Obama's "Kill List" Great Foreign Policy Move For Re-election; Long Term? Not So Much

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Obama's ‘secret kill list' shows president is final word on terrorist killing missions

When it comes to the "secret kill list"--a regularly updated chart showing the world's most wanted terrorists--President Obama is the "final moral calculation" in the kill or capture debate, according to the third in a series of New York Times articles assessing his record.

And despite his liberal background, Obama has taken an aggressive approach to counterterrorism.

The Times said it interviewed three dozen current and former advisers to Obama for the article, who described his "evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda":

They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands.

When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda—even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was "an easy one."

Part of Obama's "evolution" on terror apparently began early in his term, when a drone strike resulted in civilian casualties:

Just days after taking office, the president got word that the first strike under his administration had killed a number of innocent Pakistanis. "The president was very sharp on the thing, and said, 'I want to know how this happened,'" a top White House adviser recounted.

In response to his concern, the C.I.A. downsized its munitions for more pinpoint strikes. In addition, the president tightened standards, aides say: If the agency did not have a "near certainty" that a strike would result in zero civilian deaths, Mr. Obama wanted to decide personally whether to go ahead.

"The care that Mr. Obama and his counterterrorism chief take in choosing targets," the Times said, "and their reliance on a precision weapon, the drone, reflect his pledge at the outset of his presidency to reject what he called the Bush administration's 'false choice between our safety and our ideals.'"

And Obama's success limiting civilian deaths in drone strikes is, in part, due to "a disputed method for counting civilian casualties" embraced by Obama. According to the Times, the White House considers "all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants ... unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."

Obama's personal involvement in counterterrorism operations can be seen in his study of the "baseball card"-like "kill list." For example, in January 2010--four months before he ordered the operation that killed Osama bin Laden--President Obama questioned the ages of some of the al-Qaeda suspects on it.

"How old are these people?" Obama asked during his regular Tuesday briefing with intelligence officials--dubbed the "Terror Tuesday" meeting--in the White House Situation Room. "If they are starting to use children, we are moving into a whole different phase."

The White House has also struggled with the so-called "Whac-A-Mole" approach to counterterrorism--an al-Qaida leader killed in, say, a drone strike is simply replaced with another.

"One guy gets knocked off, and the guy's driver, who's No. 21, becomes 20?" William M. Daley, Obama's chief of staff in 2011, told the Times. "At what point are you just filling the bucket with numbers?"


Joe Scarborough On Obama 'Kill List': 'I Wonder How This Is Going To Look Ten Years From Now'

Joe Scarborough expressed discomfort on Tuesday with President Obama's newly revealed "kill list" of alleged Al Qaeda suspects.

The New York Times ran a lengthy story about Obama's intimate involvement in personally deciding which people should go on the list of targets for drone strikes. The opening scene of the story showed Obama choosing whether or not to target two teenagers, "including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years."

On Tuesday's "Morning Joe," Scarborough said that the story made him "flinch." He wondered whether it was right for the president to be so personally implicated in such choices. "Something to me is just not right about taking that into the Oval Office," he said.

The other panelists all seemed to be fine with Obama's participation, saying that it showed a willingness to confront the realities of his decisions.

Scarborough still seemed uneasy:

I just wonder, ten years from now, what we're going to be saying about a president lining up pictures of teenagers in the Oval Office and picking.

I'm not talking the morality of doing it or not doing it, I'm just talking about whether it should be kept away from the president, away from the White House.

And you stack that on top of us launching drone attacks in countries where we haven't even declared war? There are going to be some searing critiques a decade from now about our overreach.

"There could be critiques of a president who was disconnected as well and did not choose to look and did not choose think about every angle, including the moral choice," Brzezinski said. "Don't you think?"

"No," Scarborough replied. "I don't. I think there are a lot of people that are going to spin for Barack Obama ... I think you're going to have a lot of liberal hand-wringing."


Sources: AP, ABC News, AOL, Huffington Post, NY Times, The Daily Beast, Yahoo, White House

Watch Lists Not Enough To Combat The War On Terror

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Terror Watch Lists Have Limited Uses, Experts Say


Around the world, watch lists are a key but imperfect tool against terrorism.

Experts say simple issues like fickle spelling and incomplete data, as well as deliberate deception and uncooperative countries, all make it possible for a determined terrorist like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to slip through the net.

British officials are proud of their border-protecting list, which contains more than 1 million names, including that of Abdulmutallab. That didn't stop the young Nigerian boarding a plane for the United States elsewhere with explosives in his underwear — a stark reminder of the perils of flawed information-sharing and the limits of watch lists.

"It's not difficult to change your identity in the modern world," said Alain Chouet, former chief of the security intelligence service at France's counterintelligence agency, DGSE.

Analysts say intelligence tip-offs, information-sharing and data analysis are also vital to stopping terrorists, and Britain has announced an urgent review of its watch list system in the wake of the Christmas Day attack over Detroit.


E-borders Initiative

The British list holds the names of everyone from suspected terrorists and radical clerics to wanted criminals and rejected visa applicants — like Abdulmutallab, who was added after being denied a student visa in May 2009 for applying to a bogus college.

The program, known as E-borders, will eventually check all passengers traveling to or through Britain against the master list. Information comes from police, intelligence services and other sources and is held by the U.K. Border Agency.

Home Secretary Alan Johnson said this week that the list had led to almost 5,000 arrests since 2005 and prevented 65,000 people entering Britain in 2009.

"In some countries, there are separate watch lists for security, for policing and crime, for people who have lost their passports and for immigration issues, but an integrated watch list serves us well," Johnson told lawmakers in the House of Commons.

Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defense College, said the British system was an effective deterrent.

"What you have in U.K. is data mining of anyone in transit, on every single passenger coming into the U.K." Ranstorp said. "So even if you are in transit, and never meet a border guard, it's a hostile environment if you're flying through the U.K."

10 Percent Viable


The list has its limits, though. Names on it are not automatically shared with other countries, although those on a smaller terrorism-related watch list are.

U.S. authorities have said Abdulmutallab was on a 500,000-strong database of people suspected of terrorist ties, but not on a no-fly watch list. Britain has said it had no indication the Nigerian was planning an attack, and did not flag him to U.S. officials as a particular threat.

On Thursday, President Barack Obama announced about a dozen changes designed to fix the system that let Abdulmutallab slip through, including an overhaul of the nation's terrorist watch lists.

Chouet, the former French intelligence official, estimated that lists he saw when working in intelligence were only about "10 percent viable."

"The identity of people outside the European tradition is vague. People can change their names, and there is the problem of transcription into European alphabets."

He used the example of the name Mohamed, which can have different spellings and different transcriptions into English, French or Polish alphabets.

Difficulties With Nations

Even passport numbers are only partially viable since passports can be changed, or people can get passports from other countries.

And some countries are more cooperative than others. European Union nations and close allies like the U.S. routinely share information, but Britain's Johnson noted this week that "it is outside Europe that we have the problem."

The Home Office declined to name any uncooperative nations, but said biometric data such as fingerprints, now included on passports and required from all visa holders, would help tighten up the system.

Experts agree biometrics are key to ensuring names on a watch list can be matched to a real individual.

"It's very difficult to fake, and the governments have begun collecting that information massively," said Ranstorp.

Global Effort

Around the world there are multiple — and often overlapping — watch lists. In addition to national lists, Interpol established a Terrorism Watch List in April 2002 in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The list can be viewed by personnel of the international police agency and by authorized police forces in about 180 countries.

It achieves regular success, as in November when authorities in Indonesia were tipped off about Abdul Basir Latip, a suspected al-Qaida-linked militant from the Philippines. Acting on a tip from Interpol, which was sharing information from a U.S. watch list, officials nabbed him Nov. 21 at Soekarno-Hatta international airport with the help of photographs provided by the FBI. He had arrived from Syria using a fake passport.

This kind of effective coordination is more critical to successful security, analysts said, than the watch lists themselves.

Rolf Tophoven, director of the Essen, Germany-based Institute for Terrorism Research and Security Policy, said intelligence failures in the Christmas Day bombing attempt resulted from too much bureaucracy in the U.S. Leaner intelligence services have proven much more effective because there is better communication, and information is less likely to fall through the cracks, he said.

"The different intelligence authorities in the United States are too huge — the apparatus is too large to be effective," he said. "Look at the Israeli intelligence services and their effectiveness countering terrorism and I think you can take one lesson — small but effective."

An Analytical Failure

John Harrison, an aviation security specialist at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said Abdulmutallab's behavior should have set off alarm bells, even if his name on a list did not.

Abdulmutallab apparently bought his ticket in cash, was flying the same day, had no check-in luggage and purchased a one-way fare.

Any of those details — and certainly the sum — should have tripped a standard international security procedure, Computer Assisted Passenger Screening or CAPS, Harrison said.

"This case seems more to have been failure, not of lists, but a failure on the human side of intelligence, accurately assessing the threat and tracking the information to see if there were any links," he said. "It was an analytical failure."


Sources: MSNBC

"Why Am I On The Watch List?" Flagged!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Sources: MSNBC, The Daily Beast

Are People On U.S. Terror Watch List Being Allowed To Purchase Guns?

New York Times----

WASHINGTON — People on the U.S. Government’s Terrorist watch list tried to buy guns nearly 1,000 times in the last five years, and federal authorities cleared the purchases 9 times out of 10 because they had no legal way to stop them, according to a new government report.

In one case, a person on the list was able to buy more than 50 pounds of explosives.

The new statistics, compiled in a report from the Government Accountability Office that is scheduled for public release next week, draw attention to an odd divergence in federal law: people placed on the government’s terrorist watch list can be stopped from getting on a plane or getting a visa, but they cannot be stopped from buying a gun.

Gun purchases must be approved unless federal officials can find some other disqualification of the would-be buyer, like being a felon, an illegal immigrant or a drug addict.

“This is a glaring omission, and it’s a security issue,” Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, the New Jersey Democrat who requested the study, said in an interview.

Mr. Lautenberg plans to introduce legislation on Monday that would give the attorney general the discretion to block gun sales to people on terror watch lists.

The government’s consolidated watch list, used to identify people suspected of links to terrorists, has grown to more than one million names since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It also has drawn widespread criticism over the prevalence of mistaken identities and unclear links to terrorism.

A report in May from the Justice Department inspector general found that the list kept by the Federal Bureau of Investigation carried the names of 24,000 people included on the basis of outdated or sometimes irrelevant information.

Gun rights advocates said showing up on a terrorist watch list should not be grounds for being denied a gun.

“We’re concerned about the quality and the integrity of the list,” said Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association. “There have been numerous studies and reports questioning the integrity, and we believe law-abiding people who are on the list by error should not be arbitrarily denied their civil rights” under the Second Amendment.

Mr. Lautenberg introduced a similar gun-control measure in 2007, but it stalled after opposition from the N.R.A. The senator attributed the outcome to “knuckling under to the gun lobby.”

Mr. Arulanandam said the gun lobby would have to examine the details of the newest proposal before taking a position. But he added: “Senator Lautenberg has always been on the wrong side of the Second Amendment. His approach is not in the interests of public safety.”

The G.A.O. study found an increase in the last few years in the number of gun purchase requests and approvals for people on the terrorist watch list.

From February 2004 through February 2009, the report found, there were 963 requests for gun purchases through the federal system by people on the list. Of that group, 865 purchases — or 90 percent — were approved after a three-day review by the F.B.I. failed to turn up any other disqualifying factors.

A narrower study by the G.A.O. in 2005 first drew public attention to the issue. The Justice Department took some limited steps to address the issue, centralizing the review of gun purchases by those on watch lists to ensure that all possible disqualifiers were being considered.

Nonetheless, the rate of approval for requests to buy a gun went up from 80 percent in 2005 to the new study’s 90 percent. Officials were searching for explanations for the increase, which might reflect the overall growth in both the number of people on the watch list and of gun purchases.

The names of the people on the watch list are secret, and Mr. Lautenberg said he was frustrated by the F.B.I.’s refusal to disclose to investigators details and specific cases of gun purchases beyond the aggregate data.

The senator said that getting a better understanding of who is being allowed to buy guns and how people are connected to terrorism would help assess the need for legislative remedies.

The G.A.O. reported that the Justice Department in the Obama administration, however, was “noncommital” about whether it would develop guidelines if Congress moved to give the attorney general discretion to block such gun sales.


View Larger Map

Sources: NY Times, Wikipedia, FBI, Google Maps