FDD

This Is Not Even a Close Call (CM)

Sen. Mitch McConnell writes:

[O]n Feb. 16, the nation's terrorist surveillance law expired. At that moment, intelligence officials who spend their days listening in on phone calls between terrorists overseas were legally barred from following new leads without first following outdated and cumbersome warrant procedures — even if neither caller is calling from within the U.S.

The consequences of inaction are real. Today, if someone in a previously unknown terror cell calls an eager new recruit in London, our agents will have to hang up the phone, apply for a warrant and hope for the best.

If a Marine in Iraq captures a terrorist from a previously unidentified terror group, our agents will not be free to call the phone numbers in his laptop right away.

If calls placed to these numbers are routed through U.S. phone lines, our agents will have to apply for a warrant, even though the people on the other end are overseas and the terrorist with the laptop is not an American.

Me: Most Democrats know this is wrong and would cast their votes correctly. The problem is Nancy Pelosi and, one presumes, other House Democratic leaders. Democrats need to put pressure on them – rather than attacking those who are calling attention to this problem.

McConnell’s piece is here.

The Problem With FISA (CM)

Jed Babbin writes:

Put yourself in the boots of a SEAL platoon leader trying to determine if you’re walking into an al-Qaeda ambush.  You probably need -- right now, not ten hours from now -- intelligence about a bunch of guys sitting two kilometers over some hill in Afghanistan.  If any of them may be in contact with anyone in the United States, you have to get a warrant from the FISA court to listen in on his cell phone.

More here.

In Defense of Waterboarding

Mark Bowden, author of “Blackhawk Down” and a longtime student on interrogation methods says that “No one should be prosecuted for waterboarding Abu Zubaydah.” He notes that waterboarding certainly does not inflict pain – in that sense, it is not torture in the physical sense. Instead, it inflicts fear. Is there a valid distinction? He doesn’t quite say. But he adds:

People can be coerced into revealing important, truthful information. … prisoners have throughout recorded time. What works varies for every individual, but in most cases, what works is fear, fear of imprisonment, fear of discomfort, fear of pain, fear of bad things happening to you, fear of bad things happening to those close to you. Some years ago in Israel, in the course of investigating this subject exhaustively, I interviewed Michael Koubi, a master interrogator who has questioned literally thousands of prisoners in a long career with Shin Bet. He said that the prisoner who resisted noncoercive methods was rare, but in those hard cases, fear usually produced results. Fear works better than pain. … It is an ugly business, and it is rightly banned. The interrogators who waterboarded Zubaydah were breaking the law. They knew they were risking their careers and freedom. But if the result of the act itself was a healthy terrorist with a bad memory vs. a terror attack that might kill hundreds or even thousands of people, it is a good outcome. The decision to punish those responsible for producing it is an executive one. Prosecutors and judges are permitted to weigh the circumstances and consider intent.

Which is why I say that waterboarding Zubaydah may have been illegal, but it wasn't wrong.

Bowden’s look at “what was allegedly done to Zubaydah, and why” is here.

 

The Enduring Primacy of National Security (CM)

The Wall Street Journal editorializes that Senators Joseph Lieberman and John McCain have been

stalwarts on Iraq, even when it became unpopular, and despite paying a political price for it. Mr. McCain also argued persuasively for the changes in strategy now known as the surge. In his Friday visit with us, the Senator spoke with authority on all manner of foreign policy. He is a hawk in the Reagan mold on Iran, the larger Middle East and overall defense spending.

Our guess is that this national security record is the main reason for his own political surge. With the success of General David Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, even some conservatives have taken to arguing that foreign and military policy will become less important in 2008. We doubt it. This is still a post-9/11 country, and voters know they will be electing a Commander in Chief in a world that is as dangerous as it was during the height of the Cold War. In an election against any Democrat next year, Mr. McCain would have little trouble winning the security debate.

More here.

The story of Nada Prouty (RWC)

On the subject  of FBI agents, a female former FBI agent who had been recruited to work in counter-terrorism as a covert CIA operations officer, has turned out to be an illegal alien who bought her US citizenship through a sham marriage and falsified other details of her background.

Nada Prouty was caught after she accessed classified files on Hezbollah, apparently looking for the names of relatives in Lebanon.

Prouty was a Lebanese citizen who came to the US in 1990 as a college student.  She then paid an American cash to marry her so she could get citizenship.

Though I’m just guessing at this, I’ll bet she was on a scholarship from the now-dead Rafik Harriri, the rich and very crooked ex-prime minister of Lebanon and remarkable toady to the Saudi Royal family, who sent thousands of Lebanese students to the US over the years.  Nobody has mentioned the name of the American man who took money to marry her but they ought to send him to the slammer, too.

Prouty, who is now 37 years old and lives in Vienna, Virginia with a second husband, became a Special Agent of the FBI in 1999, obtained a top level security clearance, and was assigned to the FBI’s Washington Field Office to investigate crimes abroad.

In June 2003, I’ll bet because of her language skills in Arabic, she joined the CIA’s Covert Operations division and may, or may not –the government hasn’t said, worked undercover.

She had both a full field background investigation with the Bureau and another with the CIA, which she passed, and she was vetted.  She also passed a lie detector test as part of her employment.

It was her attempt to access secret Hezbollah files, for which she had no professional “need to know” that tipped off CIAcounter-intelligence officers, though it took them years to build a case against her.

Prouty was also caught taking classified files home with her.

There is no known evidence that she fed secrets to foreign powers but she has pled guilty in federal court in Detroit to conspiracy, naturalization fraud and other charges.

She will likely be fined and deported to Lebanon though there is a possibility of a prison term. 

Why the government is dithering on that subject, given the seriousness of this breech, is beyond me.  We can hope they have more than an arm up their sleeve.

If you can go to prison for holding a few rocks of crack cocaine, or not paying child support, you sure ought to be able to go to prison for threatening our nation’s national security in this time of war.

Prouty has close relatives in Lebanon, including a sister and brother-in-law who were spotted attending a Hezbollah rally led by the terrorist Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, the ideological leader of Hezbollah. Her family –they are Druze-have been associated in Lebanon with extremist politics. She hs a brother-in-law in Detrroit who has been arrested in a terrorism money-laundering case.

The arrest of Prouty and her conviction raises pretty serious questions about the infiltration of two of America’s primary agencies that investigate and fight terrorism.

“It is hard to imagine a greater threat than the situation where a foreign national uses fraud to obtain citizenship and then based on that fraud, insinuates herself into a sensitive position in the US government,” said the United States Attorney in Detroit about Prouty.

The government says the “investigation is continuing.” 

Sometimes that phrase is meaningless, and just thrown out to deflect pesky questions from reporters, but in this case it well be continuing.

Prouty’s ex-husband and many of her friends were interviewed by the FBI and CIA when they did their background investigations on Prouty years ago.  On its face, it appears that some of them lied for her in their security interviews.  They ought to pay a price for that.

George Bush has not yet named a replacement for one of his best appointments (RWC)

Fran Townsend, whose resignation as White House counterterrorism chief was just announced and becomes effective in the new year, has been one of George Bush's best high-level appointments and her departure will be a genuine loss to the West's struggle against radical Islam.  Fran, 45, is a former federal prosecutor from New York who, despite her diminutive size -she is five feet tall, blonde, with a lovely smile and a cracker-jack sense of humor, is exceptionally tough and very intellectually able. She has gained the respect of the intelligence community over the past 42 months of her tenure, and has labored to make the community work more smoothly together, despite their natural inclination to silent, intense competition.   Fran meets with the president early every morning and plays a significant role in the highly secure live quotidian teleconferences on terrorism that include leaders from 16 different intelligence agencies including the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.   

Back to the Future? (CM)

Danielle Pletka writes:

Early in his term, President Bush jettisoned the crown jewels of the Clinton administration’s foreign policy — the Israeli-Palestinian peace process     and the North Korea Agreed Framework. In each case, experts still disagree about whether he was right to do so. But the fact is that Bill Clinton had gone the extra mile in the Middle East and achieved nothing. And revelations that the North Koreans had been cheating on their 1994 commitment to abandon nuclear weapons made manifest the fraud underlying that “breakthrough.”

Seven years into the Bush presidency, however, what was old is new again.

More here.

British National Security Council (RWC)

On the plus side with the British, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown has plans to form a National Security Council modeled on ours in America.

This is part of Brown’s overhaul of the counter-terrorism work at Whitehall, giving the Prime Minister more control over Britain’s fight against terrorism –a country that has seen deep, pervasive infiltration by radical Islam.

MI5 is currently shadowing and bugging about 2,000 current Islamist extremist suspects. I heard that when I was in London recently and Jonathan Evans, the new director of MI 5 (who took the place of the wonderfully smart and able Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, who retired) confirmed it in a speech the other day. At any given time, MI 5 has more than 30 "active" terrorist cells under observation.