Sometimes Friends Just Seem Hard to Come By!

August 19, 2011

Guest Blogger Matthew Brentzel looks at relations between the law enforcement and intelligence communities.

I think all of us can agree that sometimes inter-organizational communication can be difficult.  Working with others just doesn’t always seem to work out in the end.  Issues can arise―such as misinterpretation of information, withholding information, and biased opinions―which in turn can lead to difficulties between two organizations.

That’s why I chose to write a blog post on Can’t We All Just Get Along?: Improving the Law Enforcement-Intelligence Community Relationship, from the National Defense Intelligence College.  Not only does it involve my interest in intelligence analysis, but it also brings in aspects of the work I currently do.  Although I have seen how hard it can be to come to an agreement sometimes, it can be done.  This is the main message the authors of Can’t We All Just Get Along? try to get across. “When the relationship between these communities works, it works very well.”  The authors set out to prove this theory with a series of essays that show the nature of this relationship.  One article in particular really shows what happens when a successful relationship occurs.  It focuses on the likelihood of domestic terrorism possibly developing in the U.S. prison system.  It goes on to explain the relationship between the Federal Correctional Intelligence Initiative and the U.S. Bureau of Justice Administration.  This relationship has allowed the Bureau of Prisons to evolve successfully into a network that shares gang and terrorist intelligence data.

This book brought to my attention a topic that I had never really thought about before.  I look forward to some day entering into the field of intelligence analysis, but never really thought about how the intelligence community interacted with law enforcement agencies. If I ever thought about it at all, I probably imagined that these conflicting agencies would cooperate easily with each other and supply the information each needed.  This publication revealed real differences, such as their relative willingness to divulge intelligence and their ideas about what intelligence actually is.  Finally, it covers the history of these two communities and how this history impacts their relationship today.

I would highly recommend this publication for anyone in the law enforcement or intelligence field.  In addition, I would recommend it to anybody interested in collaboration between Government agencies.  Feel free to visit the GPO bookstore and take a look at this publication here, or check out the online version via PDF format here.

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Posted by govbooktalk

Studying the Politics of Militant Islam in Southeast Asia

May 23, 2011

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m interested in international politics and global strategic issues, among many, many other things (as a reader, I’m a total magpie – and proud of it!). Since the recent unlamented demise of Osama bin Laden, the issues of terrorism and Islamic militancy are back in the news, but sometimes only superficially. Whole areas of the world continue to be ignored by the media, or appear to be on their back burner.

That’s why a book like A Muslim Archipelago: Islam and Politics in Southeast Asia, from the National Defense Intelligence College, is so illuminating. It provides both historical perspectives and contemporary insights into the origins and political position of Islam in Indonesia and its various components, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Islam in Indonesia, for example, has assimilated many characteristics of Hindu and animistic beliefs, making it vastly different than the austere Wahabism of Saudi Arabia or the fundamentalism of the Taliban. The book also points out that places like Acheh in Indonesia and the southern region of Thailand were independent Muslim polities until relatively recent times, resulting in a potent blend of religion and regionalism that sometimes explodes into insurrection. America’s own experience with the Moros of the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War is only one example – and the Moros are still challenging the Filipino state today.

A Muslim Archipelago is also a lucidly written guide to the bewildering proliferation of militant groups. as in many extremist political movements, factions and splits are common. Jemaah Islamiyeh, Laskar Jundallah, and Laskar Jihad all appear within a few pages of each other in the section on Indonesia, but the book does a good job of differentiating their aims and actions. When (and I’m afraid it’s not “if”) the next flare-up of  insurgency or terrorism crops up in Southeast Asia, this book will provide the context within which to explicate the issues and personalities involved.

I hope policy makers and strategists, and political leaders around the world can benefit form the information in this excellent book – it’s in all of our best interests if they do. You can browse through it here or here (where you can also order it as an eBook!), get your own copy here, or find it in a library.

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Orientalism, Intelligence, and Empire

January 7, 2011

It took me awhile to get a handle on this one. Imperial Secrets: Remapping the Mind of Empire, published by the  National Defense Intelligence College, cites Edward Said, Francis Bacon, Jorge Luis Borges, Michel Foucault, Jeremy Bentham, T.E. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad just in the Introduction, uses the intelligence experiences of the Roman, Ottoman, and British Empires as its core focus, and includes chapters  headed “Thuggee”, “Barzakh”, “Rhizomes”, and “Boukoloi.” This is a book that challenges its readers.

My take is that Edward Said is the real intellectual godfather of this book. His Orientalism was and remains a brilliant exposition of the West’s perceptions of the “mysterious East”. Although like all seminal works, Said’s work has been challenged, and in some ways refuted, it remains a starting point for anyone in the many fields it touches.

Although Imperial Secrets is too rich and complex a work to summarize here, it proposes that the United States, although not a classic empire, can be viewed as such, from the perspective of knowledge gathering, or intelligence, in the lands over which it exercises “imperial” influence. In the chapter on Thuggee in the British Raj, for example, an age-old Indian problem of robbery carried out via the strangulation of victims, was transmogrified by the British imagination into an organized cult of religious stranglers. Informers and punitive laws  then were employed to eliminate this phantom cult. Imperial Secrets uses this narrative to demonstrate the way empires, when faced with unfamiliar social and cultural environments, use an Orientalist discourse to fit those environments into their own frames of reference.

Another interesting theme is the value of informal networks of information, whether through the Sufi lodges of the Ottoman Empire or the transnational Freemasonic lodges of 19th Century Europe. Related to these networks are attempts by empires to use their own agents (T.E. Lawrence or the remarkable American Josiah Harlan, who had at least a shot at becoming an Afghan prince in the 1830s) and the emotional and psychological stresses that influence, or even distort, these agents’ perceptions however deeply they have steeped themselves in the cultures they infiltrate.

As I said earlier, Imperial Secrets is too intellectually challenging to review in a limited space. I haven’t even touched on its examination of Flavius Josephus as the kind of marginal informant that can to some extent transgress the boundary between and empire and its subjects, or the situationist travels of the 16th century Turkish traveler and official Evliya Celebi and their relevance as an example of  detecting information in the empty spaces between intelligence sources. (I’m starting to sound like the book, which may mean that I’m getting the point!)

Imperial Secrets is not a quick read, but it’s a stimulating one. Bear with it and you’re likely to  reap its rewards. You can read it here, get your own copy, or find it in a library.

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Posted by govbooktalk

Terrorism as Organized Crime

September 28, 2010

“Terrorist Networks Are Organized + Terrorism Is a Crime = Terrorism Is Organized Crime”

That’s the formula that Blue Planet: Informal International Police Networks and National Intelligence presents to the reader, and author Michael D. Bayer makes a good case for it. Bayer, a former chief of the Department of State’s transnational criminal investigative office, takes the view that police around the world are better positioned to know what’s going on in their local areas, no matter how remote they seem from the wider world. Through informal contacts with colleagues in their own countries and abroad, they can gather and disseminate vital intelligence to detect and suppress “worldwide manifestations of destabilizing violence, often indiscriminately labeled ‘terrorism.’”

I found Blue Planet to be an intriguing read for a number of reasons. It presents a reasonable and clearly written case for greater involvement of the police in fighting terrorism, argues forcefully against the post-9/11 militarization of U.S. anti-terrorism effort, and cites a number of fascinating case studies of how informal international police networks, even including such relatively closed societies as Cuba and China, have worked effectively to apprehend criminals. (Some of these stories could be the basis for your next suspense novel!)

Blue Planet also makes the interesting point that both international criminal operations and terrorist networks often use the same illegal methods (smuggling, money laundering, drug trafficking), and who better to learn about those links than those already tracking organized crime?  According to a recent RAND report cited in the book, “For terrorist groups that cannot or will not abandon terrorism, policing is likely to be the most effective strategy to destroy terrorist groups. The logic is straightforward: Police generally have better training and intelligence to penetrate and disrupt terrorist organizations. They are the primary arm of the government focused on internal security matters.”

Blue Planet is not just another policy report. It’s an insightful and intellectually stimulating book that also includes some terrific true crime stories. You can read it here on the National Defense Intelligence College Web site or track down your own copy here.

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Prisoner Interrogation in Three Wars

June 3, 2010

Interrogation: World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq is an absolutely fascinating read. This book from the National Defense Intelligence College takes both an historical and policy-oriented view of prisoner of war interrogations in three wars. The World War II section examines the Army’s use of Japanese Americans – Nisei – as interrogators in the Pacific, along with incisive discussions of why Japanese soldiers seldom were taken prisoners, why a relatively high percentage of such POWs cooperated with their interrogators, and why they furnished such a significant amount of intelligence to their captors (the Japanese military hierarchy assumed that their men would not become prisoners and so did not indoctrinate them about the importance of not giving up information if they were.) This part of the book also analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the Army and Navy Japanese language training  provided during the war.

The Vietnam section focuses on profiles of the most able interrogators in World War II (the wonderfully named R.W. G. “Tin Eye” Stephens for the British and Hans Scharff for the Germans) and a number of successful American officers during the Vietnam conflict. Throughout the book, the authors make the point that linguistic ability, a deep understanding of the captives’ culture and worldview, and a perception that torture or other violent methods were useless in soliciting information of value are the hallmarks of a successful interrogator of prisoners. This part of the book also describes these individuals’ occasional conflicts with the military bureaucracy, such as Sedgwick Tourison’s experience in reporting more information about the Tonkin Gulf incident than his superiors wanted to hear.

The final section, on Iraq, focuses on policy issues – specifically, whether Army doctrine should permit Special Operations personnel to interrogate prisoners. Again, real-world examples from personal experience provide a study that is both gripping and insightful.

Interrogation: World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq is a thoughtful and provocative analysis of what any army confronts in war – the need to gather intelligence from prisoners, the most effective way to do that, and the ineffectiveness of “harsh methods” in delivering useful information.

You can read the book here or get a copy from GPO here.  To find it in a library, search here.

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Posted by govbooktalk

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