Homeland Security Watch

On Monday night someone torched the Youth Empowered Society (YES) drop-in center in a tough section of Baltimore.  According to Kevin Rector, writing in the Baltimore Sun,

The clashes that left at least 144 vehicles and 15 structures on fire also claimed much of the center’s space, sometime between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. in the 2300 block of North Charles, Law said. Video surveillance showed no one entering the building, so Law believes someone “threw something burning through the front windows.” Firefighters who responded had to hack down the front door with an ax to gain entry. On Tuesday, the drop-in center – a safe space for homeless youth during the day and a hub of information for them to connect with other service providers – was a sad sight. It’s front office space had a layer of thick black sludge from ash and water to smother the flames.

YES is a youth-led, organization being incubated by the not-for-profit Fusion Partnership.  YES describes itself as follows:

YES Drop-In Center is Baltimore City’s first and only drop-in center for homeless youth. YES Drop-In Center is a safe space for youth who are homeless and between the ages of 14-25, to get basic needs met and establish supportive relationships with peer staff  and allies that help them make and sustain connections to long-term resources and opportunities… YES develops the leadership and workforce skills of homeless and formerly homeless youth through our peer-to-peer model: providing training, coaching, and employment so youth staff can effectively serve their peers and achieve meaningful, livable-wage employment after their time with YES. YES employs seven homeless and formerly homeless youth (three who serve full-time, and four part-time) and four staff who are allies…

Statistics on homelessness are unreliable, but on any single day it is estimated at least 600 Baltimore youth are homeless.  In any one year more than 2000 students enrolled in Baltimore City schools experience some period of homelessness.  Last year YES claimed to have served about one-third of this population.

Is any of this a homeland security issue?

If an emergency management agency was trying to serve “vulnerable populations” or enhance the resilience of the “whole community”, I expect YES would be a meaningful organization to engage.

If YES was serving a mostly Somali, Yemeni, or several other immigrant communities, would it be on some sort of intelligence scan?  If it was serving the educational and employment needs of undocumented immigrants to the United States, would a couple of DHS components be interested in YES?

I think reasonable people can disagree on whether or not the issue of youth homelessness is a homeland security issue.  There is an even stronger case, at least in my mind, for it not being a Homeland Security issue.

But I also suggest that what we have seen happen in Baltimore — and in Minneapolis, Paris, Birmingham (UK and US), Hamburg, and elsewhere — provides plenty of evidence that these social issues are not unrelated to Homeland Security.

This evidence also points to the role that civic enterprises — such as YES — can perform at the seams between individuals, communities, and the public sector. Boundaries are important in the public sector.  Carefully observed — and enforced — limits are especially important in a field like counter-terrorism.  For a whole host of reasons from fiscal to constitutional, we don’t want public sector agencies blithely stepping outside their statutory roles.

But there are also profound problems that messily spill over these important boundaries.

For too long, it seems to me, we have viewed smaller civic enterprises as peripheral, charitable, one-offs.  The evidence is accumulating that they are, instead, crucially important contributors to any systemic and sustainable strategy for engaging a wide-range of social challenges… including several regularly featured at this blog.

The Baltimore Police Commissioner had this to say about the following video:

“And if you saw in one scene, you had one a mother who grabbed their child who had a hood on his head and she started smacking him on the head because she was so embarrassed. I wish I had more parents who took charge of their kids tonight,” Batts said at a press conference this morning.

Also heartening to see are the slightly larger efforts of groups such as 300 Men March, Nation of Islam, and even unorganized members of the community that are working to calm the situation down, often physically placing themselves between the police and potential rioters in an effort to prevent violence.

Photo: Algerina Perna, Baltimore Sun, near Pennsylvania and North Avenue on 4/27.

The following is a long excerpt from this morning’s Baltimore Sun, combining reports gathered since yesterday afternoon.  Unlike most other media coverage I am seeing or hearing, this report fits the Baltimore I know: a place of multiple, simultaneous, proximate, contradictory realities.   If homeland security has any value to offer society, I perceive it will emerge from cultivating a strategic competence that extends beyond each of the legacy professions and can accommodate the tensions outlined in this story.

–+–

 It started Monday morning with word on social media of a “purge” — a reference to a movie in which crime is made legal. It was to begin at 3 p.m. at Mondawmin Mall, then venture down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Inner Harbor.

With tensions in the city running high on the day of Freddie Gray’s funeral, police began alerting local businesses and mobilizing officers.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore was one of the first institutions to acknowledge law enforcement concerns. With exams about to begin, school officials abruptly canceled classes “on recommendation of the BPD.”

T. Rowe Price sent employees home; Lexington Market closed early. One by one, other businesses shut down.

When 3 p.m. came, 75 to 100 students heading to Mondawmin Mall were greeted by dozens of police officers in riot gear. The mall is a transportation hub for students from several nearby schools.

The students began pelting officers with water bottles and rocks. Bricks met shields. Glass shattered up and down Gwynns Falls Parkway. Officers sprayed Mace. Confrontations bled into side streets, where officers threw bricks back. A heavily armored Bearcat tactical vehicle rolled through the neighborhood.

One officer, bloodied in the melee, was carried through Westbury Avenue by his comrades. Police used tear gas to move crowds down the street.

Vaughn DeVaughn, a city teacher, watched the scene.

“This is about anger and frustration and them not knowing how to express it,” he said. “Everyone out here looks under the age of 25. I’m out here for them.”

Some said the presence of the police antagonized the neighborhood.

“The thing is if the cops never came up here, they weren’t going to [mess] up Mondawmin,” said a young woman who was watching the clash. ” What are they going to [mess] up Mondawmin for? They shop here. This is their home.”

Karl Anderson, who works at a community center in the Mondawmin neighborhood, said he believed students misunderstood what it looks like to fight for civil rights.

“This is going to be their history,” Anderson said. “Not the Rosa Parks, the Martin Luther Kings.’

“They don’t understand that.”

Sandra Almond-Cooper, president of the Mondawmin Neighborhood Improvement Association, said it wasn’t the first confrontation between these students and police.

“These kids are just angry,” Almond-Cooper said. “These are the same kids they pull up on the corner for no reason.”

The crowds at Mondawmin were thinning when police tweeted that a police officer had been assaulted at the busy intersection of Pennsylvania and West North avenues.

A line of officers looked south as smoke rippled into the sky. Two Maryland Transit Administration vehicles had been set on fire. People were tearing a city police vehicle apart.

People took turns standing on the roof, taking selfies. A group of men located a crowbar and pried open the trunk, where police store equipment.

A CVS store and a check-cashing store were breached. Then, a mom-and-pop grocery store. People walked away with garbage bags full of supplies: diapers, bleach, snack foods, prescription drugs.

Next door, another business remained intact. A man stood in the locked vestibule wielding a shotgun.

A group of men who said they were members of the Crips — they wore blue bandannas and blue shirts — stood on the periphery and denounced the looting.

“This is our hood, and we can’t control it right now,” one of the men said.

But another bystander, who said his name was Antwion Robinson, 26, said the outburst had been building.

“They are killing us,” Robinson said. “They are actually killing us, and then they make this seem like we’re out of control. But they’re killing our neighbors and brothers. We’re just supposed to sit back and take that?”

As Robinson spoke, a man walked by.

“Don’t do anything without your face covered,” he said.

Tyrone Parker, 64, watched the mayhem. He said police broke his arm two years ago, but he didn’t approve of what he was seeing.

“They’re [messing] the whole neighborhood up,” he said.

Traffic continued along North Avenue. Sometimes, motorists pulled over to collect items looted from stores, then took off.

As police vehicles screamed through, people threw items that exploded on their windshields. One unmarked police vehicle wobbled back and forth, and nearly fishtailed out of control.

Crowds moved downtown, wandering through Mount Vernon and toward the Inner Harbor, smashing windows along the way.

At least nine businesses were breached by a group of men along Centre Street in Mount Vernon and Eutaw Street nearby.

MORE

An eight sentence summary of a longer story from the New York Times:

WASHINGTON – Some of President Obama’s email correspondence was swept up by Russian hackers last year in a breach of the White House’s unclassified computer system that was far more intrusive and worrisome than has been publicly acknowledged, according to senior American officials briefed on the investigation.

White House officials said that no classified networks had been compromised, and that the hackers had collected no classified information.

The hacking happened at a moment of renewed tension with Russia – over its annexation of Crimea, the presence of its forces in Ukraine and its renewed military patrols in Europe, reminiscent of the Cold War.

Inside the White House, the intrusion has raised a new debate about whether it is possible to protect a president’s electronic presence, especially when it reaches out from behind the presumably secure firewalls of the executive branch.

While the White House has refused to identify the nationality of the hackers, others familiar with the investigation said that in both the White House and State Department cases, all signs pointed to Russians.

On Thursday, Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter revealed for the first time that Russian hackers had attacked the Pentagon’s unclassified systems, but said they had been identified and “Kicked off.”

Defense Department officials declined to say if the signatures of the attacks on the Pentagon appeared related to the White House and State Department attacks. The discovery of the hacking in October led to a partial shutdown of the White House email system.

The hackers appear to have been evicted from the White House systems by the end of October. 

One thing interesting to me is that the summary was prepared by a website: http://smmry.com/about.

The summary is not perfect. But that it can be done at all and as well is – to me – as amazing as someone hacking White House emails.

All this reminded my of a few paragraphs I read in an April 2000 Wired article written by Bill Joy:

“First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.”

Moral for the future? Write your emails as if they will be hacked.  Read articles on the internet as if they were written by computers.

(Bill Joy’s Wired article is called “Why the future doesn’t need us.”  The quoted material was written by Ted Kaczynski, in his Unabomber Manifesto.)

(Excerpted from Oregon Live, April 21, 2015)

Teacher terrified by surprise ‘active shooter’ drill in eastern Oregon schoolhouse files federal lawsuit

Elementary school teacher Linda McLean sat at her desk on a calm blue-sky Friday afternoon nearly two years ago when she heard the clatter of what sounded like a falling ladder, followed by running feet.

A man dressed in a black hoodie and goggles suddenly burst through her classroom door. He leveled a pistol at McLean’s face and pulled the trigger. The terrified teacher heard gunfire, smelled smoke, felt her heart racing, she says.

“You’re dead,” the gunman said, and stalked out of her room.

But McLean was alive. The hooded man’s gun was loaded with blanks, part of a surprise “active shooter” drill at Pine Eagle School District No. 61, a charter school in the tiny eastern Oregon town of Halfway. The gun-toting man was Shawn Thatcher, the school district’s safety officer.

McLean was a casualty of what she now describes in a federal lawsuit as a harebrained drill in the middle of an in-service day – April 26, 2013 – that has left her with post-traumatic stress disorder….

The drill at Pine Eagle School District caught staffers at the school off guard, McLean’s lawsuit alleges.

Members of the district’s Safety Committee notified the Baker County Sheriff’s Office and its 911 dispatch center in advance of the drill so that they wouldn’t respond to an emergency at the school in case any of the school staff called.

The sheriff’s office also reviewed concealed-carry permits ahead of the drill to ensure that no teachers would fire back at Thatcher and school board member John Minarich, who also was armed and similarly attired.

Minarich was described in court papers as the principal and president of Alpine Alarm.

Thatcher and Minarich are accused of storming into several schoolrooms that day pointing their weapons at surprised teachers, firing blanks, and declaring them dead.

“Panic ensued,” according to McLean’s lawsuit. One teacher wet her pants. Another teacher tried to keep Minarich from entering his room and scuffled with the school board member, leaving the teacher’s arm injured. Some teachers fell down trying to hide.

“McLean could not figure out what was going on,” the complaint alleges. “She felt very confused. Her heart was racing. She walked out of the classroom and saw a pistol lying on the ground. … She wondered if she was really shot and was going to die.”

For an instant, McLean alleges, she thought perhaps it was OK to die. Then she thought about her daughter, who was pregnant, and grew angry that she wouldn’t be around to help with the new baby.

“She looked at the pistol and wondered if she was supposed to pick it up and shoot someone,” the lawsuit alleges….

— Bryan Denson

It has been five years since an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon killed eleven and initiated several weeks of an uncontrolled release of oil from the well-head.  Over 200 million gallons of oil are thought to have escaped into the Gulf of Mexico.

I perceive the lessons-learned — or what might still be learned — from responding to the Gulf oil spill are at least as important as those we have tried to learn from 9/11 and Katrina.

What can and should be done, and sometimes not done, when dealing with big footprint, multi-consequence disasters that unfold over an extended period of time?  How is such an event to be engaged when the technical, experiential, and even intellectual resources needed are in short supply?  How does leadership and management operate when authority and competence and capability are scattered across various public and private entities? What can the lessons-learned from five years ago tell us regarding drought, sea-level rise, pandemics, and other disasters that are as much cumulative as acute?

Thad Allen, the former Coast Guard Commandant who was pulled out of retirement to serve as the National Incident Commander for the Gulf oil spill has tried to help us learn these lessons.  Here is some of what he said back in September 2010.

When I was designated as the national incident commander, I sat down with a small group of folks who became my cadre and senior staff. I wanted to focus on what needed to be done about the universe — above the unified level that had been established. I wanted to focus on those things that were distracting unified area command from doing their job: working inter agency issues in Washington and dealing with the governmental structures, Congress and so forth…

I was a 39-year veteran of the coast guard. The last thing we want is the 3,000 mile screwdriver. We would leave tactical control as close to the problem as we could… I would like to characterize the national incident command as a thin client. To use a software term. Necessary to integrate but no more than what is necessary and without adding layers of bureaucracy.

The Incident Command System that was established in New Orleans was the basis for… the coordination of command. That is a sound system. Incident command is one of the ways to approach these spills…

If we look at what transpired, we need to know what the basic doctrine says against the reality of what we found on the ground… We did not have a large, monolithic oil spill. We had hundreds of thousands of patches of oil that moved in different directions over time that moved beyond the geographical area that was contemplated in any response plan, putting the entire coast at risk. That required resources above the plan. It required coordination across state boundaries and federal regional boundaries for the team…

We have worked on smaller spills with state and local governments with smaller responsible parties. Some of the anomalies associated with this spill that challenged the doctrine need to be looked at in detail for constructive changes to the contingency plan which should remain in place, and how we need to manage large, and, as evidence in the future that defy the traditional parameters of the incident command system…

First, I think we need greater clarity moving forward on what the responsible parties, who they are, what they do, and how they interact with the contingency plan. We have worked with the responsible parties for over 20 years, very effectively managing oil spills…There were two basic issues that were not well understood by most of the people of the US and political leaders: There would be a constructive role for the entity that was attributed to causing the event. That created concern that could not be explained away. Even though we had worked effectively in that construct in responding to oil spills. The second is the fiduciary link between the representative of the responsible party and unified command and their shareholders. There are legal requirements for documenting costs which you have to carry on a balance sheet that they cannot sever.

The second notion was difficult for the people of this country to understand and our political leaders was ultimately, there is a fiduciary link between the responsible party and shareholders which would bring into question whether or not a decision should have been made based on the environment and the response itself. As stated in the national contingency plan and by statute, the responsible party is to resource the response and the federal government is to oversee their response…That is what occurred, but as you look at the enormity of this response, and the local implications, the isolated geographical areas where access is an issue, where logistical support for this type of response is an issue, a lot of the details that are carried out by those contractors that are brought to the scene are done in a contractual obligation basis with the responsible party under the general supervision of the federal government…

There is a discussion about what constitutes an authority to take action, the day-to-day supervision of workers. How this gets interpreted in terms of feedback and the effects you are trying to achieve. There is a couple of things we need to do. We need to look at the contingency plan and think about what we need by the concept of responsible party and how we want that to look in the future…

Admiral Allen is one of those rare people who somehow speak more clearly than the transcript can sometimes capture.  Thanks to C-Span, you can see and hear his extended remarks here.

As time and space expand, typically so does the number and diversity of those involved in engagement. Allen sometimes refers to the difference between theater command and incident command.  I wonder if just using the word “command” may be misleading.

A recent New York Times article revealed that work analyzing potential Iranian nuclear futures has been spread across our existing nuclear lab enterprise:

The classified replica is but one part of an extensive crash program within the nation’s nine atomic laboratories — Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Livermore among them — to block Iran’s nuclear progress. As the next round of talks begins on Wednesday in Vienna, the secretive effort remains a technological obsession for thousands of lab employees living the Manhattan Project in reverse. Instead of building a bomb, as their predecessors did in a race to end World War II, they are trying to stop one.

A senior official of the National Nuclear Security Administration, Kevin Veal, who has been along for every negotiating session, would send questions back to the laboratories, hoping to separate good ideas from bad. “It’s what our people love to do,” said Thom Mason, the director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “It can be very rewarding.”

Given the stakes in the sensitive negotiations, the labs would check and recheck one another, making sure the answers held up. The natural rivalries among the labs sometimes worked to the negotiators’ advantage: Los Alamos National Laboratory, in the mountains of New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb, was happy to find flaws in calculations done elsewhere, and vice versa.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love the fact that this is being done in support of our negotiations with Iran over it’s nuclear program.  And it is nothing short of fantastic that we have the infrastructure and scientific capability and capacity to undertake this kind of analysis-on-demand.

But why can’t it also exist for disaster preparedness?  I could make an argument that for the foreseeable future the risk of a devastating hurricane striking a major metropolitan area or an earthquake hitting the West Coast or New Madrid fault poses an even greater danger to the U.S. than a nuclear-armed Iran.

Did we make similar investments in our disaster preparedness following Hurricane Katrina?  Nope.  Sandy?  Nope.  Near misses in pandemic diseases, such as SARS or avian flu?  Not really.

I understand that our nuclear labs and related infrastructure have been built up over decades of Cold War with the Soviet Union.  That is an investment that is pretty much unparalleled in the history of our nation.  But I can’t help but be a little disappointed that after any number of close calls or slightly less than absolutely devastating disasters our willingness to invest in research and development aimed at preventing, responding to, mitigating against, and recovering from disasters has been so weak.

What will it take to change this dynamic?  Hopefully something far short of a combined earthquake, tsunami, nuclear event.

“Find myself on a 737/800, lets see Box-IFE-ICE-SATCOM, ? Shall we start playing with EICAS messages? ‘PASS OXYGEN ON’ Anyone ? :)”

ArsTechnica reports a

 researcher who specializes in the security of commercial airplanes was barred from a United Airlines flight Saturday, three days after he tweeted a poorly advised joke mid-flight about hacking a key communications system of the plane he was in.

Chris Roberts was detained by FBI agents on Wednesday as he was deplaning his United flight, which had just flown from Denver to Syracuse, New York. While on board the flight, he tweeted a joke about taking control of the plane’s engine-indicating and crew-alerting system, which provides flight crews with information in real-time about an aircraft’s functions, including temperatures of various equipment, fuel flow and quantity, and oil pressure. In the tweet, Roberts jested: “Find myself on a 737/800, lets see Box-IFE-ICE-SATCOM, ? Shall we start playing with EICAS messages? ‘PASS OXYGEN ON’ Anyone ? :)” FBI agents questioned Roberts for four hours and confiscated his iPad, MacBook Pro, and storage devices.

In related information, the Homeland Security Digital Library writes about an April GAO report titled “FAA Needs a More Comprehensive Approach to Address Cybersecurity As Agency Transitions to NextGen.

The report on Air Traffic Control exposes flaws in newer airliners that could lead to hacks and system failures.  The implementation of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) seeks to replace the “decades old, point to point, hardwired information systems, that share information only within their limited, wired configuration.”  The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) shift to NextGen is a “modernization effort […] to transform the nation’s ground based Air Traffic Control (ATC) system into a satellite based Internet Protocol (IP) system” to increase efficiency.  However, the changes present cyber security challenges in three areas; 1) protecting ATC information systems, 2) protecting aircraft avionics used to operate and guide aircraft, and 3) clarifying cyber security roles and responsibilities among multiple FAA offices.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is representing Chris Roberts to help get his Twitter equipment returned.  The EFF wrote:

…United’s refusal to allow Roberts to fly is both disappointing and confusing. As a member of the security research community, his job is to identify vulnerabilities in networks so that they can be fixed. Indeed, he was headed to RSA speak about security vulnerabilities in a talk called “Security Hopscotch” when attempting to board the United flight.

EFF has long been concerned that knee-jerk responses to legitimate researchers pointing out security flaws can create a chilling effect in the infosec community. EFF’s Coders’ Rights Project is intended to provide counseling and legal representation to individuals facing legal threats, which is why we’re glad to represent Chris Roberts. However, we’d also like to see companies recognize that researchers who identify problems with their products in order to have them fixed are their allies. It would avoid a whole lot of trouble for researchers and make us all more secure.

On this day in 1775 irregular militia and spontaneous volunteers, eventually numbering almost 4000, confronted British infantry at the Massachusetts towns of Concord and Lexington.  After several engagements British troops retreated into Boston which then remained under siege into the summer.  Insurgent forces lost nearly fifty dead.  At least 73 British troops were killed.

On this day in 1995, Timothy McVeigh parked a rental truck packed with self-made explosives in a drop off zone just beside — and slightly beneath — the structural curtain of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.  The date was chosen by McVeigh to coincide with the battles of Lexington and Concord (and the 1993 Waco siege that ended on April 19 with the death of 76). One-hundred sixty-eight were killed by the Oklahoma City blast.  More than six hundred were injured.

The annual Boston Marathon is part of a wider celebration of Patriots’ Day which celebrates the battles of Lexington and Concord. Since 1969 Patriots’ Day has been observed on the third Monday in April.  In 2013 three were killed in two bombings near the marathon’s finish line.  Over 260 were injured.

An excerpt from Concord Hymn by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

Early Thursday morning S.T. More (a provocative name, seeming to subtly signal St. Thomas More) asked an authentic question.  S/he wondered about my take on self-radicalization.  You can see the original exchange here.

Real questions are wonderful things.  Generous, beautiful, sometimes magical.  Certainly this question has been very good to me.

It prompted additional thinking and reading, especially Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind and some Aristotle.

Aristotle gave us a comparatively brief text now known as Categories.  Here Aristotle works through how we can accurately compare and contrast, how we can express meaningful characteristics, how we can think more accurately.  Aristotle compares the sharpness of music with that of a knife as an example of confusing substance for quality.

I was drawn to Ryle because of his ground-breaking work on category-mistakes, going well beyond Aristotle.  It occurred to me that with McVeigh, Breivik, the Tsarnaev’s, and others — including several in positions of great authority — we can perceive a recurring pattern of category mistakes.  It is a tendency that constantly challenges me. Anyone who is attracted to analogies will be regularly tempted to false analogies, often false because of some form of category-mistake.

Here is the note Dzhokhar Tsarnaev scrawled on the interior wall of the boat while hiding from search teams.  Many of the unintelligible (UI) words are the result of bullets fired during his capture.

I’m jealous of my brother who ha[s] [re]ceived the reward of jannutul Firdaus (inshallah) before me. I do not mourn because his soul is very much alive. God has a plan for each person. Mine was to hide in this boat and shed some light on our actions. I ask Allah to make me a shahied (iA) to allow me to return to him and be among all the righteous people in the highest levels of heaven. He who Allah guides no one can misguide. A[llah Ak]bar!

The US Government is killing our innocent civilians but most of you already know that. As a [UI] I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished, we Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all. Well at least that’s how muhhammad (pbuh) wanted it to be [for]ever, the ummah is beginning to rise/[UI] has awoken the mujahideen, know you are fighting men who look into the barrel of your gun and see heaven, now how can you compete with that. We are promised victory and we will surely get it. Now I don’t like killing innocent people it is forbidden in Islam but due to said [UI] it is allowed. All credit goes [UI]. Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop. 

Where to begin…

Since this is just a blog, let’s try a simple exegesis:

Killing innocent people is evil

YOU are killing (“our”) innocent people

YOU must be punished, I will do so to deter YOU from further killing of innocent people. I will continue to punish YOU until YOU stop.

Fair enough?  Coherent with the original text?

If so, in these expressions, what are the characteristics of YOU?

Certainly you is other than the writer. An anticipated reader? The police?  Others?  Others as in those who do not kill innocents?  Well, give him credit, Dzhokhar recognizes he no longer belongs in the category of those who do not kill innocents.  Others as in non-Muslims?  Perhaps.  But clearly he recognizes non-Muslims can be innocent.  The text seems to be flailing about for some other category or set of categories.

In which category does the writer belong, innocent or evil? Within the claims of  the text, apparently both.  In which category does “you” belong?  Again, apparently both.  These are not yet useful categories.

This can — probably should — be continued.  But not here.

Here I will merely contrast the confusing categories that challenged Mr. Tsarnaev with the clarity that informed decisions made at the Cologne Cathedral on Friday. The memorial service at the cathedral was for those who died in the March 24 plane crash.  The memorial service was offered as a way to support those who had survived.  All those fitting the category descriptions were included.

Categorical clarity is possible.  There are several tools available to help.  One of the first steps will often involve sweeping away the dark cloud of self-righteousness.

From: Office of the Secretary 

Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2015 8:17 PM
Subject: Message from the Secretary

 April 16, 2015

Dear Colleagues:

This morning a congressional subcommittee held yet another hearing on the subject of low morale at various government agencies. Catherine Emerson, our Chief Human Capital Officer, was called as a witness.

But, before the hearing this subcommittee got a surprise personal visit from me.

My message to Congress (and the press): one of the ways we are improving morale is to stop telling the workforce you suffer from low morale. We have moved on. We are no longer “studying” the issue of morale. We are doing something about it.

The Deputy Secretary and I have an action plan to address concerns about fairness and transparency in hiring, promotion and training opportunities. We are building a pilot program to share employee ideas. We are thanking people for their good work. We are undertaking a number of other initiatives.

This morning I also told Congress that they can work with me, by addressing pay and workforce issues. In fact, the men and women all across the Department of Homeland Security are upbeat, dedicated and patriotic.

In 479 days as your Secretary, I have met enough of you to know this. Last month, I wrote you about Carol Richel, the TSA supervisor in New Orleans who suffered a gunshot wound on one day and came to work the next day. Carol is an example of the spirit I see every day-ranging from the TSA and CBP personnel I met yesterday at the Philadelphia airport, to the health care worker who treated Ebola victims in West Africa, and the Border Patrol agents I met last summer working overtime on the southern border.

Each of you deserves a thank you from the American people. Keep up the good work.

Sincerely,

Jeh Charles Johnson
Secretary of Homeland Security

(ht/rd)

(Friedrich Stark/Pool Photo via AP)

Earlier today there was a memorial service at Cologne Cathedral for the victims of the Germanwings flight that was evidently purposefully crashed into a mountainside on March 24.

According to a Deutsche Welle report:

… inside the cathedral, 150 candles flickered on the altar in front of Cardinal Woelki and the leader of the Protestant Church of Westphalia, Annette Kurschus. Each light represented a life lost in the Germanwings crash. The presence of a candle for co-pilot Andreas Lubitz had been widely debated prior to the service… Outside, on the doorstep to Cologne Cathedral, mourners were full of empathy for Lubitz’ family, who had chosen to not attend the ceremony…

During the remembrance service, German President Joachim Gauck also asked the congregation to remember the co-pilot’s family.”On March 24 his relatives lost someone whom they loved and who leaves behind a hole in their lives – in a way that they find just as difficult to make sense of as all the other bereaved.”

The inclusion of the c0-pilot in this very public act of grief (and reconciliation?) strikes me as an interesting — and potentially powerful — choice.  A bit more on why, if I can find time for a related post sometime this weekend.

The BBC has a brief video of the Cologne Cathedral memorial service.

Timothy McVeigh (far left) was the principal actor in the April 19, 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.  He killed 168 and injured over 680.  The almost twenty-seven year old was assisted by Terry Nichols, but it seems unlikely the bombing would have happened without McVeigh.

A native of western New York state, McVeigh had been awarded the Bronze Star Medal for meritorious service in the First Gulf War. After discharge he held several part-time jobs and bought and sold on the gun-show circuit.  He was often described as soft-spoken and affable.

A best selling biography of McVeigh — American Terrorist — was written with his cooperation.  Just before McVeigh’s 2001 execution one of the biography’s co-authors answered the following question posed by a BBC correspondent:

NEWSHOST:  A lot of people have asked me in conversations how does someone go from being a veteran in the US Army to becoming someone who can carry out the greatest act of terrorism on American soil?

DAN HERBECK:  Part of it started when he was a boy and he was picked on by bullies in his school. Part of it was when his parents had a difficult divorce and he was very hurt by that and part of it was when he was taught to kill in the US Army. And then a big part of it was that he really fights for gun rights and he believes that everyone should have the right to own guns and when he felt the US Government was trying to take that away from him he snapped and he decided he was going to take action against our government.

The book offers a more complicated answer, but quite late in his book tour, the co-author is willing to deploy this reduction.

Anders Brevik (second from the left), was in his early thirties when he bombed government offices in Oslo.  While McVeigh’s murder of children in a day care center was unintended “collateral damage,” Breivik  quite purposefully gunned down over sixty young people on Utøya Island.

There is a new biography of the Norwegian terrorist, the English language title is One of Us.  Reviewing the book for The Guardian, Ian Buruma wrote, “It is a ghastly story of family dysfunction, professional and sexual failure, grotesque narcissism and the temptation of apocalyptic delusions.” With modest adjustments the same diagnosis can be found in most biographies of McVeigh, including a long Washington Post profile published in 1995 titled, “An Ordinary Boy’s Extraordinary Rage.”  Breivik was raised by a single parent, bullied in school, mildly maladroit. Like McVeigh. But while their back-stories are troublesome, nothing seems extraordinary. Each of them: just one of us.

A biography of the Tsarnaev brothers has been published to coincide with the survivor’s verdict and sentencing.  The Brothers was featured on the front-page of last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, assessed by none other than Janet Napolitano.

The author, Marsha Gessen, mostly avoids the Freudian frames of the previous biographers.  Yes, the brothers were born into an increasingly dysfunctional family. Certainly there was a share of professional failure, especially for the father and older brother. Yes, there was cultural and personal narcissism.  But Gessen is reluctant to see any of these as explaining the apocalyptic delusions or violent rage that exploded on Boylston Street.

Last week the author of the Tsarnaev book was a guest on Fresh Air with Terry Gross.  An excerpt from the transcript:

GROSS: The defense is saying that Dzhokhar (above, far right) was following his brother, Tamerlan (above, second from the right), but unlike his brother, Dzhokhar was not a self-radicalized terrorist. What does the expression self-radicalized mean?

GESSEN: Nobody knows. Nobody knows what self-radicalized means, and that’s one of the weird things about the way that we talk about terrorism. We talk about radicalization as though it were a thing, as though you could sort of track it and identify it, and that’s not the case. And then we’ve added this other layer, which is self-radicalization. Originally, radicalization was supposed to mean that there was an organization that sort of took you through the stages, and then when it turned out that some people just came to terrorism by themselves, this new thing called self-radicalization showed up. No one knows what it means.

Well, some claim to know.  And I have seen some reasonable claims.  But Gessen’s critique is a helpful rejoinder to quickly applying a convenient label that mostly obscures all that we do not know.

Whatever their origins and experience, the four boys seem to have arrived at a similar nexus where rather than accept what can not be known, they sought certainty in a baptism of blood.

 –+–

Despite mixed reviews, I have ordered Gessen’s biography. It has not yet been delivered.  So my imagination has full-rein.  The title suggests to me  The Brothers Karamasov, where Dostoyevsky has the father of the three brothers being warned:

Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others.Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn’t it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea — he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility. (Book XI, translated by Volokhonsky)

What are the lies I use in self-construction?  What offenses do I construe to give me pleasure?

Nothing out-of-the-ordinary, I assure myself.

The 20th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing of the Murrah Federal Building seems to be approaching with little interest (outside of this blog, of course).

The second anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombing seems to be have passed with little interest outside of New England.

What do they have in common? What differentiates the two events?

Chris did a superb job of expressing the assumed role of Muslims in the Oklahoma attack:

“The betting here is on Middle East terrorists,” declared CBS News‘ Jim Stewart just hours after the blast (4/19/95).

What does that matter regarding Boston, since the attackers were Muslim?

Nothing, actually.

What concerns me most about the current discussion centered on terrorism is the central role that religion plays.  If the perpetrators of some violence are Muslim, terrorism is assumed.  If they are Christian, (or fill in the blank with some non-Muslim demonitation here)