We Deported Our Best Defenders Against Terrorism
[After the Bush administration woke up to the fact that it had been asleep at the stick (vacationing in Crawford) when it should have been on the alert for the terrorist attack 9/11, it proceeded to shoot itself and us in the foot by brutalizing our best resources for fighting terrorism.
One of our CCNY Muslim students and her parents were picked up suddenly then and stuck in separate prisons. We protested and they were released. But I recall a brother-in-law picketing a prison in Brooklyn where we had incarcerated a number of Muslims who had not yet established green card status in this country -- many had applied as refugees which is a right for any fleeing persecution in a home country and which we freely granted to Cubans and to Russians during the Cold War. Only years later did we learn that we had created a brutal Brooklyn gulag where Muslims held incommunicado were being beaten prior to eventual deportation.
We fought to keep one of our finest students with us at Brooklyn College -- her family, too, had been denied refugee status from a repressive Muslim country after 9/11. We won the battle for her, but she realized that her parents (both doctors) were at risk, as were her American siblings born in this country, so as a 20-year-old she got on the web and discovered that her family could be reestablished safely in Canada where she sadly took them -- she loved pizza and rock and NYC. Now she is back in college there -- and not available with her family to provide support for our efforts to engage the Muslim world with more than randomly fired rockets, bombs, and bullets.
I well recall the Muslim who turned in two bomb-building Brooklyn roommates who were planning a terrorist attack on a subway transfer station through which I pass en route to Brooklyn College (Franklin Avenue) back in the late 1990's -- before one put oneself at risk for admitting any knowledge of or connection with wannabe terrorists.
All across our country we 'farmed out' to county jails on a per diem basis as 'material witnesses' or 'illegal aliens' thousands of Muslims who should have been our best resources in dealing with terrorism. Now, as the Bob Herbert Column implies below, anyone foolish enough to report danger may find him/herself either in prison or shipped back where he/she fled from. And Terence Daly's Op-Ed Times security report on our abysmal failures in Iraq indicates precisely what we did not have available to assist us there -- people who knew the languages and cultures.
I never did see the film which portrayed an American president as a jerk, but we obviously have a C student glad-handing frat president in the the White House where we need someone with smarts enough not to be run by our crazy neocons who can come up with nothing better than launching wars and bombing the hell out of presumed enemies.
We certainly miss our fine student who was studying in Stuyvesant High School on 9/11 across the way from the World Trade Center and who was as horrified as we all were by that event. Our deep loss is Canada's gain.
Ed Kent]
.........................
Op-Ed Columnist
The Truth Puts You in Jail
By BOB HERBERT
Published: August 21, 2006
The problem with the way the United States government dealt with Abdallah Higazy had nothing to do with the fact that he was investigated as a possible participant in the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center.
He was caught in a set of circumstances that was highly suspicious, to say the least. It would have been criminal not to have investigated him.
On the morning of the attack, Mr. Higazy, the son of a former Egyptian diplomat, was in his room on the 51st floor of the Millenium Hilton Hotel, which was across the street from the twin towers. He fled the hotel, along with all the other guests, after the attack. But a Hilton security guard said he found an aviation radio, which could be used to communicate with airborne pilots, in the safe in Mr. Higazy’s room.
When Mr. Higazy returned to the hotel three months later to pick up his belongings, he was arrested by the F.B.I. as a material witness and thrown into solitary confinement. Federal investigators were understandably suspicious, but they had no evidence at all that Mr. Higazy was involved in the terror attack.
And that’s where the government went wrong. In the United States, a free and open society committed to the rule of law, you are not supposed to lock people up — deprive them of their liberty — on mere suspicion.
The government could not link Mr. Higazy to the attack, and yet there he was, trembling in a jail cell, with no reasonable chance of proving that he was innocent.
This was cruel. It was unusual. And it was a blatant abuse of the material witness statute. People arrested as material witnesses are supposed to be just that — witnesses — not criminal suspects. (The witnesses are taken into custody when there is some doubt as to whether their testimony can otherwise be secured.)
When a person is actually arrested for a crime, the government has certain important obligations, including the obligation to provide a prompt arraignment and to demonstrate that there is probable cause that the suspect had committed the offense.
Mr. Higazy was held as a material witness while investigators searched for something to pin on him.
Court records show that eventually Mr. Higazy was coerced into saying that the radio was his by an F.B.I. agent who knew that if he didn’t elicit some kind of admission from the suspect, a judge would most likely set him free. Mr. Higazy said the agent made threats regarding his relatives back in Cairo, saying they would be put at the mercy of Egyptian security, which has a reputation for engaging in torture.
Mr. Higazy’s admission was not truthful, but that didn’t matter. The feds were happy to finally be able to accuse him of a crime. They charged him with lying to federal agents when he said the radio wasn’t his.
The case against Mr. Higazy fell completely apart when a pilot, an American, walked serendipitously into the Millenium Hilton, looking for the aviation radio he had left behind on Sept. 11. (It also turned out that the security guard had lied.) Mr. Higazy’s original story, which he had clung to as long as he felt he could, had been truthful. He was set free.
It’s scary to think about what might have happened to Mr. Higazy if the pilot hadn’t shown up to claim his radio.
What the government ignored in Mr. Higazy’s case and in so many other cases linked to the so-called war on terror, is that when it comes to throwing people in jail, a hunch is not enough. As Jonathan Abady, a lawyer for Mr. Higazy, said:
“The criminal justice system recognizes that before you deprive somebody of liberty in any significant way, you have to have some quantum of proof that they committed a crime, and the government didn’t have it in this case. What they had was a suspicion.”
Once we had voodoo economics. Now, in the age of terror, we have voodoo law enforcement. Mr. Higazy’s case is far from the most egregious. People have disappeared. People have been sent off to foreign lands to be tortured. People have been condemned to secret dungeons run by the C.I.A. People have been put away at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with no hope of being allowed to prove their innocence.
For five years now Americans have been chasing ghosts and shadows, and demanding that they confess to terrorizing us. Who’s terrorizing whom here?
We need to ask ourselves: Do we want a just society? Or are we willing to trade that revolutionary idea for a repressive government that gives us nothing more than the illusion of safety?
........................
Killing Won’t Win This War
By TERENCE J. DALY
Published: August 21, 2006
San Francisco
THREE years into the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, everyone from slicksleeved privates fighting for survival in Ramadi to the echelons above reality at the Pentagon still believes that eliminating insurgents will eliminate the insurgency. They are wrong.
There is a difference between killing insurgents and fighting an insurgency. In three years, the Sunni insurgency has grown from nothing into a force that threatens our national objective of establishing and maintaining a free, independent and united Iraq. During that time, we have fought insurgents with airstrikes, artillery, the courage and tactical excellence of our forces, and new technology worth billions of dollars. We are further from our goal than we were when we started.
Counterinsurgency is about gaining control of the population, not killing or detaining enemy fighters. A properly planned counterinsurgency campaign moves the population, by stages, from reluctant acceptance of the counterinsurgent force to, ideally, full support.
American soldiers deride “winning hearts and minds” as the equivalent of sitting around a campfire singing “Kumbaya.” But in fact it is a sophisticated, multifaceted, even ruthless struggle to wrest control of a population from cunning and often brutal foes. The counterinsurgent must be ready and able to kill insurgents — lots of them — but as a means, not an end.
Counterinsurgency is work better suited to a police force than a military one. Military forces — by tradition, organization, equipment and training — are best at killing people and breaking things. Police organizations, on the other hand, operate with minimum force. They know their job can’t be done from miles away by technology. They are accustomed to face-to-face contact with their adversaries, and they know how to draw street-level information and support from the populace. The police don’t threaten the governments they work under, because they don’t have the firepower to stage coups.
The United States needs a professional police organization specifically for creating and keeping public order in cooperation with American or foreign troops during international peacekeeping operations. It must be able to help the military control indigenous populations in failing states like Haiti or during insurgencies like the one in Falluja.
The force should include light armored cavalry and air cavalry paramilitary patrol units to deal with armed guerillas, as well as linguistically trained and culturally attuned experts for developing and running informants. It should be skilled and professional at screening and debriefing detainees, and at conducting public information and psychological operations. It must be completely transportable by air and accustomed to working effectively with American and local military forces.
Bureaucratic ownership of this force will doubtless be controversial. Because the mission of international peacekeeping entails dealing mostly with civilians, the force would ideally be a civilian organization. But no civilian department is currently structured in a way that seems suitable.
At least initially, the force would most likely fall under the Department of Defense. The establishing legislation should include a fire wall, however, to guard against the tendency of paramilitary units to evolve into pure warriors with berets, boots and bangles.
Crucial to the success of this force is that the American people thoroughly discuss and understand the organization and its mission. Only by having this discussion can we avoid the example of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which combined the Vietnamese National Police with American advisers to root the Viet Cong shadow government out of rural villages. The Phoenix Program was highly effective; because it was supposed to be secret, however, the program was not explained to the American people, and it became impossible to refute charges of torture and assassination. Without the support of the American people, the program lost momentum and died.
The legislation establishing the police force should firmly anchor it in respect for human rights. Its mission will be to advance American ideals of justice and freedom under the law, and it must do so by example as well as word. That will be both difficult and critical in a place like Iraq, where it would have to wrest control of the population from insurgents who regard beheading hostages with chain saws as acceptable.
Stringent population control measures like curfews, random searches, mandatory presentation of identity documents, searches of businesses and residences without warrants and preventive detention would be standing operating procedure. For such measures to be acceptable to the public, they must be based on solid legal ground and enforced fairly, transparently and impartially.
The police are used to functioning within legal restraints. Our armed forces, however, are used to obeying only the laws of war and the United States Uniform Code of Military Justice. Soldiers and marines are trained to respond to force with massive force. To expect them to switch overnight to using force only as permitted by a foreign legal code, enforced and reviewed by foreign magistrates and judges, is quite unrealistic. It could also threaten their survival the next time they have to fight a conventional enemy.
Forcing the round peg of our military, which has no equal in speed, firepower, maneuver and shock action, into the square hole of international law enforcement and population control isn’t working. We need a peacekeeping force to complement our war-fighters, and we need to start building it now.
Terence J. Daly is a retired military intelligence officer and counterinsurgency specialist who served in Vietnam as a province-level adviser.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net
One of our CCNY Muslim students and her parents were picked up suddenly then and stuck in separate prisons. We protested and they were released. But I recall a brother-in-law picketing a prison in Brooklyn where we had incarcerated a number of Muslims who had not yet established green card status in this country -- many had applied as refugees which is a right for any fleeing persecution in a home country and which we freely granted to Cubans and to Russians during the Cold War. Only years later did we learn that we had created a brutal Brooklyn gulag where Muslims held incommunicado were being beaten prior to eventual deportation.
We fought to keep one of our finest students with us at Brooklyn College -- her family, too, had been denied refugee status from a repressive Muslim country after 9/11. We won the battle for her, but she realized that her parents (both doctors) were at risk, as were her American siblings born in this country, so as a 20-year-old she got on the web and discovered that her family could be reestablished safely in Canada where she sadly took them -- she loved pizza and rock and NYC. Now she is back in college there -- and not available with her family to provide support for our efforts to engage the Muslim world with more than randomly fired rockets, bombs, and bullets.
I well recall the Muslim who turned in two bomb-building Brooklyn roommates who were planning a terrorist attack on a subway transfer station through which I pass en route to Brooklyn College (Franklin Avenue) back in the late 1990's -- before one put oneself at risk for admitting any knowledge of or connection with wannabe terrorists.
All across our country we 'farmed out' to county jails on a per diem basis as 'material witnesses' or 'illegal aliens' thousands of Muslims who should have been our best resources in dealing with terrorism. Now, as the Bob Herbert Column implies below, anyone foolish enough to report danger may find him/herself either in prison or shipped back where he/she fled from. And Terence Daly's Op-Ed Times security report on our abysmal failures in Iraq indicates precisely what we did not have available to assist us there -- people who knew the languages and cultures.
I never did see the film which portrayed an American president as a jerk, but we obviously have a C student glad-handing frat president in the the White House where we need someone with smarts enough not to be run by our crazy neocons who can come up with nothing better than launching wars and bombing the hell out of presumed enemies.
We certainly miss our fine student who was studying in Stuyvesant High School on 9/11 across the way from the World Trade Center and who was as horrified as we all were by that event. Our deep loss is Canada's gain.
Ed Kent]
.........................
Op-Ed Columnist
The Truth Puts You in Jail
By BOB HERBERT
Published: August 21, 2006
The problem with the way the United States government dealt with Abdallah Higazy had nothing to do with the fact that he was investigated as a possible participant in the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center.
He was caught in a set of circumstances that was highly suspicious, to say the least. It would have been criminal not to have investigated him.
On the morning of the attack, Mr. Higazy, the son of a former Egyptian diplomat, was in his room on the 51st floor of the Millenium Hilton Hotel, which was across the street from the twin towers. He fled the hotel, along with all the other guests, after the attack. But a Hilton security guard said he found an aviation radio, which could be used to communicate with airborne pilots, in the safe in Mr. Higazy’s room.
When Mr. Higazy returned to the hotel three months later to pick up his belongings, he was arrested by the F.B.I. as a material witness and thrown into solitary confinement. Federal investigators were understandably suspicious, but they had no evidence at all that Mr. Higazy was involved in the terror attack.
And that’s where the government went wrong. In the United States, a free and open society committed to the rule of law, you are not supposed to lock people up — deprive them of their liberty — on mere suspicion.
The government could not link Mr. Higazy to the attack, and yet there he was, trembling in a jail cell, with no reasonable chance of proving that he was innocent.
This was cruel. It was unusual. And it was a blatant abuse of the material witness statute. People arrested as material witnesses are supposed to be just that — witnesses — not criminal suspects. (The witnesses are taken into custody when there is some doubt as to whether their testimony can otherwise be secured.)
When a person is actually arrested for a crime, the government has certain important obligations, including the obligation to provide a prompt arraignment and to demonstrate that there is probable cause that the suspect had committed the offense.
Mr. Higazy was held as a material witness while investigators searched for something to pin on him.
Court records show that eventually Mr. Higazy was coerced into saying that the radio was his by an F.B.I. agent who knew that if he didn’t elicit some kind of admission from the suspect, a judge would most likely set him free. Mr. Higazy said the agent made threats regarding his relatives back in Cairo, saying they would be put at the mercy of Egyptian security, which has a reputation for engaging in torture.
Mr. Higazy’s admission was not truthful, but that didn’t matter. The feds were happy to finally be able to accuse him of a crime. They charged him with lying to federal agents when he said the radio wasn’t his.
The case against Mr. Higazy fell completely apart when a pilot, an American, walked serendipitously into the Millenium Hilton, looking for the aviation radio he had left behind on Sept. 11. (It also turned out that the security guard had lied.) Mr. Higazy’s original story, which he had clung to as long as he felt he could, had been truthful. He was set free.
It’s scary to think about what might have happened to Mr. Higazy if the pilot hadn’t shown up to claim his radio.
What the government ignored in Mr. Higazy’s case and in so many other cases linked to the so-called war on terror, is that when it comes to throwing people in jail, a hunch is not enough. As Jonathan Abady, a lawyer for Mr. Higazy, said:
“The criminal justice system recognizes that before you deprive somebody of liberty in any significant way, you have to have some quantum of proof that they committed a crime, and the government didn’t have it in this case. What they had was a suspicion.”
Once we had voodoo economics. Now, in the age of terror, we have voodoo law enforcement. Mr. Higazy’s case is far from the most egregious. People have disappeared. People have been sent off to foreign lands to be tortured. People have been condemned to secret dungeons run by the C.I.A. People have been put away at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with no hope of being allowed to prove their innocence.
For five years now Americans have been chasing ghosts and shadows, and demanding that they confess to terrorizing us. Who’s terrorizing whom here?
We need to ask ourselves: Do we want a just society? Or are we willing to trade that revolutionary idea for a repressive government that gives us nothing more than the illusion of safety?
........................
Killing Won’t Win This War
By TERENCE J. DALY
Published: August 21, 2006
San Francisco
THREE years into the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, everyone from slicksleeved privates fighting for survival in Ramadi to the echelons above reality at the Pentagon still believes that eliminating insurgents will eliminate the insurgency. They are wrong.
There is a difference between killing insurgents and fighting an insurgency. In three years, the Sunni insurgency has grown from nothing into a force that threatens our national objective of establishing and maintaining a free, independent and united Iraq. During that time, we have fought insurgents with airstrikes, artillery, the courage and tactical excellence of our forces, and new technology worth billions of dollars. We are further from our goal than we were when we started.
Counterinsurgency is about gaining control of the population, not killing or detaining enemy fighters. A properly planned counterinsurgency campaign moves the population, by stages, from reluctant acceptance of the counterinsurgent force to, ideally, full support.
American soldiers deride “winning hearts and minds” as the equivalent of sitting around a campfire singing “Kumbaya.” But in fact it is a sophisticated, multifaceted, even ruthless struggle to wrest control of a population from cunning and often brutal foes. The counterinsurgent must be ready and able to kill insurgents — lots of them — but as a means, not an end.
Counterinsurgency is work better suited to a police force than a military one. Military forces — by tradition, organization, equipment and training — are best at killing people and breaking things. Police organizations, on the other hand, operate with minimum force. They know their job can’t be done from miles away by technology. They are accustomed to face-to-face contact with their adversaries, and they know how to draw street-level information and support from the populace. The police don’t threaten the governments they work under, because they don’t have the firepower to stage coups.
The United States needs a professional police organization specifically for creating and keeping public order in cooperation with American or foreign troops during international peacekeeping operations. It must be able to help the military control indigenous populations in failing states like Haiti or during insurgencies like the one in Falluja.
The force should include light armored cavalry and air cavalry paramilitary patrol units to deal with armed guerillas, as well as linguistically trained and culturally attuned experts for developing and running informants. It should be skilled and professional at screening and debriefing detainees, and at conducting public information and psychological operations. It must be completely transportable by air and accustomed to working effectively with American and local military forces.
Bureaucratic ownership of this force will doubtless be controversial. Because the mission of international peacekeeping entails dealing mostly with civilians, the force would ideally be a civilian organization. But no civilian department is currently structured in a way that seems suitable.
At least initially, the force would most likely fall under the Department of Defense. The establishing legislation should include a fire wall, however, to guard against the tendency of paramilitary units to evolve into pure warriors with berets, boots and bangles.
Crucial to the success of this force is that the American people thoroughly discuss and understand the organization and its mission. Only by having this discussion can we avoid the example of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which combined the Vietnamese National Police with American advisers to root the Viet Cong shadow government out of rural villages. The Phoenix Program was highly effective; because it was supposed to be secret, however, the program was not explained to the American people, and it became impossible to refute charges of torture and assassination. Without the support of the American people, the program lost momentum and died.
The legislation establishing the police force should firmly anchor it in respect for human rights. Its mission will be to advance American ideals of justice and freedom under the law, and it must do so by example as well as word. That will be both difficult and critical in a place like Iraq, where it would have to wrest control of the population from insurgents who regard beheading hostages with chain saws as acceptable.
Stringent population control measures like curfews, random searches, mandatory presentation of identity documents, searches of businesses and residences without warrants and preventive detention would be standing operating procedure. For such measures to be acceptable to the public, they must be based on solid legal ground and enforced fairly, transparently and impartially.
The police are used to functioning within legal restraints. Our armed forces, however, are used to obeying only the laws of war and the United States Uniform Code of Military Justice. Soldiers and marines are trained to respond to force with massive force. To expect them to switch overnight to using force only as permitted by a foreign legal code, enforced and reviewed by foreign magistrates and judges, is quite unrealistic. It could also threaten their survival the next time they have to fight a conventional enemy.
Forcing the round peg of our military, which has no equal in speed, firepower, maneuver and shock action, into the square hole of international law enforcement and population control isn’t working. We need a peacekeeping force to complement our war-fighters, and we need to start building it now.
Terence J. Daly is a retired military intelligence officer and counterinsurgency specialist who served in Vietnam as a province-level adviser.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net
posted by Ed Kent at 8:43 AM
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