According to the letter, all six main actors are heavily armed, organized and aggressively keen to protect and ensure the survival of their respective vested interests, be they fundamentally economic, as in the case of the local administrations run by warlords and the huge and powerful cartels of the business elite, or ideological as in the case of the militants. In the Monitoring Group’s view, economic vested interests, and now the ideological interests of the militants, are driving the opposition to the establishment of a central government. In addition, the pirate groups and the feuding sub-clans operate on the margins of the main contest between the Transitional Federal Government and the other principal antagonists, adding immeasurably to the lawless trauma and widespread instability in Somalia.

Re-Establishment of UN Security Council Monitoring Group on Somalia

Earlier this year, Leslie Rowe, the embassy's second-ranking official, signed off on a cable back to State Department headquarters that detailed grave concerns throughout the region about American efforts in Somalia, according to several people with knowledge of the report.

Around that time, the State Department's political officer for Somalia, Michael Zorick, who had been based in Nairobi, was reassigned to Chad after he sent a cable to Washington criticizing Washington's policy of paying Somali warlords.

Some Africa experts contend that the United States has lost its focus on how to deal with the larger threat of terrorism in East Africa by putting a premium on its effort to capture or kill a small number of high-level suspects.

This article is nominally about Somalia, but it's also about Zarqawi.

State says, "It's a Scene, Stupid," but Defense still sees it as a celebrity culture.

Efforts by C.I.A. Fail in Somalia, Officials Charge

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Coalition forces killed al-Qaida terrorist leader Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi and one of his key lieutenants, spiritual advisor Sheik Abd-Al-Rahman, yesterday, June 7, at 6:15 p.m. in an air strike against an identified, isolated safe house.

“Tips and intelligence from Iraqi senior leaders from his network led forces to al-Zarqawi and some of his associates who were conducting a meeting approximately eight kilometers north of Baqubah when the air strike was launched.

What no one is yet talking about is what else they gathered from the safe house. Clearly they've already been there since the strike, if they're talking about "facial recognition" and fingerprints.

Could this lead to a domino effect and the capture of the insurgency's leadership?

The next few days will be critical in determining how the insurgents respond to being headless. This is a major test for the 'scene'-ness of al Qaeda in Iraq.

Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, Killed Dead

Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in an American airstrike on an isolated safe house north of Baghdad at 6.15 p.m. local time on Wednesday, top U.S. and Iraqi officials said on Thursday.

Seven of Zarqawi's associates had also been killed in the strike.

Leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq Has Been Killed

This report from late May provides background and analysis on the situation in Somalia.

Expect Somalia's frenzied paralysis to continue. At present, there is no political force capable of prevailing on its own and no external power that is willing or has the capacity to impose a solution. The new and complicating thread in the web is the I.C.U. and Islamism.

Look in the near term for persisting waves of tension between the I.C.U. and the A.R.P.C.T., as all the other foreign and domestic forces struggle to position themselves around the central confrontation. The complexity and uncertainty of the political situation ensures that most actors will try to hedge their bets, lowering the chances for conflict resolution. The political configuration of the web has changed and become more fraught, but the familiar tangles and knots remain.

Even without taking the long view, there is not really much "news" in the latest round of reportage from Somalia. One wonders if the upswing in US national coverage is manufactured.

Somalia's Tangled Web Becomes Contorted | PINR

You may remember Terrorist 007, Exposed from a few months ago. That was an article by Rita Katz.

I was interested in whether the New Yorker article had generated any buzz in the press. The story was picked up yesterday by The Middle East Times, a Cyprus based publisher.

The SITE Institute provides an open listing of its publications, including a summary of each item. As a non-profit, SITE seeks donations. If you give $1,000 or more, she will send you a "free" copy of her book -- a $16 value, absolutely free! About the book, Robert Steele says:

Reliable sources in the counter-terrorism world inform me that this book is partly fiction in that the author is systematically integrating the accomplishments of others into her story as if they were her own. I have, however, decided to leave my review intact because she tells a very good story and its key points are right on target. I recommend the book for purchase by all--on balance it is a fine contribution. As I finished the book, I agreed completely with the author's basic premise, to the effect that open source information about US terrorist and charity ties, properly validated, should be posted to the Internet for all to see.

Here's an early article about the brouhaha over her book. She was also interviewed by National Review.

Islamic terrorism is different from organized crime on several levels and it needs to be confronted accordingly. For terrorists, money is not a goal, but rather a means. Islamic terrorists, unlike other criminals, have no value for life, not even their own. Without understanding their motives and way of thinking, they cannot be defeated. Therefore, Islamic terrorism needs to be studied in depth, and it needs to be addressed as a global, long-term problem. Which brings me to the strategic planning of the war on terror. The only way we can win this war is if we, the West, will force countries, governments, and organizations that educate, preach, and fund jihad to stop what they are doing.

Her relationship with the government has been rocky at times, as she related in her book:

"The CIA was investigating me and the SAAR investigators from Green Quest and Customs. The CIA and the FBI investigated everyone who had anything to do with the SAAR investigation... [ Read More (2.8k in body) ]

Decius wrote:

The collection of open source intelligence by private parties is not something that bothers me in the least. ... In theory, you could try to add a hum-int operational aspect ...

The article explains in no uncertain terms that SITE includes HUMINT.

For months, the staffer pretended to be one of the jihadis, joining in chats and watching as other members posted the chilling messages known as "wills," the final sign-offs before martyrdom. The staffer also passed along technical advice on how to keep the message board going. Eventually, he won the confidence of the site’s Webmasters, who were impressed with his computer skills, and he gained access to the true e-mail addresses of the members and other information about them. After monitoring the site for several more days ...

Misrepresentation?

Decius wrote:

I can see that governments might want to keep amateur hum-int operators the hell away from terrorist organizations. ... It's best done by not creating a market for the intel I think, but YMMV. ... Force used without a political process will tend to serve the interests of its funding source irrespective of justice, and this is a slippery slope toward unravelling civil society.

Partly for the sake of brevity, and partly for the sake of argument, my example (over)simplified things by proposing that the operators obtain financial support through an open-source analysis firm. It needn't be that way, or that simple.

You use the term "amateur." I use the term True Believer; to him, there should be no "market." To the extent the market exists anyway, he considers it irrelevant, perhaps even delegitimating. He would generally prefer that there not be a market. His objectives remain pure, that way.

What control does the government really have over the counterterror True Believer? No more than they have over the terrorist, one would think.

Decius wrote:

Eventually this hypothetical reaches the point where in order to proceed you have to commit a crime ... Our society cannot tolerate that from private entities. The evolution of private merc[enary] forces is already troubling in this regard.

About the issue of private mercenary forces: would it be legal for a corporation to hire such a firm to conduct counterstrike operations against a non-state entity who simultaneously attacks it in many different jurisdictions? I suspect not. Yet the hodge-podge of an international response that could conceivably be assembled to meet such a threat would likely be neither timely nor unified, and thus equally unlikely to be effective. So what is a transnational corporation to do?

Society and national governments might be able to exert pressure on formally organized "entities" with substantial above-board business operations. The levers of authority s... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

RE: Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the spying business | The New Yorker

Counterterrorism as vocation. True Believers Wanted.

Rita Katz has a very specific vision of the counterterrorism problem, which she shares with most of the other contractors and consultants who do what she does. They believe that the government has failed to appreciate the threat of Islamic extremism, and that its feel for counterterrorism is all wrong. As they see it, the best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style. Worrying about overestimating the threat is beside the point, because underestimating the threat is so much worse.

It's clear the US government, and much of the international community, seeks to deter, detect, and seize the proceeds of international fundraising for terrorism. But what about private financing of non-governmental counterterror organizations? I'm not talking about desk jockeys. I'm talking about, what if Stratfor went activist, moved to the Sudan, or Somalia, or Yemen, and used the proceeds of a vastly expanded subscription business to fund their own private Directorate of Operations? Would governments indict the subscribers?

If private counterterrorism is deemed terrorism in the eyes of official national governments, how should transnational corporations respond when terrorists begin targeting them directly? To whom do you turn when your infrastructure is simultaneously attacked in 60 countries? Must you appeal to the security council, or wait for all 60 countries (some of whom are not on speaking terms with each other) to agree on an appropriate response? What about when some of those countries are sponsors of the organization perpetrating the attack?

"The problem isn't Rita Katz -- the problem is our political conversation about terrorism," Timothy Naftali says. "Now, after September 11th, there's no incentive for anyone in politics or the media to say the Alaska pipeline's fine, and nobody's cows are going to be poisoned by the terrorists. And so you have these little eruptions of anxiety. But, for me, look, the world is wired now: either you take the risks that come with giving people -- not just the government -- this kind of access to information or you leave them. I take them."

It's the computer security story again. Katz runs a full disclosure mailing list. Privately the Feds are subscribers, even as they complain publicly about training and propriety.

This article probably earns a Silver Star, although it might have been even stronger if it had been a feature in Harper's or The Atlantic, where it could have been twice as long, and could have been less a personal profile and more about the substance and impact of her work.

It's been a year now, and at risk of self-promotion, I'll say it's worth re-reading the Naftali thread.

Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the spying business | The New Yorker

Civil Liberties and National Security
By George Friedman
Stratfor: Geopolitical Intelligence Report - May 16, 2006

USA Today published a story last week stating that U.S. telephone companies (Qwest excepted) had been handing over to the National Security Agency (NSA) logs of phone calls made by American citizens. This has, as one might expect, generated a fair bit of controversy -- with opinions ranging from "It's not only legal but a great idea" to "This proves that Bush arranged 9/11 so he could create a police state." A fine time is being had by all. Therefore, it would seem appropriate to pause and consider the matter.

Let's begin with an obvious question: How in God's name did USA Today find out about a program that had to have been among the most closely held secrets in the intelligence community -- not only because it would be embarrassing if discovered, but also because the entire program could work only if no one knew it was under way? No criticism of USA Today, but we would assume that the newspaper wasn't running covert operations against the NSA. Therefore, someone gave them the story, and whoever gave them the story had to be cleared to know about it. That means that someone with a high security clearance leaked an NSA secret.

Americans have become so numbed to leaks at this point that no one really has discussed the implications of what we are seeing: The intelligence community is hemorrhaging classified information. It's possible that this leak came from one of the few congressmen or senators or staffers on oversight committees who had been briefed on this material -- but either way, we are seeing an extraordinary breakdown among those with access to classified material.

The reason for this latest disclosure is obviously the nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden to be the head of the CIA. Before his appointment as deputy director of national intelligence, Hayden had been the head of the NSA, where he oversaw the collection and data-mining project involving private phone calls. Hayden's nomination to the CIA has come under heavy criticism from Democrats and Republicans, who argue that he is an inappropriate choice for director. The release of the data-mining story to USA Today obviously was intended as a means of shooting down his nomination -- which it might. But what is important here is not the fate of Hayden, but the fact that the Bush administration clearly has lost all control of the intelligence community -- extended to include congressional oversight processes. That is not a trivial point.

At the heart of the argument is not the current breakdown in Washington, but the more significant question of why the NSA was running such a collection program and whether the program represented a serious threat to liberty. The standard debate is divided into two schools: those who regard the threat to liberty as trivial when compared to the security it provides, and those who regard the security it ... [ Read More (1.8k in body) ]

Civil Liberties and National Security

The Moussaoui case is emblematic of the administration's approach to fighting terrorism. It has repeatedly overreached and sought symbolic victories, adopting tactics that have undermined its ability to achieve real security while disregarding less flashy but more effective means of protecting us.

Tough talk in news conferences, overheated charges that evaporate under scrutiny and executions for symbolic purposes will not make us safer. The administration needs to turn away from symbolism and toward substance if it is to have any hope of protecting us from the next attack.

How Not to Fight Terrorism