An Ignoble Experiment

2. U.S. support for Yemen govt. critical for AQAP fight, says State Dept. official

The conflict in Syria will likely have consequences for international terrorism for decades to come, Brian Michael Jenkins of the Rand Corp. said Nov. 20 during a House hearing.

Jenkins, a terrorism expert and senior adviser to Rand's president, said that Syria has provided al Qaeda a chance to establish a strong new base in the Middle East and bring in new recruits.

Speaking before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, he said the Syrian conflict has already attracted thousands of foreign fighters, including an estimated 500 from Western countries. He predicted that the number of foreign fighters would continue to rise, and that those who return to their home countries could pose a terrorist threat there.

For the immediate future, the conflict in Syria is unlikely to generate a threat in the West. "The flow right now of recruits is toward Syria, not the other way," he said. But with no end in sight for the conflict, the effects of foreign fighters gaining contacts and experience with terrorist groups is likely to endure.

"One way or another," Jenkins said, "we'll be dealing with the effluent of Syria's conflict for decades."

He said that after years of brutal attacks, neither side expects to survive in a regime dominated by the other side, which is likely to prolong the conflict. It's possible that the sides will separate into de facto partitions that are relatively stable, but even then, Jenkins said, conflict could persist on the borders of the regional enclaves.

For more:
- go to the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on terrorism, nonproliferation, and trade hearing webpage (prepared testimonies and webcast available)

Read more about: al Qaeda, Brian Michael Jenkins
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By David Perera

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3. Changing NWS tornado alert system could reduce desensitizing false alarms, says NIST

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula continues to pose an immediate security threat to Yemen and to the United States, despite the central government's recovery of territory in the south previously under AQAP control, a State Department official told a Nov. 19 House panel.

"We view continued U.S. support for the Yemeni security sector as critical as the country continues to battle an AQAP presence within its borders," said Barbara Leaf, deputy assistant secretary of state for the Arabian peninsula. She testified before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee.

Leaf also told the panel that United States "enjoys a strong and comprehensive relationship with the government of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and the Yemeni people."

Hadi assumed the Yemeni presidency in February 2012 following nearly a year of street demonstrations and violence resulting in an election with him as the sole, consensus candidate. United Nations-backed talks among political factions meant to lead to a new constitution have taken longer than initially budgeted for, with a long-standing divisions between northern and southern regions resisting easy resolution, the International Crisis Group notes in a Sept. 25 report.

AQAP militants took advantage of societal tumult rocking the Yemeni government in the spring of 2011 to seize control of the southern province of Abyan, ruling towns with a strict interpretation of sharia until a military and tribal offensive backed by U.S. airstrikes dislodged them in June 2012.

However, that, plus a sustained and ongoing drone strike campaign, shouldn't be interpreted as evidence that AQAP is struggling, warn Andrew Michaels and Sakhr Ayyash, two journalists writing in the September issue of the CTC Sentinel, published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.

"What was cast at the time as a 'defeat' of Ansar al Sharia fighters appears in hindsight as a 'strategic retreat,'" they say, reporting that the bulk of fighters were able to flee the two towns of Jaar and Zinjibar "with relative ease, in most cases with their weapons." Ansar al Sharia ("Supporters of Islamic Law") of Yemen is a merely an alias for AQAP, the State Department said in October 2012.

Since then, AQAP has expanded its presence to new parts of Yemen, the journalists say, "most notably the central province of Bayda and the eastern province of Hadramawt." Government officials also acknowledge that AQAP cells remain in towns and villages ostensibly under government or local anti-AQAP tribal military control.

The International Crisis Group also notes rising AQAP activities in Hadramawt, also listing Shebwa as a province where the terrorist group has become more prevalent.

Hadi is a vocal proponent of U.S. drone strikes, but many in southern Yemen call aerial bombing and government military action "political theater by a government more concerned with gaining Western counterterrorism support than with combating the real threat of al Qaeda influence," the ICG report says.

For more:
- go to the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa hearing webpage (prepared testimony and webcast available)
- download the September ICG report, "Yemen's Southern Question: Avoiding a Breakdown" (.pdf)
- read Michaels and Ayyash's September CTC Sentinel article, "AQAP's Resilience in Yemen"

By David Perera

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4. Local enforcement leads immigrants to relocate within the United States

A tornado warning from the National Weather Service today comes in two settings--in effect or not--and that should be changed in favor of a more nuanced system that presents different levels of threat based on the probability of a tornado hazard, concludes a government investigation into the aftermath of the May 22, 2011 tornado in Joplin, Mo.

The tornado struck the southwestern Missouri town of about 50,000 on a Sunday afternoon, killing 161 people and causing $1.78 billion in property loss. The National Institute of Standards and Technology conducted a two year study of its impact, issuing a draft final report on Nov. 21.

Among its findings is that in the five years preceding the May 2011 tornado, the National Weather Service issued 12 tornado warnings for the Joplin area, of which only one presaged an actual storm event--a false alarm rate of 92 percent.

The town had a policy of sounding outdoor sirens whenever a tornado was reported to be moving toward the town, or even if severe thunderstorm winds were expected to exceed 75 miles per hour. Although the sirens went off on average once per year, apart from routine testing, residents tended to be dismissive of them, with some tornado survivors telling NIST investigators that severe storms usually never followed the sirens, and that they knew that the sirens were meant to be audible in an area larger than potentially affected by a storm.

"The prevailing perception was that the system lacked credibility," the report says, mirroring the findings of a 2011 NWS analysis.

For its report, NIST found and interviewed 140 survivors who at some point during the warning period made a decision on what to do in reaction to the alert and when to do it. The NWS issued its first tornado warning for the northern Joplin area at 5:09 p.m. and city officials first sounded the sirens at 5:11 p.m. That NWS alert turned out to be for a storm to the north of Joplin also heading northward and which didn't produce a tornado. The NWS issued a second alert, for the storm that ended up hitting Joplin, at 5:17 p.m. At 5:38 p.m., when the tornado had already entered city limits, city officials sounded the siren for a second time.

Of the 140 decision makers, only three individuals took refuge immediately, telling interviewers that they made a habit of sheltering anytime the sirens sounded during tornado season. An additional seven told interviews they took shelter following the first siren after having monitored weather conditions throughout the day, long before the first siren went off--which they took as confirmation that something serious was actually taking place.

Of the remaining 130, 22 were unaware that a tornado was taking place until a family member or friend called them, or the tornado affected them. The vast majority--85 people--didn't take action until the tornado was confirmed another way, such as a television announcer urging viewers to take cover immediately, or seeing or hearing the tornado with enough time to take last minute action.

One survivor told investigations that after the first siren, "we walked outside and you couldn't really, didn't really see nothing then, and we went back in and finished eating," leading NIST to observe that a decision to shelter or not "had become as simple as that--if there was nothing in the sky to worry about, then it was appropriate to return to your previous pursuits until something else caught your attention."

Changing from the warning/no warning system of today to a real-time, probabilistic system would reduce the rate of false alarms, NIST says.

The report also recommends that communities adopt more "push" communications technologies that include installing outdoor siren systems with voice communication capability. The agency also recommends reverse 9-1-1, a capability that county public safety answering points in fact had before the tornado, but didn't deploy because local telephone switches weren't always able to handle the volume of calls.

The report notes that the Commercial Mobile Alert System is a newer technology for pushing alerts--it allows public safety authorities to send 90 character alerts to a geographically defined audience--but says it is limited in its ability to reach sleeping individuals and those who have visual or hearing impairments. As a result, the report says additional technologies to reach those populations should be explored.

It also calls for more research on how to increase risk perception among the populace. The NWS is testing a method of sending stronger-worded texts in tornado warnings for higher-severity storms, the report says, noting that many in Joplin took shelter after hearing the command to "take cover now!"

For more:
- download the draft final report, "Technical Investigation of the May 22, 2011, Tornado in Joplin, Missouri" (.pdf)

Read more about: disaster preparedness, Joplin tornado
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By Zach Rausnitz

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5. NYC stop-and-frisk has setback

Local immigration enforcement has driven immigrants to different parts of the United States, but generally not out of the country, according to a working paper being circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The exception is Maricopa County, Ariz., home to Sheriff Joe Arpaio's controversial immigration enforcement tactics. Excluding Maricopa County, there is no evidence that 287(g) agreements, which allow state or local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws, have any effect on decisions to leave the United States.

Maricopa County's enforcement had a dramatic impact locally though. In areas that implemented 287(g) task force agreements, which are based around street enforcement, 10.4 percent of the immigrant population exited the country the next year, compared to just 1.7 percent nationally--and Maricopa County drove that 8.7 percentage point difference entirely on its own, the paper says.

Intense enforcement may not have been the only major factor there, however. The county's proximity to a border may have also made it more likely for immigrants to leave the country, the paper notes.

The paper, by Tara Watson, an economics professor at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., included migration data from 2006 to 2011. In 2012, the Obama administration phased out 287(g) task force agreements. It maintains some 287(g) jail agreements, which allow officers working in jails to identify and process undocumented immigrants who have been charged with a crime.

The task force agreements have significantly increased the probability that immigrants will relocate to other states, the paper says, even when excluding Maricopa County. Areas with task force agreements caused a 45-63 percent increase in immigrant relocations out of state, compared to a national baseline, the paper estimates.

Relocation was largely driven by educated immigrants, the paper says. "These individuals are more likely to be documented (though their legal status is not observable in the data) and are likely productive workers in the local economy," Watson writes. "Thus, the task-force enforcement regimes may be missing their intended targets."

For more:
- go to the paper, "Enforcement and Immigrant Location Choice" (sub. req.)

Read more about: Joe Arpaio, immigration
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By David Perera

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