Mexico’s Next President Won’t Slow The Drug War

Enrique Peña Nieto. Photo: Cristhian Herrera Robledo/Flickr

At this point, there’s little doubt who is likely to win Mexico’s presidential election on Sunday. That would be Enrique Peña Nieto, who polls show leading with double-digits over his rival candidates. He’s also calling for a (subtle) shift in the fight against the cartels: don’t bother as much with stopping drugs and taking down drug lords, but focus on stopping violence and kidnapping. But as far as big changes go, don’t expect much if Peña Nieto wins, at least not soon.

First, the little things. Last week, Pieña Nieto recruited Colombian General Oscar Naranjo — a veteran of the war against the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar — as his top security adviser. Peña Nieto wants to boost Mexico’s Federal Police, and he’s for creating a new national paramilitary police force to fight the cartels.  His campaign has also been “highly solicitous” of the United States, notes Patrick Corcoran of InSight, an organized crime monitoring group. This could mean a bigger U.S. role. Naranjo is also reportedly close to U.S. officials.

This is while the cartels still exercise draconian rule over cities throughout many parts of the country, especially along the border. Ciudad Juárez, which came to define Mexico’s drug violence when viewed from outside the country, has seen a drop in murders to 2007 levels, Corcoran adds. But other cities, like Nuevo Laredo, experienced lower and lower levels of violence only for gangland killings to spark anew. The cartels have also spread to new areas.

“If you noticed, none of the presidential candidates broke openly with [outgoing President Felipe Calderón's] strategy — the farthest they went was to criticize the level of violence,” César Martinez Espinosa, a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas and a specialist in Mexican national security issues, writes in an e-mail. ”This is because they recognized that a majority of people (outside of Mexico City) approves Calderón’s fight against the cartels (some polls have tracked that), especially the participation of the military in it and because they might not have that much room to maneuver once they are in power.”

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Failure to Launch: Darpa’s Drone Contest Ends Unconquered

Last year, the Pentagon asked DIY-drone enthusiasts to come up with the spy drone of the future. Twelve months later, it looks like they might need a little more time.

In an announcement posted online yesterday with little fanfare, Darpa announced that its UAVForge competition had ended — with none of the 140 teams emerging victorious in the quest to create a better spy drone. “The teams brought creativity and enthusiasm to the competition,” Jim McCormick, the Darpa program manager in charge of the contest, said in the statement. “The competition was more constructive than you might expect; there were many examples of teams helping each other.”

The idea behind Darpa’s challenge was this: DIY drone-builders would congregate online at UAVForge.net, team up, and create portable, affordable drones able to, among other tasks, “fly to and perch in useful locations at several kilometers’ range for periods of several hours, and provide continuous, real-time surveillance without dedicated or specialized operators.”

The crowdsourced challenge saw several milestones over the last year: Each team was first asked to upload a YouTube video meant to “advertise their skills,” followed by another clip to “demonstrate early flight behaviors” of their drone.

After that, the agency held a live video demo, and went on to pick nine teams that’d partake in a “fly-off” competition at Ft. Stewart, which simulated a real surveillance mission. The winning team was supposed to score $100,000, the chance to strut their drone’s stuff in a military exercise, and an opportunity to “work with a government-selected UAV manufacturer” to produce additional copies of their winning drone.

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Next-Gen Terror Watchers Go Deep Into Al-Qaida, Tweet a Lot

Tawfik Hamid talks for a 2009 documentary about extremism. Image: Screenshot/’In The Red Chair’

Most counterterrorism scholars will never meet Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaida, let alone pray with him. As a teenage extremist, Tawfik Hamid did.

Back when Hamid was a youth in Cairo, studying at a medical school, his religious fervor compelled him to associate with terrorists. “One of the mosques at the school was reserved for Gemaa Islamiyah,” Hamid casually explains over a burger in Arlington, Virginia. Before Hamid decided that he’d prefer not to assassinate the police officer that Gemaa Islamiyah wanted him to kill, he shared mosque time on a few more occasions with the man who would succeed Osama bin Laden. Now senior U.S. generals refer to him as a “treasure.”

Similarly, most counterterrorism analysts will never interview one of the seminal figures in Islamic extremism. Yet Abu Walid al-Masri, an associate of al-Qaida figures stretching back to the 1980s Afghanistan jihad, eagerly exchanged e-mails with an obscure Australian academic named Leah Farrall. al-Masri didn’t grant the interview with a major newspaper or television network. He wanted it posted on her blog.

Hamid and Farrall don’t have much in common; he’s working on a new translation of the Koran, she’s writing essays for Foreign Affairs. But they’re united in their rigor, and their structural focus, when it comes to studying terrorism. That puts them — Farrall more than Hamid — in line with a rising group of counterterrorism scholars, many of whom are under 40 and are more likely to debate on Twitter than on the New York Times op-ed page.

“A lot of us have either lived in the region or we’ve also got at least one of the languages — Arabic, French, which helps [study] North Africa, and many of us come from a non-political science or terrorism studies or security studies background,” explains Aaron Zelin, a Brandeis graduate now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Many of us either did history or did area studies in the Middle East or Islam in terms of our actual academic background…. We understand it’s not just ‘This is Islam’; we’ve studied what Islam actually is.”

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Jamming Grenades, Micro-Missiles: Israel’s Latest War Tech, Uncovered

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Holder Held in Contempt of Congress, Which Means Almost Nothing

Attorney General Eric Holder. Photo: DoJ

The House has voted, and Attorney General Eric Holder has been held in contempt for failing to hand over documents related to the disastrous gun-walking sting, Operation Fast and Furious. Problem is, at this point, there’s almost nothing left for Congress to do.

The vote tally was largely along partisan lines: 255 yeas, 67 nays, with one present. Democrats walked out nearly en masse before the vote: 110 representatives did not vote.  Today’s vote is also different from last week’s contempt citation by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which set the layup for today’s full House vote. This one’s the real deal. But even with Holder now officially held in contempt, he is not likely to be prosecuted, according to an analysis of likely outcomes by CNN. The reason is fairly simple: what Congress is asking the Justice Department to do is to prosecute itself.

It begins with allegations by Republicans (and some Democrats) that Holder knew — and approved — an alleged plan by the ATF’s Phoenix Field Division to allow firearms to “walk” into Mexico, and into the hands of the cartels. The ATF pulled the plug after the shooting death of Border Patrol tactical officer Brian Terry by border bandits in December, 2010. An AK-47 variant rifle found at the scene was traced to Fast and Furious. Thousands of internal DoJ documents requested by congressional investigators were never turned over, though Holder was ordered to by a subpoena. But the documents may never be seen due to Obama administration’s assertion of executive privilege hours before last week’s citation.

But first, let’s break down what the House voted to do, exactly. One, the House today authorized criminal charges to be filed against Holder. But the decision to file criminal charges is left up to Ronald Machen, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia — who answers to Holder. (Machen is also an Obama administration appointee.) The chances of Machen filing charges against his boss? Around zilch. And even then, the administration has sent the documents down the memory hole, meaning Holder is immune from prosecution.

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