The shootings in Aurora were preventable. The killer was able to buy his weapons and ammo legally after he’d begun to unravel mentally. It is perfectly plausible that even a basic screening would have raised red flags. But, of course, God forbid we should do anything of the sort.
But there is another mass killing in the news recently, one that was equally preventable, the Ft. Hood shooting. The FBI report on their conduct here is fascinating to read. A couple of things really jumped out at me.
First, the shooter, Nidal Hasan tried to communicate several times with Anwar al-Aulaqi, who all of you know was the American-born radical cleric put on a kill list (and later killed) by President Obama through some sort of secret process. Well, al-Aulaqi is wholly non-committal in his exchanges with Hasan. Hasan clearly tries to bait him into something, but al-Aulaqi only answers him twice, both times blandly. For a firebrand cleric who is accused of planning attacks on the U.S. left and right, he’s surprisingly uninterested in taking advantage of this new contact. I found it odd.
Second, and more importantly, the FBI just dropped the ball. On December 17, 2008, Hasan writes to al-Aulaki:
“There are many soldiers in the us armed forces that have converted to Islam while in the service. There are also many Muslims who join the armed forces for a myriad of different reasons. Some appear to have internal conflicts and have even killed or tried to kill other us soldiers in the name of Islam…. Would you consider someone like [this] or other soldiers that have committed such acts with the goal of helping Muslims/Islam… fighting Jihad and if they did die would you consider them shaheeds.” [typos are Hasan’s]
Now, basically, the question he is posing is this: Service members take an oath when then join, and oath breaking is frowned upon. So he’s asking whether members of the armed forces can still be considered Shahid, if they kill fellow servicemen in the name of Islam despite breaking their oath? Shahid is basically jihadi-speak for, do I still get the 72 virgins?
Now, I’m sorry, but that has to trigger a full investigation. It just has to. What the hell is the point of spying on people and collecting all this email traffic if an Army officer can write to a radical cleric on our watch list and ask whether it is permissible for members of the armed forces to kill fellow servicemen and women without triggering a full investigation?
We have a massive surveillance regime in place, and yet here is a case of a perfectly preventable attack that was missed. Depressing.
Meanwhile, we just put a guy in jail for 17 years for an idiotic “plot” to blow up the Capitol and Pentagon with model airplanes! An absurd plot that was largely driven by FBI provocateurs.
Lavocat
My benighted friend: This is about one thing and one thing only: POWER. “They” have it and “We” do not. Democracy has died and we are its pallbearers.
Now, sit down, shut up, and QUICK, LOOK OVER THERE!
pluege
finish the sentence:
“We have a massive surveillance regime in place” to monitor peaceful protestors on the left. Meanwhile the NRA freaknauts are free to threaten and rampage.
Amir Khalid
This implies, wrongly, that the concept of dying as a Shahid is just some shit that crazy jihadis made up.
ETA: I have also explained in the threads here that “jihad” is a more nuanced concept than implied by the term “jihadi”, as used here to describe the likes of al-Qa’ida.
Mark S.
He probably thought Hasan was a plant.
Bernard Finel
@Amir Khalid: Yes. I promise you I know all of that. It was not my intention to write a dissertation here on the nuances of Islamic law and traditions. I was explaining what Hasan was asking, not trying to define the concepts in a more general way.
Lavocat
Ummmmm.
I KNOW that this is off-topic but it’s important.
Connect these dots, people:
1. The US has a FOURTH carrier group IN THE PERSIAN GULF;
2. Syria is imploding;
3. Iran is a major ally of Syria;
4. The Western community is salivating at the chance to launch an invasion of Syria under humanitarian cover;
5. Israel has plans to invade BOTH Lebanon and Syria in the event the Syrian civil war further destabilizes the region;
6. Israel and the US have already unofficially declared war against Iran via embargo (a clear act of war) and the Stuxnet virus (a clear act of cyberwar);
7. And, just to add a nice Franz Ferdinand fuse to this very nasty bomb: it seems that Ahmadinajad has just intimated that the Bulgarian bus bombing (three cheers for alliteration!) may have been an Iranian operation as payback for recent Israeli & American shenanigans.
I think we are about to see an October surprise come a bit early.
And if polling currently shows a close election, jingoism for war will assuredly change those numbers soon.
Strap yourselves in, folks.
Ruckus
So how much of 1984 do you believe now?
Chris
You’re an al Qaeda leader, an American soldier drops right into your lap out of the blue and offers to conduct attacks for you right in the heart of your enemy’s military. You don’t think you’d find that just a little too convenient?
Amir Khalid
@Mark S.:
I agree. It looks like Hasan emailed al-Awlaki cold. For all al-Awlaki knew, he might have been walking into a trap by taking Hasan at face value. To engage with him, al-Awlaki would need to be sure that Hasan was not a plant and did have something useful to offer. And if he didn’t have the resources to determine that, it was safest just to fob Hasan off with polite nothings.
dance around in your bones
@Ruckus: Heh.
Is the site still all screwy for everybody else? i.e. all sidebars/recent comments etc at the bottom of the page??
Steeplejack? You are my go-to guy for site funkiness…
ETA: seems to be on main page only…whatever.
hildebrand
@Lavocat: If the turmoil in the mideast breaks out in the fall, Obama loses. War jingoism will flow against him.
edmund dantes
Because those ones that they set up and egg on are easier to solve. Plus they make for good copy and help scare people.
There’s a reason they call it security theater. It doesn’t just happen at airports.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris:
Not just a soldier, an officer.
WAAAAAY too convenient.
Villago Delenda Est
@edmund dantes:
Sorta like an episode of Mission:Impossible. My father used to observe that they were all cut and dried; everything would proceed according to the plan until the final act, then something would disrupt the plan, and they’d “improvise” on the spot (all scripted, of course) and the mission would be accomplished.
Things are so much easier to pull off when they’re scripted. Just ask Jack Bauer, or Allan “Ticking Time Bomb Means Torture is OK” Dershowitz.
Mark S.
@hildebrand:
I’m not so sure about that. Most Americans are sick of wars in the Middle East. They could see Obama as the cooler head, since Mitt would undoubtedly adopt the most hawkish position possible.
jwb
@hildebrand: It’s hard to know what happens if war breaks out. About all you can say for certain is that it would scramble the deck in a serious way. Obama would be on TV all the time and be visibly in charge. Every time Romney spoke it would be clear that he was not president. It would become more difficult for Mitt and the GOP to attack the President in their usual manner. (I said difficult, not impossible. Given they way the GOP is wired today, I have no doubt that they would step right up to the line of treasonous behavior and start testing it.)
BigD
The sad truth is relayed to us by Al Arabiya news service and this is that the average Arab reads six pages of text a year. This is around one page of text every sixty days, or like, half a line per day. This is the reason for the rage in the Middle East. We as Americans can do better than this. When gazing inwardly through our navels, we know that all of this is our fault.
Family values do not stop at the Rio Grande.
Haydnseek
@pluege: Exactly. And should you dare suggest that ultra high capacity magazines are useless to civilians, you will be instantly attacked as one more librul that wants to take away our guns. It’s not a slippery slope to these assholes, it’s a near-vertical drop. People are shocked, shocked! when another mass shooting takes place, but it’s a distressingly common event. We’re Americans. It’s what we do.
Anya
@Amir Khalid: When I was a kid, my muslim grandpa who is an aalim, explained to me that you do jehad when you contribute to the public good, i,e, if you set up a volunteer organization, feed the poor, clean the roads or fight for the rights of the dispossessed, etc. He also explained to me that arm resistance is the last resort (you’re only allowed to engage in war in defense of self or others. You should never be the aggressor). So, I am with you on the way the term “Jehad” is abused by the West and by al-Qa’ida types.
Liberty60
I remember reading after the fall of the Berlin Wall, about how the Stasi had the world’s most intensive and pervasive surveillance state. The literally had a file on every single man, woman, and child in East Germany- where they worked, what they did for hobbies, all school transcripts, everything.
Yet when the end came, none were more surprised than the Stasi. They had so much information, they couldn’t process it or make sense of it. Moreover, their political culture rewarded loyalty over competence, which is one of the single most common traits of authoritarian regimes.
After all the high tech whis bangery of the modern surveillance state, it is still just- “round up the usual suspects”.
liberal
@BigD:
What the hell makes you think that reading more would make them less pissed off?
I read a shit-ton, and I’m plenty pissed off at American foreign policy in the Middle East, and I’m not even on the receiving end of the shit.
BigD
Liberal, let me explain;
Reading is so important that it can be positively correlated to good behavior, and this is why Americans should endeavor to increase reading levels in the Middle East. Perhaps we could start with a slogan ‘Give Books a Chance’. I really believe that this will work much better than war. One person can make a difference in something like this. It could be as simple as one or more humans of unspecified gender or sexual orientation driving around in one of these filled with books, and handing them out to the Arab street with sweets. The sweets would serve as a positive reinforcement of the correlation between reading and good behavior.
It is good to read, and be peaceful. With these small steps, like encouraging reading, we can all endeavor to make our world just a little bit better. And if we all pull together, we can accomplish more than conquering armies of superpowers.
Soonergrunt
You’re leaving out the rather obvious problem of the data deluge. There’s so much data that is gathered that it’s utterly mind-boggling, but so little ability to analyze that data and develop targeting information from it appropriately. As a result, only operations that go forward are ones for which the provenance is known, usually because they were originated by law enforcement or by direct contact with informers.
Hassan slips through the cracks not only because Al-Alawki wouldn’t positively engage with him (making him seem less of a threat) but because people who should’ve been ensuring that a man who never should have been allowed to continue as a psychiatrist in military service, his superiors, consistently failed in their responsibility to us, to his patients, and to him.
The Colorado shooter slips through because nobody ever heard of the guy in any relevant manner before. His only violation of the law ever was a speeding ticket.
Shorter Soonergrunt–the weak link in that chain is always the human component.
Dave
Try: If you’re going to spy on us, fuck you, don’t spy on us, it’s fucking illegal.
Chris T.
The obvious solution is to let individuals have their own suitcase nukes.
After all, a suitcase-nuke-armed society is a polite society. A polite, radioactive society. It’s especially polite inside the craters where nobody lives anymore.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Lavocat:
Over half of Iran’s Parliament also voted to close the Straight of Hormuz. Which would cut off 20% of the world’s oil supply (esp. Europe).
Very bad move on their part.
Beauzeaux
@Mark S.: Absolutely. A guy like that has to assume that 99% of the “inquiries” he gets are from FBI/CIA provocateurs. Because they undoubtedly are.
Hasan was just not plausible. al-Awlaki had half the world on his ass. Someone not unbalanced would know that you don’t try to enlist in the army by sending email to the commanding general.
polyorchnid octopunch
I’m going to look at it through a slightly different lens. Look at it from the POV of institutional legitimacy and power. Foiling plots lends the security institutions legitimacy (see, we’re protecting you!). Big successful operations end up giving those institutions more power as a reaction (look at budgets and staffing and loosened constraints after 9/11). So, given those motivations, what do those institutions want to see happen? Foiling “plots” created by those institutions help out their legitimacy. Reaction to events like Hasan give them power as their capabilities are increased and their constraints loosened in the aftermath.
What do you think those institutions are going to do?
brantl
How about the 9/11 asshole, taking flight training, saying, “I don’t need to know how to land.”? An FBI officer had this reported to him, reported it to his seniors and was completely ignored. We have a half assed commitment to security and even less to civil rights. To remain a decent and safe country, we would have to do a shitload better on both fronts.
karen marie
@dance around in your bones: I was up very late last night (west coast) and that happened to me. I thought it was just my funky setup.
Villago Delenda Est
@Beauzeaux:
One of the lessons I learned in the military is the farther up in the hierarchy you rise, the more inundated by information you are, and the more you learn, as a consequence of that inundation, to sift through it and find the information that is relevant to you.
The most successful officers master this skill early on, learning to separate the wheat from the seemingly endless chaff and concentrate on that which is most crucial to the accomplishment of the mission.
The guy at the top will have delegated all that recruitment stuff long ago, and would tune out the sort of thing that Hasan was sending to him. He doesn’t have the time or the inclination to follow up on it.
dance around in your bones
@karen marie:
It’s STILL happening to me…..I’m on the west coast, too.
I swear, if I didn’t love BJ so much….I feel like saying to John Cole “You have NO idea how bad it gets! I wish I knew how to quit you.”
hahahaha…as if.
Jay in Oregon
@Villago Delenda Est:
To me, this is the most glaring reason why Antonin Scalia needs to be tossed off of the Supreme Court; that fucker actually used Jack Bauer—a fictional character—as evidence that torture works[1].
Hello, Scalia? Torture works in TV shows because the writers decide that it fucking does.
[1] Unless you are Jack Bauer and being tortured; then you are too awesome to break.
Svensker
@BigD:
What will reading more do for the average Middle Easterner (other than improve their thinking ability, vocabulary and pleasure, as reading does for most folks) that will help us? If they read more they might find out more about what the US and its allies are doing to ME countries and that would rile them up to an even greater extent.
Our problem with the ME is NOT that their citizens aren’t educated enough. OBL was very educated. Our problem is that we keep poking them with sharp sticks and then are shocked, shocked when they respond negatively.
Before we start our big reading program over there, we might consider stopping bombing, torturing, blockading and screwing around with their governments first.
wrb
@hildebrand:
I’m not sure that is clear.
Obama isn’t Carter. He’s taken pains to show himself to be a decisive bad ass.
Mittens isn’t the jingoists’ ideal.
Remember that Obama gained on McCain when the economic shit hit the fan.
In interesting times people value the cool cucumber
NCSteve
Anyone who thinks Obama would start a war in a desperate attempt to win the election has joined the ranks of those whose worldly-wise cynicism has circled all the way back around to facile naivete. Even granting for purposes of argument that Obama is a sociopath who’d send people to kill and be killed for his own political benefit, he and his people are also smart enough to know that there are no gettable votes that haven’t already been gotten in doing that.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
Our alphabet soup of intelligence agencies were never interested in preventing these kinds of attacks. The FBI is only marginally better (and even then, maybe not)
Just like they weren’t interested in preventing 9/11 (yeah – I said it – fuck you in advance – and fuck the fucking memo)
They are far more interested in furthering the goals of whatever admin happens to be steering the ship (in the USA) gaining power for themselves and their bestest friends, and fondling themselves in the face of immediate danger to the USA.
They are here to harm us, not to help us. Notice that everything they’ve done since (and arguably well before) 9/11 has been about encroaching on the freedoms of the citizens they took an oath to protect.
Fuck the spooks.
Lavocat
@hildebrand: I said we’d be surprised. I didn’t say we’d be happy.
Me, I HATE surprises.
Dennis SGMM
@NCSteve:
Obama may find himself at war without even meaning to be. A mistake, a misunderstanding, or a hostile act by a third party can start it without him. We have packed the Persian Gulf with warships and aircraft, that isn’t helping to cool things down and it raises the possibility, just from an operational standpoint,of something going terribly wrong.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@hildebrand: LOL. I’d love to see mittens play that out.
Aside from the nuts that would vote for a potato so long as it had an “R” after it, let’s take a deep breath, and look at the situation shall, we?
On one hand, you’ve got the guy that brought down OBL.
On the other hand, you’ve got an effete douchecanoe that still thinks we’re fighting the cold war.
The old trope of “R”‘s do better on national defense has been turned on it’s ear. Whether or not this is factually true doesn’t really matter (and I’m not submitting that it isn’t). Politically, Obama has this in the bag. If Rmoney decides to play this line out, it will bury him.
burnspbesq
@Lavocat:
It’s awfully early in the day to go totally delusional.
burnspbesq
If that were true, then why didn’t entrapment work as a defense?
burnspbesq
Fixed to conform to reality.
dubo
@burnspbesq:
Because our judicial department rejects entrapment as a defense even when they agree that entrapment is literally what occurred:
“I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that there would have been no crime here except the government instigated it, planned it and brought it to fruition,” said U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon at the sentencing of four men from Newburgh, N.Y., convicted on terrorism charges. She added, “That does not mean there was no crime.”