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.
