Respect My Authoritah!

Monday's Start the Week from BBC Radio 4 is interesting, as it normally is. But what makes this week's edition particularly delightful is Madawi Al-Rasheed's response to Niall Ferguson's attempt at a bit of political analysis on Saudi Arabia's future. Her response to the history professor's, as-ever, self assured and slightly windy assertions on the Kingdom was: "this is absolutely inaccurate". Ferguson is without doubt a great scholar of 19th century economics, but he needs to hear responses like Prof. Al-Rasheed's a bit more often when he starts pontificating on matters he obviously knows less about.

And if you don't get the title.

If you don't know anything about the EU...

Through work and studies I know lots of people who know an awful lot about the EU, (don't worry though - it doesn't necessarily make them weird, or bad dinner guests. Well, not in every case.) but that is very far from the norm. Because of all the areas where the EU has some influence - for good or bad - most people have some opinion on it, but unless you really don't have anyhing to do with your spare time, most people don't know much about how and why the EU is now as it is. I happened to hear an interview with Paul Krugman today; the subject was really the future of the Euro - where he could do his whole Nobel-winning-economist-thang. Obviously this is worth listening to in its own right, but on his way to making those points he gave a very decent, clear and concise history of the EU, and being on American radio - it was aimed at people who are even less likely to know about why and what the EU is than your average European. Well worth 10 minutes of any inquiring mind's time.

A review of "Al Qaeda Weapons of Mass Destruction Threat: Hype or Reality?" by Rolf Mowatt-Larssen

Post-terrorism Paris: soldiers on the streets

I was in Paris last week at a conference about terrorism. The focus of my job has drifted on to other matters in recent years, so it was fun being back in that world, meeting old acquaintances and making new ones. I gave a speech on a report I wrote a couple of years ago - mainly about how the US military conceived of the GSPC, now called AQIM - or al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. I was that sandwich filling on my panel; squeezed between two generals, one of whom was the commanding officer of the GIGN - basically the French SAS. So not intimidating at all...

Anyway, I met a German researcher who was doing work on policy-making around the threat of WMD-terrorism. This is something that I used to work on, and my research turned me into something of sceptic. Hence I was interested when I spotted a report this week called "Al Qaeda Weapons of Mass Destruction Threat: Hype or Reality?" on the website of Harvard's Kennedy School's Belfer Center - a prestigious research establishment. Reading the preface I was made even more interested:

"Rolf Mowatt-Larssen spent more than two dozen years in intelligence, both in the CIA and U.S. Department of Energy. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he led the U.S. government's efforts to determine whether al Qaeda had WMD capabilities and to prevent a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States. Mowatt-Larssen, now a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, has put together a detailed timeline illustrating terrorists' efforts to acquire WMD."

Mowatt-Larssen writes clearly about how the alarmism around WMD-terrorism in the early part of last decade turned many analysts into sceptics; much of the discourse was seen to be hype for political purposes and that "it is difficult to debunk this allegation, given the US government's lack of credibility in the case of Iraqi WMD" (p.8). Although in the US the idea that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and might give them to terrorists became part of the justification for war, this always seemed far fetched to me. I was always interested in the possibilities of non-state groups developing chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) weapons without state sponsorship. Mowatt Larssens attempts to show al Qaeda's interest in CBRN through the 1990s and first half of the 2000s and to argue that this means the treat of WMD-terrorism is real. I think his paper is very unconvincing in its attempt.

Firstly for someone who has spent his career in intelligence his choice of sources (all well footnoted) are odd. He relies significantly on George Tenet's autobiography for many of the more interesting claims. Why Tenet felt he could reveal these intelligence details in his book, but Mowatt-Larssen could only refer to a secondary source, I'm not sure. Presumably Mowatt-Larssen saw the same intelligence whilst in government. Instead we have continual references to the memoir of the, to many discredited, former CIA chief, perhaps not the most obviously credible source. But actually that is a minor problem, the paper also contains factual errors which makes me think it was not proof read by anyone with a moderate knowledge of the subject area. Jemaah Islamiyah is a group based in southeast Asia, not southwest (p.14). Detective Constable Stephen Oake, was a Manchester police officer (not London) murdered in Manchester (not in London) and Kamal Bourgass stabbed him to death, he did not shoot Oake (all mistakes on p.25). In this, the supposed UK "ricin case", no ricin was found. Separate to Bourgass' murder conviction, he was only found guilty of conspiracy to commit a public nuisance not of a terrorist conspiracy to murder, and four co-defendents were found not guilty (charges were dropped against a further four). Mowatt-Larssen maintains Colin Powell's argument made whilst giving evidence to the UN on the eve of the Iraq war, that this was a link between Iraqi-based jihadists and "European terrorist cells" (p.25). Powell couldn't have known the outcome of the trial, still 2 years away when he spoke, but Mowatt-Larssen does not engage with the subsequent findings that there never was any ricin in the UK and despite the British government claiming otherwise there was no link from Bourgass in the UK to al Qaeda in Kabul.

Perhaps even more telling is that Mowatt-Larssen repeats the idea that in 1993 bombing of the WTC in New York, the bomb makers attempted to include cyanide in their bomb. This was a mistake made by a trial judge in a later court proceedings, and the myth was clearly proven false by John Parachini of the RAND corporation in his chapter in the excellent book "Toxic Terror", edited by Jonathan Tucker and published in 2000. I find it very surprising that anyone interested in non-state actors and CBRN weapons would not have read this book.

I've not really looked at this issue for three or four years, but if this Belfer Center paper represents where things have got to, it would seem we are still chasing our tails with only limited and often questionable open sources and as much confusion and mythology as there was half a decade ago.

But if all this a bit depressing, here's a sparkly Eiffel Tower for you:

Consultants

I was until recently of the opinion that taking the piss out of consultants and business people for their ridiculous use of jargon went out of fashion, maybe, five years ago. But today it seems that the Local Government Association in the UK is criticising its own members for now using exactly the same jargon. So perhaps the joke is hip once again. My pondering (blue sky thinking) on this matter was sparked by a day I spent recently with consultant who was organizing (facilitating) some planning (strategizing) for my work (business unit). The consultant appears to be a thoroughly decent person working hard to get a bunch of slightly suspicious and generally snarky researchers to work better together. This is probably a quixotic quest as getting researchers to cooperate is normally the proverbial herding of cats. But anyway, this is just to say that the consultant is a perfectly nice person before I begin to make fun of them. So, the day proved that consultant-speak isn’t just of invented comedic characters like in the Office or similar; they really do actually speak like that.

I got to the point where I just started writing down my favourite phrases. Readers will have to decide what they think the consultant meant by them, I will offer what came to my mind when I heard them. Resulting speculations on the state of my mind are not welcome.

• Firstly we have “stakeholders”. I was willing to let this one fly at first because I do see a use for the term, but it came up again and again (plus its usage is criticised in the article linked above). By the end of the day I came to the conclusion that the word stakeholder should from now on only be used by people who build fences or who are vampire-slayers.
• Next – “breakout groups”. Presumably a breakout group is subdivision of mass prison escape attempt. Think The Great Escape (“Let me come with you. I can see. I can see perfectly…”).
• Then “concrete action points”. These are presumably those big concrete lumps you see in Baghdad that GIs can use to return fire from behind when targeted by insurgent snipers.
• And finally – “collective internalisation”. This is clearly something that should only be attempted by experienced and highly paid porn-stars.

The plague terrorist takedown

(Photo - some dodgy terrorists with really snotty noses, hence massive handkerchiefs)
Some years ago for work I looked in some depth into the idea of "WMD terrorism". In the early part of this decade, Jihadi terrorism seemed unbounded in its brutality, someone had sent weapons grade Anthrax through the US postal service and CNN found footage in an abandoned Afghan camp of al Qaeda people gassing dogs. It all seemed so possible and hence utterly terrifying. But the scary thing was, the more you dug, the more crap you found you were digging through. And I don't mean scary crap, I mean just simple common or garden bullshit. The concept of WMD became virtually meaningless through sloppy over-use in global discourse. I remember hearing a normally sensible and grounded former US marine general on NPR call ricin WMD and just thinking the world was going nuts. Ricin is as much a WMD as bullets are. Some American terrorism 'experts' still go on about "European ricin plots", seemingly unaware that in court case after court case these claim have virtually all turned out to be nothing. American neo-Nazis were messing about with ricin in the 80s, but nobody ever accused them of plotting Armageddon. The collapse of the Bush Administration's claim that the Saddam regime had WMDs, and wanted to give them to al-Qaeda, had a lot to do with the slow retrenchment of the world's media from the story. But every once in while once these stories pops up again like a fart in a bath.

I remember seeing the story about AQIM fighters dying from the plague in Algeria a few weeks ago and didn't pay much attention. I've researched quite a lot on the Algerian situation in the past and soon learnt that vast amounts of what you read about terrorism in that country is crap. The agendas of many different actors make sorting out fact from fiction pretty hard when it comes from Algeria, and the idea that AQIM (the former GSPC) were messing around in mini-biolabs with bubonic plague seemed far-fetched to say the least. What I hadn't realised at the time was that the story came from the Sun. If you read the Sun to get your info on jihadist movements, you deserve everything you get. I noticed just two weeks back that even whilst the bodies were still lying in the open in Victoria, the Sun was suggesting that it might have been terrorist 'what done it' with the bushfires. They won't just scrape the bottom of the barrel, rather attacking it with a chisel and mallet. But whilst reading around on some other North Africa related issues in the last couple of days, I've come across some really quite impressive takedowns of the story by some quality bloggers.

So first off check The Sun Lies for a rather in-depth fisking of the story. The Armchair Generalist has a very good overview of why it is all bollocks and even finds an Algerian doctor writing in a medical journal who notes that the Algerian medical profession thinks it's bollocks too (although I'm sure the good doctor would use slightly more technical language). The Generalist sticks with the story coming back a few weeks later to note that the Algerian health ministry and WHO are also both voting for the "bollocks" option. Jihadica has an interesting post looking at this along with other very unlikely stories from recent times about al Qaeda - Thomas writes:

Let me start by congratulating the journalist on being able to fit the four words “al-Qaida”, “gay”, “rape” and “horror” in one and the same headline in the world’s largest English-language newspaper.

Journalism of that 'quality' - it just makes you proud to be British. OK, so maybe I'm missing a 'not' from that last sentence.

(You might also be interested in this earlier post on related matters)

Terrorism and failed states

I just love it when I'm right.

A couple of years ago it struck me that terrorists groups don't want to operate from failed states despite what we have heard from dozens of western politicians, military leaders and various 'experts' in the media. It's a point I've been trying to argue since. It is obvious really: failed states are awful places to live - ask a Somali refugee - and things don't work there and that includes for terrorists. Secondly when the government of a state fails, other governments stop respecting its sovereignty and feel free to intervene directly: in the early 1990s the Ethiopians repeatedly entered Somalia to kick the crap out of al-Ittihad al-Islami, a radical group they saw as threatening. After the genocide in Rwanda, the new Rwandan government repeatedly sent troops into the Congo to hunt down Interahamwe militias. Pre-9/11, al-Qaeda wasn't in Afghanistan because it had no government, it did - the Taliban was the de facto government. Bin Laden picked it because it had a government he could co-opt.

So I was chuffed to read in the executive summary of the newest report from West Point's excellent Combatting Terrorism Center the following:

Conventional wisdom suggests that Somalia, a failed state, would be an ideal safe haven for al-Qa’ida. Our analysis, however, indicates that weakly governed regions such as coastal Kenya, not failed states like Somalia, provide an environment more conducive to al-Qa’ida’s activities. In Somalia, al-Qa’ida’s members fell victim to many of the same challenges that plague Western interventions in the Horn. They were prone to extortion and betrayal, found themselves trapped in the middle of incomprehensible (to them) clan conflicts, faced suspicion from the indigenous population, had to overcome significant logistical constraints and were subject to the constant risk of Western military interdiction.

It's always great when the big boys agree with you. The whole report can be downloaded here, or look here at some of the other academically original and important work being done at the CTC.

"Why does a major news organization employ such a hack?"

I've done a certain, prominent, "terrorist expert" in the past, now in the light of this morning's climate change post, its time to consider an "expert" sceptic on climate change. Fellow Finnish-based blogger, KGS left a link in the comments suggesting that there is no consensus on climate change. This morning I wrote: "climate change scepticism is now pretty much a political position rather than a credible scientific one", and his link only supports this. The link is to an article on the Competitive Enterprise Institute's (CEI) website and it is written by Steven Milloy. In terms of making the point that climate change denial is a political (and economic) position rather than a scientific one, it doesn't get much better than this.

Milloy writes for Foxnews.com and the quote referring to him serving above as a title to this post, comes from some minor and probably second-rate climate geek called James Hansen, who has some little job directing something unimportant called... ummm... NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies!!! Milloy who has a doctorate in law, (note: NOT climate science) has set himself up as an expert on second-hand smoke not being bad for you whilst taking money from Big Tobacco, and then also on climate change, whilst getting hand outs from oil companies. All-in-all Dr. Hansen is polite in calling him a hack.

The CEI is a think-tank that promotes liberal capitalism. Nothing wrong with that - it's a market place of ideas and they have every right to promote theirs, but they do themselves no favours by having Mr. Milloy on their team if they want to be seen as doing serious work rather than just paid cheerleading for various corporate interests (scroll down a wee bit to get to the part on CEI).

As a by-the-by, I was looking at Mr. Milloy's website Junkscience.com tonight and noticed this wonderful series of Google ads just below the header (click to enlarge).


So after you've finished your rigorous scientific reading on why climate change is all hoax, you can click straight on to Nostradamus to find out what will happen in the future! As ever Google knows so much... ;-)