Before Abbottabad: hunting AQ leaders (merged thread)

[slapout9]

Steve, if we could pull it off there is real I/O merit in that SOB in handcuffs and have his rights read to him before we give him a fair trial and hang him But to go to the straight military side we had a manual and a concept called MOOTW military Operations Other Than "War" which is exactly what need to call it, but we dumped that for some reason??

[Steve Blair]

Yeah, the whole name game is enough to drive someone nuts. MOOTW was interesting, but so is small wars.... Perhaps Leveraged Actions with Synergistic Termination (LAST) or Controlled Utilization of National Termination Systems (you can do the acronym for that one, lest I be banned to the Club) might make some wordsmiths happy....

But with LE you get into that whole legal loophole question, and that tends to make me nervous. I agree with the SOB in handcuffs image, but in this day and age it also conjures up images of certain gloves that didn't fit. But what the hell, right? We all have our little word preferences.

[jcustis]

Additionally when he does go down, some will think it is all over and be further discouraged when it is not.

The irhabists stand to win when he does go down. They have their martyr who defied the mighty US and did it for a long time.

I guess this speaks to the necessity to have a message ready now, loaded and cocked. I'd personally like to see him de-mystified and put down as a low-lying cretin. There needs to be a full-court press that he died on the run, cowering like a frightened child, and not some bold entity.

I'm surprised that most of those who praise Che and wear his t-shirt don't realize that he died dirty, starved, and certainly not some valiant warrior.

[slapout9]

The legal loopholes would not be as big a problem as we think if it was done right. Just like with Noriaga in Panama was taken under special warrants and tried in a non public way. We could do the same for OBL and everyone in AQI don't just stop with him.

[wm]

The legal loopholes would not be as big a problem as we think if it was done right. Just like with Noriaga in Panama was taken under special warrants and tried in a non public way. We could do the same for OBL and everyone in AQI don't just stop with him.

Your last sentence says it all. We may have killed of the head of AQI a while back but we have a new face and name as head of AQI to be the bad guy now, don't we? [Cynicism] Even if we get OBL, we still will find another name and face popping up to haunt us--if for no other reason than so that the media can continue to gartner their profits.[/Cynicism]

[LawVol]

Slapout's Law Enforcement Operation is intriguing. I definitely see a potential down-side with the whole legality thing (I am a lawyer after all), but perhaps there are some benefits too. We get to label him as something Americans easily understand. There are no PC-type arguments about why his acts were committed and it denies him his perceived legitimacy. After all, if America has declared war on OBL then he must be important, legitimate, etc. However, a criminal is something that carries a negative perception throughout the world. In this sense it would be helpful to indict him not only for American deaths on 9/11 but also for Arab deaths.

I'm still thinking this part through, but I also see a benefit on the home front. Fighting global criminals would not seem to require a huge military presence. We, of course, would use military force to effectuate an "arrest," but that military force would be of limited duration since the mission objective is to make the arrest or kill.

Immediate questions that come to mind involve the type of seizure law (think 4th amendment) that would apply since even killing is a seizure; sovereignty issues; if captured, who would try OBL and others like him and how;etc.

[pvebber]

My take on this is that asking if a specific decision "went wrong" or not can't really be answered. There are too many audiences and interpretations of the decision to be able to definitively say one way or the other. It may have been "terribly wrong" to the perception of some audiences, but a benefit to others. What is the result "on balance" - the answer is not as important as the way you try to take account - and the implications on future decisions.

What did we try to accomplish with the decision? My recollection is that it likely had more to do with the audience here at home - rather than overseas -and the pervasive notion that we "need to hold someone to account" when bad outcomes occur.

That naming him likely had a beneficial effect on early morale and confidence here in the US, compared to a situation where a "shadowy unnamed group" was behind it is arguably true. Specifying AQ as the agency behind 9/11, de facto implicated bin Laden - distancing that name from responsibility would have been difficult and opened assorted Pandora's boxes. Would it have been possible to go after AQ without bin Laden figuring highly? My sense is probably not...would the media have hyped him anyway, with equivocating on the part of officialdom on his role feeding conspiracy theorists in the press?

If we had gotten him that would have been a handsome payday in 'political capital'. Not getting him eroded that inititial benefit, but its not clear that turned to a net negative, or just back to zero. OR set the stage for a later shift to net negative when other bad outcomes occured...

But that is here at home.

On the other hand, overseas audiences, particularly in the Islamic world, the focus on AQ and bin Laden was undenyably an early victory for our adversaries. Demonstrating that they could poke the great Satan in the eye, AND provocing such responses BY NAME was much more than 15 minutes of fame and the equivalent of Billions in ad money. Could that victory have been moderated with a strategic comms effor that payed more attention to the differences between messages aimed at home and messages to be reinforced overseas? Undoubtedly. It is not clear from any of the books I've read so far that the finer details of the needed strat comms effort was even appreciated, let alone planned out that early on. Its not clear that the lesson there has been learned.

Other audiences are not so clear, I think Europe was far more influenced by the "with us or against us" rhetoric, than anything to do with pronouncements on bin Laden. The media itself - simultaneousy an audience and a cacaphony of messeges itself would be a wild card in any strategy to down play AQ and bin Laden - the potential for a media blowback that awarded AQ a victory anyway, and was a net loss on the home front was not outside the realm of possibility.

So in some ways there is the "was it really a choice" - once AQ was identified, bid focus on bin Laden follow as fair accompli? I may ascribe too much to the media, but that is at least possible. If it was not a choice, but a matter of priority given his name was going to come up, what were the pros and cons of going 'all in'? How do you evaluate the various unitened consequences of "paying too much attention" vs "not paying enough attention" or the dreaded "looking you are deliberately being evasive on the topic" opening the door to who knows what?

Bottom line, the answer may not be as interesting as the train of logic and new questions trying to answer it leads you down. Even if we can definitively answer for this case, does that mean following the same course next time will be right? Maybe, maybe not. We tend to be too peoccupied with predicting results of decisions and their goodness, (a result that often occurs for reasons totally unrelated to the decision itself) rather than on the decision-making framework that allows examination of the ramifications of various interactions in the decision space.

Work the various outcomes of "if I do this and then this happens and other people do these other things..." Gee that is starting to sound like something that one needs to do with games and game theory-like stuff Being a proponent of "truely complex problems require game-like exploration" guy I often end up there

[slapout9]

LawVol the US Marshal's can and do serve international warrants, 4th Amendment would not be a problem due to the demonstrated danger to society at large (fleeing felon law). Also one of the authors was a...gulp..Air Force Officer...there is hope after all, and to top it off it is a Navy published paper.



Here is a link to a paper on how I think it should have been done. This is basic police work. In this case the main consultants were the US Marshal Service,British Security Service and plain old detectives.
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/...arks_jun05.pdf

PS Goesh and Stan some good huntin stuff in here for real

[Stan]

LawVol the US Marshal's can and do serve international warrants, 4th Amendment would not be a problem due to the demonstrated danger to society at large (fleeing felon law). Also one of the authors was a...gulp..Air Force Officer...there is hope after all, and to top it off it is a Navy published paper.



Here is a link to a paper on how I think it should have been done. This is basic police work. In this case the main consultants were the US Marshal Service,British Security Service and plain old detectives.
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/...arks_jun05.pdf

PS Goesh and Stan some good huntin stuff in here for real

Evening Slapout !
Coincident with our night off from evening duties (it’s Wednesday aye), we gathered for a few brews and much needed humor with EOD Techs and friends from specialized LE units (pictured below).

As politics reared its ugly head, I related Slapout’s comments and a senior LE opined: “You Yanks have made the whole affair far too personal. We don’t name our criminals. What did that get you?” Deep pause…”I would encourage the military to kill people and break things, because that is what they are there for. Do I need to send my team there and collect the 1 million ?”

I like the hunting gear, Slapout !