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-Caveat Lector-
Here's Bush's latest, "Had I known..." followed by an January USA Today
article describing numerous accounts of attempts by Al Queda to crash jets
into buildings.
NY Post
DUBYA HITS CLARKE ACCOUNT
March 26, 2004 -- President Bush insisted yesterday he had no advance
warning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and challenged the assertions of a
former aide who accused him of not placing a high enough priority on
pursuing al Qaeda prior to the tragedy.
"Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to strike America, to
attack us, I would have used every resource, every asset, every power of the
government, to protect the American people," Bush said at a New Hampshire
campaign stop, appearing with Cheryl McGinnis, the wife of a pilot killed in
the attacks.
Counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke, who served the last four U.S.
presidents, said Bush did not take the threat of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda
organization seriously and downgraded its importance, as opposed to Bill
Clinton's administration.
Clarke gave his scathing critique of Bush in testimony Wednesday before the
commission investigating the events leading up to 9/11.
One of the most damaging revelations was a letter Clarke wrote a week before
the attacks, asking White House policymakers to imagine a day after hundreds
of Americans lay dead at home and abroad because of a terrorist attack,
thinking about what they could have done to prevent it.
One grass-roots organization has already rushed out anti-Bush television ads
highlighting Clarke's testimony. Reuters
-------------------------------------
EXCERPT:
"Al Qaeda had planned attacks in London, Paris, Marseilles, Strasbourg,
Singapore, and Rome, but most of the conspirators were arrested a short time
after the Sept. 11 attacks. Meanwhile, no one had hijacked an aircraft in
the U.S. using a "real" weapon in almost 15 years, although crashing planes
into structures is not new. The Israelis shot down a Libyan jetliner they
said was headed for a building in Tel Aviv in the 1980s. A Cessna 150 fell
50 yards short of the White House in September, 1994. French commandos
prevented a jumbo jet, hijacked in Algeria by the Armed Islamic Group, from
crashing into the Eiffel Tower the following December. In the mid 1990s,
terrorist Ramzi Yousef plotted to have his friend Abdul Hakim Murad fly a
light plane loaded with chemical weapons into CIA headquarters at Langley,
Va., or to have him spray the area with poison gas. A Turkish hijacker
attempted to crash an aircraft into the tomb of former Pres. Kemal Ataturk
in Ankara in 1998. With enhanced security on at airports and passengers on
commercial airliners who will react to any danger, this threat has
diminished."
Is terrorism's threat overblown? (National Affairs).(Column)
USA Today (Magazine), Jan, 2003, by Scherer. John L.
THE THREAT of terrorism in the U.S. is not over, but Sept. 11 may have been
an anomaly. Intelligence agencies are unlikely to uncover an impending
attack, no matter what they spend on human intelligence, because it is
virtually impossible to infiltrate terrorist cells whose members are friends
and relatives. At least five of the 19 Al Qaeda hijackers came from Asir
province in Saudi Arabia, and possibly eight were related.
The U.S. was not defended on 9/11. As soon as the aircraft were hijacked,
helicopters armed with missiles should have risen to protect coastal cities.
Two F-16s dispatched from Langley and Otis Air Force bases in Virginia and
New Jersey, respectively, were too distant to reach New York and Washington,
D.C., in time. On a cautionary note, the penetration of White House air
space by a Cessna aircraft in June, 2002, and by several other flights since
the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, indicates nothing much has been
done.
Although there will be small-scale terrorist attacks in the U.S. in the next
10 years, major Al Qaeda operations are over. Of the more than 1,200 people
arrested after 9/11, none has been charged in the conspiracy. This suggests
the hijackers did not and do not have an extensive operational American
network. Some intelligence officials have estimated that up to 5,000
"sleepers"--persons with connections to Al Qaeda--are living in this
country, including hundreds of hard-core members, yet nothing significant
has happened in more than a year. The arrests in the Buffalo, N.Y., area
back up the possibility of such sleeper cells.
Al Qaeda attacks are more likely to occur abroad, but the danger of this
group is being exaggerated overseas as well. Members of Al Qaeda cells have
been arrested in Spain, Italy, England, Germany, Malaysia, and elsewhere,
but scarcely more than a score anywhere except Pakistan.
The threat of terrorism in the U.S. has greatly diminished, but Al Qaeda and
Taliban prisoners realize they can terrorize citizens merely by "confessing"
to plans to blow up bridges in California, attack schools in Texas, bomb
apartments in Florida, rob banks in the Northeast, set off a series of
"dirty bombs," and have scuba divers operate in coastal areas.
A recent book on Al Qaeda states that the organization plans 100 attacks at
any one time. This is nonsense. There have been a handful of small-scale
attacks with fatalities linked to Al Qaeda since Sept. 11, nothing near 100.
These include a church bombing in Islamabad (five deaths); the explosion of
a gasoline truck and bus outside a synagogue on Djerba Island, Tunisia (19
dead); a bus bombing outside the Sheraton Hotel in Karachi (14 killed); and
a bombing at the U.S. consulate in Karachi (12 fatalities). Three of these
incidents occurred in Pakistan. In addition, Al Qaeda links are suspected in
late-2002 bombings in Bali and Kenya. The claim by Sept. 11 terrorist
suspect Zacarias Moussaoui of an ongoing Al Qaeda plot in this country is a
subterfuge to save himself.
Al Qaeda had planned attacks in London, Paris, Marseilles, Strasbourg,
Singapore, and Rome, but most of the conspirators were arrested a short time
after the Sept. 11 attacks. Meanwhile, no one had hijacked an aircraft in
the U.S. using a "real" weapon in almost 15 years, although crashing planes
into structures is not new. The Israelis shot down a Libyan jetliner they
said was headed for a building in Tel Aviv in the 1980s. A Cessna 150 fell
50 yards short of the White House in September, 1994. French commandos
prevented a jumbo jet, hijacked in Algeria by the Armed Islamic Group, from
crashing into the Eiffel Tower the following December. In the mid 1990s,
terrorist Ramzi Yousef plotted to have his friend Abdul Hakim Murad fly a
light plane loaded with chemical weapons into CIA headquarters at Langley,
Va., or to have him spray the area with poison gas. A Turkish hijacker
attempted to crash an aircraft into the tomb of former Pres. Kemal Ataturk
in Ankara in 1998. With enhanced security on at airports and passengers on
commercial airliners who will react to any danger, this threat has
diminished.
Terrorists have attacked on holidays, but authorities are now especially
alert on those occasions, and the number and violence of anniversary attacks
have lessened. Al Qaeda has never staged an incident on a holiday.
Chemical, biological, and nuclear (CBN) attacks are possible, but difficult
and unlikely. Only one has succeeded over the last two decades--the 1995
Sarin incident on the Tokyo subway. Thousands were injured, but just six
people died.
There have been no CBN attacks with mass fatalities anywhere. Terrorist
"experts" simply have thought up everything terrible that can happen, and
then assumed it will. Terrorists would encounter problems dispersing
biological toxins. Most quickly dilute in any open space, and others need
perfect weather conditions to cause mass casualties. Some biological agents,
although not anthrax, are killed by exposure to ultraviolet light. The
Washington, D.C., subway system has devices that can detect biological
toxins. New York has the highest-density population of any American city,
and for this reason might have the greatest probability of such an attack,
but it also has the best-prepared public health system.
In one instance, Essid Sami Ben Khemais, a Moroccan who ran Al Qaeda's
European logistics center in Milan, Italy, received a five-year prison
sentence in February, 2002. His cell planned to poison Rome's water supply
near the U.S. embassy on the Via Veneto. This group had 10 pounds of
potassium ferro-cyanide, a chemical used to make wine and ink dye, but
extracting a deadly amount of cyanide from this compound would have proved
extremely difficult.
Americans are rightly concerned about a strike against a nuclear power
facility, but terrorists would have to get through a series of gates and
fences, bypass motion sensors, and outfight a heavily armed security force
to enter a containment building. Once inside the structure, they would need
to know the exact sequence to shut down a reactor. An aircraft diving at a
nuclear station would have to hit a small target, nothing like the World
Trade Center buildings, which rose 1,400 feet into the air. Containment
vessels are 160 feet high by 130 feet wide, and storage casks are even
smaller.
Politicians have proposed creating a bureau to protect food from terrorists,
but no one in the U.S. has ever died from a terrorist food poisoning. In
fact, the nation has experienced just one instance of tampering with
agricultural produce, when members of a cult contaminated several salad bars
at restaurants in Oregon. The biggest danger to the food supply would be
from salmonella, E. coli 0157, clostridium botulinum, and cholera, but
careless handling and improper preparation of food are far-greater menaces
than terrorism.
There are 168,000 public water systems in the U.S. Some serve as many as
8,000,000 people, while others as few as 25. None has ever been poisoned,
although there have been attempts.
The FBI may need reorganization, especially since its failures preceding
Sept. 11 resulted from officials making bad decisions. It is well-known that
in mid August, 2001, officials at a flight school in Eagan, Minn., told the
FBI that a French citizen of Algerian descent, Moussaoui, had offered
$30,000 cash for lessons on a flight-simulator to learn how to fly a Boeing
747. He had no interest in learning how to land the plane. Moussaoui was
arrested three weeks before the attacks. One week before the hijackings,
French intelligence informed the FBI that he was an Islamic militant who had
visited Afghanistan and had links to Al Qaeda. FBI agents could have entered
Moussaoui's computer and obtained his phone records using the Federal
statutes already in place, but which were ignored or forgotten by officials.
Reorganizations refuse to acknowledge that some individuals are smarter and
more knowledgeable than others, and new personnel will eventually resolve
these problems. The new Department of Homeland Security will disrupt normal
channels of communication and create even more bureaucratic confusion. It
will compete for resources with the National Security Council and it will be
costly trying to coordinate 46 agencies and, judging from actual terrorist
events in the U.S., wholly unnecessary. Americans must remain vigilant, of
course, but there is no need to raid the Treasury or turn the country upside
down pursuing phantoms.
John L. Scherer, a Minneapolis, Minn.-based freelance writer, edited the
yearbook Terrorism: An Annual Survey in 1982-83 and the quarterly Terrorism
from 1986 to 2001.
www.ctrl.org
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