A response to the Bail letter

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After Meg Stalcup and I published an article in the Washington Monthly, criticizing badly regulated counterterrorism training for law enforcement in America, some of the trainers who we criticized responded, and a friend of theirs, Joseph M. Bail Jr, wrote a letter claiming to "rebut" our claims. His letter, which you can read in the side panel here, did no such thing. We responded to his letter, rebutting his claims. The response is below.
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Washington Monthly piece on Counterterrorism Training for Law Enforcement

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(written with Meg Stalcup) On a bright January morning in 2010, at Broward College in Davie, Florida, about sixty police officers and other frontline law enforcement officials gathered in a lecture hall for a course on combating terrorism in the Sunshine State. Some in plain clothes, others in uniform, they drifted in clutching Styrofoam cups of coffee, greeting acquaintances from previous statewide training sessions. The instructor, Sam Kharoba, an olive-skinned man wearing rimless glasses and an ill-fitting white dress shirt, stood apart at the front of the hall reviewing PowerPoint slides on his laptop. As he got under way, Kharoba described how, over the next three days, he would teach his audience the fundamentals of Islam. “We constantly hear statements,” Kharoba began, “that Islam is a religion of peace, and we constantly hear of jihadists who are trying to kill as many non-Muslims as they can.” Kharoba’s course would establish for his students that one of these narratives speaks to a deep truth about Islam, and the other is a calculated lie. “How many terror attacks have there been since 9/11? Muslim terror attacks,” Kharoba asked the room. Silence. “Let’s start the bidding.” “Over a hundred,” someone volunteered. “I got a hundred,” Kharoba called back. Another audience member, louder now, suggested three hundred. “Three hundred!” Kharoba declared. “Over a thousand,” offered another voice in the audience. Kharoba stopped the bidding. “Over thirteen thousand,” he said. “Over thirteen thousand attacks.” He paused to let the statistic sink in.
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In Abyei

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In Abyei
March 3 2011.

Bodies. Blood-stick figures in piles. Roads clogged with thousands fleeing. Water the colour of mud. The texture of grit on the tongue. There is a steady smile on a weathered face; this old woman is not leaving. The plastics chairs are not in the restaurant. Save the chairs. The cook is still making beans. This old woman is not leaving.

Soon the beans will be gone. Then. Then there is water and flour. We can live like this for months. Older rhythms. Scarcity has its own sense of time. We crouch, close to the earth, the mortar's steady thud is lunchtime music. This old lady is not leaving. She did not leave in 2008, when the town was burned to the ground. She did not leave in '65, during the Babanusa massacre. She is not leaving.

I am in the compound of the administration, and there is an endless conference at which no on speaks.

I am in the tea-shop; canvas roof on uncertain wooden poles, plastic chairs, potions lined up on a thin table. The land is totally flat. Two weeks ago the fields were burning --- the preparation of the farms for the first rains; smoke among the stars. Now the stars are totally clear. Life is suspended. Building stops. Work stops. We gather in tea-shops: against the sky, the unrelenting heat, the live fire. They are 15km away. The village of Todach is burned, the town swells with refugees passing further south. We drink tea. They are 10 km away. Tajalei is burned down. We drink tea. They are 6 km away. They are attacking Makheer. We drink tea. The tea is 60% sugar, and I want all the calories I can get. The merchants say they will run out of supplies next week.

War does not mean everything changes. It means nothing can begin again.

They are hiding in the United Nations compound. All of UNMIS is hiding. They are not in their offices (I eat their jelly beans; I hate jelly beans). They are scared of that big outside world they are here to help. There is a protest, outside the compound.

A long wall. Sandbag watchtowers with Indians and heavy machine-guns.  We have set fire to the grasses outside, and smoke billows into the sky. The sun throws long auburn tresses onto the market stalls behind us, and the smoke obscures the worst of the sun's parting burn. We are throwing rocks at the helicopters. Above us, there is a hedge of herons flying south. The helicopters, they too move their wings. I think for a moment they are working as smoke machines in a nightclub, flinging grey whisps into the atmosphere, but no: the helicopters, like the UNMIS soldiers, are scared -- the helicopters move away from the stones, and the crowd, insatiable, angry, needing another object, turns away, towards the gates of the UNMIS compound.

There, the delegates of a high-level security conference are making uncertain exits. The crowd falls upon them, beating them. I am ahead of the crowd now, as they move away from UNMIS. And I think, as the police man-handle the delegates away from the protesters, that no one knows I am not from UNMIS. No one knows my scorn for the UN, and the crowd -- angry that UNMIS is not protecting them, not stopping their villages from being burned -- moves faster, towards me.

Behind them, I hear the police cock their weapons, as the remaining delegates are set upon by the crowd, and I encounter, in very cold rational terms, the limit of my willingness to be exposed to risk. Part of me is criticizing myself even as I turn to run, and I take every step with my mind urging me to take the counterstep, and when I hear the first shots fired, that part of my brain is even more insistently telling me to return, just as my legs are taking me further and further away from life, into life.

The next day the streets are quiet. It is a quiet village of pastoralists, in a quiet place, and we drink tea, and fall into hysterics; I tell the soldiers gathered around me (because really: what are you doing here) that the incense that they are burning smells like a woman. This, seemingly, is very funny.

We sit. We drink tea. And we wait.

War does not mean everything changes. It means nothing can begin again.

Death and the Idea of America

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When Europe tells stories about America, it is principally telling stories about itself, what it fears it will become; what it is already. To read Baudrillard's America, with its evocations of joggers cocooned in the solitary sacrifice of their energy, is to listen to a story about a world where death is banished to the margins - old age people's homes languishing in the suburbs - and our lives become more frenetic the more we try to push death away.
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Controlling Unity

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Last month the Governor of the Mecca region, Prince Khalid Al-Faisal bin Abdulaziz, congratulated all involved for the smoothing running of this year’s hajj. Thankfully, there was no repetition of last year’s tragedy, when 364 people were killed in a huge crush at the stoning ceremony, in part because of an extension to the Jamarat bridge that alleviated the flow of people. However, the invitation of Ahmedinejad to perform hajj – a hand extended by King Abdullah – reminds one that such a central event in Islam is never free of controversy.
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Lines in the Sand

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It is difficult to draw lines in the desert. The wind tends to quickly cover them up with sand, and the surface is as before. The problem is exacerbated if one has to draw lines around a nation bordered by seven other countries. If that wasn't difficult enough, it is especially hard to draw such lines when you have three competing ideas of where the line should be. Nation states like clear lines between organised sovereignties, separating out the vivid blocks of colour on our maps. Such an understanding is not shared by nomadic peoples, whose concept of territorial ownership can often be durational and change with the seasons. Nor is such an understanding shared by Islamic movements that see only one border: that between Islam and the non-believers. Suffice to say, Saudi Arabia has always had a problem with lines.
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What is Wahhabism?

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Certain figures take hold of the public imagination; they become scapegoats for all society’s ills. In the England of the 1990′s, single mothers fulfilled this function. Street violence? That will be the lack of a father figure for today’s youth. The NHS unable to cope? Blame it on all those pregnancies. Today, the single mother of international relations is Wahhabi Islam.
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Who are the Mungiki?

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The Mungiki, a Kenyan organisation linked to a series of gruesome crimes, have been called a lot of names recently. The New York Times described them as "a secret society that is part Sicilian mafia, part Chicago street gang, with a little local cultism sprinkled in." Kihara Mwangi, a member of Kenya's parliament, was more forthright: "These guys are devil worshippers."
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