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Terrorist Recognition Handbook
Ben Rothke writes "There
are two types of writers about terrorism, experts such as Daniel Pipes and
Steven Emerson who write from a distance and others that write graphic tales
of first-hand from the trenches war stories.
Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for
Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities, is unique in
that author Malcolm Nance is a 20-year veteran of the U.S. intelligence
community and writes from a first hand-perspective, but with the organization
and methodology of writers such as Pipes and
Emerson. Those combined traits
make the book extraordinarily valuable and perhaps the definitive text on terrorist recognition."
Read below for the rest of Ben's review
Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities, Second Edition
author
Malcolm Nance
pages
480
publisher
CRC
rating
10
reviewer
Ben Rothke
ISBN
978-1420071832
summary
Perhaps the definitive text on terrorist recognition.
I always thought that terrorists were anyone designated by the United States State Department, or Department of Fatherland Security as being opposed to US foreign policy.
I don't think this book is designed to say "Look for these physical features to identify potential terrorists." That's basically the book for dummies that you need for TSA.
Instead it appears that his book is more oriented towards explaining the workings of a terrorist organization. How they think, how they act, how they recruit, and what factors increase the chances of a terrorist act.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
I'm sure if the TSA reads this it will be better for most people in general but it does not solve the core problem of terrorist. You catch or kill one and there is ten more to replace him.
Its like the problem with Vietnam for the US and Afghanistan for the Soviet. Sometimes you cannot win by force. Either it has to come to understand, negotiation, or at least putting them at arms length such as building a massive security wall like Israel.
Having military bases in these people's lands, other throwing legitimate governments for over 50 years, and backing unpopular dictators is what causes them to attack us. Not because we believe in freedom or a different religion. We stop messing with things over there and when we do that the common man who currently supports the terrorists and their Jihad will be more apathetic and the popular support base the terrorists enjoy now will go away.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
But now that Iraq is a terrorist training ground, it sounds like it'd be a good book for the Bush Administration to read. If only this were the kind of Administration that reads.
There are nuts out there that pretend both things to be the same, but Pipes surely isn't among them.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I know you were joking, but comparing the likes of the RIAA to those who blow themselves up to kill innocent people in order to make a political statement is just as bad or worse than the RIAA saying that downloading is stealing. Both are unnecessary hyperbole that cheapens the real meanings of 'terrorism' and 'theft'.
...is that the TSA is 100% ineffective, because no government, regardless of how brutal they are to suspected terrorists, or how many secret police they employ, or how many phones they tap, can prevent one person from committing a terrorist act.
The only thing the TSA does is reduce the likelihood such an attack will occur on a plane. It's a huge waste of money that's simply a security blanket for the uninformed.
I don't think grandparent was calling the RIAA terrorists, but rather was mocking a recent claim from the content-mongers that "piracy helps the terrorists."
This is the same Pipes who advocated oversight of left leaning academics in case they poison their fragile students after 9/11? People to advocate such things are the truest enemies of the state. I saw him speak at my school, and he had to be hustled out of the room by his hosts after failing to respond to valid criticism of his borderline racist/fascist agenda.
I suspect the above poster, and the person he's quoting are not doctors.
Um...I have never claimed to be...and to the best of my knowledge, neither has Cory Doctorow.
Neither am I, for that matter...
So...what was your point, then?
but my wife went through several classes on statistics...
You're kidding, right?
their approach to statistics is not so simple as "accuracy" only. They have several different terms, all more or less seeming similar to the layman. I don't recall the words, but they more or less correlated to concepts such as:
False positive rate.
False negative rate.
Overall rate of accurate test.
Your objection does not invalidate the argument in my OP, it only strengthens it. The other concepts you listed do not mitigate the problem of false positives - on the contrary, they only exacerbate it.
The argument in the OP assumed (for argument's sake) that while the false positive rate was 1%, the false negative rate was 0%. If you want to make the false negative rate a non-zero number, go ahead, but you'll quickly find that it makes the overall results even worse, not better.
Using the correct, field-specific term may eliminate some of your objection.
Actually, the terms are quite correct, and your argument only succeeds in raising additional objections.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I love gaffes! please point out all of them.
in the spirit of the book review...
4000+ dead
over a trillion $ spent,
all u got to say is about gaffes?
It's been some time since I read Pipes and I didn't remember some details, so I must make some corrections to my above post.
Actually, although Pipes recognizes pretty clearly the distinction between, on one side, the moderate religious Muslims, and on the other the radical authoritarian pseudo-religious political nuts we all despise, he doesn't like the term "Islamofascism", as what they pursue isn't a fascist regime proper.
Basically, fascism was/is always nationalistic, and bound to the concept of a totalitarian central government ruling society. What these guys pursue, on the contrary, is a kind of stateless internationalistic decentralized totalitarianism. Thus, not quite the same thing. Both authoritarian, both totalitarian, but in very different ways.
He has some suggestions for naming this thing, basically variations around the word "Islamist", "Militant Islam", "Militant Islamism" etc., but I don't think any of those sound right. "Islamofascism" might not be accurate, but I guess we'll have to stick to it for se simple lack of a better alternative.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
So it does not work perfectly, I believe your math.
Actually, it's Cory's math, not mine.
What should we do? Stick our heads in the sand and ignore the threat? Rationalize that you are more likely to die in a car accident, so take no action?
I'm not advocating a course of action here...I'm merely pointing out that a "terrorist test" is doomed to failure.
If the DHS is set up to fail, they appear to have not had any failures in the last few years. May not be perfect, but maybe it is working?
Excellent point. On a related noted, I have a rock that repels tigers...perhaps you would be interested in purchasing it.
Seriously, can you point out any successes? After all, if I put on a bulletproof vest, and spend the next few hours without someone shooting at me, that cannot be taken as proof that the vest can successfully stop bullets.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
He absolutely is a hack, and his primary agenda is disenfranchisement and marginalization of American Muslims. He thinks every mosque in the US is infiltrated with radicals and "Islamists" who want to overthrow our government. Doubtful Pipes has ever set foot in a mosque, though he's been invited.
His idea of a moderate Muslim is someone who calls himself Muslim but doesn't practice Islam, e.g., people like Irshad Manji -- the heroine of the anti-Muslim bigots in our country. (sorry if you like her -- she has nothing to do with mainstream Islam in the US or anywhere else).
Pipes is fine as long as the conversation is one-way with him spewing propaganda and fear-mongering -- challenge anything he says and he resorts to hostility (see other posts in this thread).
"So it does not work perfectly, I believe your math. What should we do? Stick our heads in the sand and ignore the threat? Rationalize that you are more likely to die in a car accident, so take no action?"
There are more options for what to do than "anything" and "nothing". We should do things that make sense, and that work. If someone points out that one thing we could do doesn't work, it does not make sense to say "Oh well, we gotta do something". We shouldn't do things that don't work, not even if we can't think of anything that does.
"I think people that pay cash for a one-way airline ticket need extra scrutiny."
How much extra scrutiny, at how much extra cost? It depends on how likely they are to be bad guys, doesn't it? People who buy one way tickets with cash are almost guaranteed to not be terrorists, because a lot of people do that every day for perfectly reasonable reasons, and there aren't very many terrorists. That's not even considering that actual terrorists can trivially adapt to your test and avoid scrutiny by not doing that. Spending any resources looking at last-minute one-way ticket buyers is a waste.
"If the DHS is set up to fail, they appear to have not had any failures in the last few years. May not be perfect, but maybe it is working?"
I wore my lucky red shirt to the doctors office again, and again I didn't have cancer...
DHS/TSA, for all I know, may be doing various effective, but less visible things. The specific, visible task of identifying terrorists at airport security checkpoints is basically impossible.
The TSA stands around, making sure the people in line aren't terrorists. Now, I'm no criminal mastermind, but given the security around most US airports, all it does it make the regular citizens feel warm and fuzzy about all the gadgets they have to walk through to get on their plane. A terrorist would make a few friends at the airport, lift a few IDs, and before you know it, he can walk around the tarmac for weeks on end without being bothered, and walk right past a security line with the flash of his counterfeit badge and a smile.
Really effective security would be to bring every last troop home, and place them in every port and border crossing into the US. Even more effective than their inspections would be the fact that they aren't in foreign countries blowing stuff up. It's very difficult to recruit people to kill the infidel when he's across the ocean behind hundreds of thousands of highly trained Marines, minding his own business.
Unfortunately this would require leaders in government (Republicans and Democrats) to do an about-face on how they deal with terrorism, and as anyone knows, getting a politician to admit a mistake is harder than getting one to tell the truth in the first place. But we're the ones to blame - when the greatest threat to our way of life, according to Sean Hannity, is that "we may be driving around in Yugos," you wonder if the society is worth saving in the first place.
No, they usually have Armalites and big fistfulls of US dollars. Thank you, the US Republicans, for continuing to support terrorist attacks on your allies.
He invented and promulgates the cognitive dissonance that is summarised by the phrase: "Islamofascism."
He's a real Israeli, dual-loyalist and "newspeak" maker of the first (lowest) rank. Pipes was teh founder of The Middle East Forum - purportedly a 'think-tank', really a propaganda and media policing agent for radical Israeli military/political objectives.
Who's next on teh
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
That's not 'rationalizing.' That's proper allocation of resources. I could spend a really long time optimizing code that access data in memory and get it to be a few milliseconds faster, but if most of the time spent in the code is writing to disk, then I would be an idiot to not work on optimizing that aspect of the program instead.
I think people that pay cash for a one-way airline ticket need extra scrutiny.
I think people that move money around internationally through sketchy banks need some examination.
I'm not willing to jeopardize the freedoms and the privacy of thousands of innocent people to catch one or two criminals. The cure you're proposing is worse than the disease.
If you can identify who is paying for one-way airline tickets and a way of knowing who is paying cash for their tickets, or knowing where I'm moving my money to, then that's already an unacceptable intrusion into my life. That's before the "extra scrutiny" you think I deserve if I did any of those things. You should have to acquire some reason to suspect me of any wrongdoing and then go to a court and get a warrant in order to find out where I'm traveling to, and where I'm sending my money to.
I think people with terrorist ties need some looking at.If the government has enough reason to suspect that anyone has terrorist ties, they should have no problem getting warrants and requesting information from banks and airlines as to where these people are going and where they're sending they're money. They can also get a legal wiretap. But they need to have that terrorist connection suspicion first, and then they need to get individual warrants.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
"His father was one of the main hawks against Stalinist Eastern Block style Communism during the 60's."
And this was a bad thing because... ?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
[dhs.gov]
You're joking, right? The only references on that page I saw pertaining to foiled terrorist attacks were the case of the "binary explosives" plot and the case of the Fort Dix Six. Regarding the former, it has already been debunked so many times that I'm surprised the DHS hasn't removed the reference from sheer shame. In the case of the latter, six guys who plotted to take on a military base with a couple of firearms, and were caught because they took their jihad training video to Circuit City to burn to DVD? Seriously? We're supposed to buy this?
Every single "terrorist threat" since 9/11 (which is itself suspect) has been either a ridiculous exaggeration, an entrapment scheme, or an outright hoax.
If you live in a war zone, I would keep my bulletproof vest on. Just because you did not get shot at today does not mean you are safe for tomorrow.
1) I don't live in a war zone. Neither do you.
2) You missed my point most spectacularly. Until a real bullet hits that vest, there is no proof that it can deflect bullets.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Of course, the difference between a 'terrorist test' (presumably some sort of deep data mining across a variety of databases) and the kind of disease test Doctorow uses for an example is that repeating the terrorist test is unlikely to produce greater accuracy. Let's say you have some combination of factors that, according to the algorithm, makes you a suspect. Running the same search again will uncover the same factors and produce no improvement in your estimation, hence the need for the complementary inspection you mention. But what would that mean for the terrorist test? Probably more invasive investigation, which, apart from the obvious civil liberties issue, means more time, money, and manpower that has to be spent. So when your first screen does a poor job of identifying suspects, you have to spend a fortune disqualifying the false positives in order to root out the true positives. So it isn't really a logic problem when considered in the applicable context.
So it's like freedom fries then.
"All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.""
And where was he wrong on this?
Multiple Wives
Female Circumcision
A culture of allowing slavery of non-Abrahmic peoples
And of course, the big one, Sharia.
So tell me how many of those things you'd tolerate a western country allowing? Fess up and be honest.
I'd guess you're pretty big on the concept of separation of Church and State, correct? Then why are you giving Islam a pass when that faith explicitly denies any such separation? In the Koran, there's no difference between political and religious leadership. They're one in the same, for the whole body, the Umah. Sharia is both a religious and a civil law.
And suppose you say "but Muslim immigrants will westernize"... and many new immigrants do. But the biggest rise in fundamentalism is among the western born children of those Muslim immigrants. The London bombings were carried out by young men born in Britain, well educated, with all of the advantages that citizenship and life in Britain could provide them. Many of them had parents that set up happy lives and successful businesses here.
And yet they chose Jihad and Sharia in their Mosques. They chose to bring the sword of Islam to the people of London. So please don't make the tired old argument that Islamic terrorism is mainly about poverty or secular politics. Islamic terrorism is mainly about religious ideas, and in short, mainly about Islam, or at least their idea of what pure Islam really is.
So... why is Pipes, or anyone else for that matter, guilty of racism or one of your other isms for pointing out that there are major, and in some cases, irreconcilable differences between us? After all, something has to give. Either we have to accept things like Sharia, or Muslim immigrants have to give it up. Why is it wrong to point that out?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
That the treatment at Abu Graib was newsworthy shows that you're babbling nonsense. If the US military was at all like al Qaeda or like Saddam Hussein, then it would have been expected.
All of you other countries lost the right to have the US stay out of world affairs. The US tried to avoid both world wars, and was brought in by plots of other nations. Now, the US is going to have its hands in whatever it can reach. We get attacked when we leave the rest of you alone, and we get attacked when we don't. We might as well sway some things in our favor, then.
Before you start mouthing off about human rights abuses and "terrorist acts" by the US, you should look up some other countries. I suggest you start with China, Myanmar, Iraq, Somalia, Serbia, Mexico , Brazil, Colombia, and Peru.
Wasn't the point of calling french fries "freedom fries" to keep Joe Sixpack from empathizing and humanizing the French when they decided to not back the invasion?
Suicide describes what type of bomber. Bomber means someone who kills with explosives. I don't really see how changing suicide to homicide makes it any "worse".
Anyways, any media that would call them "homicide bombers" aren't the ones that will be followed by the group that produces the suicide bombers.
It's just emotional gut-thinking that just makes you feel better.
What term do you use to describe the kamikaze of WW2? Divine Wind is a pretty romantic term, especially when you consider the first Kamikaze and what it meant for Japan. Are they homikaze? Last-ditch-act-of-desperation-due-to-lack-of-resources-including-veteran-pilots-kaze?
I can look at the term "suicide bomber" and not think: oh, the poor lad went so emo, the only way for him to describe his anguish to another was with the destructive blast and shrapnel of an explosives vest, I really should feel sorry for him and subscribe to his newsletter. All this bellyfeel claptrap will be the end of western civilization, not some schmuck wearing a few pounds of C-4.
The TSA is a government agency searching people without any specific evidence that any specifc person has committed any specific crime. Not searching "upon oath or affirmation," not searching upon "probable cause," just searching everyone. How could you be more blatently in violation of the 4th amendment? I realize we as a nation don't care much about that amendment since we discarded it for DWI checkpoints, but this is particularly abusive.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Fighting against uniformed forces using asymmetrical tactics because you're a smaller force facing a larger force is one thing. Attacking civilians with no warning to get on CNN and have your demands heard is another. There is a proper use for the term "terrorist", but it's being used more broadly than it should be.
You will save more lives if you spend the money on preventing car accidents than spending on anti terrorism. I assume the aim of the game is to save lives?
It should all be about bang for your buck. You can only do so much, so do the most effective.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
The parent post is not flamebait. While it's debatable that Pipes actually has fascist views, there is enough evidence to have the debate. The rest of the post is simply based on well-documented behaviour and statements.
Damn those pesky terrorists
By the look of it this book doesn't really address the fundamental issues underlying terrorism. I realise that this is outside the scope of the book and that it would be controversial, to put it mildly, in the US; but sooner or later we are going to have to tackle the issue of 'why'. We have at least since 9/11 had our heads stuck firmly in the sand, with fantasies about how terrorists are completely different from us, how they are 'evil', 'envious of our freedom' or at least 'insane' - this book goes some way to puncture that myth, at least.
The truth is, we are not going to win any war against terrorism - it's like the 'Gumby Brain Surgery'(ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumbys). We have to understand why something so utterly irrational as terrorism can not only exist, but spread rapidly; really, I would have thought that much was obvious. The good news is that it isn't impossible; as the book suggests, these people are rational, often intelligent, and if they can arrive at the conclusion that they have to go and blow themselves and other people up, then we can follow their logic. I should think that there is a good chance that we will discover one or two points that we can address intelligently, thus breaking the rationale of their reasoning. This is all about popular support - the terrorists have popular support because they can argue strongly for their goals; we can make their arguments weak if we know what we are doing, and once they lose popular support, they will soon cease to be a threat.
And by that I mean, these times are not the only ones to have faced the "threat" of "terrorism".
... and I doubt seriously that that book pays any attention to such obviously unimportant matters.
... and ... and ... and now they're Muslims and copyright infringers and Free-and-Open-Source-Software distributors and peer-to-peer networks users and ....
Can we classify the various Haiti independence movements during the 1700s as terrorists? Do we?
Would similar procedures apply to Tsarist Russia? When Tsar Alexander II had been killed in a bomb blast in Nevsky Prospekt on March the third, 1881?
In post-Krakatau-eruption Dutch East Indies? When there where a significant number of disaffected Javanese?
What about the Moro resistance to the US annexation of Mindanao? The Cebuan resistance to the US annexation of Cebu?
In the south of China around the time of the Long March?
During the Mau-Mau in Kenya?
You see, as they say, "One man's terrorist is another man's guerilla/Freedom Fighter/useful idiot/Republican senator/US President" etc, ad nauseam
At various times, apparently terrorists were obviously Jews and homosexuals and Catholics and Protestants and Poles and Marxists and voodun priests and
We have some downright brilliant people in power, and they won't stop until everybody's been fucked up the arse with curare-tipped depleted uranium-covered thermonuclear fenceposts - themselves excluded, naturally.
"I his bow, and spun and wove, likes you." Vere de Vere out of my mould's mouth dragged me of the voluntary apes.
Oh, I see.
This administration has lied through their collective teeth to us about everything else...but when it comes to the events surrounding 9/11, the administration's Official Version of Events is sacrosanct.
Not all advocates of 9/11 truth are raving loons that maintain that there were no planes and that space beams destroyed the Towers...although this administration would very much like you to believe that that is the case.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey