[iwar] [fc:Undetected-At-Home]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-13 13:25:17


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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 13:25:17 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:Undetected-At-Home]
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Washington Post
September 13, 2001
Undetected At Home
By Vincent Cannistraro
The catastrophe resulting from the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the
Twin Towers demonstrates that the United States has made little progress in
understanding and deterring the threat from the various fundamentalist
extremes. These extremist groups, driven by religious fanaticism -- such as
al Qaida in Afghanistan and the domestic Christian Identity, a white
supremacist group -- are now the most virulent threat to democracies. The
new threats are more unpredictable than those we saw during the Cold War,
because these terrorists are motivated by a professed religious imperative
and a willingness to kill themselves while inflicting major damage on our
institutions and personnel. This kind of motivation and the use of
conventional methodologies to execute their violence seem beyond the ken of
a U.S. government principally focused on threats from biological, chemical
and nuclear missile attacks. Despite several billion dollars annually spent
on counterterrorism programs, the world's most sophisticated and
well-staffed intelligence and law enforcement agencies failed to detect the
threat to the American homeland we witnessed on Sept. 11. The results of
this broad-based failure are appalling.
The FBI and the CIA, responsible for domestic and international
anti-terrorism, were caught unaware and unprepared for the impending suicide
bombing attacks. Worldwide threat advisories have been issued and reissued
over the past two months by the State Department, all of them focusing on
the perceived threat to U.S. citizens and facilities abroad. Most of these
advisories were based on intelligence reporting indicating that Osama bin
Laden's group was planning a series of attacks in the Middle East and Far
East. Six weeks ago a confidential source with access to bin Laden reported
that al Qaida intended to "unleash hell" on America. As usual with bin
Laden, it was not a casual threat but was understood by the United States as
an imminent attack against U.S. installations overseas, especially in the
context of electronic intercepts that seemed to corroborate impending
foreign attacks. Nothing in the U.S. intelligence arsenal or the FBI's
domestic intelligence gathering program pointed to attacks in the United
States. All eyes were focused abroad. Meanwhile, an apparent al Qaida
network in North America was preparing the most daring and spectacular
terrorist operation in history.
Have we invested too heavily in technical intelligence collection systems at
the expense of the hard and difficult challenge of penetrating terrorist
groups with human sources? There is little doubt now that bin Laden's
terrorist cadre, learning exponentially as it suffers losses, has employed
the intelligence technique of deception to mislead the United States. Bin
Laden no longer transfers funds electronically and no longer communicates
with subordinates over telephones, relying on couriers to disseminate funds
and instructions. Meanwhile, one can surmise that bin Laden is deliberately
providing disinformation over open communication channels, expecting his
adversaries to be listening.
Beyond the misplaced budget priorities and the serious lack of human
intelligence collection, we have yet to devise a coherent anti-terrorism
program that does not treat politically and religiously inspired terrorism
as a law enforcement problem. The U.S. policy is to treat al Qaida as if it
were a simple criminal organization that could be crippled by the
prosecution of its secondary component parts. The Justice Department
declared a great victory when perpetrators indicted for the bombings of
American Embassies in East Africa were found guilty. There seemed to be no
recognition that the authors of the bombings, those who conceived and
financed the operation, are beyond the reach of law enforcement in
Afghanistan, free to conceive and execute new atrocities against America.
Now that the United States is under attack, the inevitable question is
whether we should adopt the Israeli counterterrorist method of "preempting
terrorism" by killing would-be terrorists. The Israelis face suicide bombers
almost daily and have long experienced the terror many New Yorkers faced on
Sept. 11. The president has said we will strike back at the people who
directed these atrocities and those that harbor them. But preemptive killing
not only doesn't prevent future acts of terrorism, it is antithetical to
American democratic values and may instigate new acts of terror by others.
Retaliation for the sake of punishing the antagonist will not remove the
source of the problem or deter new violent events. The cruise missile
attacks on bin Laden's camps and the bombing of the pharmaceutical plant in
Sudan in the wake of the East African bombings illustrate this. The United
States' first line of defense has to be good intelligence. When that has
failed, as in the present case, the United States must employ the full
arsenal of weapons available, including a military response. If it can be
demonstrated that al Qaida carried out these abhorrent acts, the United
States should demand that the Taliban, which hosts bin Laden, turn him over
to us within 48 hours. Failing that, the United States must launch a
military operation, including land forces, to destroy both the sponsor of
the attack and the government that supports him.
The writer is a former chief of CIA counterterrorism operations.

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