Cops or Police in Counterinsurgency COIN

[jmm99]

under Blog Roll: "Dave Dilegge and His COIN Jedi Knights". We can now all be addressed as "SIR" - have to dream up a good Jedi domain to go with that.

I find Ackerman's 3-para piece to be basic mush. Here are the last two paras of the piece:

And here’s where it’s become unfortunate that mainstream political discourse has created negative connotations around a “law enforcement approach to terrorism.” I can guarantee you that if you said to someone, “Hey, do you think that in terrorism investigations, we should create the perspective amongst counterterrorists that their job doesn’t stop until someone is neutralized?” they would say “Yes.” Well, you goddamn hippie: you’ve got a law enforcement mindset. I guess people don’t understand this enough, but intelligence analysts approach their craft rather differently. They look for patterns in information, and pass those patterns up the chain. They do not investigate in the sense of the word that you and I understand from TV. That’s why there was no APB inside the CIA or the National Counterterrorism Center on Abdulmutallab after his father’s walk-in. Abdulmutallab, in the intelligence world, is a data point. He is not a suspect.

Now, if you had the FBI handling the Abdulmutallab portfolio, or people who think like FBI agents, maybe it still doesn’t go anywhere. But maybe they start compiling information and building a case and new information turns up and the guy gets yanked before he’s on the plane. I gather that’s what John Brennan meant when he said yesterday there was “no one intelligence entity or team or task force [that] was assigned responsibility for doing that follow-up investigation.” None of this is to say the FBI has to be given the lead for these sorts of things. A joint approach is the right approach if you want to see everyone’s information. But it is to say that within that joint entity, analysts need — wait for it — a law enforcement approach to terrorism.

Ackerman is hung up on the need for some kind of criminal prosecution in these cases. Whether he opposes military commissions as an option, I can't tell from the piece. However, even if military commissions are used, evidentiary standards have to be met - in Ackerman's jargon, "a law enforcement approach to terrorism."

It is interesting that he uses the term "neutralized" (in the sentence I bolded). Whether he knows it or not, the readers here of threads dealing with Vietnamese Pacification and the Phoenix segment of it, know that "neutralize" meant "kill, detain or convert" (roughly in 1/3 ratios) in that program, which combined the LOAC and law enforcement rules.

The bottom line is that under LOAC (per the US), Abdulmutallab does not have to be prosecuted. He could simply be detained or interned (depending on his status determination under the GCs); and interrogations could proceed or not according to the Army Field Manual.

The general run of those I called above, the Law of War advocates (the "military" approach; often coupled with "Let's take the gloves off"), are equally confused by asserting that reference must be to milkitary commissions. No "gloves off" there - he'd be just as lawyered up (and perhaps with counsel more competent in "Small Wars" issues).

The option not to prosecute in either venue seems to escape both sets of political spinners - as it has also escaped the Obama administration, except as a last resort.

Regards

Mike

PS: detention, as a standalone, often escaped the Bush II administration - depending on the direction of the wind blowing into the Oval Office.