Why Grill Embassy Bomber Abu Anas al-Liby?

The alleged mastermind behind U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, now captured, is about to experience a legal circus that comes with any trial of a notorious character. Politics aside, is such a trial a good idea from the perspective of gaining intelligence out of him?

To answer this question, one must first come to grips with what intelligence he has to offer. There is tactical intelligence about impending attacks, active networks, methods, logistics, and financing. Strategic intelligence may include insight into long-range plans, support networks, and identification of terrorist leaders and their vulnerabilities. As for the 15-year-old attacks themselves which have already been investigated and studied, there is still something important he can reveal. Specifically, the details of his target selection process can inform our future defenses. Why is this important?

In the unclassified world of security thought and rumination, it has long been held that terrorists bent on attacking U.S. embassies in Africa zeroed in on perhaps four likely targets and then ultimately chose Kenya and Tanzania as the easier targets. We think -- or have speculated -- that the target selection process boiled down to picking softer targets where security was more relaxed because there had been no attacks or threats of attack prior to the targeting. Effective interrogation of Abu Anas al-Liby can illuminate this inference, thereby giving us useful insight into how terrorists pick their targets.

Now, if this individual has valuable information, will a public, media-rich trial contribute to or inhibit loosening his tongue? Individuals with a prosecutorial bias will argue that trials do wonders to encourage captured traitors to talk. To some extent this argument has merit. The reason is that traitors who are caught generally have nothing left to trade that the government cannot confiscate. Why would they want to trade anyway? Usually they have one or more family members left devastated by their act of treason, and trading something of value is all that they can bargain with to keep authorities from legitimate confiscations that can be exceptionally hard on these families. Thus, the traitors' one card to play becomes cooperation in failure analysis aimed at determining what happened and how much damage the traitor actually caused. This is called damage assessment, and a trial can nudge traitors into cooperating in damage assessment as a condition of a plea bargain. Traitors know that they face a life sentence if not execution, so sentencing offers little incentive for cooperation because it just does not change. However, in exchange for full cooperation in the failure analysis debriefings, traitors can sometimes get authorities to go easier on the family members who had nothing to do with their perfidy, as an alternative to, say, leaving spouses homeless and destitute.

What about terrorists attacking Americans abroad who have no such ties within our country, however? Sadly, an American trial offers no such inducement to cooperate. Indeed, it offers counterproductive incentives to turn a legal proceeding into a platform for railing against the United States and chanting manifestos in an effort to rally like-minded and aspiring jihadists. Meanwhile, prosecutors eager to honor the playbook of legal fairness accorded U.S. citizens deserving protections under the law, may well bar legitimate intelligence interrogation on the theory that this may impede successful prosecution. Alternatively, if the embassy bomber were to publicly disappear, materializing in a facility approximating Guantanamo where he could be treated humanely while facing questioning that will take as much time as he has left on earth, perhaps he will disgorge information that will save American lives.

Prosecution is a fine objective, but it does not take on the same priorities as protection, and protection accords a greater premium to preventing the next attack than to avenging the last one.

-- Nick Catrantzos

What If Shots Fired at Your Shopping Mall?

When I used to consult for large organizations to advise their employees how to stay out of harm's way in dangerous places, the primary concern was travel to unstable countries. Today, similar worries extend to places like shopping malls, yet some of the advice from my corporate engagement was equally welcome by a concerned shopper with fears springing from the mall shooting in Kenya. Here are three of my top ten tips that apply to the situation we all face today.

Rule 1: Always go in the direction opposite trouble rather than toward it.

Rationale: People are curious creatures. Our natural inclination on hearing some commotion is to approach its source to see what is going on. For personal security, this can be a deadly mistake. Bodyguards learn to stay focused on their principal, no matter what noise or distractions are taking place. They train themselves to make protection their overriding priority, to move the protectee safely away. Similarly, the noise of gunfire should not magnetize but repel you. While the naive cannot help but be drawn to the commotion, making themselves targets in the process, smart survivors react by getting out of harm's way.

Rule 2: Trust your instincts about danger. Looking silly beats getting hurt.

Rationale: Humans process some clues faster subliminally than via time-consuming application of logic. A story in Gift of Fear, for example, recounts how a woman who was carjacked outside an ATM experienced a feeling of unease while waiting for her boyfriend to withdraw his cash as he left the engine running and the car unlocked. Only after debriefing did the woman realize that what had triggered her visceral anxiety was that she saw a glimpse of an approaching figure wearing jeans -- the carjacker -- but had not had the luxury of time to reason out that her instincts had activated because her boyfriend was not wearing jeans that day. The point is that if she had trusted her instincts without delay, she would have locked the car with the push of a button instead of experiencing a tense encounter with a dangerous villain. The same applies in cases where people routinely override their instincts for fear of appearing silly or prejudicial, as when stepping into an elevator occupied by a hulking derelict or gang of kids. People do this all the time because they don't want to appear judgmental or to look silly and waste time taking the stairs or another elevator. But silly is better than hurt or dead. Isn't it better to defer your shopping, lose your place in line, and get rapidly out of Dodge at the onset of a mall shooting than to linger or worry about how silly you may look if overreacting? Considering the respective worst case scenarios, looking silly still trumps getting shot.

Rule 3: Move, move, move.

Rationale: This was a favorite tip from a friend and colleague I had lost touch with for over 20 years until finding him training executives and their chauffeurs outside the U.S. in how to use their armored limousine to avoid being killed or taken hostage. (Chauffeurs in particular needed more training, because their knee-jerk reaction was to avoid scratching the limo.) His point was that, outside of the movies, few adversaries have a Plan B. They prepare one main attack and generally stick to it. If you can disrupt that plan by getting away from the target area, in the vast majority of cases you will get away and the attackers will not keep after you. Besides, in the case of a mall massacre, the chances are that you are not being targeted specifically. In the terrorists' minds, any casualty is as good as another, and numbers count. Your objective, then, is to avoid being one of those numbers. Move quickly. You need not be as fast as an Olympic sprinter. You just have to be faster than the next victim who hesitates or wanders unthinkingly into the line of fire.

Bottom Line: Survival begins in the mind. There is always something that you can do to improve the odds in your favor.

-- Nick Catrantzos