-- Comandante Lentes, "Pillars of The Sea" --
If I hadn´t seen it, I wouldn´t have believed it.
Even now, I´m not sure I believe it
The Daily Mirror´s headline of November 29:
"Jihadi John´s British terror ring smashed as cops uncover a network stretching across the U.K."
Before continuing, the Mirror -- self-described "brightest tabloid newspaper" -- is not the most reliable source of information. The Mirror has been caught on various occasions running incorrect stories; equally true, it published apologies. Such was its exit.
Aware there could be a credibility problem, I scoured the Internet without success for a denial, official or otherwise, of the items in the Mirror report you are about to see. Until a denial appears, they stand.
That report contains two narratives:
(a) "Last month [September 25] the FBI confirmed they knew Jihadi John’s true identity but details have deliberately not been made public while intelligence officers continue to monitor the movements and electronic communication of his alleged helpers."
You just saw the FBI´s explanation of why it has not revealed Jihadi John´s identity: it does not want to alert his accomplices whom it wants to monitor. We will return to this theme.
(b) "Crucial clues have been provided by US analysts who have used advanced facial recognition technology to literally unmask the killer [Jihadi John].
Using only the man’s eyes — the only part of his face left uncovered in the video – they have pieced together a photofit style picture of what they say lies underneath the mask.
The forensic officials created two versions of the likeness: one clean shaven and another with a mustache.
The US source said: ´High-tech imaging techniques have been used, but it is still only a very good guess at what the killer could look like´"
The Mirror says the US analysts and forensic officials who prepared the photofit image worked with the US Government. Similarly, ABC reported the facial recognition experts worked "in consultation with" the U.S. Government.
Did you spot it? If the two media are right, there is a potential conflict between narratives (a) and (b).
If (a) is true -- the FBI has identified Jihadi John -- then (b) is now beside the point. FBI, if you know who he is, there is no need for advanced facial recognition technology to unmask him. To see what Jihadi John looks like, pick up the phone and call his mother. You will get baby pictures, school photos, wish-you-were-here vacation images, selfies.
Only one conclusion makes sense.
If advanced facial recognition technology is still being used in any way by government authorities to identify Jihadi John, our prior post´s null hypothesis -- the FBI does not know who he is -- is confirmed.
It´s time to come down hard with both feet, and re-issue the null hypothesis. The FBI has no idea who Jihadi John is.
Corollary: in claiming he knows who Jihadi John is, FBI Director James Comey is lying.
Sidebar: the photofit image of Jihadi John gives us only a very good guess? I hate to tell you, FBI, but that image is worse than no image. No image will not send authorities on a wild goose chase.
Let´s look deeper. Let´s assume a timing issue is involved, i.e., the photofit image was produced for the U.S. government before it identified (by other means) Jihadi John. In that case, the FBI is still not off the hook.
How can I be so sure about identification via other means? Simple. FBI, your good guess is neither good nor a guess. Anybody who has taken an art class (I did) knows the idea of constructing an entire face based on eyes alone is ridiculous. I challenge the FBI to find one credible artist anywhere who disputes that conclusion. Crucial clues were furnished by the photofit image? You´re joking. To prove or disprove our point, when Jihadi John is eventually identified publicly, we will publish the photofit image and the real image side by side. You, dear reader, will be the judge. Until then...
FBI, you were had by a smooth-talking software vendor. I guess it´s time to pass along words of wisdom a computer systems engineer gave me: there are more cons per square inch in the computer business than in Sing Sing.
Something else in the Mirror report is right out of the Keystone Cops.
"Our source revealed all of [Jihadi John´s] friends and contacts in Britain had been identified and that a web had been uncovered ´stretching from Dewsbury to London´.
An intelligence expert commented: ´Those supporting this terrorist face a simple choice – either co-operate with inquiries or face the full force of the justice system. There is nowhere to hide.´...
Counter-terror police officers acting on US intelligence have found and tracked suspected members of his terror support network in the UK.
The Sunday Mirror understands up to a dozen suspects have already been targeted by the authorities..."
As noted, the FBI said it is not revealing Jihadi John´s identity so as not to alarm his accomplices whom it wants to monitor. However, the fact of the matter is... Jihadi John´s helpers were piercingly alerted on three separate occasions:
(i) Let´s go back to August 25 -- to the ABC report containing the photofit image of Jihadi John.
The report begins with London street scenes. "British authorities today were focusing on these neighborhoods in London were several hundred young muslim men had been recruited to become some of the most brutal jihadis in the ISIS organization..."
ABC´s word focusing needs focusing. Did the British authorities go door to door or did they stay in their offices pouring over names and street camera footage? Both? Whatever the case, and regardless if the ABC report is right or wrong, true or false, the report in and of itself alerted Jihadi John´s accomplices in England that the heat was on.
Nowhere to hide? Really? Try Syria. Put yourself in the place of a Jihadi John network member. You see or hear about the ABC report. You look out the corner of your eye. An oldies but goodies 1966 song is playing downstairs: all my bags are packed, I´m ready to go... the dawn is breakin´, it´s early morn; taxi´s waitin´, blowin´ his horn....
(ii) Fast forward two weeks. Jihadi John´s supporters were again warned about an impending police dragnet. This time, the guilty party that tipped them off was not ABC but the Mirror and anonymous "spy sources."
The Mirror reported on September 7:
"Counter-terror police are poised to arrest up to a dozen suspected British associates of Jihadi John, as the net closes in on the blood-thirsty hostage killer.
Spy sources insisted they now know the identity of the Islamic State executioner and that they would unmask him ´within days´...
Yesterday, sources revealed that an elite FBI team, which flew into the country last month, was closing in on 12 suspects in the UK. They believe the alleged Jihadi John helpers provided money and contacts as well as assisting him with travel to Syria.
Based at Scotland Yard, a number of the police officers attached to the FBI travelled to the West Midlands to monitor the movements and communications of the terror network.
The suspects are all British and include several people from the West Midlands who are already known to the UK security services.
Described as ´hardened extremists´, the men are believed to be connected to previous UK-based foiled terror plots.
A US source said: ´It has been a co-ordinated effort to track down the support network around the British Islamic State executioner. Our inquiries have given us leads across the country.´
´We are 99.9% certain now as to who "John" is but investigators have had to tread softly in charting and approaching his wider network in the UK.´"
Again, put yourself in the place of a Jihadi John network member. You read the above Mirror report. Again, it does not matter if the report is right or wrong, true or false. You will not sit at home waiting for the knock on the door; you will take your exit.
Only one word adequately expresses the FBI´s handling of this entire affair: incredible. Back on September 7 we learned the FBI was "poised" to arrest a dozen members of the Jihadi John web. If the Mirror is right -- more on a possible glitch in a moment -- the arrests took place two months later, in November. Talk about telegraphing a punch. All I can say is, FBI, CIA, SIS -- whoever you "spy sources" are -- never step into a boxing ring. A neighborhood poker game either.
(iii) We come to the third advance warning handed to Jihadi John´s accomplices. It is the most blatant of all. It came on September 25. There is no doubt whatsoever who tipped off the jihadists: the FBI.
The FBI´s announcement that it knew Jihadi John´s identity but would not reveal it was... the most guaranteed way possible to spook his fellow terrorists. FBI, if you truly didn´t want to warn them, what you would have said was simply this: "We still have no idea who Jihadi John is." To create credibility for your statement and to add a distraction, you would tack on an additional sentence such as: "In fact, we are beginning to suspect he may not even be from the U.K., that his accent was faked." Jihadi John´s terrorist accomplices would have heaved a huge sigh of relief and gone their usual way, all of it of course monitored by you.
Truly? Why did we say truly? The word evinces a profound problem, perhaps fatal. We will explore it in our next post.
We have said it before; we will say it again. U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agents are not strategic thinkers. As our prior post showed, when it comes to terrorism, they literally and figuratively have no idea what they are talking about. Corollary: when it comes to individual terrorists, U.S. government personnel don´t have the foggiest idea whom they are dealing with. Those upshots were inevitable because Washington has no analysis.*
Two things in the Mirror report reveal other slab-dab nonsense:
(i) The Jihadi John accomplices were arrested at the end of November. Or were they?
Read closely the Mirror´s words: have found, closing in on, leads, tracked down, uncovered, targeted. None of them justify the headline of Jihadi John´s "terror ring smashed." I have a simple yes-or-no question for you, British and American authorities and Mirror: were the jihadists arrested? Your lite n´ lively wording evinces that you are clowning around.
(ii) FBI/U.S. source, you say you are "99.9% certain" who Jihadi John is.
99.9% is not 100%. You are keeping open the exit identified in our prior post -- The Fudge Factor, a.k.a., Weasel Words, CYA, Wiggle Room.
Give up, FBI: you have no idea who Jihadi John is. Those words are no doubt provoking right now a lot of nodding and winking, laughing, over at CIA headquarters. None of it is justified. If anybody understands terrorists less than the FBI, it is the CIA (see our first footnote below).
FBI, you can quickly, easily and definitively prove the null hypothesis wrong. Now that you have "smashed" Jihadi John´s conspiracy ring, there is, by your own reasoning (see above, on not wanting to alert his helpers), no reason whatsoever to keep his identity a secret a single second longer.
We come to the proverbial bottom line. The FBI´s continuing refusal to publicly identify Jihadi John is a screen door on a submarine.
That refusal brings us back to our original hypothesis: the FBI told the truth. It knows who Jihadi John is but is withholding his identity.
As we shall see in our next post, if FBI Director James Comey is telling the truth, the implications are far more disturbing than if he were lying.
* * *
Intelligence agents and law enforcement officers: show you received loud and clear Peter Kassig´s final message.
Be worthy of it.
Be your own role model.
Stop playing the puerile game of fooling others in order to fool yourselves.
Stand and deliver. Release Jihadi John´s identity immediately, if you can.
Stop being adolescents. Until you do, FBI, CIA, British intelligence officers -- you, not the terrorists, are the ones with no escape.
UPDATE: December 21. An Alternative to Torture.
Constant lighting, all-white rooms, loud music...and worse.
A lot worse.
Readers ask: what was the alternative to the $81-million man´s torture program so hastily adopted by the CIA.
There are, in fact, various alternatives.
First, I must repeat our policy. This blog does not give advice; it offers opinions. The line between them is not always clear. However, please keep in mind the following considerations:
"An opinion may consist of advice which is (i) deliberately offered too late to be actionable; (ii) knowingly impossible to implement due to circumstances prevailing at the moment; and/or (iii) offered with the foreknowledge that the simple fact of its publication will render its practical value null and void."
To find alternatives to torture, we need to know what neither the CIA nor FBI, State Department or Pentagon, knows:
What is a terrorist?
For the sake of convenience I will repeat here our definition from The Source of Terrorism: Middle Class Rebellion:
"A terrorist is usually a middle class rebel (1) experiencing magnified marginal or transitional conditions, who (2) voluntarily (3) goes through certain rites of passage, among which are (4) clique membership and (5) a deliberate decision to commit a criminal act that is almost always (6) violent and usually (7) murder, in (8) the name of higher intentions or convictions without (9) retaining consciously the ambiguity of his criminal act and his higher intentions/convictions. He expresses powerful, unconscious, ambivalent emotions in two ways: (10) converting his intentions/convictions into idées fixes or absolute truths, the opposite extreme from ambiguity, and (11) wielding uncertainty as a weapon. That uncertainty is total, as shown by the fact that (12) everyone — allies, non-combatants, even himself — is a potential victim. A concluding note: it is the syndrome, the running together of components, which counts — not specific components taken in isolation.
By not admitting what he cannot admit, the terrorist guards his secret, even from himself.
By not admitting what he is, the terrorist shows the gravity that admission holds for him. To my knowledge, no terrorist or other middle class rebel has ever said what he is.
What he is, is the secret he keeps: he is a middle class rebel."
All reputable quantitative and qualitative studies point to the same conclusion. Inside the majority of terrorists is a middle class rebel.** Unless that reality is acknowledged and understood, further discussion is pointless; progress, impossible.
You just saw what is blocking America and Europe. It is unconscious and ideological in nature and, for the time being, insurmountable. Knowingly impossible to implement: that is what makes what follows opinion, not advice:
Our definition of terrorist can be interpreted as a series of doors to solutions. Here is one that Source discussed at length:
What is the way out for a middle class rebel-terrorist? Answer: the same way he got in. Here, we are looking at the optimal solution. If he exits the terrorist syndrome, he will volunteer more information than you ever imagined.
Look at items 5-7 of our definition, i.e., rites of passage required of any would-be terrorist.
For all the same reasons that death is the maximum threshold for entering the terrorist syndrome, death is also the maximum threshold for exiting it. Source presented case studies of how that threshold operates, starting with David Horowitz:
The son of high school teachers who were Communist Party members, Horowitz was a leading agit-prop figure of the 1960s. He was co-editor of Ramparts Magazine, the San Francisco standard-bearer for The New Left.
Today, Horowitz is a ham-fisted spokesman for conservative causes. He supported Ronald Reagan.
What created the colossal change?
Our discussion in Source starts with an International Herald Tribune article. After arriving in California,
"´Horowitz soon met Huey Newton, the leader of the Black Panthers, a man of exquisite dialectics and thuggish impulse. Horowitz was entranced. As he sees it today, he fell for a familiar left trope: the romance of the outlaw. "It’s the Rousseauian vision of the noble savage," he says. "The violence of the poor is always romanticized because their consciousness has not yet been raised."
Horowitz helped open a Panther school. When Newton was accused of killing a teenage prostitute and fled to Cuba in 1974, Elaine Brown took over the Panthers. She has written of watching Newton beat a middle-aged tailor to a brain-smeared pulp and realizing just how little she cared.
She asked Horowitz to recommend an accountant. He sent over Betty Van Patter, who worked on Ramparts’ books. Months passed, and she called Horowitz one night, upset at what she had found in the Panthers’ books. She took her concerns to Brown. A month later, the police found Van Patter’s body floating in San Francisco Bay, her head caved in. (Although journalistic investigations, including one Horowitz wrote, pointed to Panther involvement in her kidnapping and murder, no one was ever charged.)
The death upended Horowitz. He had seen the Panthers’ gangster style, sensed their menace, and yet failed to properly warn Van Patter. Twenty-five years later, his voice catches and his face flushes as he recalls the moment. "When Betty died, I was taken right off my high horse and blasted into the ether. It was like my personal report card was ruined. I could no longer justify myself."
His slow inquiry into her death became an inventory of his self-deceptions. His marriage broke up, he became alienated from his friends. By the late 1970s, he had come to question the entire Church of the Left: He had seen the far left dissolved into violence, and the moderate left fail to reckon with the toll taken by communist-led revolutions in Cambodia, Vietnam, Angola and Central America. The church analogy is apt, says Peter Collier, his longtime collaborator and another émigré from left to right. "After the first doubt you cannot keep from sliding to the bottom and questioning everything."
But Parker of the Shorenstein Center says: "David needs to grow up. He’s never come clean about how deeply involved he was with the Panthers, and that prevents him from taking a full and measured view of his soul and human complicity in evil. His experiences should produce caution."
Michael Powell, “The Radical Transformation of David Horowitz,” International Herald Tribune, April 3, 2001.
Collier’s comment, After the first doubt you cannot keep from sliding to the bottom and questioning everything, is worth highlighting. All or nothing, either or: the total absence of intermediate positions to which one could fall back to for support, is a hallmark of middle class rebellion.
The same lack of intermediate positions was evident in the case of Ed Husain, a member of the Islamist radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain. Husain, like Horowitz, underwent a conversion after experiencing a killing. He had wanted to be one of the intellectual leaders of the movement:
´But when things got out of hand and one of his colleagues, Saeed, killed a Christian Nigerian, Husain called it quits with Hizb ut-Tahrir.
“I was spiritually down in the gutter, remote from the Koran and remote from my parents,” he said.´
Jane Perlez, “Ex-radical turns to Islam of tolerance,” International Herald Tribune, June 2/3, 2007.
There is no doubt that killing is a frequently-encountered threshold for entering as well as exiting terrorist groups. That threshold is comparable to the one required for the suspension of disbelief in theater plays and novels..., to wit, once you can get someone to kill, you can get him to do anything. I consider it to be important enough to be included in the definition of terrorist.
In On Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman observed that killing is ´a rite of passage´ with all the accouterments, e.g., purification rites such as parades, memorials, and monuments, for re-entry into society. (Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, Massachusetts, 1996, pp. 270-4). Those who are concerned with the problem of how to convince terrorists to leave their groups would do well to study the killing-induced trauma that many returning American veterans suffer. The key to a large part of the problem is there." (Source, pp. 207-10)
* * *
The possessed of Dostoevsky have stronger ties to the
Babbitts of Sinclair Lewis than normally meets the eye. -- The Source of Terrorism: Middle Class Rebellion, p. 252 --
The starting place for Washington to learn -- among other things -- how to interrogate and treat terrorists is a phenomenon analyzed in depth by Carl Jung: enantiodromia.*** Any extreme tends to change into its opposite. The more extreme the extremist, the greater is the potential for enantiodromia to occur.
To the point: inside every middle class rebel-terrorist lurks a die-hard conformist, a humdrum reconciler. To activate his inner Babbitt, one needs only to understand the process involved and which buttons to push. Torture is not among them.
That in a nutshell is why, CIA, you flushed $81 million of our money down the toilet.
_______________
*Wherever there is no analysis there arises an irresistible recourse to gadgets, gimmicks, shortcuts; to two-month-old contacts; to he-said-that-she-said ruminations and daydreams; to walk-in-walk-out anonymous sources; to hot tips passed over the bar counter and backyard fence; to neat ideas and other bolts from the blue; to hurry-up phone calls: to instant experts. En toto -- desperation, the very thing the CIA projects onto ISIS (see our prior post).
An up-to-the-moment example:
In the wake of the release last week of the Senate Intelligence Committee´s five-year investigation of CIA torture, the New York Times published an eye-opening report on how certain things came to be.
In 2002, the CIA captured a major al-Qaeda operative, Abu Zubaydah. O.K., now what? Who ya´ gonna call?
"A C.I.A. lawyer at the April 1, 2002, meeting suggested the name of a psychologist, James Mitchell, who had been on contract for several months, analyzing Al Qaeda for the agency’s Office of Technical Service, the arm of the C.I.A. that creates disguises and builds James Bond-like spy gadgets.
The lawyer, Jonathan Fredman, had heard the name from someone in the office, and within hours of floating it, counterterrorism officials were on the phone with Mr. Mitchell. By that evening, according to the report released last week by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the agency had incorporated Mr. Mitchell’s views into a classified cable ordering preparations for the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah...
The cable called for constant lighting, loud music and an all-white room to keep Abu Zubaydah awake. The setup would cause ´psychological disorientation, and reduced psychological wherewithal,´ the cable read.
With little debate or vetting of Mr. Mitchell and his approach, the C.I.A. that day in 2002 started down a road to interrogation practices that Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, last week called ´a stain on our values and our history.´
In the months that followed, Mr. Mitchell, a former Air Force explosives expert and trainer, and later his partner, Bruce Jessen, another psychologist and former Air Force officer, designed, led and directed the interrogations and became the prime advocates for what is now widely considered to have been torture. In the process, they made tens of millions of dollars under contracts that their critics within the C.I.A. warned at the time gave them financial incentives to repeatedly use the most brutal techniques.
The C.I.A. has said it hired Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen because their experience with ´nonstandard´ interrogation was ´unparalleled.´ But the government’s own experts favored the traditional approach to questioning prisoners. And the Senate report makes clear that the speed with which Mr. Mitchell was brought into the program — less than 24 hours elapsed between the time his name was floated and that first cable — meant there was no time to analyze whether his approach was best.
Former officials involved in the program attribute the speed to one thing: desperation. With the C.I.A. under pressure to obtain information from its prisoners, Mr. Mitchell seemed to have the answer to how to do it.
That eagerness for a new, aggressive approach is reflected elsewhere in the Senate report. One C.I.A. officer said the agency’s best intelligence justifying harsh interrogations came from a ´walk-in´ source — someone who appeared one day and told the C.I.A. that Allah permitted jihadists to cooperate only if they were threatened. There is no evidence in the report that the C.I.A. ever corroborated those assertions.
In a lengthy interview last week after the C.I.A. released him from an order forbidding his talking about his role in its program, Mr. Mitchell said the speed of his hiring was a surprise even to him. ´I never knew how that happened,´ he said. ´I just got a phone call.´”
The original cable foretold in two words the shoddy project the CIA -- indeed, the nation and world -- were in for:
Psychological wherewithal. You, dear reader, just saw a textbook case of Lazy Language. And the like; so on and so forth; whatchamacallit; if you know what I mean; whatever; the whole nine yards; thingamajig; etc.-etc.: no competent professional anywhere in any field resorts to such verbal crutches.
**This month´s case study: Indian police arrested Mehdi Masroor Biswas, a 24-year-old computer engineer who was running a major, pro-ISIS twitter account @ShamiWitness. His father is a retired electrical engineer.
***“{T]he emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time. This characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, one-sided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control.” C. G. Jung, “Psychological Types,” in C. G. Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 6, H. G. Baynes, translator, 1990, p. 426. (Paragraph 709).