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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NickSE who wrote (75583)	2/19/2003 12:12:23 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 281500

I would hate to be Saddam or a member of his family or crowd in a room full of Kurds! I have slight differences of opinion with this "Reason" piece, but overall, unfortunately, it is accurate. 1. Two Strikes, Bottom of the Ninth Let's pretend that the Federal Bureau of Investigation came into being on September 12, 2001. How long would it be reasonable to wait before it got its anti-terror act together? How many utterly absurd blunders would we tolerate before top-level FBI managers were fired and replaced with non-FBI talent? Does two full years and three absurd blunders seem reasonable? If so, we're almost there. The latest Orange Alert is the second major phantom the FBI has chased in recent months, following the mysterious and ultimately non-existent five Arabs who were supposedly set to do evil over the holiday season. Both cases suggest that the bureau hasn't a clue how to complete its counter-terrorism mission. When a terrorist in FBI custody makes claims about future attacks, and those claims result in police with fully-automatic weapons deployed to street corners and cabinet officials advising Americans to construct safe rooms with duct tape and plastic sheeting, that terrorist has successfully committed an act of terror. And the FBI was his unwitting accomplice. A captured terrorist has no conceivable interest in supplying the FBI with accurate information on future attacks. He does, however, have an interest in diverting resources from actual attack plots, scrambling security assets so his cohorts still in the field can observe how they operate, and inducing general panic via grand claims about a "dirty bomb" set to explode in New York or Washington. Therefore, all claims about future acts of terror should be subjected automatically to polygraph examination. Until such claims pass that test, they should not be placed in the great intelligence-collection machine and used to justify a heightened state of alert. The fact that the FBI is not routinely polygraphing terror suspects about their claims indicates that they are likely trying to establish some element of trust or rapport with terrorists. If so, the FBI has fundamentally misunderstood the task at hand. Unlike your basic serial killer or mobster, two species of killer the FBI has a great deal of experience handling, a motivated terrorist has very little incentive to cooperate even obliquely with his interrogators. While he will want to have his cause understood, it is stretch to assume that, like a psycho killer, he craves understanding or admiration from his captors. Nor, like a mob guy, does he want the join the witness protection program. The terrorist views himself as a prisoner of war, and like many POWs, he will continue to look for ways to confound his enemies. The FBI needs to understand this very simple concept and break away from its bureaucratic inertia. A third false alert based on sketchy, untested claims should see FBI Director Robert Mueller and his deputies sacked and replaced with individuals committed to something other than ass-covering and empire-building. reason.com