Friday, October 19, 2012

A CASE FOR RENEWED VIGILANCE



“AS LONG AS IT TAKES”
 The New York Federal Reserve Bank on Liberty Street



(Friday Oct. 19, 2012, New York City)  Two days ago a Bangladeshi man, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, 21, was arrested after attempting to detonate what he believed to be a 1000 pound bomb outside the Federal Reserve Bank at 33 Liberty Street in Lower Manhattan just about 6 short blocks from the site where the World Trade Center's Twin Towers once proudly stood.  Nafis came to America in January on a student visa and in July made contact with a man he was hoping to enlist in his desire to wage “jihad” allegedly telling this individual he had plans for a terrorist attack.  Nafis was completely unaware that this individual he was trying to recruit to assist in his cause was in fact an FBI informant.   As Nafis and his ‘co-conspirators’, who were undercover FBI Agents, continued to plot, the entire enterprise was now a full-fledged “sting operation”.  “It is important to emphasize that the public was never at risk in this case, because two of the defendant’s ‘accomplices’ were actually an FBI source and an FBI undercover agent,” Mary Galligan, acting head of the FBI’s New York office, said in a statement.

“Terrorists have tried time and again to make New York City their killing field,” New York Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly said yesterday in a statement. Kelly noted that the city has faced 15 terror plots since the 2001 attacks. “Vigilance is our watchword now and into the foreseeable future.” 

This foiled plot is just the latest example of the asymmetry of the terrorist threat.  An individual or a small group of like-minded people are capable of causing death and destruction on an enormous scale as we witnessed on September 11, 2001 and others have lived with for decades around the world.  On its face it appears to be a virtually impossible mission to prevent a terrorist attack in New York City or anywhere in our wide open American society.  It has been through the tireless, valiant efforts of the NYPD and the specialized Intelligence and Counter Terrorism Units as well as the federal intelligence community and cooperation from our allies that we have not been rocked by another successful attack on our soil.  These efforts, combined with a certain degree of luck have kept us safe thus far.  As Commissioner Kelly commented, New York City remains a high value target for terrorists and we must never become complacent or allow our focus and energy to stray. 

TELLING TIME

Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of the terrorist mind for Americans to grasp is that they do not tell time like we do.  The length of their memories, patience and tenacity seem to be completely alien concepts in our incredibly face paced, individualistic, materialistic, somewhat hedonistic culture.  America is also a very “young” Country having only been in existence since 1776.  Many of the terrorist who pose the most clear and present danger to us come from Countries and societies with long histories some stretching back to antiquity.  We have seen ethnic and tribal conflicts centuries’ old flare up in places where central governments are but tokens of authority.  In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union several of the former Soviet states erupted in bitter conflicts over animosities hundreds of years old. 

Many of the most ancient and storied Countries and cultures in the world are experiencing internal strife as modernization and globalization are seen as a threat.  Lands that were literally the cradle of civilization for millennia are now nations struggling to find their place and identity in a world moving at light speed.  Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and their immediate neighbors were for most of recorded history the epicenter of civilization.  There are regions in Afghanistan and Pakistan that, according to one CIA operative who spent time in those areas in October through December 2001, which have essentially remained “unchanged since the days Jesus Christ walked on Earth”.

There are locations throughout the Middle East that are referenced in the Bible, Koran and Torah that have profound significance for three of the major religions: Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam.  Some of these “Holy Sites” are among the most contested parcels of land and have been the source of bitter, bloody “religious” conflicts the world has ever seen.

Now some of these once mighty nations with rich cultural histories are caught in the grip of rapidly changing demographics with the majority of their populations being under the age of 28 years old with staggeringly high unemployment, widespread poverty, disillusionment, and despair.  Technology such as the Internet has exposed these populations to the western world, allowed them to explore the wider world beyond their borders, and to wonder why conditions in their native land is so vastly different than in the West.  There are myriad forces and factors, influences and ideas that have allowed an infinitesimally small number of (mostly) men to lash out using acts of terror as their chosen modus operandi. 

As the award winning, highly respected Iranian journalist currently residing in Pakistan, Bilqees Seema of B4 Media recently wrote, simply referring to Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists as “ Ill-tempered with non-cultured backgrounds; this definition is enough to understand their "intention", in your words "threat". We have to find out the "roots"”.  And she is absolutely correct but, that is another component of what should be a comprehensive approach to the threats to our national security posed by those to whom we, the United States, represents the most significant threat to their homelands, beliefs, faith and independence.
Indeed, our State Department must seriously earnestly address the “roots” of terrorism.  To achieve some broader understanding a more robust concerted active effort must be made as a component of our foreign policy agenda.  This in no way excuses acts of terror; it is merely a statement of fact if we are to minimize the threats before they blossom into active operations. There is a well know albeit twisted logic at the heart of the matter at least regarding the stated intentions of Al Qaeda. 

CAN YOU HEAR US NOW?

The eleven years since September 11, 2001 have produced a voluminous numbers of well researched books, scholarly papers, studies, articles and solid journalistic reporting documenting the genesis of Al Qaeda, its mutation from the CIA backed “mujahedeen” fighting the Soviet Union and ultimately defeating one of the “Super Powers” after 10 long years of fierce fighting.  As the mighty Red Army was forced to retreat, the mujahedeen reveled in their first intoxicating taste of victory and finding proof positive from Allah Himself the righteousness of their cause.  These two rewards proved to be addictive as the opium that grows so freely in the plains and valleys of southern Afghanistan.  They were hooked and hungry, battle tested, tough and ready to take on the next Goliath.

Many of the mujahedeen (Holy Warriors) returned to their native countries bringing with them the skills learned in the battles they fought in Afghanistan.  Those who remained in Afghanistan became Al Qeada and, once the Taliban seized control of that largely fractured, lawless, country in 1996 where tribal, ethnic, and regional bonds never recognized any central government, Al Qaeda had a safe haven from which to plot, plan and train for the next conflict.

In 1996 in a taped interview with ABC television reporter John Miller, Osama bin Laden “declared war” on the United States.  But, apparently, no one was listening.  After a series of successful lethal embassy bombing in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole suddenly Osama bin Laden was on the radar screen of every intelligence agency in the western world and that his declaration of war, once considered the laughable blustering rhetoric of a lunatic living in a cave in the Khyber Pass, it was laughable no more.

Actually the history of Al Qaeda in America goes back to 1990 when radical Jewish Defensive League founder firebrand Meir Kahane was killed in a Manhattan hotel by an Arab gunman in November 1990 after Kahane concluded a speech warning American Jews to emigrate to Israel before it was "too late." [1] ( The government of Israel had previously designated Kahane as a "terrorist)In July 1990 Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, also known as The Blind Sheikh, came to the United States and began preaching in Mosques in Brooklyn, New York and across the Hudson River in Jersey City, New Jersey.  It was members of his ‘congregation' including Ramzi Yousef, who carried out the truck bombing of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993.  Ultimately Yousef was apprehended and extradited back to New York City and, as the FBI helicopter that was transporting him to the Manhattan Federal Detention Center passed over the still standing Twin Towers he told an FBI Agent that “next time” those towers would fall.  And, as we know, fall they did 8 years later.

Ramzi Yousef is also the nephew of the alleged "mastermind" of the 9-11-01 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who has been held at the US Prison at Guantanamo Bay Cuba since his capture in Pakistan in 2003.

UNDERSTANDING VERSUS URGENCY

The desperate need to gain understanding of the dynamics that create men bent on doing us harm is a matter on the international diplomatic level to be engaged in rigorously by the State Department.  That is one prong in this multipronged defensive effort to protect our City and Homeland.  This will require time; a great deal of time utilizing a variety of tactics from negotiations and communications among governments, to providing modest financial and humanitarian aid where we can.

However, in “real time”, the roots of terrorism have little relevance to the day in, day out task of securing New York City.  It is a task the likes of which no other domestic law enforcement agency has become so effective in such a short period of time than NYPD.  The sense of urgency infuses the vigilance they must maintain with an immediacy of purpose; and this immediacy requires tactics and methods of an aggressive nature that often have come under fire in the New York City media and among civil rights groups.  There is no doubt that the efforts to secure our City are laden with thorny legal issues which the NYPD has taken very seriously. 

The NYPD Intelligence Unit headed by former CIA Deputy Director David Cohen works closely with the Department of Justice as well as with the NYC Office of Legal Counsel and NYPD Legal Bureau to assure they are operating within acceptable legal parameters.  The novelty of having a local Police Force so actively engaged in intelligence and counter terrorism has posed unique challenges as they have had to navigate" on the fly", so to speak,  in uncharted, murky waters where the hazards and perils are usually visible on the surface.

In a report issued on October 12, 2011 by STRATFOR Global Intelligence titled “Growing Concern Over the NYPD's Counterterrorism Methods” written By Scott Stewart, the author noted, “The NYPD's counterterrorism and intelligence efforts are still new and developing. As such, they are unconstrained compared to those of the larger legacy organizations at the federal level. At the same time, the department's activities are unprecedented at the local level. As its efforts mature, the pendulum of domestic security and civil liberties will remain in motion, and the NYPD will face new scrutiny in the coming year, including judicial oversight, which is an important standard in American law enforcement. The challenge for New York is finding the correct balance between guarding the lives and protecting the rights of its people.”

ONE DAY AT A TIME

One of the most prescient concise axioms describing the asymmetrical nature of the complexities of the challenges the terrorist threat presents is that “All they need is to be right once, we need to be right 100% of the time.”  So true it is.  It is sometimes akin to the proverbial “needle in the haystack”. In our City of almost 10 million residents, with hundreds of thousands more who come here to work and visit daily, with over 800 miles of subway track winding through tunnels and on elevated tracks, with all our many landmarks, businesses and industries packed densely into 319 square miles across the Five Boroughs, the odds of determined terrorists appear decidedly in their favor.  Numerically, of course, they are; statistically it is not quite as obvious but that is a moot point for some academic’s research years hence.

Out of the total NYPD force of approximately 31,000 Members of Service (MOS) the official numbers of those assigned to the Intelligence and Counter Terrorism Units are relatively closely guarded secrets but it is safe to say that they number an estimated 1500 Officers, Analysts, and other specialists in areas ranging from designing uniquely tailored computer algorithms, to translators fluent in languages such as Farsi, Urdu, Arabaic, and their many dialects.  Back in the 1980’s NYPD had more MOS assigned to fight organized crime and that was a comparatively finite and intimately familiar battleground with most of the adversaries well known.  This puts into stark relief facing those tasked to protect and secure our City.

It is a “war” fought most of the time on a daily basis with the battle zone stable and unchanging in one sense with an amorphous, ethereal potential adversary lurking next door, in plain sight or in the shadows perhaps supported by well concealed slender conduits leading back to places in South Asia, The Subcontinent, somewhere in The “Stans”, The Philippines, the Middle East or God knows where.  Perhaps that slender conduit extends only as far as California, Texas, Michigan or Connecticut.  Who knows?  Who can say?  It is the charge of NYPD to answer those questions every day, one day at a time.


TAGS:  NYPD, NYPD INTELLIGENCE UNIT, COUNTER TERRORISM UNIT, COMMISSIONER RAY KELLY, LEGAL ISSUES ASSOCIATED WITH DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS, AL QAEDA, OSAMA BIN LADEN, MUJAHADEEN, AFGHANISTAN, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, RAMZI YOUSEF, 1993 WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING, MEIR KAHANE, STRATFOR GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE, STATE DEPARTMENT, BILQEES SEEMA,

[1]: Courtesy of Wikipedia

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Copyright The Brooding Cynyx 2012 © All Rights Reserved

Monday, October 15, 2012

POWER OF WE




THERE IS REAL POWER IN “WE”

AS THE WORLD SHRINKS, LESS “THEM” MORE “US”


 WE ARE A GLOBAL COMMUNITY




(Monday October 15, 2012 – Blog Action Day)  Our world has shrunk dramatically.  In less than 20 years we have truly evolved, largely for the better, into a global community more intricately linked than anyone could have anticipated not that long ago.  Technology has given us all access to an amount of information, knowledge, ideas, and data of every conceivable kind fostering exchanges among us - no matter how far flung we might be from each other geographically - to begin to close racial and ethnic divides, to bridge religious misunderstanding, share perspectives and perceptions, opinions and ambitions at a volume and frequency never fully anticipated when the World Wide Web emerged as a novel new media in the early 1990’s.  The “Information Super Highway” has been the cyber conduit creating networks and communities while allowing events occurring in remote locations on our planet to be shared with the wider world in “real time”.

Yes, globalization has its detractors and has had some unintended consequences but overall has, at least its social networks, information and news sharing component, proven tremendously beneficial.  Those of us of a certain age, born and raised in the pre- information age world, marvel at the technology and its capabilities and implications.  We have seen over and over the value of an individual with a phone camera and an Internet connection capturing for all the world to see a heinous crime or injustice. Borders, boundaries have eroded; despots, and demagogues have fallen. There is no way to understatedly express the profound impact of the technology that has significantly  increased our proximity to each other.

Everyone participating in this year’s Blog Action Day is a testament to how our world has changed and will continue to change ever more rapidly.  Once we were lone voices; perhaps concerned citizens, politically active, advocates for certain causes who may have written a letter to the editor of the local newspaper and had to be content with that.  Now we can write and share our causes and advocacy, find like-minded individuals and communities and we are no longer simply lone voices lost in the winds of current events and held captive by the corporate owned “main stream media” who have no vested interest in reporting the truth, allowing alternative opinions to be heard, and are nothing more than tools of governments and moneyed interests who became their masters. 

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Let’s concede the fact that there exists a dark, malicious, and inherently dangerous side to our interconnectivity.  For the purpose of this discussion we'll look only at the upside, taking stock of the infinite benefits our shrinking world allows us, for the first time in human history, to exploit as a means to wield real power as “we”.  The examples of the good social media has done, the light it has cast into dimly lit shadows, the fresh air of new ideas that has blown through windows now open, that had long been closed, grow in significance virtually every 24 hours. Secrets are harder to keep; oppression more difficult to hide, crimes against humanity less likely to be concealed. Famine and deadly outbreaks of disease become news in the never ending always ravenously hungry 24 hour a day news cycle. Satellite phones allow lone physicians in the farther recesses of the Congo and Amazon basins to communicate with colleagues in France, Spain, Paraguay, the United States collaborating from afar for a common purpose.  Time has been reduced by technology, this reduction in time has saved lives, brought much needed aid to refugees and those in desperate need with stunning rapidity.

From the “Arab Spring” of 2011 that toppled repressive regimes to exposing the atrocities in the American run prison, Abu Ghraib, in 2003, “we” are slowly but surely changing our world, demanding transparency from our governments, able to mobilize like-minded people where ever they may be to draw attention to a cause be it disease or disaster, hunger or human rights violations, no issue or event need necessarily transpire in the vacuum of isolation any longer.

A CASE IN POINT : MALALA YOUSAFZAI


     

 


Just last week the world learned of a horror that may have never been known outside the harsh, rugged confines of the Swat Valley in Pakistan.   On Tuesday October 9, masked Taliban gunmen attempted to assassinate a 14 year old school girl simply because she dared to dream, to want an education and to speak out against the vicious militants who cannot abide by such ambitions from a girl.  Two of her classmates were also injured in the attack on the van serving as a school bus.

At the age of 11, Malala Yousafzai took on the Taliban by giving voice to her dreams. As turbaned fighters swept through her town in northwestern Pakistan in 2009, the tiny schoolgirl spoke out about her passion for education — she wanted to become a doctor, she said — and became a symbol of defiance against Taliban subjugation. [1]   While all three survived, but late on Tuesday doctors said that Ms. Yousafzai was in critical condition at a hospital in Peshawar, with a bullet possibly lodged close to her brain.[1]

A Taliban spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, confirmed by phone that Ms. Yousafzai had been the target, calling her crusade for education rights an “obscenity.”

“She has become a symbol of Western culture in the area; she was openly propagating it,” Mr. Ehsan said, adding that if she survived, the militants would certainly try to kill her again. “Let this be a lesson.”[2]

As of earlier today the courageous young women was transported to the United Kingdom for specialized care via a specially equipped air ambulance provided by the United Arab Emirates.  Ms. Yousafzai has demonstrated strength of character and conviction, as well as a depth and breadth of courage that belies her tender age. There have been spontaneous public demonstrations across Pakistan where the people of Pakistan have voiced their outrage at this atrocity.  Yes, it occurred far away from where “we” sit but “we” knew about it within hours.  We all should pray,  offer our intentions, thoughts or express our support as we each chose to for this brave member of our global community clinging to life.


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The statistics feature of Blogger allows us to  not only track our audience but also see how they find our Blog, what links and search engines bring them to us, and where they are located.  We have readers in the United States and our neighbor to the north, Canada as well as in Russia, Turkey, England, China, Indonesia, The Netherlands, Belgium, Estonia, and Australia, just to mention a few in no particular order.  If there is not tremendous untapped energy and power from this interconnectivity than we all might be missing the point.

The United States exports elements (good and bad) of our culture and, in return, the free flow of ideas and thoughts, the establishment of cyber relationships becomes a self-perpetuating series of intertwined feedback loops.  We have come a long way yet we need to travel so much further.  All we have are each other.  We are not governments or regimes.  We do not occupy seats at the United Nations or command militaries or militias. Nor should we want to.  But we each have a voice and together, our voices uniting for various causes, from diverse and disparate places, making connections never before possible, we can enact change.  We can be heard.  We must be heard.  We will be heard.


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The Brooding Cynyx thank the organizers of BLOG ACTION DAY 2012 and all who have taken the time to participate.  We are immensely proud and feel privileged to have been a part, albeit a small, small part, in this movement far larger than anyone one of US.  It is all about the POWER OF WE!




TAGS: BLOG ACTION DAY 2012, THE POWER OF WE, OUR SHRINKING WORLD, THE GLOBAL COMMUNITY, MORE “US” LESS “THEM”, SHARING IDEAS, OPINIONS AND KNOWLEDGE, TECHNOLOGY, SOCIAL MEDIA

[1], [2]; Compliments of New York Times

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Copyright The Brooding Cynyx 2012 © All Rights Reserved