Newsletter: Preventing Torture within the Fight Against Terrorism

The International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims has just published its latest newsletter, which you can access here.

Wikileaks=End of Overclassification?

The dominant response to the release of thousands of classified documents on the war on Afghanistan seems to be "nothing new there." As President Obama put it today,


"While I’m concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations, the fact is these documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate on Afghanistan; indeed, they point to the same challenges that led me to conduct an extensive review of our policy last fall."


Does this mean that the explosive growth in the classification of government documents is a waste of time? That all of these secret documents don't really contain any secrets? I doubt that is what is being suggested here, but it is a pretty logical inference.


It's possible that leaks like this could create pressure for more transparency in the the classification and release of government documents. If the authorities worry that their classified documents have a good chance of being leaked, they may decide to classify fewer pieces of information or to keep such information classified for a far shorter period of time. After all, unclasssified documents are rarely news. If the dominant interpretation of these files is correct--that they tell us nothing we did not already know--then the only reason they are newsworthy is because someone labelled them secret. It would be a good thing is this was the response, but if the past is any guide it's more likely to lead to more classification rather than less.. 

How Useful is the Wikileaks Data Dump?

Wikileaks today released tens of thousands of secret US government documents regarding the war in Afghanistan. Some have already concluded that the revelations that have been reported from these documents are not really that new. Others see the potential for shedding new light on the conflict.

Both are probably correct. Most of the documents are reports by lower-level intelligence personnel and small unit officers, which could not be expected to draw major conclusions about the overall conflict. But any diplomatic historian will tell you that a big trove of documents certainly has the potential to deepen our understanding of the US side of the conflict.

Some of the text analysis tools I blogged about earlier this month could come in very handy in categorizing and analyzing these documents. But learning anything substantial or novel from these files will require overcoming three hurdles. The first is time; no instant analysis of 90,000 documents is any use. The second is completeness. Wikileaks has not released all of the documents it has obtained; it reports withholding about 15,000 that would put lives at risk, expose informants, or interfere with ongoing military operations. But these documents may be the most revealing. They may also be systematically different that the documents that have been released, which makes it tricky to infer anything about the unreleased files from the released files. The third difficulty is the data generation and storage processes. Were these secret reports generated every time a particular event occurred? Where they generated on  a regular basis across the entire conflict? Were all reports saved? Or did the rules governing generation and saving of reports change over time? If this is the case, it might mean that the reports represent a changing and not very accurate picture of the underlying activity they are intended to capture.

The Director of National Intelligence's Most Important Task is to be Fired

The Senate is considering the nomination of James Clapper to be the next Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Many wonder why he wants the job--he currently runs intelligence for the Department of Defense, in the past ran a major intelligence agency, and the job of DNI has too little power (as former DNI John Negroponte acknowledged yesterday). Add to this the fact that the President's adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security, John Brennan, is said to be the "real" DNI, the one who has the power--in the form of the confidence of the president--in intelligence circles. This makes sense, as the key job of the National Security Council is to coordinate the actions of the many foreign policy and intelligence agencies, making sure that they are not working at cross purposes and are implementing the President's agenda. 

Why not, then, somehow merge the roles of DNI with the authority current held by someone like Brennan? Why not appoint to the DNI job someone close to the president, perhaps with a senior joint appointment to the National Security Council? This would give the DNI the legislative and, more important, the political power to do real things.


One reason for keeping the DNI at arms length from the White House is to maintain a form of plausible deniability. Generating intelligence that allows the authorities to prevent terrorist attacks is really, really hard. There are always going to be intelligence failures. Even if there were an obvious fix for the problems of the intelligence community, such as failing to share information, intelligence agencies will never to able to stop all attacks. To paraphrase Stanley Baldwin, some (terrorist) bombers will always get through.

Having an DNI as a cabinet-level agency outside of the White House allows the political leadership to distance itself from these inevitable failures. The White House can make sure that any blame falls mostly on the intelligence community and especially on the DNI.

From the perspective of the DNI, then, it might make sense to conceptualize the office as about "management" rather than "leadership". If it sticks to (boring but important) budgeting, technology, and training issues, the DNI is less in the loop for intelligence failures. The decision of early DNI's to build a largish analytical shop, to take responsibility for briefing political leaders on intelligence,  and to try to assume some operational authority (for example, over the National Counterterrorism Center and the appointment of intelligence liaisons to foreign intelligence services) involve the DNI pretty directly in these failures. Focusing on management instead might provide some insulation from pressures to fire the DNI for the next intelligence failure. It might also do some good in reforming the intelligence community. Politically, though, it does not serve the interests of an (ambitious) ODNI or the White House.

Human Rights Watch on Intelligence Sharing and Torture

Human Rights Watch just released a report on international intelligence sharing with countries that engage in torture. It focuses on how Britain, France, and Germany cooperate with foreign intelligence services that torture in order to collect intelligence useful for law enforcement and counterterrorism purposes. Here are the key conclusions:


Intelligence cooperation is important to countering terrorism. But regular receipt of, and reliance on, foreign torture information implicitly validates the use of unlawful methods to acquire information. The practice of using such information and public statements affirming the legitimacy of doing so risks creating a market for torture intelligence. It violates the positive obligation under international law to prevent and punish torture and can amount to complicity in such abuse. And using torture as evidence is a clear breach of the global torture ban.

France, Germany and the UK can engage in necessary intelligence cooperation without undermining the global torture ban. To do so, they must make genuine inquiries with sending countries to determine whether torture was used to obtain it and what steps the authorities have taken to hold to account those responsible for that abuse. Cooperation should be suspended in particular cases where there are grounds to believe torture or ill-treatment were used to obtain shared information. There is also a need for tighter parliamentary oversight of intelligence cooperation, and stronger rules to prevent torture material from entering the judicial process.

Tools for Text

I recently attended a methodology workshop, Tools for Text, that focused on text as a source of data. It was a great workshop that brought together leading people in the field to explain what they do to novices like me. The organizers have put together a nice web site with descriptions of the workshop, relevant readings, and really useful links to software. Check it out if you are at all interested in this sort of thing.

Compliance among weak states: Africa and the counter-terrorism regime

My colleague Beth Whitaker's article "Compliance among weak states: Africa and the counter-terrorism regime" has just been published in the Review of International Studies. You can access it (gated) here. This is the abstract:


This article examines levels of compliance with the counter-terrorism regime in Africa, where weak states might have been expected to conform. Instead, even under American pressure, some governments have seized the anti-terrorism rhetoric while others have been more reluctant. A comparative analysis of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda demonstrates that domestic political factors largely explain this variation; compliance is highest in countries with the least democratic institutions and minimal mobilisation of domestic constituencies. Aid dependence and the perception of a terrorist threat also play a role. To the extent that popular pressures in transitional democracies reduce compliance, the article raises questions about the legitimacy and effectiveness of the counter-terrorism regime.

New Paper: The Effect of Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq

Here is the abstract for an interesting and timely new working paper on how civilian casualties influence insurgent attacks in Afghanistan and in Iraq:


How are insurgents able to mobilize the population to fight and withhold valuable information from government forces? More specifically, what role does government mistreatment of non-combatants play? We study these questions by using uniquely-detailed micro-data from Afghanistan and Iraq to assess the impact of civilian casualties on insurgent violence. By comparing the data along temporal, spatial, and gender dimensions we are able to distinguish short-run 'information' and 'capacity' effects from the longer run 'recruiting' and 'revenge' effects. In Afghanistan we find strong evidence for a revenge effect in that local exposure to ISAF generated civilian casualties drives increased insurgent violence over the long-run. Matching districts with similar past trends in violence shows that counterinsurgent-generated civilian casualties from a typical incident are responsible for 6 additional violent incidents in an average sized district in the following 6 weeks. There is no evidence of short run effects in Afghanistan, thus ruling out the information and the capacity mechanisms. Critically, we find no evidence of a similar reaction to civilian casualties in Iraq, suggesting insurgents' mobilizing tools may be quite conflict-specific. Our results show that if counterinsurgent forces in Afghanistan wish to minimize insurgent recruitment, they must minimize harm to civilians despite the greater risk this entails.


The paper is authored  by Luke N. Condra, Joseph H. Felter, Radha K. Iyengar, and Jacob N. Shapiro. Shapiro also contributed to the symposium on terrorism and human rights I blogged about earlier this week. 

Terrorism and Human Rights Symposium: The Press Release

Here is the press release for the symposium on terrorism and human rights that I posted about yesterday; you can access the articles themselves from yesterday's post too.