New Authorization for Use of Military Force Against the Islamic State

On January 15, 2016 the Congressional Research Service (CRS) released a report by Specialist in Foreign Policy Legislation Matthew C. Weed entitled A New Authorization for Use of Military Force Against the Islamic State. Since "a number of members of Congress have raised numerous questions and concerns about the President's authority to use military force (AUMF) against the Islamic State," the report "focuses on the several proposals for a new AUMF specifically targeting the Islamic State made during the 113th and 114th Congresses." Included are "a brief review of existing authorities and AUMFs, as well as a discussion of issues related to various provisions included in existing and proposed AUMFs that both authorize and limit presidential use of military force." The appendix section provides " a comparative analysis of similar provisions in new AUMFs proposed in the 113th and 114th Congresses."  

Weed notes that the "report will be updated to reflect congressional activity."

CIA Torture Report

On December 9, 2014 the Senate released the recommendations, executive summary, and findings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program commonly known as the CIA Torture Report.  Read a PDF of the Executive Summary, Findings and Conclusions and/or a PDF of the Minority Views of Vice Chairman Chambliss and Senators Burr, Risch, Coats, Rubio and Coburn.

The official digital version (PDF) is now available on GPO’s Federal Digital System (FDsys). The print version is available for purchase at GPO’s retail and online bookstore for $29.

Remembering 9/11

For a sampling of events, reports, and multi-media information about 9/11, please see the Remembering 9/11 LibGuide .

Blog Commemorating 9/11

Starting July 5 the Homeland Security Digital Library will publish one blog a week leading up to the ten year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The blogs will honor those who died by highlighting lessons learned and societal changes made to ensure another such attack does not occur. The blog schedule is:

• July 5 – Terrorism, Terrorists and Threats
  
• July 12 – The Department of Homeland Security
  
• July 19 – The 9/11 Commission Recommendations
  
• July 26 – Emergency Preparedness
  
• August 2 – Border Security and Immigration
  
• August 9 – Transportation and Travel
  
• August 16 – Freedoms and Rights
  
• August 23 – Protecting Critical Infrastructure
  
• August 30 – Communication
  
• September 6 – Commemorating 9/11

Access On the Homefront Blog entries at https://www.hsdl.org/hslog/.

Country Reports on Terrorism 2009

The State Department has released its 2009 Country Reports on Terrorism. Starting in 2004, this annual report replaced Patterns of Global Terrorism. The report "serves as a reference tool to inform policymakers, the general public, and our foreign partners about our efforts, progress, and challenges in the campaign against international terrorism."

Country Reports on Terrorism (2004-2008) and Patterns of Global Terroism (1995-2003) are also available at http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/crt/index.htm.

Afghanistan: Post-Taliban Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) released a report (Order Number: RL30588) dated 12/30/2009 that provides background information about issues surrounding the conflict in Afghanistan.   The Thurgood Marshall Law Library has made available online "Afghanistan: Post-Taliban Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy." The 41 page document complete with tables and a map of Afghanistan provides a succinct summary of issues our government must consider in dealing with the conflict in Afghanistan.

Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan

On Jan. 4, 2010 the Center for a New American Security released a report entitled "Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan" which examines the relevance of the U.S. intelligence community to the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.  The report argues "that because the United States has focused the overwhelming majority of collection efforts and analytical brainpower on insurgent groups, the intelligence apparatus still finds itself unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate in and the people they are trying to protect and persuade."  The authors, Major General Michael T. Flynn, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence in Afghanistan, his advisor Captain Matt Pottinger, and Paul Batchelor, Senior Advisor for Civilian/Military Integrations at ISAF, recommend "sweeping changes to the way the intelligence community thinks about itself – from a focus on the enemy to a focus on the people of Afghanistan."

Biological Lab Safety

The Defense Science Board (DSB) which provides independent advice to the Secretary of Defense just released its final report about safety in DoD (Department of Defense) biological labs. When comparing DoD labs with those of similar size in government, industry, and academia, the report found that DoD labs were as good or better. The labs also exceeded recommendations by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, the DSB task force also found that "a determined adversary cannot be prevented from obtaining very dangerous biological materials intended for nefarious purposes, if not from DoD laboratories, then from other sources." Therefore, the task force recommended improvements in seven areas:

Cyber Red Team (computer systems security)

Monitoring Activities

Biological Personnel Reliability Program

Overseas Regulations

Compliance Inspections

BSAT (Biological Select Agents and Toxins) Transport

Public Education and Relations

Terrorism Reports

Two new annual reports about terrorism are now available.

• The National Counterterrorism Center has made available its 2008 NCT Report on Terrorism.
• The State Department has made available its 2008 Country Reports on Terrorism. In 2004 this series replaced Patterns of Global Terroism. Previous reports including Patterns of Global Terrorism are also linked.

Response to Nuclear Detonation

Unfortunately in today's world United States public and private institutions must think about what to do in the event of a nuclear detonation. To address this topic the Homeland Security Council has just released its Planning Guide for Response to a Nuclear Detonation: First Edition targeted to emergency response planners and their leadership. The guide "addresses the unique effects and impacts of a nuclear detonation such as scale of destruction, shelter and evacuation strategies, unparalleled medical demands, management of nuclear casualties, and radiation dose management concepts." It focuses on what to do the first few days before Federal resources could be put in place.

Stability and Security in Iraq

The Department of Defense has released its Dec. 2008 quarterly report, Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq. The report indicates progress toward political, security, and economic stability in Iraq. Also of interest are charts and graphs scattered throughout the publication on such topics as oil production and export, civilian deaths, U.S. deaths, weapons caches, neighborhood stability, and MoD and Mol operational readiness. Another helpful tool is a list of acronyms and abbreviations.

Previous quarterly reports are also available.

New Military Reports

New reports are available from the Defense Science Board. Challenges to Military Operations in Support of U.S. Interests [2007 Summer Study] is available as an executive summary (Vol. I) or as the main report (Vol. II). The introduction paints a grim picture: "The United States could well confront the possibility of going to war abroad in the face of significant devastation in the homeland--dividing forces between homeland catastrophe relief operations and combat abroad--even facing the possibility that deploy and supply of U.S. military forces could be delayed and disrupted." The study investigated and made recommendations for seven areas for which the United States might need more preparation:

• Future of war
  
• Unconventional weapons and technology proliferation
  
• Nuclear proliferation-a special case
  
• Unconventional operational concepts and the homeland
  
• What we know and don't know about adversary capabilities: intelligence
  
• Fighting through asymmetric counterforce
  
• Strategic communication--another instrument of U.S. power

A December 2008 report also addressed nuclear weapons:Permanent Task Force on Nuclear Weapons Surety Report: Nuclear Weapons Inspections for the Strategic Nuclear Forces. An April 2008 related report dealt with unauthorized movement of nuclear weapons.

Iraq Stability and Security

The latest (Sept. 2008) quarterly report of the Department of Defense's "Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq" is now available. Previous editions are located at http://www.defenselink.mil/home/features/Iraq_Reports/index.html. Major topics covered include political stability, economic activity, security/transferring security, and Iraqi Security Forces training and performance.

al-Qa'ida's Foreign Fighters in Iraq

The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has released its second report about al-Qa'ida's foreign fighters in Iraq. Entitled Bombers, Bank Accounts, and Bleedout: al-Qa`ida's Road in and Out of Iraq, the report expands on the analysis contained in the first report and introduces "a host of new data" about suicide bombers, fighters, funding sources and expenditures, and ties to other groups.

Major new findings summarized by Professor Sawyer of West Point (GovDoc-L 28 Jul 2008) include:

Foreign Fighters were an important source of funds for AQI; Saudi Fighters contributed far more money than any other nationality.

Far more Syrians and Egyptians are held at Camp Bucca than were listed in the Sinjar Records, which likely reflects the demographic shift away from those nationalities.

Approximately 75% of suicide bombings in Iraq between August 2006 and August 2007 can be attributed to fighters listed in the Sinjar Records.

"Bleedout" of fighters from Iraq is occurring, but in relatively small numbers. Nonetheless, these individual fighters will likely be well-trained and very dangerous. The primary threat from these fighters is to Arab states, Af-Pak, and perhaps Somalia.

Smuggling of all kinds across the Syrian/Iraqi border has long been linked to corruption in both Syria and Iraq, which limits both government's ability to crackdown.

Fighters that contributed money to AQI were more likely to become suicide bombers.

Nuclear Threat to Electronic Communications Sytems

The Commission to Assess the Threat to United States from
Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack has released its latest report entitled Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack: Critical National Infrastructure. According to the report:

The electromagnetic pulse generated by a high altitude nuclear explosion is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences. The increasingly pervasive use of electronics of all forms represents the greatest source of vulnerability to attack by EMP. Electronics are used to control, communicate, compute, store, manage, and implement nearly every aspect of United States (U.S.) civilian systems. When a nuclear explosion occurs at high altitude, the EMP signal it produces will cover the wide geographic region within the line of sight of the detonation.¹ This broad band, high amplitude EMP, when coupled into sensitive electronics, has the capability to produce widespread and long lasting disruption and damage to the critical infrastructures that underpin the fabric of U.S. society.

According to a July 10, 2008 press release, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs held a seventh hearing on Islamist radicalization and homegrown terrorism. Witnesses including Maajid Nawaz, a former leader of the United Kingdom's Hizb uut-Tahrir now working as a counterterrorist, "outlined steps that should be taken to identify, isolate and ultimately eliminate the threat of homegrown terrorism and the ideology that supports it." Committee Chairman, Joe Liberman, said, "We must better understand the roots of Islamist ideology so we can better guide our international, national and local efforts to counter its spread under its many different names, whether it is Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hizb ut-Tharir, the Muslim Brotherhood, or other splinter groups that promote the ideology."

The House also addressed this topic in its Rept. 110-384 Pt. 1, Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (Oct. 16, 2007). One of the nine points made in the report addresses who might be a terrorist: "Individuals prone to violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence span all races, ethnicities, and religious beliefs, and individuals should not be targeted based solely on race, ethnicity, or religion."

The act recommends establishing a National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Ideologically Based Violence. First among the Commission's charges is to "Examine and report upon the facts and causes of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence in the United States, including United States connections to non-United States persons and networks, violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence in prison, individual or `lone wolf' violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence, and other faces of the phenomena of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence that the Commission considers important." View the latest status on the progress of the act through Congress.

Two Iraq Reports Now Available

The Rand Corporation just released a report analyzing the planning and execution of combat and stability operations in Iraq. Conducted for the U.S. Army, the report begins with prewar planning, revealing that while many government agencies and organizations "identified a range of potential postwar challenges and suggested strategies for addressing them" before the invasion of Iraq, two sets of assumptions by officials in the highest levels of government undermined those suggestions: 1. many senior government policymakers were optimistic about "conditions that would emerge after major combat concluded" and overrode counterarguments, and 2. senior military commanders thought that civilians would be responsible for the postwar period. The report also looks at the role of U.S. military forces after initial combat ended on May 1, 2003 through June 2004, and civilian reconstruction efforts. Both the June 30, 2008 press release and the report entitled After Saddam: Postwar Planning and the Occupation of Iraq are available online. (The report is also available in paper.) This report is one of an eight-volume set analyzing combat and stability planning and execution in Iraq. Six of the volumes are classified; a seventh volume, in process, will be unclassified.

The conduct of the war in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein is the subject of another report just released by the Combat Studies Institute Press at Fort Leavenworth. Entitled The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003-January 2005: On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign, the report "examines both the high-level decisions that shaped military operations after May 2003 as well as the effects of those decisions on units and Soldiers who became responsible for conducting those operations." A print copy is also available from the Government Printing Office. A review of the report is available from History News.

Recycled Interrogation Methods

The New York Times revealed in a July 2 article entitled "China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo," that interrogation methods used by the Chinese on American prisoners of war during the Korean War were imitated by our military trainers in Guantanamo Bay. Congressional hearings have expressed concerns about using such methods. On July 26, 2007, for example, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s S. HRG. 110-257 entitled Extraordinary Rendition, Extraterritorial Detention and Treatment of Detainees: Restoring Our Moral Credibility and Strengthening Our Diplomatic Standing contains statements from Senators Biden and Feingold denouncing such techniques. Likewise Senator Leahy in the Judiciary Committee’s S.HRG. 110-299 entitled Preserving the Rule of Law in the Fight Against Terrorism, Oct. 2, 2007 denounced similar methods used in Abu Ghraib: “. . . the terrible abuses of Abu Ghraib, which stained us as a country and which were the direct results of a lack of clarity and restraint in the rules of interrogation.”

How do we as a country find an effective yet moral way to gain necessary intelligence, a method showing clarity and restraint? The Intelligence Science Board of the National Defense Intelligence College has been grappling with better ways to solicit information. Its Dec. 2006 Phase 1 report entitled Educing Information, Interrogation: Science and Art, Foundations for the Future, covers a wide variety of subjects such as evaluating intelligence detection devices, the costs and benefits of interrogation, behavior science lessons learned from educing information, and challenges in developing a new educing information paradigm.

Reconstruction Progress in Iraq

The latest (April 30, 2008) State Inspector General For Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) ) quarterly report is now available. The report details how the $46 billion for relief and reconstruction allocated to Iraq since April 2003 has been spent. It also provides information about "the top five projects in each construction sector, the top contractors by income, an overview of reconstruction management, and SIGIR's new audits and inspections." One bit of good news is that Iraq's revenue income should be around $70 billion for 2008 which is twice the expected amount.

National Guard and Reserves Status

The Defense Science Board, a Federal Advisory Committee which provides independent advice to the Secretary of Defense, has issued a new report about the current deployment of National Guard and reserve troops. Entitled Deployment of National Guard and Reserve in the Global War on Terrorism, the report examined the "length and frequency of deployment of members of the National Guard and reserve." The board looked at the Secretary of Defense's January 2007 policy which set the following guidelines: "one year deployed and two years not deployed for the active force, one year mobilized and five years not mobilized for the reserve components." The report concluded that "given current levels of operational demand, today's Army active, National Guard, and reserve force structure will not support DOD's policy." It also emphasized the need for more training at reserve home stations before mobilization and expressed concern about having sufficient support at home to meet "homeland security, civil support, and domestic emergency requirements."