Posted on 07/04/2002 10:27:33 AM PDT by dirtboy
Penn professor Stephen Gale has frightening scenarios of al-Qaeda bringing this nation to its knees. People listen, but he's not sure they're hearing.
In 1998, University of Pennsylvania political science professor Stephen Gale went to Washington with a warning.
He told Federal Aviation Administration security officials that terrorists might seize airplanes and fly them into some of the nation's most prized landmarks. Two he mentioned: the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
No one listened, he said. An FAA security official told him that scenario fell into the category of threats the government is powerless to stop - like meteorites.
Gale walked out furious.
Today, people are listening. The 59-year-old resident of 46th Street and Osage Avenue testified in April before the Senate Appropriations Committee about the nation's vulnerabilities. He is a frequent guest on radio and TV shows, and since Sept. 11 has been mentioned in scores of newspapers and magazines.
Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, writing in the Wall Street Journal, mentioned Gale's FAA warning as an example of someone "who was doing things right." (As for the FAA, a spokesman said yesterday that through its own intelligence service, it was aware of the threat before Gale's visit.)
Gale's message isn't a comforting one. He warns that the nation could be paralyzed by attacks on electrical power grids that are guarded by rent-a-cops. He describes Osama bin Laden's network as smart, resourceful and determined to cripple the economy in ways that could make Sept. 11 seem mild. He gives al-Qaeda a 50-50 chance of toppling the United States - reducing the nation to frightened, fragmented territories focused on their own survival.
Gale hasn't been impressed with the nation's response. He has likened Tom Ridge, the homeland security director, to a "wooden Indian," and has questioned whether the nation has produced political leaders capable of the hard choices necessary to defeat terrorism.
He is critical of Attorney General John Ashcroft - not for being too hard-right, as many of Ashcroft's detractors believe, but for treating alleged 20th hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui as a routine criminal defendant entitled to his day in civilian court.
An iconoclast, Gale has been at odds with his own employer, too.
"There are a substantial number of people on this campus - students, as well as faculty and administrators - who believe that we deserved it on Sept. 11," he said.
A Penn official said she was "astounded" by that claim. "That is very odd," said Carol Scheman, vice president for government, community and public affairs. "Speaking personally, it's utterly antithetical to my experience with my colleagues."
Gale notes that he wasn't invited by Penn to speak at a symposium on terrorism two days after the attacks, even though he taught a course called "Topics in Terrorism" for years.
When U.S. Rep. Robert A. Brady (D., Phila.) approached Penn last fall with the prospect of $6 million in state funding for a new anti-terrorism center that Gale would run, the university balked, the congressman said, asking instead that the money go to veterinary programs.
Hearing that, Brady balked.
"I think it's a mistake," said Brady, who teaches a graduate course with Gale part-time. "Penn should use him and use his expertise and give him some funding."
Scheman said Penn turned down the overture because there was much more involved in setting up such an institute than raising money. "It's a misapprehension of the facts to think he [Gale] was stopped from doing something because of personality," she said.
Gale doesn't worry about whom he offends. "I'm the guy who believes that seminars are a blood sport," he said. At a recent luncheon for him, colleagues joked about his habit of "running into walls head-first" - an image he loved.
In a time of specialization, Gale refuses to specialize. He has made himself an expert on terrorism, but he has also written on the philosophy of science, population change, community development block grants, and linguistics.
Gale came to academia by an unconventional route. He grew up poor in New York City, and worked as a postman and a dairy farmer in central New York state before getting a degree. At one time, his plan was to own his own farm.
"I was there milking 80 cows a day," he said. "Very heavy work. There were five tons of manure you had to scoop each day into the spreader" to be troweled onto fields as fertilizer.
He got his undergraduate, master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Michigan in the 1960s, specializing in regional science. He has taught at Penn since 1973.
He has run a graduate program called Organizational Dynamics (but is stepping down this week and returning to the political science department). Students have ranged from bank executives to clergymen.
Smoking a pipe, Gale provokes his classes with real-world examples such as the failings of Philadelphia public schools and the Wharton School's construction of the $120 million Huntsman Hall academic center. ("What's the goal here, guys?" Gale said in an interview. "Do you want to educate students or do you want to prepare an architectural statement for the city of Philadelphia?")
The program's aim is to help students learn to overcome hidebound boards of directors ("lazy slobs," Gale says), and "institutional rules" that lead them down "blind alleys," to realize whatever goal they have set.
Terrorism has been a specialty of Gale's for years, an outgrowth of his focus on regional interests that straddle national boundaries.
Diana Koros, whom Gale describes as his "significant other," said he always knew terrorism posed such a lethal threat, but couldn't get others to share his concern.
"Since I've known him he was always so sure this was coming," said Koros, who met Gale in 1987. "He couldn't tell you when, but he could tell you it was coming. No one else thought of these things' being conceivable."
Now that the threat is real, Gale said, the nation needs to take it seriously.
An attack on buildings where the nation's electrical grid is balanced, for example, would disrupt health care systems, shut down computer networks, and disable fuel pumps, all part of the "essence of modern life." It would create, he said, the "endgame" in which "we're done."
"There ain't no nation no more," he said. "We'll splinter into a whole bunch of regional segments that are just going to figure out how to survive. That's it.
"We have all sorts of efficiencies built into our system. And the flip side, the dark force of efficiency, is vulnerability."
Gale calls for stepping up security measures, pivoting from a police mind-set to a military footing. It must be made plain to people, he said, that the rules have changed. Airplanes need commandos, not sky marshals, he says. If four kids breach the perimeter fence at a building that houses the electrical grid, the security guards can't take the chance of asking questions.
"You have to kill them," he said. "It may not be what you want to do in the best of all possible worlds. This ain't the best of all possible worlds. You're going to lose an electrical grid that brings down the entire nation.... I can't afford to ask what you're doing there, because I might lose the whole nation as a result."
Critics see such views as extreme. Criminologist Lawrence Sherman, also at Penn, says that for police to shoot first and ask later could be disastrous. It's one thing for police to react to a gun-wielding suspect, and quite another to react to someone about to turn the power off.
"I don't think we want to be upping the ante for police to be shooting people all over the United States simply because we had so many people die on Sept. 11. Pretty soon we'll lose as many as we lost on 9/11."
Gale's tastes are eclectic. His crowded office in Penn's McNeil Building is filled with computer equipment that looks as if it could pilot the space shuttle. His books run from Shakespeare to business ethics, and he's especially fond of Tom Clancy novels. He's writing a short story of his own now. The title: "Survivor."
"It's about surviving," he said. "And if you don't focus on what it means to survive, you're going to lose. That's the priority. It's always the priority of any species."
For all the attention he's getting, Gale isn't persuaded that the response is much different from what he got four years ago at the FAA.
"There's certainly been a lot of interest in speaking to me," Gale said. "Do I believe people are listening?
"No."
On Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge
"I don't think he's quick-studied himself into what this is about. He's accepted the party lines. Maybe he still has that streak in him. But you have to be the person in the administration who says, 'I don't care if I'm a sore thumb. This is what we are going to do. Let them fire me."
On hard choices in protecting against terrorism.
"The question is how would we change the rules of engagement. How do we convince the American public that racial and ethnic profiling isn't something that's trying to once again separate people into upper and lower classes - haves and have nots-but we're all in this together?"
On Israel's airline security:
"Nothing's happened to El Al since 1968. The biggest target in the world. Why? Because you can't get on if you're the least bit suspicious. And the way they handle screenings is if they want to give you an enema, they're going to do that, too."
That's not quite what he said, and the difference, although subtle, is very important:
He gives al-Qaeda a 50-50 chance of toppling the United States - reducing the nation to frightened, fragmented territories focused on their own survival.
This country is already very close to splitting apart - first we had the Clinton years, with two very different perceptions of reality (Dems versus ours), then Florida, and now we had those who would punish our enemies and those who would apologize for how horrible our country is. Al Queda doesn't have to destroy us - they just have to drive an occasional wedge into the fault lines that already exist.
Wish I could get one of the books to this Professor to review.
Such a truly serious attack, vastly different from the mostly symbolic attacks of 9/11, would create a surge of unity far more powerful than what we saw last fall. IMHO.
I also think the chaos it would create would be quickly contained.
A dedicated enemy himself needs an infrastructure and he needs us willing to remain vulnerable for fear of political correctness. The terrorist infrastructure: An anonymous arab street in the US, little Palentines where terrorists can travel and meet without scrutiny. A lax immigration and documents system. A system of 'mosques' providing a transmission belt from the middle east to the US, being protected from investigation because they are 'religious.'
So he can cash out and go on Oprah again? We need someone beyond the Schwarzkopfs, and Powells and Ridges. An old school person the likes we have not seen in quite a while.
I guess we'll have to disagree on that point. When this country was attacked at Pearl Harbor, all but a tiny few of the lunatic fringe fell in behind the war effort. Now, we have a sizable minority who is doing their level best to blame this country for the 9/11 attacks. That is how much the American spirt has changed in sixty years. And that is the fault line, the weakness where this country can be attacked.
I also think the chaos it would create would be quickly contained.
Florida is still an open issue for many leftists. I agree the center is holding. But the edges are starting to fray...
Another excellent point, demonstrating how far things have deteriorated between Pearl Harbor and 9/11...
This I must agree with. Ridge is a career politician with ambitions to high office. And as such he is not the type to take career-ending risk.
Ridge will follow the common wisdom and won’t rock the boat unless he has GW and most of the Republican Caucus behind him.
He has shown this already in spades. One only has to look at the issue of arming pilots to understand the truth of what Gale is saying.
Yeah, Gale wants commandos on planes. Something I thought should have been done right after 9/11 until we had a full compliment of air marshalls.
Otherwise, we'd have seen more attacks
Oh, grow a pair, will you? I have no patience with Chicken Littles.
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