As someone who was really, really sad to leave FDL, I think I may have a sense of what you’re going through. Can’t wait to read your next work, and the future of civ-lib coverage here at FDL, too.

Thanks for the link, DDay. One thing you might be interested in that didn’t make my piece: my anonymouse sez that the long-term basing accord is gonna be more like … well, check the transcript:

we’re not going to have kind of a permanent basing structure like in Korea or something. But I think what we will have is a — it’s fair to say we’ll have a counterterrorism capability. So a strike capability, that we’ll able to ensure that there’s not that reemergence of a safe haven threat to us, or a substantial — well, basically that. I mean, I think we’ll have an architecture that enables us to do that. Now, the exact logistics of that are still being worked out in the context of the strategic partnership.

FWIW.

Lord, I miss FDL.

Or, alternatively, Mueller: Now More Than Evar!!!!1!

Thanks to all of you for reading, and particularly to my FDL fam. I’ll see you in your comment threads now…

Fair point. And as much as I complained about all my New START email spam on Twitter, the arms-control community waged a successful non-stop PR blitz for the treaty for the inside-the-Beltway crowd.

What I always wonder about is whether nuclear security can be like climate change — something that starts out as the parochial interest of a fairly cloistered political community, but then a movie or something (Inconvenient Truth, in the climate case) comes along and turns it into a widespread social movement.

Dafna Linzner, ladies and gentlemen! #honored #ballin

And thanks very much to Tony for taking the time for being part of this fascinating chat; and everyone for participating.

Coming up on the end here… One of the conclusions of the book is that we need to respect an Afghan reconciliation process with the Taliban. The Taliban leadership say they won’t negotiate until we leave. Do we put that on the table in the hopes of unlocking a peace deal? From the looks of this weekend’s NATO summit, that’s not really on the table. But should it be?

Tony, we’re coming up on the final stretch here. What do you want everyone here to know about ABLE DANGER? When it first came to light in 2006 it seemed fantastical — a will to believe we could have stopped 9/11.

Ah, I might have read your comment too quickly — if what you mean is targeting Pakistani officials and institutions then yeah, I would imagine not even the Obama administration could argue the AUMF covers that.

Except that the AUMF, practically speaking, authorizes anything an administration says it wants authorized. There’s nothing in there about drone strikes in Pakistan or cruise missiles (and soon drones) in Yemen. And yet they occur, justified under the AUMF’s unbounded grant of warmaking authority against al-Qaeda. Boots on the ground could be similarly defended — after all, there are Special Operations Forces in Pakistan now, in an officially “advisory” capacity.

I’m not making a normative case that we should be on the ground in Pakistan. Just that if we were, the AUMF is hardly an obstacle to doing so as it stands. The real obstacles are political and diplomatic.

the Obama WH Afghan policy is nothing more than the super sizing of the Bush WH policy

Tease this out a bit, would you? Do you mean that it’s not a strategic approach, ie, bringing us to an acceptable endgame? Or that — as you write in your book about the mid-2000s — it neglects the centrality of Pakistan?

And going off that question: in the book, you and your colleagues argue repeatedly for raids into Pakistan. I’m not sure what I think about that — it seems hypocritical to bomb Pakistani targets 101 times this year from the air but balk at boots on the ground in the context of a “destabilizing measure.” But on the other hand, what if it is destabilizing? Faisal Shahzad didn’t just talk about the drones as a motivation for trying to blow up Times Square, he talked about the entire Afghanistan-Pakistan war.

there IS no problem with identification and tracking of people who meet his profile – it was the “political correct” culture that prevented the laws and regulations from being effectively used…

Tony, can you explain this a little further? This is a common refrain in the intelligence community and it needs a bit of unpacking. What’s the ‘politically correct’ culture amongst analysts and how does it inhibit good intelligence work?

So given that we’re entering a period in which American citizens are emerging as terrorist assets — Anwar al-Aulaqi, Faisal Shahzad, Maj. Hasan — is there a need to harmonize PC standards with EO 12333′s guidelines? I know the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence labors to be the connection to sync up the intelligence and law enforcement communities, but is there a danger of broad data-mining jeopardizing a terrorism prosecution otherwise?

(that should be “from the perspective of finding terrorist connections to U.S. persons…”)

From the perspective of finding U.S. persons, are you ever working toward a probable-cause standard? Or (as some intelligence analysts have cautioned me) is that just not a relevant term from an analyst’s perspective, given the category difference between intelligence and law enforcement?

As a follow-up: how specific or rigorous are the instructions you receive during a data-mining exercise for what counts as a “connection”? If I try to access the al-Falluja extremist forum, is my IP address going to pop up, or will it be typically filtered out unless I have a variety of other connections to a given target?

And maybe this is a good segue into how ABLE DANGER actually worked, what it was/wasn’t, etc…

So, as someone who’s been inside a big data-mining operation, can you tell us how you balance the privacy/security question? In the book, you tend to give short shrift to the legal questions involved with ABLE DANGER — I think you wrote, “hell, they’re terrorists,” at one point when recounting the SOCOM lawyers wanting to shut the program down.

But there’s a great fear that mining metadata for possible terrorist involvement is going to ensnare a great deal of constitutionally-protected behavior. Especially now that we’re seeing a stated desire on the part of al-Qaeda’s Yemen offshoot to encourage homegrown terrorism. On the inside, where do the legal restrictions come in?

I thought we might bracket ABLE DANGER for a second, given that your book is about very sensitive intelligence operations in Afghanistan. Most of them get messed up by bureaucracy, in your telling, even when they look like they’re going well, or are disconnected from a larger strategy. What do you think the implications of that are for a special-ops-centric strategy going forward in Afghanistan, which frequently gets discussed as an alternative to our huge, heavy footprint there?

Hey Tony, which I hope I can call you. Welcome to the Lake & thanks for doing this Book Salon. What kind of restrictions are you under for discussing aspects of the book that have been redacted?