agency’s authority to make tactical decisions on strikes.

Then again, it has long struck me as more than a little odd that the CIA, not the Pentagon, is running our drone wars. Killing bad guys en masse isn’t really an intelligence mission, even granting that the line between intelligence “operations” and military operations has always been somewhat murky. And it’s no longer a matter of a strike every now and again as a complement to a wider operation. Increasingly, the drone war is the whole enchilada.

Last year, Mr. Obama expanded the CIA program to 14 drone “orbits.” Each orbit usually includes three drones, sufficient to provide constant surveillance over tribal areas of Pakistan. The CIA’s fleet of drones includes Predators and larger Reapers. The drones carry Hellfire missiles and sometimes bigger bombs, can soar to an altitude of 50,000 feet and reach cruise speeds of up to 230 miles per hour.

The drone program over the past decade has moved from a technological oddity to a key element of U.S. national-security policy. The campaign has killed more than 1,500 suspected militants on Pakistani soil since Mr. Obama took office in 2009, according to government officials.

To some degree, the program has become a victim of its own success. Critics question whether aggressive tactics are necessary following the eradication of senior al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, including Osama bin Laden, killed in a helicopter raid by Navy Seals in May after drone and satellite surveillance of the compound where he was living.

Many officials at the Pentagon and State Department privately argued the CIA pays too little attention to the diplomatic costs of air strikes that kill large groups of low-level fighters. Such strikes inflame Pakistani public opinion. Observers point to the rising power in Pakistan of political figures like Imran Khan, who held large rallies to protest the drones and could challenge the current government.

The CIA has always been a strange hybrid. It was created in 1947–via the same Act that created the Secretary of Defense, a separate Air Force, and the National Security Council–as a postwar descendant of the military’s Office of Strategic Services. But whereas OSS was mostly about conducting operations, CIA had a second side: the analysis of intelligence. The two have very different bureaucratic cultures and draw from almost entirely different pools of people. (The same is increasingly true of the FBI, which is an uncomfortable hybrid between a white collar law enforcement operation and a counterterrorism intelligence analysis operation.)

It simply makes no sense to have CIA operating powerful weapons systems and calling the shots on targeting. And, rather obviously, the operations side isn’t listening to the analysis side at all or they wouldn’t be doing it so recklessly. Naturally, this is all done in the black so there isn’t much data to go on.

There seems to be a lot of speculation these days about military action against Iran and, depending on who you listen to, it’s either Israel, Britain, or the United States who are planning to take action, or perhaps all three together. First, we have a report from Haaretz that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu is trying to persuade his cabinet to back a pre-emptive strike on Iran:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are trying to muster a majority in the cabinet in favor of military action against Iran, a senior Israeli official has said. According to the official, there is a “small advantage” in the cabinet for the opponents of such an attack.

Netanyahu and Barak recently persuaded Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who previously objected to attacking Iran, to support such a move.

Although more than a million Israelis have had to seek shelter during a week of rockets raining down on the south, political leaders have diverted their attention to arguing over a possible war with Iran. Leading ministers were publicly dropping hints on Tuesday that Israeli could attack Iran, although a member of the forum of eight senior ministers said no such decision had been taken.

The Guardian, meanwhile, is reporting that British forces are preparing to assist the United States in strikes on Iran:

Britain’s armed forces are stepping up their contingency planning for potential military action against Iran amid mounting concern about Tehran’s nuclear enrichment programme, the Guardian has learned.

The Ministry of Defence believes the US may decide to fast-forward plans for targeted missile strikes at some key Iranian facilities. British officials say that if Washington presses ahead it will seek, and receive, UK military help for any mission, despite some deep reservations within the coalition government.

In anticipation of a potential attack, British military planners are examining where best to deploy Royal Navy ships and submarines equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles over the coming months as part of what would be an air and sea campaign.

They also believe the US would ask permission to launch attacks from Diego Garcia, the British Indian ocean territory, which the Americans have used previously for conflicts in the Middle East.

The Guardian has spoken to a number of Whitehall and defence officials over recent weeks who said Iran was once again becoming the focus of diplomatic concern after the revolution in Libya.

They made clear that Barack Obama, has no wish to embark on a new and provocative military venture before next November’s presidential election.

But they warned the calculations could change because of mounting anxiety over intelligence gathered by western agencies, and the more belligerent posture that Iran appears to have been taking.

All of this is happening as we hear reports that the IAEA is about to release another report on Iran’s nuclear weapon’s program that is likely to conclude that the Islamic Republic is continuing in it’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons and the systems for delivering them. Of course, we’ve heard that story before, as well as the complete opposite. . The United States’ National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 stated that Iran had halted it’s nuclear weapons program in 2003. In February 2009, though, both the United Nations and the United States issued reports saying that the program was further along than previously believed. Less than a month later, though, the Director of National Intelligence seemed to debunk those February reports.  In August of that year, we were told that Iran was on the verge of becoming a nuclear power.  Last year, we were informed of a CIA report saying ”Iran continues to develop a range of capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so.” Now, we’ve got this report coming out which is apparently going to ramp of the Iran nuclear fears again, leading people like John Bolton to declare, once again, that we have to strike Iran immediately.

Iran is on course to build nuclear weapons, according to evidence compiled by United Nations inspectors.

Research to be presented by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) next week will provide details pointing to the military dimension of Iran’s nuclear program. …

The atomic watchdog is expected to say that Iran is working on nuclear missile technology, researching the detonation of a nuclear device and dramatically increasing uranium enrichment at a facility buried deep in a mountainside. Its report is likely to take the Middle East a step closer to a nuclear arms race. …

The key part of the IAEA report is expected to say that Iran is dramatically increasing uranium enrichment at a facility in Qom, deep in a mountainside, that could within months be fortified against conventional weaponry.

So, expect the drumbeat of war to begin pounding again from the usual quarters. As far as the Israelis are concerned, there are obvious reasons to be concerned about a nuclear Iran, or a non-nuclear Iran for that matter. The rhetoric coming from Ahmedinejad and Khameni, along with the regime’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah, makes them a serious threat to the safety and security of Israeli citizens, and Israeli interests in other parts of the world. At the same time, though, it’s fairly clear that an attack on Iran wouldn’t be the cakewalk that some on the right seem to think it would be:

Iran’s forces may not be up to much but, with the help of Hamas and Hezbollah, they could wreak havoc. British and US troops in Afghanistan would be exposed to even greater danger than they are now – their bases in the Gulf, notably in Qatar and Bahrain, would be easy targets. The Strait of Hormuz, the entrance to the Gulf, the canal through which more than 50% of the world’s oil is shipped, would be closed. What would arise from the ashes?

Some may say that is a price worth paying to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The suggestion is that there is a “window” now that would enable Israel on its own to strike Iran’s nuclear sites. Next year, the “window” would be left open to the US (and the UK) before Iran’s nuclear weapons reached the point of no return.

Such reasoning, if this is what it can be called, is that of the dangerous fool. How crushed and devastated would Iran have to be before it could no longer restart a nuclear programme, even one just involving fissile material as a weapon for terrorists?

(…)

Why attack, or even threaten to attack, a country whose leaders are increasingly worried, more worried, about the state of the economy and internal dissent than any perceived threat from Israel? Iran is a far more sophisticated and divided society than the picture generally painted in the west.

These arguments are all well-placed, and they argue strongly against the kind of pre-emptive war that some in Israel and on the American right seem to favor at this point. We already learned in Iraq what the costs of such a war can be, and there’s every reason to believe that things in Iran would be just as difficult, if not more so. Fortunately, it seems unlikely that we’ll actually move close to war anytime soon. Barry Rubin and Jeff Dunetz note the many reasons why the reports we’re hearing of war by the Israelis are likely much ado about nothing, and I recommend reading their arguments in that regard. As far as the United States, it’s pretty clear that, absent some kind of aggressive move by Iran that demands a response, President Obama is not going to launch a pre-emptive war against Iran before the 2012 elections. For one thing, it would likely tick off the left wing of his party even more than things like the intervention in Libya did. For another, it’s highly unlikely that action against Iran will be as bloodless as the war in Libya was for the the United States. The last thing a President running for re-election wants are pictures of soldiers being buried from a war he started while he’s running for re-election. Finally, with the public overwhelmingly supporting the disengagement from Iraq, and very non-supportive of the war in Afghanistan, it’s unlikely that the public has the stomach for another conflict, especially one that seems as unnecessary as this one.

So, expect to hear another round of war fever being whipped up. It’ll probably be really popular among most of the Republican candidates for President except Ron Paul and Gary Johnson. In the end, though, I doubt it will amount to anything real.

Mike Flynn, the 2-star who blasted military intelligence, is now the 3-star charged with fixing military intelligence.

Kimberly Dozier, AP (“Officer who vowed to fix intel now troubleshooter“)

The Army general who said U.S. military intelligence was failing troops in Afghanistan just got a new job as the top military troubleshooter at the Director of National Intelligence. He also got promoted.

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn wrote a controversial paper called “Fixing Intel,” when he was the chief military officer in Afghanistan. He blasted military intelligence for being too focused on terrorists, neglecting the economic, social and other information troops need to wage an effective counterinsurgency.

Flynn’s new boss, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says hiring the three-star general is like putting the guy who complains about the food in charge of the mess hall. He said now it’s Flynn’s job to fix intel.

This may be the most awesome military leadership story ever. I don’t think that intel is fixable in any real sense. The job’s too hard and the expectations are too high. Further, there are only so many assets and they’re naturally going to get too focused on the thing the commanders, uniformed or civilian, are demanding the answers to.

Flynn has an impressive resume and is likely as qualified as anyone for this task. I wish him luck. He’ll need it.

You can read the January 2010 CNAS working paper FIXING INTEL: A BLUEPRINT FOR MAKING INTELLIGENCE RELEVANT IN AFGHANISTAN in PDF form here.

Reuters informs us today that the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki came about on the recommendation of a secret panel of government officials who have apparently been given the authority to determine who the United States can target for killing without due process of law:

American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

The panel was behind the decision to add Awlaki, a U.S.-born militant preacher with alleged al Qaeda connections, to the target list. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen late last month.

The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process.

Current and former officials said that to the best of their knowledge, Awlaki, who the White House said was a key figure in al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al Qaeda’s Yemen-based affiliate, had been the only American put on a government list targeting people for capture or death due to their alleged involvement with militants

Since this whole thing is cloaked in secrecy, it’s not even clear what role the President, who is supposed to be the man in charge of all of this, actually plays in the process, which leads to the concern that President Obama has essentially delegated authority that he really shouldn’t have the authority to delegate:

The process involves “going through the National Security Council, then it eventually goes to the president, but the National Security Council does the investigation, they have lawyers, they review, they look at the situation, you have input from the military, and also, we make sure that we follow international law,” Ruppersberger said.

Other officials said the role of the president in the process was murkier than what Ruppersberger described.

They said targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC “principals,” meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval. The panel of principals could have different memberships when considering different operational issues, they said.

The officials insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

They confirmed that lawyers, including those in the Justice Department, were consulted before Awlaki’s name was added to the target list.

Two principal legal theories were advanced, an official said: first, that the actions were permitted by Congress when it authorized the use of military forces against militants in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001; and they are permitted under international law if a country is defending itself.

Several officials said that when Awlaki became the first American put on the target list, Obama was not required personally to approve the targeting of a person. But one official said Obama would be notified of the principals’ decision. If he objected, the decision would be nullified, the official said.

A former official said one of the reasons for making senior officials principally responsible for nominating Americans for the target list was to “protect” the president

That would be a little concept called deniability. Remove the decision from the President’s purview, and the argument can be made that he can’t be held responsible. If something goes wrong, someone else will be available to fall on their sword. If legal objections are raised, then the President is theoretically protected from liability. It’s a concept that goes as far back as the assassination of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170 by courtesans of King Henry II, but not on his direct order. It was the reason for the bizarre structure of the Iran-Contra scheme by Admiral John Poindexter and Col. Oliver North so as to shield President Reagan from direct knowledge of what was being done in his name. And, now, it’s apparently being used to compile lists of people to be targeted for killing without any kind of due process. The phrase Star Chamber comes to mind.

Glenn Greenwald is, not surprisingly, disturbed:

So a panel operating out of the White House — that meets in total secrecy, with no known law or rules governing what it can do or how it operates — is empowered to place American citizens on a list to be killed by the CIA, which (by some process nobody knows) eventually makes its way to the President, who is the final Decider.  It is difficult to describe the level of warped authoritarianism necessary to cause someone to lend their support to a twisted Star Chamber like that; I genuinely wonder whether the Good Democrats doing so actually first convince themselves that if this were the Bush White House’s hit list, or if it becomes Rick Perry’s, they would be supportive just the same.  Seriously: if you’re willing to endorse having White House functionaries meet in secret — with no known guidelines, no oversight, no transparency — and compile lists of American citizens to be killed by the CIA without due process, what aren’t you willing to support?

That’s pretty much the question I’ve been asking ever since the news of the original kill order against al-Awlaki become public more than a year ago. The revelations regarding the decision making process, as minimal as they are, only heighten those initial concerns. The idea of that a secret panel of government officials can decide on their own who lives and who dies is troublesome on many levels. Additionally, as Greenwald notes, when decisions like this are made in secret and without any kind of legal oversight it’s very easy for the evidence to be manipulated, and even exaggerated:

What’s crucial to keep in mind is that nobody can see this “evidence” which these anonymous government officials are claiming exists.  It’s in their exclusive possession.  As a result, they’re able to characterize it however they want, to present it in the best possible light to support their pro-assassination position, and to prevent any detection of its flaws.  As any lawyer will tell you, anyone can make a case for anything when they’re in exclusive possession of all the relevant evidence and are the only side from whom one is hearing; all evidence becomes less compelling when it’s subjected to adversarial scrutiny.  Yet even given all those highly favorable pro-government conditions here, it’s obvious — even these officials admit — that the evidence is “partial,” “patchy,” based on “suspicions” rather than knowledge.

And yet the committee, or whatever, you want to call it, decided that evidence was sufficient to put al-Awlaki on a targeted assassination list. Moreover, although the claim is being made now that he is the only person ever to be put on that list, it was reported back in 2010 that there were at least three or four others on the list with him, none of whom have ever been identified. These are actions that are being done in our name, and they’re being done in secret. That’s not something any American should be comfortable with.

There are some times when secrecy is necessary for the good of the country. The planning for the operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden was secret both because the raid could not have succeeded without it, and because we simply couldn’t trust the Pakistanis with the knowledge of what we were about to do. Throughout that operation, though, President Obama was involved in the decision making and the planning of the operation. There are also times when secrecy is used to hide actions that are improper, immoral, or potentially embarrassing. In the case of the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, it seems clear to me that punting this decision off to a committee was not only wrong, but the height of irresponsibility on the President’s part. He ought to be ashamed of himself.

As James Joyner noted yesterday, the FBI arrested Rezwan Ferdaus, a 26 year-old American Muslim from Massachusetts on charges that he was plotting to carry out a terrorist attack against targets in Washington D.C. The details of the plot, as alleged in Ferdaus’s charging documents, make the entire seem thing very serious:

Ferdaus allegedly gave the undercover FBI agents a detailed set of attack plans “with step-by-step instructions as to how he planned to attack the Pentagon and Capitol,” according to the Department of Justice.

The plans focused on the use of three small remote-controlled drone-like aircraft loaded with C-4 plastic explosives, which he planned to fly into the Capitol and the Pentagon using GPS equipment, according to the DOJ.

(…)

Ferdaus’s plan allegedly evolved to include a “ground assault” as well, in which six people would coordinate an automatic weapons attack with the aerial assault and massacre whomever came into their path, according to the DOJ.

As it turned out, all of the overt acts that Ferdaus took toward this goal were took place under the guise of an FBI sting operation during which he was made to believe that he was in contact with al Qaeda agents in the United States who were assisting him in carrying out the plot. Without the assistance of the FBI agents who were guiding him slowly toward further incriminating himself, there seems to be very little evidence that Ferdaus had either the means or the opportunity to carry out any kind of terrorist attack, not the least anything on the scale of what he apparently had dreamed up on his own.

This isn’t the first time that a would-be terrorist has been caught up in FBI sting masquerading as a terrorist plot. Last November, the FBI carried out a high profile arrest of 19-year-old Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a Somali-American who thought he was engaging in a conspiracy to detonate a bomb during the lighting of the public Christmas Tree in Portland, Oregon. Just a month earlier, a Pakistani born American citizen was arrested for plotting to carry out terror attacks on the D.C. subway system, also as the result of an FBI sting operation. And back in 2009, Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19 year old Jordanian immigrant was arrested in connection with a plot to bomb a Dallas skyscraper. In each of these cases, all of the actions that the men arrested took in furtherance of the alleged plots were done with the assistance of FBI agents posing as al Qaeda agents or sympathizers. In fact, in each of these cases there no evidence that any of the men had taken a single step in furtherance of the plot before they had come into contact with the FBI.

I agree with James Joyner that it’s probably a good thing that men like Fedraus are off the street, these types of arrests, and the FBI sting operations that bring them about, do raise the question of whether resources are being properly focused in hunting down domestic terror threats. As Benjamin Friedman notes, the logistical difficulties involved in the type of plot that Fedraus had in mind here, combined with his own limited resources without FBI assistance, suggest that the man was more likely a nominee for a Darwin Award than an imminent terrorist threat. This is a pattern that repeats itself throughout all of these sting operations, and, as Glenn Greenwald notes, it leads one to wonder if we’re using out law enforcement resources wisely:

Wouldn’t the FBI’s resources be better spent on detecting and breaking up actual Terrorist plots — if there are any — rather than manufacturing ones so that they can stop those?  Harboring hatred for the U.S. and wanting to harm it (or any country) is not actually a crime; at most, it’s a Thought Crime.  It doesn’t become a crime until steps are taken to attempt to transform that desire into reality.  There are millions and millions of people who at some point harbor a desire to impose violent harm on others who never do so: perhaps that’s true of a majority of human beings.  Many of them will never act in the absence of the type of highly sophisticated, expert push of which the FBI is uniquely capable.  Is manufacturing criminals — as opposed to finding and stopping actual criminals — really a prudent law enforcement activity?

If your effort is to stop actual attacks and uncover people living in the United States who may actually be in contact with foreign terrorist elements, it strikes me that the answer to Greenwald’s question is no. What are the odds, for example, that any of the four men I noted above would have done anything absent the prompting they received from coming into contact with FBI agents who are pretending to be al Qaeda operatives? Given the fact that none of them had any access to outside resources that didn’t come from the FBI, it’s quite likely that the answer is that those odds are pretty low.

Of course, there is another benefit to these types of operations. A high profile arrest like this reinforces the idea that we remain under imminent threat of another 9/11-style attack at any time. That reinforces the argument that the massive budget of the Department of Homeland Security, and the continued suppression of civil liberties in the name of “security.” Trotting another one of these wanna-be terrorists out every now and then is a good way for Federal anti-terror authorities to justify not just their continued existence, but their expansion, and it’s a great way to shout down those who suggest that, just maybe, it’s time to think about scaling back the authority Congress granted them when it passed the PATRIOT Act with barely enough time to discovery what was actually in it.

Fedraus committed a crime and he’ll likely spend the better part of the next two decades in a Federal Prison because of it, but perhaps we need to ask ourselves whether operations like this are really accomplishing anything.