Two fascinating pieces here on the spatiality of the 'WoT'; according to William Saletan, "IEDs shift the orientation of war from space to
time", and did you know that the jurisdiction of the NYPD now includes Bagram airbase in Afghanistan?Jon ClokeGaWCLoughborough

Human nature: Science, technology, and life.

 

The Jihadsons: Technology lessons from the Iraq
war.

 

By William Saletan

 

Posted Friday,
 Oct. 12, 2007, at 8:03 AM ET

 

 

Last week, in a four-part series, Rick Atkinson of the
Washington Post detailed the U.S.
military's struggle against "improvised explosive devices" in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
So far, IEDs have killed about 2,000 U.S.
troops and wounded 20,000 more. From January to July, Atkinson counts more than
20,000 Iraqi roadside bomb attacks—"one every 15 minutes." To the
extent that we're losing the war, IEDs are a major reason why. What can we
learn from this humbling experience? Here are a few lessons.

 

1. IEDs shift the orientation of war from space to time.
Last year, after being briefed on IEDs, President Bush described them as a
weapon chosen by Iraqi terrorists "to attack us from a safe distance,
without having to face our forces in battle." That's not quite right.
Attacking from a safe distance was the idea behind the previous guerrilla tactic:
sniping. A sniper is hard to hit because he's hidden and far away. But there's
a tradeoff: The safer his distance, the harder it is for him to deliver his
bullet to the right spatial coordinates. The same goes for any artillery.

 

IEDs eliminate this tradeoff. The killer delivers his lethal
charge exactly where he wants it. He achieves this by being at the chosen
spatial coordinates at an earlier point in time. The only coordinate he has to
worry about is temporal: when to set off the blast. He can watch the spot and
detonate his bomb manually, or he can set it to blow automatically when you
drive over it. Insurgents have done both. Some use infrared sensors to detonate
when the first warm object passes overhead. Others time radio signals to take
out approaching convoys. As Atkinson puts it: "A bomb with 100 pounds of
explosives detonating beneath an armored vehicle was equivalent to a direct hit
from a six-gun artillery battery, but with an accuracy no gunner could hope to
achieve."



You can't defeat IEDs in space. You have to fight them in
time. You have to find the killer—the "emplacer"—at the time
coordinate when he's planting the bomb. U.S.
forces have gradually learned this lesson. They're dispatching aerial drones to
catch emplacers in the act. They're planting bugs and surveillance cameras.
They're analyzing audio and video recordings of dangerous areas before they go
in, to make sure there's no time coordinate at which somebody has booby-trapped
the relevant space coordinates.

 

2. Morality is expensive. It's easier to destroy things than
to preserve or build them. You just plant another bomb, slink away, and let the
Americans worry about finding the needles in the haystack. It's even easier
when you don't care whom you kill. With an automatic infrared trigger, you can
be hundreds of miles away when your bomb goes off. If it wipes out a school
bus, so be it. Meanwhile, senior American officers have withheld IED-fighting
equipment, at mortal risk to their own troops, in part because it might damage
Iraqi gas or power lines. That's the price of being nice.

 

Our technology, unlike the enemy's, has to be safe as well
as effective. That takes time and money. Atkinson describes a device called JIN
that was rejected in part because each unit, which cost $800,000, would be
destroyed by any IED it detonated. But that cost pales next to the political
price of U.S.
casualties. The purpose of IEDs has been to kill enough Americans with enough
regularity to make the public demand that our troops come home. The insurgents
are winning because they care less about death than we do.

 

3. Machines are crucial to defeating terrorism. The main
advantage of machines isn't that they're brilliant. It's that they don't bleed.
Four years ago, the United States
had six working military robots. Now it has 6,000. One mobile model detects
explosives from molecules in the air. Others inspect and defuse suspected
bombs—or get blown up trying. We can't stand death, so we replace our soldiers
with lifeless proxies.

 

Spatially, robots are a way to be at the bomber's target
location without really being there. Temporally, they're a way to knock the
bomb off its time coordinate, detonating it before humans arrive. Atkinson
describes how American electronic warfare planes "burn the route" in Iraq
and Afghanistan,
flying over roads and beaming radio signals to set off IEDs before convoys pass
through.

 

4. Simplicity beats complexity. We have $800,000 custom-made
gizmos that take years to design, build, test, and refine. The insurgents have
consumer electronics. They turn artillery shells into bombs. They use
fertilizer compounds, rice bags, and gas and propane canisters to make
explosives. They enlist egg timers, washing-machine dials, cell phones, car key
fobs, walkie-talkies, wireless doorbell buzzers, and toy remote controls as
detonators.

 

One advantage of their approach is that it's cheaper. They
can trade IEDs for robots all day. Another advantage is that it's constantly
evolving. They don't need high-priced military contractors to upgrade their
technology. The toy companies and cell-phone makers do it for them, and U.S.
military countermeasures can't keep up. The third advantage is that simple
technology is easier to teach to new users. You don't need an engineering
degree to become a bomber. You just need to know the basics of key fobs or ham
radio.

 

5. Communications technology is accelerating the enemy's
adaptive speed. Atkinson notes a Marine's complaint that in Iraq,
"The Flintstones are adapting faster than the Jetsons." The complaint
is misconceived. Today, the Flintstones are the Jetsons. In fact, they're the
Jihadsons. Insurgents use the Internet to share bomb recipes, emplacement
methods, and updates on U.S.
countermeasures. They advertise IED services on Web sites, complete with video
of previous blasts. They distribute bomb-making manuals on CDs. One recent
Web-posted manual was titled "How to Disable U.S.
'Joint IED Neutralizer.'" Another was "Military Use of Electronics
Prepared by Your Brother in Allah." Flintstones, meet Jetsons.

 

American military strategists originally thought they could
snuff out IEDs by rounding up the bomb makers. That might have worked if the
insurgents operated like the Pentagon. But they don't. Their simple technology
is easy to teach, and they don't need to bring you to a camp in Afghanistan
to do it. Just click "download," and bang, you've got better intel
than Dick Cheney. According to Bush, the enemy's turnaround from discovering
new U.S.
anti-IED technology to posting instructions on how to defeat it is down to five
days.

 

Bush thinks the lesson of this reaction speed is that we
should suppress information about our technology. But maybe the lesson is that
we can't stop the spread of destructive technology and information, in which
case we'd better concentrate on reducing the number of people who feel
motivated to use it against us. As Atkinson points out, when we closed Moqtada
al-Sadr's newspaper in the spring of 2004, Shiites joined Sunnis as IED
bombers, and the number of attacks almost doubled.

 

6. Humans are still better than machines. To begin with,
we're more agile and discerning. Insurgents can disguise IEDs as rocks,
curbstones, corpses, and car parts. Our machines can't find these bombs. Slight
variations in flight trajectory or wind-blown trash confound our efforts to
digitally identify IED-related activity in aerial images. The best IED
spotters, according to an Army report, are soldiers who have hunted or fished.

 

Humans are also far better at adapting. By watching the
weather and our drone takeoffs, insurgents deduce when it's safe to move. By
observing our convoy precautions, they learn how to work them into bombing
plans. When we jam their detonation frequencies, they monitor our jammers and
switch detonators. Our jammers don't evolve fast enough to keep up with their
innovations.

 

Some of our best countermeasures have been random or ad hoc.
We've reconfigured obsolete jammers, put "hillbilly armor" on our
vehicles, and used truck-mounted toasters and leaf blowers to clear out IEDs.
Our most effective anti-IED technology is a vehicle-mounted bomb decoy whose
distance from the chassis is designed to vary by whim. If the enemy can't
predict our behavior, he can't plan.

 

7. Human limits also limit technology. Some of our
technology fails because it asks too much of us. We designed a drone to be
operated remotely by troops in a trailing vehicle, only to discover that riding
in one vehicle while virtually driving another made soldiers carsick. We built
an IED armor kit that made vehicle doors so heavy soldiers can't open them. We
developed digital surveillance programs that capture so many precise images
that the officers assigned to monitor them become overloaded and zone out.

 

The enemy's simple technology suits human limits; our
complex technology defies them. Our crazy menu of jammers confused our troops,
making them think they were jamming the right frequencies when they weren't.
Our tutorials in wave propagation flummoxed them. When the $800,000 IED
neutralizer flunked real-world tests, the company that built it blamed operator
error, denying that the machine was "a failure in any way." But if
humans can't operate your machine, your machine is a failure.

 

8. Here come the cyborgs. If humans are too precious to hunt
IEDs, and if machines are too obtuse, there's a third option: animals. In fact,
the analog dexterity of animals can be combined with the manipulative power of
digital technology. In the last few years, the military has explored the idea
of bomb-detecting bees monitored by miniature cameras. It has sought remote
control of IED-sniffing dogs through radio receivers attached to their collars.
The bomber operates his IED from a safe distance. Why not do the same with your
dog?

 

Alas, dogs will be dogs, and bees will be bees. The bee idea
fell through because bees soon died, wasting their training in explosives
detection. The dog project never achieved stardom because, as Atkinson
explains, "a working dog grew easily distracted after 30 minutes, not
unlike a soldier watching an aerostat monitor." To overcome these limits,
we'd have to take the cyborg concept a bit further, putting silicon technology
directly into the bodies of animals and, eventually, soldiers. But that's a
story for another war.



A turf war in the battle against terrorism

 

By Dafna Linzer

 

updated 11:50 p.m. ET
March 21, 2008

 

NEW YORK - Not
long after Sept. 11, 2001,
as New York City began to build a
counterterrorism effort to rival those of most nations, Police Commissioner
Raymond W. Kelly decided to put an end to the department's reliance on the FBI
for classified data coming in from Washington.

 

Kelly, who was working to protect the city against another
attack, wanted his own access to the stream of threat reporting concerning New
  York. The solution was to install a
classified-information vault, like the FBI's, at NYPD headquarters.

 

Kelly made the request in the spring of 2002 and waited six
years for an answer. After questions from The Washington Post for this story,
the FBI said it has decided to approve the vault, a specially designed, guarded
room known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.

Story continues below ↓advertisement

 

No other police department in the United
  States has responded to the threats of
terrorism in quite the same way as the NYPD -- or clashed as sharply with the
nation's primary counterterrorism agency, the FBI.

 

A thousand NYPD officers are assigned full time to
operations drawing on traditional missions of the CIA and the FBI. The
department's liaison officers have been deployed from Nairobi
to Singapore,
while its networks of domestic informants stretch across the five boroughs of New
  York City.

 

In the past seven years, Kelly and his deputies have formed
close working relationships with key intelligence agencies and the Department
of Homeland Security. The NYPD has so many native foreign-language speakers that
it lends translators to the Pentagon.

 

But the FBI, protective of turf and disdainful of local
initiative, froze Kelly's department out of two New York-related terrorism
investigations, officials say. When more than 100 top police detectives joined
the FBI's joint terrorism task force, they were not initially permitted to read
the bureau's case files.

 

"People have information, and they want to control
information," Kelly said in an interview at police headquarters, just five
blocks from where the World Trade
 Center once stood.
"Controlling information is power, and they don't want to let it go -- it
is as fundamental as that."

 

Working largely on its own, the NYPD has transformed an
unmarked Brooklyn warehouse into a counterterrorism
center with a national and global reach. In a second facility in Manhattan,
the department runs undercover operations, recruits spies and houses
intelligence analysts.

 

Inside police headquarters is a high-tech situation room
where rows of computer monitors give off a moody blue light and
floor-to-ceiling television screens beam images from around the world. It's
staffed 24 hours a day with officers tracking local and international threats
as well as the movements of as many as a dozen NYPD detectives on foreign
assignments.

 

During a recent interview there, Kelly and David Cohen, the
deputy commissioner for intelligence, were interrupted by a liaison officer
calling from the scene of a suicide bombing in Israel
to report on a new technique employed by the bomber.

 

Successes include the arrest in 2004 of two Muslim men on
charges of plotting to blow up a subway station near the Republican National
Convention, and the arrest and deportation in 2003 of two Iranian men who were
filming a subway track in Queens, Cohen said. The former
probe, in which one of the men pleaded guilty and the other received a 30-year
prison term, was based on a year of undercover work by one of Cohen's top
detectives.

 

 

"Local law enforcement is best placed to gather
ground-level intelligence," said Roger Cressey, the principal deputy to
the counterterrorism chief at the National Security Council from 1999 to
November 2001. "Only when you combine that with what you are getting at
the federal level will you create a holistic picture of the threat. NYPD has
done that and is a model for other major metropolitan cities to follow."

 

For Kelly, the vast and pricey operation fulfills a pledge
to protect the city and provide its 8 million residents with a sense of
security. Kelly, a former Marine and a Customs Service chief in the Clinton
administration, is serving his second stint as commissioner and often chides
himself and the city for not being more aggressive after the 1993 bombing of
the World Trade
 Center.

 

He said he is not prepared to rely entirely on others for
the city's protection. "We just see ourselves very much at risk here, the
top of the target list," he said.

Story continues below ↓advertisement

 

Shut out of local cases

 

In March 2003, working from information gleaned by the CIA,
NYPD detectives and FBI agents investigated and then arrested a Pakistani
national named Uzair Paracha. Investigators said Paracha had been working with
several senior al-Qaeda suspects, including Majid Khan -- whose family lives in
the Baltimore area -- on plots that
included blowing up gas stations on the East Coast.

 

The detectives and agents learned enough to tip off the CIA
to the whereabouts of Paracha's father, a businessman and alleged al-Qaeda
financier who investigators said had met with Osama bin Laden. Four months
after the younger Paracha's arrest, the CIA picked up Saifullah Paracha in Thailand
and then secretly rendered him to a CIA prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

 

NYPD detectives had previously been to Bagram, with Pentagon
permission, to interview detainees connected to New York.
But the Paracha case was treated differently. For the first time, the FBI
blocked detectives from joining a bureau interrogator who was traveling to
Bagram to interview the elder Paracha.

 

The FBI agent in charge in New York,
Joe Billy, said the interrogator would brief detectives on her discoveries, but
she went on extended leave after her return, according to a former NYPD
official. As a result, whatever detail was extracted about the Paracha family's
contacts or intentions in New York
went unreported to the police, the official said.

 

"We wanted to send our lead detective on the case to
Bagram with the FBI agent to talk to Paracha," said James Waters, a deputy
commissioner and the senior ranking NYPD officer in the joint task force. But
"the FBI just didn't want the NYPD there."

 

The ban on NYPD visits to Bagram, where hundreds of
prisoners were detained by the CIA and the U.S.
military, lasted two years and outraged New York
detectives working on the task force, two officials recalled in interviews. By
the time access was restored, Paracha had been moved to the military prison at Guantanamo
  Bay, Cuba. New
  York detectives interviewed him there, years after
his arrest.

 

FBI spokesman John Miller said: "There were a number of
issues and agencies involved in the Paracha case. We worked through it, and
we're all fine now."

 

Just as the Paracha investigation was getting underway, FBI
agents in Ohio were secretly
questioning a Kashmiri-born truck driver named Iyman Faris. On orders from
Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the orchestrator of al-Qaeda's attacks against the United
  States, Faris plotted to help bring down the
Brooklyn Bridge,
prosecutors later alleged.

 

After two scouting trips, Faris reported back to Mohammed
that security in New York was too
tight to carry out the attack, prosecutors said in court documents. In May
2003, two months after Faris was secretly detained, then-Attorney General John
D. Ashcroft held a news conference to announce his indictment for allegedly
planning an al-Qaeda attack in New York.

 

The NYPD was stunned -- the department had not been told
about the plot or Faris's visits to New York.
Although Faris was cooperating with federal agents in Ohio,
the FBI in New York was not
following up on his contacts in the city, where he stayed during his visits and
where he might have tried to buy explosives.

 

For months afterward, top NYPD officials -- Michael Sheehan,
an ex-Army Ranger who had served as the State Department's top counterterrorism
official, and Cohen, a former deputy director of the CIA -- sought access to
Faris so detectives could question him about his trips. They also wanted
Faris's computer, phone and address book. They were turned away.

 

The Justice Department moved swiftly against Faris, and he
was sentenced just six months after his arrest. By the time the NYPD finally
questioned him, he was serving a 20-year sentence, claiming that his guilty
plea had been an error and refusing to cooperate.

 

"We'll never even know what we missed, what leads we
might have pulled," said a senior NYPD official, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity to avoid creating tensions with FBI colleagues.

 

Asked for comment, FBI spokesman Miller said, "We
realigned the way headquarters communicates with the field offices on terrorism
matters, and it's unlikely that glitch could occur today."

 

NYPD's global reach

On a whiteboard in Cohen's office at One
 Police Plaza
is a list of locations that currently trouble him. None of them are in the United
  States, and few of them are noted publicly
by intelligence officials or counterterrorism experts in Washington.

 

Working with detectives posted overseas, undercover officers
in New York and informants, Cohen
has identified towns in South Africa,
Yemen, Egypt,
Jordan and Morocco
that he wants NYPD officers to know. If they arrest anyone who has been to
those towns, he wants to be told.

 

Cohen, the only person to have led the CIA's clandestine
service and its analytical division, still drinks coffee out of a CIA mug. He
said his work with the NYPD has given him a sense of professional freedom and
accomplishment that is hard to achieve in the bureaucratized intelligence world
of Washington.

 

A fifth of Cohen's staff was born overseas. He has 70 Arabic
speakers working on counterterrorism cases, and lends some to the Defense
Department and foreign intelligence agencies.

 

The NYPD's foreign contacts provoked early FBI complaints,
particularly when the department embedded homicide detectives with Britain's
Scotland Yard, Israel's
Shin Bet and other overseas security services.

 

"The FBI had essentially a monopoly on counterterrorism
work nationally, and all of a sudden this local police department shows up and
is beginning to send persons around the world, is developing a system of
listening posts and trip wires, and to use the most benign word I can find,
they were miffed," Cohen said.

 

But recently, officials in the FBI and the NYPD said the
bitterness that plagued their first years after the 2001 attacks has faded. The
NYPD has successfully obtained $100 million in federal funds for its
counterterrorism effort.

 

Both departments credit the improvement to a pivotal
meeting, 2 1/2 years ago, between Kelly and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III
that coincided with a change in the FBI's top staff in New
  York.

 

Mark Mershan, the FBI's assistant director in charge of New
  York, said he and Mueller discussed whether the
NYPD's practice of posting detectives overseas was harming the bureau, and
decided it was not.

 

Mershan said senior officials at the FBI opposed giving the
NYPD its own Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) because it
would have allowed the department to "bypass the FBI and establish its own
links with the intelligence community. Clearly that has happened anyway, so I
have called David Cohen and told him that we will be pleased to certify the
SCIF."

 

Mershan emphasized that the FBI's task force has become highly
cooperative in the past several years. This week, he signed travel orders for a
bureau agent and an NYPD detective to go to the Horn of Africa to investigate a
new lead in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings. "They are going together, as
partners," he said.