Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

by | Dec 12, 2007 | Off topic

We do, according to this ABC News piece (courtesy of Bruce Schneier):

A teen suspect’s snap decision to secretly record his interrogation with an MP3 player has resulted in a perjury case against a veteran detective and a plea deal for the teen.

Unaware of the recording, Detective Christopher Perino insisted under oath at a trial in April that suspect Erik Crespo wasn’t questioned about a shooting in the Bronx.

But the defense confronted the detective with a transcript it said proved he had spent more than an hour unsuccessfully trying to persuade Crespo to confess.

Perino was arraigned today on 12 counts of first-degree perjury and freed on bail.

Comparing waterboarding stories

by | Dec 11, 2007 | Conflict and security, North America

Like everyone else this morning, I’ve been reading the account of the torture of cpatured AQ operative Abu Zubaydah provided by retired CIA agent John Kiriakou in an exclusive interview with ABC News (full transcript here).  What happened as a result of the waterboarding, asked interviewer Brian Ross?

Kiriakou: He resisted [for] probably 30, 35 seconds….And a short time afterwards, in the next day or so, he told his interrogator that Allah had visit him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate because his cooperation would make it easier on the other brothers who had been captured. And from that day on he answered every question just like I’m sitting here speaking to you.

….Ross: So in your view the water boarding broke him.

Kiriakou: I think it did, yes.

Ross: And did it make a difference in terms of —

Kiriakou: It did. The threat information that he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.

But Kevin Drum, on the ball as ever, remembered that there’s an account of the torture of Abu Zubaydah in Ron Suskind’s terrific account of the war on terror, The One Per Cent Doctrine.  So he looked it up again, and found this account, which begins with what investigators found in Zubaydah’s diary:

“The guy is insane, certifiable, split personality,” [Dan] Coleman told a top official at FBI after a few days reviewing the Zubaydah haul….There was almost nothing “operational” in his portfolio. That was handled by the management team. He wasn’t one of them….”He was like a travel agent, the guy who booked your flights….He was expendable, you know, the greeter….Joe Louis in the lobby of Caesar’s Palace, shaking hands.”

….According to CIA sources, he was water-boarded….He was beaten….He was repeatedly threatened….His medication was withheld. He was bombarded with deafening, continuous noise and harsh lights.

….Under this duress, Zubaydah told them that shopping malls were targeted by al Qaeda….Zubaydah said banks — yes, banks — were a priority….And also supermarkets — al Qaeda was planning to blow up crowded supermarkets, several at one time. People would stop shopping. The nation’s economy would be crippled. And the water system — a target, too. Nuclear plants, naturally. And apartment buildings.

Thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each flavor of target. Of course, if you multiplied by ten, there still wouldn’t be enough public servants in America to surround and secure the supermarkets. Or the banks. But they tried.

So what do we make of the discrepancy?  As Drum notes, it’s the “same guy. CIA sources for both accounts. But diametrically opposite conclusions.”  His conclusion:

I don’t know. But even if waterboarding worked Kiriakou has since decided that it was wrong. Why? “Because we’re Americans, and we’re better than that.”

Update: Kiriakou’s being investigated by the Justice Department for giving ABC the interview.

Top down or bottom up resilience? Don’t ask Nick Clegg

by | Dec 10, 2007 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, UK

Earlier today I went along to the launch of Demos’s new report, National Security for the 21st Century, by Charlie Edwards.  It’s an excellent pamphlet and anyone interested in how governments co-ordinate themselves to deal with complex risks should read it.  Anyway, at the event, Liberal Democrat leadership contender Nick Clegg made a strong call for an end to the “politics of fear” (duly picked up the media), arguing that the public “will come to resent parties and governments who beat the drum of fear most loudly”.  He said:

“In a climate of fear, decisions are taken as a short-term response rather than as part of long-term strategy.  As more and more of these decisions are made, the overall approach becomes less – rather than more – coherent.  And as government lurches from one decision to the next, it succeeds in neither protecting people nor empowering them”.

Well, amen to that.  Instead, Clegg went on, we need a national security strategy “based in part on public engagement, involvement and action … putting power and confidence into people’s hands so they are equipped to tackle danger”.  So, he said,

“If Britain is to be prepared for emergencies of all kinds, I believe we need to re-establish some form of Civil Defence organisation.  And it must be community-based, community-led, and engage people. I want to explore how we can get people to learn skills to serve their community, and share the skills they have, so when emergencies happen – from flooding to a terrorist attack – it isn’t just a small, professional elite who step up, it’s everyone, with their own particular skills.  I will set up a working group to look at how best to structure this sort of Community Resilience Force. And I want to use the principles of openness, engagement and individual action across the board, not just in terms of national security.”

Now, admittedly Clegg’s Community Resilience Force is thin on the detail.  Well, fair enough; he’s in the closing straight of a leadership contest.  But what’s appealing here is the idea of resilience as a bottom-up undertaking.  Clegg seemed tacitly to admit that faced with a really serious system shock – a ‘Black Swan’ event – top-down co-ordination will quickly become overwhelmed: even a competent FEMA would have struggled to cope with Katrina, in other words.  In such circumstances, a resilient citizenry will be the difference between breakdown-and-recovery versus outright collapse (c.f. The Upside of Down). 

Or so I thought.  But then came the questions.  Having spent the weekend reading John Robb’s must-read book Brave New War, I stuck my hand up.  Quoting Robb, I observed that insurgents in countries as disparate as Iraq and Nigeria were proving increasingly adept at identifying ‘systempunkt’ nodes: the critical hubs which, if attacked successfully, risk taking down the entire system through a cascading failure.  There are plenty such points in our power, water, gas, food and financial systems – just look at today’s FT for a snapshot of how much trade into Britain relies on a couple of over-congested ports, Felixstowe and Southampton. 

What would Clegg’s vision of participatory resilience look like in the context of that kind of shock, I wondered? Hmm, said Clegg.  Well, community empowerment wouldn’t really be the point in that kind of context.  That sort of context is more a matter for the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.  Right, I nodded, ignorant of the content of said Act but resolved to look it up at the earliest opportunity.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered this afternoon that not only does the CCA 2004 not appear to be based on participatory resilience, it is in fact the epitome, the quintessence, the very archetype of a top-down approach. 

Once you’re past the (sensible) parts on emergency planning, you find that the part Clegg was referring to is about overhauling Emergency Powers in UK law.  What it says, in essence, is that that in an “emergency” (that’s any event, not necessarily in Britain, which “threatens serious damage” to human welfare or the environment, or “war or terrorism that threatens serious damage to the security of the UK”), then the relevant Secretary of State – that’s any Cabinet member, not just the PM-  can do anything. 

Oh, you think I exaggerate?  Here’s section 22 (1):

Emergency regulations may make any provision which the person making the regulations is satisfied is appropriate for the purpose of preventing, controlling or mitigating an aspect or effect of the emergency in respect of which the regulations are made.

Now, I may not be a politician, but I must admit that I’m struggling slightly to see any particular correlation between (a) this interesting approach to governance and (b) community-based resilience or decentralised, participatory citizenship. If I understand Nick Clegg’s position correctly, then, the executive summary goes something like this:

“Centralised bureaucracies perform badly in conditions of stress, while decentralised citizen-led systems are more robust – except if the conditions of stress are sufficiently stressful, in which case the exact opposite applies.”

Um… glad we got that straight.