Spookery: you have to take chances

Much gloating about the brief capture of a couple of SIS officers and their SAS escort in eastern Libya by those too far gone in hatred of the current UK administration to give it any credit at all.

Absent any reliable sources of information about what is going on, a covert mission was certainly worth a try. The West in general and Britain in particular has a great deal to lose if Khaddafi is replaced by a headless monster, as in neighbouring Tunisia, and it is simply common sense to try to get alongside the leading insurgents as soon as possible.

If the British government could back the eventual winner early, the damage to national interests would be greatly reduced. Indeed, British influence might even be enhanced. It helps that the French and Italians were also heavily committed to the Khaddafi regime, and are better targets for residual anti-colonial feeling.

Straight diplomats are seldom any use in a crisis precisely because it is their job to be risk-averse. They are best at drafting bouts de papier, a skill of little relevance once the guns begin to shoot. The main function of an intelligence service is to keep their own government informed about what is bubbling beneath the surface.

When, as in North Africa, apparently monolithic regimes crumble, it is the spooks who have to scramble to find out who is likely to come out on top. It is in the nature of intelligence work that operations, especially when mounted quickly in a fast-changing environment, will sometimes go tits-up. But it is surely better to try and fail than not to try at all.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel

So said Samuel Johnson. According to this NYT story it is the first - at least as it applies to the US Patriot Act, an Orwellian misnomer if ever there was one.

For eight years, government officials turned to Dennis Montgomery, a California computer programmer, for eye-popping technology that he said could catch terrorists. Now, federal officials want nothing to do with him and are going to extraordinary lengths to ensure that his dealings with Washington stay secret.
 
The Justice Department, which in the last few months has gotten protective orders from two federal judges keeping details of the technology out of court, says it is guarding state secrets that would threaten national security if disclosed. But others involved in the case say that what the government is trying to avoid is public embarrassment over evidence that Mr. Montgomery bamboozled federal officials.

Actually, if Samuel Johnson were alive today, he would modify his adage: what he meant was the abuse of patriotism that we now call National Security, in whose name so much evil has and will continue to be done for as long as we refuse to see that governments exaggerate external threats to justify internal repression.

Hat-tip Kinsla

Wikileaks - a quandary for libertarians

In principle, the more the workings of any state are exposed to public scrutiny, the more people will realize that they are ruled by group-thinking mediocrities corrupted by an inflated idea of their own importance. The hope is that this will motivate people to take back the excessive power they have delegated to the state.

In practice any student of politics already knows this, and the rest are divided between those who prefer not to be reminded of their own abdication of  personal responsibility, and those who yearn to be subsumed into a great collective endeavour because their individual existences are so dispiriting.  

This peculiar fellow Assange seems to be waging an info-war exclusively against the United States, as though it were the source of all the evils in the world. Yet he is able to do this only because it is the most open society in the world. One that, at its best, does more good in the world than all the rest put together.

From the treatment of AIDS in Africa to Chilean miners trapped a mile underground, who are you going to call?  Not that you need to - they are usually only too ready to volunteer the help that only they can provide. The rest of the developed world may have the means, but it miserably lacks the capacity to act. 

Does Assange only receive leaks from US sources? If so, is it because it is more careless with its confidential information? Or because the profit to be made from it far outweighs the limited amount of punishment the US can inflict on those responsible?

If Assange does not receive leaks that would embarrass other governments, then the potential profit and loss calculation would seem to predominate. But if he does receive such information, and chooses not make it public, then his pose as a guerrilla warrior for freedom of information is a sham. 

As I said at the beginning - it's a quandary. The most likely result of using the relative openness of US society in order to damage its international standing will be to make it less open. Power will still do what power always has - it will simply do it with less consultation and on the basis of far more limited group-think.

Intelligence failure

Here we go again. Seems my old Firm got taken for a ride by a guy posing as a senior Taleban figure, whose bona fides was apparently confirmed by senior individuals in the Karzai regime's security forces.

Cue the CIA to declare that they have "long been institutionally sceptical" of dealing with "non-marquee Taleban". Long-term being since last January, when they lost eight officers after a man they were cultivating came calling wearing a C-4 waistcoat and blew up their main station in Afghanistan.  

Cue politicians to schedule a judicial inquiry; cue journopukes, who as we know always check their sources so immaculately, to jeer and to demand greater oversight. The Times (£) second leader says:

It is surely time to abandon the Intelligence and Security Committee in its present form and replace it with a joint parliamentary intelligence committee of both houses with its own independent secretariat.

Hello? Earth to the Times: these are people the best and the brightest of whom fall for the most blatant journopuke stings and whose entire existence is one long round of off-the-record briefings to the press. Not to mention going unpunished when they reveal top secret operational details in and outside Parliament, or when exposed as agents of a hostile intelligence service.

As usual, the journopukes want it the way they like their sex: both ways. Intelligence services have to work with walk-ins, and cannot avoid being vulnerable to plausible fraudsters if they are to remain open to the possibility, however remote, that the genuine article might waltz in.

Half a million quid is PEANUTS compared to what a "marquee" Taleban figure could collect.

Also as usual, the MSM is missing the key point: the validation of this turkey by senior figures in the Karzai regime, who must have known he was a fraud. Two possibilities:

1. A desire to embarrass the Brits, who are not only the ancestral enemy but are also militarily as well as politically contemptible in Afghan eyes; or
2. The Karzai regime is stocked entirely with con-men who will flee the country the moment the US pulls out, to live very well on the money they have been salting away in numbered bank accounts, and they are ready to play along with any stupidity the Allies come up with to keep the scam going as long as possible.

 A bit of both, is my bet.

Truth and torture

The Liberal Curmudgeon blog reminds me that there are still people who believe that physical torture, while immoral and repugnant, is also effective.

Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News called attention a few days ago to a little-noticed study by the Intelligence Science Board that found there was no scientific validity to the "coercive" interrogation methods that have been used against "high value" terrorist detainees held by the United States. This is not news to any professional military, intelligence, or law enforcement interrogator.

Indeed it is not. So much so that I recall a briefing at the School of the Americas in Panama where an interrogator with experience in Vietnam flatly stated that information obtained by torture was unreliable, and that the process merely brutalised the torturers. It's possible he was snowing us, but he was quite vehement.

If memory serves, what he said is echoed by Liberal Curmudgeon: what works is a thorough understanding of the enemy's language and culture; hours of preparation for each hour of interview; playing on the prisoner's need to tell his story; and using knowledge to keep the upper hand at all times.

What I did not know at the time and am intrigued to learn is that this was the gospel according to Sherwood Moran, an extremely skilled interrogator who had great success with Japanese POWs during World War II.

Actually, that was not such a big deal: the Japanese had no counter-interrogation training because they were supposed to die rather than surrender, and their shame made them relatively easy subjects. But it occurs to me that the same endogenous pressures operate on captured Islamist terrorists.

Either way, there is no disputing that physical coercion simplifies the subject's psychological situation. He will volunteer nothing and will "read" his interrogators' questions for the answers that will satisfy them. Someone seeking confirmation for what is, in fact, false intelligence, will get it by torture, where more skilled and sympathetic interrogation would uncover the truth.