Code Yellow for Yemen

The lead article in today’s New York Times is titled, “U.S. and Britain Close Embassies in Yemen Capital.” It describes the decision to close these buildings based on new information regarding a possible Al Qaeda attack.

The focus on Yemen has grown since the backing of the Al Qaeda group there, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, for the failed Christmas Day terror attack on a plane flying from Amsterdam to Detroit. The decision to close the embassies was based on a credible threat and occurred after a private meeting between General Petraeus, now responsible for the entire Middle East, and the President of Yemen.

In my opinion, the current reaction is purely defensive in nature. The United States must avoid “fighting the last war” because the next attack will come from a different country in a different way. Al Qaeda learns and adapts, and they will avoid attacking us where we expect it. Human intelligence is far more important than responding to past weaknesses.

For human intelligence, you need to start to infiltrate terrorists groups. And this will only occur if we provide a crash course in the Arab language and Arab customs for our operatives. We can’t anticipate the next terrorist attack through improving security measures or fiddling around with the terrorist watch list. With millions of bits of information, more than the Library of Congress every day, we simply don’t have the manpower to review them all, never mind trying to connect the dots.

We need to get men in the inside of Al Qaeda to anticipate their next move.  This should be the main focus of all our intelligence agencies moving forward.