Government Executive - Authors - Matt Schiavenza

Four U.S. Marines Killed in Attack at Tennessee Military Recruitment Office

Matt Schiavenza, The Atlantic — Fri, 17 Jul 2015 09:35:24 -0400

A gunman opened fire at two military recruiting stations in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Thursday morning, killing four U.S. Marines before dying in the attack. Three others, including one police officer, were wounded. According to Ed Reinhold, the FBI Special Agent in Charge, the Marines were killed at a recruitment center where the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marines all share offices. President Obama described the attack as a “heartbreaking circumstance” while cautioning that “we don’t know all the details.” According to CBS News, U.S. Attorney Bill Killian said officials were treating Thursday’s attack as an “act of domestic terrorism.”

The gunman was identified as Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, 24, of Hixson, Tennessee. Federal officials said that he was not under investigation at the time of the attack.

The violence in Tennessee represents the first attack on a U.S. military recruitment center since 2009, when Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, a 23-year-old man unhappy about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, opened fire on two men standing near a recruitment center in Little Rock, Arkansas, killing one. Recruitment centers, by their nature, are open to the public, and Chattanooga’s Armed Forces Career Center had no additional security at the time of the attack.

In a statement released after the attack, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam said that “lives have been lost from some faithful people who have been serving our country, and I think I join all Tennesseans in being both sickened and saddened by this.”

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Drone Deaths and the Myth of Precision

Matt Schiavenza, The Atlantic — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 10:05:41 -0400

On Thursday morning, President Obama appeared before White House reporters to announce that a January drone strike had inadvertently killed two Western hostages held at an al-Qaeda compound in Pakistan. The tragedy, he said, would lead the United States to review its policy surrounding drone warfare.

"We will identify the lessons that can be learned from this tragedy, and any changes that should be made," he said. "We will do our utmost to ensure it is not repeated."

A day later, however, there's little reason to believe that American policy will change. The existing done program has broad bipartisan support in Congress, reported the National Journal on Friday, and several of President Obama's most outspoken opponents refrained from criticizing the administration.

"We are not going to terminate the drone program," Lindsey Graham, a Republican Senator from South Carolina, said.

The United States has used drone warfare since 2004, but the program escalated since President Obama's inauguration in 2009. For a president eager to wind down America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the small, pilotless aircraft offered an opportunity to target specific enemy combatants without requiring U.S. ground troops.

But drone strikes often aren't as accurate as their proponents claim. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that the 415 drone strikes launched in Pakistan since 2004 have killed between 2,449 and 3,949 people. Of these, between 400 and 1,000 have been civilians. Micah Zenko, an expert in drone warfare at the Council on Foreign Relations, told The New York Times that of the eight U.S. citizens killed by American drone attacks, seven were killed unintentionally—including Warren Weinstein, one of the two hostages who died in the January strikes.

Technology has improved in the decade-plus since the American drone war began. A second-generation armed drone called the Reaper, for example, canlocate a target to a single room within a house. But drone strikes are only as accurate as the intelligence they're based on. The Obama administration admitted on Thursday that it did not know Weinstein or Giovanni Lo Porto, the Italian aid worker killed alongside him, were in the compound when it was struck in mid-January, despite months of video surveillance. The White House also did not know that Adam Gadahn, a California-born spokesman for al-Qaeda, was present when he died in a separate January drone attack.

Gathering reliable intelligence in the tribal areas of Pakistan, a rugged, remote area largely beyond the federal government's control, remains a formidable challenge. According to a report in Bloomberg, the U.S. is reluctant to send agentsto the area. The nature of al-Qaeda itself—a fluid, stateless organization lacking a clear bureaucracy—makes it difficult for foreign spies to infiltrate. Terror groups have also learned how to minimize use of technology that could betray their location and activities.

Since embracing drone warfare in 2009, the Obama administration has shown a willingness to strike known terrorist targets—even when the possibility of collateral damage exists. The attacks on the compound holding Weinstein and Lo Porto—as well as that on the one holding Gadahn—were deliberate strikes on al-Qaeda targets, little different from hundreds of others launched since 2004. Dan Benjamin, a former State Department officer now at Dartmouth College, toldBloomberg's Josh Rogin that the accidental killing of hostages had simply been a matter of time.

"If you are taking kinetic action against terrorist targets for years and years on end, the law of averages is going to catch up with you and something terrible like this is going to happen," he said.

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The U.S. Government's Foreign-Language Problem

Matt Schiavenza, The Atlantic — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 10:11:25 -0500

For American citizens wishing to serve their government as linguists, career advancement can present a vexing Catch-22. To acquire the language and cultural skills needed to succeed in the job, a linguist typically must spend years within a foreign country, developing ties with residents. But this experience abroad is a career obstacle too. According to a report in the New York Times, several FBI employees with ties in foreign countries have seen their careers stalled as a result due to being placed in a post-9/11 "risk-management" program devised by the agency.

The program, Post-Adjudication Risk Management, or PARM, subjects its targets to additional security screenings, polygraph tests, scrutiny of foreign travel, and reviews of electronic communications. The FBI notifies those agents placed under PARM review, but the process for getting off the list requires severing ties with family members and contacts living overseas. Even worse, some of the agents allege that the PARM program stalled their careers. Gamal Abdel-Hafiz, an Egyptian-born linguist who has worked for the FBI since 1994 and helped the bureau on high-profile terror investigations, believes he was placed in PARM in retaliation for supporting another colleague's grievances. The FBI, meanwhile, told him his placement resulted from frequent contact with and travels to Egypt.

"If you're in this program, it affects you from moving up," Bobby Devadoss, a Dallas lawyer representing Hafiz and other FBI agents in the program, told theTimes.

In a statement released Saturday, the FBI acknowledged the existence of PARM but denied that being placed in the program harmed any prospects for career advancement.

The controversy over PARM is only the most recent language-related difficulty that the United States government has faced in conducting foreign policy. In the years after the September 11th attacks, the U.S. Army launched a campaign to recruit Americans qualified to serve as interpreters for languages like Arabic, Pashto, and Dari. Despite promises of high compensation, these efforts met with resistance. Worse, the Army expelled over 300 gay linguists for violating the now-defunct "Don't ask, don't tell" policy even as they were highly desired. Even those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan encountered enormous bureaucratic frustrations.

Translators and interpreters hired in-country encounter even more serious problems. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military employed an estimated 50,000 natives as interpreters, luring them with the reward of safe passage to the United States. But the visa process has been slow, leaving behind a backlog of thousands. Meanwhile, these interpreters—considered traitors by groups like the Islamic State or the Taliban—take on enormous risks for themselves and their families.

Representative Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, is one of Congress' leading advocates for bringing Iraqi and Afghani interpreters to the United States. "While we do need to have good background checks and we do need to be cautious about this, it's been way too slow at this point and a lot of translators have given their lives in the wait," he told Reason. Fortunately, FBI employees stuck in the PARM program don't have to deal with risks to their safety. But 13 years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, it's worth asking whether such security safeguards do more harm than good.

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What Exactly Does It Mean That the U.S. Is Pivoting to Asia?

Matt Schiavenza, The Atlantic — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:07:36 -0400

More than ten weeks after his confirmation as the new United States Secretary of State, John Kerry finally went to Asia. The former Massachusetts senator stopped in South Korea, Japan, and China over the busy weekend, the first time an American Secretary of State visited all three nations in the same trip. Kerry's visit also coincided with the escalating crisis on the Korean Peninsula, a subject of increasing concern for Washington.

But zooming out a bit, Kerry's visit also provides a fresh opportunity to examine the "Pivot to Asia", one of the Obama Administration's central foreign policy initiatives. Simply put, the pivot is meant to be a strategic "re-balancing" of U.S. interests from Europe and the Middle East toward East Asia. But what does that really mean, in practice? To further explore the "Pivot to Asia", here's a handy Q&A:

Why did the Obama Administration launch this pivot? And what does it entail, in practice?

Closer relations between the Washington and Asia aren't new -- trade between the continent and the United States, and between the U.S. and China in particular, has exploded in the past two decades, so in a way the "Pivot to Asia" is just placing a name on a trend that has been going on for years.

Read the entire story at Atlantic Wire.

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