The Enemy Within

While we're on the subject of national security and law, I have to mention a fascinating discussion I had earlier this week. As you know, I'm involved in the National Security and Law Society at Fordham. (Very, very new - our chapter was started last term by my classmates). Once in a while we have interesting discussions about relevant current events and issue. This week's discussion centered around a blog post, written by the founder and president of the chapter at Fordham, James Creedon. Many of you probably heard about the arrest and indictment of one Abdul Alishtari, a.k.a. "Michael Mixon". He was charged with helping to finance terrorism... although while being a donor to the GOP (!) and a founder of the Global Peace Film Festival. You should definitely take a look at the post for the details, as well as other resources. Anyway, our discussion centered around what should have been done about this individual and what would Judge Posner do in this situation.

Full disclosure: Because of other school activities, only a few people showed up to the meeting, and even fewer actively participated in the discussion. Which is the reason I'm bringing it up here - to get more feedback.

Question I: Was it a good idea to arrest Alishtari so soon? Should the FBI have waited to see whether he is involved in a bigger conspiracy and follow him around to catch the bigger fish?

IMHO, that question is not an easy one to answer. The response requires a delicate balancing test of costs and benefits. What would we be gaining by arresting Alishtari? By waiting it out?

Arrest

As someone else suggested, it's important to make an example out of Alishtari so that others wouldn't follow him. So perhaps arresting him at this point was a good idea - the noise will strike fear into the hearts, of those tempted to follow his example, and encourage them to abandon their schemes.

Arguments against:

* Judge Posner thought it was a better idea to follow him until the rest of his cohorts were found and caught.
* Arresting him so soon wouldn't stop terror financing. Instead, it would get the cohorts to lie low for a while... only to reemerge under a different guise when the controversy died down.
* We are not really gaining anything from arresting him so soon, if he's indeed part of a conspiracy. He will probably either refuse to cooperate and plead the Fifth or if he is motivated by ideological considerations rather than just the financial gain from his schemes, he'll do even more damage by deceiving the investigators and leading them AWAY from the "big fish". Even promising to reduce his sentence probably won't do much good... and it's not an easy recourse to take legally, either.

However, I thought that Judge Posner's suggestion, although it made much more sense than the immediate arrest, was not without serious flaws either.

* First of all, though it might help catch at least some of Alishtari's terrorism-funding cohorts... it's not a 100% possibility. Such a serious operation is very hard to pull off, and considering that we're missing a LOT of logistical information, it would probably end in a goose chase. I simply don't have that much faith in our large-scale internal intelligence powers.
* It's QUITE possible that Alishtari is NOT the only major Republican donor involved in the scheme, if not the terrorism-related parts of it, then at least the money laundering. And while fighting and exposing corruptions should always be our top priority, no matter which party is involved... such operations should ALSO be done very carefully and intelligently. Can you imagine the political ramifications of accusing well-known individuals... who may have been completely unaware of what was happening? Proving who knew or should have known what and unravelling a "conspiracy of silence" would definitely require a lot of QUIET UNDERCOVER investigation... but, I have a feeling, a leak in such a situation is almost inevitable, and the judgment of the press concerning sensitive information is best not be mentioned in this post. And yes, I absolutely think that such an investigation SHOULD be done... but no one's talking about it, for some reason.

Other alternatives:

* Implementing Judge Posner's idea might be easier if we recruited Alishtari to our side without making an official arrest and drawing unwanted attention to the operation. If he actively and consciously cooperated, it would resolve the issue of getting him not to suspect anything ever... which he would probably start doing at some point, and possibly ruin the entire operation.
* However, I don't really think that would work. I think Alishtari has his ideological loyalties and would probably be more deceptive than helpful. Not what we want at all.

The baiting plan could work if we used tactics implemented in other countries, which have a very successful record of catching internal terrorists:

* Use infiltrators of background very similar to Alishtari to to ensure his trust and incriminate himself and his allies.

BUT

* Such a plan is ONLY good if we have the human intelligence to pull it off. The issue here is TRUST... and I doubt we have enough agents, who are sufficiently trained and could actually pull it off. Let's face it, such a plan would only be succesful because it would require a tremendous amount of planning, sophistication, and complexity. Something's telling me that we're not at that level of intelligence development when it comes to people like Alishtari, and perhaps cooperating with countries, which do have the human intelligence, would be the only reasonable solution until we build up our own network.

Which brings me to the next question:

Who should be doing the investigation?

* FBI is mainly a law enforcement agency, encouraged to arrest... and therefore, tempted to arrest at earlier stages. It is not an intelligence-oriented organization.
* CIA's activities are by law limited to external affairs.
* NASA is not suitable either.

Judge Posner suggested to create another agency, which would NOT have law enforcement power, but which would have internal intelligence power, and would specifically deal with counterintelligence and rooting out the likes of Alishtari. Its powers would be checked by FBI and other overseeing organization. It would only be able to investigate and point out suspects, leaving the arrest decision up to FBI.

Objections

From the left:
* Too many agencies, too much bureaucracy already.
* Average Americans are already wary of all the investigations and underground government work. Yet another investigative agency would feel too much like Big Brother.

From the right: (that was me)

My concern is that the agencies we do have already are pretty bad about information sharing, despite this Administration's attempts to change that. Adding another agency would probably only complicate the matters... and increase the levels of internal competition. We should be focusing more on eliminating the interagency rivalry, which is completely counterproductive and very harmful to the country's security.

As you can guess, we didn't come to any conclusions... quite possibly because there were two few for us to present a real gamut of perspectives. This blog, however, I think has enough of an audience to provide an interesting forum for exchange of more sophisticated and detailed ideas. So... what do you guys think? I'm especially interested in hearing from readers involved in any of the above-mentioned areas, but I also look forward to hearing from everyone else! Comment away!

Challenged,
Irina