Posted on 12/31/2002 3:09:11 AM PST by kattracks
Capitol Hill (CNSNews.com) - One homeland security advisor to the Bush administration charged Monday that the U.S. could not rely on defensive measures to gain victory in the war against terrorism. Other experts warned that terrorists will attempt another mass casualty attack against the U.S. in 2003.
Dr. David Kay is a counter-terrorism expert with the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies (PIPS), which sponsored a seminar Monday on the success of U.S. efforts to respond to terrorism and to deal with future threats. The chief U.N. nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq following the Gulf War, Kay believes the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks provoked an important change in the attitudes of government officials.
"I think 2002 ... was the tipping point when the metaphor for dealing with terrorism changed from 'terrorism is a crime' and the appropriate institutions for dealing with it are the police, law enforcement, and the judiciary," Kay said, "to 'terrorism is war,' and the appropriate tools for dealing with terrorism as war are completely different."
Such a shift in mindset is absolutely essential, Kay warned, for dealing with a threat he believes is eminent.
"Although we have often talked in the past ... about weapons of mass destruction or mass disruption, chemical, biological," Kay recalled, "I think 2003 will see terrorists finally making offensive use of technology to do us great harm."
Because of the potential for that threat to become a reality, Paul Bremer, chairman and CEO of Marsh Crisis Consulting, said the U.S. must fundamentally change its primary response to terrorist threats.
"This war cannot be won on the defensive," Bremer said. "No matter how good we make our homeland security, there is virtually no way we can defend all of the targets that terrorists can come after."
A member of the Bush administration's Homeland Security Advisory Council, Bremer served as ambassador-at-large for counter terrorism under President Reagan after spending 23 years with the U.S. Diplomatic Service. In 1999, House Speaker Dennis Hastert appointed him chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism.
Bremer believes terrorists' motivations have changed over the past 20 years from attracting attention for their causes to exacting retribution and revenge for perceived wrongs. That, combined with the potential for access to weapons of mass destruction, means the U.S. must abandon any ideas of responding to terrorism as a law enforcement problem.
"Wait and respond is no longer acceptable," Bremer explained. "We have to move from 'wait and respond' to 'detect and destroy.'"
Because potential targets are unlimited, terrorists would only need to seek out a "weak link" in U.S. security to launch a successful attack. That, Bremer said, leaves the administration with only one option.
"We have to go on the offensive," he said. "To be blunt, we have to kill the terrorists before they come here and kill us."
Michael Swetnam, CEO and chairman of the board of PIPS, offered his assessments of U.S. efforts to accomplish that and other counter-terrorism goals in 2002.
"I think that we can give ourselves a full bevy of mixed grades in our war against terrorism," he said.
Swetnam - co-author of Usama bin Laden's al-Qaida: Profile of a Terrorist Network , and a member of the technical advisory group to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence - gave the U.S. the following "grades" for its counter-terrorism efforts:
- A to A-minus: Assembling world coalitions in the fight against terror. Swetnam noted aid provided by Syria, Yemen and Pakistan, nations that have traditionally harbored terrorists;
- B to B-minus: Efforts to fight al Qaeda. While the U.S. has disrupted the organization, seized some of its money, and captured or killed many of its leaders, more then three-fourths of the group's leadership is alive and attempting to regroup;
- C-minus: Reconstructing domestic civil defense. While the federal government has created a Department of Homeland Security, state and local governments have, Swetnam believes, been given little direction and no money;
- D: Addressing the root causes of terrorism. Swetnam believes the U.S. is losing the propaganda war to bin Laden and other Muslim extremists who promote hatred of Americans;
- F: Addressing shortcomings of the intelligence community: Swetnam believes the problems in U.S. intelligence agencies, which allowed the 9/11 attacks to be planned and executed without detection, still exist;
"We have a mixed grade this first year of our war on terrorism," Swetnam concluded. "Unfortunately, we will probably have many years yet to improve upon these grades before this war on terror is fought to the point where we can feel comfortable again."
E-mail a news tip to Jeff Johnson.
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If you aware of it, why do you attempt to use it in an argument?
If you had your way, would the Old South still be buying and selling black slaves and breeding them like so much cattle?
No, slavery was finished as an institution anyway. Market forces would have destroyed it within 20 years.
Yours is a very extreme view
It also happens to be the correct one.
BUT, I would agree with you that it is a great pity we had to sacrifice so many of our constitutional prerogatives -- the right of individual states to self-determination, the right of secession and latterly the right of free association -- in order to accomplish that end.
Great. We end slavery of blacks a few years early, to allow the future enslavement of us all. Nice trade.
I honestly don't see any way of doing this, short of taking over the entire Arab World and running it as a military regime, while outlawing Wahabbism and summarily executing all clerics and those who attempt to spread its message, while at the same time forcing all children in that region to be raised on either moderate Islam or the peaceful religion of their choice, with all the hard-assedness of the Chinese crackdown on their schools after Tienanmen Square. The current generation is lost; they are brainwashed way beyond saving. The only hope is to protect the next generation from the evil of Islamism so that they wholeheartedly reject it when exposed to it as adults.
I mean, you can't win over a bunch of fundamentalist psychopaths with some pretty billboards and a pirate radio station.
As long as the President calls Islam a "peaceful religion" Bush totally misses the root cause of the terrorism problem. - Tom
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