President Barack Obama (WDCpix)

The enhanced screening of airline passengers from the Muslim world in the aftermath of the failed terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines flight 253 has set off a shockwave of disappointment from supporters of President Obama and surprise from security experts. Few believe, based on experience, that de facto profiling is an effective anti-terrorism tactic. But they do view it as playing into al-Qaeda propaganda that the United States is at war with Islam — propaganda that Obama has attempted to publicly refute.

“The marginal returns in terms of increased security from most new measures to check travelers eight years after 9/11 are likely to be less than their costs in terms of inconvenience, privacy and the fears of innocent Muslims,” said Philip Heymann, a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration who consulted with the Department of Justice and intelligence agencies on efforts to reform interrogations for the Obama team.

[Security1]Throughout his presidential campaign and first year in office, Obama took pains to emphasize that his perspective on counterterrorism did not imply a hostility to Islam — a credible case, given his childhood experience in Indonesia and the baseless rumors that he is actually a Muslim. In recent interviews, Obama aides have said the president considers his Cairo speech to be one of the highlights of his tenure. “America is not — and never will be — at war with Islam,” he told an audience at al-Azhar University in June.

But amid persistent political criticism of Obama’s approach to counterterrorism two weeks after the failed attack, the Department of Homeland Security announced last week that citizens of 14 nations flying to the U.S. will face additional scrutiny on an indefinite basis, including full-body pat-downs and increasing inspection of their carry-on luggage. Only one of those nations, Cuba, is neither a Muslim nation nor one with a substantial Muslim population. Several of those nations, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, have been the subject of extensive efforts by the Obama administration to convince their citizens that the U.S. aims to help them.

The rules presume that citizens of these nations pose the greatest risk of attempting a terrorist attack aboard a plane. But the December 2001 attempt to detonate American Airlines flight 63 came from Richard Reid, a British citizen of Jamaican heritage. Similarly, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was indicted last week for the attempt on Northwest flight 253, was a Nigerian evidently radicalized in Britain. Nigeria has not been on any U.S. watchlist for terror before the issuance of the new Department of Homeland Security rules.

As a result, Bush administration officials Michael Chertoff and Mike Hayden publicly oppose profiling. Abdulmutallab “would not have automatically fit a profile if you were standing next to him in the visa line at Dulles,” Hadyen, a former CIA and NSA director, said on ‘Meet The Press’ on Jan. 3. “One of the things al-Qaeda’s done is deliberately tried to recruit people who don’t fit the stereotype, who are Western in background or appearance,” Chertoff, a former secretary of Homeland Security, said on the same program.

In his remarks Thursday after receiving preliminary reviews about the attack, Obama assured the public that his administration would “not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans,” adding “that is exactly what our adversaries want, and so long as I am President, we will never hand them that victory.” He did not acknowledge any tension between his comments and his administration’s new profiling rules.

But Kalsoom Lakhani, a Pakistani citizen who graduated from American schools and directs a Pakistan-based philanthropic organization, said the new rules make her “nervous to travel.” She pointed to an August poll from Pew finding that Pakistan was an exception to Obama’s global popularity, with only 9 percent of Pakistanis considering the United States to be their partner.

Just two weeks before Abdulmutallab’s failed attack, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton claimed “solidarity with the people of Pakistan” at a gala thrown in New York by a new outreach group, the American Pakistan Foundation. “I believe that you are helping to lay the foundation for a new era of partnership not only between our countries, but between our people,” she continued, themes that her special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, has sounded throughout 2009. Yet Pakistanis attempting to visit the U.S. will now face the mixed signal of being singled out for added scrutiny at airports. (In Cairo, Obama pledged, “we will match promising Muslim students with internships in America.”)

Lakhani questioned whether the administration’s profiling would have negative implications for Muslims living in America as ell. “If Muslim-Americans like [Fort Hood shooter] Nidal Hasan and the five Americans arrested in Pakistan are turning to radical Islam, is that symptomatic of Muslim-Americans feeling out of place and marginalized in America?” she said in an email. “Do we exacerbate that problem by the way we react to these incidents (CNN’s ‘Homegrown Terror’ special for example), acting as if they are a stain on the entire Muslim community or Islam rather than the crimes of individuals who are radicalized on the fringe?”

Mike German, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, added, “If you employ racist policies, it shouldn’t be surprising if that engenders hostility rather than cooperation.”

German, now a legal counsel to the ACLU, said he regretted Obama’s apparent capitulation to a political climate that still features collective suspicion of Muslims. “Our politicians aren’t grown up about it,” he said. “I have tremendous confidence in the intelligence of the American people when they’re given correct information about terrorism.”

We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. (Applause.) And we honor — we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it’s easy, but when it is hard.

He was talking about closing Guantanamo Bay, and CCR brings up Obama’s words in the context of the decision not to repatriate about 40 Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo Bay who are cleared for release. But doesn’t this portion of the Nobel speech have more salience in the context of the new “terror prone nation” no-fly rules, which exhibit all the signs of racial profiling without forthrightly admitting that’s what it is? If you’re from a Muslim country, or a country with a lot of Muslims in it, you’re going to be pulled out of airport security and searched, even though that wouldn’t have caught shoebomber Richard Reid; even though Bush appointees Michael Chertoff and Mike Hayden argued against it on “Meet The Press”; and even though Rahm Emanuel told The New York Times’ Peter Baker that Obama “considers his speech in Cairo to the Islamic world in June central to his efforts to combat terrorism.”

What did he say in Cairo?

America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.  Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

Yes, the dignity and the justice of being pulled out of line and strip searched for a bomb hidden in your anus because you share, in the broadest possible sense, the same faith or heritage as a group of murderous criminals.

Do not misunderstand; this is not just a polite clash of ideas. It is deadly and deadly serious. We need our intelligence and law enforcement communities to gather information about radical movements, identify training, penetrate cells, disrupt, discredit, and eliminate those who would harm Americans and innocents anywhere. But most of the work necessarily is unglamorous, meticulous watching and analyzing. Prior to 2001, too much of the thinking in intelligence agencies had been the Cold War spy-versus-spy maneuvering and now too much of it is the warfighting mentality that replaced it over the past eight years. The failure to share information in 2001 was that the intelligence community was still in the Cold War mentality. The failure to share information this month was that the intelligence community had replaced the Cold War mentality with a warfighting one. If the focus is on “kinetic action” it shapes how you evaluate and value information. How irrelevant the movements of disciples of an extremist must seem when the focus is on assassinating him. How unimportant the denial of a visa must seem if what really counts is warfighting. A watchlist takes on less importance at an airport if the purpose of it is thought to be identifying an assassination target on a distant frontier rather than sidetracking a would-be bomber.

It is Cheney, not President Obama, who has misdiagnosed the problem and gotten us off track.

Meanwhile, Cheney — and his pals at Politico — have even lost Chris Matthews.

Former Bush administration officials gave the generic statement that the PSP was “of value,” to quote FBI Director Robert Mueller’s rather conspicuously understated judgment. But there’s no evidence given in the report about valuable contributions that the PSP uniquely provided to the counterterrorism fight, even when conceding that most of that stuff is classified.

For instance, here’s the Justice Department inspector general’s assessment:

Even though most PSP leads were determined not to have any connection to terrorism, many of the FBI witnesses believed the mere possibility of the leads producing useful information made investigating the leads worthwhile.

However, the DOJ [inspector general] also found that the exceptionally compartmented nature of the program created some frustration for FBI personnel. Some agents and analysts criticized the PSP-derived information they received for providing insufficient details, and the agents who managed counterterrorism programs at the FBI field offices the DOJ [inspector general] visited said the FBI’s process for disseminating PSP-derived information failed to adquately prioritize the information for investigation.

So: diligence on a wild goose chase. I guess that’s something. What was the value added for the National Security Agency?

In May 2009 [former NSA and CIA director] told NSA [inspector general] that the value of the Program was in knowing the NSA signals intelligence activities under the PSP covered an important ‘quadrant’ of terrorist communications. NSA’s Deputy Director echoed Hayden’s comment when he said that the value of the PSP was in the confidence it provided that someone was looking at the seam between the foreign and domestic intelligence domains.

Again: value in checking boxes, but no value in, like, stopping terrorism. What about CIA?

The CIA [inspector general] determined that the CIA did not implement procedures to assess the usefulness of the product of the PSP and did not routinely document whether PSP reporting had contributed to successful counterterrorism operations. CIA officials, including Hayden, told the CIA [inspector general] that PSP reporting was used in conjunction with reporting from other intelligence sources; consequently, it is difficult to attribute the success of particular counterterrorism case exclusively to the PSP.

For this the Bush administration violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and then gutted it, with the help of a Democratic Congress.

–

You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook.

A year later, the report is complete, and I’ve just gotten a copy of it. What does it say? I’m still reading it, but one thing it says is that the CIA’s involvement in the program is deeper than has been reported. And one interesting bonus fact: the report calls the program the “President’s Surveillance Program,” rather than the manipulative “Terrorist Surveillance Program” handle the Bush administration gave the program when it became public in order to put critics in a tight spot. (“What? You oppose surveillance for dangerous terrorists who want to kill your grandchildren????”)

More as I read the report.

Update: Here’s the basis for switching up the nomenclature, and it comes with a point of pride. Two years ago, in July 2007, Paul Kiel and I tried to make sense of then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ congressional testimony about the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” and concluded that there must have been more than one secret surveillance program authorized by President Bush beginning in 2001. Today the IGs’ report bears us out:

The specific intelligence activities that were permitted by the Presidential Authorizations remain highly classified, except that beginning in December 2005 the President and other Administration officials acknowledged that these activities included the interception without a court order of certain international communications where there is “a reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of al-Qai’da, affiliated with al-Qai’da, or a member of an organization affiliated with al-Qai’da.” The President and other Administration officials referred to this publicly disclosed activity as the “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” a convention we follow in this unclassified report. We refer to other intelligence activities under the Presidential Authorizations as the “Other Intelligence Activities.” The specific details of the Other Intelligence Activities remain highly classified, although the Attorney General publicly acknowledged the existence of such activities in August 2007. Together, the Terrorist Surveillance Program and the Other Intelligence Activities comprise the PSP.

–

You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook.

The president, when he issued his executive order tying all American agencies to the Army field manual, also launched a six-month study to determine whether or not the field manual, the Army field manual and the 19 techniques contained therein, are sufficient in all cases facing the Republic. We’re in the midst of that study. To make these techniques public — and Andrea, I must admit, I’ve not seen the redacted version, so I don’t know the final decision — but to the degree to which we make these techniques public, to tell our enemies the outer limits of American interrogation techniques, it moots the study that the president directed, because it effectively takes these techniques off the table.

Well, yes, exactly. The only way this would be problematic is if you believe the Obama administration issued the executive order banning torture as a public cover while it secretly let the CIA return to Bush administration-era practices. Even then, it’s not totally problematic, because we know from numerous public disclosures in the press that the CIA has, for instance, waterboarded people. In that nefarious circumstance, at least Hayden’s point would have some merit, because the administration could always withhold official recognition about what techniques the CIA employed in interrogations. It would be a lie. But still.

But in fact, officials all down the line — from President Obama to Attorney General Holder to CIA Director Panetta — have expressly forsworn torture. They embraced the Army field manual, which is not legally problematic from a Geneva Conventions-compliance perspective, precisely for that reason.  There are important vagaries, because the field manual can’t envision every conceivable case, and that’s what the review is going to address. And since I see that the president has put out a statement in the time it’s taken me to write this post, I’ll just quote Obama:

First, the interrogation techniques described in these memos have already been widely reported. Second, the previous Administration publicly acknowledged portions of the program – and some of the practices – associated with these memos. Third, I have already ended the techniques described in the memos through an Executive Order. Therefore, withholding these memos would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time. This could contribute to an inaccurate accounting of the past, and fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States.

Radical concept.