‘Beyond the Manhunts: How to Stop Terror’ – a GPS special premieres this Sunday at 10 a.m. & 1 p.m. ET
On GPS this Sunday: ‘Beyond the Manhunts: How to Stop Terror’ – an in-depth look at how U.S. intelligence is working at home and abroad.
Fareed explores a number of key issues: The hunt for Osama bin Laden, the state of al Qaeda, the morality of drone strikes, and the threat of lone wolves striking the U.S. homeland. Expert voices include former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden, and former CIA Counter-terrorism chief Robert Grenier.
“It's very easy, when you get out on that slippery slope, to say…well here we are, we shouldn't just be focusing only on the international terrorists,” Grenier says. “What about the people who are supporting them? But when we take the next step and we start attacking them as an affiliated group, as though they were international terrorists themselves, we’re inviting a lot of trouble.”
By William L. Tafoya, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: William L. Tafoya is a retired FBI Special Agent and professor and director of Information Security & Protection at the University of New Haven. The views expressed are his own.
When confronted by a sudden, unexpected high level of stress and overwhelming anguish, our brain employs a coping mechanism that suppresses the experience long enough to enable us to regain control. This capacity kicks in automatically to prevent us being paralyzed, unable to move or speak.
But because the same experience can be perceived differently depending on the individual, each of us responds in a very different way. Some of us will run when confronted by a challenge, while for others, the brain will also try to block something out altogether when we do not understand what is going on. But putting off dealing with something does not resolve it – a fact that U.S. policy makers would do well to consider.
Although the computer was around before, it was not until 1959, when Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce simultaneously but independently invented the integrated circuit – the computer chip – that the Information Age truly began. Since that breakthrough, every facet of our lives has been spinning faster and faster in the direction of total dependence on information systems.
By Richard Wike, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Richard Wike is associate director at the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. You can follow him @RichardWike. The views expressed are his own.
Last Saturday, three people were killed and more than 30 injured when two bombs exploded near the headquarters of the Muttahida Quami Movement, or MQM, a leading political party in Karachi, Pakistan. It was yet another tragic incident in a campaign season plagued by violence that has seen dozens killed. As the country prepares for this weekend’s elections, the Taliban has significantly stepped up its attacks. And no matter which party emerges victorious from the May 11 poll, it will have to answer to a public that is increasingly worried about the threat extremism poses to the Pakistani state.
Pakistani fears about extremism had actually been on the wane over the last few years. The high mark of concern was 2009, when the Taliban gained control of the Swat Valley and neighboring areas within 100 miles of the nation’s capital Islamabad. In a spring 2009 Pew Research Center poll, 57 percent of Pakistanis described the Taliban as a very serious threat to the country. But after the Pakistani military forced a Taliban retreat, fears declined, and by 2012 a little more than a third of Pakistanis held this view.
‘Beyond the Manhunts: How to Stop Terror’ – a GPS special premieres this Sunday at 10 a.m. & 1 p.m. ET
By Fareed Zakaria
We are now a little more than three weeks from the Marathon day bombings in Boston, a good time to ask ourselves, what did it tell us about the future of terrorism? What is the nature of the threat we face – and are we prepared for it?
First, Boston was not the kind of attack that we have worried about and planned for in the last decades. Al Qaeda, the group that planned and directed the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, then the attack of the American destroyer, USS Cole, and then the World Trade Center, was an organized, well-financed group with deep roots in a few countries, strategic leaders, clever planners, and fanatical supporters. That group is a shadow of its former self, battered by ten years in which Western and allied governments have attacked its leaders, tracked its money, and followed its trail. Perhaps most important, as it practiced terrorism in more countries, it lost any political support or sympathy it had in the Muslim world.
Indeed, before Osama bin Laden died, he wrote about al Qaeda's reduced fortunes. “He was very aware that the al Qaeda brand was in deep trouble,” terrorism analyst Peter Bergen notes. “He was advising other groups not to adopt the al Qaeda brand because it would be bad for fundraising, would attract a lot of negative attention.”
By Fareed Zakaria
This past weekend’s massacre in Syria “suggests that sectarian cleansing is not being conducted for the purpose of establishing a potential state but for other strategic reasons to ensure the flow of Alawite fighters from and into this area,” suggests Hassan Hassan in The National.
“As the rebels close in on the coastline, the regime probably feels that such massacres will deepen sectarian tensions and pit Sunni and Alawites against each other, thereby convincing the Alawites they need to fight alongside the Assad regime for their survival.
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All those charts showing China's economy surging past the US by 2030, or 2025, or even 2017, could start to look very credulous, writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Telegraph. “China may not surpass the US this century.”
“As of last year U.S. GDP was roughly $15.7 trillion, compared to $8 trillion for China on a nominal exchange rate basis, the measure that matters for gauging economic power. China’s output is 75 percent of U.S. levels on a purchasing power parity basis but even on this measure the Chinese ‘sorpasso’ is looking less certain. Clyde Prestowitz, an arch U.S. ‘declinist’ who has just thrown in the towel, says China may ‘never’ catch the U.S. on any relevant measure. That is a stretch, but not impossible on a forecastable horizon.”
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“We are witnessing the reversal of the Awakening, the Sunni popular movement that helped to dramatically change the course of the Iraq war six years ago,” argues Joel Rayburn in the New Republic.
“The towns that are the setting for the current violence, including Hawijah, are all former insurgent strongholds that switched sides in 2007 and 2008 and began fighting against Al Qaeda alongside U.S. and Iraqi troops. But this movement of about 100,000 Sunni tribal fighters was never really embraced by a skeptical Shia-led government, and as U.S. troops withdrew, the Awakening came under pressure from the government on one side and Al Qaeda and other extremist groups on the other. Now Awakening leaders seem to be on the verge of returning to outright resistance against the government.”
By Ryan Costello, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Ryan Costello is a policy fellow at the National Iranian American Council. The views expressed are his own.
Sweeping sanctions on Iran appear to have claimed their latest victim: the Samsung App store. Samsung has reportedly decided to block access to its App store in Iran from May 22. If true [Editor’s note: Samsung declined to comment to CNN], it is the latest sign that Western sanctions are restricting technology from the Iranian people, damaging the cause of democracy and human rights in Iran.
In 2009, Iranians protesting a stolen presidential election utilized the internet, cell phones and social media to organize, skirt government censorship and capture their government’s incorrigible human rights abuses. The Iranian regime found that authoritarian repression was not so easily hidden in a highly connected, digital world. The murder of Neda Agha-Soltan by a government militia, captured on video with a cellphone, helped to galvanize domestic and international opposition to Iran’s repression. However, weeks ahead of the first Iranian presidential election since 2009, U.S. and European sanctions are blocking Iranians from the same technology that helped the Green Movement organize for human rights and democracy. Such counterproductive policies only help the regime’s hardliners to repress and censor the Iranian people, stifling democratic change.
‘Beyond the Manhunts: How to Stop Terror’ – a GPS special premieres this Sunday at 10 a.m. & 1 p.m. ET
By Cindy Storer, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Cindy Storer is a 21-year veteran analyst of the CIA who specializes in terrorism and intelligence education. She is currently a lecturer in Intelligence and National Security at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina. The views expressed are her own.
Warning about and reacting to a potential threat is a complex, time consuming, and costly business. There are multiple opportunities for an array of people and organizations to take different kinds of action over an extended period. When a terrorist attack happens, examining those actions is an important part of understanding what we might do differently to help prevent future attacks. But when such examinations turn into witch hunts (which they inevitably do in the American political system) you get neither understanding nor accountability. You get only scapegoats, and a repeat of all the problems that were not identified and addressed the last time.
The multiple opportunities for warning and intervention come in three phases – strategic, operational, and tactical. But while these phases provide analysts, collectors, operators, and decision-makers with opportunities, they also provide numerous chances for mistakes, and often, but not always, opportunities to correct those mistakes. There is rarely a single point of failure, but individual acts of courage are often necessary to move the process along. The further along you are in the process, the less options you have and the more immediate the danger you face. A useful analogy for these warning stages is weather forecasting.
By Letta Tayler, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Letta Tayler is a senior terrorism-counterterrorism researcher at Human Rights Watch with an expertise in Yemen. You can follow her @lettatayler. The views expressed are the writer’s own.
The last time Amina al-Rabeii video conferenced from Yemen with her brother Salman, a detainee at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, she barely recognized the skeletal man on the screen.
“His eyes were sunken into dark recesses,” al-Rabeii told me when we met recently in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. “He was slumped in his chair and he could barely keep his head up. He couldn’t concentrate and he didn’t seem to register what we said. We could hardly keep from crying.”
Salman al-Rabeii, 33, was reportedly picked up in Afghanistan in December 2001. He is among the scores of detainees participating in a three-month-old hunger strike to protest their indefinite detention without charge at Guantanamo. He also is among about 90 Yemenis at the prison – the largest bloc by nationality and the group at the heart of the current Guantanamo crisis.
By Fareed Zakaria
Obama may have spoken too loosely about a “red line” in Syria. But the most damaging thing he could do now would be to take action simply to follow through. One does not correct for careless language through careless military action.
Syria is a humanitarian nightmare, which the United States should do more to address. Washington should help create and sustain more havens — in Jordan and elsewhere — for refugees and should coordinate with other countries to get aid in faster and more effectively to those in need. It is trying to bring the various rebel groups into a more coherent opposition movement, though that is a daunting challenge.
But we must understand that the Syrian conflict is fundamentally a civil war between a minority elite and the long-oppressed majority — similar to those in Lebanon and Iraq. People fight to the end because they know that losers in such wars get killed or “ethnically cleansed.” The only path to peace in such circumstances is through a political accord among the parties.
‘Beyond the Manhunts: How to Stop Terror’ – a GPS special premieres 10 a.m. & 1 p.m. ET this Sunday
By Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr., Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr. is the former chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and head of the National Clandestine Service and author of Hard Measures. The views expressed are his own.
When I first published my memoir Hard Measures, How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, a year ago, I got lots of requests to participate in documentaries. I turned most of them down. But I agreed to be interviewed for Greg Barker’s Manhunt because of a promise he made – and kept – to tell the story using only the voices of the people involved in the search for Osama bin Laden. Too many filmmakers and journalists come to this story with their own agenda. They arrive with all the answers and only seek snippets of quotes to bolster the conclusions they have previously made.
Barker took another approach and let the men and particularly the women of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center explain their reasoning and actions. Viewers hear directly from those who were central to raising the alarm about bin Laden and long before most Americans had heard of him – and those who contributed to bringing down the al Qaeda leader and most of his henchmen.
Reasonable people can and do disagree about the tactics we employed. But no one should doubt the sincerity and motivations of these intelligence officers. Manhunt does an excellent job of illuminating not only the meticulous work done by CIA officers, but also the pressure we all felt to prevent follow-on attacks.
By Andrew Billo, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Andrew Billo is assistant director Policy Programs at the Asia Society's New York headquarters. The views expressed are his own.
Ten days ago, I travelled to Ly Son Island, a volcanic atoll thirty kilometers off Vietnam’s central coast. I wasn’t there for the island's famous garlic and seafood, but rather as a participant on a Vietnamese government-sponsored trip to see the island from which the country claims Nguyen lords in the late 16th century launched exploratory trips to the Paracel and Spratly archipelagos.
But if I had taken a similar tour to China’s southern Hainan Island, the information I received would have been much different. China claims it took possession of the Paracels as far back as the Han Dynasty in 110 AD. Whether Chinese or Vietnamese ancestors occupied those islands first is now a question at the center of the two countries’ stormy territorial dispute, and shows both the difficulty – and necessity – for both countries to find resolutions grounded in contemporary realities.
Just this week, China promised to look for peaceful solutions to territorial disputes at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, but much of the world increasingly views China's efforts to claim the South China Sea as belligerent and bullying. If its neighbors were persuaded by the country's aspirations for “a peaceful rise” in the last decade, their trust is quickly fading.
For more Last Look, watch GPS, Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN.
Everything old is new again. And capitalist Russia is seemingly catching socialist Stalin fever all over again.
Sixty years after the death of the dictator who murdered millions, his reputation seems to be having a bit of a “rehabilitation.”
In a recent poll, 47 percent of Russians said Stalin was a "wise leader who brought the Soviet Union to might and prosperity.” And on Wednesday, May Day parades in Russia celebrated Stalin – and none other than President Putin invoked his legacy in a ceremony.
You see, Stalin was the first to be named a Soviet “Hero of Socialist Labor.”
Some 20,000 people were so honored after him. But then, like the USSR, the awards ended abruptly in 1991. But 22 years later, this May Day, Putin revived the tradition, bestowing honors now simply called “Hero of Labor.”
Mr. Putin said recently of his own regime "I don't see any elements of Stalinism here."
Well, we could point to one.
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