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--- Begin Message --- -Caveat Lector-9.11.01: TWO YEARS LATER
Terror: A question of when, not if
'Perpetual war' --
a grim new reality of American life,
experts agree
James Sterngold
San Francisco Chronicle,
Sunday, September 7, 2003
Two years after a handful of Middle Eastern terrorists commandeered
four airliners and shattered America's sense of invulnerability, the government is still groping to respond to a largely unseen enemy known for unflinching ruthlessness, patience and inventiveness.
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, reduced two of the largest buildings on Earth to dust,
killed more than 3,000 people and mobilized the nation like no event since Pearl Harbor. But despite two lightning wars, won convincingly, one of the largest-ever reorganizations of the federal government, a rewriting of criminal laws, the detention of hundreds of suspects and the expenditure of billions of dollars on homeland security, the country is, many terrorism experts say, little safer today than it was two years ago.
"We know we will be hit again and hard, and that some attacks will succeed, " said
Brian Jenkins, a former special operations soldier and a terrorism expert and government adviser for 30 years. "We know that if they had the capability to kill tens of thousands of people, they would. There are no self- imposed restraints. These guys cannot be deterred."
Further, the experts argue, this vulnerability will last for decades. Success will have
to be measured not by elimination of the threats, which most experts now regard as impossible, but by resilience after the inevitable strikes occur. That will require a fundamental shift in the national mind-set and a lowering of expectations that, experts warn, national leaders have yet to articulate.
"There is still a fervent desire by Americans to see 9/11 as a one-time anomaly, that
all this inconvenience will end, that the Bush administration will announce that we have captured Osama bin Laden and it's over," said Jenkins, a senior adviser at the Rand Corp. think tank in Santa Monica. "That's not going to happen. The terrorists have been able to create a perpetual war." He added, "We view war as a finite undertaking. Our opponent considers it a condition."
America's leaders should use this anniversary to start preparing for even deeper and
more far-reaching changes in how the new threats must be confronted, and their likely toll, said Anthony Cordesman, a former government official and now a national security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"You can't eliminate the cause and eliminate the war," he said. "It took us half a
century to win the Cold War. This will take another 50 years. It will be a war of constant change. The threat will keep changing, and we will have to keep changing in response. I think we are in the very early years of something where you do not know what to expect."
Michael Cherkasky, the chief executive of Kroll Inc., a leading security and
investigations concern and an adviser to the American military in Iraq, said he believes the Homeland Security Department's failure to prepare Americans for the new kind of demands of this unconventional war have increased the country's vulnerability, in part because a new terrorist strike might have even graver repercussions for national morale.
"What people need to realize is that you can arrest all the al Qaeda leaders you
want, but two or three or four people can still cause catastrophic damage," said Cherkasky, whose recent book, "Forewarned," describes missed warnings and harshly criticizes what he describes as the government's badly misguided responses to the threat. "The real issue is not prevention.
"This is our children's war," he added. "That's why I'm so concerned. The job is
virtually undoable." Even many of the officials charged with protecting key sites express a sense of foreboding mixed with a determination to do what they can with extremely limited tools.
"A cultural mind-set change is needed now, but it's not there yet," said D. O. "Spike"
Helmick, commissioner of the California Highway Patrol, which has taken on major new duties in a state rich with likely targets. "Do we have a lot of vulnerabilities still? Yes, and we probably always will."
EARLY PROTECTION EFFORTS
Added to that, of course, is the arrest or killing of many al Qaeda operatives and
Most experts agree that in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, it was appropriate for the government to respond with hasty, ad hoc efforts simply to protect areas known to be vulnerable, from airliners to bridges. These efforts have produced notable successes, including the arrest of clusters of alleged terrorists in Detroit, Seattle, Portland and Buffalo, N.Y., and a sting operation that prevented an arms merchant from selling a shoulder- fired missile to possible terrorists.
leaders abroad.
"We're better at what we're supposed to be doing," said Kevin Ryan, the U.S.
attorney in San Francisco. "It is my view that it is no coincidence that we haven't seen another attack since 9/11."
But many experts warn of complacency, arguing that the kind of threat posed by al
Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups is too malleable and too persistent to be defeated by the addition of any number of guards or detection devices. No arrests have been made two years after the traumatizing anthrax attacks against Congress, the mail system and media outlets. Terrorist Osama bin Laden, Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein remain at large. Islamic terrorists have succeeded in attacking targets ranging from a French oil tanker and the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad to a hotel in Jakarta.
If there is a common thread connecting the often-conflicting
views on how America should confront terrorism, it is that America must adopt a more sophisticated, long-term approach -- and a realistic understanding of the losses that lie ahead.
"Having untrained National Guardsmen in the airport terminals was fine, but it should
have lasted 30 days," said Cherkasky. "Fundamentally we're no safer than before."
He said, for instance, that only about 2 percent of the more than 20 million shipping
containers that move through U.S. ports every year are examined, making ports a critical weak point. Michael DiGirolamo, a deputy executive director at the Los Angeles International Airport, the target of one foiled al Qaeda plot in 1999, expressed concerns about air cargo and the way the U.S. mail is handled by the airlines.
"The culture has changed aboard the aircraft," said DiGirolamo. "In some of the ways
we were vulnerable before, we're no longer vulnerable. But in others we are."
He added that the airport has spent a little more than $100 million in special
measures since Sept. 11, but has received only about $15 million from the federal government -- and that funds are getting tighter.
"Congress has gotten sticker shock," he said. "That's unfortunate."
Furthermore,
many potential targets, from Disneyland to the Sears Tower in Chicago, are owned by corporations, not the government. Yet the federal government has yet to institute strict programs requiring corporations to protect such sites. Jules Kroll, the founder of Kroll Inc., described this as a major blind spot.
"The best companies looked at themselves," said Kroll. "That lasted about six to nine
months."
ALL-ENCOMPASSING ALERTS
Last week, in advance of Thursday's second anniversary of Sept. 11, the FBI issued
what has come to be a typical terrorist alert, so all-encompassing as to be all but useless. Al Qaeda attackers might try to transform hijacked airliners into missiles again. Male suicide bombers might dress as women to escape detection. Truck bombs might be used, but it was not clear whether that would be at industrial sites or against poorly protected "soft" targets, like hotels. A strike might take place inside the United States, the officials said, or terrorists might hit abroad. The FBI actually identified four men it said might be plotting an assault, but it was not certain what they had in mind, or where. And, the FBI warned, watch out for food and water supplies; terrorists might try and poison them.
Tom Ridge, the head of the new Homeland Security Department, calls the permanent
state of preparedness "the new normalcy."But the frustrations of many of those who have to provide security is growing because of the concerns that the public and national leaders do not appreciate the depth of the crisis and what it calls for.
The federal government has placed great emphasis, for instance, on developing new
technologiesto detect terrorist devices, from nuclear bombs and so-called radiological "dirty bombs" to chemical and biological devices. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been recruited as a principal source of new technologies, with its budget for these programs doubling to roughly $100 million from $50 million, said Page Stoutland, deputy leader of the division working on the problems. The lab helped identify the type of anthrax used in the 2001 attacks and created detectors to pick up any release of biological agents at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah. It is developing sensors to pick up radiological materials in trucks and cargo containers. Stoutland warned, though, that some law enforcement agencies are demanding instant results. That, he said, could produce inferior technologies that not only may not work well but could take time and effort away from more fruitful long-term projects.
"One can always accelerate efforts, but one has to have reasonable expectations,"
he said. "Over the next two or three years, we really will make progress." Added Cordesman, "Really good programs will take fully five years to be implemented. You don't get instant capabilities. There is no instant victory."
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