[iwar] [fc:Attacks-On-Symbols-Of-U.S.-Power-Mark-A-Second-'Day-Of-Infamy']

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-12 15:34:52
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 15:34:52 -0700 (PDT)
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Wall Street Journal
September 12, 2001
Attacks On Symbols Of U.S. Power Mark A Second 'Day Of Infamy'
By John Fialka and Jackie Calmes, Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal
WASHINGTON -- America found itself at war in peacetime. Horrific as
Tuesday's attack was, though, warning signs have long pointed to a day like
this coming.
No antimissile defense was going to stop it. Just as Japan on Dec. 7, 1941,
destroyed America's longstanding belief in its ocean-guarded
invulnerability, now Sept. 11, 2001, joins that date to live in infamy --
for obliterating Americans' sense that foreign terrorism, even when aimed at
U.S. interests, was something that mostly happened somewhere else, to
someone else.
As a shaken Rep. Curt Weldon (R., Pa.) said, "This is 21st century war."
Especially in the past decade, a rash of terrorist attacks aimed at U.S.
interests have proved the killing power of carefully-placed explosives and
the increasing sophistication of global terrorist groups. For all the
precursors, the nation appeared wholly unprepared for Tuesday's catastrophe
-- even though, by targeting the Pentagon just over the Potomac River in
northern Virginia, and the World Trade Center anchoring Manhattan's skyline,
a stealth enemy struck at the very symbols of America's government and
economy.
Past terrorist incidents were all "mere apples and oranges compared to this
in terms of magnitude, coordination and &amp;hellip; pain inflicted," says Bruce
Hoffman, an expert on terrorism for the Rand Corp. think tank. Moreover,
says Mr. Hoffman, whose office is in sight of the Pentagon, the pattern of
recent terrorist incidents may have steered U.S. defense efforts in the
wrong direction.
Those attacks have led to a focus on the truck bomb, the weapon used in the
October 1983 blast of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241,
the 1996 barracks bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 and wounded 500,
and the August 1998 blasts that devastated U.S. embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania and killed hundreds.
Similarly, it was a car bomb that went off in the 1993 attack on the
now-destroyed World Trade Center. While many experts predicted that attack
would be a wake-up call for Americans, alerting them to the terrorist threat
at home, in fact the event faded in memory -- perhaps because the casualty
count was far less than it could have been. More than 1,000 were wounded,
but just six people died.
In response to the threat of car and truck bombers over recent years, U.S.
officials have surrounded the White House, Capitol, Pentagon and other
national institutions with giant cement pots filled with flowers. Such
impediments seemed almost superfluous Tuesday, as members of Congress and
staff passed them when they evacuated the Capitol complex, eyes to the sky
for fear of more hijacked airliners crashing down.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, some U.S. experts focused on
containing weapons of mass destruction, to guard against chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons falling into terrorists' hands. With the
attention either to relatively rudimentary truck-bombs or sophisticated
weapons of mass destruction, "We've been focusing on two ends of the
spectrum," Mr. Hoffman says. Using airliners as bombs amounts to a threat
that "sits right in the middle. It is spectacular, not exotic, but
unfortunately is very, very effective."
Airline hijackings long have been a terrorist tactic, though most planes
have been landed safely. The Libyan bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 in
midair 12 years ago led to a step-up in already cumbersome airport-security
measures. A portent of Tuesday's sort of disaster came seven years ago, when
authorities apprehended a man who was going to hijack an Air France liner
and blow it up over Paris.
The Boeing 757 that exploded at the Pentagon normally weighs 200,000 pounds,
including about 170,000 pounds of jet fuel. "From now on," says Gary
Milhollin, an engineer and director of the Wisconsin Project, which traces
components of nuclear weapons, "I guess we have to consider airliners to be
in the category of dual-use weapons."
What experts call dual-use weapons -- ordinary commercial products that can
be turned into deadly weapons -- have been a hallmark of recent terrorist
activity. Timothy McVeigh, America's own terrorist, filled a truck with
fertilizer to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma
City. A speedboat laden with explosives pulled alongside the U.S.S. Cole in
October in Aden, Yemen, crippling the ship and killing some crewmen.
Since Iraq's attack on Kuwait in August 1990 led to the Persian Gulf War,
U.S. intelligence agencies have worried that certain commonly used chemicals
and pharmaceutical gear could be adapted for weaponry.
As for the destructive power of a crashing airliner, much of the analysis to
date has focused on accidental crashes. For example, such an accident
explains why all 103 operating U.S. nuclear plants are protected by cement
domes purposely designed to withstand an airliner crash, says Bill Beecher,
a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Throughout the 1980s, a series of international airline hijackings prompted
U.S. authorities to fortify airports and increase security. In 1983, a bomb
exploded outside the U.S. Senate chamber, leading to security procedures
that have made much of the Capitol off-limits to tourists.
"What is truly dismaying about this is that these attacks happened in
several cities at roughly the same time with no advance notice, despite the
fact that the Clinton and Bush Administrations have spent an awful lot of
money and an awful lot of man-hours trying to follow terrorist groups," says
James Lindsay, a foreign-policy analyst at Brookings Institution, a think
tank here.
"For some Americans, this will tell them that the world outside is a
dangerous place, full of people who don't like the U.S., and they will have
a tendency to turn their backs on it," Mr. Lindsay says. "Others will be
tempted into a kind of jingoism, where we strike out blindly at an imagined
enemy."
It will be the President's job to control both reactions, he says.
Analysts note that terrorists often try to provoke an overreaction that can
prove more crippling ultimately than the event itself. For example, security
restrictions could be imposed on commercial airliners that become disruptive
to travel. "Yet we need airliners," said Mr. Milhollin. "Our economy depends
upon them."
Despite budget woes, Congress is certain to consider providing billions of
dollars more to beef up U.S. intelligence agencies. "It will be easy to say
this is an intelligence failure, but you could be talking about a small
nucleus of sophisticated people," Mr. Hoffman says. "Terrorist groups have
gotten much more diffuse. There is no way you could have an agent in every
one of those cells."
-- Robert S. Greenberger contributed to this article.

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