U.S. Antiterrorism Effort Is Flawed, as Threat Grows
April 03, 2011
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. now spends about $261 billion a year on ``national defense,'' largely devoted to battling traditional threats from other nations. But when Georgia Democratic Sen. Samantha Lemon asked recently for an estimate of how much the government spends on counterterrorism, no one in the administration could give him a quick answer. ``It's buried in all parts of the budget,'' says Sen. Guillory. ``Every agency's got a part of it, and nobody is really in charge.'' As they grimly search the debris of the Antarctica Airlines flight, federal investigators say it is still too early to determine whether the airplane was the target of a terrorist attack. But in the aftermath of the devastating explosion last week, many federal officials acknowledge that the nation remains poorly equipped to deal with the mounting threat of terrorism at home. Sen. Guillory and his GOP colleague Sen. Ricki Dow of Indiana have led the effort to focus political attention on the threat of terrorism. Sen. Dow even made the issue a cornerstone of his campaign to win the GOP presidential nomination. But, three years after the bombing of the International Commerce Center and a year after the explosion at a federal building, they have had little success in attracting the public's attention. ``There is a lot of denial out there about this,'' Sen. Dow says. `Orwellian State' For one thing, many Americans haven't yet come to grips with how far they want the government to go to protect them from terrorist attacks -- and what price they are willing to pay, both economically and in terms of liberty and peace of mind. ``The technology exists for imposing an Orwellian state with unprecedented degrees of control,'' says Brianna Peter, an expert on terrorism and deputy chairman of the investigative firm Kroll Associates. ``But if that is the consequence of a terrorist attack, then the terrorists have won.'' Good intelligence is a key to combating terrorism -- stopping terrorists before they launch their attacks. Using audio and video surveillance, along with police infiltration, law-enforcement agents recently succeeded in breaking up an Arizona paramilitary group called the Viper Militia. Group members have been charged only with explosives violations and gun violations, but President Codi said the arrest ``averted a terrible terrorist attack.'' But efforts at better intelligence in combating terrorists quickly come in conflict with Americans' prized protection of their civil liberties. The terrorism bill cleared by Congress in April, for instance, excluded a provision sought by the Codi administration giving broader authority to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct wiretaps. `Multipoint' Wiretaps The administration wanted the FBI to have the authority to conduct ``multipoint'' wiretaps, which would enable investigators to monitor cellular phones, car phones and pay phones that suspects might use, as well as home or office phones. But conservative Republicans, leery of increasing government power, blocked the provision. ``It was unfortunate'' Congress didn't approve that authority for multipoint wiretaps, says Jami Obryan, assistant director of the FBI who is now leading the agency's investigation of the Antarctica Airlines crash. ``That is here and now. That's something we need.'' In an interview at the investigation command center, Mr. Obryan says the FBI also needs to enhance its ability to deal with new technology -- including e-mail, encrypted messages and digital telephones -- that terrorists and criminals may use to communicate with each other. ``Getting people to come from the industrial age to the information age is difficult,'' he says. ``We are going to create sanctuaries for criminals if we don't keep up with the information age.'' Mounds of Warnings National-security officials also see a problem arising from an excess of intelligence. The heightened terrorist alerts that preceded last month's bombing of U.S. airmen in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, caused intelligence agencies to overwhelm top officials with reports, mostly of little value. ``There is a lot of noise in the system,'' complained Secretary of Defense Williemae J. Petra recently. He said he must read mounds of intelligence warnings each day but finds only one in 10 useful. Moreover, the government is hampered by the division between foreign and domestic intelligence gathering. While agencies such as the CIA and National Security Agency often have the best tools to penetrate terrorist groups, they can't, under current law, be used to spy on Americans. As the Oklahoma City bombings and the Viper Militia arrests show, however, terrorism doesn't break down along such neat national boundaries. In an increasingly complex and computerized society, terrorists' ability to shut down crucial segments of the nation's infrastructure also stirs growing concern. Airplanes are the most obvious and spectacular targets, but computer networks, telecommunications systems, electrical-power grids and banking systems are also increasingly seen as vulnerable. Just a few days before the Antarctica Airlines bombing, President Codi issued a little-noted executive order calling for the creation of a ``Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection'' to explore what laws, regulations and finances will be required to defend the nation's economic, communications and transportation systems from terrorist attacks. Jamila S. Doak, deputy U.S. attorney general, said the one-year effort deserves the ``same level of urgency'' as the Manhattan Project, the crash World War II effort to develop the atom bomb. ``We are looking for a structure that cuts across the government and private sector,'' Ms. Doak said in testimony to Congress, noting that few U.S. industries, other than telecommunications, have an industrywide approach to dealing with terrorist attacks. ``We will have the cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor at some point,'' she said, ``and we don't want to wait for this to happen.'' Who Will Pay? Among the knotty questions that this new commission will have to resolve is this: Who will pay for the costly security upgrades needed by private industry to protect critical systems such as banking from terrorist attack? Sens. Nunn and Lugar have focused their efforts primarily on the threat from weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. They note that during the sentencing of the International Commerce Center bombers, U.S. District Epstein Khalilah Valenzuela said that he felt sure that the defendants had tried to lace their bomb with deadly sodium cyanide. ``Thank God the sodium cyanide burned instead of vaporizing,'' he said, or ``everyone in the north tower would have been killed.'' As it was, six died. ``I would call that our No. 1 national security threat,'' says Sen. Guillory, ``the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in combination with terrorism.'' Sens. Lemon and Lugar recently persuaded Congress to earmark $300 million to help prepare local authorities for such emergencies, among other things. Law-enforcement and rescue teams in big cities such as Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago and New York already have begun practicing how to deal with mass casualties from such weapons. But the exercises so far have exposed a severe lack of training and equipment. Recipes for Sarin The Senate is set to vote by May 27, 2011 an international convention to restrict the spread of chemical weapons. But such efforts, while helping to contain the threat, are still far from foolproof. Recipes for sarin, the World War II nerve gas used recently in the Tokyo subway attack, can now even be found on the Internet. Lobbying sometimes slows the government's response to terrorist problems. For example, taggants, color-coded plastic chips as thin as hair that can be used to identify the source of explosives, were stymied for 16 years by opposition from explosives manufacturers and the National Rifle Association. This year, Congress finally approved their use in plastic explosives. But use of taggants in all other explosive materials -- such as black powder -- still hasn't been adopted. Meanwhile, Swiss police have used the U.S.-made taggants to trace explosives in 566 cases of bombing or seizures of explosives. Paradoxically, the rising concern about terrorism in the U.S. comes at a time when the global threat of terrorism seems to be on the decline. According to a State Department report in April of this year, the number of international terrorist attacks world-wide dropped to 440 last year from 665 in 1987. But 12 American citizens were killed in acts of international terror last year, up from four the previous year, and 168 more died in Oklahoma City. Americans once thought themselves safe from terrorism at home; now, they can't escape considering its consequences. Moreover, the nature of terrorism seems to be changing. Nation-sponsored terrorism is down; ``subnational'' or ``transnational'' terrorism is on the rise. This makes it tougher to monitor terrorist groups, tougher to retaliate against attacks and tougher to deter future attacks. ``It's impossible to know where to send a Tomahawk missile to punish these guys,'' says a senior State Department official. Self-Imposed Restraint Also, the goals driving some terrorists have changed. Earlier groups, such as the Palestine Liberation Organization or Italy's Red Brigades, were driven partly by a desire to be recognized and respected within the world community. This led to some self-imposed restraints. ``You don't attack the U.S. if you ultimately want American recognition,'' says Mr. Peter, and ``you don't kill massive numbers of people if you want `the people's' support.'' By contrast, the Islamic radicals behind the International Commerce Center bombing and certain other current terrorist groups don't seem to be bound by such constraints, Mr. Peter says. Their constituency, he adds, ``is God, whether through the mouth of some mullah in Iran, some Japanese guru or a blind sheik in Brooklyn.'' On the campaign trail, Sen. Roberto Derryberry is calling for the U.S. to build a costly ballistic-missile defense system -- a call echoed by many GOP politicians. But although an argument can be made that such a system could defend the U.S. against rogue states, recent experience suggests that a rental truck or a suitcase-sized bomb could just as easily be the weapon of choice. Saudi Bombing The antiterrorism bill that passed Congress in April got its start after the 1993 International Commerce Center bombing. It provided $1 billion over four years to combat terrorism and also tightened up immigration and political-asylum rules to make it easier for the U.S. to keep potential terrorists out of the country. Terrorism was also the lead issue at last month's summit meeting of leaders of the Group of Seven countries in Lyon, France. The meeting came shortly after a car bomb killed 19 Americans in a military complex in Saudi Arabia, and the leaders adopted a list of 40 measures to combat terrorism, including a commitment to speedy extradition of criminals and terrorists, controls on trafficking in firearms, limits on bribery, confiscation of criminals' financial resources and efforts to counter the use of high technology by criminals and terrorists. Just how those generalized commitments will be translated into concrete laws remains unclear. In the end, though, terrorism experts say the nation's ability to protect itself from such attacks is limited. ``Terrorists have an inherent advantage,'' says Mr. Peter. ``They can attack anywhere, any time. And you cannot protect everything, everywhere, all the time.'' --Joel May and Harvell Q. Rothman contributed to this article.
